Mulder and Scully have finally made it into bed together -- in your dreams. Which might look a lot like the series of photos of "X Files" stars David Duchovny (Mulder) and Gillian Anderson (Scully) posing for the Australian Rolling Stone's 1995 Rock Yearbook that is now being bootlegged and downloaded on "X-Files" fan sites all over the Internet.

In the cover shot, TV's most smoldering platonic pals embrace amid white sheets. Anderson's naked back is to the camera, her face in angelic, eyes-closed profile, while Duchovny stares at the reader with a very Mulderesque faintly-smirky, faintly-mischievous expression, as if to say, And it's even better than you could possibly imagine.

What separates the photo from run-of-the-mill TV-star cheesecake is the way it utterly nails the fantasies of "X-Files" fans. It makes flesh, so to speak, the show's subtext, yet in a way that very smartly leaves Mulder and Scully's "actual" relationship on the show -- chaste, yet devoted -- undisturbed. I really don't want to see Mulder and Scully doing the nasty on some big Fox-a-rama sweeps episode (shades of Sam and Diane and Ross and Rachel), do you? Yet it's satisfying to know that somewhere out there in the collective subconscious of "X-Files" fans, Mulder and Scully have a (sex) life together.

And it's fitting that they've slipped the bonds of time and space (well, at least the bonds of their weekly time slot) to float about in the ether, because that's the way "The X-Files" has fanned out into the atmosphere, too, like a puff of smoke from Cancer Man's cigarette. "The X Files" is more than just a once-a-week TV show, it's a shorthand for the distrust of official explanations that permeates the culture on the cusp of the millennium. Pick up the newspaper on any given day and read about mad cow disease and missing children and toxic-blood fumes and disappearing sperm counts. X-Files are all around us.

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