Chapter 2: Examination

"I know it looks bad, but he'll be fine." The resident doctor with curly white-blond hair wasn't quite able to allay their fears the way Jack had hoped. Of course, it looked bad! Daniel was unconscious, barely breathing last he checked. Concern for Daniel was one thing, Jack was at least used to that. But concern for whatever facility they had stepped into was new, as the lights swept on and off at unpredictable intervals. "Now, if you'll just sit down…"

"I'm not sitting down, damn it!" Jack snarled, side-stepping her wild scanning devices. "You already waved one of these little coin-rolls in my face. What else do you want?" When he passed a table scattered with medical devices, he picked up a small cylinder with a flashing red light at the top and shook it, staring at it. It was apparently not as interesting as whatever Sam was staring at in the far wall, so he tossed it back onto the table. Some kind of massive television-screen, Jack decided, that didn't show the latest game.

"Sir," Sam said, pointing at the display of hideous orange and blue on black. "This is a depiction of human DNA."

"Fascinating," Jack rasped, coming up on his toes before slamming back down to his heels. He reached for his P-90, but remembered that it had been taken away. His frustration renewed, he turned back to the good doctor, who was now giving Teal'c a hard time about taking a seat.

"I feel well," Teal'c assured her in his monotone. "An examination is not necessary."

The doctor grunted in exasperation. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do with you three! If everyone wasn't so busy with the malfunctions, you would probably be taken care of by now." She idly checked on Daniel for a moment, scanning him with her little scan-thingy and staring at the read-out-whatsit in her hand. When it told her nothing interesting, she paused, and then collected herself with a sigh. "I don't know that we've been properly introduced. I am Doctor Katherine Pulaski, the Chief Medical Officer on the Enterprise. You can call me… Katherine," she decided after a moment.

Sam smiled her best smile, that almost signature grin that she adopted when she was meeting someone new. "I'm Major Samantha Carter, but everyone calls me Sam," she answered, offering her hand. Katherine seemed pleased that at least one of them was cordial. "I'm sorry about our less-than-friendly attitudes. Today's been a… strange day," she explained.

Katherine laughed somewhat lightheartedly and went back to Daniel's side with different scan-thingy. Jack watched with mild interest, if only to make sure it didn't do anything harmfully invasive. "It sounds like it's been one of those for all of us!" she said.

"Well…" Sam said carefully with a small smile, "I'll bet ours was stranger."

"No doubt," Teal'c said without warning, after apparently considering it for a while, "we are in some sort of alternate universe, Major Carter."

"Alternate universe?" Katherine breathed. "That does sound like a strange day. You came up from the planet? I haven't been briefed on—well, anything. I can't imagine anyone has. The communications have been up and down all day. As you can probably tell." Katherine growled as the lights went off and on again. "I can't wait to hear what's been going on since the Yamato exploded."

"The… Yamato?" Teal'c repeated.

"I can't wait to hear what's happened, either," Jack interrupted, striding to the middle of the room between Katherine and Sam. "Your captain has all but promised to blow up our only way home."

"Sir," Sam sighed. "If this is alternate universe, then there will be other Stargates like there are in our universe. Maybe even one on Earth."

"Maybe," Jack reminded. "In case you didn't notice, the Stargate on the planet didn't exactly need a Stargate here for it to work!" Sam pondered that quietly, which, Jack guessed, was a bad sign. If Sam didn't know what was going on, then no one did. In fact, the only person that seemed to have given any lucid thought to the situation was Teal'c. But, then, maybe Sam and Jack were preoccupied with their concern for Daniel?

Yeah. Jack was going to go with that. Give Sam a few minutes to arrange her thoughts.

"Stargate," Katherine repeated. "What is a Stargate?"

Sam started to explain, but Jack held a hand up in her face. She needed to explain nothing. She needed to figure out everything. "Ah-ah! Sam." Jack turned to Katherine. "It's a big ring-thing that makes a wormhole that allows people like me, Sam, Teal'c, and Daniel over there to travel between planets."

Sam shrugged and muttered, "Basically, yeah."

"Major Carter," Teal'c said. "There is no way to know if there would be a Stargate on Earth as there is in our universe. I also see no evidence of Goa'uld presence either now or in their past. This universe is entirely different from our own in every way."

"They don't have the ring-thing," Jack objected, drawing a large circle in the air with his finger.

"No, but they have something similar enough that when we—somehow—went through the wormhole on our side, it dumped us out here," Sam agreed. That's my Sam, Jack thought, smiling a little. Maybe she could get them out of this. Or not... "On the other hand, judging from the number of options that cycled through their gate, the computer didn't have the ability to compensate for stellar drift over a couple hundred of thousands of years. But who am I kidding? We can't even think about getting back until we figure out why this happened in the first place. Reverse it."

"We can't think about getting back without a 'Gate, either," Jack corrected, folding his arms over his chest. "They both seem pretty important to me."

