The Garden of Edith

by skypig21

McKay finds his hands—and his mind—full when he encounters Mainland colleagues while on a simple repair call to their base camp.

A/N: Takes place after "Siege III," prior to "Runner."

Dr. McKay's Adventures at Camp Dustbowl

"It's the generator. Something's wrong with it and we've lost power to everything."

"I know it's the generator. And I'm not surprised that it's broken, since no one besides me knows how to properly care for them. What I find astonishing is how I have to stop what I'm doing, jump up, come all the way down here and save the day yet again! I have plenty to do in my lab, thank you, and wasn't planning to visit the Gobi Desert when I got up today."

Which was a little bit of a lie. Dr. Rodney McKay hadn't actually gone to bed the night before, so he hadn't actually gotten up that morning. Living without sleep wasn't a big deal for him. The fumes of power naps and what passed for Lantean coffee were adequate substitutes. He hadn't expected to be sent to the Mainland, however, and that had screwed up everything.

McKay's plans for that day mimicked the agenda he set for himself everyday: attempt to facilitate perfect order in the universe. He accepted that perhaps this goal would take a lifetime of effort to reach. What he rejected was having whatever progress he could make that day shot to hell before breakfast.

Dr. Michael Barber practically groveled when McKay emerged from the puddle jumper. The expert on ecosystems seemed nervous, even squirrelly. McKay remembered a long, incredibly boring meeting early on, six, maybe seven months ago, during which it was decided to send a team of farmer-types to attempt crop raising on the Mainland. Sort of like homesteaders, several members joked. The project had moved in fits and starts, interrupted by "weather and Wraith issues," as one early report put it.

Now before him stood Barber, rather thinner than before, dressed in a filthy and torn t-shirt, beige canvas shorts, beach flip-flops and a ball cap with poker chips and "Las Vegas" embroidered on its ratty bill. McKay hadn't exactly forgotten about the farmer team; he'd simply had enough on his plate without worrying about whether they had plowed the lower forty.

Although McKay led the scientific side of the Atlantis expedition, he didn't have in-depth knowledge of every branch of the science tree. Medicine, for instance. He could go on with the rest of his life just fine, completely ignorant about maladies of the human body and the cures for them. Better, in fact. Hard science, physical science, the intertwining worlds of energy and matter, light and substance, now those were worth staying up all night to study!

"How many are on your team?" asked McKay, striding towards the base camp.

"Four. I mean, five," Barber replied.

"And what have you been up to since…when did you report in last?"

"We reported about five weeks ago, just after the last supply drop. We were sending reports to Dr. Dumais, but she hasn't responded in months."

McKay stopped, shocked to remember that he had, in fact, tasked Dumais with interacting with the Mainland team.

"I'm sorry but Dr. Dumais is dead. An illness. Five months ago. Who's been receiving your transmissions? How are the supply drops still coming?"

Barber frowned in concentration. "I'm sorry to hear about Dr. Dumais. The drops are scheduled through the quartermaster. If we all fell dead, the jumpers would still show up every six weeks, dumping MREs at the landing area. As for who's been reading my reports--I don't know. We haven't heard from anyone in a long time, though."

McKay didn't know quite what to make of this. Surely Barber's group, Ph.D.s all, had the common sense to inquire about Dumais's silence. For a scientist, Barber had a tremendous lack of curiosity. McKay made a mental note to check the mainframe drive holding his late colleague's inbox.

Five tents stood in a clearing not far from the jumper's drop-off point. Their flaps lay open to allow in light and whatever breezes happened by. Just east of the tents, a naquada generator occupied a well-protected lean-to that kept it free of sun, dust and rain—assuming it rained here. Cables snaked from the unit to only one tent, which appeared to contain lab equipment. The remaining tents were sparsely furnished with sleeping bags and small piles of personal items. McKay thought that the sheer number of studies needing to be done here would warrant more tent space, at least three set aside for labs. But he was not all that familiar with agriculture. When he returned to Atlantis, he intended to read up on it a bit.

Passing the tents, McKay ducked into the lean-to and assessed the generator. Its exterior looked fine, as shiny and perfect as always. McKay began tinkering with it, checking the cable ports and so forth. Dr. Michael Barber, Ph.D., environmental studies, Cornell University, stood looking over McKay's shoulder, obviously having little else to do that day.

"What's wrong with it?" he asked, wringing his hands anxiously.

"I don't know, yet."

"Can it be fixed?"

"Presumably."

"And if it can't? We'll have to return to Atlantis, right?"

McKay's patience, never plentiful to begin with, gave out. "Excuse me? Working here. Go away."

"Okay, okay." Barber shuffled away, then stopped. "Say, you might want to check out Edie's place, while you're here," he said.

McKay waved him away distractedly. He was lost in his thinking about the generator. The beauty of its design always impressed him, no matter how often he viewed it. Such a small thing, producing so much energy. Aside from the matter of this amount of naquadah being capable of destroying all life within a 5,000-mile radius should it explode, he had no worries.

The sun rose higher in the sky. Sweat dripped down McKay's face and dropped off the edge of his jaw. He found it strange that such a humid place had so little precipitation, as evidenced by the dusty landscape. Stranger still was the impotent creek he'd noticed upon his arrival that flowed strong and clear just steps away. The water looked clean enough but almost nothing grew up beside it. Overall, this part of the Mainland appeared to be an unbroken veil of beige. From the fine, sandy soil to the crispy, lifeless foliage of many deceased plants and trees, every feature of the land around him melted into one blank off-white canvass. Obviously, at some point stuff did grow here; just that most of it was dead, now.

The agricultural team working here was equally strange, filing reports late if at all, failing to accomplish anything and making successful contact with Atlantis only after the generator quit. Which was another thing. Naquada generators rarely malfunctioned on their own. It usually took a staff blast, several 16mm rounds or lightning strikes to shut them down. This one had a bad relay pack, a part that failed about as often as pigs flew.

His repair complete, McKay left the lean-to and walked to the edge of the creek. Barber and his team were gathered there, casually picking at lunchtime MREs. McKay accepted the canteen that Barber offered to him.

"All done?" the scruffy environmental scientist inquired.

"Of course," McKay replied, taking a long swallow. "I've built naquada generators, so naturally fixing them isn't a problem." He stared at the creek and watched the water move by, curious. "So nothing grows here."

Barber nodded.

"And you guys don't do anything all day but go round and round conducting the same tests on the same patch of soil and then complaining about how nothing grows here."

Barber didn't respond for a moment. He looked around at his team, then idly traced his fingers in the dust.

"It's not just us," he said. "It's that idiot Edie out there. We were all together working on this, but then everyone sort of…lost interest? Or maybe we just couldn't agree on how to go about doing the research."

Barber's face broadcast a quickly shifting emotional medley—hopeful, then frightened, confident, then uncertain. McKay had conversed with the man maybe twice before sending the team to the Mainland. At that time, Barber had seemed perfectly cogent, as had the other members of the Mainland team. The ones that he remembered, anyway. Watching the vast quantity of poorly concealed sentiments moving to and fro across his colleague's face, McKay sensed that the team needed to be hauled in for medical evaluations. Perhaps Beckett would be able to determine why these erstwhile bright and motivated individuals had become almost completely stupid. Or maybe they were that stupid to begin with. No matter. The project was no longer viable; it was time to pack it in.

"Research is research," he said, ignoring his suspicions for the moment. "You get your samples, you analyze them, report your findings. Every high school sophomore knows that. And who is this Edie you keep mentioning?"

"Edith. Oh, excuse me. Doctor Edith Halliday. She's our agronomist. Or she was. Took off months ago, said she'd work the project on her own. Lives five, maybe six miles from here. Calls in on the portable once a week to keep from draining the battery. Turns on the unit at noon for fifteen minutes on what passes for Wednesday in these parts. Which, as it happens, will be in about a half-hour. Lucky you, McKay. She claims to be growing things a mile a minute, but that's a crock of shit. Nothing grows on this part of the planet."

No argument there, thought McKay, looking at the lifeless desert around him.

Barber continued, "We had a bit of a falling out. To put it bluntly, she's a bitch, but you didn't hear me say that."

"Yes, I did," McKay retorted in irritation. "Dr. Barber, you were sent here to do one thing: figure out a way to make food happen. How does that lead to one of your team going native while the rest of you sit around acting unemployed?"

Barber shrugged. The front of his ratty t-shirt was speckled with crumbs from his lunch. He stood, brushed himself off.

"Listen, McKay, you sent us out here. It wasn't my idea, but okay. We got dropped off, we unpacked, found that this wasn't really a going concern. What were we supposed to do?"

McKay felt his ire rising. Sure, he'd sent the team to the Mainland…and then promptly forgotten about them. It wasn't his fault. He was being asked to save the city and save the world and save this and save that every five minutes. How could he—why should be—keep track of Johnny Appleseed and his ilk when they were perfectly capable of reporting in all by themselves?

"So," McKay began, "You land here, discover that it sucks, and break up the group like over-educated members of Camp Lord of the Flies. How unprofessional. In case you haven't noticed, everyone in Atlantis, where your paycheck is signed…if you actually received a paycheck…but that's not the point. Everyone there is hungry. The Athosians are hungry."

McKay's words seemed to make little impression. Barber glanced sheepishly at his teammates and rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck.

"Failing in your primary task," McKay continued, "you should have reported in and requested relocation. What have you done in all of this time? Or were you too busy working on your Eagle Scout badge to do the actual science that the Ph.D. after your name requires?"

"Easy for you to say," Barber growled. "You're in a climate-controlled lab all day, instead of out here in the frying sun trying to pull watermelons out of the sand. You think it's so easy? Do it yourself!"

With that, he stomped off to the tents, followed by the other scientists, whose names McKay had already forgotten. The relentless pull of a full-blown argument churned mercilessly in his gut.

"In case you haven't heard," he shouted, following Barber to his tent, "we've had a few minor problems with, oh, I don't know, freaking big-ass storms and Genii take-over attempts and Wraith hiveships attacking the city."

Barber stared at him blankly, obviously out of the loop in more ways than one.

Never one to let his point escape him too early, McKay continued. "Not to mention—but I'll do it anyway--that I have been to more disgusting places and faced far more life-threatening, dire circumstances in the past month than you've experienced in a lifetime. If not for me, you'd have been a Wraith's dinner many moons ago! You are so busted, Barber. Pack up your gear. When Halliday turns on her radio, tell her to meet us here so we can all leave together."

His order was greeted with amusement by Barber and his team.

"What? What's so funny?"

"Edie won't come."

"I'm Atlantis's lead scientist. If I tell her to meet me here, she has to do it."

"Tell you what: I'll get her on the horn and you can order her over here."

With that, he pawed around in his gear for a few moments, and then stood up bearing a portable radio unit.

"We use the generator to recharge these babies. The frequency's tied into your earbud, so we can have a nice little conference call in…" He peered at his watch. "Four minutes."

McKay stood sweating in the midday sun, enervated by this pointless conversation with this ridiculous man. He drank from his canteen, quickly consumed a Fig Newton snack pack newly arrived on the Daedalus from Earth, and waited.

Finally, Barber pressed his radio's transmit button.

"Eeeeeeedieeeeeeee!" he squealed, like a pig farmer calling his least-favorite sow to dinner.

When he failed to receive a prompt reply, he repeated himself, this time even more obnoxiously.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeedieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

Annoyed, McKay asked, "Why isn't she responding? Is her radio on?"

Barber glanced at the rest of his team, sharing a private moment that bounced between them. McKay was beginning to loathe these people and their knowing looks.

"Yeah, it's on. High noon 'Wednesday,'" he drawled, making quotation marks with his fingers in the air. "Edie's very particular about that. Speaking from experience, I'd say she's giving us one of her long, exasperated pauses. I can see her now, standing there, trying to get her temper under control."

His radio fizzled with an open return line. "Barber! What!"

McKay flinched from the distorted shouts in his earpiece.

Barber threw McKay an I-told-you-so expression, then keyed back. "Got a guy here from the city. Wants you to pack up and come on in, back to Atlantis."

A long pause followed. Perhaps this woman was stupider than Barber and his team—if that were possible.

"Negative, Base."

Seeing the opening for what it was, McKay keyed his radio. "Dr. Halliday, I'm Dr. Rodney McKay, not 'Some Guy'." He gave Barber a filthy look. "As you know, I'm chief scientist for the Atlantis mission. Do you have anything to report on the status of your work?"

"Nothing I'd care to discuss over the comm. Nothing that's ready for review. I'll write up my notes and forward them to you," she said, dismissively.

McKay knew bullshit when he heard it. He was a prolific—though relatively unskilled—bullshitter himself.

"Sorry, Doctor. You obviously misunderstood me. I want you and your notes here at Base by 0800 hours, when you'll be returning to Atlantis with me and the rest of your team. You remember them, don't you?"

The silence on the other end of the comm was so pointed it practically hurt.

"Dr. Halliday?" Deafening silence. McKay rolled his eyes, then turned accusingly to Barber. "What the hell is wrong with you people?"

Atlantis's best environmental expert shrugged dully. McKay felt his temper rise again.

"Load up a pack. We're going to get her and drag her back here if we have to."

Barber reacted as though McKay had placed him before a firing squad.

"No-no-no-no! McKay, you don't understand. She's fierce. She's crazy. I'm not going within a hundred yards of her without a tranquilizer gun.

"What do you mean 'fierce'? Is she armed?"

