Reminder:
"This is spoken English."
"This is spoken Czech."
This is a thought.

Last time: There are more exciting things to do around Atlantis than homework. Like checking out that Wraith dart we just brought back (in chapter 23) to figure out how to get Cadman out of McKay's head.


Chapter 25. Fumbles McStupid.

"I hope I'm not in the way," Anna said. She looked around and dodged out of the way of a couple of scientists walking past, consulting a tablet together. They seemed pretty irritated, and spoke in rushed English.

"You aren't," Radek assured her. He looked up at one of the monitors he was working on, and then at the Wraith dart. "This is a very specific, highly stable stream of power that we need..." He had about a dozen reference texts up on another monitor... everything they knew about Wraith darts. It wasn't a lot of information, all things considered, since they were adding to this compendium of knowledge as they spoke. The information they were adding wasn't working and in a thousand pieces, so to say they knew "very little" about the dart was probably generous.

Radek went to a nearby table and stared dejectedly at the tray with the transformer pieces in it. Appropriately, labeled "Transformer Bits" in huge block letters that were most certainly not Radek's. "This is a very specialized transformer..." He picked up one of the little black pieces.

"But you can reverse engineer one, right?"

He rounded a wall of computers and displays until he stood in front of them. "Eventually," he said.

Anna frowned. "Why did you let Colonel Sheppard make you rematerialize him before you were finished?" It might have been a gamble, what with how unstable the signals were on the planet before they hooked the device up to some power. But everything had worked out, more or less.

Radek looked at her, his eyebrows down over his eyes like he was confused. Maybe he didn't know why he'd done it. Or maybe he thought the answer was supposed to be obvious. Because he's Colonel Sheppard didn't seem like a good answer to Anna... but maybe it should have?

Except Doctor McKay was storming into the hangar. Elizabeth, Colonel Sheppard, and Doctor Beckett were on his heels. He stood indignantly at the entrance to the hangar and looked at Doctor Beckett.

"Carson," he said. "You want to tell Zelenka or should I?"

"Well, Radek," Doctor Beckett started, but Doctor McKay interrupted him.

"You really screwed something up because when you rematerialized me, you managed to also rematerialize Cadman's consciousness in my brain. Good job."

Radek looked flabbergasted. With good reason. Anna wasn't sure exactly what Doctor McKay meant, or even if such a thing was possible. But it was a big problem.

Colonel Sheppard's fault. She was sure.

"What?" Radek finally managed. "No, no. How did that happen?"

"You don't know," Doctor McKay said, almost like a question. But then he interrupted himself. "Of course, you don't know." Then he snapped his fingers impatiently. "What have you got?"

Radek pointed to the Transformer Bits tray and explained what it was and why he'd done what he'd done. As if he needed to explain that—Doctor McKay could have been wiped from existence without his help.

Maybe. It seemed a reasonable conclusion. Almost anything seemed reasonable at the moment: Doctor McKay had another consciousness in his brain.

"Oh." Doctor McKay tossed a piece of the transformer back into the tray as soon as Radek finished explaining what he was trying to do. "Nice work!"

"We were running out of power—I knew hardly anything about the machine," Radek said. Explaining. Again. Everything except the most crucial information that it wasn't his idea. "Who would have thought this could be one of the side effects?"

"So instead of waiting to understand what it was you were doing, you just mashed on the keyboard hoping something would happen!" Doctor McKay finished.

"You're alive, aren't you?"

Doctor McKay didn't answer that, probably because the answer was yes. At least they'd gotten that much right. Then he shouted, apparently at no one, "He doesn't know how to fix it!"

"What?" Radek asked.

Doctor McKay gave Radek an acidic smile and pointed at his head. "I'm talking to her."

"You can hear her thoughts?" Elizabeth spoke up from the doorway.

Anna hoped that didn't go both ways. Poor Cadman.

"No, not her thoughts, thank god," Doctor McKay said. "I can hear when she's speaking. Or when she's trying to speak."

Elizabeth turned to Doctor Beckett. "Are you sure he should have been discharged from the infirmary, Carson?" she asked.

Doctor McKay rolled his eyes.

"According to the MRI, he's as healthy as he ever was," Doctor Beckett answered.

"Well, we can't all be track stars, now, can we?" Doctor McKay asked the air again. He realized everyone was staring at him and said, "Her again."

Colonel Sheppard looked to Doctor Beckett. "Maybe there's something an MRI wouldn't pick up, if you know what I mean."

Doctor Beckett looked like he was trying very hard not to smile.

"I'm not crazy," Doctor McKay said. "I just have another consciousness in my brain."

"So you just look crazy," Colonel Sheppard said.

"I'm sure I do, but only because Doctor Fumbles McStupid over here was in way over his head!"

