Ch. 48 — Mooning the President

Flitwick crouched and examined the ground, then cast a spell of some sort. He stood and cast a narrow-eyed look around. "Perhaps," he said slowly. "But if this . . . Room . . . is as good as you say, it could be using magic to fool me."

Harry nodded. "Yeah, that's what we thought, at first, about the ship."

Flitwick narrowed his eyes slightly at that. "Ship?" he said suspiciously.

"You'll see, soon enough," Harry said. He pulled out his wand and thought a moment. "Accio worm." Nothing happened for a moment, then a worm came flying through the air. Harry caught and handed it to Flitwick. "I doubt there are any earthworms in the Room."

"Unless the Room can summon things from Hogwarts Green houses," Flitwick said with a raised eyebrow.

Harry sighed and banished the worm back to where it had been. He thought a moment longer.

"Okay," Harry said "if you really want proof, why don't you apparate to Hogsmeade and Hermione and I will meet you at the Gates? After all, it's impossible to apparate in Hogwarts. And if Hermione and I walk to the Gates, it's impossible for the Room to simulate us meeting you."

The professor looked around, then apparated to the fence at the rear of the back-garden with a crack! He looked around, then disapparated with another crack to somewhere else. Harry waited patiently.

Flitwick suddenly appeared with a crack. He sighed and walked back to Harry. "Well, unless you've been a projection of the Room this entire time, there's no way it could fake my apparating."

Harry nodded and they went back inside.

Frowning heavily, Flitwick stopped at the cupboard under the stairs. He glanced up at Harry's carefully neutral expression, and then opened the cupboard door to look inside. While the old cot had been removed, his uncle hadn't bothered to paint the insides, so Harry's old scrawl of Harry's Room was still visible when the wizard shoved the coats to one side. So were some of the other drawings he had made on the walls. The wizard pulled on the light-bulb cord. Nothing changed with the audible click. The bulb had burned out at least a year before Harry had received his Hogwarts letter.

The Dursleys were so used to the cupboard being unavailable for things, they hadn't used it enough the last few years to bother with replacing the bulb with one that worked.

They went upstairs in silence. Flitwick had a hard look on his face. That the Headmaster was going to get a drilling on Harry's circumstances, was clear to Harry.

Once they were again in the castle corridor, Flitwick looked up at Harry. "While that was . . . interesting . . .," he said, "I don't think it was what you meant when you said that what you would show me next would astonish me."

Harry nodded. "That was merely to show you the Room can make portals to other places besides inside Hogwarts." He walked up and down the corridor, again. This time a steel door appeared — the same one that had appeared for many months until they had acquired the Vanishing Cabinets.

Not that Flitwick knew that.

"You remember Lee Jordan, right?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Well, in October of ninety-five, with the Pink Toad refusing to teach us any D.A.D.A. spells, we found the Room of Requirement and used it to make a secret room where we could study and practice our spells. It was a classroom she couldn't find simply because she, and her sycophants, didn't know it existed. And it didn't exist when no one was in it. Only those training in the room knew it existed.

"Lee wanted to see if the Room could do a spaceship." At Flitwick's blank expression, Harry explained. "The non-magicals are very interested in stories about space." He waved his hand up to indicate the sky above the castle. "They have many stories, both books and plays, of ships built to fly to other planets, and even other stars."

Flitwick nodded. "Ah, yes, I remember your mother mentioning they had built a ship to go to the moon." He smiled, remembering, "And she did mention several moving pictures about space, she even insisted I see one . . . I think it was called Star Wars?"

Harry nodded. "Lee wanted to see what the Room could do about that fantasy . . . what would it come up with." He looked at the door. "It came up with this." He walked towards the door, which hissed open just before he reached it. Hermione and Flitwick followed him inside the metallic corridor. "It took us weeks to realize that the Room hadn't made a simulation of a Starship. Instead, it had opened a portal to an existing, real Starship!"

Flitwick stumbled, as if he had caught his foot on a slightly higher paving stone. "A real ship? In space? As-in, hundreds of miles above the Earth?" he said, stunned, and looked around at the metal walls.

Harry shook his head. "Make that millions of miles. We discovered it was almost at the orbit of Jupiter.

Flitwick stopped. "You're joking."

