The gate made a sound like a vacuum cleaner clogging and the watery looking interface was gone. The members of SG-1 weren't trapped on this distant side of a wormhole that no longer existed (or ever did depending on your view of reality. If it's not in this universe does it exist at all? Is a tunnel through the fabric of the universe real? Physicists will argue about that for years and make no sense at all. I mean how can you take something seriously when the fundamental assumptions about it begin with analysis using imaginary numbers?)

The four of them fanned out and looked around. Samantha Carter took a soil sample, by placing it in a little jar. Jack O'Neill continued to take soil samples by collecting them on his boots.

They nodded happily. There were no surprises and the place looked just like the video that their little robotic fiend recorded when it came through for a brief sojourn a day or so earlier. Unlike NASA's remote probe, this little roving sojourner managed to avoid colliding with the first rock it came near. It missed that one completely, by turning at right angles and colliding with the second one.

"Doesn't appear to be any one here, Jack," commented Daniel Jackson.

"Nope," agreed Colonel Jack O'Neill of the SGC.

This is what they saw. The stargate was surrounded by rocks and grass. That was familiar. The terrain surrounding about half of the gates they went through could be described in much the same way. The Goa'uld who had sampled terrestrial ecology, had very limited taste in their ecological decorations.

Further away, they saw a lot of trees. Conifers to be precise. Further into the distance was a woody slope that became escarpments at greater altitude. SG-1 appeared to have emerged in a valley surrounded by seriously craggy mountains.

"So where do we go?" Carter asked O'Neill.

"Well our instructions were pretty vague," O'Neill replied.

"'Find out what's going on and return home' is not really all that specific no," commented Jackson. As was his want he spoke slowly, like a personal computer running windows (any version) which thinks it's a multi-tasking environment, when really all that is happening is that the program doing the talking is only getting a small portion of the available processing power, and it sounds like it to the outsider. Jackson was already itching to go exploring for whatever ancient culture the Goa'uld had deposited on this planet, and that planning routine was the piece of software that was hogging the processor and all the available RAM at the moment.

Of course they did not know that this was a Goa'uld colonial development. Jackson just hoped that they had emerged inside another Goa'uld project, because the alternative was going to be pretty boring.

There's not a lot of archaeology in a forest full of trees, supported by a fleet of symbiotic insects, bacterium and viruses.

*

"Teal'c," General Hammond suggested with exaggerated patience. "We might move on to what you encountered when you moved further afield."

General hammond noticed the cup that Colonel Makepeace had left on the table beside the General's elbow. He took a sip and then wondered to himself what the drink had been before the cat drank it, processed it and then later discharged it through another, much smaller bodily orifice.

Teal'c nodded his understanding. Normally these post rout briefings were handled by the still upright and lucid from among the other three members of the SG-1 team. They had a lot more experience in the matter and usually at least one of them was conscious when they came back through the gate. It had to happen sooner or later, but Teal'c had never realised how difficult it was to deliver these things on an ad hoc basis.

He assembled his thoughts and began again.

*

SG-1 battled onward through the undergrowth and the rampant insect life. They were bitten, scratched and sapped on before they were a kilometre into the journey. Trees and scrub seemed to be actively impeding their progress.

"There's always been something that worried me about the Stagate," O'Neill said to Teal'c. They were sort of leading the movement through the underbrush at that moment, and striding side by side. "You hung around with the Goa'uld for a bit and they used the things pretty extensively, maybe you can answer the question."

"And what is that Colonel?" Being asked a direct question about his past was a rarity and Teal'c raised a single eyebrow in wonderment.

"Well, we know how big they are?" O'Neill drifted into his query, allowing Teal'c time to translate and catch up.

"Yes."

"What I want to know is what use could they possibly be?"

"I do not think I understand the context of the question." Teal'c very nearly raised both eyebrows at that one.

"Well, it struck me that they were too small and too slow to be any use as a transport medium. I mean ours is flat out handling the traffic from a dozen exploration teams. As a means of commercial transport they would be incredibly useless. Think about it. You have to transport the thing a zillion miles to the next star, and then you go to all the trouble to set it up and then what do you do? You put down a thing that's about the size of a kid's bedroom wardrobe. I mean what use is it being that small? If it were big enough to drive a train through, then I could understand, but…You know it would make more sense if you carried the little one to the next star and then expanded it once you got it there. You know send the bits through one at a time and then build a much bigger one."

Teal'c walked on in silence for a while. O'Neill respected his need to think about the query.

Finally Teal'c said. "So what is your question?"

"Nothing," O'Neill sighed. "I was just thinking out loud."

They pushed on through the underbrush.

"It would be nice to come across a conveniently placed roadway," moaned Daniel Jackson. "Or a track or a walking trail or maybe even just a dry river bed."

