CHAPTER ONE

It had been New York's coldest winter on record, indeed it lasted into the coldest spring and temperatures continued to drop below zero right up to the end of April. A freelance prophet had taken up station across the street from the United Nations building to warn the world that its end was at last, really and truly, nigh. Not for our little blue planet was the fiery demise foretold in the Bible, but a solid, global freeze.

"Hell," the old man wheezed, shaking his banner, "is not a lake of fire but a desert of ice."

Prophets of doom come and go but for pragmatic New Yorkers it was business as usual, not least among them the pre-dawn joggers and strollers.

Dawn the next day:

The Yorkshire terrier's frantic barking sounded flat on the frozen April air. At that hour of the morning there was no other sound in Central Park, except, of course, for the muffled crunch as the dog's elderly mistress, Agnes Marshal, as she stepped gingerly from the path and began to cross the stiff, white grass.

She tiptoed warily towards a clump of frozen bushes that seemed to be the focus of the dog's attention and stooped to squint myopically through the frozen foliage.

"I hope you aren't worrying cats again, you scallywag."

Taking courage from the fact that the dog was standing its ground in the face of some perceived threat she stepped boldly around the bushes. Recoiling tremulously, her hand flew to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, her eyes bugged weirdly behind her high-mag lenses and she dropped her cane. Had it not been for the dog anyone would have walked past the prostrate, naked figure. Lying face up, it was so thoroughly covered from head to toe in frost as to be almost invisible against white grass. At first she thought it was a marble statue, perhaps stolen from a museum and abandoned here. But why would her dog bark at a statue? He would be more likely to cock a leg briefly against it to label it 'of no further interest' and be on his way.

When Agnes got over the initial shock she found herself admiring the beauty of the perfectly proportioned torso, the handsome face, with its firm, sternly set jaw, the long, frozen hair fanning out under the head.

"Oh, dear, Snuffy! What have we found?"

She picked up the dog and fondled it. Her eyes remained fastened on the beautiful figure, forbidden thoughts forming and immediately being extinguished.

"My goodness! He looks as though he fell from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel."

The dog whimpered softly. She held it close to her face and hugged it.

"I wish Michelangelo could have seen this one, Snuffy."

She laughed nervously and continued, as if she were rehearsing a script:

"This one has been more lavishly endowed by God than any of Michelangelo's representations of male pulchritude. God! Did I say that?"

She stared at the figure for a full minute.

"Poor soul, what a way for one so beautiful to wind up."

She put the dog down and fished her mobile phone out of her greatcoat pocket.

The ambulance crew and the cops, like Agnes, had no doubt that they were looking at a subject for the coroner, with one exception. The senior paramedic, Paul Bronowski, thought differently. He had spent thirty-five years dealing with the victims of New York's long, pitiless winters. He had collected dozens of frozen bodies from parks and alleyways, derelict buildings, doorways, cardboard cartons and sleeping bags. S.C.G. (Special Category Garbage) was how his younger, less sensitive colleagues referred to them. On a few rare occasions he had come across people in a state similar to this one and who had survived, (filled to the gills with their favourite brand of anti-freeze). Now, some instinct was telling him that this one was not dead either.

"Handle this one with care," Bronowski told his crew. "Get him on a stretcher and cover him with blankets. I'm certain this guy still has a chance."

Lieutenant Ignatius Patrick (Iggy) Delany of Homicide, Manhattan Precinct, NYPD overheard Bronowski.

"And don't drop him for Chrissakes or you'll have to sweep up the splinters," he chortled.

"Lootenant," Bronowski growled as they slid the stretcher into the ambulance.

"Thank God you're a cop because as a comedian you'd starve."

Delany stomped his feet and blew clouds of warm breath vapour on his hands before producing a notebook and a ballpoint.

"Sure thing Bronowski," Delany said civilly enough. With a large freckled hand he grasped the door as one of the paramedics was closing it. "You got your job to do and I got mine. I have to take a look at him."

