All characters not mine, all weird science I can't blame on anyone else.

Winter in July


Peter sat at the counter in the Harvard basement lab listlessly, through the already hot but rain sticky Boston morning. His head was slumped in his hands, elbows propped on the table. He hadn't been sleeping well, and for this, could not (directly) blame his father's nocturnal ramblings. He'd been having the same nightmare over and over, the past few nights. Laying on a table in a white white space, unable to move. Blue-white light with indistinct shapes in the periphery of his vision. And the cold. Brittle, numb, implacable, eternal, hopeless cold. Cold that ever so gradually seized up through his limbs, body, stole over his heart, and then seeped into brain where he knew, just knew, if it ever completely swallowed his mind that he would never wake up.

He wearily started to lift his head, rubbing his palms through his eyes and down his cheeks as he did so. Halfway up, he reluctantly opened his eyes, to find Walter staring keenly at him. But not his Walter – the man gazing at him was poised and focused, and was favoring him with the penetrating look of a scientist dispassionately watching a lab rat succumb to a manufactured virus.

Peter found himself frozen mutely in mid-gesture, heart racing, his eyes wide, the self-same rat pinned on his stool unable to look away. He felt a mixture of both immediate precariousness as well as an ugly sense of déjà vu. Time and sound stopped – until the lab door swung open with a crash of light and hallway chatter.

He turned his head to see Olivia walking through the doorway, raincoat over her arm, fiddling last raindrops off her umbrella distractedly. Unnerved, he turned back to the counter, only to find Walter slumped sloppily at the stove and looking at him with a familiar perplexed expression.

"Forgive me for asking again, son, but what end of this DOES a scrambled egg come out of?" On his fingertips, Walter had precariously balanced a raw egg, and was poking at it tentatively with a spatula.

Peter felt the blood drain back into his heart and blinked slowly. Olivia set her things down on a table and greeted the two men.

She did a double take at Peter. His skin was grey pale and his eyes were hunted.

"Peter," she said with small concern, taking his shoulder and turning to look at him closely, "are you feeling ok?"

For a moment the younger Bishop considered collapsing in her arms, but then stealing another look at his father - fruitlessly shaking the raw egg and then inexplicably holding it to his ear - he gently shrugged out of her grip and mustered an ironic grin.

"Oh, yeah. Besides having to Groundhog Day my way through freshman chemistry class with Mr Wizard here, for all eternity, I'm doing great. How bout you?"

Olivia straightened and pursed her lips. Peter slid off the stool, and without malice moved over to take the egg from his father.

"You want eggs, Walter? Fine, look, I'll cook you an egg. Go do something with less potential for setting the lab on fire."

He bumped his father out of the way, who clapped his hands gleefully and scurried over to Olivia, clasping both of her hands in his.

"Olivia, my dear. The rain makes you positively radiant. Come see how my flesh-eating ice borer worms are coming along. And Peter," he said over his shoulder, "do not add cranberries to my eggs. I simply can't tolerate them – it is not like it is Thanksgiving today."

Peter glanced back and frowned over the non-sequitur but continued bustling with the pans, spatulas, butter and other various egg paraphernalia. If nothing else, it was an excuse to do something other than focus on the pounding in his head. "So, Olivia – would you like cranberry or non-cranberry eggs, then?"

Over in the corner of the lab, Walter was excitedly summarizing for Olivia the results of his investigations.

"Yes, so here you see some of ice worms that we removed from the body at the docks. Mr Baker, was it? I never forgot a face, but then, his was gone with the rest of his head, wasn't it? Poor chap. Exploding brains, tut tut."

"I have these little fellows in this chill box to keep their temperature down below freezing. Interestingly, if you raise them even a little above freezing, their bodies actually dissolve due to the cellular membranes losing structural rigidity. It's as if they need the cold to help them stay solid."

He lifted the lid of the chill box, while nodding mournfully over at a large beaker sitting nearby, half filled with some murky bluish substance, which Olivia realized slightly nauseously must be the remains of some of the other worms.

