"Yeah." He didn't say what he surely must have been thinking: since the structure was little more than a ruin now, there was no guarantee that a working dialer still existed. "Let's start our search over here."
They paced off a rough grid in order to ensure that they wouldn't overlook any areas. Nearby trees donated medium-sized branches to the cause; after a section of debris-strewn ground had been thoroughly searched, the pair stabbed a branch into the dirt in each of the section's four corners to mark its boundaries.
Hours passed while they combed through the wreckage, clearing tangled vines and mosses away from any surface that did not look naturally formed. Ronon took charge of moving the largest pieces, but both felt the strain. On occasion a smooth, curved piece of metal would snare their attention, only to raise false hopes.
With each branch placed, Teyla's dread became more acute. Often, out of increasing desperation more than anything else, they would err in their measurements and allow the sections to overlap so that they searched some areas more than once. All of it was to no avail.
The sun inched closer to the mountains. Ronon sat down hard, wiping sweat from his brow onto his sleeve. Resigned, he shook his head. "If there ever was a dialer in that building," he said, "there's nothing left of it now."
Teyla closed her eyes, unable to ward off the despair any longer. Without a device to dial the gate, and with no way to even identify their location, they were stranded.
"I appreciate you finally gracing us with your pres„ence.
"Keep your shirt on, Rodney. Janczyk's on his way with the scanner." Carson glanced around the laboratory as he entered. He rarely had cause to visit many of the areas Rodney's team had devoted to Ancient technology research; his skills were required chiefly when someone touched something they shouldn't have. The directed energy lab was more austere than most. Other sci ence sub-teams had personalized their respective labs with posters and photos from home. No such individual touches were visible in this room-only intimidating machinery separated by bulky metal and polymer shields, along with a neatly hand-lettered sign that read `Don't screw up.
Charming.
"You've got the sample in the airlock chamber?" Carson asked.
With an impatient gaze cast toward the ceiling, Rodney answered, "Yes, although the airlock feature itself is not of great use to us, since energy of this form can be transmitted through many types of solid boundaries. It's a wave, put plainly, not altogether different from a sound wave. Though I'd rather blast hip-hop music through my skull at top volume than hang around this stuff too long. Our somewhat optimistic theory is that the chamber's protective shielding will block enough of it to allow us to take some measurements before we start to forget why we're here."
"Are all physicists as naturally cheerful as you are, Rodney?"
Focused on initializing a machine that resembled an oscilloscope, Rodney frowned distractedly. "What?"
"Forget it." Carson turned as the lab door opened and Janczyk wheeled in a diagnostic imaging scanner, Earth-made because of the interference adarite induced in Ancient technology. "Jan, there's room for that over here."
As Janczyk wheeled the scanner past him, Rodney paused, and Carson could almost see the wheels turning in the scientist's head. Rodney never seemed to know how to act around Janczyk. He might have been one of the more socially awkward members of the expedition, but in this particular case he was hardly alone.
Before becoming one of Carson's more diligent research assistants, Karl Jancyzk had been a lance corporal in Atlantis's Marine detachment. He'd been in the city about a year when an off-world encounter with a Wraith had accelerated his twenty-two-year-old body to the physical age of almost seventy. The quick actions of his teammates had allowed him to become one of the few people to survive a feeding.
With only the barest notion of how the Wraith feeding process worked, Carson had despised the fact that he could do nothing to give the man back his stolen youth, so he'd listened when Jan confessed his dread of returning to Earth. The military had planned to give him a new identity to match his apparent age, and security concerns would have prevented him from reuniting with his family. Instead, Carson had suggested that he be retrained and allowed to stay in Atlantis. Colonel Sheppard had pulled up Jan's personnel file and noted his high test scores in the biological sciences, and Jan readily accepted Carson's offer of a research post.
The Marines, to their credit, still counted him as one of their own, and everyone had seen far stranger things in their time with the Stargate program. Even so, it couldn't be easy for a man not long out of high school to look and feel twenty years older than anyone else in the city, to say nothing of the mortality questions that must have blindsided him. One of Pegasus's everyday injustices.
The equipment was readied, and immediately a faint vibration could be detected on the pseudo-oscilloscope.
"Does that frequency happen to ring a bell?" Rodney asked. "No pun intended."
"Funny." Carson studied the readout. "It's in a harmonic range that could certainly be disruptive to neurological function. Neurons fire in specific patterns; in the hippocampus they fire almost in circular chains. If the adarite emits a wave that's on exactly the right frequency-or, rather, the wrong one-it's possible that it could un-sync that pattern and prevent the transmission of signals to other parts of the brain."
"And what a lovely thought that is." Rodney reached for the airlock chamber control pad. "I'm going to increase the pressure in the chamber to confirm whether or not this frequency is related to the energy discharge."
"Don't take it up too far," Carson warned. "This material is incredibly powerful."
"Thank you, Sherlock. I thought I'd just kick it up to three atmospheres and see if our brains short-circuited." Glaring derisively, Rodney tapped out a command on the keypad. "Increasing to 1.2 atmospheres."
Almost instantly, a spark lit the chamber, and the readings on the screen spiked. Rodney swore under his breath and brought the pressure back to one standard atmosphere. "Well, that was conclusive. The release of energy is correlated with the output of this frequency."
"So if we found a way to dampen the frequency, the adarite would no longer produce any power."
"Infuriatingly, yes."
A mild clatter sounded behind them. Carson turned to see Janczyk backed up against a shelving unit, holding his head in his hands. "Jan?"
It took two more calls before his assistant glanced up, confusion clouding his eyes. "Sony, Dr. Beckett. I just, uh, got this wicked headache all of a sudden."
"Did it coincide with the energy spike?" At Jan's blank expression, Carson traded a look of alarm with Rodney. "Jan, do you remember seeing Rodney increase the chamber pressure a minute ago?"
The ensuing silence spurred Rodney into action. "The chamber's shielding isn't effective," he deduced, slamming a thick metal cover down on the transparent lid of the chamber. "We just smacked ourselves with a level of brain-scrambling energy that was magnitudes higher than what Radek and Wen received."
"Infirmary. Now." Carson grabbed Jan's arm and steered him out into the corridor. Following close on their heels, Rodney locked the lab door behind them.
As soon as the trio arrived in the infirmary, Carson directed Jan onto the scanner bed, trying not to get ahead of himself. He didn't feel any different than he had earlier. Maybe there was more at work here than they yet realized.
Rodney paced the room, clenching and unclenching his fists at his sides. "I can't believe I was shortsighted enough to subject myself to that risk," he fretted. "What if I just destroyed my memories of my entire postdoctoral year? The loss to quantum mechanics research alone-"