He stepped into the ambulance, Bronowski at his elbow as he made his examination Delany said:

"So what makes you think a guy as stiff as this could unfreeze and walk away?"

"My guess is that he's in a cryogenic state."

"Y'mean like suspended animation?"

"Yeah, somethin' like that. Some rich people with terminal illnesses have their bodies preserved in liquid nitrogen before they die. Some think they may some day be able to shut a live body down for centuries and then wake it up again."

"No kiddin. Why would anyone wanna do that?"

"Incurable diseases won't always be incurable. Mebbe even death will be reversible some day."

"And death shall be no more, eh?" He began to scribble. "I sure as hell never heard of anyone who's been frozen alive and stashed away like Rip Van Winkle."

"Nobody's ever proved that it works. But we're wasting time Delany. I gotta get this poor guy some help but pronto."

The other cops by now had done what cops routinely do. They took pictures, probed around in the frozen grass for clues, asked a lot of questions and wrote down the answers.

Delany questioned Agnes Marshal. There were no footprints in the frosted grass when she arrived on the scene. In the ambulance the Lieutenant scribbled some more in his notebook:

"Male (Boy! No doubt about that!) Caucasian. (Well he's sure as hell a white man right now!) Age, twenny-five, twenny six. Two hunnert fifty pounds, athletic build (football/baseball player. Marine? Too clean-cut for a boxer and too lean for a wrestler, looks too refined for any of those.)"

The big cop took a handful of the frozen hair and held it for a minute to defrost it.

"Lootenant!" Yelped Bronowski, "get your great Irish paws offa my patient. Let's leave it to the experts to thaw the poor guy!"

"Wha ..."

The cop recoiled like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He shrugged off the rebuke and continued writing.

"Hair, umm, to be discovered. Eyes, ah, lemme see, Jeez he's cold, grey-blue I guess. No ID. Toad'ly naked, no visible injuries, no visible evidence of foul play, and um, better say, no vital signs, but paramedic Bronowski says victim in, um Say Bronowski, how'dja spell that state CRY-O-JENNICK?"

"THAT'S C-R-Y-O-G-E-N-I-C, cryogenic, Lootenant."

"OK, Bron take him away."

Delany put away the notebook and put his arm around Bronowski's shoulders.

"Off the record, Bron, is this cryojesics?"

"Cryogenics, Lootenant."

"Whatever. You wouldn't be just pullin' my chain? I mean, freezin' live people?"

Bronowski sighed. "Science fiction writers are often proved right when the nerds and propellor-heads have caught up. Take flying to the moon."

"Yeah, with the windows open."

"Television, remember them old Flash Gordon movies? Two-way wrist radios, space ships cruising to Mars like it was Coney Island, missiles that chased old Ming's ships?"

"Y'think cryogenics could be like all that stuff?" Delany asked, puckering up his face in puzzlement. "I mean ever, for real?"

Bronowski straightened his back, sighed and rubbed his neck. He was tired and longing for a warm shower and bed.

"Judging from all that stuff, as you call it, I'd bet on it; but I wouldn't bet on being around to collect my winnings."

"Or to pay up!"

"Like I said, I've heard that some rich people have their bodies frozen when they die. Some, I hear, before they die, though it ain't legal. Stored in special cryogenic chambers cooled by liquid nitrogen. They don't rule out the possibility that some day medical science will have found a cure for death, old age, disease."

"But, live people, for Chrissakes!"

"There's no record of it. Like I said, it's illegal. But if you were ninety and on your way out, would you not take a chance?"

"Sure, why not, but on a cop's pension?"

"Right, it costs a bomb and you'd have to be stored at a critically maintained temperature with a lotta fancy apparatus."

Delany shrugged asymmetrically, one shoulder up, the other down, and grinned.

"What the heck, if you got it you can't take it with you. Might as well blow it all on a three-legged horse. Either way ya lose nothin!"

"It's probably tax-deductible," said Bronowski dryly.

Delany thrust his misshapen trilby to the back of his head, stepped down from the ambulance and peered at the sky.