Anna glanced between Radek and Doctor McKay, momentarily indignant. A feeling Radek obviously shared, along with incensed humiliation. Now Anna knew why Radek didn't seem to like Doctor McKay that much.

She looked at Radek. "He doesn't know anything about the dart either!"

He held his hand up to stop her from talking about halfway through her tirade, but he didn't say any of that. "Yes. Yes, I made a mistake trying to save your life. Now, do you want to try to fix it or do you want to continue to berate me some more?"

"I'm perfectly capable of doing both at the same time," Doctor McKay mumbled. He gave Anna a sideways glance as though he'd only just realized she was there. Then he looked at Radek. "I assume you've tried to run one of our own generators on it?"

Radek took a deep breath and then shook his head, fiddling with the tablet he'd been carrying around. "It's not as simple as that. The trick is having it interface with the Wraith machine in real time. The power fluctuations are huge and if we overshoot just a little, we're, uh, screwed up. Again."

Everyone looked at Doctor McKay, but he wasn't looking at anything in particular. Just the floor. He should have been looking at the floor—he should have been ashamed of himself, talking to one of his colleagues like that. If it were up to Anna, she'd never help him ever again.

"Yeah, um, if we can maybe run an interface program, that will take care of the, uh…" Doctor McKay paused, and shook his head. He looked up and tried to make eye-contact with Radek, but immediately looked somewhere else. "Here's what I want us to try. We'll take a, uh, naquadah generator and, um…"

Doctor McKay spun around and screamed at the floor, "Yes! What?" He paused. "Well, stop asking stupid questions!"

Anna hadn't quite recovered from his outburst when Doctor Beckett said quietly, "Rodney…"

Doctor McKay was still talking to the floor. "I will get you out of here, okay? Now just be a good little girlie and keep quiet." Another pause. "And do you have a degree in physics, hm? What about mechanical engineering?"

"Rodney?" Elizabeth said gently.

Doctor McKay whirled toward Elizabeth and shouted, "Yes!" He seemed to realize that he was no longer talking to the floor and took a deep breath. "Sorry. I'm sorry. What, please?"

"Why don't we let Zelenka handle this?" she asked.

"I'm fine," Doctor McKay said.

"No, you're not," Colonel Sheppard said.

"And I'd like you to talk to Doctor Heightmeyer," Elizabeth continued.

"I think it'd be more useful if I…"

"Rodney," Elizabeth interrupted. "I'm not asking you."

Anna bit her lip while Doctor McKay turned a glance around the hangar. He looked livid and humiliated. But he deserved whatever of that he got. Except she noticed Radek looked almost apologetic.

Doctor McKay turned toward the entrance to the hangar. "Fine." He left without another word, leaving the scientists alone with the Wraith dart.

Radek sighed and looked around. "You heard him," he said. "Let's hook up a naquadah generator and see if that will do it."

"You said it isn't that simple," Anna said.

"It isn't." His pointed glare was probably for her Czech as much as it was for her yelling earlier. "The naquadah generator doesn't put out power stream as refined as this machine needs. But we should try it."

"Why?" Anna asked.

"Because," he said. "Rodney wanted us to." He walked away toward the dart where a group of scientists were wheeling a large grey object up next to it. Anna recognized it from schematics as a naquadah generator.

"Colonel Sheppard wanted you to rematerialize him," Anna said. She followed him to stand next to the reactor. It felt like he was just blatantly ignoring her now. "You did that, too, even though you knew you shouldn't have."

"We will try something else as soon as this is finished. I need you to either stop talking or go somewhere else," he said, and pointed off in the most convenient direction.

Anna frowned at him. Why try something he was sure wouldn't work when he hadn't even tried something he thought might? "You're wasting time," Anna snapped. "Having me here isn't going to make any difference."

"Anna!" He turned toward her and gritted his teeth. He sighed. "Please."

Anna huffed, anger twisting her heart into knots. "Fine. If that's what you want." She backed away, and he just watched. Didn't say anything. It only made her angrier. Maybe Doctor McKay was right.

#

"Don't worry about it. Tomorrow, she'll be fine. Like nothing ever happened." Radek paused and stared at the screen. Like he would forget about this tomorrow. What were the odds Anna would? "You are such an idiot."

Of course, Anna would not be fine tomorrow. She was right, anyway. Radek usually knew exactly what he was doing. And, in this case when Rodney had the unfortunate circumstance of a security officer in his brain, he knew what he was doing far better than Rodney did.

He did know exactly what he was doing! So why would he let Colonel Sheppard talk him into something he knew was a bad idea?

"You are. You really are," he said to himself. "You are an idiot of the highest degree."

"Zelenka?"

"Yes?" Radek turned around in his chair.

Collins stared at him.

