Jimmy tensed when he saw Krycek open the bottle of rubbing alcohol again.

"Don't worry, I'm just going to give you an injection," Krycek said. He dabbed an alcohol-soaked cotton ball on the inside of his elbow. "Try to relax your arm."

The needle slipped in painlessly. Krycek seemed to know what he was doing. Jimmy was obviously the prisoner of an accomplished enemy agent, just like in the movies.

"I'll bet I know what that is. It's pentium sodathal, isn't it? Ow!"

"Sorry," Krycek said, his voice oddly strained. "I didn't mean that to hurt. It's just..." and he broke up laughing. "You shouldn't make someone laugh when he's in the middle of..." and he lost it again. He managed to get the needle out without doing too much damage, and set the empty hypo down on the nightstand to wipe tears from his eyes.

"What have you got?" Byers asked eagerly. He'd heard Frohike and Langly congratulating each other over some kind of breakthrough and came to look over their shoulders.

"Sorry, buddy, didn't mean to get your hopes up," Frohike said. "It's not good news."

"We managed to get the Goodyear blimp to give us a good picture of Jimmy's seats in E-com-Net Stadium," Langly explained. "Sure enough, they're empty."

That must mean there was a Ravens game today. Was it football season already? He knew that Jimmy had bought season tickets for the second year in a row. Last year he'd gone to all the home games, except when he was out of town breaking into Death Row and so forth. Frohike pointed at one of the bright purple spots in a sea of random colors, then zoomed in on four empty purple seats.

"I suppose that rules out stealing his stadium seats as a motive for the kidnapping," Byers said dryly.

Despite his quiet tone of voice, Frohike and Langly both looked as if he'd slapped them. "We're just trying to check out every possibility," Langly said in a small voice. "It was a long shot, but this was an easy place to check. We've looked everywhere."

"I'm sorry. I'm really on edge over this. I know you're doing your best." Trying to give them a chance to brag a little to make them feel better, he asked, "How did you find his seat?"

"The seat numbers were easy, of course," Langly said.

"There's an online seat map on the web," Frohike explained, "but just to double check, we looked at some archived footage the internal stadium cameras. They've got some state of the art equipment, let me tell you! Highest tech football stadium in the country." He flipped through some still pictures, blown up to just a handful of fuzzed-out figures, but Byers had no trouble recognizing his friend's familiar face. Each picture definitely showed Jimmy, wearing various shirts on different days.

Byers noticed that there was always an empty seat on his left and two empty seats on his right. "You said seat 'numbers,' didn't you," he said slowly.

"Yeah, he bought four season tickets for some reason," Langly said. "Last year, and this year again."

"He kept asking us to go with him," Byers recalled softly. "We never did."

"Yeah, total waste of money," Langly said. "He should have saved it for the printers. Or his car payments."

"I meant to go with him to at least one game, someday," Byers whispered.

"It always seemed like there was plenty of time, didn't there?" Frohike said understandingly, laying a hand on his shoulder. Frohike was the last one Byers could imagine accepting Jimmy's invitation, but at least he understood Byers's feelings of guilt. Come to think of it, Frohike had gone to a lot of Orioles games with Mulder this past summer. At least with Mulder there had been a second chance.

The overnight package had an obviously false return address, and the sender name was Koatcek. Unless Krycek had flown Jimmy to Kansas City, he'd either altered the tracking records or sent it there by air cargo to be dropped off near the sorting facility. Either way, he'd been careful to reveal nothing about his true whereabouts.

Byers didn't want to think about what might be in that package. He wasn't a religious man, or he would pray with all his heart for God not to let it be what he was afraid it might be. But he knew perfectly well that if there was any kind of god in control of the universe he lived in, it was a god who regularly allowed such gruesome things to happen.

The package was too small to contain a human head, at least, but it was big enough for anything from a heart down to -- Byers tried not to think about it.

"What do you think?" Langly asked him after Frohike finished running the bomb sniffer over the package and brought it inside. They tried to make a practice of using the bomb sniffer and Geiger counter on all packages they received, and if they felt like being especially careful they had a glove box to open packages they suspected of containing biological threats. Byers suspected none of this was necessary in this case, but he hadn't said anything as Frohike had done the routine checks. It was a welcome excuse to put off having to open the package.

"I don't think Krycek is sending us anything dangerous, if that's what you're afraid of," Byers finally answered.

"What else, then?" Langly asked. "He's not exactly going to send us a nice present."

"Not a nice present, no," Byers agreed quietly.

Langly gave him a puzzled look. Then his eyes widened and he covered his mouth and sprinted for the bathroom.

"Let's get this over with," Frohike said grimly, as retching sounds were heard from the bathroom. "Want me to open it, buddy?"

Byers nodded numbly. He forced himself to watch Frohike cut the tape, open the flaps, and start removing wads of newspaper. Mostly tabloids, judging from the fragments of headlines screaming out from them. Byers caught a glimpse of "...Stole My Organs..." and shuddered. At least there were no blood stains on the papers, he told himself. That was a good sign, wasn't it?

Finally Frohike pulled a small, unlabeled glass jar out of the box. He dug through the rest of the packing material, but failed to turn up anything more alarming.

The jar contained a highly viscous white fluid. Frohike raised his eyebrows, then took it over to the microscope. Byers went to check on Langly and tell him it didn't seem to be anything as horrible as he was imagining. When they got back, Frohike had already prepared a slide and was studying it under the microscope. "Yeah, it's just what it looks like," he said, looking up.

Langly and Byers exchanged puzzled glances. "What does it look like?" Langly asked Frohike, peering at the jar. "I've never seen anything like this before."

"Sheesh, Langly! I knew you were a virgin, but don't tell me you've never..." He let his voice trail off, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

"Oh!" Langly and Byers said simultaneously.

Byers sat down. He couldn't believe Jimmy had cooperated in collecting this... sample. Somehow Krycek had forced him. Milked him. He pictured, over and over, what must have happened. The humiliation that implied, and the casual way Krycek had sent it to them unlabeled, made Byers furious.

Finally, he became aware that Langly and Frohike had been working with other lab equipment for some time and were quietly discussing their findings. "Dead less than twelve hours," Langly was saying.

"What?!" Byers said, snapping back to reality. "Dead? How can you tell?"

"Because they're not moving, for starters," Langly said. "You know, little tails swishing? Looking for some huge, round, ripe ovum?"

The cells. He was talking about the individual sperm cells.

"Are they Jimmy's?"

"Haven't you been paying attention?" Langly asked.

"Langly," Frokhike said quietly, "can't you see he's upset?" To Byers, he said, "They're definitely Jimmy's. We compared the DNA to a strand of his hair from the shower."

"I keep telling him to clean those up," Langly griped.

"Yeah, right," Frohike said. "Do you know how many long blond hairs I had to dig through to find one short one?"

"Guys," Byers sighed.

"Okay, I'm sorry," Frohike said. "You were right. While we were arguing about whether the picture was real, Krycek was doing god-knows-what to Jimmy."

"Yeah," Langly said softly. "The package could have been--" he paused, looking sick, "something much worse. I'm sorry too, man. What more can we say?"

"Don't say it to me," Byers said. "Save it to say to Jimmy, when we get him back." He stood up to head for his room, wanting to be alone for awhile. "By the way," he added absently, "it's a myth that all sperm cells are trying to fertilize the ovum. A good percentage of them are blockers, chemically triggered to swim toward another man's sperm."