"They wait in joyful hope for the glory of the resurrection! Don't we all? Our parish priest reminds us of that every Sunday at Mass."

"Ours too. Some day he may be right and resurrection won't cost us a plug nickel. Same story, different language," Bronowski said with a lop-sided grin.

Delany scratched his head and pulled at his big Irish nose.

"Beats me what happened to his clothing. No mugger in his right mind would tackle a guy this big and muscular without usin' a weapon, but there isn't a mark on him."

"Beats me too, Lootenant. Maybe he fell asleep from fatigue or hypothermia and some guy stripped him clean. Say, can we get this guy outa here, like right away?"

Delany threw a lazy salute at the paramedic.

"OK Professor Bronowski, he's all yours. I hope he makes it. We'll be in touch."

As Bronowski shut the rear hatch of the ambulance Delany called out:

"Another thing, when you've defrosted him lemme know what colour his skin is for my report?"

He stabbed at his notebook with his ballpoint.

When Bronowski and his crew delivered their frozen man to the emergency room at Allenbrook Memorial he had a hard time convincing them that there was hope for him and persuading them to go through the motions at least. Bronowski was greeted with such gee-whizz questions as:

"Where did you find this guy, locked in a meat reefer plant?" or, "Hey, where d'you guys think you're goin' with that stiff? Might as well wheel him straight to John Doe Reception."

However, most of the senior people had a deep respect for Bronowski's experience and competence as a paramedic. They took the frozen man to the emergency room and routinely went through the usual hypothermia and resuscitation procedures.

They were about to give up when Matt Foreshaw, a visiting consultant, heard about the frozen man.

"What about the new hyperbaric chamber over at St Boniface Clinic," he asked.

"Hyper what?" They wanted to know.

"Pop him into the hyperbaric chamber, punch a few buttons!"

"I know, I know," retorted one of the sceptics, "it's a man-size microwave cooker."

"Yeah," sneered another, "and when it bleeps you haul him out and serve him up with horseradish sauce and a sprig of parsley."

"OK," said Foreshaw with a shrug. "You don't care if the guy is alive."

They stared at each other wordlessly for several tense seconds. It was Foreshaw who broke the silence.

"This chamber floods the body with oxygen. Maybe there's a chance for this guy, he's built like a Swedish lumberjack. Besides the Allenbrook techies will be eager to receive the first subject for their new toy."

Two hours later, over at St Boniface's their efforts proved Bronowski's intuitive diagnosis correct. First, after an hour in the chamber, the frozen man unfroze and began to manifest low level brain activity. Another hour passed and they had restarted his heart and restored respiration, albeit at alarmingly erratic rates. All his other vital signs remained steady though abnormally low. Nevertheless, by late afternoon, there was still no flicker of consciousness. The next morning, though still deeply unconscious, his vital signs stabilised and they ferried him back to Allenbrook Memorial. There was just one mysterious clue as to the strange man's recent life when they routinely pumped his stomach out. It contained a prodigious quantity of porridge, enough, the forensic people said, to feed (but not poison) Notre Dame's football team for a season. Mysterious? This was not your regular store-bought breakfast cereal that you pour water on and blast for four minutes in a microwave. It was made of cooked and otherwise unprocessed oats.

In the intensive care unit the young intern noted the third reading on his thermometer, rectal this time.

"This guy should be dead."

"I hope not," whispered a junior nurse. "He's some hunk o' mortal man!"

"Mortal sin, more like," a winsome redhead murmured.

A CAT scan revealed no brain lesions.

At five in the afternoon Lieutenant Iggy Delany received a phone call from the Ambulance Unit at the hospital.

"The Frozen Man is now unfrozen," the caller told him. "He has dark hair, fair skin with freckles. Oh, and one more thing, there's a personal note for you from Bronowski. It reads: 'He's too good-lookin' to be a Mick!"

The big cop grinned.

"Yeah? Well I gotta personal reply for Bronowski: "He looks too intelligent to be a friggin' Polack."