"Funny you should suggest that Daniel," said O'Neill with a mockingly serious note tinging his voice.

"Why? What have you found?"

"A river bed."

Jackson pushed through the bush to catch up to O'Neill.

"Trouble is," O'Neill continued, "that it isn't dry yet. In fact there's quite a river sort of meandering through it."

And around one of O'Neill's legs. That is seriously going to effect his spit and polish.

The flow of water took care of the dirt on that particular boot but looked likely to give O'Neill the unique experience of walking in wet socks.

SG-1 crowded closer to have a look. Anything besides trees would be a welcome sight. The river looked little more than a wet interruption to the ever present trees though. The water was covered almost completely by a chaotic arrangement of water lilies. They were almost as dense as the grass covering in the clearing where the gate had been placed. It was that very lack of apparent water surface that led to O'Neill's soggy sock.

He pulled his leg out of the water and shook a few stray lily leaves off his boot.

"Oh, that might be bad," agreed Jackson tentatively.

"Yep," O'Neill agreed, and frowned at his now wet, but still partially muddy boot. "Looks pretty deep as well."

"Should we try to Fjord it?" Samantha Carter asked. Her arrival at the water's edge caught Daniel Jackson completely by surprise and almost gained him a pair of wet boots to match the one currently worn by Jack O'Neill.

"We could," O'Neill mused to himself, "we could, but then we could walk along the river a ways and see if we could find a bridge somewhere."

"Why would there be a bridge?" Teal'c asked. Teal'c eyebrow was up, as was his want when he was asking question. It was a sort of mocking physical piece of punctuation.

Teal'c stepped up to join the rest of SG-1 and his proximity disturbed Daniel Jackson's precarious balance on the edge of the river. Jackson's arms windmilled for a moment until her regained his balance. He rocked and he jerked a few times and finally managed to right himself. The splash we heard was O'Neill being knocked into the water once again. Filling his other boot with water.

"Thanks Daniel," he said in a tone that completely lacked sincerity.

"About the bridge idea…" Teal'c prompted. Jackson's and O'Neill's actions had rather sidetracked the conversation for a moment.

"There might not be," O'Neill conceded while he climbed back onto the bank of the river, "but I don't have a better idea."

"Which way?" asked Jackson. "Up stream or down stream, that is the question."

"Actually I think it was 'to be or not to be'" suggested Teal'c.

"Is there a reason why there might be a village in one direction over another?" Carter asked O'Neill.

"Yeah that may be the case," Jackson agreed with Teal'c. "But it doesn't help us find a bridge."

"I don't know," conceded O'Neill. "We might look in the river and see if there's any signs of human habitation in the water."

"Or a bee," said Teal'c.

"What?" asked Jackson. He had been trying to listen to both the conversation he was having with Teal'c and the one between Jack and Sam at the same time and wasn't following either very well. He looked across at Teal'c and wondered for a moment what they had been talking about. Teal'c wore an expression that was slightly off centre of impassive, which might have meant anything if O'Neill had worn it, but signified an expectation of a humorous response when Teal'c wore it. It was not worn often.

"Sewerage?" asked Carter.

"That was a joke Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said. "I am practising the delivery of Tau'ri humour."

"Why?" Jackson asked.

"Just signs of rubbish would be enough," said O'Neill, "any thing to suggest that people had been here and used the river."

"Because you all seem to do it at some time," Teal'c persisted. "Especially in times of stress, and I felt that it would help in the development of my personality."

"So where do you get your inspiration? Not from Jack I hope."

"If there's no rubbish then the village must be down stream," Carter concluded.

"No," Teal'c answered. "I have a book called 101 jokes for all occasions. It is published by the Reader's Digest Corporation."

"Or… they're really clean," O'Neill told Carter.

"Thanks for the warning," Jackson told Teal'c. "There's not much chance of a clean old civilisation," he said to Jack and Sam completely confusing Teal'c who had not been following both conversations.

"Well if you two are finished discussing lame jokes?" O'Neill reminded them of their plight in a much louder voice. "We should head up stream."

"I thought we just concluded that if there was no rubbish we should head down stream," Carter complained.

"Haven't you smelt this river?" O'Neill said sardonically.

"Oh is that what it is?" Carter asked as the idea dawned on her. She had just begun the entertain the idea that it wasn't the smell of three unwashed male bodies that she could smell, but might be the smell of more than three, and washing in the water was not the only use they made of the river.

And to think that Jack O'Neill had stepped in it. Yuck!

*

"Was there any thing there Teal'c?" General Hammond asked with exaggerated patience. "You were sent over there to find signs of life and some how SG-1 finished up a medical emergency. What signs of life did you find?"