"But Professor," she asked quizzically, "the body we found, our Mr Baker, wasn't anywhere near freezing. How is it that the ice worms managed to survive?" She swallowed. "At least some of them."

Over at the small lab stove, the eggs (without cranberries) were in a large skillet and starting to bubble. Peter leaned heavily against the side of the stove with one hand, and with the other, rubbed his forehead with the ball of the hand holding the spatula. He considered idly that he had just the same sort of headache you get when quickly drinking something icy, a frozen margarita or a root beer float. With some of his earlier irritation back, he mentally vowed not to indulge his father in any more late night treat runs unless it was to a honest-by-god pub.

When Peter drew back his hand, he noticed it was slightly shaking.

His father continued to lecture enthusiastically in the back. With long forceps, he carefully removed a worm from the chill box and presented it to Olivia. The worm was about 2 inches long, fat and segmented, and of the peculiarly glacial blue of ice itself. It wiggled determinedly against the metal tongs holding it.

Olivia shrank back imperceptibly despite herself.

"It looks far too healthy to have been sitting in a live – or even room temperature - body for any length of time," she repeated.

"Yes, don't they look good?"

Walter brought the worm close to his face and examined it.

"It helped to have something to feed them. Luckily, I had the foresight to bring a piece of the dead man's chest with me after removing them. They'd seemed to like that."

He set the worm down on a plastic tray with ice cubes already layering it, while Olivia considered becoming sick.

Behind them, Peter staggered for a second, gripping the edge of the stove for balance, as he got the building, overwhelming sensation of his head being inexorably ripped open from without, complete with cracking skull and bits of brain flying. He shook his head, only to have a whole aurora borealis rattle his skull. He opened his mouth to say something, but found his throat constricted and breath icy in his chest.

"So clearly," Walter continued, obliviously, "when they were introduced IN the dead man, the temperature would have had to be below freezing, long enough for them to get established."

Olivia frowned. "But, Walter - it is over 90 deg out there. This man didn't work with any kind of ice or air conditioning systems, and his family swears he hadn't left Boston for the last month, much less made a trip to the Arctic and back."

Walter smiled sadly, with some triumph.

"Maybe his physical body wasn't. But it wouldn't have to be. We're considering astral projection, here."

Olivia looked at him with mouth agape. Before she could muster an answer, there was a clatter, soft thump, and a hoarse moan. She spun around as Walter craned to look past her shoulder.

By the stove, Peter had slumped to his knees and was pressing both hands to his forehead in what looked very much like an attempt to hold his head together. Olivia rushed to his side, sliding to her knees as she reached out to him, pulling him to her chest. His skin was icy, and as his head lolled back and his eyes slid to her face, they were eerily blue. Glacial blue.

Forgotten for the moment, Walter pursed his lips and carefully placed the ice borer back in the chill box. He replaced the lid, and as as afterthought, rummaged under the counter and pulled out a thin metallic webbing. This he draped carefully over the box. Straightening his lab coat, he drifted in Olivia's wake, with a soft, worried expression on his face. Peter seemed to be mostly or at least materially unconscious, and Olivia struggled slightly to edge him up off the floor the few yards to the couch. He lay back unprotestingly, and after a moment, she drew a blanket up to his chin.

"Peter", she said earnestly, stroking his cold cheek with a knuckle, "Can you hear me?"

His eyes fluttered, green again, and his head rolled tiredly against her hand.

"Walter, what is wrong with him?"

The older Bishop, who'd been looming over her, eyeing his son, drew back.

"I'm not… sure," he said, tentatively.

Olivia looked around at him sharply.

"What do you mean, you're not "sure"? Do you know what is happening to him?"

Walter looked around evasively.

"I think he's been having nightmares. He wouldn't tell me, of course."

"Walter…", she said warningly. "This isn't a nightmare. How long has this been going on?"

The scientist stepped back and sat gingerly at the end of the couch by his son's feet.

"Oh, I don't know precisely, of course." He sounded apologetic, almost. "I assume from when I first brought the ice borers home to put in our hotel minibar at night. Before I got the chill box delivered."

