SGA fic: I Believe in Wishful Thinking, 1/3
This has been sitting finished on my computer for weeks, and I finally got around to final revisions. It's only several...months late.
Title: I Believe in Wishful Thinking
Author: Pentapus
Disclaimer: SGA not mine.
Notes: Small spoilers for "Phantoms". AU. McKay, Sheppard. Written for reel_sga with the prompt Theodora Goes Wild. Thanks to siriaeve and katelennon for reading it over, and to monanotlisa who read it over, and wrote me comment necking. That's a form of approval, right?
Summary: That’s ridiculous! You can’t publish anonymously in scientific journals.
Rodney was in the middle of laminating the last instructions at the table by the door when someone leaned over him, saying testily, “Your call’s gone through.”
“Quiet,” he hissed, running the rubber straightedge over the plastic. “This is a delicate process that requires -- ”
“I left the international dial-out instructions on your desk,” the voice continued. “We’re running the data from the abbreviated gate simulations, and I’m not actually your secretary.”
Rodney snorted. “Are you leaving tomorrow? Wading into the cesspool of idiots who’ve stalled themselves on basic math? No? Thank you for volunteering.”
“Basic math?”
Rodney set the laminated page aside with the other four to be trimmed. When he straightened, back creaking, Dumais was staring bug-eyed at him from the doorway, slender arms crossed over her stomach and dark hair pulled back. She was normally a quiet person, but Rodney prided himself on breaking his scientists out of their shell.
“Dr. McKay--”
Rodney huffed. “Yes, phone, right, fine. I heard you the first time.” He dumped the finished pages into her arms, which she made the mistake of catching. “Trim these, would you? And send them to my address, but apartment 2C--nice woman, working in particle physics, has some half-way intelligent ideas for--well, hopefully, she won’t starve Penzias--hence the instructions, of course. Pretty too actually, with the hair and the -- I think she likes me -- ” and swept past her into his shared office.
His shared office. God, glaring failure aside, it would to be good to get back to someplace that appreciated him.
“I’m not -- ” Dumais started again futilely, but Rodney lifted the sleek, black desk phone off its hook, tuning her out.
“I’m coming back,” he said into the receiver. “There’s still no success with the Atlantis gate. Until we figure out the data compression, being here is pointless on levels you would not believe -- ”
“No, you are not,” said a voice he didn’t recognize, smoothly with a touch of Eastern Europe. “Look up new paper in Pompous Science.”
“All their material is crap,” Rodney snapped back automatically. “Why would -- look, who is this? Where’s Grodin?”
A pause. “Dr. Radek Zelenka, with engineering,” said the voice with a bit more deference, which told Rodney that he was a new guy, despite his knowledge of the proper title of Rodney’s least favorite journal. “You yourself admitted that not all of Pompous Science is absurd, yes? There was one -- ”
Rodney was already snapping his fingers frantically at Dumais, at her desk smoothing flyaway strands of dark hair behind her ear so casually she had to be deliberately ignoring him. “You! Hey!”
She looked up, brow furrowed unpleasantly, lips parting.
“No. Shut up; this is important. I need the new issue of Pompous Science, now.” Dumais stared at him blankly, and he let out a tortured sigh. “The American Journal of Mathematical Physics. Go!”
Dumais pushed off in her wheeled chair towards the communal bookshelf by the coffee makers. She ran her fingers over the narrow spines, selecting a slim, colorful issue with a skillful twist of her wrist. Rodney waved her over frantically, babbling into the phone, “I assume you’re telling me -- ”
“Yes, there is new one, follow up to the first.”
“Right, right,” Rodney said as Dumais came over, a pad and pencil tucked under her arm, spreading the journal open to the table of contents. Rodney jabbed a finger at the listing, and they both fumbled to flip to the right page. “After the first article, I highly doubt this -- oh. Oh my god -- this is -- have you -- ”
“Yes, yes, I have seen,” Zelenka agreed, impatient.
What is this? Dumais mouthed at him, tapping a fingernail against the glossy page of equations. Rodney waved a hand at her; he was too busy reading at breakneck spead -- getting halfway through before he lost the math (really, math was never why he got into physics in the first place) and starting over. Dumais was trailing her finger down the page from top to bottom, trying to follow the logic upside down.
“It’s all wrong,” Rodney said, awed, flipping slowly through the four page article.
“But a new and intriguing wrong,” said Zelenka, excitement thrumming under his even tone.
“There’s no way we can apply this inside a Lorentzian wormhole -- the time dilation -- ” He needed -- scratch paper, lots of scratch paper. He needed to go through these equations as soon as possible. He tried to turn the page, but Dumais pushed his hands away, turning back to the first, flipping open the pages of her yellow legal pad.
“Yes, yes,” Zelenka hummed impatiently.
“If we just tweak -- ” Rodney scrambled for a pen until Dumais pushed one into his hand. He flipped over Kavanagh’s latest self evaluation to scrawl accidentally implied wormhole dynamics across the shadows of self-importance (which should always be earned, Rodney felt).
What is this? Dumais mouthed at him again, bright-eyed, and Rodney felt a passing affection even if she were the type of theorist who thought philosophy had useful scientific applications.
“On the second page -- ” Zelenka said, no doubt with his own notes spread out before him.
“Who wrote this?” Rodney demanded, skipping ahead to the second lemma.
“You will love this: I have no idea.”
Dumais tapped her pen against his wrist. This is --
“What?” Rodney waved her off. “Someone new? Of course it is, but the name -- let me check -- ”
“Pen name, Dr. McKay. Anonymous. No one knows.”
"What? The first one too?"
"Yes."
“That's ridiculous! You can’t publish anonymously in scientific journals! I want this author!”
“Yes,” Zelenka agreed. “So you must get him for us while you are still on the correct continent.”
Rodney’s pen stuttered to a stop halfway through an integral curve. “Please, just call -- do you know what I am in the middle of -- ”
Dumais burst into audible speech, “This is the problem Park discovered during the gate calibration -- ”
“Yes, obviously!” Rodney snapped, rethinking any warm thoughts he might have been aiming in her direction.
“What?” said Zelenka.
“Not you, I was -- ” Rodney made a flighty gesture wasted on Ze-whathisface. “Why haven’t you talked to Pompous Science?”
“We have tried. They will give us nothing. Someone must go in person and find him.”
Rodney hated recruiting. He hoped Zelenka wasn’t going to start hinting in his direction with completely irrelevant arguments about Antarctica being on the other side of the globe. “It could be a her,” he protested weakly, doodling shapeless loops in the corner of the yellow page.
For a beat, Zelenka didn’t answer, trying to recover the thread of conversation; the shapeless loops evolved into part of a Dalek’s knobby shell. Then, in exasperation, “And she will be all long legs, all needing to pass on genes, yes? Perhaps you would reconsider going yourself in that case. Do not blame me for your language’s inadequate pronouns.”
“Oh yes, we have such gender issues, as opposed to say, all those languages where I need to remember the gender of a table.”
Zelenka ignored him. “Simpson’s flight will route through Los Angeles where she will talk to this editor and be very terrifying but also accommodating, yes?” Rodney felt a sympathetic chill. “Perhaps she will find you your mail order mathematician. Remember to invite me to the wedding; I hope there will be lobster. Good bye!”
“Wait! Zellunka, you dirty bastard!”
**
Yesterday:
“Tell me again what went wrong,” Elizabeth said from the speaker phone in Carter’s office.
“There was a problem with the receiving gate,” he told her, flipping a USB memory key between his fingers with each circuit of the tiny space before the desk.
“But Dr. Jackson’s address was correct,” Elizabeth repeated. “If the problem was with Atlantis’ gate -- ”
“No. We’ve been over this. Elizabeth -- " Rodney gestured ineffectively at the phone on the desk, hands spread wide. “I can’t confirm Wonderboy’s gate address because the gate didn’t connect. I’ve got -- oh, you know, the french girl and Park and Hoggle looking at the data, but without a connection....”
“My name is Vogel,” Vogel said. “And there was a connection.”
“Rodney?” Elizabeth said hopefully.
“Fine. There was a connection,” Rodney corrected himself. “Jackson’s address appears to be viable, but not necessarily -- look, the reason stargate wormholes transmit objects in one piece is that the receiving gate stores all incoming matter as an electrical signal until a complete transfer occurs.” He took a breath. “Atlantis’ gate didn’t initiate the data storage program and the wormhole --
“A wormhole that’s safe for people to walk through,” Dumais said without looking up from the laptop on the desk.
“ -- didn’t form. Yes, thank you. It’s possible the hardware is intact, and Atlantis’ gate merely failed to initiate the process. If that’s true, we might be able to do it manually by sending an artificial cue, but we don’t have the power for the kind of trial and error that would require.”
“Bottom-line, Rodney. Where are we?” The disappointment behind his explanation must have been clear, because her voice had gone cold and flat.
“If we walk through the gate without the Ancient safety measures functioning? Dead.”
“Really dead,” Dumais added.
“Scrambled and in pieces,” Vogel added, “on a molecular level.”
“Yes, thank you,” Rodney snapped, glaring at the ceiling.
“What’s the solution, Rodney?” Elizabeth said.
“The solution? Are you kidding me? The solution is recreating the Ancients’ understanding of matter’s interaction with a wormhole from the ground up -- which, hello, Grodin’s been trying to do, and I know he’s not me, but frankly -- ”
“Do it,” Elizabeth said with an air of finality. “I want you back here working on this, starting yesterday.”
“Obviously,” Rodney said, like he’d even needed to be told, and cut the connection.
**
Today:
Dumais swung in, hanging between the doorjamb and the knob. “Simpson just got in,” and swung out again.
“Right, right,” Rodney said absently. Across the desk, Park lifted his head blearily, muttering in Korean, a bic pen stuck to his cheek.
“What?” Rodney asked irritably because the only Korean words he knew were for ribs and pot stickers. “Dumais!”
“She is not your secretary,” Park slurred, rubbing his face and staring in surprise at the pen that fell off.
“So she says -- Dumais!”
He got Simpson instead, her North Face fleece still folded over her arm even though it was summer in Colorado.
“I stopped in L.A.,” Simpson said. “Straight to Musselman’s office at UCLA, and, get this -- ”
She leaned forward secretively, Park gravitating towards her in anticipation. Even Rodney fell forward a little, though he’d never admit it, or possibly he’d blame it on sleep deprivation or her blonde hair.
“ -- the article was peer reviewed, as all our submissions are. This is what he says to me, as if that’s some sort of excuse, as if that kind of anonymity isn’t antithetical to the spirit of scientific progress -- ”
There were days when Rodney sort of liked Simpson. Not that that kept him from --
“And?” he snapped. “Who is it, where is he, and/or when does he arrive?” He hadn’t slept in two days, as if he had any time for patience normally.
Simpson stared at him in disbelief.
