Last week Daedalus presented his new Hibernator. The subject is cooled down strongly enough to stop his heart, but his blood is kept moving by rhythmic hydrostatic pressures applied in sequence to his limbs and regions of his body. Thus his vital organs still receive their greatly reduced demand for oxygen and fuel. Monitoring equipment keeps him stable; at wake-up time, microwave heating swiftly restores his normal body temperature.

The primary beneficiaries of the technology are old people. A municipal Hibernatorium could see thousands of pensioners safely through the winter at far less cost than normal pension and social service provisions. Not only would they dodge the hardships of cold weather; they would live longer. Ageing, and the stealthy advance of degenerative diseases, will almost cease at hibernation temperatures. A pensioner with ten years of life in him could last for twenty years — and all that time would be summer. He would not need to relocate to some warm but dreary southern geriatric resort; he could stay around to follow the progress of his grandchildren, and experience and deplore what the world is coming to, for a much longer period.

The mental effects of the Hibernator remain to be explored. Will six months of hibernation seem like six months to the memory? If not, hibernating pensioners will hardly notice their periods of torpor. But if so, the Hibernator could revolutionize the prison service as well. Most prisoners would be happy to serve their time unconscious; and most prison governors would be only too pleased to let them. At the end of (say) ten years' hibernation, the criminal would wake up to recall his crime and late way of life as a distant folly. He could reasonably vow to leave all that behind, and start life afresh. Unconsciousness would be a far better form of rehabilitation than sharing a gaol with an ever-changing crew of lively expert criminals, all keen to swap ideas.

The Hibernator could serve still other purposes. The long-term unemployed could sleep out an economic downturn; unrequited lovers might embrace it as a way to forget. Those valiantly predicting a religious revival, or the resurgence of Socialism, or invasion by aliens, could use it to await (or sleep safely through) these social revolutions. And the younger child's hopeless threat to his big brother — “Wait till I'm older than you!” — would at last have a chance of coming true.