Part Two: Inadequacy

Dr. Rodney McKay fiddled with a tiny scar on his left hand. Funny, he couldn't recall how it had gotten there. Such a miniscule thing, but significant nevertheless, because he noticed every injury, every drop of blood that left his body.

Kate Heightmeyer was speaking, but, at this moment, McKay wasn't paying attention. He didn't need her to explain things to him; her job was to listen to him explain himself. Today he was having difficulty boosting power to the long-range sensors.

"I get a lot of grief from Zelenka," he interrupted. "And…what's his name? That new guy, Bryson.

"You feel they don't trust your work?"

He snorted derisively. "Of course they do. My stuff's good."

Heightmeyer nodded, waiting. She knew him better than anyone. That made her terribly dangerous and unattractive, his frequent sexual fantasies notwithstanding.

"Sheppard's got the gene, Carson's got it. Those of us who responded positively to the gene therapy get by all right, but not like the natural carriers. They have the city at their feet. No big deal, certainly. Just that it's wasted on them. Sheppard's a killing machine—and I mean that in the nicest possible way--and Beckett's too chickenshit to use this…this gift, if you will."

"And you feel…short-changed?"

McKay raised his head, but not his eyes. Even when he was trying to be direct he couldn't look people in the face.

"The reason I get crap from my colleagues is because they blame me for not having the talent to use the city's systems as well as the natural carriers. But it's not my fault. The city will listen to people like Beckett, who has no business talking to her, rather than to me, someone who can use the information in a productive way."

Kate Heightmeyer made a brief notation on her yellow legal pad. This made him nervous. What if someone saw these notes? It's not as if yellow legal pads were password protected.

"Is it possible to train yourself to be more proficient with Atlantis's systems?"

Now she was trying to solve the problem. He yawned, weary of this conversation. The city needed fixing, not him.

"Well," he said, perfunctorily. "I'm due…someplace else."

Heightmeyer looked up from her pad. McKay felt curious—even a little frightened--about what she had written there. "We still have five minutes."

"I…I know," he stammered, anxious to leave and thoroughly inept at coming up with an excuse for doing so. "There is something important that I need to see in my lab. You know physics: It runs on its own schedule."

The therapist gave him a confused scowl. It was easy to turn his back on that. She was a shrink; probably 90 percent of her patients had triggered that look.

McKay entered his lab. It was late in the day, almost dinnertime for those who worked day shift and ate at regular intervals. McKay had barely eaten in days, for he truly was bent out of shape about Atlantis, about her stubborn refusal to connect with him.

He and others had lately come to refer to the city as "she," which McKay felt was quite fitting indeed.