Harry shook his head. "It took us until December to move it to Jupiter to take on more fuel. Then, in January, we moved it to Uranus for various reasons. In the summer of ninety-six, we moved it to Earth, over London, six-hundred miles up."

Flitwick gave him a hard look. "Apparition range."

Harry nodded. "Lee, the twins, and several others who had graduated Hogwarts wanted easy access to the ship without having to sneak into the school."

The short wizard slowly nodded. They resumed walking.

"Runes?" Flitwick said, looking at the labelled doors they passed.

"Yes, they are somewhat archaic compared to what Hogwarts teaches, they don't quite have the same meanings that we are taught in Runes class. But they are close enough to understand. It appears that they are the written language of the ship's builders," Hermione explained. "But fascinatingly, they are not being used in any magical way on the entire ship. They are just used for labelling things, and books in their library."

The professor gave her an absent-minded nod.

A moment later, they stepped out onto the Bridge. Flitwick stopped, stunned again. He was looking at the British Isles from a viewpoint he had only ever seen when looking at a globe of the Earth.

He slowly walked over to the "windows" and just stared. He could see the shadow of the sunset creeping across Europe.

He didn't say anything until Luna said, "Magnificent view, isn't it?" He didn't jump but he did turn around to face her. He took a slow look around the bridge.

He blinked on seeing that not only was Luna there, but so were Marietta Edgecombe, Cho Chang, and Angelina Johnson. Each seated in front of podium.

He looked over at Harry, took a deep breath, and let it out. "Why are you showing me this?"

Ten minutes later, pacing back and forth, Flitwick said, "So, to sum up, you have found a world you think the Goblins might like and you want to offer it to them? Just as you found a world for the Merpeople, the Centaurs, and the unicorns?"

"Yes."

Flitwick didn't say anything for a few moments. "Before I could say anything, I would need to see this world of yours. When could we take a look at it?"

Harry looked over at Marietta. "Time to One-oh-seven?"

She smirked. "Sixteen minutes including final approach. It's all plotted and laid in."

He turned to the Professor. "I can get us down to the surface fifteen minutes after that. We can be back before dinner."

After blinking a moment, the professor gave him a big grin and gleefully looked out the windows at London. "Yes, let's!"

After warning the on-board crew that they were about to take a jaunt to One-oh-seven Piscium, and waiting a few minutes as the various crew-members exited or joined the ship, they were on their way. As Flitwick stared out the window at the slowly changing positions of the closest stars, Harry had Angelina give him a run-down on what they knew about both the star and the planet.

While the three of them took a Runabout down to the planet, Harry had the Angelina locate the observation drone the Galileo had previously left to study the planet. It would have accumulated extensive and detailed maps of the surface, with numerous videos of the many animals and plants on the planet, as well as the rest of the star system. Angelina would transfer everything to a tricorder they would give to the professor. It would be limited to that information only — and contacting Harry, Hermione, or Lee, of course.

The first location they visited was a great plain, with a large mixed herd of animals grazing. The ship was, naturally, cloaked, so they didn't spook the creatures.

"Would you like to take one of these back to prove this isn't a fantasy?" Harry said.

A few minutes later, Flitwick had stunned, shrunken, and stasised two different animals.

Their second stop was near a mountain range, where they collected two more animals and a few samples of rocks. Then they visited the seashore and took a sample of the water.

It was as they flew back to the Requirement that Flitwick began to appreciate the size of the ship. On the trip down he had spent his time staring at the planet. "Why is this ship so big?" he asked incredulously.

Harry shrugged.

"From the design specifications, it has a crew capacity of around fifteen-thousand," Hermione said. "About half of that is in support services, such as maintenance and repair — they didn't have magic. The flight bays, the big pods on either side of the main part, house the X-Wing fighters, the Runabouts like this one, and several other small crafts for various purposes. The warehouses for spare parts and such maintenance equipment as the ships need is are included. They also hold quarters and entertainment facilities for most of the smaller ships' crews and their families." She sighed.

"We only have one wing of X-Wing fighters, seventeen, at the moment. It's manned mostly by werewolves, at present. The were's find the practice fights with the ships one way to deal with their wolves' aggressive tendencies."

"Werewolves?" he asked, startled.

"Oh, yes." She paused and looked at Harry. Harry shrugged.

