“It’s a lot more basic. This isn’t their nuclear power plant, it’s their camping equipment. It beams down and—” He pointed out the locking seams between pieces of equipment. “—snaps together. Turn it on, plug it into a water source, and you get a comfortable atmosphere. There are probably some kind of controls for adjusting the temperature to suit you.”
“‘Do not adjust settings.’”
“You don’t have to tell me. But… okay, so I’ve worked in some places where people had fights over the thermostat.”
“The SGC, for one.”
“At Area 51 they ended up putting a lock on the air conditioning controls. Although you could open it with a paper clip if you really never mind that. My point is, does it make sense to build an air conditioner and then warn your end users not to adjust the temperature?”
“For the Asgard it might,” Daniel said. “They tend to be pretty sure that there are right ways and wrong ways to do things. The device might not need setting if it was already preset to adjust the temperature to whatever its designers felt was ideal for Asgard health and comfort.”
“So I wonder what the other settings do?”
“Adjust other aspects of the climate to some ideal? Either on a local level or… this power cell would have been serious overkill for running your basic window air conditioner. And this is the Asgard we’re talking about. They could probably affect the entire planet’s climate if they wanted to.”
“Yep,” Daniel said. He took another step back from the machine. “We’ve seen a device that could control the climate on a planetary scale before, although it wasn’t Asgard. The NID grabbed it and brought it back to Earth. That turned out… badly.”
“We can deactivate it,” Rodney said. “I’m pretty sure this is the auxiliary power pack.”
“How sure?”
“Considering the amount of time I’ve spent studying Asgard power generation systems, actually fairly sure.” He pulled the power pack out, and was rewarded by feeling the flow of air through the machine stop.
“So what have we got?” John said, coming halfway down the stairs and looking skeptically at the machine.
“Weather control device,” Rodney said.
“You think it might be a weather control device,” Daniel said.
“All right, it’s a local climate control device that, given it’s designed to have enough power run through it to air condition the Sahara Desert, looks to me a lot like a weather control device. I’ve deactivated it so we can take at least part of it home to study without any chance of making the rotten weather on our new planet any worse.”
“The weather’s not that bad.”
“Are you kidding? The city stays so cold these days that I have to wear three pairs of socks just to feel my feet.”
“My quarters aren’t cold,” John said.
“The city likes you.”
“There’s a small problem with taking this thing back to Atlantis,” John said. “If you’re sure you’ve deactivated it—”
“I’ve seen all that I want to see of attempts to control the weather gone very wrong,” Rodney said. “If I say it’s deactivated, it’s deactivated. Believe me when I say that working in the Pegasus galaxy has given me a lot of practice in how to turn things off.”
“It’s not going to fit in the jumper. In fact, I’m pretty sure the jumper would fit in that thing.”
“We’re going to have to take it apart. I’m pretty sure it’s designed to come apart in pieces. Maybe not exactly easy pieces to get up the stairs, but that’s what we have you and Ronon for, right?”
“Those pieces are the size of refrigerators,” John said.
“Hey, it’s not my fault that the Asgard probably beamed it down here.”
“You’re going to help carry it.”
“I’d like to finish documenting the find before you take the whole thing apart and start experimenting on it,” Daniel said.
“Finish up,” John said. “I’ll go get the jumper. At least we can park it close enough that we don’t have to hike.”
Rodney looked at Daniel as Sheppard’s footsteps receded upstairs. “Not going to argue that he shouldn’t land the jumper on the archaeological site?”
“I think the huge brush fire probably killed any chances of finding something just lying around on the surface,” Daniel said. He sat on his heels to investigate another panel covered in Asgard writing.
It grated on Rodney’s nerves. “You know, the brush fire wasn’t our fault. Blame that on the terrifying bird creatures that tried to set us on fire so they could roast us and eat us.”
Daniel looked up at him over the rim of his glasses. “Did I say that the brush fire was your fault?”
“No, of course you didn’t say that.” He examined the machinery, trying to identify a chunk of it that would be reasonably practical to remove. It was possible that they were going to have to leave the biggest pieces of the machinery in place, but the idea of not being able to study them without returning to a remote site full of homicidal ostriches who set things on fire was unattractive.
“I have to ask. What is your actual problem with me?” Daniel asked conversationally after a while.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah. Is it just… see, I don’t even actually know. Because being professionally jealous of me—”
“I am not professionally jealous of you.”
“See, I know you’re not, because what I do is so completely unrelated to what you do that it would be like me being jealous of Ronon. It’s not like you want to be the world’s best archaeologist.”
“Please, archaeology isn’t even a real science.”
“I’m not even touching that one right now. You’re not still bitter about the time Sam got you sent to Siberia, are you? Because that was her, you know well, her and General Hammond, not me.”
“I’m not still bitter. I was never bitter, it was a very productive opportunity to learn about naquadah power systems.”
“I just thought that since you don’t like the cold… ”
“And Sam has really come to appreciate me. You know, after her initial desperate crush turned into a more collegial respect.”
“Right.”
Rodney could hear the skepticism in his voice, and he didn’t think it was just for the idea that Sam was pining after Rodney. It stung unreasonably much. He’d put a lot of distance and time between him and the guy he’d been before he went to Atlantis. He understood all too well why people hadn’t liked that guy, but he’d also put distance and time between himself and most of the people who’d only ever known that guy.
“Let’s just figure out the best way to take this thing apart,” he said.
Daniel shook his head. “Fine, let’s do that.”
“Come in, Ms. Weir.”
Elizabeth took a deep breath and pushed open the door of the senator’s office in the Dirksen Building. It was very seventies, with orange carpet and bucket chairs, which seemed behind the times in this brave new world. The Cold War was over and even the New York Times had proclaimed the End of History.
But for her it was a beginning, a highly competitive internship on the Hill with the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the first ten weeks she’d done the usual things — answering the phone when irate constituents called, stuffing envelopes, printing name tags for various events. She’d gone to committee hearings, standing among the other young people in their black suits listening to testimony which, for the most part, was unenlightening. She’d eaten in the Senate cafeteria and once she’d seen Senator Kennedy looking just like he did on TV. Oh, and she’d checked in Tipper Gore at a luncheon and had refrained from saying a word about rock music lyrics.