Rodney groaned. “So, you’re telling me, you went in person to the den of stupidity -- and you didn’t get anything for it? Why did you come back?”
Simpson dropped her arms, letting her bags and the blue fleece slide to the floor with a thump. “Please, McKay, refusal to share information means nothing when you lock your office with a spring bolt lock and everyone in the country carries three credit cards.”
She tossed a manila file folder onto his keyboard. It tilted awkwardly on top of his hands, and sheets of Xeroxed correspondence slid out across the tabletop. Scratch that, Rodney decided, there were days when he really liked Simpson, and not just the days when she ‘accidentally’ spilled experimental space glue from the chemistry labs all over Kavanagh’s chair.
In the early days of the SGC, the recruiters had made the mistake of equating brilliance in the field of astrophysics with having any useful skills whatsoever, and had staffed a lab full of theorists whose concept of reality existed more in the math in their head than in any awareness of a whole planet outside their office. The experimentalists were only marginally better.
Rodney would never in his life recommend an interest in, say, hiking as beneficial to the practicing physicist. On the other hand, at age thirty six and about to travel to a different galaxy, he still valued the working model of an A bomb his science teacher had strongly encouraged him to abandon--read, had invested in stronger and stronger locks for the lab’s supply closet--over all of his research, undergraduate and graduate. In his years at the SGC, Rodney had done his best to make sure that the SGC attracted that sort of physicist, one that might, say, be of some use in practical matters. Such as annoying Kavanagh.
Rodney studied the open file. Both anonymous papers, it seemed, had been submitted by mail, with a P.O. Box for a return address and no other identification. Several weeks of snail mail correspondence had followed as the editors of Pompous Science had tried to explain to Mystery Author the same thing Rodney was only too happy to tell to anyone willing to listen: you don’t publish anonymously in scientific journals. Seriously, what’s the point?
Mystery Author had responded to the attempt to reason with him promptly (in three to five business days) with a pen name from one of the most infuriating pseudo-science movies ever made.
With that sort of an introduction, Rodney didn’t know why Musselman bothered reading the article at all, but someone obviously had and the beauty of the mathematics within must have been too great to resist. Three letters and two sarcastic pen names later, Musselman had sent the article off for peer review, this time under a name that was neither Marty McFly or James Tee or Buckaroo Bonzai. ‘Jed Waterbury’ was either as free of pop culture allusions as it looked or a reference to a movie that had slipped under the radar of Rodney’s latent masochism.
But beyond that -- “Wait, is this all there is?”
Simpson shrugged. “I suppose Musselman could have had McFly’s true identity locked up in the cabinet,” she said, “but the correspondence was such a smoking gun, I didn’t bother. Did you see who referred him?”
Rodney shuffled through the papers. “Someone from UW Madison? Kelly? What has he published, why haven’t I heard of him?”
Simpson’s smile was a dry smirk. “You haven’t heard of him because Dr. Malcolm Kendall is a highly respected, tenured professor of economics.”
Rodney stared at her.
“So I sent him an email. We’ll see how that works out.”
Rodney pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes. “Simpson, we just sent anemail to an economist to help us simulate matter-energy transformations across the space-time dilations of a Lorentzian wormhole. Yes, let’s hope for success -- or no, wait, I have a better idea: go downstairs. Try to convince Vogel and Dumais to come up with something that leaves me with all my limbs and a pulse at the end of it.”
“Ha,” Simpson said and left, which Rodney thought sounded like a pretty good summation of his week.
**
Simpson spent a day looking over the work Rodney’s miniscule SGC team had already accomplished (accomplished being a relative word, as it suggested actual accomplishments) before announcing that she wanted to be in Antarctica to personally supervise the recovery of the scarred crystals that housed the remains of the Ancient database, which, for some insane reason, had been left mostly in the hands of archaeologists. She seemed certain she could find the Ancient schematics for the design of the stargates -- why, Rodney wasn’t sure. No one else had been able to. He hadn’t been able to.
Rodney had told her to stop complaining and start checking his math, or Park’s math really--the guy was sort of sketchy--and had gone back to his room on-base with the half-formed thought of putting on a clean shirt. He found sitting on his small, utilitarian bedside table, instead of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, a shiny new paperback in lurid crimson, clear airport newsstand faire; it’s title sprawling across the red in sharp, ragged font: Theodora Goes Wild. And the subtitle crowded next to the leather-clad body builder bending buxom Theodora backwards over his thigh: She found a Den of Sin in a Paragon of Virtue.
Rodney went back to the lab without changing.
Park’s medical-staff-sort-of-girlfriend appeared early on day nine of Rodney’s Failed Attempt to Reach Ancient El Dorado, supposedly to see that Park was full up on his migraine prescription and to drop a few sickening remarks about his elegant hands. She didn’t get very far in her weird appendage fetish, brought up short by the sight of Rodney’s team huddled around their laptops, eyes fever-bright with 20 hour days, before she tentatively suggested that getting to Atlantis was not an emergency situation and that they would find it when they found it.
Wrist deep in high level mathematics, Rodney almost believed her until some moron lingering in the hall muttered, “If they find it.” In this case, realism was as malicious as spite, and Rodney perked right up, better than double shot espresso.
By lunchtime though, even vengeful rage was flagging and Dumais’ latest twist of theoretical brilliance had hit the same wall as all her others. Simpson stepped into the lab, clear-eyed with the jet lag that had her sleeping until noon -- prompting Rodney to choke on a power bar and whip out the eyesore of a paperback in revenge.
Park and Vogel and Dumais all blinked at him in confusion, and Simpson asked innocently, “Oh, Rodney, did you join a book club?”
“Ha!” Rodney scoffed, and licked his thumb defiantly. “Chapter two! Tired Innocence! The next day! The small park, green with summer foliage, which had only the night before been a shadowed background to her moonlit abandon!”
The funniest part about it was that Simpson kept waiting for him to stop. Or maybe it was that Rodney really meant to, it was just that -- well.
Maybe they had been working too hard and not really sleeping or possibly even eating so much as absorbing nutrients from the--rather ripe--air in the lab. And in those circumstances, once you started reading cheesy porn aloud to your colleagues it was very difficult to stop.
There was only so much genius-level theorizing you could do at a time, he consoled himself, smiling smugly at Simpson’s horrified face and trying to pretend that Dumais hadn’t been completely smitten with Theodora since two pages in and that bit with the tree house and the failed Broadway singer turned muscular construction worker.
“Wait,” Simpson said suddenly. “Why are you starting at chapter two?”
“Um, that’s -- “ Rodney protested feebly, “the author has was way with descriptions that are very, uh, rousing -- ” Simpson stared. “It’s very difficult to rest when your thoughts are occupied with the kind of advanced concepts that I deal with on a daily -- ”
“Oh my god,” Simpson said sincerely.
**
They passed the halfway mark on Rodney’s third turn, which was about the time Theodora discovered the secret sex cult among the local carnival employees, able to perform their daring sexploits beneath the cotton candy stand or high above the grounds in more-spacious-than-you’d-realize Ferris Wheel buckets.
For her next trick, Theodora, heretofore trapped in a small, respectable town, detoured to nearby Boston to fling herself into the sex-starved mass of students and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which would have been enjoyable enough on its own even if his audience hadn’t included one alum each of the MIT undergraduate and graduate programs, but at that point he reached the description of the lanky blonde man with the thick glasses and graceful wrists, and --
‘Oh,’ Theodora breathed in surprise--
Rodney paused to glare at Dumais who looked about to protest (again) Rodney’s refusal to make the sounds effects like Park did, which was actually extremely terrifying.
--in surprise. ‘I saw you at the club last night... Tiger.’
Underneath his horn-rims and freckles, Tiger blushed. The color illuminated his high, delicate cheekbones. ‘That’s not my real name, Miss Pushpop. It’s Jed--
Rodney stopped dead around the name. The rest of them, who had been taking their own turns reading, except for Vogel who’d been looking at Rodney like he was contagious, looked up slowly. They didn’t catch on until Rodney repeated the name incredulously.
“Wait,” Simpson said. “Is that...?”
“ -- the pen name of the anonymous author,” Dumais confirmed.
“Oh my god!” Rodney says. “Wait, am I delirious? Is this sleep deprived delirium?”
“Please, keep us out of your delusions, McKay,” Simpson said sincerely, just as Vogel burst out, “It’s a coincidence. No, we are not finding the answers to the mysteries of wormhole physics in pornography!”
“Is that better or worse than finding them in an economist?” Rodney asked at the same time Dumais exclaimed in protest. Next to her, Park mused in a sort of waking daze, chewing on the end of his mechanical pencil, “I find the characters very engaging.”
“Yes, fine,” Rodney agreed. “The only sane conclusion is that we are exaggerating the significance of a coincidence as a result of massive sleep deprivation. But, seriously, the character is a mathematician! There’s no way this is a common name! Is it possible -- ”
“Exaggeration,” Vogel assured him, pained.
Rodney stared at the book in his hands. “Maybe I should sleep,” and honestly considered it, except Dumais snatched up a discarded legal pad and said, “Wait, if you consider Wheeler’s original theory -- ” and Rodney forgot about it entirely.
**
He woke up with the edges of a keyboard pressed into his cheek, a cramp in his right calf and alarms going off all around him. Dumais was sleeping draped over her legal pads while Simpson messed around with the gate simulations on the bank of computers against the wall. With his feet propped on another chair, Park alternated between studying the display from over her shoulder and reading ahead in Theodora Goes Wild. From the doorway, Vogel said, “The Stargate is going to blow up.”
“If the stargate blows up, it will end all life on earth,” Rodney said automatically before his senses caught up with his brain, hands flailing. “Wait, wait, what -- why aren’t you up there? Why aren’t I up there? I need to get up there!”
“I know, I know,” Vogel said, slumping. “But the officer on duty sent me back down. We’re not regular employees of the SGC, and they say the situation is under control.”
“I’m a regular employee, and did I mention all life on earth -- !” Rodney bolted from the room, careening down the hall with a cramp in his leg.
He all but fell out of the elevator into two frantic airmen, who immediately tried to turn him around, but Rodney could pin words together faster than an auctioneer and throw three kinds of I.D. at them besides, and oh right, was about to save the world. So it wasn’t altogether difficult to bulldoze his way into the control room where the active wormhole was pulsing in a truly alarming fashion and some All-American Hero was saying, “Yeah, let’s avoid that,” to which Rodney had to respond: “You mean the end of all life on earth? Congratulations! Where’s this man’s medal! Of all the -- ”
“Christ, I don’t have the energy for you right now.” That was Carter, her voice chilly like an early trip through the stargate, and Rodney opened his mouth to agree with her -- but instead, Carter pointed at the airmen who had followed Rodney in and barked, “Get this man out of my gate room,” before pivoting back to the control displays without waiting to see her order carried out.