Meanwhile, in the intensive care unit the now Unfrozen Man was ticking over steadily (except for consciousness) until, that is, around five o'clock. In the blackness a fragment of consciousness flashed like fork lightning. He drew in a long, strong breath that hissed loudly through his clenched teeth. His moan was a suppressed scream of agony. In that instant even the ghostly rectangle of sunshine through the drawn curtains seared his eyes. It hurt even through his closed eyelids. In that same instant he saw the young, woman leaning over him, smiling reassuringly.

There was something vaguely familiar about her. She was a doctor, she explained, and she had been assigned to keep him under observation. Her name, she told him, was Emer.

There was something vaguely familiar about that too. Emer Farrell. The last name somehow seemed to belong to the first. She kept talking softly and rapidly as though she was trying to get a purchase on whatever glimmer of consciousness was dawning in her patient.

"Your hair is very dark," she whispered, brushing back the shoulder-length locks gently. "When you came in here it was white as snow."

She was very young and slender with reddish hair that veiled her face. Her head was blocking the light from the window so he could see little of her features other than the tiny highlights on her cheeks and the tip of her nose and the tiny beads of light on her moist lips. Veiled or not, it was clear enough that she had a pretty face. He was not yet conscious enough to be aware of, much less wonder at, the tubes and the batteries of electronic monitoring equipment to which he was hooked up. For him, at that moment, prettiness or homeliness was only barely an issue. More than anything he wanted to die, to be released from the pain that blazed savagely in every inch of his body. For him nothing else mattered but that wish, that overriding need, for death. The wish came wordlessly, instantaneously, just like the questions.

"Who am I? Where am I? Why am I?"

The wordless questions and the wordless wish filled this brief, black state of being, this nightmare, like a whirlwind. His delirium allowed him a transient glimpse, a fragment of memory, of what had gone before. He had died already. At least he thought he had died; and now the naked disappointment, he had not died. If any words had accompanied that revelation there would have been among them a shining, newly-minted word for death. It would have been a word betokening light and peace, an absence of pain.

Now he was ready for a second desperate attempt at achieving this blessed release. He thought of it as slipping through a narrow door from the nightmare into a bright, silent, sunlit meadow. Failing that, he willed an exchange of his indescribable torment for eternal nothingness, his total dissolution, final erasure from the eternal record. Nirvana. Nirvana, at least his understanding of the word, would be the final solution, an assurance that the pain would never again return.

The young woman placed a cool hand over his eyes as though she knew it was the only part of him that was amenable to solace. She sighed softly.

"There now, the pain will pass. I promise. You feel uncomfortable because your circulation is coming back to normal. It's like when you wake up and don't know where your arm is because you've been lying on it. Then when the blood starts to flow again...."

The fragment of excruciating consciousness died like a spark from a wood fire. "Nirvana," was the wordless thought that crossed his mind as he plummeted down into darkness. Nirvana. It was a word loaded with compressed meaning, meaning that now exploded like a firework in his brain. It meant nonexistence. That was good; because death for him implied continued existence; and life in any form was too painful to contemplate. Nirvana was what he craved, non-being. Total annihilation. No more pain of body, mind or spirit.

From far away she was asking him if he knew who he was; if he remembered his name. He wrestled briefly with the question. Then, once more, down, down, down into the abyss he plummeted. The pain and the frequency of the tiny, stabbing flickers and sparks of light were declining. His name flitted like a moth across his barren mind. It was gone before he could capture it. He made a hoarse sound like, "Coo." The effort boosted the pain and his longing for deliverance. "Nirvana, come! Come!" But he could still hear her voice a long way off. She was chiding him gently.

"Naughty Coo, you've gone and wet your bed again."

Then she laughed softly.

"Your waterworks must be thawing out."

He felt hands on him, tugging this way and that, rolling him onto his side.

"Now we'll have to find you some dry things."

He began slowly to float up from the abyss again. Baffling questions arose like taunting demons, mocking him, renewing his pains, flitting from consciousness before he had time to comprehend them.