"No. But…she yells. A lot." Barber scrubbed at his forehead, as if trying to shine up his mind.

"She yells," McKay said, confounded.

"Yeah. A lot."

"A lot, yes, I heard that. I am so sorry for all of you. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that we are leaving here together when the jumper returns first thing tomorrow. So, if nobody minds can someone load a pack and take me to this person?"

Barber spoke up again, his confidence seemingly running out of his pores like sweat.

"We…we don't know where she's living."

McKay stared at Barber. "You don't know?"

The other man looked down at his feet ashamedly, completely deflated. McKay eyed him suspiciously.

"Are you ill?" he inquired.

Barber shook his head in response.

"Manic-depressive or something?"

Another headshake, this one more emphatic.

"Okay, which direction did she take?"

Barber sputtered, tears rising in his eyes. He appeared to be devolving into a complete imbecile, vainly grasping excuses out of the air. "We don't know! She took off in the night. Never left a map, nothing. We didn't know she was gone for a couple of days."

"A couple of days?"

"She kept to herself. We didn't see her every day."

"And you never bothered to go looking for her? You said she's only five miles away. How hard can it be to pull together a search party, or contact Atlantis for a jumper to do an aerial? HOW DID YOU GET HIRED ANYWAY?"

The older man put his hands to his face in surrender. "I don't know! I don't know anything! Just take us out of here. Please! We want to go back to Atlantis and forget this place forever."

A click in his earbud alerted McKay to Dr. Halliday's presence.

"Are we off party line?" she whispered.

McKay grabbed Barber's unit and switched it off. "We are now," he replied, stepping away from Barber and the rest.

"Dr. McKay, I've got a lot of things going on out here. I can't leave unexpectedly. Surely you understand."

"What sorts of things?"

"Crops, of course. Lots of them."

"Here? I mean, there?" he replied, skeptically.

"Yes, here. Where did you think I meant?" He didn't hear "idiot" muttered under her breath, but her tone spoke along those lines quite clearly. "If you'd care to follow the creek northward eight point three kilometers, I'd be happy to meet you and take you to my research outpost."

"Forget it, Doctor. Meet me here tomorrow at 0800 hours."

"Let me put it this way, Dr. McKay: You really want to see this."

Dr. McKay's Adventures on the Creekside Path

Within the borders of McKay's little-picture view of his own authority, Dr. Halliday's refusal to come in from the Outback was almost incomprehensibly dim-witted. He was Atlantis's Science Grand Poobah, the King of All Disciplines Scientific. If he told her to do this or that, she had to do it. That was the whole hierarchy thing put into practice. His hierarchy.

Edith sat at the bottom of the authority food chain. Still, she said she had crops, which, if true, would make her wildly successful at the task she'd been sent here to do. And her success, he figured, would likewise shine a big, bright light on McKay. Therefore: A short walk. Bring back a green bean or something and, boom, McKay would be elevated to a veritable God of Science.

He turned to Barber: "Fierce?"

Barber sniffled and nodded cautiously.

McKay smiled cockily. "Ah, yes. She sounds terribly frightening to anyone lacking a backbone. Strange, I didn't think that invertebrates were awarded advanced degrees."

Barber retreated quickly, mumbling to himself. The other men on his team had yet to utter a single word. At least Halliday spoke in complete sentences. McKay tugged on his pack and applied sunscreen to his face and neck. A few minutes later, Barber and his team waved goodbye tersely, having extracted a promise that they would be evacuated from the Mainland within a day.

McKay followed the creek north, as Halliday had instructed. He did not particularly enjoy the outdoors. He was certain that he was going to hate Halliday as much as Barber did, if not more. He could have simply returned to Atlantis and asked that a military contingent be sent to get her. Yet, Halliday was up to something, it seemed, and he wanted to be the first person to see it.

Humid air prickled his skin. The day had just passed its midpoint, and he felt lethargic in the thick atmosphere. The tempting creek spilled happily on its way, yet nothing of particular note was growing on its banks. Water, water everywhere, he mused. Three kilometers into his trek, McKay sat at creekside and pulled out his canteen. The water within was warm and tasted musty. Still, he knew for certain that it was free of pathogens, something the creek might have in abundance.

An insect buzzed near his head. This was the first living thing he'd noticed so far in his journey. McKay watched the thing, which resembled a small cicada, until it grew bored with him and flew off. A moment later, he noticed a remarkable odor, something reaching through the sour smell of his own perspiring body. The scent attracted him with a curious strength, for he was a man of the laboratory, who thrived in a more sterile environment.

The cicada circled a spot where the creek's bank dipped down towards the water. Advancing cautiously—his natural approach to anything out of doors—McKay noticed a small, delicate white flower sprouting in the moist earthen incline. The closer he moved to the flower, the stronger the scent that enticed him. His heart sped up a bit, like it did when he was at the cusp between a bright idea and a point that he wanted to make about it. It was almost a high, almost a head rush, alien and yet so familiar.

Stranger still were the feelings that assailed him, banging around within his mind, reverberating through his body and reaching into the primitive center of him, where need and craving and lust lay. Then everything else tumbled into that pit: pride and shame and trust and courage and all the rest.

Instantly terrified, McKay jerked back, scrambled up the bank and began running north, again, along the creek. His pack bounced heavily on his shoulders, but he ignored it as he sought to gain as much distance between himself and the anxiety that had assaulted him. Adrenalin forced him to keep going, even as his legs tired in the drenching air, and his lungs wheezed from the stress placed upon them.

After another kilometer or so, McKay stopped from fatigue and thirst. He panted loudly, trying to control his breathing, and stood bent over, hands on knees, until his head cleared and his heart slowed. He took a long drink from the canteen, enjoying the water for all that it was worth.

McKay was not a fine physical specimen. He left that sort of thing to Sheppard and the others. Unable to overcome adversity though physical strength—or even a good shooting arm—McKay adapted by being able to outthink anything. Once the panic abated, at any rate. Yes, once his mind cleared of the garbage it was telling itself about certain and imminent death, he could rise to almost unbelievable heights of creativity and insight.

Still, something about the small, white flowers had so attracted and alarmed him, he could not yet process what it was or whether it was a gift or a threat. Organizing his thoughts, he adjusted his vest and pack.

"Just a bit of heat exhaustion," he concluded, speaking confidently to the dried up plants around him. "I'm fine, now, so…" Clearing his throat of the last vestiges of fear, he walked on.

At 8.3 kilometers, McKay stopped again. Dr. Halliday had promised to meet him at this place, although the area resembled with incredible sameness the entirety of this part of the planet: dusty earth, yellowed plant life, cicadas and nothing else. One thing was different here--the land sloped up from the creek, rising a hundred feet in a gentle incline.

"Dr. Halliday?" McKay keyed his radio.

"Dr. McKay," he heard from both his earbud and the hilltop above him.

There stood a small figure dressed in khaki hiking shorts, a baggy black t-shirt and Stanley work books. Upon her head sat a mashed booney hat, which looked like it had seen if not better days, then at least many of them.

McKay almost laughed. This was the ferocious creature that sparked such fear in Barber, he of the Land of Bigdumbness? With a cock of his head, McKay waited for the diminutive woman to walk down the hillside. She seemed at home with herself, unlike McKay, who was almost never relaxed—not when he was awake at any rate. As Halliday came nearer, McKay saw that she stood a full head shorter than he, and that she was a little older, as well. Her tanned skin attested to many days working out of doors. She was painfully thin, but not in an underfed way; more like a long-distance runner, all muscle and sinew.

Feeling terribly fat, pasty-faced and shapeless, McKay introduced himself.

"I'm Dr. Rodney McKay, head of the science division."

"Dr. Edith Halliday," she responded. "I prefer to be addressed as Edith."

She shook his hand firmly and then turned to plod up the hill. As she did, McKay noted that her light brown hair was extremely short and cut in rough bunches, as if she had done the job herself. He followed her up the hill, noticing that her legs had no extra flesh on them, that her hips didn't sway in that rolling motion that he so appreciated on well-built women. Instead, Edith climbed the hill like…well…like a person. Like a man. McKay was not attracted to men. He was not at all attracted to Dr. Edith Holliday.

That out of the way, he began to focus on the matter at hand, the so-fabulous spectacle that awaited him in the Valley of the Jolly Skinny Botanist.

Dr. McKay's Adventures on the Other Side of the Hill

The hill was not as easy to climb as McKay had assumed. Edith scaled it well enough, but then she'd been living on the other side for ages. He reached the hillcrest out of breath and on the verge of becoming cranky again.

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes…and stopped.

It took him a moment to realize that he'd dropped his backpack, that he'd actually fallen to his knees in utter surprise. He had seen so many wondrous and terrifying things since coming to the Pegasus Galaxy, but nothing had prepared him for this.

Before him lay acres and acres of green and growing things. McKay was an astrophysicist; from this distance he recognized nothing save for a good-sized plot of corn, the stalks reaching six, seven, eight feet tall. Without even approaching, however, he could tell that this was a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. Level pathways cris-crossed between raised beds filled with rich black loam and plants in various stages of their life cycles.

"How…how is this possible?" he stammered, rising and sorting himself out.

Edith didn't respond, but strolled down the lee side of the hill, beckoning McKay to follow.

"What is this? Broccoli?" McKay pointed about him as he approached the fields. "Here…beans, uh, and peppers and…what is that?"

"You mean you can't tell?" She eyed him incredulously.

"If Powerbars grew on trees, I'd be able to identify them. Vegetables, not so much."

Edith shielded her eyes with her hand and looked off in the distance. "That's coffee," she said quietly, as if not wanting to disturb the act of growing.

"Coffee? But it's green."

Edith rolled her eyes. "Yes, well, coffee beans start out green, just like the patties on the cheeseburger bush."

McKay smirked. "Very amusing. How can you grow coffee here? It needs Juan Valdez and Colombia and all of that, right? I mean, you've got it growing in roughly the same place as lettuce. That is lettuce isn't it?"

"Yes. Romaine. I don't care for iceberg."

"Coffee!" McKay blinked dreamily. "How does it taste?"

Edith shrugged. "I haven't brewed any yet. Growing coffee is one thing, roasting it so that it's palatable is another. I don't have a roaster here, as you can imagine."

Not looking away from the coffee grove, McKay answered, "I can build one."

"You can?"

"Ph.D. Mechanical engineering, Northeastern University. Among other degrees."

"Impressive. I am Ph.D. in agronomy from Purdue University, Ph.D. in plant sciences, Yale."

In the world of advanced degrees, one's pedigree stands head and shoulders above all other considerations. It does not matter if one is a fine cook or a loving parent, no one cares about hobbies or volunteer work. Great minds can be surprisingly petty ones, as well, focused as they are on the alphabet soup of honors after one's name and the purity of one's university affiliations.

McKay was glad he hadn't recited the entire list of parchments that he had received so far; it wasn't fair to broadside a complete stranger with something like that.

He glanced at Edith, wondering what she thought of his educational lineage. She herself was pretty much a well-educated gardener. A bit of wind drew his attention away from himself and out into the paradise that lay before him.

Dr. McKay's Adventure with the Flowers

"How is this possible?" McKay repeated himself, muttering thoughts, theories and criticisms as they came unbidden into this head. "Might be some elements in the soil or the air. Probably a combination of things. Sunlight's optimal. It rains here but not over there." He took in as much as possible, noting the line of demarcation between lifeless areas and productive ones. The garden lay within a natural basin, bordered on three sides by scrub and on the fourth by a deep woodland area. It, too, was green and growing, and McKay wondered how far it spanned. He could not recall his impressions of the land seen from the airborne puddle jumper. Land was land; it was not very interesting to him, so he paid it little if any attention--unless he was about to crash into it.

"Something in the water, perhaps?" He continued to speak to himself. "Radiation? Dr. Halliday?"

"Edith."

"Yes, uh, Edith. Just a… Wow. Cool." He clamored under the canes of a thornless blackberry bush. Cautiously, almost reverently, he picked one of the glossy ripe berries and placed it on his tongue. The assault on his senses made his head spin. Nothing compared with this. Nothing. He had subsisted on Powerbars and MREs and fake coffee for many months, so many that the concept of a single morsel containing flavor, texture, aroma, nutrition and moisture had become lost to him, as if it were an ancient legend, a myth believed only by children and the simple minded.

"Something you need, Doctor?" Edith stood a few feet away, watching McKay with amusement.

"What? Oh, yes…I, uh, hang on." He could not resist taking another berry, then another, until his whole life hung on standing there, partially hidden by the drooping branches, eating berries until his belly was full. At length, he emerged from the cover, bashfully trying to wipe the berries' dark juices from his hands and lips.

"I was examining them for signs of…blight," he stammered.

"Blight?"

"Yes, blight. But they're healthy and, uh, un-blighted."

"Well, that's good," she said. "This is the first place they've actually grown for me. So, gee, what a relief to know they're not blighty."

McKay nodded, still licking his fingers, feeling more sated than at any other time in his life.

"If you're interested, I have something else to show you," she said, beckoning him to follow a ways down the main garden path. They walked in companionable silence for quite a long while, pausing from time to time to finger the leaves or produce in one plot or another, Edith making brief remarks about how she had grown it. McKay turned on his video camera and acquired some footage to show that someone on the agricultural team had achieved results.

"This is it," she said, as they approached a copse of peculiar white flowers, like the one he had examined at the creek. "They're called sera flowers. I don't know what it means, though."