“What! You!” Rodney said. He had no idea what was going on, if it were Goa’uld or Replicators or someone new or no one at all. But maybe they weren’t lying about having it under control because by the time his escorts got him back to the computer lab with the rest of his team, the alarms had shut off and the red lights at the tunnel intersections were no longer flashing. The airman on the left, who was actually some kind of officer, reached up to tap his radio.
“They’ve given the all clear,” he told Rodney, right before he left him in the door of his lab, shell-shocked and sleep deprived.
An hour later, when Carter told him that gate travel would be suspended for at least the next several weeks while they repaired damage to the gate caused by some unpronounceable tribe of contrary Jaffa, Rodney decided to fly to Boston.
**
“Wait, seriously?” Simpson said. “Boston?”
“Landry didn’t understand why it would be a problem,” Rodney said. He threw up his hands. “An intergalactic expedition poised for departure! And he didn’t see why suspended gate travel would be a problem!”
“In all fairness -- ” Dumais started.
“Poised for departure!”
“Boston?” Simpson asked. She was holding Theodora Goes Wild in her hands, running her fingers over the raised letters of its title, looking dazed. “Rodney, you know even if there is a connection between the two, flying to Boston isn’t likely to--”
“Progress?” Rodney snapped.
Simpson paused. “How many fingers did you say the Anthropologists needed?”
“Boston,” Rodney concluded, grabbing the book and stuffing in his duffle. He felt only a little bit vindicated charging the last minute first class air fare to the SGC.
**
It helped that Lynnfield, MA was a real place. Otherwise he’d be stuck in Boston, wishing he was in New York and working on a laptop on which he couldn’t legally store anything actually useful with occasional glares in the direction of MIT’s criminally misinformed physics department.
Instead he rented a car, doubled checked his list of Theodora Goes Wild locations, which Dumais had color-coded in a scheme that Rodney feared corresponded to specific lewd acts and meant he’d never be able to look her in the face again, and headed for the suburbs.
He crossed the boundary of Lynnfield, MA around eight p.m., his rented Toyota jittering along the paved brick roads. It was good-sized town, forty-five minutes west and north of Boston with half a dozen square blocks of downtown lined with tall trees and green lawns and quaint brick store fronts. He passed a wooden sign next to city hall pointing him to Ardmore Park, which -- Rodney added to himself with a certain forbidden glee -- had only the night before been a shadowed background to her moonlit abandon.
All of a sudden, he desperately wanted to drive around the whole town and check off all the places on the list and maybe call up Dumais and Park to brag about it because they would be jealous--and then he caught himself smiling into space like an imbecile and thought about bashing his head against the steering wheel.
Still, the latent teenager part of his brain thought treacherously, it wasn’t like he had anything immediately better to do.
Because, like the anonymous article that had started the whole unbelievable business, the author of Theodora Goes Wild wrote under a pen name (“Lynn Field”--oh ha ha, subtle, Rodney thought), and the publisher was not willing to part with her identity.
Color him surprised.
No, the surprise had been the article in the New York Times, describing the uproar in small, quiet Lynnfield at the sudden appearance of a risqué romance novel glorifying an astonishing amount of illicit sexual fun taking place right in their little town, ranging from the truly vanilla affair with the singer-construction worker to the elaborate bondage club in the basement of the Lynnfield Community Center.
The content of the article was, in short, that Lynnfield’s Mayor (with the support of Lynnfield’s School Board) denied the existence of any such organizations so emphatically that if the interview had lasted a minute longer, he would probably have denied the existence of any sexual relations within Lynnfield whatsoever and perhaps provided the name of the firm that handled all the invitro.
In short, there was little Rodney could accomplish here tonight except to confirm the town’s existence, so he turned down Oak street towards the large wooden coffee cup jutting out above a green overhang. It was a small coffee shop, trapped like an afterthought between a bicycle repair shop and a garden supply. Its counter and two cramped tables took up as much space as all the impressive machinery of the modern Starbucksian coffee system.
Being a Thursday night, it was mostly deserted. The barista, young and curvy and honey blonde, stood behind to the register, bent over a slim paperback. Across from her on a stool at the counter sat the coffee shop’s only other occupant, a skinny, narrow man with dark, scruffy hair. Neither looked up as he came in.
“Ahem,” Rodney said.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” the girl protested with a groan. “That’s not fair at all!”
“Sort of the point,” drawled her companion, not sounding much like a New Englander. He sat with his elbows on the counter and shoulders hunched. Rodney could make out the sharp bones of his shoulder blades and the first few knobs of his spine underneath his dark shirt.
The girl rolled her eyes heavenward, sighing in a tiny sound that was a bit like a hiccup before turning to Rodney with a wide smile that would have seemed genuine if Rodney hadn’t just seen her engaged in some mysterious but sincere pursuit with Scruffy Hair Guy over there.
“Look, house coffee -- whichever, I don’t care -- black, large,” Rodney said, hands outlining a boxy space in front of him which he intended to be filled with coffee, soonest.
“Coming right up,” said the girl, turning away. Rodney drummed his fingers against his opposite forearm.
“Sure you don’t want any of the nine hundred and one things that could go in that cup of coffee, at your pleasure?”
The voice was slow and dry and pronounced “things” more like “thangs”, and Rodney realized belatedly that Scruffy had wheeled around on his stool, one arm propped next to his little book and the curve of an umbrella handle hanging off his knee. Rodney’s first impression of him -- from the front -- was something like Fox Mulder with a more evenly proportioned face. Except for his nose, which took a strange banana curve to the left.
“I suppose you prefer your cappuccino with a touch of almond,” Rodney said sarcastically.
“Nah,” the skinny man said, stretching the non-word out unnecessarily, “I usually just swing by for a nice cold glass of milk. Maybe a cookie.” He smirked, lifting a dark eyebrow in a smoky glance at the blonde barista who returned it from under her long lashes with a secretive smile.
“God, stop that!” Rodney snapped, disgusted. “Not that she isn’t ridiculously hot, what with the hair and the -- ” Rodney stopped himself before he could gesture incriminatingly. “She’s young enough to be your daughter!”
Both Barista Girl and Scruffy turned to stare at him, all round eyes and parted lips, and Rodney had a weird moment where he couldn’t decide which of them was more distracting. Then Scruffy’s expression went flat, and Rodney was left with his hand dangling in mid “ -- and breasts!” gesture while the barista set his coffee on the counter with more force than strictly necessary.
She said, “That’ll be $3.75,” but brightly. She added, with a smile: “That's less than five, sir. Three of the green ones with Washington on them, and the same again in coinage.” The register rang ominously.
Scruffy snorted and seemed to reach an internal decision, tension running out of his shoulders. His eyebrow went up again in a sort of facial shrug, drawing ahead of his jailbait girlfriend by at least half a point, and he turned with an exaggerated groan, as though from sore muscles, back to his little book. “So,” he continued too loudly, “you’re walking back to your car, but there’s no moon, you have no flashlight, and all the lights in the lot are off. How do you find your car?”
It was Rodney’s turn to stare. He felt only a little better to see the barista staring too.
“Maybe you’ve got a system,” Scruffy suggested obliviously, tapping a finger on the page. “You always park in the same place.”
“It’s someplace you go regularly?” the barista asked half-heartedly, eyeing Rodney.
“Or! Wait!” Scruffy waved a hand in such an upbeat gesture that it had to be forced. There was just no way. “Maybe you’ve got, say, some UV paint and -- ”
“What are you, double oh seven?” Rodney blurted. “Does the question even specify that it’s night? Who cares about lamp posts at noon?”
The two of them paused. Scruffy began flipping through the pages at the back of the book.
“Hey,” he said, surprised. “I think he’s right.”
“About something,” said the barista, turning away from the counter to run a cloth over already gleaming equipment.
“Look, I -- sorry about -- though really, I don’t see why you’re surprised -- ” Rodney clutched at the warmth of the coffee through the cardboard cup and bulldozed onwards, “Do you know where the nearest Holiday Inn Express is around here? You know, the one with the free breakfast?” He pointed over his shoulder. “Supposedly, it’s stored in the car GPS, but let me tell you, Hertz ‘Never Lost’ is a gross misnomer.”
“There’re a few out by Route One,” Scruffy said. “Take Lake St. east towards Ninety-Five, turn right on One. Don’t know if there’s an Express, but there’s a Holiday Inn.”
“Right, well, uh, thanks,” Rodney mumbled, backing up. “I’ll just uh -- head out.”
“How’d you get here anyway?” Scruffy broke in, leaning back with all his lazy poise returned. Rodney couldn’t shake the way it felt like he was being ignored. “It’d require a lot of wrong turns from Ninety-Five.”
“Well, I was trying to get here, actually, before I realized the futility of expecting anything, even science, to finally provide competent directions, and I’ll be back in the morning because -- hm. Well, here,” Rodney said, tugging the novel out of one pocket of his rain jacket.
Scruffy didn’t drop his lazy smile, but he let out a sharp breath through his teeth that was half sigh, half laugh.
“Oh no,” said the barista. “I should have known. I hate to break it to you -- ”
“Hey,” Scruffy said, flipping through Rodney’s copy, “is this annotated?” He paused to read a lengthy notation penciled into the margin. “Because that’s pretty dedicated. I kind of have to admire that level of perversion.”
“Um -- what?” Rodney said.
“I promise you," the barista continued with some exasperation, "no matter what some fictional account tells you, there is no bondage club in the basement of the community center or the police station or the backroom of the coffee shop. We barely have enough space for the room in front." She added earnestly, “I’m as disappointed as you are.”
“Christ, Marie, I don’t want to know that.”
“Well, maybe not quite as disappointed,” the barista revised, frowning at the annotated novel in Scruffy’s hands. Despite her self-assured confession, she was blushing, a wash of pink across her cheeks and the tips of her delicately shaped ears.
“Bondage club.” Scruffy squinted at her, then put up his hands, palms facing out. “No, no, I meant it -- no more info, please.”
Barista glared at him pinkly. “I’m going to blame it on your influence if Mom ever finds out.”
“God,” Scruffy sighed, rubbing a hand over his face, “she’ll believe it too.”
“Hello!” Rodney snapped, “Can we forget about your underage bondage romance for a second, and get back to where you have apparently concluded that I am on some sort of sexual perversion safari?”
“You’re not?” said the barista.
“No!”
“Wouldn’t be the first,” said Scruffy. “At least -- how many was it, Marie?”
“Three total. Two were this week,” said the barista. “And those were just the out of towners.”
“There you go! Three people have come in to ask Marie if she’s the girl with the paddle in chapter four.”
“It’s chapter five actually,” Rodney said primly, “and frankly, your descriptions don’t match at all so I don't see -- What! I am not a lecherous tourist! I am an astrophysicist!”
“...and everybody knows they don’t have sex,” said Scruffy.
"And a genius!"
"Oh they definitely don't."
