“He’s frozen!   Oh my God, he’s frozen!” came a cry in the large warehouse.

Staring in wonder at the tall, moustached lieutenant, who stood as rigid as a statue in the middle of the refitted aircraft hanger, the six technicians slowly started toward him, their hands outstretched before them like Boris Karloff in an old Frankenstein movie.   Of course they had all heard of freezing-out: the phenomenon had been reported off and on since the earliest days of America’s ionic-drive experiments, toward the end of World War One.   But this was a new installation, its personnel only recently recruited from more mundane laboratory work, so until now they had never actually encountered a freeze-out.

Nevertheless, they had been briefed on the phenomenon and knew that the only “cure” was a quick laying-on-of-hands, to effect a rapid transfer of vitality from their own bodies to energise the frozen subject and bring him back to life.   So, trying their best to avoid the look of abject terror in the eyes of the lieutenant, the six technicians moved forward, hands held out like Boris Karloff.

They moved quickly, they had been warned the laying-on-of-hands had to be effected as soon as possible, or else the victim could become “set”: permanently frozen, like a living, breathing statue.   What they had not been warned was that another possible side-effect of the freeze-out was a “burn-out”:

Two of the technicians already had the palms of their hands placed flat against the lieutenant’s chest, when without warning he burst into flames.

One young woman was lucky: screaming from shock and agony, she managed to release the lieutenant then ran shrieking around the workroom, her hands flaming like gasoline torches.   Burnt to charcoal up to a few centimetres above the wrists, she would lose both hands.   But at least she would survive the burn-out.

The other technician and the lieutenant were not so lucky: The two men were engulfed in a mountain of yellow-white flames.   Small sprays of white-hot fat jetted from the bodies of the two men (one screaming aloud from agony, the other frozen, screaming with his eyes only) as their body fats sizzled like barbecued meat, even while they lived, as the flames burnt with almost supernatural intensity.

In only seconds they had been reduced to a large mound of charcoal, which continued to collapse in on itself, rapidly losing all resemblance to anything that had ever been alive.   Until finally it dissolved into a pile of fine, grey-white ash.