He looked at the blooms, feeling somewhat mesmerized, somewhat afraid. Snapping back to alertness, he considered what she had just told him.

"Wait a minute. Who calls them sera flowers?"

Edith seemed to catch herself, her gaff, her slip of the tongue.

"I call them that," she corrected.

Even someone inexperienced with the finer points of crap-ola shoveling would have caught the little pile that Edith was pushing his way, thought McKay.

With deft hands, Edith picked some of the flowers and held them out.

"Here, take a whiff," she encouraged.

He backed off stiffly, as if she were trying to toss a primed grenade to him.

"No," he said quietly, trying to quell the panic rising in his gut.

She came closer, slowly bringing the fluttering white petals to her nose and taking a deep breath.

McKay winced and backed away further, trying to halt Edith's approach. "You don't know what you're doing. There's something very strange about those things. Just…just put them down. Please."

"Don't be silly. Look!" She breathed in their rich scent once again. "See? Nothing. They just smell nice. That's why I'm growing them. What, you're having an anxiety attack over some flowers?"

"No, no, no, I'm fine. It's just that… I don't like the way they smell," he said at last, holding onto a safe excuse as if his life depended on it. "They stink. Seriously."

Edith paused. For a moment McKay thought that she might fling the flowers at him, just to see him run away in fright. A long moment passed, as they both stared at the heady array. Then Edith dropped her hands and the flowers fell to the ground. Both scientists said nothing for a while. McKay sighed and reorganized his thoughts.

"I want to see your notes," he said, trying to regain his composure.

"Yes," Edith responded, coming to attention. "This way."

With that, she led McKay to another part of the garden, where the beds ended and a clearing began. There stood a small log cabin, with a sturdy front porch. This astonishing structure, newly built but positively 19th-century American in style, seemed right at home in this tranquil setting.

Fortunately, this time McKay didn't have to wait for an explanation.

"It was here when I arrived," Edith said.

McKay took this at face value. It was a log cabin in the middle of a planet still full of unknowns. Someone had cut the trees and laid the logs just so. Who it might have been was a question too broad to consider right then and there. With a sigh of resignation, McKay stepped onto the porch and entered the structure.

Dr. McKay's Adventures Inside

Edith's cabin held the same sorts of gear as Barber's tent: A sleeping bag, a few articles of clothing, penknife, radio, etc. A small bed had been created out of reeds latched together. It was covered by a thick straw mattress. An Athosian oil lantern hung on a hook by the door. Two large, rough wooden tables, one for eating and one holding various sorts of laboratory equipment, and a couple of portable folding stools took up the cabin's remaining interior space. A laptop computer lay off to the side. McKay was certain that the batteries were depleted by now.

There was no electricity or running water, but a large built-in fireplace covered the wall opposite the door. It looked well used and even now smoldered lightly.

All of the agronomist's notes were handwritten. The words started out normal-sized and easily readable, becoming smaller and smaller with each succeeding sheet, as if Edith realized at some point that she had so much to write and not enough paper to write upon. Several worn-down pencil stubs lay on the table. Edith evidently needed supplies from the city. Pulling a sheet from the middle of the pile, McKay scanned the careful script and concise shorthand:

Aquadulce Claudia. Germination 4 d. True leaves 9 d. 8.25 hrs. sunlight/d. Pests nil. Fungus nil. Easy. Devas not present.

Melon : Edonis F1 Hybrid. Germination 5 d. True leaves 11 days. 8.25 hrs. sunlight/d. Pests nil. Fungus nil. Devas present.

Lycopersicon. All var. incl. hybrids. Germination 4 d. True leaves 7 days. 8.50 hrs. sunlight/d. Pests nil. Fungus nil. Blossom end rot nil. Difficult. Devas present.

Interesting. The expedition had brought hundreds of seed types to Atlantis. He hadn't been deeply involved in this aspect of the expedition, but it made perfect sense to have the knowledge and ability to grow food, on the off chance that McDonald's hadn't yet expanded into the Pegasus Galaxy.

Edith had obviously succeeded where Barber's quartet had failed. Based on McKay's observations, though, the woman's innate talent solved only half of the mystery. It did little to explain the fact that the soil here was of a completely different consistency than the soil 8.3 kilometers away, where Barber sat in the dust picking lint out of his navel. It was different from the soil half a kilometer away, as well, and better by far than the dry-packed earth just on the other side of the hill. Only the topographical basin itself had soil capable of sustaining healthy plant life. And that was strange, indeed.

Edith entered and prepared a vegetable lunch. McKay didn't really like healthful food, but he remembered the blackberries. By the time Edith laid the plate before him, his salivary glands were literally aching in anticipation. Increasing his delight was the cup of berry juice that she handed him, which he drank in one swallow.

He bolted his food in typical fashion, making no comments about it. Food was fuel, it was glucose feeding his brain, it was calories. Calories are measurements of heat. Heat is energy in transit. One calorie is the amount of heat energy it takes to raise the temperature of a gram of water 1C. A calorie is equal to 4.185 joules. When McKay thought about food, he thought about heat, about energy and its properties, which fascinated him.

Edith cleared her throat. She sat across from McKay at the table and re-read the first few pages of her notes, making small corrections with one of the absurdly short pencil stubs.

"Love your notes," said McKay, finishing his meal and pushing his plate aside. He laid the bulk of Edith's papers between them and leafed through carelessly. "Very, uh, mid-20th century. Need more paper? Pencils? Tell me, who is Devas?"

Edith's small grey eyes shifted back and forth as she formulated her answer. McKay was not hugely successful at separating lies from falsehoods, but he sensed that she was deciding whether to tell the truth or present him with a piece of bullshit pie for dessert. Then she rifled through her notes, eventually locating the page she needed. This she handed to McKay without comment.

The page contained a drawn figure that looked like Tinkerbell, only much, much smaller, naked and apparently sexless, no larger than a thimble. It's most prominent features were two sets of dragonfly-type wings, which were all together longer than Tinkerbell itself. A caption below the drawing read "Garden Deva."

McKay gazed at the page, then lifted his eyes to look at Edith.

"Uh-huh," he said.

Color rose in Edith's cheeks. McKay did not know her well enough to determine whether she was embarrassed or becoming angry. She fussed with the papers on the table, nervously gathering them up and tapping them so that the page edges lined up precisely. Then she laid them on the table and regarded McKay with a level stare.

"Devas live here," she said, measuring her words.

"They do." McKay could not bring himself to ask this as a question.

"They built this cabin for me."

"They did."

"They enable me to grow the garden. I mean, I can grow it anyway because that's what I'm especially good at, but they saw my potential and gave the soil its richness and made it rain here. When I planted the seeds brought from Earth, they germinated and grew alarmingly fast, in perfect health. It seems as if this whole area used to be full of prodigious flora, but something happened and it all died away. This is the one place where anything will grow, and I believe that the devas are responsible leading me here and for helping me farm it."

She paused, taking in McKay's quizzical expression, then continued.

"The devas—that's what I call them—are invisible. You can't photograph them or record their voices, but they work through me somehow to produce what you see growing out there." She gestured towards the garden.

Without speaking, McKay looked at the drawing of the deva once again. Then he tucked the page in among the rest of Edith's notes and sat with his hands folded in patient consideration.

"You're a very insane person, you know that?" he said, quietly.

She looked at him for a moment, blinking uncomprehendingly.

He continued. "I mean, do you really believe that little…what did you call them? Doodahs?"

"Devas."

"Yes, yes, devas! That these invisible flying-around things are growing your plants out there? I mean, you might as well tell me that this place is the result of the energy generated by an infinitely large number of infinitely small hamsters dancing on the head of a pin, because that at least is within the realm of physical possibility. Devas, not so much."

"Devas are well known throughout history, going by various names: elves, gnomes, woodland spirits, fairies…"

"Ahk!" McKay waved his hands in frustration. "This is a ludicrous, vicious time suck! Just once I'd like to go from morning until night, working in my lab on something actually important, without having to deal with some bonkers thing or bonkers person or bonkers situation draining yet another day out of my life!" With that, he shoved himself away from the table and stomped out of the cabin to the first garden rows.

"Come on out, little elfs! Tiny, invisible deva people!" he shouted. "Let me see you! I'm waiting!" He folded his arms across his chest and tapped his foot impatiently. Edith watched him from a distance, mercifully quiet once again. He glanced back at her, daring an explanation of why all the various woodland spirits happened to be invisible.

"The only way that you can see them is under the influence of the sera flowers," she offered, with the earnestness of any true believer who is herself disbelieved. "They contain a chemical that strips away the mind's normal capacity to process visual input, allowing us to experience perception on a different plane of existence."

He stepped toward the woman, liking the way he stood so far above her. "That's called tripping, Dr. Halliday."

She brought herself to her full height, still at a physical disadvantage to McKay but not an emotional one.

"How dare you! I've been here for months. You just showed up today. Which one of us would know exactly how things operate?"

"The one who isn't stoned!" he blasted. "It's all very fine for you to camp out here all by yourself, performing the Rites of Spring, while the rest of us go without coffee and food, as long as there's some rational reason for it. You were waiting to reveal this place when?"

"When they said I could," Edith murmured.

After a few minutes, when no spirits, invisible or otherwise, appeared, McKay returned to the cabin to collect his gear.

"I'm leaving," he said simply.

"Fine," Edith replied, following him in, her anger rising with the same speed as McKay's. "I'm staying. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out."

"Hardly," he gritted out. "Oh, and guess what? You're out of your freaking mind. Once Dr. Weir gets my report, there will be any number of doctors and psychiatrists lining up waiting to speak with you."

She grabbed his sleeve, spinning him around to face her. "Why won't you just consider the possibility that what I'm telling you is the truth? What are you so afraid of?"

McKay looked down at her, even angrier now that she had pulled out the coward card.

"You see this?" he said, pointing to his head. "This is all that I am. My mind is the only thing that I have going for me. And you're saying that in order to make a bunch of vegetables grow I have to screw it up with the Pegasus Galaxy's version of Windowpane?"

She didn't answer. Thankfully. He looked down at her, both pleased and guilty to see fear shadowing her features. He was going to rain on her loopy picnic. She was obviously a lunatic, nice garden or no. In time, she would surely be a danger to herself, if not to others. Not that there were any others. Except for him. Right now, anyway. Whatever.

He sighed and finished loading his pack.

Edith tried another approach. "I'm not saying that they exist absolutely, but…"

"Because they don't!" McKay cut her off.

"How do you know?" Edith's voice had risen in sharpness and volume, and her face had become pinched, with tendons bulging prominently in her neck. He now understood what Barber had been talking about. "You've not spent one single minute trying to make contact with them. Not that they'd want to speak with someone so completely closed-minded!"

McKay noted the futility of their argument. For a moment he imagined himself to be back in undergraduate school, heatedly discussing with his physics professor the latest theory on the movement of quantum particles in a vacuum. They'd argue and calm down, argue some more, then go out for coffee. McKay smoked back then. Nicotine helped him think sometimes. And sometimes, like today—especially today—he had a hankering for a few smokes. Today? He wanted a whole pack.

Shaking off thoughts of nicotine, he left the cabin and began striding down a smaller inlet, searching for the main garden path. Edith followed him, blathering on about "archetypes" and "the nature of consciousness" and similar New Age hyperbole. McKay half-listened, more intent on finding a way out of the garden and back to the creek.

"Halliday, you're a scientist," he said, over his shoulder. "Where's your proof? Don't tell me about what you think. Tell me about what you've been able to prove. Until then, you're a crazy, disturbed and, frankly, totally flakey person. Now…"

Turning to take one last look at the garden before leaving on his journey back to Barber's base camp, McKay was stopped by a wall of heady scent. The sera flowers. Edith was standing close beside him, a cluster of blossoms in her hand. McKay had but a moment to escape the pungent perfume, a moment lost in surprise when he realized that Edith was going to make her point whether he wanted her to or not.

Dr. McKay's Adventure with His Eyes Closed

The sera flowers' convincing fragrance captured McKay's attention like a new organized chaos theory. He lay on the path, digging his hands into the soft loam, smelling the soil's richness. Each grain against his skin tingled almost imperceptibly, but he felt it, felt the power that lay in the loose surface of the land. In time, the tingling overwhelmed him, until it was all he could feel everywhere, even in his mind, where small thoughts passed, telling him that it was time to rejuvenate. The thoughts comforted him, like a lullaby or a long sit in a rocking chair. His eyelids drooped, then his head, then his body, as the sera flowers brought him peace.

Dreams came to him like visitors from afar. He saw people, but knew that they were really the plants growing all around him. He heard incomprehensible voices, but understood them on a visceral level. A blanket of comfort lay upon him, so McKay felt none of the evening dew dampening his clothing and misting his skin. And always, always drifted in the aroma of the sera flowers, casting out a gossamer net of hypnotic splendor.

Nighttime swallowed the dusk. Away down the path, insects buzzed. Small animals padded by, keeping some distance from the man lying prone before them. McKay saw these creatures in his dreams, as if his eyes were open but covered with a thin obscuring film. He watched himself sleeping, watched as the sera flowers released more of their potent spell. It was a divine thing, this path; these creatures, divine beings. The sera flowers were divine expressions of nature's kindness. The plants wrought from the earth were the most divine things of all. McKay was not a religious man, but in this dream he believed in all possibilities, in all of the things that could be if his imagination would let them exist.

