Thank you for the reviews! I know this is a bit different from my usual stories, but it IS going somewhere; bear with me.
Chapter Two: Theories
As Elizabeth had feared, Caldwell came back, six weeks later, with new orders from Earth. They were to re-establish contact with the Doranda system and continue the Arcturus experiment.
"I do not like the results we are seeing here, Rodney," Zelenka pointed out as they pored over their figures, late at night.
"It could work," McKay snapped. But privately, he had to agree. During the past six weeks, in between missions, they'd done a lot of checking and double-checking of the figures he'd initially come up with, and his ardor for the project had cooled considerably. At first he'd laughed off Radek's theory about unpredictable particles, but it was starting to look more and more likely. Not that he could tell Radek that he'd been right all along; it would make the man completely insufferable.
"Rodney." Radek caught at his sleeve, gripping his arm until McKay raised tired eyes to his friend's face. "Last time, Collins died. We now know why he died, what killed him. We cannot guarantee the same will not happen to us. In fact, equations indicate it will happen to us, sooner or later."
"So we find a way to stabilize it." McKay detached Radek's hand from his arm with a hard shake; he hated being touched. "We can't walk away from something this big. In fact, we're basically being ordered not to." He heaved a sigh and stared at his watch. "Meanwhile, in five hours I'm going through the gate to yet another godforsaken planet that doesn't have a ZPM, so this will just have to wait until I get back."
Zelenka curled his hands around his mug of cold coffee, and looked away from the exhaustion in McKay's face. "How much thought have you given to quitting Sheppard's team?"
McKay's head snapped up. "None at all," he said, unconvincingly.
"Rodney, a blind man can see you do not like going offworld. You go with them because you want to be first, because you must be first to push every button. You know it is true. But you are needed here more than you are needed there."
McKay's eyes were fixed on a point somewhere on the wall, past Zelenka's shoulder. "It wasn't always that way," he said in a voice so soft he could barely be heard.
Zelenka wondered, with a twinge of pain, to what extent his friend was rewriting the past to suit his own ego. As far as he could tell, Rodney had never liked going offworld, and Zelenka couldn't blame him; his own single trip through the gate, so far, had been terrifying and overwhelming. It was certainly true that in the past, the head scientist had seemed to get a lot more out of it than he did these days. But, from Zelenka's point of view, McKay's natural habitat had always been the labs; the gate trips had always been just interludes during which the rest of them had to muddle through without the chief scientist -- and Zelenka lived in terror that something would happen to McKay, and the crushing responsibility for Atlantis would come down on his own shoulders. The idea of having McKay on Atlantis full-time was a huge weight off his mind.
Of course, telling him that would be the surest way to guarantee that the contrary scientist would hardly be seen on Atlantis again. Zelenka had no desire to push him either way, but he could definitely see which way the wind was blowing. There was a persistent rumor around the labs that Sheppard had asked to have Rodney taken off his team and Elizabeth had refused. Zelenka wasn't sure how much credence to put in it, but he could tell that it was really just a matter of time.
"So ... where are you going, tomorrow?"
"Some backwater forest planet with nothing whatsoever of interest." McKay pushed himself away from the lab counter with a sigh. "It'll be fun. The awkward silences in the puddlejumpers are my favorite parts. The last time we went through the gate, Sheppard threatened to duct-tape my mouth shut if I didn't stop talking. Claimed I'd talked nonstop during an entire three-hour jumper flight. As if!"
"As if," Zelenka agreed, his mouth quirking.
"I just like to fill the gaps in the conversation. And lately, it's been nothing but gaps."
"You don't have to like the people you work with, Rodney." He was thinking of certain people around the labs. Not Rodney; he actually did like Rodney, even the cooler and more distant Rodney who had slowly emerged in the wake of Collins' death. But there were certain other scientists who could take a one-way trip to Earth on the next flight of the Daedalus without causing him to weep.
"I'm well aware of that." McKay's shoulders slumped, just a little. "Suppose I should sleep, or there won't be enough caffeine in the world to deal with Sheppard tomorrow."
"Well, at least there's plenty of coffee, with the new shipment from the Daedalus," Zelenka offered.
McKay heaved another sigh. "Yeah, and as if I don't have enough to worry about, I'll get to spend the entire time offworld trying to figure out a way to tell Caldwell that we need more time before we start up the Arcturus project again."
Zelenka grinned. Even as tired as Rodney looked, it was impossible to resist the temptation to twist the knife just a little bit. "So you admit that I am right?"
McKay flinched as if stung by an insect. "You? About what?"