She looked back at Flitwick. "One of the functions built into the ship was the ability to fabricate a duplicate, or build something from the library of stored plans for other ships and bases. It's not a dedicated unit for that, so it's slow at it."

"It took the ship months to build the first base in orbit around Uranus," Harry said.

Hermione huffed. "Then, Sirius decided to play a prank on Remus and took him to the base on the night of his transformation — and nothing happened."

"Nothing?" squeaked the professor.

She shook her head. "He didn't transform at all."

"And he didn't on the following month, either," Harry added.

"Only a few believed him when he started telling the other weres. But then he took a few of the braver ones there the next full-moon, and they didn't change, either.

"That made believers out of them," Harry said dryly.

"After that, it snowballed. We have every werewolf who lived in England now living full-time on the base, and most of the ones from the continent . . . around three-hundred-fifty, I think.

"They're trying to track down the weres in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia, but they are finding it tough going as most are very good at hiding.

"They're quite happy to have normal lives now, and they feel that acting as our flying firepower, they can repay us. Plus, flying the X-wing fighters in mock battles bleeds off most of the aggressive tendencies."

"Wait," Flitwick said incredulously, "How are you feeding them all?"

"Oh," Harry said, "The ship has what's called a matter-replicator. We just give it a sample of what we want it to replicate, like a steak dinner, and seconds later, you have two steak dinners. Magic isn't involved, so Gamps laws don't come into play. And once the pattern is stored, you can make as many as you want. So, feeding everyone is simply a matter of having enough energy to power the replicator."

The Runabout glided into its bay and settled down.

"And with the millions of tonnes of Helium-three on Uranus, we have enough power for many centuries!" Hermione concluded.

Flitwick looked at her.

"Oh, right," she said. "Helium-three is what we're mining on Uranus to power the ship and everything else."

He slowly nodded.

As promised, they returned to Hogwarts in time for dinner. It was a mostly silent trip as the professor mulled over what he had seen and heard.

They went to the Apparition and Vanishing Cabinets room to return to Hogwarts. Angerlina had prepared it for them by hiding the Vanishing Cabinets behind a don't-notice-this spell keyed to only let crew-members see them.

They explained that room was the only room in which apparition would work. A moment later, they were in Hogsmeade.

"What other surprises do you have for us, Mr. Potter?" he asked, half-jokingly.

On the way to Hogwarts, Harry and Hermione told him about the Yank's Star Gate program, and that the non-magicals thought the magicals were actually aliens who could pass themselves off as humans. The Statute of Secrecy was being carefully followed. They also explained how they were terra-forming both Mars and Venus, and that they envisioned Mars as a future home for all magical creatures.

Once they reached the castle, it was a very quiet professor who accompanied them to his office.

"It will take a few days," he said, "for me to contact a friend in Gringotts." He sighed. "Many Goblins have almost as little regard for half-bloods as some pure-blood wizards. So that will require a few more days, a week probably, for me to meet with the right Goblins, explain what you are offering, and show them the samples and tricorder." He frowned. "Then it'll be up to them to verify what they can and decide this isn't a trap of some kind." He shook his head. "Give it a couple of weeks, if things go smoothly. A couple of months, if not."

Harry shrugged. "There's no real hurry, truthfully. I just thought I should make the offer."

"That is most generous of you," the small professor said approvingly. "Your parents would be proud of you, especially your mother."

Harry felt a warm glow inside at his words, and smiled.

"Let me put these away," the professor said, waving the tricorder and gesturing at his pockets.

A few moments later, they were headed for the Great Hall and dinner.

"Miss Granger, you mentioned that you managed to make a portal similar to the ones the Room creates?"

"It was a combined effort, Professor," she said. "It was me, Lee Jordan, and Angelina Johnson." She paused. "We know we can reach anywhere in the solar system. Lee and Angelina are on the Galileo trying to set one up at Merfolks world." She frowned. "It takes a lot of power to set one up, though. The three of us almost exhausted ourselves setting up one at the inner edge of the Oort cloud, two-thousand astronomical units away. They're taking turns charging up the runes on a giant boulder to see if that will make it easier to go further."

"Then there's getting it to work underwater and filter out any possible contaminants as the next problem," she mused.