Then the palette of McKay's reverie fell to a darker hue. Soon he was awash with melancholy, a black beast rising within him. Now came visions of the Wraith, of people and entities and machines threatening him with death and heartbreak, threatening his friends, his new family of brothers and sisters. A sorrow rose up within McKay's soul, something so painful he curled into a tight ball of misery and wept, believing that he had truly lost them, all of them, and that now he was alone, the last of his kind in a galaxy immeasurably far from home.

Open your eyes.

McKay missed his cues. He lay, inconsolable, in the garden's perfect soil.

See us here.

After a while, he began to snore.

Genius, eh?

……

McKay awoke before the sun began to color the sky. His head ached, his body felt jittery and unstable. A morning chill had seeped into his bones, bringing with it an ache for warmth. He sat up on the path, brushing grit out of his hair, gathering his wits before attempting to continue his walk to the jumper. He could not figure out why he had slept outdoors without a bedroll. Climbing to his feet, a wave of dizziness caused him to stumble. His shredded common sense re-wove itself out of absolute necessity. The jumper would wait for him if he were late. No rush. First warmth, then water and food, then a bit of daylight.

"I am totally over this place," he intoned, still bleary-eyed and confused. "Where's that house?"

In short order, he located the cabin. Stepping onto the porch, he was sidelined by another bout of disorientation, so he sat on the wooden dais, cradling his head in his hands. He stayed like that for a long time, passing from awareness to a light slumber from one moment to the next.

Edith came out of the cabin and sat down next to him. She didn't say anything, which was fine by him. The potent sera flowers had left a light residue on his thinking. McKay felt the heat radiating from Edith's skin. Heat moves in waves, it seeks stasis, balance. A warm object will give up its heat much more quickly than a cold object will collect it. A simple concept. He felt as if Edith were giving up her heat to him, offering it for no other reason than that he needed it. McKay was embarrassed by his thoughts of her heat, and these waves and that warmth. For a second, he considered touching her.

"I made breakfast," she said.

"Good," he replied. "Uh, good."

He became suddenly alert as the stupefying fuzziness in his mind cleared out just enough so that he remembered…

"You drugged me!" he shouted, clamoring away from Edith as if she were a Wraith poised to feed on him.

Edith held out her hand in a placating gesture.

"Don't touch me! Get away! You tried to kill me!"

"McKay, you're fine. Do you remember what you saw?"

A moment of profound confusion passed over him, then a data burst of memories played like a super fast-forwarded movie in his brain. He possessed no talent at hiding his emotions. Edith was staring at him, studying the private things reflected in his eyes. She was trespassing! Eavesdropping!

Panting with exertion, McKay used his waning energies to creep away from the brittle woman who stared at him knowingly. He'd seen that look before, on other womens' faces. What did they know about him that he could not see for himself?

"I am so going to have your hide for this," he seethed, unable to discern if he meant her slipping him a mickey or her intrusion into his inner caves, where even he hated to visit. "You… you…" but he could say no more after that, having passed out again.

Dr. McKay's Adventures with His Ego

There was almost total silence in the meeting room, broken only by the muted footsteps of people walking past its door in the hallway outside.

McKay stood before the assembled group, arms crossed tightly around his chest. Beside him on a table sat his laptop, its screen in motion with uploaded video of the garden.

"As you can see, there are plants, vegetables of many sorts, but nothing else," he said, dryly. "No anomalous energy readings, no garden spades moving on their own, no headless horseman galloping about."

Scientists of various stripes gaped at the extraordinary footage.

"How long has she been cultivating these things?" one of McKay's astute colleagues inquired. "Why didn't we know about it before now?"

"Five or six months. Dr. Dumais was reading their reports." He stopped talking, giving weight to her memory.

Elizabeth leaned in for a closer look at the screen.

"And Dr. Halliday says they are an indigenous life form?"

McKay's jaw stiffened at the ludicrous suggestion.

"That's what she says. She says a lot of interesting things, none of which make any sense at all. You know, between her and Barber, I'm starting to think that the horticultural sciences are as dangerous as they are boring."

Elizabeth shook her head ruefully. "Carson found minute quantities of an unknown substance in the blood of every member of Barber's team. He says it appears to be a cross between an opiate and a hallucinogen, and believes it may have caused the mood swings, lethargy and cognitive dysfunction you noticed in the four of them. Do you believe that Dr. Halliday is also under its influence?"

McKay snorted derisively. "Do I look like a doctor?" Noticing the many pairs of eyes staring at him, he paused for a moment. "Okay. Let me rephrase that. Halliday's stoned and crazy. She refused to leave the Mainland, said she had to commune with the devas and whatnot. Now, I can't tell you with one hundred percent certainty whether she's under the influence of a smelly flower or if she's auditioning for her own private version of 'Survivor.' Logically, though, you see my point. If you want this studied further, I can take down a few people and we can survey the area. Once we find nothing but a strung-out botanist with an Earth Mother complex, we can ship her back here for psychological testing and then begin farming the area ourselves."

Linda Collins spoke up. An experienced commercial agronomist, she had obviously read McKay's initial repot. "We could terrace the surrounding acreage, add some nitrates to the soil for greater yields, set up an irrigation system using the nearby creek as a water source. Shouldn't take long to expand the 'garden' as Dr. McKay called it, to a working produce farm."

The meeting broke up. McKay was glad he hadn't had to provide a long-winded argument for his side. He felt like crap, hung over and pissed off, still parched and weary and dusty from trudging back to the jumper at dawn, where Barber and crew silently joined him on the flight back to the city.

His collapse at Edith's cabin was followed in short order by another dreary awakening, a full-on panic attack, then a long drink of water from the creek—pathogens be damned—and a rush to get back to the jumper site as quickly as possible. He had neither spoken to Edith nor paused to listen to her plea that he reconsider the veracity of her claims. He didn't even notice the sharp chill in his bones at that point. It was all about getting away from that place and the lunatic that inhabited it.

Once back at Atlantis, McKay had called a meeting before even bothering to bathe. He wanted to ensure that his impressions of the outpost were the first heard. Any delay at all to listen to Barber or Halliday's sides would undoubtedly lead to a huge debate about whether opium and tiny garden fairies existed on the Mainland. Elizabeth was extremely fond of seeing all sides to an argument, even the sides that were basically highly evolved fantasies. And, for the love of all that is rational, he had neither the time nor the patience for something like that.

Now it was late afternoon. Beckett expected him in the infirmary, but he was disinclined to go. The new survey team would be leaving first thing the next day. There was quite a bit of work to accomplish between now and then. To prevent anyone doubting his own reasoning, McKay deftly refrained from revealing his experiences with the sera flowers and the profound effects that they had had upon him. Should Beckett find even a small residual form of the sera flowers' intoxicant in his blood—and McKay was certain that he would--his assessment of the Mainland situation would be completely discarded. And he had no time for that.

There was coffee to harvest, an emergent situation if ever there was one.

Dr. McKay's Adventures with Drs. Collins and Franklin

No morning dew had settled on the barren meadows on the other side of the garden basin. A two-man crew safely landed their jumper amid the crackling brush, and assisted with moving cases of scientific testing equipment up the steep hillside and then down into the verdant cropland. The awe spreading across their faces, and those of the science team that had accompanied him, satisfied McKay deeply. He felt like he'd discovered Edith, as if she were the lone survivor of an indigenous tribe living sequestered from the rest of the world in a jungle hamlet. No matter her shortcomings, Edith had a talent for growing stuff—lots of stuff—that surpassed charming and clever and ran all the up the flagpole to brilliant. As she approached, he was struck again by her ease, how she didn't seem to notice how small and plain she was.

"Dr. Halliday," he said, "these are Doctors Beckett and Franklin, and Linda Collins."

"Your specialties?"

Beckett reached out his hand. Edith shook it confidently.

"I am a medical doctor," Beckett stated. He watched her face for a reaction, but she blocked his view with a tight, professional smile.

"Entomology," said Franklin. "We met at the first staff meeting."

"Huh," replied Edith, noncommittally.

"Agronomy, like yourself." Collins shook Edith's hand, as well, not hiding her pleasure at finally meeting the only other person on the expedition with the same specialty.

Glancing briefly at McKay, Edith cast her eyes towards a bed of paddypan squash. Seeming to take encouragement from the pale-green fruits of these vines, she turned back to the doctors.

"Would you care for a stroll, Dr. Beckett?"

An uneasy flutter rolled in McKay's gut. Edith's willful trickery still fresh on his mind, he was reluctant to send his friend into the fray like this. On the other hand, he felt fine, now. Whatever she had exposed him to—if in fact she had exposed him to anything at all--had cleared his system with no palpable after effects.

Taken aback, Beckett agreed and the two began to casually meander down the main garden path, their shoes kicking up little clouds of dust as they walked. McKay permitted himself a smile recalling how delighted she was to show him--and how astonishingly happy he had felt seeing--so many beautiful growing things. Shame that the woman was delusional.

The other members of his research team looked up frequently from their work, admiring the farm, taking in their peaceful surroundings. Atlantis may have been stunningly beautiful, but the natural world was its own creation and nothing that the Ancients could build would ever match it. Collins breathed deeply, as if capturing grace from the air itself. Air samples, McKay remembered. They needed air samples, soil and water samples. Energy readings, looking for radiation, anything, everything that was there, anything that was not. Plant specimens, every one. He ticked off a mental list of what he hoped to accomplish over the next day or so.

McKay relished getting deep into this study, spending days and nights in his lab, going over the data he was about to collect. This was the backbone of science for him, picking up an idea from the piles of quantified information and running with it until exhaustion or a firm conclusion overtook him. He loved this about himself, about the work that he did.

"What's this?" Linda Collins held a small white flower in her palm. No gloves on, McKay noted. Despite having only a Master's and no Ph.D., Linda was a good researcher. She was, however, sloppy on occasion.

Tensing up, McKay backed away. "Where did you find that?"

"On the table here next to the..."

"Put it down and wash your hands," McKay responded, handing her a canister of anti-microbial wipes and a pair of Nitrile exam gloves. "Bag it carefully and, whatever you do, keep it away from your face..."

To McKay's chagrin, his advice was too little too late. Cutaneous exposure to the flower's biochemical magic seemed to be having the same effect as breathing it in. Within ten seconds, Collins face lit up and a spacey smile crossed her lips. She turned her head, following the paths of unseen birds or, perhaps, the devas Edith was so fond of hallucinating.

"Oh, this is just perfect!" McKay helped Collins to the ground, hoping to keep her from wandering off.

"I see them," she giggled. "They're everywhere! So beautiful!"

"What do you see?"

Collins continued to stare at air.

"Collins! Tell me what you see."

She stiffened at the insistent tone of McKay's voice. Coming back to herself a very little bit, she cleared her throat, blinked emphatically.

"They are very small, the size of a bottle cap, but they are a perfectly formed hominoid species…except for the wings."

"Wings?"

"Tiny wings, bilateral dual wing sets, like a dragonfly."

"They look like people?"

Collins nodded, then cocked her head inquisitively.

"Like people, like hummingbirds. Skin is iridescent, like the body of a hummingbird. And they are speaking to me!" She gasped in wonder and joy, like a lottery winner the moment they realize that they have won.

McKay reached back to the table and began switching on laptops and cameras, sound and video recording equipment, energy sensors and everything else.

"Keep them occupied!" he implored Collins. "I just have to get this…ah, here we are!" With a flourish, he swung the camcorder towards the area at which Collins was staring. "Ask them a question! Ask them who they are! Franklin! Franklin, get over here!"

He turned towards Charles Franklin, Ph.D., entomology, from Case Western, who was staring delightedly at his left hand, moving his digits as if a centipede were snaking between them.

"Franklin, I need you to grab the portable UV unit and…" but Franklin could not or would not respond, so intent was he communing with his hand. Incredibly, he, too, had somehow come in contact with what was now almost certainly the absolute bane of McKay's existence. McKay half expected Carson Beckett to come dancing up to him babbling about wee garden sprites and the heather and the heath and so forth.

Keeping the camcorder trained on various parts of the garden, McKay continued to ask Collins questions. What were the creatures saying now? Did they have an aura or some other light around them? Were they touching her skin? How did that feel?

Within a very short time, both Collins and Franklin stopped talking completely. Looking up from his colleagues, McKay felt disgusted and jealous. They seemed to be sensing only joy in their visions; McKay's brief exposure had thrown him to the darker side, as if were the only side he possessed. Beckett was still on his guided tour with Edith. For a while, McKay operated the camcorder and the other equipment, dwelling on his inability to lighten up, taking baseline readings for analysis later.

"You've got to be kidding me!" he shouted to the assembled devices around him. "I'm getting nothing. No readings at all! If you're really here, then show yourselves to those of us who are sober."

He envied Collins and her happiness, for, since arriving at Atlantis, very few members of the expedition had experienced delight of any sort. He wanted Franklin to share his visions, real or not, just because they were something different from the usual consoles and laptops and wires and generators of his everyday existence. Why had his foray into Devaland been fraught with so much darkness?

McKay stopped himself. Coveting other people's acid trips was definitely not his style. There was nothing here worth recording, unless he wanted to make an art film about Timothy Leary's progeny.

Not that that prevented him from continuing his efforts.