"Where am I? But first, WHO am I? What had she called me? Coo? Is that my name? And who is she? Did she say Emer?"

Emer. It was as if the name struck a monstrous, cracked iron bell in his brain. It triggered the pain afresh. It rose like the swell on a boiling ocean and the questions no longer mattered.

"You must have been picking dandelions, if you handle the dandelion you will pee in your bed, in your sleep."

She was laughing that soft, quiet laugh again as she and a beefy young woman tugged at his feet and legs.

"Just look at you! Soaking wet. Poo! Coo! Yuk!"

Merciful darkness and blessed silence entered and filled the canyon of pain once more. It could have been years or minutes later that he floated gently up again towards a light that was softer than before.

"Who are you?" He wanted to ask, but his throat closed and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He moved his tongue around his mouth and managed to work up a dew of saliva. He tried again: "Who are you?" He managed a half whisper, half wheeze. But she had gone. He felt warm and dry once more. And the pains had eased. He drifted into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

When he began to rave early in the morning they could make no sense of what he was saying. New Yorkers learn to identify languages by their sounds, their cadences, even if they don't understand them. You hear them every day on the street, in the subway, in the stores, all the time, Spanish, Italian, Yiddish, German, Polish. With all the vital signs now proclaiming him to be in robust health yet, oddly, deeply unconscious most of the time, their strange patient spoke no recognisable language. It was not Slavonic, Greek, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Polish. Nurse Nancy Bright Water, a native American, shook her head emphatically. It was not an indigenous tongue. Nurse Molly Gallagher from Donegal, however, raised her eyebrows when she heard him babbling away.

"Sounds like Irish. But it isn't. Maybe Scots Gallic or Manx, though I might catch some shred of meaning from either of those. Perhaps Welsh or Cornish?"

"Or Breton," suggested a senior consultant. "Those last three belong to the Brythonic branch of the ancient Euro-Celtic tongue."

"How do you come to know all this Pete?"

"A friend of mine got me hooked on the subject. He's a Welshman called Dave Morgan. He's a paleolinguistics and palaeography consultant. Used to teach palaeo-somethin' or-other in Berkeley, California, where he wrote a bestseller on the Celts. The upsurge in the New Age phenomenon brought flocks of publishers and movie-makers to his door. After a number of appearances on popular TV chat shows he was so hounded by publishers and movie-makers that he moved to New York and set up a consultancy. Says it beats trying to teach meat-headed rich kids who don't want to know anything."

They taped some of their patient's rantings and sent the cassette by courier to Dave Morgan. The result was a meeting with the hospital's Chief Psychiatric Consultant, the dour Doctor Mervin Schumacher who, alone among the staff, attached the least significance to the Frozen Man and his ravings. He dismissed him as a drifter who had fallen asleep in Central Park and been stripped by some freezing fellow vagrant. When Morgan arrived, just in time for morning coffee, he presented himself as disappointingly undistinguished. He was small, fat, middle-aged, shabby and perspiring. His dark, unkempt, curly hair, greying at the temples, was tousled in a rakish, Celtic way. However all of this was to some extent compensated by a certain charm, a boyish enthusiasm and his lilting, rhapsodic English. His darting, dark brown eyes glittered with excitement.

"Old Irish," he announced, after the first gulp of black coffee.

He put the cup down on the polished walnut desktop and began vigorously rubbing the leather patches on the elbows of his threadbare brown jacket. The psychiatrist frowned and, with a theatrical flourish, passed Morgan a crystal coaster.

"Sorry," said Morgan taking the hint and placing the cup on the coaster with a sheepish grin. "Mustn't leave fairy rings on such a beautiful desk."

His quip fell flat. He coughed nervously, produced the cassette from his bulging pocket and held it in front of him with both hands like a priest at the Consecration.

"It belongs," he said in a hushed, reverential tone, "to the Irish of around the beginning of the Christian era!"