“Look,” Rodney snatched up the book and shook it at him, “in this book is a character of exceptional mathematical skill -- the mathematics of which the author gets right, by the way -- whose unusual name just so happens to match an anonymous author of two -- two! -- very promising articles in a usually laughable academic publication. And,” Rodney announced grandly, “I am here to find him.” He eyed the barista, “Or her.”
Scruffy started laughing. Rodney thought he detected a note of disbelief.
“I’ve heard the explanations my brother comes up with for why he definitely, absolutely was not masturbating in the shower for forty-five minutes,” warned the barista, like that was supposed to mean something.
“How did you -- ?” Scruffy waved a finger between Rodney the book, chuckling. “I mean, connect the two.”
“A colleague brought it in. Curiously, the article in the New York Times claims the book was published only in the New England area by a local company,” Rodney admitted. “How Simpson got a hold of it flying from Auckland to L.A. to Denver is anybody’s guess.”
“Lucky,” Scruffy said deadpan.
“Yes, well, oh damn it, is it raining?” Rodney glared through the windows at the suddenly dark sky and the rain and nature in general.
“Well, I’m heading out,” Scruffy said. He flipped his book of lateral thinking puzzles shut, slipping it inside his jacket and reaching for the umbrella hanging off his knee.
“Oh, oh, good,” Rodney said. “I’ll share your umbrella,” and when Scruffy blinked at him in incomprehension, “Do you know how easily I catch cold? Did I mention that I am an employee of your government and that I daily make vital contributions to national security? Really, it’s in your best interest -- ”
“Hey now,” Scruffy said, “that’s not the problem at all.” And as if to demonstrate, he lifted the umbrella handle from his knee. When he drew it out from underneath the bar, Rodney saw that it was not an umbrella at all but a sturdy walking cane.
“Oh,” Rodney said, “Well, I -- ”
“See you later,” the barista told him, adding with special emphasis and an eye for Rodney, “Uncle John.”
“Oh my god,” Rodney shouted, “that’s even worse!”
“Come on, Tourist Pervert,” Scruffy said, with a rakish grin, “I’ll limp you to your car.”
In reality, Scruffy barely limped, though as a spectator Rodney couldn’t decide if that was because of a lack of severity of his injury (was it a permanent disability?) or because of the man’s deft hand with a cane. Rodney had never connected limping with skill and agility, but the whole maneuver was engrossing to watch, even with the rain dripping down his neck.
“Are you sure you’re not a touring pervert?” Scruffy asked suddenly. Rodney realized they were standing in front of his car. Or rather, Rodney was standing there staring at the man’s legs and not making a single move to get out of the rain.
“What! No!”
“You were just -- never mind. Do you have a name or should I just keep calling you... ”
“Rodney,” Rodney said immediately, and then recanted, “Doctor Rodney McKay. Dr. McKay. Um.”
Scruffy was looking at him oddly. “John,” Scruffy said, switching his cane to his left hand, and holding out his right. Rodney shook it awkwardly. John’s lips twitched in the direction of a smile. “There’s a town meeting tomorrow, five o’clock at city hall, if you’re set on looking for that author.” He nodded towards a building reminiscent of the Greek Parthenon at the far end of the street. His eyes got round and innocent. “Lots of knowledgeable people there to ask.”
Rodney’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Right. I’ll do that.”
“Good luck, Dr. McKay,” Scruffy called as Rodney climbed into his green Toyota and pulled away.
**
The next day, Rodney woke up at an absurdly late hour (nearly ten o’clock), barely made it to his free buffet breakfast where he tripped over his chair to escape the complimentary orange juice, and drove the forty minutes back to Boston to talk to the mid-sized publisher responsible for Theodora Goes Wild. In her small twelfth floor office, Ms. Field’s editor offered to forward any fan letters Rodney had, but would not divulge any information regarding the author’s identity.
Rodney groaned. At least she admitted it was a pen name.
“First of all,” Rodney said, “I am not a fan. Ok, possibly, in the sense that I can admire a certain descriptive skill -- ” he stopped with an impatient grimace. “Second of all, I am not a pathetic fan. So, no, I am not here to stalk your strange and bashful client, except in the sense of offering future, gainful employment.” He glared expectantly.
The editor stared back. Rodney narrowed his eyes.
“Why,” the editor asked carefully, but not at all like she was folding, “do you want to offer my strange and bashful client gainful employment?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake! I work for the defense department. You do not have to worry about the U.S. military trying to steal your author as part of an effort to subsidize romance novels for its troops!”
Rodney waited.
“I would be happy to forward your fan letters on to my client,” said the editor again in her friendly, immovable manner.
“Aaargh!” Rodney said and stalked out.
He seriously contemplated sending a ‘fan letter’ -- with an invisible hybrid Asgaard/Ancient tracking device included. He hadn’t told her that he definitely wouldn’t send one -- okay he sort of had -- and when he returned to his hotel, he printed out the basic SGC recruitment letter, the one that didn’t contain any useful or interesting information at all except the letterhead of the U.S. Armed Forces. In the end, he didn’t include the tracker, which, he admitted privately, was less because of any moral high ground and more because he hadn’t actually designed it yet -- one of the disadvantages of impulsive side trips and hasty packing.
So naturally, he drove back to Lynnfield and circled the downtown like a shark -- slow, lazy laps to keep the wisps of tranquil suburbia moving over his gills.
Friday noon was still a weekday in the kind of town where most adults commuted far, far away to make their money, but it was also summer and bright and so Ardmore park across the street teemed with a distressing number of children and their caretakers. Rodney derailed in the middle of plotting a course around the snot-soaked mud magnets when he spotted a half-familiar figure on a bench by the playground, wooden cane hanging off the back. Rather than circle around the far side of the park, he found himself parking and stalking across the grass.
“You!” Rodney could see the man stretched haphazardly over the bench, legs kicked out, his face tilted to the sky. He was wearing an olive green polo shirt and worn jeans and his hair, if anything, was even more of a mess than it had been in the coffee shop last night. At Rodney’s shout, he rolled his head to the side, eyes opening. They were pale in the sunlight and the same muted green as his shirt.
“Me,” he said cautiously with an innocuous smile, squinting at the sun that had emerged from the clouds behind Rodney’s head. The bland look turned into recognition, his mouth open in surprise, and he sat up. “Hey, you’re the angry sex tourist!”
“Your wit. It wounds me.” On the playground, a huddle of children burst apart like a firework. Out of the chaos, a dark haired boy stumbled towards them, skinny with a familiar, mindless smile. Rodney had a sudden, horrified thought.
“McKay, right?” Scruffy was saying, and, “Did you make it to the -- oof!” when the boy ran straight into his knee. Scruffy ruffled his hair in a friendly greeting. “Hey, buddy. What’s up?”
“Show me how to make the, the,” the kid babbled breathlessly, leaning over Scruffy’s thigh and kicking his feet. He finished mournfully, “I lost mine in the tree.”
“Oh, sure. Here.” Scruffy reached for a file folder Rodney hadn’t noticed wedged under his thigh, taking out a leaf of 8 x 10 paper with a carefully typed table and printed categories that looked official and important. He braced it against his unoccupied thigh and bisected it in a clean fold without hesitation or apparent regret. “Best time to do this? Mid April. They’ll be a lot of papers on your parents desk. Trust me. Now, here’s the first fold. So, you take this one, and then I’ll -- ”
Scruffy began to move through the folds of a complex paper airplane, letting the child mimic his movements.
Watching this, Rodney said, “Oh god, you don’t like children do you?”
The boy froze.
“You know,” Scruffy said, without looking up from his folding. “I bet once upon a time, you drooled on your mom’s lap too.” He tapped the boy’s elbow with his knuckle. “Hey, like this, see?” and the child relaxed, finishing the fold of the plane’s nose.
“I’ll grant the obvious necessity of their existence when it comes to continuing the species, but I don’t have to remember it fondly.”
Except fondly was exactly the word Rodney might use to describe the look Scruffy was giving the boy and his inexpert folds. Rodney sat down with a huff. Scruffy dug two paper clips out of his pocket for the front of the planes, and the boy took off with a paper jet in either hand. Rodney grudgingly admitted that Scruffy was not an incompetent paper plane engineer and they might, possibly, fly in a passable manner.
“They’re not bad.” Scruffy looked up with a reluctant grin. “And they’re pretty good at flying with their feet on the ground.”
Rodney gestured exasperatedly. “Look, you’re obviously impaired -- but that means pretty good at not actually flying.”
Scruffy rolled his eyes, straightening out of the slouch he’d been sitting in even while teaching the boy to fold a paper jet. Rodney noticed that he moved his left leg awkwardly, though he hadn’t seemed to limp so strongly last night, even reaching down with his hand to arrange it into part of his new respectable pose. He pulled the cane from the back of the bench and set it between his feet, his palm on the handle cocked jauntily forward like someone Rodney might expect to see in a British period piece or Mary Poppins.
“God,” Rodney said in disgust because it was not charming, and flopped down onto the bench.
Scruffy watched this curiously, finally asking, “Had some luck with your person search?” His voice was a sort of hoarse, hollow twang rather than deep or rich and Rodney was embarrassed about how much he liked it.
“What? Are you -- yes, the waking hours I since I last saw you total maybe half a day, but I’ve already canvassed the entire town and cataloged the dark secrets of its inhabitants.”
“You could,” Scruffy coughed, fingering the handle of his cane, “try the publisher. I think it’s up, you know, around here.” He spoke reluctantly, like it had to be dragged out of him, except of course he was volunteering the information.
“Good. Brilliant. That might have been legitimately helpful advice if I hadn’t done just that this morning. I already know she can barely stand to let me in the front door.”
Scruffy shrugged. His crooked nose actually appeared have an aristocratic sort of bent from this side. “Not even when you explained you were trying to recruit one of the minor characters for your top secret government project?”
“When did I tell you it was top secret?” Rodney asked sharply.
Scruffy threw up his hands in defense, laughing in disbelief. “You didn’t. I was joking.”
“Oh, well. Hmph. Thank you for the suggestion.”
“It’s just cuz I like you,” Scruffy said generously.
“Oh ha, and also, ha,” Rodney said. “Unfortunately I don’t grade for effort. Wait, where are you going?”
Scruffy pushed himself to his feet, leaning on the cane. “It’s noon, McKay. Lunchtime. You coming?”
“Oh. Well, I would hardly be a genius if I turned down food, would I?” Rodney agreed, happy with himself until Scruffy turned to the playground, cupping a hand around his mouth and hollering, “Yo! Brendan!” and the tiny boy with the paper airplanes peeled away from the pack toward them.
“What? Wait,” Rodney squeaked, “I distinctly remember a comment in which you indicated that it wasn’t yours! Why do we have to keep it?”
“Hello!” Brendan chirped brightly from somewhere near his hip. “Where are we going, Uncle John?”