Olivia stared at him, aghast.

"You did WHAT?"

Walter looked down, petulantly.

"Well, I couldn't let them DIE, and the fridge here was full. And too warm. The fridge in the hotel was just perfect because all there was in it was those tiny little bottles of alcoholic beverages and as you know, they have a freezing point much lower than water. Or ice worms."

Olivia's eyes were opened wide. She looked at the penitent, cowering figure in front of her, then looked up at the ceiling, and then looked again down with a long breath.

"Walter." She said, and the professor reluctantly looked up to meet her eyes.

"What have you done to Peter?"

The object of their attention was coming groggily around. A faint pink blush had come back to his cheeks, and his eyes fixed on Olivia with effort.

"Olivia?" he said weakly.

The blonde agent looked down at him and cradled his head protectively.

"I'm here, Peter. You're OK."

"Mmm, ok..." His lashes fluttered on his cheeks, and then his eyes snapped open wide. "Then why is my father this close to me with electrodes in his hands?? That is NOT ok!"

Peter glared frantically at his father and feebly edged himself up the couch closer into Olivia's embrace

"Son, don't be alarmed. I just need to measure your core body temperatures." With that, the scientist eagerly reached in with the fans of wires.

Olivia reached out to knock away the older man's hands with her own extended arm.

"You are NOT putting those in my body," Peter protested.

"Oh, no, no my boy, I just want to measure the skin temperature at various points as surrogate. You'd be much too warm inside already by the time I was able to implant anything surgically."

Peter's eyes grew wide again and he shrank back into Olivia's chest as Olivia spoke first.

"DR BISHOP. Stop. What ARE you doing?" she demanded.

Walter sighed and sat back. The older man's gaze went long, reaching back and reliving old memories.

"The worms," he started slowly, "to move through ice like they do, so soft as they are, no teeth... William and I suspected that they might have some natural affinity, natural resonance, you might say, for interdimensional travel."

Despite the effort, Peter rolled his eyes and coughed hoarsely.

"And here's where we're going off the rails on this crazy, crazy train, now.."

His father looked at him fondly.

"No. No, we were on to something. Truly. It was our intention to demonstrate real astral projection, where the traveler, rather than being simply a disincarnate presence, would actually have physical reality in the distant place." More memories flowed. "The ice borers were the key. We hypothesized that they could act as catalyst for a human traveler, one that was sensitive to their magnetic frequencies. Magnetic fields are like roadways to them, you know…" he carried on conversationally.

"That is why we focused our early experiments on the magnetic north pole, where both ice borers and natural magnetic fields are concentrated."

Peter had experienced dawning horror as his father continued to speak.

"Canada!" he exclaimed. "We went to Canada a few winters when I was a kid!"

His father beamed.

"Yes, very good, Peter! You always wanted to see the reindeer. I would tell you that we were visiting Santa Claus. Or was it that you wanted see an elf, and I promised we'd visit Disneyland?" He frowned, considering.

Olivia looked from one man to another in disbelief.

"So, Walter – you used your son to attempt astral travel, at, at, the magnetic north pole? Using flesh-eating worms?"

There was an open, pregnant, pause.

"It was long ago. We weren't successful." Walter stood up briskly, as Peter again closed his eyes in long suffering resignation.

"But it looks like someone else has been working on it since then," he continued. "I didn't mean to cause you discomfort, son, but I needed to see if these worms were the same kind we experimented with. And I did need a fridge to keep them in, since you refused to get me the ice cream machine last month," he finished defensively.

Peter narrowed his eyes in disgust, but didn't say anything. Olivia shook her head and tried to make clear sense of their path.

"Ok, so someone who knew about your experiments with ice borers and, um, astral travel is now trying to reproduce them, with the effect of sending at least one man to his death in the arctic. And, bringing him back."

She frowned.

"So, the question is, what is our man Baker's connection to these people? Was he involved in the team, or unwilling participant? And in that case, what made him a target?"

Reviews, please! While I get the hang of this. I've still got a few episodes to catch up on, but couldn't resist opportunity to write weird science.