"Could this not have something to do with the Quantum Mirror we discovered on P3R-223?" Teal'c asked. Thank you, Teal'c! Was he seriously the only one thinking today?

"I don't think so; this is nothing like any alternate reality we've ever seen," Sam sighed.

Katherine, meanwhile, had been watching the conversation with great fascination crossed with horror, which was about half of what Jack was feeling. He could only imagine himself in a couple years, walking around in colorful pajamas like these clowns. But where, exactly, were they walking around?

"The Enterprise," Jack said, turning to Katherine. "What, exactly, is the Enterprise?"

"It's a ship," Katherine answered, and then turned to the display on the wall that Sam had been studying. "Computer, please show us a picture of the Enterprise."

"Interior schematic or exterior?" the computer returned in a fabricated female voice.

"Exterior," Katherine answered.

The display of human DNA was swapped out for the weirdest-looking ship Jack had ever seen. It was… hard to explain. There was some sort of saucer or upside-down bowl on some kind of… thing. "How is that a ship?" Jack asked.

"Sir, I think that's a spaceship," Sam said.

Jack squinted at it and Teal'c informed everyone, "It does not match the configuration of any Goa'uld ship that I know."

"Goa'uld," Katherine repeated. "You've said that before. What are Goa'uld?"

"Parasites," Sam explained.

"Snakes," Jack answered.

"False gods," Teal'c said.

Katherine frowned at all of them, and gave Teal'c a funny look when he started unbuttoning his shirt. Jack didn't realize what he was doing and, by the time he did, it was too late. Junior had poked his ugly head from the cavity in Teal'c stomach and screeched. "This is a Goa'uld."

"Teal'c!" Jack warned, but Katherine had already pretty much screamed in abject horror. Or perhaps that was a gasp of total fascination. All the doctors that Jack knew had a weird way of looking at gross and/or boring things. Jack would have screamed when he first saw one if he hadn't been so angry at life. And here he was again, a Goa'uld in his face, and all he wanted to do was throw a nuclear bomb at it. "Teal'c, put Junior back!"

"What is that?" Katherine asked, retrieving her devices and thrusting them in Teal'c's direction. "Is it really a parasite?"

"Well, sort of," Sam said with that expression she got when she was about to go into painful detail about something. Jack tried to think of something to interrupt her, but couldn't think of anything. "It also…"

"Jack…" Ah. Perfect distraction.

"Daniel." Jack went over to him and realized that the slate he was lying on probably wasn't all that comfortable. It didn't really matter when he was unconscious. Daniel blinked groggily, as though he'd only just woken up from a long sleep, and not zapped by an angry computer program. "You have got to stop almost getting killed."

"I'll keep that in mind," he chuckled softly and put one hand on his forehead, wincing in pain. "God, my head. What happened?"

"The Stargate kind of zapped you," Jack answered.

"But, I'm happy to report that you will be just fine with a little rest," Katherine put in. "My name is Doctor Katherine Pulaski."

"Daniel," Daniel offered. "Doctor Daniel Jackson." He grimaced painfully again, squeezing his eyes shut. That put Katherine Pulaski in action.

She seized a nearby instrument, tapped into the miniature display, and went straight for Daniel's neck with it. Jack had no idea what it was, but generally the saying was that when people went for the neck, it wasn't a good thing. He struck his hand out and seized hers before she could touch Daniel with it. He caught Doctor Pulaski with a serious glare just as she looked at him in slight confusion.

"I assure you, it's perfectly safe," she said with a small smile, touching the thing to her own neck. There was the sound of a small hydraulic releasing, but nothing seemed to have happened to her. "It's just a mild pain-killer. For his head," she added, then looking at Daniel. "You took a bit of a nasty bump."

Daniel chuckled, obviously in pain. "You're not kidding."

The lights went down and back up again as Doctor Pulaski administered the pain-killer. Then a voice from nowhere spoke everywhere. "Attention, all hands." It was the voice of the bearded man they'd seen on the bridge. "We've found a way to purge the system; we're out of the woods."

Katherine flashed a celebratory smile at them while the voice went one to say, "Doctor Pulaski, how are our guests?"

Katherine tapped a decoration on her chest, what Jack had assumed was a medal of some sort, and said, "As far as I can tell by inspection, they're all fine."

"The one that was injured?" he prodded.

"He is going to be fine, too," she said, patting Daniel on the shoulder.

"Good. As soon as he can be up, Captain Picard would like to see them."

"Captain Picard?" Jack mouthed to Sam. She shrugged.

"I will have them sent up to his ready room at the first opportunity."

"Thank you, Doctor. Riker out."

Doctor Pulaski hit the medal on her shoulder again and looked at them. "That would be a meeting I'd love to see. I've heard lots of stories in my day, some really crazy. But yours, I think, takes the cake." She raised her eyebrows at them with a smile, going about her work in her little domain.