And Rodney moaned, “Not another one.”
**
PART TWO.
Title: I Believe in Wishful Thinking
Author: Pentapus
Disclaimer: SGA not mine.
Notes: Small spoilers for "Phantoms". AU. McKay, Sheppard. Written for reel_sga with the prompt Theodora Goes Wild. Thanks to siriaeve and katelennon for reading it over, and to monanotlisa who read it over, and wrote me comment necking. That's a form of approval, right?
Summary: That’s ridiculous! You can’t publish anonymously in scientific journals.
Rodney was in the middle of laminating the last instructions at the table by the door when someone leaned over him, saying testily, “Your call’s gone through.”
“Quiet,” he hissed, running the rubber straightedge over the plastic. “This is a delicate process that requires -- ”
“I left the international dial-out instructions on your desk,” the voice continued. “We’re running the data from the abbreviated gate simulations, and I’m not actually your secretary.”
Rodney snorted. “Are you leaving tomorrow? Wading into the cesspool of idiots who’ve stalled themselves on basic math? No? Thank you for volunteering.”
“Basic math?”
Rodney set the laminated page aside with the other four to be trimmed. When he straightened, back creaking, Dumais was staring bug-eyed at him from the doorway, slender arms crossed over her stomach and dark hair pulled back. She was normally a quiet person, but Rodney prided himself on breaking his scientists out of their shell.
“Dr. McKay--”
Rodney huffed. “Yes, phone, right, fine. I heard you the first time.” He dumped the finished pages into her arms, which she made the mistake of catching. “Trim these, would you? And send them to my address, but apartment 2C--nice woman, working in particle physics, has some half-way intelligent ideas for--well, hopefully, she won’t starve Penzias--hence the instructions, of course. Pretty too actually, with the hair and the -- I think she likes me -- ” and swept past her into his shared office.
His shared office. God, glaring failure aside, it would to be good to get back to someplace that appreciated him.
“I’m not -- ” Dumais started again futilely, but Rodney lifted the sleek, black desk phone off its hook, tuning her out.
“I’m coming back,” he said into the receiver. “There’s still no success with the Atlantis gate. Until we figure out the data compression, being here is pointless on levels you would not believe -- ”
“No, you are not,” said a voice he didn’t recognize, smoothly with a touch of Eastern Europe. “Look up new paper in Pompous Science.”
“All their material is crap,” Rodney snapped back automatically. “Why would -- look, who is this? Where’s Grodin?”
A pause. “Dr. Radek Zelenka, with engineering,” said the voice with a bit more deference, which told Rodney that he was a new guy, despite his knowledge of the proper title of Rodney’s least favorite journal. “You yourself admitted that not all of Pompous Science is absurd, yes? There was one -- ”
Rodney was already snapping his fingers frantically at Dumais, at her desk smoothing flyaway strands of dark hair behind her ear so casually she had to be deliberately ignoring him. “You! Hey!”
She looked up, brow furrowed unpleasantly, lips parting.
“No. Shut up; this is important. I need the new issue of Pompous Science, now.” Dumais stared at him blankly, and he let out a tortured sigh. “The American Journal of Mathematical Physics. Go!”
Dumais pushed off in her wheeled chair towards the communal bookshelf by the coffee makers. She ran her fingers over the narrow spines, selecting a slim, colorful issue with a skillful twist of her wrist. Rodney waved her over frantically, babbling into the phone, “I assume you’re telling me -- ”
“Yes, there is new one, follow up to the first.”
“Right, right,” Rodney said as Dumais came over, a pad and pencil tucked under her arm, spreading the journal open to the table of contents. Rodney jabbed a finger at the listing, and they both fumbled to flip to the right page. “After the first article, I highly doubt this -- oh. Oh my god -- this is -- have you -- ”
“Yes, yes, I have seen,” Zelenka agreed, impatient.
What is this? Dumais mouthed at him, tapping a fingernail against the glossy page of equations. Rodney waved a hand at her; he was too busy reading at breakneck spead -- getting halfway through before he lost the math (really, math was never why he got into physics in the first place) and starting over. Dumais was trailing her finger down the page from top to bottom, trying to follow the logic upside down.
“It’s all wrong,” Rodney said, awed, flipping slowly through the four page article.
“But a new and intriguing wrong,” said Zelenka, excitement thrumming under his even tone.
“There’s no way we can apply this inside a Lorentzian wormhole -- the time dilation -- ” He needed -- scratch paper, lots of scratch paper. He needed to go through these equations as soon as possible. He tried to turn the page, but Dumais pushed his hands away, turning back to the first, flipping open the pages of her yellow legal pad.
“Yes, yes,” Zelenka hummed impatiently.
“If we just tweak -- ” Rodney scrambled for a pen until Dumais pushed one into his hand. He flipped over Kavanagh’s latest self evaluation to scrawl accidentally implied wormhole dynamics across the shadows of self-importance (which should always be earned, Rodney felt).
What is this? Dumais mouthed at him again, bright-eyed, and Rodney felt a passing affection even if she were the type of theorist who thought philosophy had useful scientific applications.
“On the second page -- ” Zelenka said, no doubt with his own notes spread out before him.
“Who wrote this?” Rodney demanded, skipping ahead to the second lemma.
“You will love this: I have no idea.”
Dumais tapped her pen against his wrist. This is --
“What?” Rodney waved her off. “Someone new? Of course it is, but the name -- let me check -- ”
“Pen name, Dr. McKay. Anonymous. No one knows.”
"What? The first one too?"
"Yes."
“That's ridiculous! You can’t publish anonymously in scientific journals! I want this author!”
“Yes,” Zelenka agreed. “So you must get him for us while you are still on the correct continent.”
Rodney’s pen stuttered to a stop halfway through an integral curve. “Please, just call -- do you know what I am in the middle of -- ”
Dumais burst into audible speech, “This is the problem Park discovered during the gate calibration -- ”
“Yes, obviously!” Rodney snapped, rethinking any warm thoughts he might have been aiming in her direction.
“What?” said Zelenka.
“Not you, I was -- ” Rodney made a flighty gesture wasted on Ze-whathisface. “Why haven’t you talked to Pompous Science?”
“We have tried. They will give us nothing. Someone must go in person and find him.”
Rodney hated recruiting. He hoped Zelenka wasn’t going to start hinting in his direction with completely irrelevant arguments about Antarctica being on the other side of the globe. “It could be a her,” he protested weakly, doodling shapeless loops in the corner of the yellow page.
For a beat, Zelenka didn’t answer, trying to recover the thread of conversation; the shapeless loops evolved into part of a Dalek’s knobby shell. Then, in exasperation, “And she will be all long legs, all needing to pass on genes, yes? Perhaps you would reconsider going yourself in that case. Do not blame me for your language’s inadequate pronouns.”
“Oh yes, we have such gender issues, as opposed to say, all those languages where I need to remember the gender of a table.”
Zelenka ignored him. “Simpson’s flight will route through Los Angeles where she will talk to this editor and be very terrifying but also accommodating, yes?” Rodney felt a sympathetic chill. “Perhaps she will find you your mail order mathematician. Remember to invite me to the wedding; I hope there will be lobster. Good bye!”
“Wait! Zellunka, you dirty bastard!”
**
Yesterday:
“Tell me again what went wrong,” Elizabeth said from the speaker phone in Carter’s office.
“There was a problem with the receiving gate,” he told her, flipping a USB memory key between his fingers with each circuit of the tiny space before the desk.
“But Dr. Jackson’s address was correct,” Elizabeth repeated. “If the problem was with Atlantis’ gate -- ”
“No. We’ve been over this. Elizabeth -- " Rodney gestured ineffectively at the phone on the desk, hands spread wide. “I can’t confirm Wonderboy’s gate address because the gate didn’t connect. I’ve got -- oh, you know, the french girl and Park and Hoggle looking at the data, but without a connection....”
“My name is Vogel,” Vogel said. “And there was a connection.”
“Rodney?” Elizabeth said hopefully.
“Fine. There was a connection,” Rodney corrected himself. “Jackson’s address appears to be viable, but not necessarily -- look, the reason stargate wormholes transmit objects in one piece is that the receiving gate stores all incoming matter as an electrical signal until a complete transfer occurs.” He took a breath. “Atlantis’ gate didn’t initiate the data storage program and the wormhole --
“A wormhole that’s safe for people to walk through,” Dumais said without looking up from the laptop on the desk.
“ -- didn’t form. Yes, thank you. It’s possible the hardware is intact, and Atlantis’ gate merely failed to initiate the process. If that’s true, we might be able to do it manually by sending an artificial cue, but we don’t have the power for the kind of trial and error that would require.”
“Bottom-line, Rodney. Where are we?” The disappointment behind his explanation must have been clear, because her voice had gone cold and flat.
“If we walk through the gate without the Ancient safety measures functioning? Dead.”
“Really dead,” Dumais added.
“Scrambled and in pieces,” Vogel added, “on a molecular level.”
“Yes, thank you,” Rodney snapped, glaring at the ceiling.
“What’s the solution, Rodney?” Elizabeth said.
“The solution? Are you kidding me? The solution is recreating the Ancients’ understanding of matter’s interaction with a wormhole from the ground up -- which, hello, Grodin’s been trying to do, and I know he’s not me, but frankly -- ”
“Do it,” Elizabeth said with an air of finality. “I want you back here working on this, starting yesterday.”
“Obviously,” Rodney said, like he’d even needed to be told, and cut the connection.
**
Today:
Dumais swung in, hanging between the doorjamb and the knob. “Simpson just got in,” and swung out again.
“Right, right,” Rodney said absently. Across the desk, Park lifted his head blearily, muttering in Korean, a bic pen stuck to his cheek.
“What?” Rodney asked irritably because the only Korean words he knew were for ribs and pot stickers. “Dumais!”
“She is not your secretary,” Park slurred, rubbing his face and staring in surprise at the pen that fell off.
“So she says -- Dumais!”
He got Simpson instead, her North Face fleece still folded over her arm even though it was summer in Colorado.
“I stopped in L.A.,” Simpson said. “Straight to Musselman’s office at UCLA, and, get this -- ”
She leaned forward secretively, Park gravitating towards her in anticipation. Even Rodney fell forward a little, though he’d never admit it, or possibly he’d blame it on sleep deprivation or her blonde hair.
“ -- the article was peer reviewed, as all our submissions are. This is what he says to me, as if that’s some sort of excuse, as if that kind of anonymity isn’t antithetical to the spirit of scientific progress -- ”
There were days when Rodney sort of liked Simpson. Not that that kept him from --
“And?” he snapped. “Who is it, where is he, and/or when does he arrive?” He hadn’t slept in two days, as if he had any time for patience normally.
Simpson stared at him in disbelief.
Rodney groaned. “So, you’re telling me, you went in person to the den of stupidity -- and you didn’t get anything for it? Why did you come back?”