Flitwick stopped.

They stopped and looked at him curiously.

"Miss Granger, I would like to see one of the portals you created, as well as the spell-work you put into it."

"It's mostly runes, though," she explained.

He shrugged. "I will bring Bathsheda Babbling with me."

She looked at Harry. "It's currently in a Runabout, for safety reasons."

Harry just shrugged.

"I could land it, cloaked, over by where the stadium was built for the First Task in the Tri-wizard, I suppose," she mused. "After dinner?" she said to the diminutive professor.

He nodded. "Yes, that will do nicely."

They had reached the Great Hall. Flitwick headed for the Head Table, and they headed for the Gryffindor table.

As they sat, Harry said, "I think your next project should be to develop a way to prevent someone from making a portal to a room or area you want to keep them out of." He grinned. "I think Gringotts and the Ministry would pay quite well for something to keep intruders out!"

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Like we need money."

"It'll be gold we don't have to sneak by the Goblins to get things we haven't scanned."

She pursed her lips and murmured, "Yes."

Flitwick had sat beside Professor Babbling and seemed to be in a deep conversation. Both kept looking up at Hermione the whole meal. Babbling seemed especially excited towards the end of their conversation.

Hermione pulled out her wand and gave it a slight twitch, then reached to the collar of her robes. Harry couldn't hear what she said, but he assumed she was asking someone to move the Runabout with their test Portal assembly to remains of the stadium.

Finally, after explaining to Ron where they had been this afternoon, the trio stood and started for the doors. The two professors almost jumped to their feet and hurried out the Professor's door beside the Head Table.

Both were waiting when the trio left the Great Hall.

"Need us along?" Harry asked Hermione as they met with the professors.

She sighed. "No, not really. I'll just open a short portal to one of their offices." She gave a wry grin. "I think it'll mostly be me explaining the runes and spells we used to set it up. I know Ron would be bored to tears . . . and so would you, I guess. I can tell you everything later."

"Okay," he said, "See ya later." He turned to Ron. "How about a game of chess?"

Hermione and the professors head out the Castle doors while he and Ron headed for their dorm.

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After losing two games to Ron, Harry settled down to the latest assignments from his classes.

He had just finished for the evening, Hermione still hadn't returned, when Lieutenant Rascal gave him a call. They had spelled the comms to let people know when they were paged, and by whom, without anyone else hearing.

After retreating to his dorm room and setting up a silencing spell, Harry contacted the Lieutenant.

"As Commodore Jordan has said," he said dryly, "SG-One is cursed . . . with more than normal stupidity."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes. The team was at a new planet and Colonel Jack O'Neill deactivated his helmet to take a closer look at an artifact, and it grabbed him by his face.

"It didn't kill him, and, in fact, everyone thought nothing more had happened other than that. He came back through the Star Gate just fine, none of the detectors went off at all. He seemed fine for a day, but then he began speaking in a new language."

The Lieutenant sighed. "To make a long story short, it seems he accidentally triggered an alien library computer to download the entire database of the Ancient Ones repository of knowledge into his mind. Unfortunately, the human brain hasn't evolved enough to assimilate that much information that quickly and began to subsume his personality, their doctors had no solution and said he would probably end up comatose in another day or two. However, before he went silent — he couldn't speak English because he kept using alien words instead, but he was still functional — he was able to install numerous new Stargate addresses, not known to the Goa'uld, into the dialling computer. Many of them were in our database, but not all. Apparently, they had been established after the Requirement was abandoned.

"Then he built a super-charger for their Star Gate and began dialling out."

He huffed. "I was going to shut-down the gate, but the destination dialled had eight chevrons instead of the normal six, and it actually connected! Predictably, Colonel O'Neill headed for the gate." He paused. "At this point I didn't see the point in stopping the Colonel. He seemed confident he needed the address he dialled — and if I stopped him, he'd end up functionally dead, anyway.

"I managed to get several drones through the Gate before it shut-down. Unfortunately, wherever he went, it is even out of subspace radio range.

"After a short time, the Gate reactivated, and he came back through. He said he went to the Ida Galaxy where the Asgard removed the knowledge that was overloading his brain. He seems okay, I gave him a complete scan and could detect no abnormalities.