"That it is too dangerous until we solve the problem of radiation."
Rodney tossed his hand in the air with a dismissive snort. "According to my theories, yes."
"Your theories? If we are awarded Nobel for this, my name will be first."
"In your dreams, Radek."
Zelenka watched him slouch out of the lab, and wondered what the hell was really bothering the man. If it was this gate team business, hopefully he'd see the light and quit the team before he made everyone else in the labs miserable.
It hadn't escaped Zelenka's notice that some of the gate teams had a startlingly close bond. SGA-6, for example, the team with Dr. Benham. Or Lorne's team. But there were others who merely tolerated each other, and from what he'd been able to tell, Sheppard's team was one of those.
It was too bad. But then, as abrasive as Rodney was, it was hardly surprising. The man could try the patience of a saint. Zelenka liked him -- he was a big enough man to admit it to himself, though he'd rather be slowly baked over hot coals than admit it to Rodney -- but he couldn't blame Sheppard's team if they barely tolerated him. There were plenty of people in the labs who felt that way about him, too.
Zelenka sighed and rubbed his gritty eyes. He'd done enough calculations for one night. Doranda would still be there in the morning.
He didn't see Rodney all the next day, until finally spotting him across the cafeteria that evening. Crossing with his tray, he saw that the other scientist looked exhausted; there were even -- Radek raised an eyebrow -- sticks in his hair? He was cramming food into his mouth with single-minded intensity.
"Rodney," Zelenka greeted him.
"Mph," McKay managed, and cleared his throat with a swig of coffee.
"How is the ZPM search coming?"
McKay snorted. "We're not actually searching for ZPMs at the moment, more's the pity. We're back to pick up Carson; well, Sheppard is -- there's hardly any point in me going back with them. And the food on that planet is absolute swill."
Zelenka slid his tray onto the table. "You are back for Dr. Beckett? Someone is hurt?"
"No ... well, not yet ... suffice it to say that we found this kid Wraith on the planet and now Sheppard's got some kind of hare-brained idea about a drug that can stop the Wraith from feeding on humans--" McKay paused to take a huge bite of his sandwich, oblivious to Zelenka's open-mouthed stare of shock. "Oh," he said, through the mouthful, "and their day-night schedule happens to be completely reversed from ours, so right now I've got the worst case of jet-lag ever. Or would it be gatelag? And I think I've got blisters from tramping around in the woods. Did I mention the food is lousy?"
"A child Wraith? Did you say a way to stop --"
"Forget the Wraith; that's not important. Let Colonel Flyboy and the goon patrol deal with it." McKay pushed back his chair and stood up with the half-sandwich in his hand. "I think I've solved our unpredictable-particles problem on the Arcturus project. It came to me while we were traipsing around in the woods -- not like there's anything else to think about, since Ronon and Teyla are about as good at making conversation as a couple of tree stumps, and Sheppard's turned into a G.I. Joe action figure ..." Still talking, apparently not noticing that his audience was sitting back at the table gaping at him, McKay took off across the cafeteria.
"You have -- Rodney, wait!" Hastily grabbing a roll from his tray, abandoning the rest of it, Zelenka pursued his boss across the cafeteria. "You have a way to stop the radiation?"
McKay spun around, all bright, smug animation. As insufferable as he could be in that mode, Zelenka couldn't help being glad to see that look on his face again -- it was the first time that Rodney had really been that enthusiastic about anything in months.
"We don't stop it. We just get rid of it."
Zelenka shook his head. "We have been through that, Rodney; we cannot reliably shield against it, and even if we could shunt it somewhere else, there is nowhere to send it where it would not threaten us."
McKay snapped his fingers. "Oh, yes, there is."
"Where, then?"
"We build a bridge to another universe."
Sometimes he had no idea where Rodney's leaps of logic took him. "Excuse me, a what?" Zelenka followed him out into the corridor.
"A bridge. It came to me on the planet, like I said." McKay stuffed the rest of his sandwich into his mouth so that he could gesture with both hands. His next few words were hopelessly garbled, until he swallowed. "-- is a spacegate planet, and I've been tossing around this idea -- well, all right, it's Carter's idea if you get technical about it, but that's neither here nor there -- where was I?"
"Carter's idea," Zelenka prompted him.
"Yes, right -- the idea is to build an intergalactic gate bridge, using spacegates -- I doubt if Earth is going to be willing to devote any kind of serious resources to it in the near future, so it's really just academic at this point, but anyway, going through the spacegate got me thinking about the interstellar bridge idea, and then suddenly it hit me." He snapped his fingers. "We channel the particles into some other space-time, so they don't affect ours! Just like a-- a faucet! Only for lethal doses of radiation rather than water ... actually it's probably a bad example ..."
