Rodney's mouth dropped open. "Rod?"

The newcomer nodded. "That's my name. I guess that makes you a 'Rodney'?"

"Yeah, Rodney. Are you the same one who, well, dropped in before?" Rodney asked.

"There's no way of knowing for certain whether our precise realities were connected in the past, but this isn't the first time I've had to do this," Rod replied. "First with the exotic particles, now with the heat. Did you people ever consider that realities are separate for a reason?"

"What exactly is going on here?" Tunney wondered.

"Ah yes, Mal. I assume you had the bright idea of using his work to pump excess heat out of this reality, while assuming the chance of that reality - my reality - not taking kindly to the excess heat to be small enough it wasn't worth thinking about?"

"Uh... I suppose you could put it that way. So, you're the Rodney McKay of another reality? And you came here to tell us to turn off the heat?"

"Precisely."

"And you've done this before?"

"After a fashion."

"How did you..."

"I can't get into that, Mal."

"Why do you keep calling me 'Mal'?"

"Well, the you in my reality..."

"This one doesn't go by 'Mal' any more than I go by 'Rod'," Rodney interrupted.

"Chill, Rodney, it's not a big deal," Rod replied.

"Bad choice of words there," Jennifer put in, finally coming to terms with the situation. "We're trying to prevent that."

Rod grinned. "Oh, hi Jen." Rodney coughed pointedly. "...nifer," Rod quickly added. "How unsurprising to see you here. What were you saying about preventing chilling?"

Rodney quickly explained. "'Genius' over here ignored all my warnings about the instability of interdimensional bridges, so now we're stuck with a heatsink we can't shut off."

"You can't?"

Having heard enough of Rodney's derogatory comments, Tunney took over the explaining and gave Rod an actual quick explanation. He had just finished explaining why the force field couldn't be shut off when Bill Nye ran in, followed by a security guard. "Quick, a man just got spontaneously frozen!" Nye exclaimed.

"He what?" Kramer asked, glad for something to distract him from the two McKays. He was still a little confused about what was actually going on.

"Hang on, since when were there two McKays?" Nye asked, much to Kramer's chagrin.

Jennifer answered this, as the McKays and Tunney had ignored Nye's entrance and were still talking among themselves. "The new one is from the other reality. Where we're sending the heat. What did you say about a frozen man? I'm a doctor..."

"He's in the main hall. You'd better hurry."

"Come on, guys," called Jennifer when she realised the other men weren't following.

"What's up?" Rodney asked.

"A man was frozen. Spontaneously."

"Hey, it's Professor Nye!" Rod exclaimed

"Professor?"

"Never mind that, we need to get out there!" Jennifer protested.

"Right." Rod glanced at Tunney as they left the control room. "Frozen people? How do you suppose that happened?"

"That's what I was about to ask!" Rodney interrupted.

"Hmm. You probably were. Well, Mal? Malcolm, I mean."

"Uh... let's wait until we see what's happened."

-

As Jennifer examined the unfortunate man and talked to herself about body temperature and tissue damage, the others speculated on the cause. "Oh, so when the bridge makes a sudden demand on the heat-sink…"

"The heat-sink reacts by drawing power from a single localized place inside the containment field," Rodney McKay finished Tunney's sentence.

"And that beam would freeze anything in its path," Tunney realised. "Oh…I did not see this coming."

"It's…freeze-lightning," labeled the two McKays in unison.

"Freeze lightning? Ooh, I like that."

"Well, you can't have it. It's mine. It's…copywritten," said Rodney defensively.

"Ours. We thought of it first," Rod amended.

Nye shook his head at that. "There are just two people entitled to refer to themselves as 'we'; one is the editor and the other is the fellow with a tapeworm."

"What's that got to do with anything?" Rodney wondered, annoyed. Meanwhile, Rod muttered, "It's not the worms calling themselves 'we' that are the the problem so much as the snakes." Fortunately no one was paying attention, though several of the guests were starting to wonder why there was a second man who looked like Rodney McKay but wasn't in formal attire.

Before the conversation could get any further out of hand, Jennifer walked over from her examination of the frozen man. "How's he doing?" the McKays asked.

The conversation continued, but Tunney found it difficult to focus on the seriousness of the situation, due to the constant doubling of the McKays' speech.

-

To be continued!