An hour later, Collins and Franklin lay curled together, sleeping in the dirt. They made a cute—if rather disturbing--tableau, but McKay didn't pay them much mind. He was busy fast-forwarding through the video and repeating his assessment of proximal energy readings, trying to spot a wayward insect that looked like a tiny person. Or a tiny person that resembled an insect. Either way, he was looking for signs of anything worthy of the riveting attention that the other scientists had paid it.

A flicker of static sputtered in his comm's earbud.

"Shit!" someone said softly, more distracted than cursing.

He touched the device to transmit. "Something going on, Carson?"

The silence on the other end spoke volumes. Rising quickly, on high alert, McKay scanned what he could see of the expansive garden, looking for threats.

"Carson, answer me."

Franklin let out a blissful sigh, and McKay's attention skittered everywhere, as anxiety gripped him. Someone was coming, running with halting strides, taking in erratic breaths.

Then, from many yards away, far, far down the garden rows, he heard Carson breathlessly shout the word that he always, always least wanted to hear: "Help!"

Dr. McKay's Adventures as a…Uh…Doctor

Some people were natural-born crisis junkies. Sheppard was like that. Teyla, too. They got into a bad situation, they just pulled out a weapon and, hey, problem solved. McKay used his weapon as a distraction. He expected more from himself, wanted to find his dead-calm center, but a niggling part of him suspected that he lacked such a place entirely. As uncomfortable as holding a gun may have made him, blood and injuries and death blew completely. And he had taken the same first aid class as everyone else in Atlantis, so he was supposed to be at least somewhat useful in a hectic medical situation, even if he was next to useless as a soldier on the battlefield. Bodies, however, responded to him rather like other threats: He could throw palliation at them just fine, but rarely did he succeed in hitting his mark.

Thus, when Carson Beckett came staggering towards him, his head bleeding like a waterfall, McKay halted for a moment, wanting so very much to call intergalactic 911.

"My God!" he cried, assisting Beckett to the ground, much as he had done with Collins just an hour before.

"Ah, crap!" Beckett replied, trying to recover his wits.

"I get that. Yes, you look like crap. What happened?"

Beckett did not reply. He lay down, cradling his head in his hands, not yet able to allow anyone to look at the injury. Edith approached quickly and quietly, shushing the injured man.

"He fell in the path," she said, softly but intently.

"What did you do to him?" McKay snapped.

"Nothing," she responded. "I didn't do anything."

Now stricken with a deeper concern, he waved Edith away and, with a calm that he didn't know he possessed, gently moved Beckett's hands. He stared at the injury, a laceration about two inches long, and hissed in sympathy.

"Get the first aid kit from the pack by the table," he ordered.

"I didn't do this," Edith insisted.

"Pardon my skepticism and just do what I'm telling you to do."

She complied without speaking. McKay surprised himself a little bit, for he remembered some of the first aid class, after all.

"Carson, do you know where you are?"

The doctor, who had been alternately starting off into space or wincing in pain, scowled in concentration.

"Dunno. Airdrie? Clydebank?"

"Almost right. How about your birthday? What day were you born?" He donned a pair of exam gloves and held a trauma dressing to the wound.

"Today's my birthday? Ow! Stop it!"

"Don't, Carson. Lie still." His hands shook badly and his mouth felt dry. Between the blood and torn skin and Beckett's confusion, he was definitely out of his element.

"I have to sit for my A levels today. Please, can you give me a lift?"

"Ah, I know. Who is the president? And remember we've had two of them. I want the name of the one we have right now."

"Get me out of this bloody Ancient chair! Rodney! Stop nattering about with that. Just get me the hell out of here!" With that, Beckett attempted to sit up, an effort that ended as abruptly as it began when he fell sideways. He lay there for a while, saying nothing and evidently content enough with that.

McKay was not content in the least. He spied Edith watching Carson carefully.

"You did this. I know it. Look over there." He pointed to Collins and Franklin. "We're three for four here today, Doctor. You need to back off about a hundred yards, because I'm not going to go down like the rest of them."

"I didn't…" she protested, but McKay keyed his radio.

"McKay to Lt. Franks. We have a medical situation here. Three patients. What's your EMS provider level?"

"I'm an EMT, but Capt. Baker's a medic."

"That's all I need to know. Get here now."

Loading Beckett and the others into the jumper did not take an especially long time. Collins and Franklin ambulated quite nicely once McKay began complaining loudly about sleeping on the job. Beckett was carried in on a stretcher, still bleary-eyed and believing himself to be in south-central Scotland, closer to Edinburgh than Glasgow.

"I'll have just one scone. Ta," he muttered. "Mum will be expecting me for supper, so just a wee cuppa for now."

McKay found this very amusing, despite his friend's rather obvious concussion. He wondered whether Carson would give up some really juicy secrets if he simply fed him a few leading words or phrases.

Once the jumper was ready for launch, McKay looked around for Edith. He assumed that she knew to climb aboard for transport back to Atlantis, assumed that she would welcome a chance to return to civilization. Hating a delay in transport, he stalked over to the cabin only to find it empty. Then he traipsed around the garden itself, looking for her and calling her name. Nothing.

In short order, he radioed the jumper to launch.

"No use everyone waiting any longer. Head out now and then send another jumper to pick us up in the morning."

With a quick wave, Franks lifted off. McKay watched the amazing ship as the early evening sun cast golden shadows along its flank. Then it rose swiftly to cruising altitude and slid off towards the sea.

McKay wandered over to the table holding testing equipment. Several samples had been acquired before everyone took a dive into the crapper. These he placed in a larger box marked "Specimens." Then he packed the collection filters containing pollen, phytolith and microfloral samples. All this time, he was keenly aware that Edith was somewhere about, possibly watching him, possibly spinning down into a complete, blithering madwoman. Or—unlikely but possible—she was coming to her copious senses, realizing that people might matter a little bit more than heirloom tomatoes. When she approached him once more, he didn't even bother to turn to face her.

"Why did you do this?" she asked, outrage evident in her voice.

"Do what?" He was very tired, not in a mood to argue--again.

"Bring those people here. Lay out all of that equipment. I told you that devas can't be photographed."

"We need to start on Plan B, Doctor."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning expanding the area, bringing in more people to manage things, terracing, fertilizing, and eventually harvesting enough food to supply Atlantis and the Athosian community. Why are you looking at me like that? What did you think you were supposed to be doing here, anyway?"

"I was just getting started with this. It's not ready to be expanded. No one's been consulted. We have to ask permission."

McKay chose not to reply to that. He busied himself with the equipment, which he treated with genuine reverence. Finally, he turned to face her.

"Poisoning Collins and Franklin was a low-down, dirty, thoroughly unnecessary, extremely ballsy way to try to prove the existence of little sentient butterflies. Toxic flowers don't just show up on tables, any more than purple bunnies rain down spontaneously from the sky. Not on this planet, anyway. The only way the flowers could have gotten there is by you planting them…so to speak."

"I told you, McKay, I didn't have anything to do with that."

"Oh, and Carson? You're telling me that he just suddenly fell over like an aged oak tree and cracked his head on, what? There's a bunch of vegetables out there."

"There's rocks and whatnot," she said, lightly. "He tripped on a vine. They're everywhere, you know."

Hearing Edith's indifferent answer infuriated him. These were his colleagues, his friends, people that he cared for enough to pretend that he didn't care at all.

"Carson is a doctor, Doctor. He spends all day helping people. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

He didn't really want to hear Edith's answer. She had said enough, more than enough. Her face registered no concern at all, as if it had never crossed her mind that what had happened to Carson, Collins and Franklin was all together wrong. So it didn't necessarily surprise McKay when she gave him her now-familiar stare and intoned, "Everyone will recover completely. They didn't want them here, so something had to be done."

His eyebrows rose questioningly. "They?"

McKay was accustomed to Edith's willful ineptitude when it came to telling the entire truth all at one time. She seemed primed and ready to paint him a very large picture now, though.

She cleared her throat. "The devas. They want only you here. No one else. Just you and me. For now, anyway. They wanted you to see the garden, so they had you come to the Mainland to fix the generator after they broke it. They knew that you would come here."

"You asked me here," he said.

Edith shook her head. "You would have come anyway, whether I asked to you or not."

And McKay thought back to his arrival on this part of the Mainland, just a couple of days ago. Yes, the generator had needed a part that rarely went south. Indeed, he would have come to her neck of the woods no matter what she wanted. He thought about these things…and then dismissed them outright.

Edith looked out at the darkening sky. "Franklin and Collins won't remember what they saw today. Sera flowers can be a lot of things, including hypnotic. The devas saw to it that the two of them will recall neither the flowers nor their sightings. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it is."

"Devas don't break generators and they don't go around choosing what people remember and what they forget. They are figments of your imagination, by-products of those flowers you keep sticking your head into."

Edith smiled broadly for the first time since McKay had met her. "You'll see what they remember when they wake up. But, really, McKay, if I'm so insane, so frightening, then why didn't you leave and go back with the others? Why are you still here?"

This question hung in the air for quite a while. Edith seemed to have enjoyed asking it, and McKay was similarly appalled that he might have to give an honest answer. Fortunately for him, their present argument could be thrown back into the pot for consumption another time. He indicated the lab table, still strewn with the gadgetry of his craft.

"I'm packing up the samples," he said, glad to have a reasonable explanation. Science in its pure form never lied. It didn't misrepresent itself. His failures always came from within, not from the facts he was trying to squeeze out of the universe.

He stood tall once more, taking a breath to calm himself. "The Scientific Method leaves nothing to chance. It is the means by which observations are sculpted into a theory, which is then tested as thoroughly as possible with the equipment available at the time—equipment such as this. The results of those tests determine whether or not the theory is valid."

"Sometimes science can't explain things."

"Then as far as we know, those things don't exist." McKay shut down his laptop and placed it in its case. "Look, opinion isn't science. Perhaps in my opinion microbes don't exist. Or maybe the universe is run by tiny little cats embedded in our brains. That doesn't make it so."

"Cats?"

"My point is… You can't prove anything without quantifiable, tangible evidence. Snorting flowers and seeing things don't score research points. They're out of the ball park entirely."

"You want to turn the garden into an agri-business. They won't let you. This is their land, not ours, and it's not for you to decide how it will grow."

McKay threw up his hands in disgust. "And it's not for you to decide, either. A jumper's coming in the morning to take us back to the city. Start packing."

She stood back, bound in place by trepidation. "You don't understand. I have harvests, compost to spread. There's so much to do here. I can't leave." She hesitated, looking distracted, as if someone—many people--were conversing with her simultaneously.

McKay was not at all perceptive to other people's feelings. They were not his concern, since he had his own feelings to worry about. If Edith had her reasons for staying, they couldn't possibly exceed in importance his reasons for making her leave. He was accustomed to getting his way, either by argument or by complaint. Edith seemed immune to both.

"I'm staying," she said with a growl, locking eyes with his.

"You're leaving."

"Make me."

They stood glaring at each other, with the silent garden waiting expectantly all around them. McKay did not doubt for a second that, given the proper leverage, the tiny woman could snap his back like a stalk of celery.

"Please?" he whined, almost giving up. "You can take a real shower. I'm sure someone in the city's got a box of brand-new pencils and a pad of paper for you."

Something caught Edith's eye and she returned to her previous attitude of paying exactly zero attention to McKay. He felt fed up with Edith and her fantastical, make-believe world. This was more Heightmeyer's deal than his. He wished he'd requested the psychologist accompany Beckett and the others. Carson had a way with crazies, too, special juju powers that whack biscuits responded to. He wished that Beckett had been well enough to stay here with him. He wished a lot of things because a vague sense of dread was creeping up his spine, its chilly fingers brushing against his skin.

In sudden desperation, he approached Edith, who remained fixated on her visions, and took her wrist—delicate and woefully narrow--in his hand. She bolted to attention, her eyes wide and fearful.

"Don't!" she piped, in the tiniest voice McKay had ever heard. "They believe that you are threatening me."

Since leaving his cat, his apartment and his planet behind, McKay had lived in a state of constant, low-level apprehension. On a rather limited sliding scale of emotions, he was either frightened or not-quite-so frightened. His adrenal glands were probably the size of footballs from overuse. Not a day went by when he wasn't at least a little bit terrified. Why should today be any different?

Looking at Edith, holding her tiny arm, McKay realized he'd made a very big mistake at the same instant that another jolt of adrenalin rammed through his system. And Edith seemed to know what to expect, for she took a deep breath, as if preparing for a long underwater dive. Thus, despite his congenital defect with understanding others, McKay sensed from Edith's expression that something very bad was about to happen to him.

And he was right.

Dr. McKay's Adventures with He-Doesn't-Know-What

McKay's first thought was that someone had just hit him upside the head with a baseball bat. The blow tossed him sideways a good five feet from Edith and her bony wrist. He landed heavily, air escaping his lungs with a strangled pant. He jumped back to his feet, staggering but upright, willing his vision to clear and his wheezing lungs to draw breath again.

He saw nothing out of the ordinary about, no other humans besides Edith, no werewolves or other monsters, no MS-13 gang members. The garden was still silent, except for a few scritching insects and his own fearful sputtering.

"Ed-…"

A second blow landed on his back, feeling like a cement block slamming into him from shoulders to buttocks, knocking him to the ground again. Panic working with him for a change, he rose swiftly and took off, running down the garden path, cutting down smaller avenues and attempting to hide among the cornstalks. They towered above him like skeletal giants, and McKay felt even more frightened amongst the corn than he had in the open lanes. He scurried out of the plot, looking behind him, turning his head from side to side, trying to see what was after him. Nothing. He saw only the stillness and the growing things around him.

