cvs disaster recovery

[Gregory Seidman <gss+debian@cs.brown.edu>]

Before anyone brings it up, I know there should have been backups of the
CVS repository. That said, I am in the following situation:

1) Machine alpha, which had the CVS repository, is temporarily
   unavailable (in a policy, rather than technical, sense).

2) Machine beta has a completely up-to-date checkout of the entire
   codebase, and even the CVSROOT.

3) Machine alpha will probably become available again in a few weeks,
   but work must proceed on the codebase in the meantime; furthermore,
   we need a temporary repository to work with.
   
4) When/if alpha is available again, we would like to be able to merge
   the changes in the new repository into the old repository as if we
   had been using the original repository the whole time.

Is there any way to accomplish this? Do I have to give up and simply
import the entire codebase as if it were a new project?

--Greg