Harm looked at her as though he might be about to make a disbelieving snort. He strained himself with a visible effort. "So what was the ride like?" he asked.

"Like she said it would be. It was the world's worst roller coaster. There were lights that stretched and I was sure at one stage I could taste the colour green." She shook her head, sending her hair into a frantic little orbit.

"So what was the aliens home world like?"

"I didn't see much of it. I remember the gravity. That was the give-away. We really were on another planet. I felt light, you know. I had a real spring in my step. The light was different and there were these smells that I couldn't recognise, but it was the lack of gravity that brought it home."

"What, like about half of what you were used to?"

"Not that much. Perhaps three quarters."

"Well, what did it look like?"

*

They had emerged inside a corridor. The walls seemed to glow with a light of their own. There were no shadows. Sarah Mackenzie had trouble with the glare. The iris in her eyes wouldn't close enough to dull it down to levels where she could see properly.

She shielded her eyes and tried to make out the details of her surroundings.

Daniel Jackson and Teal'c looked around, examining the details of the corridor and the Asgard stargate with an intensity that Sarah Mackenzie found hard to understand. Carter held up an instrument like a hand held light meter. She looked at it a few times and tutted to herself. She placed it into a pocket sewn into the piping of her trousers.

O'Neill and Odin returned to the gate location, walking along the corridor from the opposite direction to the placement of the gate. They appeared to Mackenzie's dazzled eyes to materialise from the glare.

"He's ready for us," Odin said. It was the first words Mackenzie had heard him say. She was sure he wouldn't be able to speak English, and was surprised that he could. "I am not speaking," he explained as though reading her mind. "I am just making contact with your speech centres and placing data into your neurological audio processing centres."

"OK," said Mackenzie, to just about everybody present.

"His name is Fox Mulder," explained Odin. "As far as we can make out he has been trapped with the Goa'uld for almost a year."

"That's terrible," commented Mackenzie.

Odin nodded; a remarkably human gesture. "We hope we can recover him. We feel responsible for his plight."

"The FBI have been searching for him pretty thoroughly," O'Neill explained. "We don't let much information out about this. There's an assistant Director of the FBI who found us, or rather a bunch of net nerds who publish an anarchist paper called 'The Lone Gunmen' found us and let him know. Apparently the AD was this guy's boss. Astute fella, picked up on the whole secrecy thing. Only got one bit wrong. He thought we were responsible for the mess this guy's in. Seems someone at the Department of Defence is involved, we just don't know who."

"This is amazing," said Mackenzie in one of her more cunning moments of understatement.

"He's through this way," said Odin's voice in her head, and led them along the corridor and then through a doorway that Mackenzie was sure wasn't there a moment earlier. They entered a room that shared the same characteristic over illumination as the hallway. For a moment Mackenzie envied O'Neill his dark glasses. The only feature visible in the room was an altar that projected from the floor in the middle of the room.

A man in his late thirties was lying on the white altar, dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans. His feet were clad in quality leather lace up boots. All were spotlessly clean. His dark hair was cut into spikes about an inch long. He had pursed lips and a slightly down turned nose.

He appeared to be unconscious. Or dead.

Mackenzie said her thoughts out loud.

"Ah that would be because he is dead," said O'Neill, dead pan. He added the caveat, "sort of," in a much smaller voice.

Mackenzie looked the question at Carter, hoping for (or dreading) elaboration.

"It's a matter of quantum physics," she said uncertainly. "They've locked the state of all of his subatomic particles so the particles can't change their quantum state. That means they have managed a sort of state of suspended-animation."

Mackenzie eyed her off for a moment. "That sounds like science fiction," she observed.

"Have a look around you. Science fact perhaps. We have no idea how they do it. We also have no idea how they manage to maintain that illusion of his presence. He shouldn't look like this."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if his quantum state was locked, then all light that impinges on him would reflect back as though he wasn't there, or it would pass through him without being interfered with by the passage. Our theory suggests that someone in that state would either be a perfect mirror or completely invisible, we don't really know which, and the Asgards are no help. Every time we ask them a question like that they just tilt those oversized heads of theirs to one side and blink at us. We won't get an answer out of them, no matter how hard we try. We're just left with trying to work it out by ourselves. There are arguments about what that," she gestured at the man on the altar, "means in SGC's science forums."

"If he is dead then…"

"Asgard technology," O'Neill explained as if that answer said it all. Perhaps it did for him, Mackenzie thought. After a while magic would start to look real if you kept encountering things like she had endured during the last half day, every day, day in day out for years.

"They copied the quantum signature of his thought processes into a crystalline memory construct," Carter explained, well that was what she though she was doing, "so you could interrogate it."

That explanation made little sense to Mackenzie, but she thought she had a few little bits of it, hear and there. "Is his body alive?"

Carter did not answer. She looked at Odin who had remained silent throughout the explanation, allowing the humans to explain the events in their common language. The Asgards had found that it helped to convey the concepts to let the humans communicate among themselves despite the obvious errors and misinterpretations that Carter was guilty of conveying.

"It could be again," explained Odin.

"But it isn't now?"

"That is correct."

"How would you reanimate him."

"That is within our capability, but we would only undertake the task if the consciousness that we restored to the physical/biological matrix was a valid one."

"That's what you want me to help you to determine."

"Yes."

"Wouldn't a psychologist be a better choice?"

"We are not interested in the state of his neurological development or his trauma adjustments. We are concerned with his ethical development. We do not want to place a dysfunctional entity into you care."

Mackenzie digested that argument and saw the sense of it. They were planning to leave the counselling to the human specialists, provided the man was well enough to accept the treatment.

She walked around the altar, examining him carefully. He was a relatively tall man, she could tell by the length of his limbs. "I cannot see how all this works," she said. "How can I talk with him? I cannot achieve anything if I can't speak with him."

"He is dreaming," explained Odin. "We will question his dreams. You will interrogate the dreamer."

She looked at him challengingly. "How?"

"You will share his dreams," Odin said cryptically.

"How do I do that?" she asked.