-1CHAPTER THREE
STARGATE COMMAND, JULY 18, 1998, 1300 HOURS
In the Briefing Room on Level 27 of the Stargate Command Center beneath Cheyenne Mountain, General George Hammond had called a meeting of his senior officers and scientists to discuss the arrival of the strangers. He had heard the story told by Quinn Mallory of the circumstances of their arrival here, and over the past twenty-four hours, General Hammond had issued orders to various of his subordinates to confirm it. Now he was about to hear their reports.
Seated around the table were Colonel O'Neill, Captain Carter, and Dr. Jackson, as well as Dr. Bill Lee, a short, balding man who was the senior scientist attached to Stargate Command, and Jay Felger, a nervous, fidgety man with brown hair and large eyes who was, after Samantha Carter, the chief physicist attached to the SGC. Hammond looked at O'Neill first.
"Colonel," Hammond said, "I assume you have the report of the team sent to Mr. Mallory's home in San Francisco."
"Yes, General," O'Neill said, nodding. "It turns out that Mrs. Mallory is one of those mothers who never throws any of her children's stuff away. Mr. Mallory's bedroom is exactly like he left it, and so is his laboratory in the basement of their home." He handed Hammond a packet of photos. "As you can see, the equipment found there corresponds exactly to what Mr. Mallory said we should find."
Hammond opened the packet, took out the photos, and reviewed them. It did indeed appear that Mallory had not been lying to them, at least on this score.
O'Neill smiled as he continued. "Oh, and the gate creaks."
"Come again?," Hammond said.
"Mr. Mallory was insistent that we check to see if the gate in the white picket fence leading into his front yard creaks when you open it," O'Neill said. "He says that gate has been creaking since he was a little boy, and he's been able to determine that several of the worlds he's passed through were not his own, because their versions of that gate did not creak."
"Hmmm," General Hammond said. "That's a pretty flimsy piece of evidence. What if Mrs. Mallory had it fixed after he disappeared?"
O'Neill smiled again. "Mr. Mallory is sure that HIS mother would never do that."
Shaking his head and setting the photos aside, General Hammond looked at Captain Carter.
"Captain," he asked, "have you and the other scientists come up with a theory as to why Mr. Mallory and his companions were transported here, rather than to somewhere in San Francisco, as seems to have been the case up to now?"
Samantha Carter nodded. "I've discussed it at length with Dr. Lee and Dr. Felger, and we have a hypothesis," she said. "We think it occurred because their device…the timer…was activated at the exact moment that our Stargate locked in the seventh symbol. The Stargate, rather than opening a wormhole to P7J-989, somehow attracted here the wormhole opened by Mallory's device."
"How is that possible?," Hammond asked.
Carter shrugged. "We don't know, Sir. There is still so much about the Stargate that we don't know. And of course, Mallory's device is a complete mystery."
"As of now that's only a hypothesis, mind you," Dr. Lee put in. "Until we can test it, we won't know for sure."
"And exactly how we would test it, we're not sure either," Felger added.
Hammond frowned. He didn't like the uncertainty of all this. Looking again at Captain Carter, he asked, "Is there a possibility of a similar malfunction sending one of our teams into an alternate universe, where they can't be recovered?"
Carter frowned in return. "I don't know, but I would be lying if I said it weren't a possibility." Lee and Felger nodded.
Turning to Dr. Lee, Hammond said, "Doctor, you've examined the device confiscated from Mr. Mallory. What is your opinion of it?"
"Amazingly sophisticated," Dr. Lee said. "And the wonder of it is that it is constructed completely with components manufactured here on Earth. Stuff you can pick up at Radio Shack, mostly, with some modifications, of course."
"Is this something we can adapt to our own program?," Hammond asked.
"Very possibly," Lee replied.
"One major flaw of the device is the whole timer thing," Felger added. "It may be possible to redesign it so it will maintain a fix on our Earth at all times, which can be activated at will by the user of the device, without waiting for a timer to run down. Of course that will take some effort, but with Mr. Mallory's assistance, we could probably do it."
"Sir, Professor Arturo is also a brilliant Physicist," Captain Carter said. "He was Regent's Professor of Cosmology and Ontology at the University of California at Berkeley and has written a number of influential papers on quantum physics. If he could be persuaded to join our program, I think he'd be a definite asset."
"I'll take that under consideration, Captain," General Hammond replied. Turning to Daniel Jackson, he said, "You and Captain Carter have been speaking to them on both a formal and informal basis. Have you found any evidence thus far that they are not of this world?"
"No, General," Dr. Jackson said. "We've been going over random trivia about current events, history, culture, just about anything we can think of to ask. Everything from our world seems to match the situation in the world they came from. Of course, who really knows? The difference between our world and Mr. Mallory's home world, if they are not in fact one and the same, could be something so completely trivial that we'd never know about it…like, for example, some person in a small town in South Africa deciding to paint their bedroom walls blue instead of green. It could be that insignificant."
"So what you're telling me is, we will never be able to determine, with absolute certainty, if Mr. Mallory and his companions are native to our world," General Hammond said, shaking his head in dismay. He sighed deeply. "Well, I guess the question then becomes, is our world similar enough to his home world that he and his companions will want to settle down here?"
"You'll have to ask Quinn and his companions that question, General," Jackson replied. "Only they can answer it."
"What if they decide they'd rather not stay? You're not going to let them leave, are you?," Colonel O'Neill asked.
"I'm not sure that I can, in good conscience, hold them here against their wills," Hammond replied.
"General," O'Neill said forcefully, "letting them go and take that technology with them would be a big mistake. The advantages it could give us…"
"I'm well aware of the advantages it would give us," Hammond replied. "I will consider that factor when I make my final decision, Colonel."
"Yes, Sir," Colonel O'Neill said. "Thank you, Sir." O'Neill sat back in his chair again, satisfied. He trusted Hammond to make the right decision.
"Now," Hammond said, "I know you've all got work to do." He stood up. "Dismissed."