His associate, the sallow blonde, was Laura Westerley, and she was a doctor as well, specializing in internal medicine, which, if you think about it, ought to take in just about everything but dermatology. I’d assumed she was a nurse, because most women in white had been nurses when I was frozen. That was just one of the things that were not the same anymore.)

“You were found,” Fischbinder told me, “in a frozen-food locker in the sub-basement of a house in Union City, New Jersey.”

“At 673 Parkside Avenue,” I said.

“You remember the address after all these years?”

“As if it were yesterday. As far as I’m concerned, it was yesterday.”

“Yes, of course. For years the house was owned and occupied by a family named Akesson.”

“Swedish Danes,” I said. “Or Danish Swedes.”

“You know them?”

I shook my head. “I knew a man named Harald Engstrom, and the last thing I remember was drinking a drink he poured for me. He was staying at a friend’s house, and Akesson must have been the friend. And I wound up in the family freezer, next to the cans of Birdseye frozen orange juice.”

“Not the family freezer.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly mean-”

“I doubt the family could have known about it,” he explained. “This was a special hi-tech unit, state-of-the-art in 1972 and still impressive all these years later. And it was installed in a sub-basement of the Akesson house, a small one-room affair reached through a trapdoor in the floor of the furnace room. Someone had run an electrical line to the chamber, and that supplied the power to keep the thing running and you well frozen. And there was also a backup system, a battery-operated generator that would kick in and power the chamber if the power lines were down in a storm. Whoever did this wasn’t taking any chances that you would thaw prematurely.”