Schumacher's eyelids drooped. Morgan, in a burst of histrionic enthusiasm added:

"We're actually listening here to a living sample of the long defunct Goidhilic branch of Euro-Celtic spoken around the beginning of the first millennium."

His hands shook slightly as he took a long pull from his coffee as Schumacher, smirking sourly, eyed him sceptically.

The psychiatrist, consulting his watch with an expansive gesture.

"So, where does this leave us? Where can we go from here?"

Morgan's eyes twinkled darkly.

"I could call a colleague in Ireland, a Professor Timothy Travers. He has made a close, lifelong study of old Irish language, customs and lore, particularly the arcane knowledge of the druids and the alleged magic of the Tuatha de Danaan. He's eminently qualified to help."

Chief psychiatrist, Mervin Schumacher did not share Morgan's incautious gusto. He was unconvinced. He leaned across his desk, his ice blue eyes probing the boyish face.

"Looks more like a classic example of cryptamnesia, genetically transmitted traces of ancestral memory, perceptual engrams surfacing from the deep regions of the subconscious during a state of deep trance or delirium."

Morgan's big smile subsided into a lopsided grin as Schumacher persisted.

"Sure. I agree that's feasible, but we have to consider all the possibilities. Cryptamnesia has a number of well-documented cases."

Morgan hunched his shoulders and with his head thrust forward he spread his arms as though he were going to swoop like an eagle at the unbelieving Schumacher.

"Documented, sure," he said with exasperation, "but not explained, only speculated about."

"Then there's a more familiar phenomenon," continued Schumacher, "glossalalia."

"Of course. That too is a possibility; but glossalalia subjects are usually fully conscious and tranquil. Usually they speak pseudo or precognitive language. Claims are made that others can interpret glossalalia even when the speaker does not understand his/her own utterances."

Schumacher had his head in his papers again, frowning menacingly as he watched Morgan rummaging in his bulging pockets.

"Look, let me use your phone, I'll pay for the call to Ireland."

Schumacher nodded distractedly. Morgan pulled out a cheap Walkman and reached for the phone.

"I'll play some of this stuff over to Travers and see how he reacts."

Schumacher made a decidedly rude show of disinterest, riffling noisily through papers as though he had mislaid a vital document.

Travers took a long time to answer the phone. At last, Morgan spoke into the mouthpiece:

"Tim? Hi. It's Dave, yeah, Dave Morgan I have something. What? The time?"

The Welshman glanced at his watch. "Why, it's, er. Oh, sorry boyo, I clean forgot the time difference. Sorry, sorry, sorry."

He raised a hand and opened his mouth as though waiting for a break in the strangled vituperation coming across the Atlantic. "I have something very exciting on tape. Let me play it to you."

Without waiting for absolution from Travers, Morgan clicked in a cassette, flicked the switch on the Walkman and pressed the speaker to the phone mouthpiece. Less than half a minute into the tape they could hear Travers shouting excitedly. Morgan put the phone to his ear and grinned, listening intently. He played the rest of the tape to the Irishman, and spent a couple of minutes in what was mostly an east to west conversation. When at length the Welshman put the phone down his boyish grin was back and his dark eyes fairly sparkled with excitement.

"Travers got quite worked up about the linguistics, although the tape offers little in the way of coherence there's no doubt about the language. He confirms my opinion."

He clapped his hands with childlike joy.

Schumacher had moved to the far side of his spacious office and was making a show of preoccupation with the contents of his filing cabinet.

"He confirms nothing, he merely concurs with your opinion. In other words both of you could be wrong."

Morgan blinked helplessly at the rude rebuff. Before he could make any response Schumacher shot a terse question:

"So when can we expect this Travers to arrive in New York?"

Morgan's face brightened briefly and then clouded suddenly. He shifted uneasily in his chair, wringing his hands.

"Join us? I'm afraid that's not possible. Professor Travers is, er, unwell."

"Then neither I nor my patient can afford to waste any more time!"

Schumacher was busying himself with his paperwork again.