Off to his left he heard a brief noise, like a footfall on thick carpeting. Then he was flying again, landing on a patch of soybeans, which seemed to lift him and toss him back to the path, where he promptly righted himself and stumbled on. Passing into the wheat field, he noticed that the stalks seemed to sense his presence and resist his efforts to run through them. He felt the grainy tops smack at his hands and arms, not hurting him but not making him feel welcome, either.

The beds swung past him as McKay passed from one field to another, counting the paths between them and sensing the different textures of the soil on which he tread. Edith had spoken of having a rice paddy hidden by taller plants in the middle of the garden, where the land dipped down to its lowest point. McKay reached it and was unable to stop himself from splashing down into a face full of water and mud. He tottered backwards, landing on his ass in the shallow muck, which felt as if it were pulling him down like quicksand, like a black hole, like a very, very bad nightmare. He shook the water out of his eyes and pushed down with his hands, gaining just enough purchase to get him up and running again.

Seeing the futility of slogging through the rice paddy, he backtracked to a footpath once again, hoping that the garden would end at some point, that whatever wanted to beat him into next Wednesday stopped at the edge of the planted fields. He sensed this might be so, although logically there was no reason why it would be. Still, there was hope in that, if nothing else at the moment.

Another thrust to his chest laid out McKay flat on his back before a wallop pelted his belly and another almost dislocated one of his shoulders. It was more difficult to get up and run away, now. Still, fear is a strong motivator and, as long as he had presence of mind and enough stamina, he would try to outrun this unseen enemy. So the smartest man in two galaxies took a moment after each sortie to regain a measure of drive, and continued. The garden was very large, and he had a lot of distance to cover before coming to the end of it. He was struck several more times, not heavily, though. McKay thought that it—he—she—they--might be having some fun with him, playing a game that kept him frightened and running without causing more harm than a possible exploding heart and a head full of soon-to-be-totally-white hair.

In time, McKay reached the far edge of the garden, several hundred yards from where the attack began. Beyond lay dense woods, a hiding place, perhaps, or maybe a place to become hopelessly lost. He was a good decision maker—usually. In his lab, anyway. Which is where he wished he were right now, instead of out in the middle of Knott's Scary Farm. Under duress in the field decision-making was quite another thing entirely. He did not wish to enter the woods. Who knew what dangers lay in wait for him there? Neither could he stay out in the open, where everything—and, from the looks of it, nothing—wanted to take his life one blow at a time.

His indecisive pause had its price, as another blow landed straight across his lower legs, flipping him to the dirt once again. This time he lay there panting, unable to rise. The woods stood so close, and yet he had no reserves on which to get himself there.

"Please, please, please," he whispered to the sky, scarcely able to move his lips, let alone attempt to run again. "I'm sorry. Whatever I did. I'll just leave, now."

On came the impossible scent of sera flowers, followed by a burst of light before his eyes. Voices whispered in his mind. They spoke an incomprehensible language. Clasping his hands around his head, McKay pleaded for the voices to shut the hell up. The flowers were giving him a blinding headache, flooding his senses with too much input.

"Overload!" he gasped, squeezing his eyes tightly closed in a vain attempt to make it all go away.

McKay rolled onto his hands and knees and opened his eyes. The woods were not far, now. He thought that he could make it there, where these voices might cease. One slow motion after another, his head pounding with each beat of his overworked heart, McKay crawled into the very edge of the woods. Using a small tree for support, he pulled himself upright and glanced back at the garden. It lay silent and still, just like always. Puzzled, he stepped further into the forest, out of the taunting sunlight.

The trees themselves were unexceptional, but their roots grew in cup-shaped forms, like gondolas. All sorts of low-growing shrubs filled the areas between the trees. Colorful flowers bloomed in the dappled underbrush. McKay still felt vulnerable there, physically diminished and more than a little bewildered from the attack he had just sustained. A gentle breeze caught in the treetops, rustling the leaves up there. In his waning panic, the forest seemed to be speaking—but a different language than that of the garden. He felt like he'd just passed the border between two vastly different countries, with conflicting customs and dialects.

"Mustn't get too excited," he squeaked to himself. "Must take deep cleansing breath. Inhale. Exhale. Ah! All better!"

But his limbs still felt like jelly, as his adrenalin abated and weariness settled in. He staggered, feeling lightheaded from the attack, from something else, the voices, perhaps, which continued to annoy him.

"Would everybody just shut up? Please! I'm trying to think here."

And think he did. About what sort of being had thrashed him, and about where Edith may have gone. She was there when the first blow came; surely no one as tough as she would willingly allow such brutality to go on without intervening. He pondered the trees, the noise of the leaves, and why he thought it was language rather than mere sound. He walked haltingly and thought and listened for the sound of anything evil pursuing him.

Eventually, McKay tired to the point of collapse. Sitting upon a toppled tree trunk, he noticed again the smell of sera flowers, now almost cloying in the closeness of the deeper part of the forest. He thought he might be lost. He thought he might be getting ready to have a burst brain aneurysm, since the throbbing in his head had reached what were surely fatal proportions. Then he thought he might be getting ready to pass out, as the flowers seemed to rise up and envelope him in their narcotic embrace.

McKay did not dream this time. It was night when he began to regain consciousness. One by one, his senses returned, first bringing him the beating of his heart, then the sounds of the forest. His skin felt clammy and all together unpleasantly damp. With dismay he realized that he'd wet himself while he'd slumbered. His body ached in places he didn't know he possessed. Not a single inch of him felt at peace, least of all his capacious mind, which almost immediately began asking itself question after question, none of which he could answer.

Scooting up into a sitting position, his head spun a bit, then stilled. There were no forest sounds, which creeped him out more than he would have thought.

With a shiver, McKay found his feet and did a slow three-sixty, trying to get his bearings. It was so dark that for a moment he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him when a tiny distant flicker caught his attention. Cocking his head and listening intently, he could just make out the sound of Edith calling his name. About time, too. He'd been out there what, the whole night? Long enough to suffer the stiffening of his muscles and the indignity of emptying his bladder in situ. Still, Edith was trying to find him and his cold little heart swelled because of it.

He waited for a while before attempting to catch Edith's attention. His mouth was as dry as dust; his tongue felt stuck to the back of his throat. He shivered from the night air and from the damp, and huddled only steps from where he'd slept. His gloomy spirits rose each time Edith's voice rang out and her lantern swung in his direction, coming closer with each sweep. At last she was close enough for Rodney to croak out a rough "Over here." As the light came near, he called to her again until she was right there, stretching out her hand to reach his and then taking hold.

"You're a sight," she said.

McKay nodded, not sure if she was tame this time or whether she was just seconds away from going off on another rabid tirade. Because he didn't think that he could live through one of them right now.

"I'll help you back to the cabin." She took his arm and placed it over her shoulder. McKay noted how her protruding scapulae and clavicular joints made for an uncomfortable prop. Still, he was too weak to walk all the way out of the woods without something holding him up. A boney shoulder was far better than nothing at all. It had been a long time since he'd been this close to anyone, let alone a woman and, although he didn't understand anything about her and this crazy garden and these invisible monsters that beat on defenseless astrophysicists, she did feel good to lean upon And warm. And, for the moment, friendly.

The walk to the cabin took them through the garden, which made McKay every bit as fearful as any sane person would expect. Although nothing swung at him this time, he couldn't help but start at every imagined movement out of the corner of his eye. Edith spoke softly, muttering encouraging platitudes that seemed both moronic and comforting.

"We'll be there soon," she said. "I won't let anything bad happen to you. Just keep walking. That's good."

As hypertensive as Edith's voice in extremis made him, her soft murmurings relaxed him almost to the point of stupor. It was as if she had a Jekyll and Hyde complex, one moment a raving madwoman, the next Your Very Best Friend.

McKay's legs threatened to give out on him several times during their trek. Edith, small though she may have been, was far stronger than she looked. The journey back took quite a bit longer than had his sprint into the woods. He was miserable the entire time, but tried to stay awake by asking questions.

"Who…what…" he began, trying to collect his thoughts. At last he was ready to begin again. "What hit me?"

A simple enough question, he thought. Edith's shoulders stiffened under the weight of his query.

"Okay," McKay was still hopeful of learning something. "Forget about what hit me. It's invisible anyway, so whatever. What does it want?"

She didn't answer. Instead of heat, Edith radiated anxiety, which was far stronger than the passive flow of faster-moving molecules into an area of slower-moving ones. He would have pushed her further had he the energy to do so. He was nothing if not tenacious. For now, however, he chose the wiser path—not always the easier one for him—and kept his mouth shut.

They reached the cabin at last, just a few hours before sunrise. Edith sat McKay at her board and brought him water, tea, some fruit and a few biscuits slathered with jam. Then she put up several large pots of creek water to boil and, while waiting for them to heat by the fire, sat with him while he ate.

The silence stretched between them. McKay kept falling asleep at the table, his body curling down slowly until his forehead landed on the table with a muted thud. Edith woke him each time this happened, making sure that he finished his meal and took in a sufficient quantity of water.

After McKay had eaten, Edith cleared away his dirty dishes, then lifted the board itself to reveal a sturdy wooden tub beneath. With deliberate motions, she hefted the heavy pots of heated water and dumped their contents into the tub, followed by an equal amount of cool water.

With a slight flourish, Edith handed McKay a bar of soap and indicated that the bath was his. He removed his jacket, shirt, shoes, socks and trousers, which Edith carried outside to wash. Once alone, McKay removed his underwear and settled into the tub for the greatest bath of his lifetime. The soap smelled of sesame seeds, a nice aroma, not too frilly, not too sharp. Gradually, his muscles relaxed. Some of their soreness diminished. The headache that had taken up permanent residence inside his skull retreated to the edges of his awareness. In this strange place, this land, this cabin, he forgot about the danger outside and focused only on the warm water.

An hour passed, during which he slept off and on. The water cooled to tepid, so McKay dried off and dressed in a loose Athosian tunic that Edith had made ready for him. She had already gone to sleep, and was breathing softly in her narrow bed. McKay watched her for a few minutes. He wondered whether she would put on some weight back in Atlantis if he fed her ice cream and chocolate cake every day. Then he wondered what she would feel like all plumped up if he hugged her.

But she wasn't all plumped up. And he wasn't going to be hugging her. So he let those thoughts drop, shuffled over to the sleeping bag she'd laid out for him on the floor, got in and promptly slept like a dead person for many, many hours.

Dr. McKay's Non-Adventure

Bissu-da-buzz. Buzz-uh. Oo-ba-ee-bee.

Bissu-da-buzz. Buzz-uh. Oo-ba-ee-bee.

Bissu-da-buzz. Buzz-uh. Oo-ba-ee-bee.

"Let me sleep." McKay flung his arm around in the empty air above his head before letting it flop onto the floor on which he lay. The zizzing repeated, this time more emphatically.

Bissu-BA-BUZZ! Buzz-uh! OO-ba-DU-ee!

It sounded like bug language, if bugs could speak. Interesting. McKay cracked an eye. It also reminded him of how his earbud sounded when someone spoke and it wasn't actually placed in his ear. McKay weighed the relative probabilities: Bug versus radio. Bug versus radio. Bug versus…

Bizzu-Mc-BUZZ! Buzz in! Do-ba-read-me?

Doctor McKay! Come in! Do you read me?

The comm unit was on the floor, not far from his head. He grabbed it up, and placed it in its proper position.

"Yes, I hear you. Who's this?"

"Lt. Franks in Jumper 3, Doctor. Running kind of late this morning. Have to stop at the Athosian community to drop off supplies. Should be along to pick up you and Doctor Halliday at 1300 hours. Do you copy?"

Wearily rubbing his face, McKay nodded to no one in particular. "Copy that, Jumper 3. Thirteen hundred hours. McKay out."

He sat still, wrapped in the bedroll, for several minutes. Edith wasn't around, so in the privacy of the cabin, he lifted the tunic he'd donned the night before and examined his aching and battered body. Few parts of it had escaped without bruises or some other evidence of the violence to which he'd been subjected. All of his bones seemed intact, although his left shoulder hurt like a mother. He hoped it wasn't the rotator cuff, because he'd heard that rotator cuff injuries needed "scoping," whatever that was. He hated medical interventions of any sort. Doctors were okay; Beckett was a good friend, after all, but the needles were scary, and so were MRIs and x-rays that could reveal unsuspected horrors that lay within him, not to mention…

"McKay! Get out here!"

"Oh!" Startled—and actually quite relieved to be pulled from the depths of one of his least favorite phobic reveries—McKay smoothed down his hair and clothing, rose from the floor and exited the cabin.

In physics, a theory is a theory until it is proved or disproved by observable evidence. According to quantum law, Schrödinger's fictional cat is both alive and dead in the superposition of states. It is alive because we don't know that it is dead. It is dead because we do not know for certain that it lives. McKay stood on the porch, stunned into silence, and realized that he should have applied this principle to the existence of devas earlier on.

Edith stood at the edge of the garden, hands on hips, looking out over acres and acres of withered foliage. Even the forest beyond was dying, its once-vibrant green fading to khaki. McKay's knees felt weak, just as they had the moment he'd first seen the garden, when it was alive and growing joyously.