Simpson dropped her arms, letting her bags and the blue fleece slide to the floor with a thump. “Please, McKay, refusal to share information means nothing when you lock your office with a spring bolt lock and everyone in the country carries three credit cards.”
She tossed a manila file folder onto his keyboard. It tilted awkwardly on top of his hands, and sheets of Xeroxed correspondence slid out across the tabletop. Scratch that, Rodney decided, there were days when he really liked Simpson, and not just the days when she ‘accidentally’ spilled experimental space glue from the chemistry labs all over Kavanagh’s chair.
In the early days of the SGC, the recruiters had made the mistake of equating brilliance in the field of astrophysics with having any useful skills whatsoever, and had staffed a lab full of theorists whose concept of reality existed more in the math in their head than in any awareness of a whole planet outside their office. The experimentalists were only marginally better.
Rodney would never in his life recommend an interest in, say, hiking as beneficial to the practicing physicist. On the other hand, at age thirty six and about to travel to a different galaxy, he still valued the working model of an A bomb his science teacher had strongly encouraged him to abandon--read, had invested in stronger and stronger locks for the lab’s supply closet--over all of his research, undergraduate and graduate. In his years at the SGC, Rodney had done his best to make sure that the SGC attracted that sort of physicist, one that might, say, be of some use in practical matters. Such as annoying Kavanagh.
Rodney studied the open file. Both anonymous papers, it seemed, had been submitted by mail, with a P.O. Box for a return address and no other identification. Several weeks of snail mail correspondence had followed as the editors of Pompous Science had tried to explain to Mystery Author the same thing Rodney was only too happy to tell to anyone willing to listen: you don’t publish anonymously in scientific journals. Seriously, what’s the point?
Mystery Author had responded to the attempt to reason with him promptly (in three to five business days) with a pen name from one of the most infuriating pseudo-science movies ever made.
With that sort of an introduction, Rodney didn’t know why Musselman bothered reading the article at all, but someone obviously had and the beauty of the mathematics within must have been too great to resist. Three letters and two sarcastic pen names later, Musselman had sent the article off for peer review, this time under a name that was neither Marty McFly or James Tee or Buckaroo Bonzai. ‘Jed Waterbury’ was either as free of pop culture allusions as it looked or a reference to a movie that had slipped under the radar of Rodney’s latent masochism.
But beyond that -- “Wait, is this all there is?”
Simpson shrugged. “I suppose Musselman could have had McFly’s true identity locked up in the cabinet,” she said, “but the correspondence was such a smoking gun, I didn’t bother. Did you see who referred him?”
Rodney shuffled through the papers. “Someone from UW Madison? Kelly? What has he published, why haven’t I heard of him?”
Simpson’s smile was a dry smirk. “You haven’t heard of him because Dr. Malcolm Kendall is a highly respected, tenured professor of economics.”
Rodney stared at her.
“So I sent him an email. We’ll see how that works out.”
Rodney pressed the heels of his hands into his closed eyes. “Simpson, we just sent anemail to an economist to help us simulate matter-energy transformations across the space-time dilations of a Lorentzian wormhole. Yes, let’s hope for success -- or no, wait, I have a better idea: go downstairs. Try to convince Vogel and Dumais to come up with something that leaves me with all my limbs and a pulse at the end of it.”
“Ha,” Simpson said and left, which Rodney thought sounded like a pretty good summation of his week.
**
Simpson spent a day looking over the work Rodney’s miniscule SGC team had already accomplished (accomplished being a relative word, as it suggested actual accomplishments) before announcing that she wanted to be in Antarctica to personally supervise the recovery of the scarred crystals that housed the remains of the Ancient database, which, for some insane reason, had been left mostly in the hands of archaeologists. She seemed certain she could find the Ancient schematics for the design of the stargates -- why, Rodney wasn’t sure. No one else had been able to. He hadn’t been able to.
Rodney had told her to stop complaining and start checking his math, or Park’s math really--the guy was sort of sketchy--and had gone back to his room on-base with the half-formed thought of putting on a clean shirt. He found sitting on his small, utilitarian bedside table, instead of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, a shiny new paperback in lurid crimson, clear airport newsstand faire; it’s title sprawling across the red in sharp, ragged font: Theodora Goes Wild. And the subtitle crowded next to the leather-clad body builder bending buxom Theodora backwards over his thigh: She found a Den of Sin in a Paragon of Virtue.
Rodney went back to the lab without changing.
Park’s medical-staff-sort-of-girlfriend appeared early on day nine of Rodney’s Failed Attempt to Reach Ancient El Dorado, supposedly to see that Park was full up on his migraine prescription and to drop a few sickening remarks about his elegant hands. She didn’t get very far in her weird appendage fetish, brought up short by the sight of Rodney’s team huddled around their laptops, eyes fever-bright with 20 hour days, before she tentatively suggested that getting to Atlantis was not an emergency situation and that they would find it when they found it.
Wrist deep in high level mathematics, Rodney almost believed her until some moron lingering in the hall muttered, “If they find it.” In this case, realism was as malicious as spite, and Rodney perked right up, better than double shot espresso.
By lunchtime though, even vengeful rage was flagging and Dumais’ latest twist of theoretical brilliance had hit the same wall as all her others. Simpson stepped into the lab, clear-eyed with the jet lag that had her sleeping until noon -- prompting Rodney to choke on a power bar and whip out the eyesore of a paperback in revenge.
Park and Vogel and Dumais all blinked at him in confusion, and Simpson asked innocently, “Oh, Rodney, did you join a book club?”
“Ha!” Rodney scoffed, and licked his thumb defiantly. “Chapter two! Tired Innocence! The next day! The small park, green with summer foliage, which had only the night before been a shadowed background to her moonlit abandon!”
The funniest part about it was that Simpson kept waiting for him to stop. Or maybe it was that Rodney really meant to, it was just that -- well.
Maybe they had been working too hard and not really sleeping or possibly even eating so much as absorbing nutrients from the--rather ripe--air in the lab. And in those circumstances, once you started reading cheesy porn aloud to your colleagues it was very difficult to stop.
There was only so much genius-level theorizing you could do at a time, he consoled himself, smiling smugly at Simpson’s horrified face and trying to pretend that Dumais hadn’t been completely smitten with Theodora since two pages in and that bit with the tree house and the failed Broadway singer turned muscular construction worker.
“Wait,” Simpson said suddenly. “Why are you starting at chapter two?”
“Um, that’s -- “ Rodney protested feebly, “the author has was way with descriptions that are very, uh, rousing -- ” Simpson stared. “It’s very difficult to rest when your thoughts are occupied with the kind of advanced concepts that I deal with on a daily -- ”
“Oh my god,” Simpson said sincerely.
**
They passed the halfway mark on Rodney’s third turn, which was about the time Theodora discovered the secret sex cult among the local carnival employees, able to perform their daring sexploits beneath the cotton candy stand or high above the grounds in more-spacious-than-you’d-realize Ferris Wheel buckets.
For her next trick, Theodora, heretofore trapped in a small, respectable town, detoured to nearby Boston to fling herself into the sex-starved mass of students and faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- which would have been enjoyable enough on its own even if his audience hadn’t included one alum each of the MIT undergraduate and graduate programs, but at that point he reached the description of the lanky blonde man with the thick glasses and graceful wrists, and --
‘Oh,’ Theodora breathed in surprise--
Rodney paused to glare at Dumais who looked about to protest (again) Rodney’s refusal to make the sounds effects like Park did, which was actually extremely terrifying.
--in surprise. ‘I saw you at the club last night... Tiger.’
Underneath his horn-rims and freckles, Tiger blushed. The color illuminated his high, delicate cheekbones. ‘That’s not my real name, Miss Pushpop. It’s Jed--
Rodney stopped dead around the name. The rest of them, who had been taking their own turns reading, except for Vogel who’d been looking at Rodney like he was contagious, looked up slowly. They didn’t catch on until Rodney repeated the name incredulously.
“Wait,” Simpson said. “Is that...?”
“ -- the pen name of the anonymous author,” Dumais confirmed.
“Oh my god!” Rodney says. “Wait, am I delirious? Is this sleep deprived delirium?”
“Please, keep us out of your delusions, McKay,” Simpson said sincerely, just as Vogel burst out, “It’s a coincidence. No, we are not finding the answers to the mysteries of wormhole physics in pornography!”
“Is that better or worse than finding them in an economist?” Rodney asked at the same time Dumais exclaimed in protest. Next to her, Park mused in a sort of waking daze, chewing on the end of his mechanical pencil, “I find the characters very engaging.”
“Yes, fine,” Rodney agreed. “The only sane conclusion is that we are exaggerating the significance of a coincidence as a result of massive sleep deprivation. But, seriously, the character is a mathematician! There’s no way this is a common name! Is it possible -- ”
“Exaggeration,” Vogel assured him, pained.
Rodney stared at the book in his hands. “Maybe I should sleep,” and honestly considered it, except Dumais snatched up a discarded legal pad and said, “Wait, if you consider Wheeler’s original theory -- ” and Rodney forgot about it entirely.
**
He woke up with the edges of a keyboard pressed into his cheek, a cramp in his right calf and alarms going off all around him. Dumais was sleeping draped over her legal pads while Simpson messed around with the gate simulations on the bank of computers against the wall. With his feet propped on another chair, Park alternated between studying the display from over her shoulder and reading ahead in Theodora Goes Wild. From the doorway, Vogel said, “The Stargate is going to blow up.”
“If the stargate blows up, it will end all life on earth,” Rodney said automatically before his senses caught up with his brain, hands flailing. “Wait, wait, what -- why aren’t you up there? Why aren’t I up there? I need to get up there!”
“I know, I know,” Vogel said, slumping. “But the officer on duty sent me back down. We’re not regular employees of the SGC, and they say the situation is under control.”
“I’m a regular employee, and did I mention all life on earth -- !” Rodney bolted from the room, careening down the hall with a cramp in his leg.
He all but fell out of the elevator into two frantic airmen, who immediately tried to turn him around, but Rodney could pin words together faster than an auctioneer and throw three kinds of I.D. at them besides, and oh right, was about to save the world. So it wasn’t altogether difficult to bulldoze his way into the control room where the active wormhole was pulsing in a truly alarming fashion and some All-American Hero was saying, “Yeah, let’s avoid that,” to which Rodney had to respond: “You mean the end of all life on earth? Congratulations! Where’s this man’s medal! Of all the -- ”
“Christ, I don’t have the energy for you right now.” That was Carter, her voice chilly like an early trip through the stargate, and Rodney opened his mouth to agree with her -- but instead, Carter pointed at the airmen who had followed Rodney in and barked, “Get this man out of my gate room,” before pivoting back to the control displays without waiting to see her order carried out.