Teal'c nodded. "Ah certainly General Hammond…"

*

"OK. It's a horse," said O'Neill. "I can also make that identification, Daniel. Horse, equine animal. Found all over the world and heavily domesticated."

The SG-1 team were huddled beneath the branches of a large tree and hidden from the horse's view by a heavily leaved branch. By now SG-1 had dispensed with their helmets and had twigs in their hair. After several hours on the march they also had a bad case of BO from all that effort carrying their field packs on their backs.

"Exactly," Daniel Jackson said with exaggerated patients. "On earth."

"Yep."

"This isn't Earth." He made a tah-dah gesture with his hands.

It was wasted on O'Neill.

Jackson did it again.

A light came on inside O'Neill's head. It was a feeble sort of glow, like a torch trying to fill a room, but it was there all the same. Jackson had one of his charitable moments and conceded that O'Neill might have latched onto the idea after all.

"Oh so that was what the business was with the funny lights and the cold. I have only just now realised what it was all about. We're somewhere else," O'Neill said, not restraining the tendency he had toward sardonic, neigh, sarcastic humour.

"Yeah, to a place where horses are not a native species."

"OK. I'll go along with that."

"Then this is a human settlement, and there would be Goa'uld here."

"OK, I can wear that as a working hypothesis."

Teal'c had given up with the eyebrow raising by this stage. O'Neill wasn't watching for one thing and Teal'c had gotten used to the idea of O'Neill and his expanded vocabulary since he had taken to ready lately. Must be part of growing old, he thought.

*

"Perhaps I wasn't specific enough, Teal'c," General Hammond conceded. By this stage of the narrative, General Hammond really wanted to place his head in his hands and have a good scream. "What happened when you encountered the human settlement?"

"Ah that…" began Teal'c.

To the unbridled joy of the entire debriefing team, Teal'c was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile phone. Everybody in the room went through that newly developed ritual of searching through their pockets for their phones and surreptitiously checking to see if they were the ill mannered swine who had left their phone switched on. None of them had. It was actually the phone that Janet Frasier had brought into the conference room, just in case there was a change in the condition of the SG-1 team members currently in the care of her department.

The entire conference room full of inhabitants looked her way. We can tell by the sickly looks on their faces, that pasty expression that comes when all of the blood finds another place to be, somewhere other than the little capillary blood vessels in the skin of their face, that they are not happy to be receiving information through that particular source at that moment. If no-news is good news, then the corollary might also be true, and any news is not good news.

Janet Fraiser picked up the phone and answered it, reluctantly.

Everybody listened into the conversation, well half of it anyway.

"Frasier here," she said, all official and suitably professional. It was a cover of course. What she really wanted to say was, "yeah, what?"

There was a delay while the phone filled her ear with information that the rest of the room's occupants were not privy to.

"How long has this been going on?" she asked the little assembly of electronic components that was talking to her ear.

Then there was another delay.

"I'll be right down," she said finally. She snapped the phone closed and cut the connection with a bitter flourish. The room full of military peacocks took a clue from her demeanour, she wasn't carrying bad news… just news.

"Good news?" General Hammond asked, there was a hopeful note to his voice.

Janet Frasier turned to look at him carefully. "Daniel woke for a few moments," she said "He wasn't lucid. He mumbled a few things and then lapsed back into the coma."

"What did he say? Anything?"

"Oh no! It's the accountant!" she replied softly. "And then he just screamed."

A wry smile appeared on General Hammond's face. "Perhaps it's time to promote than man to line management," he commented dryly. "Nothing else?"

"No,' she shook her head, "sorry."

"Pity," he muttered.

"I should go down and supervise."

"Will you be able to add anything to the work?"

"Possibly."

"I think it best if you hear what caused it in the first place. It might aid in the work later on."

Janet considered that for a moment and then agreed.

"Carry on Teal'c" General Hammond said after a heavy sigh. "You were going to tell us about the human settlement…"

*

"It's a village," said Teal'c. He rested on the top of a little hillock and looked out over a scattering of thatched roof huts and humpies. Smoke issued from rough chimneys that sprouted from the roof of over half of the huts like mushrooms. Goats and cows roamed aimlessly in the space between huts, leaving neat little piles of fertiliser on the ground. It looked far from clean. The river slinked past the huts and tried to get through the environs without being sullied, and failed dismally.

"Sort of I suppose," conceded O'Neill. "I hope that's not the hight of civilisation on this planet."

"We need to get closer so we can hear what they say and work out what language it is that they speak," Jackson said.

"Best idea I suppose," O'Neill agreed. He nodded and waved them back into the lee of the hillock so that the entire team could confer.

Jackson was a bit worried. He had agreed with O'Neill a lot today. It was getting scary.

"I've got a plan," said O'Neill.