So he'd been talking out loud. He just hoped it was all in Czech. "How are the simulations going?" Radek asked, leaning back in his chair to see Collins' laptop.

"Better since we got to clean up that mess you had before…" Collins answered.

"Better." Radek chuckled. "Define 'better.'"

"It's unlikely to explode in our faces." Collins laughed. "Which is better than the first test you and Doctor McKay ran. Schreiber told me all about it. I can't believe Doctor McKay made that many mistakes."

"Don't be too hard on him." Radek sighed. Or maybe they should be. This was probably going to be the one time in their lives when Rodney was obviously wrong. Granted, there was the two-consciousnesses-in-one-brain thing. A security officer talking over every higher brain function, probably because she didn't have any.

That wasn't fair to Cadman, either. Cadman was supposed to be some kind of explosives expert. Even Radek admired her technical expertise in that area.

"Rodney's not infallible," Radek finished.

Collins chuckled. It was something of a running joke between them, but Radek usually only took part when Rodney was out of earshot. Rodney would be the first to object, the last to let slide a joke which, true or not, was even the slightest bit damaging to his delicate ego.

"But I heard that transformers weren't the only things blowing up in here," Collins continued.

Radek looked over the top of his laptop screen. "You heard about that, too?" he wondered. Atlantis was like a small town: sometimes it seemed news traveled faster than the speed of sound around here. There were probably some 'gate technicians he didn't even know who only knew him as Doctor Fumbles McStupid now, thanks to Rodney. He'd take "the Czech one" over that any day.

"Heard about it?" Collins chuckled. "I think the Genii heard about it."

That didn't make him feel any better. "From whom?"

"I was working with Anna on her homework." Collins looked a bit sheepish. "She was going to ask you to help translate it, but I guess she changed her mind."

"Great," Radek mumbled. "I'm sure there's nothing else I can do wrong today… What time is it?"

"Late," Collins said.

"We missed dinner, late; or it's almost breakfast, late?" Radek asked.

"Somewhere in between?" Collins said, looking for a clock somewhere. The lack of immediately available clocks explained a lot of late nights. "It's almost one."

Radek sighed and leaned back in his chair again. That explained a lot. It explained why his eyelids were heavy, his stomach was growling, and his temper was becoming shorter by the minute. There were two options as far as Radek saw it. "We can go sleep for a few hours or brew a few cups of coffee."

Collins smiled, but he rather looked like he was in pain.

"I don't like those options, either…" Radek sighed. He picked up a transformer bit and turned it in his fingers. "Hard to imagine something this… ugly could convert raw power like that into something so… ordered."

"It doesn't fit with my personal definition of Wraith, either," Collins admitted.

It seemed so very un-Wraith that it wasn't just unlikely. It seemed downright impossible. It had been their experience that most of their systems interfaced with Wraith technology in a way that was at least passable.

This was something else entirely. This was like Ancient tech. They'd worked for a long time in Antarctica to make things like their tablets work as seamlessly as they did. They basically built entirely new platforms and operating systems made precisely to work with Ancient systems. Radek and the others worked long hours, in the light, the dark, and bitter cold to build, test, and perfect the systems that saved their lives when they first arrived.

They didn't have that kind of time for this.

"I don't think this is going to work," he said finally.

"The transformer?" Collins asked, looking at their cobbled version of a Wraith transformer. It was pretty good at transforming energy into fire, but that was about it.

"Probably." He didn't know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant their brains. They weren't working, either. "This is too crude. We need something more… structured." Radek looked at Collins. His face was completely blank. "We need some sleep."

"That, I can agree to."

"We will reconvene at five," Radek said.

"I owe you a drink. Or three."

Radek looked around. Rodney wasn't here, or else he was insulting them from afar. "For?"

"I wasn't there, but calling someone Fumbles McStupid in front of everyone on Atlantis a new low. Even for Rodney."

"Oh." Radek sighed. "We'll drink to Rodney's health after we fix this problem."

That apparently sounded good to Collins because he was already gone. And before Radek could ask him how Anna's studying went, too. Before he could ask just what, exactly, Anna had told him. At least the other members of the science team refrained from calling him Doctor Fumbles McStupid, in public, anyway.

But maybe Rodney was right.

Don't be an idiot. Rodney wasn't right. He wasn't infallible. Neither of them were.

Just because Radek often gave more evidence of his fallibility didn't mean anything…

He stopped by the empty mess hall for a sandwich and brought it back to his room. He stood outside his door, looking at Anna's for a long time. She was probably asleep. Shouldn't wake her.

Didn't know what he would say if he did…

He went into his own room and looked at the sparkling lights of Atlantis while he ate. He had four hours to sleep. Four long, blessed hours, free of Rodney and any sound other than the breeze drifting past his open window.


Next time: We all belong somewhere... even people like me.