“What! You!” Rodney said. He had no idea what was going on, if it were Goa’uld or Replicators or someone new or no one at all. But maybe they weren’t lying about having it under control because by the time his escorts got him back to the computer lab with the rest of his team, the alarms had shut off and the red lights at the tunnel intersections were no longer flashing. The airman on the left, who was actually some kind of officer, reached up to tap his radio.
“They’ve given the all clear,” he told Rodney, right before he left him in the door of his lab, shell-shocked and sleep deprived.
An hour later, when Carter told him that gate travel would be suspended for at least the next several weeks while they repaired damage to the gate caused by some unpronounceable tribe of contrary Jaffa, Rodney decided to fly to Boston.
**
“Wait, seriously?” Simpson said. “Boston?”
“Landry didn’t understand why it would be a problem,” Rodney said. He threw up his hands. “An intergalactic expedition poised for departure! And he didn’t see why suspended gate travel would be a problem!”
“In all fairness -- ” Dumais started.
“Poised for departure!”
“Boston?” Simpson asked. She was holding Theodora Goes Wild in her hands, running her fingers over the raised letters of its title, looking dazed. “Rodney, you know even if there is a connection between the two, flying to Boston isn’t likely to--”
“Progress?” Rodney snapped.
Simpson paused. “How many fingers did you say the Anthropologists needed?”
“Boston,” Rodney concluded, grabbing the book and stuffing in his duffle. He felt only a little bit vindicated charging the last minute first class air fare to the SGC.
**
It helped that Lynnfield, MA was a real place. Otherwise he’d be stuck in Boston, wishing he was in New York and working on a laptop on which he couldn’t legally store anything actually useful with occasional glares in the direction of MIT’s criminally misinformed physics department.
Instead he rented a car, doubled checked his list of Theodora Goes Wild locations, which Dumais had color-coded in a scheme that Rodney feared corresponded to specific lewd acts and meant he’d never be able to look her in the face again, and headed for the suburbs.
He crossed the boundary of Lynnfield, MA around eight p.m., his rented Toyota jittering along the paved brick roads. It was good-sized town, forty-five minutes west and north of Boston with half a dozen square blocks of downtown lined with tall trees and green lawns and quaint brick store fronts. He passed a wooden sign next to city hall pointing him to Ardmore Park, which -- Rodney added to himself with a certain forbidden glee -- had only the night before been a shadowed background to her moonlit abandon.
All of a sudden, he desperately wanted to drive around the whole town and check off all the places on the list and maybe call up Dumais and Park to brag about it because they would be jealous--and then he caught himself smiling into space like an imbecile and thought about bashing his head against the steering wheel.
Still, the latent teenager part of his brain thought treacherously, it wasn’t like he had anything immediately better to do.
Because, like the anonymous article that had started the whole unbelievable business, the author of Theodora Goes Wild wrote under a pen name (“Lynn Field”--oh ha ha, subtle, Rodney thought), and the publisher was not willing to part with her identity.
Color him surprised.
No, the surprise had been the article in the New York Times, describing the uproar in small, quiet Lynnfield at the sudden appearance of a risqué romance novel glorifying an astonishing amount of illicit sexual fun taking place right in their little town, ranging from the truly vanilla affair with the singer-construction worker to the elaborate bondage club in the basement of the Lynnfield Community Center.
The content of the article was, in short, that Lynnfield’s Mayor (with the support of Lynnfield’s School Board) denied the existence of any such organizations so emphatically that if the interview had lasted a minute longer, he would probably have denied the existence of any sexual relations within Lynnfield whatsoever and perhaps provided the name of the firm that handled all the invitro.
In short, there was little Rodney could accomplish here tonight except to confirm the town’s existence, so he turned down Oak street towards the large wooden coffee cup jutting out above a green overhang. It was a small coffee shop, trapped like an afterthought between a bicycle repair shop and a garden supply. Its counter and two cramped tables took up as much space as all the impressive machinery of the modern Starbucksian coffee system.
Being a Thursday night, it was mostly deserted. The barista, young and curvy and honey blonde, stood behind to the register, bent over a slim paperback. Across from her on a stool at the counter sat the coffee shop’s only other occupant, a skinny, narrow man with dark, scruffy hair. Neither looked up as he came in.
“Ahem,” Rodney said.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” the girl protested with a groan. “That’s not fair at all!”
“Sort of the point,” drawled her companion, not sounding much like a New Englander. He sat with his elbows on the counter and shoulders hunched. Rodney could make out the sharp bones of his shoulder blades and the first few knobs of his spine underneath his dark shirt.
The girl rolled her eyes heavenward, sighing in a tiny sound that was a bit like a hiccup before turning to Rodney with a wide smile that would have seemed genuine if Rodney hadn’t just seen her engaged in some mysterious but sincere pursuit with Scruffy Hair Guy over there.
“Look, house coffee -- whichever, I don’t care -- black, large,” Rodney said, hands outlining a boxy space in front of him which he intended to be filled with coffee, soonest.
“Coming right up,” said the girl, turning away. Rodney drummed his fingers against his opposite forearm.
“Sure you don’t want any of the nine hundred and one things that could go in that cup of coffee, at your pleasure?”
The voice was slow and dry and pronounced “things” more like “thangs”, and Rodney realized belatedly that Scruffy had wheeled around on his stool, one arm propped next to his little book and the curve of an umbrella handle hanging off his knee. Rodney’s first impression of him -- from the front -- was something like Fox Mulder with a more evenly proportioned face. Except for his nose, which took a strange banana curve to the left.
“I suppose you prefer your cappuccino with a touch of almond,” Rodney said sarcastically.
“Nah,” the skinny man said, stretching the non-word out unnecessarily, “I usually just swing by for a nice cold glass of milk. Maybe a cookie.” He smirked, lifting a dark eyebrow in a smoky glance at the blonde barista who returned it from under her long lashes with a secretive smile.
“God, stop that!” Rodney snapped, disgusted. “Not that she isn’t ridiculously hot, what with the hair and the -- ” Rodney stopped himself before he could gesture incriminatingly. “She’s young enough to be your daughter!”
Both Barista Girl and Scruffy turned to stare at him, all round eyes and parted lips, and Rodney had a weird moment where he couldn’t decide which of them was more distracting. Then Scruffy’s expression went flat, and Rodney was left with his hand dangling in mid “ -- and breasts!” gesture while the barista set his coffee on the counter with more force than strictly necessary.
She said, “That’ll be $3.75,” but brightly. She added, with a smile: “That's less than five, sir. Three of the green ones with Washington on them, and the same again in coinage.” The register rang ominously.
Scruffy snorted and seemed to reach an internal decision, tension running out of his shoulders. His eyebrow went up again in a sort of facial shrug, drawing ahead of his jailbait girlfriend by at least half a point, and he turned with an exaggerated groan, as though from sore muscles, back to his little book. “So,” he continued too loudly, “you’re walking back to your car, but there’s no moon, you have no flashlight, and all the lights in the lot are off. How do you find your car?”
It was Rodney’s turn to stare. He felt only a little better to see the barista staring too.
“Maybe you’ve got a system,” Scruffy suggested obliviously, tapping a finger on the page. “You always park in the same place.”
“It’s someplace you go regularly?” the barista asked half-heartedly, eyeing Rodney.
“Or! Wait!” Scruffy waved a hand in such an upbeat gesture that it had to be forced. There was just no way. “Maybe you’ve got, say, some UV paint and -- ”
“What are you, double oh seven?” Rodney blurted. “Does the question even specify that it’s night? Who cares about lamp posts at noon?”
The two of them paused. Scruffy began flipping through the pages at the back of the book.
“Hey,” he said, surprised. “I think he’s right.”
“About something,” said the barista, turning away from the counter to run a cloth over already gleaming equipment.
“Look, I -- sorry about -- though really, I don’t see why you’re surprised -- ” Rodney clutched at the warmth of the coffee through the cardboard cup and bulldozed onwards, “Do you know where the nearest Holiday Inn Express is around here? You know, the one with the free breakfast?” He pointed over his shoulder. “Supposedly, it’s stored in the car GPS, but let me tell you, Hertz ‘Never Lost’ is a gross misnomer.”
“There’re a few out by Route One,” Scruffy said. “Take Lake St. east towards Ninety-Five, turn right on One. Don’t know if there’s an Express, but there’s a Holiday Inn.”
“Right, well, uh, thanks,” Rodney mumbled, backing up. “I’ll just uh -- head out.”
“How’d you get here anyway?” Scruffy broke in, leaning back with all his lazy poise returned. Rodney couldn’t shake the way it felt like he was being ignored. “It’d require a lot of wrong turns from Ninety-Five.”
“Well, I was trying to get here, actually, before I realized the futility of expecting anything, even science, to finally provide competent directions, and I’ll be back in the morning because -- hm. Well, here,” Rodney said, tugging the novel out of one pocket of his rain jacket.
Scruffy didn’t drop his lazy smile, but he let out a sharp breath through his teeth that was half sigh, half laugh.
“Oh no,” said the barista. “I should have known. I hate to break it to you -- ”
“Hey,” Scruffy said, flipping through Rodney’s copy, “is this annotated?” He paused to read a lengthy notation penciled into the margin. “Because that’s pretty dedicated. I kind of have to admire that level of perversion.”
“Um -- what?” Rodney said.
“I promise you," the barista continued with some exasperation, "no matter what some fictional account tells you, there is no bondage club in the basement of the community center or the police station or the backroom of the coffee shop. We barely have enough space for the room in front." She added earnestly, “I’m as disappointed as you are.”
“Christ, Marie, I don’t want to know that.”
“Well, maybe not quite as disappointed,” the barista revised, frowning at the annotated novel in Scruffy’s hands. Despite her self-assured confession, she was blushing, a wash of pink across her cheeks and the tips of her delicately shaped ears.
“Bondage club.” Scruffy squinted at her, then put up his hands, palms facing out. “No, no, I meant it -- no more info, please.”
Barista glared at him pinkly. “I’m going to blame it on your influence if Mom ever finds out.”
“God,” Scruffy sighed, rubbing a hand over his face, “she’ll believe it too.”
“Hello!” Rodney snapped, “Can we forget about your underage bondage romance for a second, and get back to where you have apparently concluded that I am on some sort of sexual perversion safari?”
“You’re not?” said the barista.
“No!”
“Wouldn’t be the first,” said Scruffy. “At least -- how many was it, Marie?”
“Three total. Two were this week,” said the barista. “And those were just the out of towners.”
“There you go! Three people have come in to ask Marie if she’s the girl with the paddle in chapter four.”
“It’s chapter five actually,” Rodney said primly, “and frankly, your descriptions don’t match at all so I don't see -- What! I am not a lecherous tourist! I am an astrophysicist!”
“...and everybody knows they don’t have sex,” said Scruffy.
"And a genius!"
"Oh they definitely don't."