"I must start talking to other linguistics and medical experts right away."

The little Welshman gave Schumacher a pained look.

"I doubt if you'll find anyone like Travers, I'm afraid. He's quite unique, you know."

Schumacher sighed heavily, peered at his watch, tapped it, held it to his ear and looked at it again. He frowned darkly and stood up.

"Perhaps you'll call me as soon as your Professor Travers is well again. I might at best be amused by his Celtic lunacy."

A week passed and Schumacher's search for a suitable luminary yielded nothing. The mysterious patient, now known among the team of staff assigned to his case as Coo, remained in a deep coma most of the time, connected via a tangle of wires and tubes to an assortment of high-tech monitoring equipment. Occasionally he opened his eyes briefly. From time to time he mumbled in his strange language. They had found no one who could translate the ravings of their patient. Linguistics experts, native speakers and students of Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, Flemish, even Basque, one of the most enigmatic languages in the world, could do no better than to speculate about the stem of a word here and there. No sentences, no coherent phrases penetrated the Babelian barrier. They even called on a number of Pentecostalist elders reputed to have the mysterious charism of Tongues or Glossalalia described in the second chapter of The Acts of the Apostles. They too were baffled. Some Irish Charismatic Catholics were called in. They too were stumped.

Despite rigorous efforts by, and dire threats to, the hospital staff to maintain a strict media blackout, the story inevitably leaked, providing a bonanza for specialists, expert commentators and more than a few crackpots. The 'Unsolved Mysteries' team were knocking on the hospital doors. They were politely warned that if they went with the story prematurely they would receive zero cooperation when there was more convincing substance to the story.

When the 'X Files' people came around they too received short shrift. Some ancient Anglo Saxon words were used in the exchange. An obscure group of fringe Ufologists were banging on the doors of the White House screaming 'alien cover-up' and demanding a public enquiry into what they called the 'Frozen Man Affair'. 'The Ice Man', as others called him, was despite the appeals and admonitions from the hospital, getting extravagant exposure on the international news channels. Hospital staff were even more vigorously forbidden to respond to approaches from media and to decline all financial blandishments under pain of dismissal on grounds of ethical impropriety.

It was not until Agnes Marshal and her Jack Russell made the front page of TIME magazine and the affair was receiving more dignified scrutiny and comment that Schumacher realised the futility of keeping his patient under wraps any longer. He might as well recognise and exploit 'The uses of adversity.' After all there was considerable personal and commercial gain on offer. Why not quietly rejoice in all the ballyhoo while it lasted? He called Morgan. How was Professor Travers? Could he come to New York as a paid consultant and help them document this bizarre case? No and no. Why not? Was he that indisposed? Indispensable? Would he not consider a trip to New York as a kind of working vacation? Schumacher homed in on one piece of the untidily presented jumble of information being fed to him by Morgan: The foundation in which Travers worked was a special, hush-hush unit of the Irish Eastern Health Board. It dealt with rare delusive states, among them one they had labeled 'Transtemporans Dementia.' It's undisputed top savant was Professor Timothy Travers.

Schumacher brightened at this.

"Travers sounds like our man! Look, it could be to his advantage as well as ours to come here and spend some time with us observing such a rare specimen as our patient."

Morgan stood up and spread his hands in a helpless gesture, turned and walked to the window. Staring down into the street he said:

"I don't think that's possible."

"Not possible? But..."

Morgan returned to his seat in front of Schumacher's desk. He stared down between his spread knees at the floor for a while and then looked the psychiatrist in the eye.

"This sounds ludicrous, crazy. I didn't want to tell you. I mean..."

Morgan looked helplessly ceilingwards like a Renaissance martyr, rolling his eyes helplessly.

"So what sounds crazy?" Asked Schumacher with uncharacteristic gentleness. "Most of what I hear every day of my life sounds crazy, is crazy literally. Come on Morgan, try me."

Morgan cleared his throat, fidgeting with a paper clip on the desk.

"Travers is in the Ossageel Foundation near Dublin in an academic capacity but..."

