Treadmill
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In 1934, Glenn Cunningham was the fastest man alive.
In 1908, Cunningham was a bed-ridden cripple, both legs fire-shriveled, one foot toeless.
Cam thinks about Cunningham a lot. Mostly in the mornings, during the part of the morning when he has energy to spare for thinking.
Cam's become very good at focusing. It's become his most important survival skill. He likes to focus on the heel of his left foot, because by 10 am, that's the only part of his legs that doesn't hurt.
For as much of the day as he can, he focuses. He focuses on the end of the treadmill, walking and running and hobbling towards it. He'll crawl if he has to. He'll get there. That's where the Gate is. He focuses: he puts the Gate at the end of the treadmill. Unlike other treadmills, he knows he's going to get to the end of this one. He just has to keep moving, keep pushing. When the pain and exhaustion darken the room in front of his eyes, when he can't see the Gate any more, he keeps on moving towards it anyway. He knows it's there.
Like Cam, Cunningham was from Kansas. They get some crazy storms in Kansas, summer and winter. Cam's seen some amazing rainbows there, blazing across the sky after a bad storm. Pots of gold. There's a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. And by all the gods of brutal pain and sacrifice, he's going to get there.
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Boondocks
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It was Cameron Mitchell's twenty-third trip through the Gate, so the number wasn't anything special or different. What was different was the landscape.
Teal'c looked impassive. Carter looked distracted. Jackson looked annoyed. Cam looked around and drew a nice deep breath, full of the smell of green grasses and dusty earth. Under the wide empty sky, rippling waves of grass ran out to the horizon in every direction from the Gate, a lone point of stone and metal in a sea of green and brown and bronze and gold.
Carter pulled out her compass and the widget-o-meter she'd developed for calibrating terrestrial compasses to work with extraterrestrial planetary magnetic fields. Teal'c began to wade through the hip-deep grass, heading unerringly, Cam assumed, for the spot where the UVA had splatted when its instrumentation was knocked out by that same unusually strong planetary magnetic field. Jackson and Cam followed the clear trail of bent and crushed grasses to where the MALP had gotten stuck.
Cam gave a cursory glance at the wheels and couldn't see any reason for the breakdown. Well, as long as the planet wasn't hostile, Landry would send out technicians and retrieve the Air Force's Very Expensive Property. He got a good hold on the flanges, scrambled and clambered on top of the thing and looked around.
Jackson squinted up at him. "See anything?"
"Nope." Cam pivoted slowly. "Nothing but miles and miles of . . . miles and miles."
"No trees, huh?" Jackson's grin had that private, in-joke look to it.
"Trees?"
"That was a joke of Jack's. I don't think he ever put it in the reports." A shrug. "Nothing at all? You'd think there'd have to be something . . . I mean, there's a Gate, so . . . "
Cam finished his pirouette and pointed. "Over there. Long way off, but there's a kind of a shadow. That's trees. In country like this, where there's trees, there's water. And where there's water, there might be a settlement."
Jackson brightened, then narrowed his eyes. "How far off?"
"Bit of a walk. Nice day for it, though."
"Are you always this cheerful?"
"Hell, it could always be worse. Like I like to remind myself," Cam said as he hopped down off the MALP, "at least I'm not in Kansas any more."
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