"I had one of the Healers check him out, and she found nothing magical had been done to the Colonel.

"Fortunately, everything he saw and heard on the other side of the Gate was recorded by two of the drones hidden on his uniform." He paused. "The recordings are quite interesting. I've sent the recordings to your tricorder."

Harry sighed. "Okay. Thanks for doing an excellent job, again. I'll get back to you later if I have any questions."

"Oh, you'll probably get a laugh out this, but the Asgard on the other side of the Gate claim that Humans were on their way to being one of the Five Great races in the galaxy."

Harry snorted.

"I agree . . . Lieutenant Rascal, over and out."

██:::::██:::::██

When Hermione met them in the Common Room the next morning, she looked as if she hadn't had a lot of sleep the night before. Despite that, she was practically vibrating with excitement.

Harry had barely asked her if she was alright when she launched into her explanation.

"A Mastery!" she started breathlessly. "Professor Babbling said it was probably worth a Mastery!" She danced a jig in excitement. "I showed them the portal, the runes are carved on both sides of the Portal . . . then opened it to each of their offices in turn . . . it works a lot like the Room does, you just imagine where you want to connect and walk back and forth three times to set the destination, then it opens up . . . except you have to charge the runes first if they haven't had enough time to charge from ambient magic . . . but that's a minor problem . . . all we need to add are more aggressive charging runes . . . it'll be a cinch to do that . . . and a rune that glows green if there's sufficient charge for a local portal . . . we can easily limit it to only on-planet! I've already told Angelina and Lee and they're working on the runes to prevent someone from opening a portal to where they aren't wanted. A Mastery! Already!"

She hopped in place excitedly. "I'll be joining them after classes today!"

To say she was distracted in her classes would be an understatement. However, distracted for her merely meant she wasn't as intensely focused as usual. Harry was pretty sure he and Ron were the only ones who noticed.

And that was the pattern for the next week. If she wasn't in class, she was with Lee and Angelina, working on the new runes.

She disappeared as soon as the last class was out and didn't reappear until curfew. With her tricorder, and access to the digitized Hogwarts library, she could finish her assignments anywhere.

The portal to Mer-world was on a back-burner, apparently.

The days passed quickly, with the intense pressure that the seventh-year N.E.W.T.s were known for.

A bit over two weeks later, almost at curfew, Hermione once more came into the Common Room dancing.

She flopped down on the chair beside Harry at the desk he was using. "Done!" she declared happily. "We can both create a portal, and block an area from an incoming portal! It does require a few rune-stones to define the area covered for blocking, but it works." She sighed contentedly, then grimaced. "Now we have to write it up in a parchment for the International Masters' Runes Journal.

"You should do two parts," Harry said, leaning back in his chair. "Part one should be the rune-stones to protect an area. When that's finished, send it out to the Journal with an invitation for them to come see the working unit you made. Once they see the working unit, they'll know you aren't trying to prank them. Then send the manuscript to the Ministry and Gringotts so they can get prepared before the second part, how to create a portal, is sent in to be published."

She looked at him quizzically. "Shouldn't we send the whole thing to the Journal, first?"

Harry shook his head. "Someone would leak it, then someone else would try to break into Gringotts or the Ministry before the Journal could publish the blocking runes."

"Hmm, yes," she said deflating slightly and nodding slowly. "There is that."

"How does it work?"

She smirked. "We went back to the original runes that create the portal and added a few that check for the blocking runes. If they detect any, the runes creating the portal, stop." She sighed. "We had to hide the checks in the other runes so they couldn't be disabled." She grinned. "Lee is quite devious. He assigned a value to each rune, and then added the whole set together to get a checksum. If you remove any rune, and I mean any rune, the entire set fails to do anything." She giggled. "The best part is, the checksum is self-recursive. Each time you start it, it randomly selects a rune, and starts there to assign values before it calculates the total. The end result is always the same, but removing a rune to try to determine its value and crack the checksum won't work.

She sighed. "We need to set up a store selling the rune-blocking stones. The blocking range of one stone is eleven times the height or width of a portal, which we made eleven feet for the portal-runes we intend to publish. Two stones separated at the maximum distance make a rectangle that is twenty-one times the portal size in length by eleven times wide. Four stones make a square box and eight stones a cube with sides twenty-one times the maximum portal size. Then you just add more stones as necessary." *

"We don't even need to involve crew-members in the stores, we can hire anyone," Harry said, musing out loud. "We'll need to inform the non-magical governments of the portals, and provide them with the stones for all their important buildings." He frowned. "You know some wizards will take advantage of the portal to do mischief."