He placed his face in trembling hands, willing the things to life again. But that didn't happen. The plants had all begun to die in the nighttime, quietly giving up their lives and maybe their souls. He still didn't know what this garden was all about, whether there were beings here besides the human ones, whether any of the tiny flying creatures really existed. If they had, they were gone, now, dead or relocated.

McKay had believed outright that the cat was dead, without concrete evidence that that was so. Edith had said that the cat was alive, her proof even less palatable because it involved ingesting alien pharmacopeia. The truth resided on one side of the knife edge of reality, but rather than teeter on that edge McKay dismissed it, refusing to give the poor cat at least some benefit of the doubt.

McKay put his professional reputation on the line every day. He had made enough mistakes already, did not wish to appear foolish, even with—especially with--the bulk of his career ahead of him. What would everyone think of him if he supported a theory—postulated by a woman clearly not in her right mind--containing the words "devas" and "elves"? His colleagues would go crazy.

McKay watched Edith wander between the raised beds. She wiped tears from her face and sniffled softly as she walked.

"I guess you got your wish," Edith called to him.

McKay didn't respond. She certainly had a way with cutting remarks. As good as his, if not better.

After a while, Edith came round to the cabin and went inside to begin packing. McKay followed. He helped her to dismantle the lab. They didn't speak. His clothes had dried by the fireplace, so he changed out of the tunic into them. As they moved some of the smaller items to the jumper pickup site, McKay noticed bruising around Edith's wrist, where he had taken hold of her the day before.

"Did I do that?" he asked.

She glanced at the injury and shrugged.

"I'm sorry. You're so tiny, I…" he stammered. He was certain that his face was turning all shades of crimson. "I didn't think I'd grabbed you that hard. Dr. Beckett should probably take a look at that when we get back."

"Probably," she responded, not even vaguely interested.

They continued preparing for departure, each lost in their own thoughts.

In the early afternoon the jumper set down on the other side of the hill separating the garden from the uncultivated wilderness around it. Lt. Franks and co-pilot Capt. Biddle helped McKay and Halliday load the jumper's belly with cases of lab equipment and a backpack containing Edith's personal belongings. Once the jumper became airborne, McKay moved to look out the front window. The garden was now indistinguishable in color from the dead land around it.

Dr. McKay's Adventures with His Eyes Open

It had taken every bit of his ingenuity to devise a plausible excuse and means of getting there without hardly anyone knowing about it. It had taken more than a few lies. McKay was a terrible, terrible liar. The worst, in fact, that he had ever met. One little, "Oh, by the way, I need to take out a jumper to see how the intake/uptake value is working," and half of Atlantis would think he was lying and the other half would know. Eventually he had worked out the kinks, managed to create a reasonable excuse to explain why he had to return to the Mainland. Now he stood before the decayed ruins of Edith's garden.

Off-shore breezes had pushed aside the clinging humidity. A cloudless sky hung overhead. He surveyed the area, walking over each path, occasionally toeing the remains of bean stalks, tomato vines and graying coffee plants. No one had composted the debris, so it lay there, wasting away.

Her reports complete, Edith had left for Earth weeks ago. She hadn't said goodbye to McKay, not that he thought she would.

Elizabeth had called a meeting of the entire agricultural team shortly after McKay and Edith's return. Barber and others had analyzed the sera flowers, live ones and dead. When dried, pulverized and mixed with the constantly shifting dust at Barber's Base Camp, they produced a mild version of its typically stupefying effects. Not enough to completely incapacitate a person, just bewilder him. McKay supposed that Barber had acted bewildered. Stupid, bewildered—not much difference. A large amount of the pure substance from living blossoms, absorbed or inhaled, could produce the same results as a heroin overdose: delirium, bradycardia, hypotension, respiratory suppression.

Edith had attended the meeting, looking like someone who had just experienced a tremendous personal tragedy—looking like someone who was still going through one, actually. She gave a brief rundown of her activities over the past half-year and mentioned the possibility of "entities existing beyond our normal perception" contributing to her success with the garden. No one spoke up about this; they had read her reports and were fairly convinced that she was a lunatic.

McKay had neither supported nor denied her assertions. He'd lied that his bruises were the result of a fall from a tree. Beckett, still rattled by his head injury, nodded warily, neither buying McKay's story nor willing to devote the amount of energy needed to pry out the truth.

The few times McKay had seen Edith after that, prior to her departure from Atlantis, she was either eating alone in the cafeteria or else hunched over her laptop in the lab. She'd put on a few pounds, which suited her.

So. Here he was.

He sighed.

The decrepit garden provided no comfort. McKay knew that Edith's career lay in ruins and that he'd done nothing to prevent it, even though he had physical evidence--contusions of all shapes and colors--to prove that something quite out of the ordinary was happening at the outpost.

He worried about himself, thought that perhaps Beckett would erroneously conclude that his injuries were self inflicted. Beckett wouldn't rat him out, but such interesting news has a way of making itself public. Rumors being what they are, a thing like that could taint a man's reputation for years. Who would believe outright in such a trinity: devas and sera flowers and those to whom the devas chose to reveal themselves? An improbable and complicated faith if ever one existed. A lot of people depended on him, now. Everyone, in fact. The city itself needed his guidance. Doubt and trust do not mix. One person hesitating, questioning his judgment at precisely the wrong time… He didn't want to think about it.

For a while McKay felt convinced that Edith had created her own problems. Bit by bit that idea wore thin. She was strange-looking, not at all hot, temperamental and quirky…but clever in her own way and…perfectly sane.

McKay was a scientist above all else. His first spoken words as a child were "What if?..."

Now he asked himself the question he should have postulated the moment Edith first showed him the little pencil drawing she'd done of the deva, the drawing buried in her notes.

What if…Edith were sane? What did that say about this place?

So.

He sighed again.

"I hate being wrong," he said to the nothingness around him. His palm had started to sweat around the vial that held several sera flowers. All of the other specimens had died the same day that the garden wilted. He had no theory as to why this sample had survived.

Unless… What if?

"If I am wrong, I'm sure you'll let me know." He glanced about nervously, sweat breaking out along his hairline, wishing that he could prove this thing once and for all in the lab, where it was clean and safe and protected by all sorts of biohazard eradication devices, portable defibrillators and whatnot. "Yes, I suppose you will."

He laid the vial on the ground and set up his video camera so that it would capture a large portion of this part of the garden in its viewfinder. Then he made ready a full canteen, an emergency transponder, a digital camera, a voice-activated tape recorder, an Epi-Pen, some candy bars, an MRE, one pair of latex-free disposable gloves, several empty vials and glassine envelopes, a magnifying glass, and a signal flare.

"It is not out of the question that Dr. Halliday could be reinstated," he said to the dead air. "I'm…I'm willing to admit that I may have made a mistake. If I did, then I can fix it."

He finished setting up and sat in the dirt close by the gear, next to the vial.

"But the only way I'll know if I'm mistaken is if you guys cooperate with me, okay? See the cameras here?" He pointed to the video and digital cameras, like a game show hostess displaying prizes. "All you have to do is let me get a picture of you and, boom, problem solved!"

No one spoke back. He self-consciously cleared his throat, then turned on the video camera. For a second, he felt the energy of this place trying to find a way to express itself. McKay concentrated on the sensation, this tiny vibration, with hope and fear and anticipation. But it passed. Edith may have been right again; there was only one way to fully experience the things going on here.

He lifted the vial from the ground. The flowers were perfectly preserved within. It was like looking into the face of God. It was like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun. Everything was all jumbled up in his gut about this.

With trembling hands, he unscrewed the cap, tapped the flowers into his palm and brought them to his nose, breathing deeply, until the flowers' narcotizing effects made him limp and accepting. Beckett had mentioned after his own analysis of the flowers that the opiate qualities took some getting used to, that constant exposure had given Edith a very high tolerance. McKay didn't know how many flowers were enough; he didn't want to spend his day here stoned out of his mind, without ever getting off a single shot or recording any voices other than his own spaced-out reverie.

An instant later, he didn't exactly care, because the sera flowers had stripped away all rational thought. Then they took away normal consciousness, as well.

The sun was still high in the sky when McKay came to. He checked his watch. A half-hour had passed, effectively etherized from memory. His equipment sat untouched where he'd left it. Now-dead sera flowers lay strewn across his belly. He brushed away the petals and stood, thinking that it hadn't worked, that the party was over before it had even begun.

He ought to have expected that his legs would give out under him, but was surprised when he collapsed. Disgusted with himself, he tried to rise again, only to find his limbs rubbery and not willing to take commands just yet. After a great deal of effort, he managed to get within reaching distance of his canteen. His vision blurred and refocused, then blurred again. He was holding the canteen. Then he was drinking from it. The canteen shimmered in the sun. And so did all of the equipment. Which is why he had so much trouble discerning the moving thing from the stationary stuff around it, but eventually there was no mistaking what he was seeing.

"Hello," said Tinkerbell.

And McKay laughed.

Dr. McKay's Adventures with Tinkerbell

The deva, whether physically present or merely imagined, appeared just exactly as Collins had described it. Describing the ineffable is an impossible task, however, and a lot had been lost in her translation.

The creature was not just beautiful, it was beautiful. There were its physical properties, its quick and graceful movements and all of that, surely, but then there were the feelings that it elicited, the feelings that it pulled from the tiny, self-absorbed heart of Dr. Rodney McKay. He liked his anger and his insecurities and his pride. They were familiar and protective. All that other stuff, like love and hope and compassion, was best kept hidden. Tinkerbell brought it to the surface, where it exploded like a mortar shell.

This was extremely unfair. McKay had come here in a sincere effort to determine which side was up with these devas. No one said anything about experiencing super-concentrated boluses of ungainly—not to mention unmanly—emotions.

Trembling in awe and terror, the same terror that had gripped him the first time he ever came near a sera flower, McKay gasped at feeling all of this crazy good stuff, all of this crazy bad stuff at once. This couldn't be safe and he tried to back away from it.

"I am under the influence of a very powerful hallucinogenic drug," he said to his vision.

"A very powerful drug. Stay back!" he panted, suddenly furious, as the tiny deva flew in circles around him. Livid outrage worked beautifully at keeping all of that other stuff out. McKay got to his feet, wobbling with his butt in the air and his hands on the ground for a short time before becoming upright. This was good. Wasn't it?

"Something…" he began, as he looked at his shaking hands. "Something very, very weird is happening here from the brug…uh, drug. The drug. The…" McKay's fury dissolved into its fraternal twin: fear. Like a child, he placed his hands over his eyes. Right then and there, a huge spiraling force curled its way up his spine, a sense of limitless power, something he wanted dearly and yet had no idea what to do with. His body reeled as if pushed by the wind from a speeding train passing very close to him. He felt completely out of control, and another jolt of raw fear leaped from his belly to his heart.

Don't look inside.

"Who said that?"

Look without.

"What?"

Work through us.

"Yeah. Sure. Whatever. I'm opening my eyes, now. Just…just don't hurt me or anything."

So he did open his eyes. And he saw them everywhere, so many Tinkerbells that the air undulated with the glowing beings that drifted before him. One of them came close enough to touch. When McKay reached out his hand, the being lit upon his upturned palm. It felt like a mere puff of air, as its wings slowed their flutter. Its tiny feet tickled his calluses. McKay brought his hand close to his face, the better to see the being, the person, there. He said nothing for fear that his breath would blow it to pieces. His eyes lit up with unbridled joy; he smiled wider than he had in years, feeling happier now than ever before, happier even than the moment after he'd finished defending his last Ph.D. dissertation.

The deva on his hand flew away quickly, and McKay followed its path to a desiccated squash vine, where it landed silently on dainty feet. More Tinkerbells followed their mate, until the vine was lined with them, sitting on the yellowed husk. All at once, the vine burst back to life, turning green before his eyes, leafing out exquisitely, trailing adventitious shoots that searched for something to hold on to. The vine grew squash flowers, large ones, pregnant and gestating and delivering all in a moment. And McKay fell back in surprise.

Stunned, he gazed at the thing that had grown up right there. Then, remembering himself to be a man of science, remembering the concept of reproducible results, he skittered off to his set up and grabbed the digital camera, capturing images of the devas at work, at play—for that is what they were!—and the vine and the thing that had grown there just for him, just to show him, just because he had wanted it to.

The air was no longer silent. The devas moved about, their wings singing in the breeze, settling on one grove after the other, bringing back to life everything that had died there weeks before.

It was a magical sight for McKay, different from anything he imagined, even as a child, when the unseen world held so much promise. Instead of supernatural creatures, he had had visions of atoms coming together to form molecules, of molecules constructing themselves into ethylene glycol, hydrochloric acid, calcium carbonate and so many others. Who needed comic book heroes when the physical world held more power than the imagination could ever hope to conceive?

One square plot after the other began to transform itself into a living garden once again. And, among the greenery he spied it: A mound of sera flowers, happily retaking their former home. McKay did not fear them any longer, now that he knew them to be exactly what Edith had claimed—the means by which to see the devas. He rejected Barber's claims about their malignancy. Instead he greedily gathered every flower he could find and held them close to his chest, so that their provocative aroma became everything to him. The flowers were so kind, so important to his research. They were writing this particular dissertation for him, and he loved them for it.

For a second, he caught himself getting too happy about all of this. That was the second before his legs really did give out on him, the second before his mind found a pinpoint of clarity that something wasn't quite right. His emotions ping-ponged between not caring and caring desperately and, with a stumbling, sliding, dizzying gate, he forced himself back to the place where he had set up his equipment.