Zelenka stared at him. "Is that even possible?"
"Good question, but it's more than we had before. I need to set up some computer models and see how we might be able to get it to work."
Following him towards the labs, Zelenka's brain whirled around the idea. It was crazy. It couldn't possibly work. The trouble was, he couldn't come up with a good idea why it wouldn't work, aside from the sheer insanity of it. "The particles, wouldn't they cause a rather serious problem in other spacetime reality?"
"Only if it's inhabited, and the odds of that are about a billion to one."
"Assuming infinity realities, I do not like those odds."
"Feel free to take your cloud of gloom elsewhere then, Radek. This has real potential. If we can --" He paused, and raised a hand to reach for his radio. "Yeah, McKay."
Zelenka wasn't wearing a radio at the moment, so he got to hear half of a brief conversation. Rodney sounded tired and annoyed, before he finished with a short, "Yeah," and disconnected with a slap of his hand.
"You are needed elsewhere?"
"No ... no, I'm not." Regret mingled with the annoyance on McKay's expressive face; Zelenka wondered if Rodney had the slightest idea how easy he was to read. "Sheppard's team is leaving to drag Carson back to the Planet of the Wraith. Just wanted to know if I was staying behind."
"And you are?"
McKay's spine stiffened. "Of course I am. There's nothing for a physicist to do in that miserable forest, and I have far more important work here."
He turned his back and slapped open the door to the labs -- angrily, it seemed to Zelenka, following him inside.
------
Radek, the wimp, slunk off to his quarters around midnight, but McKay was far too wired to sleep. The mission to Ellia's planet was the furthest thing from his mind as he scribbled equations and wrote computer code as fast as his fingers could fly.
Sometime towards morning, he fell asleep for a couple of hours at his computer, waking up with gritty eyes and a caffeine headache as the early shift of lab techs began to file into the room. They gave him a wide berth. Someone had the forethought to start a fresh pot of coffee, though, and McKay swooped down upon it, then went back to look over the results of the rough simulations he'd started running before he fell asleep. There were still a number of problems to resolve, but everything looked very hopeful.
This could actually work.
He couldn't wait to present his findings to Elizabeth and Caldwell. Elizabeth had been giving him the cold shoulder ever since he'd gone above her head -- oh, sure, she'd been polite in the meetings and all, but cool formality had replaced the friendliness they'd once had. Maybe this would make her wake up to reality. It was time for the woman to stop being petty and face up to the fact that she'd almost let the find of the century -- no, the millennium, slip through her fingers.
This ... this was why he shouldn't be on the field teams. He was wasted there. Someone else could do the legwork; he should be here, in the labs, working on important -- hell, civilization-shaping breakthroughs like this one. Who had once said that a man can't serve two masters? That was exactly what he'd been trying to do, and it was time to quit it. He hadn't enjoyed going out with Sheppard's team in months, and he was far more useful here. Time to stop fooling around.
He typed out a quick email to Elizabeth, requesting that he be reassigned to Atlantis full-time, and hit Send before he could have second thoughts.
Now then. As much as he hated to stop working, he was shaky from lack of food and sleep, with his internal clock still screwed up from that damned planet yesterday. A shower and breakfast sounded like a good idea, and then he'd round up Radek and they could start preparing a report to give to Elizabeth and Caldwell. There was no particular hurry; from what he'd heard, the Daedalus would be in orbit for another few days, at least.
In the middle of breakfast, he glanced up to see Sheppard, Teyla and Ronon file into the cafeteria. They headed for the military side, of course. Since the lines between military and civilian had started to crystallize, McKay hadn't eaten with his team very often. No point to it, really.
At least they were back. He wondered if they'd found out anything useful. Teyla and Ronon both looked dragged-down and tired, but Sheppard seemed fresh and bouncy as ever. Actually ... more so than usual. He looked cheerful. McKay hadn't seen that look on his face in awhile.
He tried not to tune in on their voices, but still they drifted to him, through the murmur of background noise. Sheppard's disturbingly perky voice, in particular.
"Wanna go for a run after breakfast, Ronon?"
McKay's mouth twisted a little bit. Sheppard and Ronon had certainly bonded lately, in a very manly, grunting-and-shooting-stuff kind of way. It was yet another thing to dislike about the big oaf.
"Thinkin' about catching a little sleep, actually," Ronon rumbled.