She shrugged. "The ship can replicate a million of the rune-stones in under a minute. Then it's just a matter of pumping a little magic into them. Once they've got magic, they'll power-up properly in a couple of days."

He sighed. "Okay. Let me know when they're done and I'll set up an appointment with the Queen and the Yanks." He sat still a second, then buried his face in his hands and groaned. "And there's something I never thought I'd say!"

Ron and Hermione laughed at him.

██:::::██:::::██

Lee Jordan contacted him late one night. "We almost lost SG-Ten today," he paused. "Or maybe I should say, over the last three days?" He chuckled. "This time it wasn't SG-One!" He paused. "They were visiting P3W-451, an apparently deserted desert planet. It was in a twin-star system where the companion star was a neutron star. The neutron star was slowly siphoning material from the planet's star. It seems they had bad timing as the neutron star hit its mass limit and collapsed into a Black Hole shortly after they arrived there. Fortunately, their hover boards allowed them a rapid return to the Gate.

"As per procedure, Major Boyd used his comm to issue an emergency panic-dial to the MALP so the Gate would be just opening when they arrived." He sighed. "What happened next is complicated, they were already in the heavy time-dilation field from the Black Hole. What took them a minute was barely a fraction of a second on Earth — two hours their time was a second on Earth. However, when the Gate activated, the gravity wave from the Black Hole leaked through and slowed down time long enough for SG Command to realize something was wrong and allow the gate to open.

"Lieutenant Rascal was on duty and immediately noticed that everyone at SG Command was moving very slowly — about one-tenth as fast as they should. He sent an alert out immediately to both the non-magical government and to the other weres in the overwatch group.

"When the computer in SG Command tried to shut down the gate because of the anomaly, it was slow enough for him to over-ride before it could completely execute.

"The time-dilation field on P3W-451 kept the Gate open for the five hours it took for the four members of the team to realize it was open and come through on their hoverboards. Rascal had programmed the computer at the Gate to shutdown as soon as the last person exited it."

Lee shook his head in disbelief. "For SG-ten, it had been only a few seconds from them opening the Gate until they went through. For SG Command, it was seven hours. For us, it was nearly three days!"

"Why didn't you contact me earlier?"

"Realistically? There was nothing you could do! All SG Command was doing was simply waiting for the other team-members to come through the Gate."

Harry slowly nodded. "Yeah," he finally said. "I guess you're right . . . I think Rascal needs a promotion. He seems to be pretty on top of things."

██:::::██:::::██

It was the fourth Saturday in May that Lieutenant General Hammond was at Camp David, standing outside the Main building, Aspen Lodge, again. President Clinton, select members of his cabinet, the Secret Service, and a squad of Marine guards were there as well. Unlike the previous meeting at Camp David, this one had no journalists present. At the appointed time, three space-suited D.S.F. crew-members teleported to the lawn in front of them only a yard or two away, facing them.

From the insignia, one was clearly Admiral Potter, the one beside him was Number One, and the third was probably one of their Combat Specialists, Hammond assumed, if he was reading the insignia on their helmets correctly.

After an exchange of greetings, they went inside to the same meeting room they had used before and settled down into the chairs arranged around the room. The Secret Service agents took up positions in the corners of the room. The Marine guards remained outside the room.

"Now, then," Clinton said with a slow drawl, "Lieutenant-Commander Patil told us you had something important to discuss?"

"Yes," the Admiral said. "Several of our experts were intrigued by the Star Gate system you have discovered, and decided to see if they could design something similar for us." He paused. "They succeeded in creating a Portal."

Everyone in the room stiffened. Hammond leaned forward. This was astonishing news, a possible game-changer.

He sighed. "At the moment, unfortunately, it is only useful in this star system. We are still in the process of determining how to set it up to reach other star systems."

That was disappointing. He pursed his lips.

"Unlike the Star Gate system, however, it does not use an addressing system. Instead, you only need the origin device to create a Portal."