Morgan placed his hands on the desk and leaned forward until his face was close to Schumacher's. He cleared his throat and went on:

"I know this sounds bizarre, but as well as being a consultant, Travers is also a patient."

Schumacher's face seemed to be having difficulty registering an unequivocal expression.

"A patient? Does his condition have a name?"

Morgan took a long time to answer. He rummaged aimlessly through his pockets, shifted from one foot to the other.

"Yes," he mumbled at last, "Transtemporans Dementia."

"What?" Croaked the psychiatrist, "you mean..."

"Hear me out," pleaded the Welshman, "I must explain something to you. Travers' symptoms are virtually identical to those of his patients. But he has almost convinced the staff and consultants of Ossageel that some, if not all of the patients in this category really are displaced in time. He has a similar conviction about our Frozen Man."

There was a long tense silence between the two men. Schumacher's eyes darted searchingly over Morgan's face as though he was making a professional diagnosis.

"So, your expert is both patient and consultant in a nut house?"

Schumacher had gone a pale with disbelief and anger.

"How in hell could such a bizarre situation arise?"

A tense silence fell between them. Morgan fumbled in his pockets again as Schumacher walked unsteadily to the window and stared out at the middle distance. A minute passed before the psychiatrist broke the silence. Without turning from the window he murmured, half to himself.

"It must be true what George Bernard Shaw said, Ireland is the world's largest open-air lunatic asylum!"

Morgan closed his eyes and made an uncoordinated gesture that suggested he was fighting off a swarm of bees.

"You asked me to try you. Look, please bear with me, Schumacher, and accept that we are here faced with an unprecedented set of circumstances."

Schumacher returned dejectedly to his desk, sat down heavily and folded his arms tightly, shoulders hunched, jaw muscles tense, eyes averted. Then he gave an imperceptible nod which Morgan took as an invitation to continue.

He went on:

"Travers was, over a period of five years, investigating a number of cases of Transtemporans Dementia. He began to come up with a rather bizarre theory. According to him a few of his patients were really bi-locating in a different time-space frame which he called the Otherwhere. While they were thus, their normal self was taken over by an Otherself, a perfect replica of their Ownself. The Otherself has the Ownself's memory, experience, skills, total consciousness. In each of those cases, according to Travers, there is but one person bi-locating at two different regions of the space-time continuum."

The professor put his hands over his ears with a pained grimace.

"Shades of alternative universes and dopplegangers! This is becoming more like an abstruse theological discourse, like three persons in one god, than a scientific theory. If you can believe this bi-location hokum, Morgan, then the Welsh must be as nutty as their Irish cousins."

Morgan, rose and leaned across the desk.

"I keep an open mind, bi-location is, according to Travers, more than a theory. I know the man. I take him seriously. I want to pursue the lead he has given me, given us."

Schumacher's mouth stalled and began to work soundlessly as though hunting for an intelligent response to such a departure from the parameters of scientific enquiry.

"You mean .... but Morgan, this Travers is insane. His mind has become so overworked, so obsessed, with his investigation that it has invented a solution."

Morgan assumed a slightly crouched position, hands outstretched towards Schumacher like a wrestler sizing up his opponent.

"Just hold it right there, Schumacher, and listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you."

Schumacher, caught off guard by this uncharacteristic show of gritty assertiveness, made as if to speak but Morgan raised an admonishing finger and looked him sternly in the eye.

"Please wait until I've finished and then tell me if you think Travers is mad. Last night I had a long telephone conversation with him. He told me an incredible story. Incredible or not, however, I'm keeping an open mind about it. If you will give me the opportunity I'll let Travers tell you that story, exactly as he told it to me, right now."

As he spoke, Morgan hauled the Walkman from an inside pocket, slipped a cassette into it and set it on Schumacher's polished walnut desk. Schumacher stared at his watch for five seconds, sighed and nodded slowly. He pressed a button on his intercom and told his secretary he was not available for an hour. Morgan switched on the recorder....

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