Not knowing exactly what to do, he felt his pulse. It was there, but so? What did that mean? He was getting jittery and his lungs were becoming stubborn about doing their job. And? Muscles twitching. The chemical formula for ethylene glycol is C2H6O2. Its atomic weight is 62.0682. Melting point, boiling point, vapor density, vapor pressure...and? The order of the universe was quickly reshuffling itself. Was this an allergic reaction? Anaphalaxis? Yes? No? What if…? He balled his fists and pounded them against his thighs. What to do, what to do! This was not going well anymore. It was hard to think with all of the shaking and the fear. The devas curiously circling his head provided no comfort, and he swatted them away angrily.

"Stop, stop, stop, stop," he chanted, thoughts coming in fits and starts like chunks of data through a network. Packets, they were called. Back and forth along the cables, Cat 3, Ethernet, routed here and there and back here again. He was beginning to lose it, lose the ability to transmit data down his neural network, from his brain to the rest of his body, to his fingers, to his toes, and back up to the brain. The packets weren't getting through, and the cables were being cut, one by one, like pruning a shrub. But Edith would know about that, not him.

With clumsy motions, he switched on the transponder. He tried to light a flare but failed when his hands refused to coordinate with each other. Then, not knowing what else to do but feeling as if the world were slipping away, he grabbed the Epi-Pen and uncapped it. Drawing in a sharp breath between his teeth, he looked at the business end of the pen, whining loudly at the thought of having to use it, because it was one of the most painful things he'd ever experienced in his life. McKay, in a full-on panic, considered whether it was more pleasant to fall unconscious and die than give himself an Epi-Pen. He damned himself for having no presence of mind in a crisis.

Panting, he felt the edges of his vision dim. Now or never.

No, wait! Just one more second to gather his courage.

Just one more breath, as hard as that was to take.

Then, with no more excuses to delay him, he pressed the pen against his thigh, midway between his hip and his knee. The needle plunged into his flesh, and he felt the jab and the epinephrine shoot into the muscle. He cried out and cursed himself, everyone else and everything else in the universe. After ten interminably long seconds, he pulled out the needle and stuck it sharp-down in the dirt, then rubbed his leg for another ten seconds, just like he'd been taught, just like he'd had to do several times throughout his life.

The epi did its job. But it wasn't what he needed. He didn't know what was wrong with him or what to do for himself now. Epinephrine is a vasoconstrictor and a bronchodilator. If that wasn't enough to save him, he didn't know what was.

A buzz came through his radio. McKay swiped at his earbud to respond, but missed. Nothing came out of his mouth anyway, except a groan as wispy as the sensation of a deva's fluttering wings. He fell back, landing in the dirt with a soft thud. He smelled the sera flowers' potion still clinging inside his nostrils, saw the devas above him. His eyes closed to the world. This was not a bad way to go, actually. He had seen and touched the divine. Not many people could say with all honesty that they had done this prior to their deaths.

So.

All in all.

For a man who prided himself on being right, McKay was rather pleased that he had been wrong about this.

Dr. McKay's Adventures Among the Living

Someone had tilted his head back and was pushing oxygen into his lungs. The mask fit snugly over his mouth and nose, and his mouth and nose felt quite far away from his brain. Some voices said some things but they were muffled, as if coming from the other side of a wall. A rubber tourniquet bound his arm. A little stick, then the band was removed. He was completely relaxed, which was good. He had already forgotten about having just died and was now interested more in these sensations, which, for some reason, reminded him of being fitted for a suit.

Had he known that medical personnel were attempting to save him, McKay would have been dismayed. He detested people messing with his body.

Eventually, Beckett's voice came in clearly.

"Keep ventilating at 15 liters… I just gave him one amp 50 dextrose and two milligrams Narcan. You see anything around besides the Epi-Pen?"

"No, Doctor."

"Aye, well…load and go, then."

Aye, well… McKay loved that sort of remark. So calm with not a thing to fear around it.

Narcan did what epi could not. Gradually, McKay realized that he was in a jumper, that something unique had happened to him that day, although off hand he could not remember exactly what. For a while, he was too overwhelmed to speak, but was able to open his eyes a couple of times. Beckett's face swam into view. McKay smiled a little bit because his old friend was there. Then he cried a little bit, as well.

"Rodney, why are you crying? Are you hurting anywhere?"

McKay nodded.

"Where?"

McKay pointed to his chest, his hand looping around a bit before locating the proper part of his anatomy. "My pride," he murmured.

Beckett checked McKay's pupils, double-checked the IV line, then loaded up another syringe with additional Narcan. Leaning in close to his patient, he spoke quietly, as if telling him a secret.

"Are you daft, man? What were you trying to do? The toxin from those flowers works like heroin only much more so. Besides that, you seem to be quite sensitive to it. No tolerance, see? We got there you were barely breathing."

McKay closed his eyes in response. He needed to think. Beckett seemed to recognize this and left him to his thoughts except to ask him about the Epi-Pen and cut away his pants leg to look at the injection site. McKay shuddered remembering administering the pen, and his leg tensed up in response. He winced, then settled down again.

"Carson?"

"Hmm?" Beckett was listening for a blood pressure.

"Can you just keep me out of it?"

"Meaning?"

"I don't want to be completely alert right now."

His friend smiled faintly and placed a comforting hand on McKay's shoulder. "Believe me, Rodney, you won't be completely alert for a long time."

And he was right, because when McKay closed his eyes he found it easy to block out everything. He felt stupid and lazy, could certainly relate to Barber right now.

An entire day passed before McKay came around long enough to hold a sensible conversation. He knew that Sheppard and Teyla had visited him, remembered speaking with them. Not that he could recall exactly what they had spoken about. He hoped he hadn't said anything weird, anything about the devas and the squash plants because, oh, lordy, he'd never live that down.

So when Elizabeth stood by his bedside and handed him the jello cup from his lunch, he didn't know at that point how much she had heard and how much he was going to have to bullshit his way out of.

He waved off the dessert, but Elizabeth insisted.

"There's always room for jello," she said, with her usual cryptic smile.

"I don't want it," he dismissed.

"It's the snack food of champions," she replied.

"Yes, well, I prefer little chocolate doughnuts."

Elizabeth gave up the whole jello bit, laid the cup on a nearby table and took a seat next to McKay's bed. For a while she didn't say anything. McKay knew what this was about, for he had experienced it several times before. She was waiting for him to explain himself. He also knew that, despite her seemingly calm disposition, she was absolutely furious. Thinking about Elizabeth's fury made him recall Edith's fury. And then he wondered whether every woman had a furious side to counteract the nice, soft, warm side, with its little laugh and its cake-baking and sheet-folding and…

"Well?" she interrupted.

"Oh!" McKay jumped. "I was just thinking about…about cakes."

"Cakes?"

'No, not cakes. I was thinking about why I went to the Mainland."

She said nothing, waited rather impatiently.

"I went to the Mainland…to…I was one step away from completing my research on the outpost. You remember the outpost? Yes, well, the outpost was deserted. Of course you know that because you ordered everyone out of there. So, well, I went there to film the site where Dr. Halliday had… Did you see the video? Look at the pictures? It's all on there, everything growing and these little…little things flying around!"

Elizabeth visibly shuddered. "We watched the video, Rodney. The only thing it shows is you walking around high as a kite, practically eating a salad of those flowers, then…" She stopped for a moment, clearly shaken by what she had seen. "Then you began to feel the effects of the toxin, set off the transponder, administered your Epi-Pen, and collapsed."

"That's it? What about the vines growing and the squash thing sprouting? And a whole mound of the flowers appeared right before my eyes. Seriously. Elizabeth, I'm not making this up!"

She sighed heavily. "Rodney, when Beckett and his team located you, there was nothing alive in that garden except you—and you were almost dead yourself. I know you preserved a couple of sera flowers for study from the samples brought back to Atlantis, but not enough to kill you. Where were you hiding the rest all this time? Tell me honestly, Rodney, how many did you bring down there with you?"

"Elizabeth, I'm telling you the truth. They grew up right then and there. If they're dead now, then there aren't anymore living specimens as far as I know.

She looked at him sadly. "You get so caught up in things, Rodney. Please. We really need you here."

"I know," he replied, unable to look at her, feeling ashamed for the first time in many years.

"Get some rest, then. You can return to duty when Carson says you're fit to do so. Until then…take care of yourself."

He nodded, then watched her leave the infirmary. He was all set to get angry but thought that perhaps he ought to just wallow in guilt and shame for a while. Couldn't hurt. Then he ceased to care whether anyone believed him or not. He had seen what he'd seen, felt what he'd felt. Everything he had witnessed seemed real enough to him. If the video failed to provide proof, if the sensors and filters and recorders ignored what was obviously there, so what. He'd live this down eventually. He would write a report, couch everything in such beautifully rational language, such carefully balanced logic, that anyone reading it would be tempted to do exactly as he had done.

Sleep was pulling at him. He took it up on its offer, beginning to write the report in his mind before nodding off again.

Dr. McKay's Final Adventure

Having slept for the better part of two days waiting for the sera toxin to leave his system, McKay was ready, willing and able to pull an all-nighter. Which he did immediately following his release from the infirmary.

His quarters illuminated by the glow of his computer monitor, he played and replayed the video he'd taken of the garden—all of it, from the first colorful shots of Edith's playground of nature, to the lifeless fields shortly before the site was evacuated, to his painfully embarrassing recent adventures. The images gave up nothing. As far as anyone could tell—anyone being several dozen scientists as committed (if not as smart) as himself—the garden was alive one day and dead the next. This was a fluke of nature, a blight, perhaps, and little magical flying people had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

"This is Helianthus tuberosus, commonly known as a Jerusalem artichoke or sunchoke," Edith was saying, her voice somehow pleasing coming through the tinny speakers on McKay's computer monitor.

He watched the images of the woman who had made the garden happen. She and her devas. Or maybe it was just her all along. He'd never know for certain now. McKay had captured only brief footage of Edith, and he hadn't bothered to spend much time watching it. There was one part that he enjoyed, though, a 20-second shot of her walking slightly ahead of him, then bending down to show him some feathery carrot tops arcing gracefully above the soil. She turned toward him, saw him filming her and ducked her face away, as if she knew she was homely not meant to be photographed.

McKay played this part over and over. He had always been attracted to really, really hot women, no matter how stupid they were. Samantha Carter being the sole exception, he liked it when smart women were unattractive. That way, they'd devote their lives to science and discuss particle accelerators with him instead of going off and getting married and being distracted with things like china patterns and morning sickness.

For a second he felt sorry for Edith. Then he loved her more deeply than he thought imaginable. Then someone knocked on his door. He paused the video and answered it.

"Good morning, Sunshine!" John Sheppard carried a full coffee cup in one hand and a sheaf of paper in the other. "Ready for today's staff meeting? Doughnuts are on me."

McKay took the papers and glanced through them. Nothing all that earth-shaking would be going on at the meeting. Nevertheless, he could manage to remind everyone during the course of it that he was, is and would always be smarter than they are.

"It's at 0900, Sheppard. That's two hours from now."

"Just thought I'd make sure you were awake and…aware."

"Yes, that's very funny. I appreciate your concern."

John peeked into McKay's quarters. "No white rabbits hopping about in here, are there?"

McKay smirked, completely pissed off, subtly pleased that someone cared a little bit to check in on him.

"No rabbits, white or otherwise."

"Well, good. See you in a couple of hours, then." With that, he handed the coffee mug to McKay and left.

McKay dropped the papers on his desk, sat and swiveled his chair towards the monitor once again. His finger poised over the Play button, he stopped dead. His eyes grew wide in shock and fascination.

"This can't be…" He gently touched the monitor, wondering if the sera toxin were completely flushed from his body. Maybe he was getting flashbacks. He blinked exaggeratedly. When the image failed to resolve, he shook his head, thinking that perhaps he was getting too old for staying up all night. Still, the image remained the same: Edith crouching down, delicate hand held lightly on the carrot fringe, surrounded by hundreds of tiny devas, some of them airborne, some of them perched on her booney hat, on her shoulders, on the friable soil beneath her, on nearby plants, on everything that existed in the frame.

McKay advanced the video one second. Nothing. He backed up two seconds. Nothing. He ran the video forward and backward in slow motion, eating up time before the staff meeting, forgetting about the staff meeting, not caring about the damned staff meeting until Elizabeth buzzed his earbud concerned by his absence. He made an appearance, gave the shortest possible responses to queries. The meeting was entering its second hour when McKay gave up trying to appear interested and simply eased out the door unnoticed.

He raced back to his quarters and rolled through the video again and again, trying to determine whether he'd caught anything else of note on the tape.

"C'mon, c'mon!" he griped, his patience expired.

Eventually McKay realized that tape was devoid of more strange pictures. Pausing at the one split-second shot of Edith and the beings all around her, he resized the image down to a square inch and moved it to his computer's desktop. That way he could look at it any time he wanted to. Or not. He wasn't sure why he wanted it there. Maybe it reminded him that not everything is quantifiable. Not right away, certainly. If this was true in science, it was definitely the case with the intangibles, with complicated and superfluous things like beauty and joy and love. But he had had little experience with those sorts of alien entities. So.

He squinted at the picture of Edith, realizing that he had made her as small as a deva. He'd have to show it to her if he ever saw her again. She would like that.