"I'm sure we are all tired," Teyla said diplomatically. "It has been a very long and ... difficult day."
"I'm not tired."
"Yeah," Ronon said. "We noticed."
McKay saw Teyla glance his way, and hastily looked down at his food. Somehow the scrambled eggs -- real eggs! from the Daedalus! -- had lost some of their appeal. Sooner or later, he was going to have to tell them that he'd quit the team. Or maybe they would hear it from Elizabeth first. Selfishly, he hoped so. That way, he wouldn't have to see their reactions. The next time he ran into them, by accident, somewhere around Atlantis, it would all be over. They could just all say hello and goodbye, and go their separate ways. Well, Ronon would probably grunt, but it amounted to the same thing.
His mind's eye, refusing to cooperate with his efforts at denial, summoned up a mental parade of their faces as Elizabeth told them the news. Teyla looked sad, in a fetching and wistful kind of way. Ronon just looked relieved; he'd never liked McKay any more than McKay liked him. And Sheppard ...
He realized that he had no idea how Sheppard would react. Regretful? Relieved? Angry? Yeah ... anger was probably a given.
Maybe he'd just stay out of Sheppard's way for a while.
He picked up his tray and slunk out of the cafeteria, rudely rebuffing a couple of geologists who made the mistake of saying good morning to him.
Behind him, he heard Ronon say something, too low to make out the words. Sheppard and Teyla both laughed. Light and happy, the way they used to.
It didn't hurt. He was over it.
------
That evening, Elizabeth finally managed to locate him. Up to that point, he'd been doing a fairly good job of avoiding everyone. He was off in one of the less-frequented labs, troubleshooting one of the stickier areas of the bridge theory -- namely, what sort of physical equipment it was going to take in order to accomplish it. He'd turned off his radio, but that wasn't entirely unusual; he often did that when he was in single-minded pursuit of a problem and needed to concentrate.
"Rodney? Do you have a moment?"
At least it wasn't "Dr. McKay." Not yet. He looked up to see her standing in the doorway, hands clasped in front of her, back stiff.
"Okay, who ratted me out?"
A slight smile curved her lips. "Ah, so you are avoiding me, then? And a lady never reveals her sources."
Zelenka. Had to be, the little Czech stool pigeon. "Well, since you're here, I take it that you, uh -- I mean, did you --"
"Get your email? Yes, Rodney, I did. Actually, that's what I wanted to talk about."
He gestured at the lab stool across from him. Elizabeth shook her head. "No, I have a meeting with John and Carson in a few minutes. I don't intend to debate you on this, because I really have felt this coming for a long time. I just wanted to ask if you're sure, Rodney."
"I am." He hadn't really been sure until he said it, but it felt right. His chest still hurt with a tight, constricting pain, but some of the iron bands eased, just a little bit.
Elizabeth nodded, briefly. "I don't know if I should tell you this, but after Doranda, John asked to have you removed from the team."
It shouldn't hurt. It really shouldn't. "Did he, now."
"He did. I told him that I wouldn't do it behind your back."
"Well ... thanks." For extending me a little bit of common courtesy, when Sheppard wouldn't.
"And I think the same applies here," she continued. "I'll accept your resignation, Rodney, but only after you talk to John about this. Which I'm guessing you haven't done."
Damn. Hoisted by his own petard. "Do you really think that's necessary?" He was whining, and he knew it; he hated hearing that tone in his own voice. "If he's asked to have me taken off already, it's not like he's going to say no."
"This is about openness, Rodney, and communication within the team -- and the city. I can't have my head scientist and my leading military officer at each other's throats. If you end this badly, you may not be able to work together, and Atlantis has more than enough problems without that."
Annoyingly, he knew she was right; that didn't mean he couldn't argue about it, though. "Come on, Elizabeth, we're adults. We can handle it."
She raised an eyebrow. "Yes, because sneaking around behind your team leader's back, and then hiding from me because you knew I'd call you on it, smacks of responsible, adult behavior, Rodney."
"Oh, come on now, that's unfair --"
"Is it?" She flinched, and reached for her radio. "Yes, I'll be right there." Turning to Rodney, she said, "I have to go; this is rather important. If you like, you can come. John will be there; the meeting is about him, actually. You two could talk afterwards."
About Sheppard? Now, why didn't he like the sound of that. On the other hand, whatever they were talking about, it was evident that he hadn't been originally invited, and damned if he was going to drop in like a poor relation. He'd just wheedle the details out of Carson later. "No. I need to finish this up."
Elizabeth hesitated, as if she wanted to say something else. Then she just nodded, and left.
----
TBC