“Look,” Rodney snatched up the book and shook it at him, “in this book is a character of exceptional mathematical skill -- the mathematics of which the author gets right, by the way -- whose unusual name just so happens to match an anonymous author of two -- two! -- very promising articles in a usually laughable academic publication. And,” Rodney announced grandly, “I am here to find him.” He eyed the barista, “Or her.”
Scruffy started laughing. Rodney thought he detected a note of disbelief.
“I’ve heard the explanations my brother comes up with for why he definitely, absolutely was not masturbating in the shower for forty-five minutes,” warned the barista, like that was supposed to mean something.
“How did you -- ?” Scruffy waved a finger between Rodney the book, chuckling. “I mean, connect the two.”
“A colleague brought it in. Curiously, the article in the New York Times claims the book was published only in the New England area by a local company,” Rodney admitted. “How Simpson got a hold of it flying from Auckland to L.A. to Denver is anybody’s guess.”
“Lucky,” Scruffy said deadpan.
“Yes, well, oh damn it, is it raining?” Rodney glared through the windows at the suddenly dark sky and the rain and nature in general.
“Well, I’m heading out,” Scruffy said. He flipped his book of lateral thinking puzzles shut, slipping it inside his jacket and reaching for the umbrella hanging off his knee.
“Oh, oh, good,” Rodney said. “I’ll share your umbrella,” and when Scruffy blinked at him in incomprehension, “Do you know how easily I catch cold? Did I mention that I am an employee of your government and that I daily make vital contributions to national security? Really, it’s in your best interest -- ”
“Hey now,” Scruffy said, “that’s not the problem at all.” And as if to demonstrate, he lifted the umbrella handle from his knee. When he drew it out from underneath the bar, Rodney saw that it was not an umbrella at all but a sturdy walking cane.
“Oh,” Rodney said, “Well, I -- ”
“See you later,” the barista told him, adding with special emphasis and an eye for Rodney, “Uncle John.”
“Oh my god,” Rodney shouted, “that’s even worse!”
“Come on, Tourist Pervert,” Scruffy said, with a rakish grin, “I’ll limp you to your car.”
In reality, Scruffy barely limped, though as a spectator Rodney couldn’t decide if that was because of a lack of severity of his injury (was it a permanent disability?) or because of the man’s deft hand with a cane. Rodney had never connected limping with skill and agility, but the whole maneuver was engrossing to watch, even with the rain dripping down his neck.
“Are you sure you’re not a touring pervert?” Scruffy asked suddenly. Rodney realized they were standing in front of his car. Or rather, Rodney was standing there staring at the man’s legs and not making a single move to get out of the rain.
“What! No!”
“You were just -- never mind. Do you have a name or should I just keep calling you... ”
“Rodney,” Rodney said immediately, and then recanted, “Doctor Rodney McKay. Dr. McKay. Um.”
Scruffy was looking at him oddly. “John,” Scruffy said, switching his cane to his left hand, and holding out his right. Rodney shook it awkwardly. John’s lips twitched in the direction of a smile. “There’s a town meeting tomorrow, five o’clock at city hall, if you’re set on looking for that author.” He nodded towards a building reminiscent of the Greek Parthenon at the far end of the street. His eyes got round and innocent. “Lots of knowledgeable people there to ask.”
Rodney’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Right. I’ll do that.”
“Good luck, Dr. McKay,” Scruffy called as Rodney climbed into his green Toyota and pulled away.
**
The next day, Rodney woke up at an absurdly late hour (nearly ten o’clock), barely made it to his free buffet breakfast where he tripped over his chair to escape the complimentary orange juice, and drove the forty minutes back to Boston to talk to the mid-sized publisher responsible for Theodora Goes Wild. In her small twelfth floor office, Ms. Field’s editor offered to forward any fan letters Rodney had, but would not divulge any information regarding the author’s identity.
Rodney groaned. At least she admitted it was a pen name.
“First of all,” Rodney said, “I am not a fan. Ok, possibly, in the sense that I can admire a certain descriptive skill -- ” he stopped with an impatient grimace. “Second of all, I am not a pathetic fan. So, no, I am not here to stalk your strange and bashful client, except in the sense of offering future, gainful employment.” He glared expectantly.
The editor stared back. Rodney narrowed his eyes.
“Why,” the editor asked carefully, but not at all like she was folding, “do you want to offer my strange and bashful client gainful employment?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake! I work for the defense department. You do not have to worry about the U.S. military trying to steal your author as part of an effort to subsidize romance novels for its troops!”
Rodney waited.
“I would be happy to forward your fan letters on to my client,” said the editor again in her friendly, immovable manner.
“Aaargh!” Rodney said and stalked out.
He seriously contemplated sending a ‘fan letter’ -- with an invisible hybrid Asgaard/Ancient tracking device included. He hadn’t told her that he definitely wouldn’t send one -- okay he sort of had -- and when he returned to his hotel, he printed out the basic SGC recruitment letter, the one that didn’t contain any useful or interesting information at all except the letterhead of the U.S. Armed Forces. In the end, he didn’t include the tracker, which, he admitted privately, was less because of any moral high ground and more because he hadn’t actually designed it yet -- one of the disadvantages of impulsive side trips and hasty packing.
So naturally, he drove back to Lynnfield and circled the downtown like a shark -- slow, lazy laps to keep the wisps of tranquil suburbia moving over his gills.
Friday noon was still a weekday in the kind of town where most adults commuted far, far away to make their money, but it was also summer and bright and so Ardmore park across the street teemed with a distressing number of children and their caretakers. Rodney derailed in the middle of plotting a course around the snot-soaked mud magnets when he spotted a half-familiar figure on a bench by the playground, wooden cane hanging off the back. Rather than circle around the far side of the park, he found himself parking and stalking across the grass.
“You!” Rodney could see the man stretched haphazardly over the bench, legs kicked out, his face tilted to the sky. He was wearing an olive green polo shirt and worn jeans and his hair, if anything, was even more of a mess than it had been in the coffee shop last night. At Rodney’s shout, he rolled his head to the side, eyes opening. They were pale in the sunlight and the same muted green as his shirt.
“Me,” he said cautiously with an innocuous smile, squinting at the sun that had emerged from the clouds behind Rodney’s head. The bland look turned into recognition, his mouth open in surprise, and he sat up. “Hey, you’re the angry sex tourist!”
“Your wit. It wounds me.” On the playground, a huddle of children burst apart like a firework. Out of the chaos, a dark haired boy stumbled towards them, skinny with a familiar, mindless smile. Rodney had a sudden, horrified thought.
“McKay, right?” Scruffy was saying, and, “Did you make it to the -- oof!” when the boy ran straight into his knee. Scruffy ruffled his hair in a friendly greeting. “Hey, buddy. What’s up?”
“Show me how to make the, the,” the kid babbled breathlessly, leaning over Scruffy’s thigh and kicking his feet. He finished mournfully, “I lost mine in the tree.”
“Oh, sure. Here.” Scruffy reached for a file folder Rodney hadn’t noticed wedged under his thigh, taking out a leaf of 8 x 10 paper with a carefully typed table and printed categories that looked official and important. He braced it against his unoccupied thigh and bisected it in a clean fold without hesitation or apparent regret. “Best time to do this? Mid April. They’ll be a lot of papers on your parents desk. Trust me. Now, here’s the first fold. So, you take this one, and then I’ll -- ”
Scruffy began to move through the folds of a complex paper airplane, letting the child mimic his movements.
Watching this, Rodney said, “Oh god, you don’t like children do you?”
The boy froze.
“You know,” Scruffy said, without looking up from his folding. “I bet once upon a time, you drooled on your mom’s lap too.” He tapped the boy’s elbow with his knuckle. “Hey, like this, see?” and the child relaxed, finishing the fold of the plane’s nose.
“I’ll grant the obvious necessity of their existence when it comes to continuing the species, but I don’t have to remember it fondly.”
Except fondly was exactly the word Rodney might use to describe the look Scruffy was giving the boy and his inexpert folds. Rodney sat down with a huff. Scruffy dug two paper clips out of his pocket for the front of the planes, and the boy took off with a paper jet in either hand. Rodney grudgingly admitted that Scruffy was not an incompetent paper plane engineer and they might, possibly, fly in a passable manner.
“They’re not bad.” Scruffy looked up with a reluctant grin. “And they’re pretty good at flying with their feet on the ground.”
Rodney gestured exasperatedly. “Look, you’re obviously impaired -- but that means pretty good at not actually flying.”
Scruffy rolled his eyes, straightening out of the slouch he’d been sitting in even while teaching the boy to fold a paper jet. Rodney noticed that he moved his left leg awkwardly, though he hadn’t seemed to limp so strongly last night, even reaching down with his hand to arrange it into part of his new respectable pose. He pulled the cane from the back of the bench and set it between his feet, his palm on the handle cocked jauntily forward like someone Rodney might expect to see in a British period piece or Mary Poppins.
“God,” Rodney said in disgust because it was not charming, and flopped down onto the bench.
Scruffy watched this curiously, finally asking, “Had some luck with your person search?” His voice was a sort of hoarse, hollow twang rather than deep or rich and Rodney was embarrassed about how much he liked it.
“What? Are you -- yes, the waking hours I since I last saw you total maybe half a day, but I’ve already canvassed the entire town and cataloged the dark secrets of its inhabitants.”
“You could,” Scruffy coughed, fingering the handle of his cane, “try the publisher. I think it’s up, you know, around here.” He spoke reluctantly, like it had to be dragged out of him, except of course he was volunteering the information.
“Good. Brilliant. That might have been legitimately helpful advice if I hadn’t done just that this morning. I already know she can barely stand to let me in the front door.”
Scruffy shrugged. His crooked nose actually appeared have an aristocratic sort of bent from this side. “Not even when you explained you were trying to recruit one of the minor characters for your top secret government project?”
“When did I tell you it was top secret?” Rodney asked sharply.
Scruffy threw up his hands in defense, laughing in disbelief. “You didn’t. I was joking.”
“Oh, well. Hmph. Thank you for the suggestion.”
“It’s just cuz I like you,” Scruffy said generously.
“Oh ha, and also, ha,” Rodney said. “Unfortunately I don’t grade for effort. Wait, where are you going?”
Scruffy pushed himself to his feet, leaning on the cane. “It’s noon, McKay. Lunchtime. You coming?”
“Oh. Well, I would hardly be a genius if I turned down food, would I?” Rodney agreed, happy with himself until Scruffy turned to the playground, cupping a hand around his mouth and hollering, “Yo! Brendan!” and the tiny boy with the paper airplanes peeled away from the pack toward them.
“What? Wait,” Rodney squeaked, “I distinctly remember a comment in which you indicated that it wasn’t yours! Why do we have to keep it?”
“Hello!” Brendan chirped brightly from somewhere near his hip. “Where are we going, Uncle John?”
And Rodney moaned, “Not another one.”
**
PART TWO.