Winter is a depressing time, particularly for old people trying to keep fed and warm on an inadequate pension. The British government makes special payments to such folk in cold weather. In the face of similar winter hardships, many animals simply hibernate. They allow their body temperature to fall to some low value, and their metabolism slows to a crawl. Even big mammals, such as bears, hibernate. So Daedalus is now exploring the possibilities of human hibernation.

Cold has two competing effects on the human body. The metabolic rate slows down, reducing the demand for oxygen and fuel; but at the same time, the heart and lungs slow down as well, reducing the supply of these essentials. For a few degrees of cooling, these effects stay in balance. Surgical patients can be cooled slightly to extend the time for which the heart or brain can be isolated. But at about 25 °C the balance breaks down; the lungs may keep going but the heart is likely to stop. To become practical, human hibernation will have to keep the blood moving somehow.

The obvious idea, fitting the heart with a pacemaker and forcing it to beat, seems not to work — at least, not in rabbits. But Daedalus recalls that volunteers in centrifuges, or those subjected to negative pressure below the waist, can have as much as 20% of their blood drained down and ‘pooled’ in the lower part of the body. So DREADCO engineers are devising a sort of ‘iron heart’, by analogy with the iron lung. Each of the subject's limbs is placed in a sealed cylinder, and big sealed cups are placed strategically against his body. By sucking and blowing on these containers in a suitable rhythm, the blood can be shunted peristaltically from region to region around his body. The iron heart will never approach the pumping efficiency of the real thing. But it should circulate the blood sufficiently to meet the greatly reduced oxygen demand of a hibernating pensioner.

A refrigeration unit and various monitoring controls complete the DREADCO Hibernator. The user will be placed in the device and chilled into dreamless oblivion. Like a hibernating animal, he may need to be woken at rare intervals to eat and excrete; but essentially winter will cease to exist for him. And, of course, he will cease to exist for the government. In the municipal Hibernatorium, chilled pensioners in bulk will sleep the winter away at trivial cost to the Nanny State.