Olivia wastes no time as she walks back into the lab. "What can you tell us, Dr. Bishop?"

Walter wears his headlamp, looking down into a pan that has the contents of the unfortunate victim's stomach within. "Not much yet, but if Ms. Mc—I mean, Agent McManus is right, I'll be able to tell you within the next hour." He begins humming a familiar yet disparate theme.

Olivia looks over to Peter, who is sitting next to the microscope. He formulates a response to her unanswered question. "Holst's The Planets. I think we're up to Mars."

Emily brings her crystalline samples over to Peter. "I'm going to need to analyze these. Would you mind if--?"

He smiles. "Be my guest." She dons a lab jacket and begins to put one of the crystals into a beaker, affixing it over a Bunsen burner. She turns and hands him the packet of dusty rose crystals. "I could use some help."

"Right." Peter begins the same process with this set of crystals.

"You think that these are the substances we're going to find in these children." Olivia tries to give the two some space within their section of the lab, leaning over the railing from above.

Peter looks up at her. "No idea." He turns his head to the side. "You?"

"I think we'll find some of them," Emily replies, fixing the safety glasses on her head. "I'm more interested in the ones that we won't find in their bloodstreams. Were they aborted attempts or are they something else entirely?"

"Why would he risk this?" Olivia asked this question in the car, but did not get a satisfactory response. Indeed, Emily seems in some respects to be just as out of balance as Walter. "I mean, he'd been working on those compounds for at least a month. He clearly thought they would work. What went wrong?"

"There was a contaminant. That's what yields the results we saw at the park, playground, whatever." Emily studies the green crystals as they slowly begin to disintegrate into liquid.

"Normally it's due to impatience," Walter chimes in. "The critical compound in the Braincamp materials cannot be accelerated with a catalyst. I suspect he used simple rock salt as a catalyst and it had the deleterious effects we witnessed today." His face takes on a slightly harder look. "Almost identical to the rat studies we did before that terrible summer."

"But normally catalysts have no effect on the end result." Astrid looks from Walter to Olivia. "Right?"

"Yeah, normally," Peter responds absently, noting the color change in the crystals, from a dusty rose to an elephantine gray as they liquefy. "But sometimes if you are dealing with compounds that aren't as stable as, say, your typical minerals, a tiny speck of dust is all that's needed to completely ruin your experiment. Rock salt could have decimated the compound's better qualities."

"You speak from experience." Astrid knows better than to pose it as a question.

Peter's grimacing smile tells it all. "Many times. Mostly with the chemistry set my father bought me when I was eight."

"Well, if this guy was so smart—he did go to Braincamp, after all—then wouldn't he know that?"

"I would think you are right, Olivia, but sometimes we forget the simplest of things when we are under undue pressure to give results." Walter smiles wistfully in her direction. "My guess is that, in all of the excitement and pressure, he simply forgot to not use any catalyst. Most unwise."

"How long does it take without a catalyst? Or at least, how long did it take back in 1983?"

Walter tilts his head in memory. "I think it took four weeks, all told, to complete the last step. The first ten or twelve steps took less than four altogether."

"So why rush it? I mean, he paid for that warehouse for a year in cash. He could have just sat back and waited. No one knew he was there." Olivia shoots a pointed look at Emily, who is oblivious to it. "So he had plenty time to get it right." Her phone rings, and she answers it without thinking. "Olivia Dunham."

"Hey. We just found Robert Delevan's body—or at least a body that matches his description." Charlie sounds defeated.