"We can, for example, open a portal to anywhere on the planet from this room, if the Portal device was in here."

There was dead silence. Hammond felt his eyes widen and eyebrows raise in surprise. So did most of the others in the room.

"Anywhere?" the President said incredulously.

The Admiral and his Number One nodded.

The President took a big breath and slowly let it out.

"If you don't mind, we can bring the Portal here in a few minutes, and demonstrate what it can do." He looked down at the floor. "Is this a wood floor?"

"Yes, sir, it is hard oak over six-inch timber joists on twelve-inch spacing," one of the attendants said.

The Admiral shook his head. "The portal is quite heavy, solid granite, we should put it on the ground or concrete." He smiled wryly, "Otherwise it would go straight through the floor."

"How about out front?" Clinton suggested.

The Admiral nodded. "That would do."

Five minutes later, after they had relocated outside, a six-foot-wide-by-six-foot-tall granite slab appeared, growing from a small dot that appeared far away to suddenly stopping right in front of them. It tottered a moment, as if it were about to fall. The Admiral, Number One, and the Combat Specialist held out their right hands and the slab steadied.

Number One took a close look around the slab, and nodded, apparently satisfied it had weathered its trip unharmed.

"General Hammond, is anyone in your office?" said Number One.

Surprised at the question, he said, "No, of course not. It's locked whenever I'm not there."

"Good," Number One said. "We've never been there, so this will be an excellent demonstration." She looked at the Admiral.

He walked back and forth in front of the slab, pacing while thinking. On his third pass, the front of the slab shimmered, and door appeared. He turned and opened it. He gestured to the General. "Look inside and tell me if this is your office."

Hammond hesitantly moved to the door, then looked . . . into his office. He gave a startled look to the Admiral. "It certainly looks like it," he said.

Potter stepped through and waved the General inside. "Make sure this is your office."

Hammond was shaking his head in disbelief as he checked the drawers of his desk to see the things he normally kept in them. Then he walked over to the door to the rest of the Star Gate Complex and looked outside. He was, indeed, inside the complex.

The others at Camp David were watching through the open Portal door.

He closed the Complex door and looked around the office. He nodded to himself and walked over to his phone. He picked it up. "This is Major General Hammond, put me through to Camp David." After a short wait, he was talking to a Captain at the Camp. "The President is in front of Aspen Lodge, send a runner to him that I am calling from Star Gate Command, and verifying my presence there. That's all." The officer on the other end repeated his message back to him, he verified it, then hung up.

The President was staring at him.

He and the Admiral stepped out onto the lawn.

The door disappeared, leaving the slab as it had been originally.

"That appeared to be my office," Hammond said to the group, shaking his head wryly. "But as soon as a runner shows up, we'll have positive proof.

"Mr. President, how would you like to visit the Moon?" Admiral Potter said.

Hammond, and everyone else, gave him a hard look. Was he serious? . . . Of course, he was serious! He wouldn't have asked if he wasn't.

Less than a minute later, the entire group was standing in a vast giant chamber that Hammond recognized from the photos Daniel had made. "Mr. President, I recognize this from the photos taken by Dr. Jackson." He turned slightly to face Admiral Potter. "This was where you had a Star Gate."

The Admiral nodded. "Yes, before we realized how dangerous it was, and disassembled it for raw materials." He turned to Number One. Nothing was said, but a moment later, everyone suddenly felt lighter. "I had Number One turn off the gravity field in the floor. What you feel now is only the Moon's gravity."

One of the Marine guards on the other side of the Portal stepped inside, and almost fell in the lower gravity. As he steadied himself, he held out an envelope, "Mr. President, you have a message."

The gravity quickly returned to normal, and the Marine walked over to Clinton. Clinton took the envelope, opened it and read the message, then read it aloud. "Major General Hammond called from Star Gate Command, and said he is verifying his presence there."

They all exchanged significant looks. The Portal was real, they weren't in some kind of alien simulation.

██:::::██:::::██≈ ≈ ≈ ≈

Author's Note: In A Matter of Time, a neutron star collapses into a Black Hole after siphoning material from its close companion, the sun of P3W-451, for several thousand years. It takes less than a second for this to happen. The time-dilation field created by the intense gravity of the Black Hole propagates at the speed of light.