These days he no longer remembered when exactly he'd decided to confine his expectations to explaining the seemingly unsolvable puzzle. Nothing they'd tried, none of the bright ideas he and the team had cooked up over the years, had had any effect. Still they'd never stopped trying. What had continued to spur them on was one simple fact, based on the laws of probability; with every failed attempt their chances of succeeding the next time increased. And that was what drove Selena.
As he looked over at her, he noticed for the first time that most of her unruly mop of hair had escaped the chignon at the back of her neck and flared around her face like a gray, curly halo. Her lab coat was rumpled, and fatigue had blotted shadows under her eyes and carved her crow's feet into deep, angry lines.
"You look terrible," he said, smiling.
"Have you looked at yourself lately?"
He hadn't, but he supposed it didn't take too much imagination to get the picture. At least her coat was only rumpled. His was stained with what had to be at least a gallon of coffee. Though that nicely covered those blotches of grease, leftovers from a meal he couldn't even recall eating.
"This last batch of readings looks interesting. It suggests a temporal not a spatial phenomenon," she offered. "I have to stick with it. Maybe-"
"Show me then." He crossed the room and flung himself into a chair next to her.
It wasn't what she'd expected, and it triggered a frown. "Radek, you can't stay here. You're the only one who stands a reasonable chance of making this work."
Still confident, even after all these years of futility.
"That's exactly why I need to stay," he replied. "Even though, personally, I feel you may be overestimating my capabilities. Show me what you've got."
She brought up the latest figures. They had installed sensors all around the gate to measure abnormalities in the energy flux. Each time they'd dialed the readings had been nominal, indicating that there was nothing wrong with the gate itself. Then, over the past ten days or so they'd occasionally registered energy spikes while the Stargate was supposedly dormant. In each instance, the spikes lasted for the average duration of an intragalactic gate journey and they had always shown exactly the same characteristics. If nothing else, it had confirmed Radek's longstanding suspicion that it had to be the system that was faulty. It also suggested that, somehow, the gates remained interconnected even when they weren't active. Unfortunately, fascinating though the observation was, it also remained completely useless unless they could figure out what it meant. If they figured it out in time, they might save the lives of everybody who had fled into the hills.
As if the planet or fate or Charybdis were laughing at the mere thought of this possibility, a new tremor slammed into the lab. Selena's chair toppled, spilling her under the desk, and Radek flung himself over her, partly to protect her, partly to seek cover from the rain of mortar, tiles, fittings, and other junk that burst from the torn ceiling. That sole, steadfast window pane gave in at last and sent a shower of shards sailing across the lab. Everywhere in the building alarms went off, only this time there was nobody left to silence them. The klaxons barely contrived to add to the noise that seemed to turn the air solid.
To Radek it sounded as though the planet itself was groaning-and perhaps it was; for reasons unknown Lantea was expanding, rapidly, straining at the seams, its continents just about ready to pop off the surface of the doomed planet. All scientific analysis of the problem basically read like the diagnosis of a monumental case of gas.
The notion of a planet suffering from indigestion made him chuckle, though neither their current predicament nor the pre dicted end result were funny in the slightest. Lantea would simply fly apart, and sooner rather than later.
Finally, the shaking stopped but instead of the leaden postshock silence-so profound that you could hear the dust rustle through the air-now there was the unchecked wailing of the klaxons. Of all the pointless noises…
Beneath him, Selena stirred and gave a groan loud enough to be heard over the racket. "Get off me," she yelped. "I can't breathe!"
"Sorry"" He rolled off her, crawled out from under the desk and rose to survey the damage.
The holographic projector had been knocked out this time, obliterating that entirely redundant simulation of the rate at which the planet expanded. Sadly, Radek's glee at finally finding something useless destroyed wasn't meant to last. Selena's computer terminal was dead, too, and the readings, which he'd never had a chance to study properly were gone. Instead of figures, her holo-screen showed a multicolored fizz of static.
"Oh damn!" Selena had climbed to her feet behind him and stared at her ruined terminal. She was bleeding from a cut above her eyebrow, and the crimson trail of blood had painted a stark pattern into the mortar dust that caked her face.
"K certu!" Radek echoed glumly, his voice struggling for audibility under the screech of the alarms.
The chunk of masonry that had destroyed the terminal had also diminished their last chance, however insignificant, to get the gate to work and save all those people who had flooded into the hills like lemmings. And they still kept coming.
Ironically, the only piece of lab equipment still working was a bank of monitor screens that showed constant surveillance images of the Stargate and the area surrounding it, which was fast getting choked with refugees, all terrified, all desperate to escape. A whole throng of people had gathered under the awning that protected the dialing console and some clearly knew enough to be aware of what the device was supposed to be doing. Which was the extent of their knowledge. A dozen hands at once frantically-and randomly-pushed glyphs, while some impatient or frustrated souls kicked at the base of the console. One of them was attempting to pry open a maintenance hatch. If he succeeded, the mob was bound to pull out the crystals and destroy the device.
Radek supposed he should get worried or try to contact the authorities in a vain effort to dispatch someone to stop these people. But what difference would it make? Selena seemed to have come to the same conclusion.
"Just look at them," she said tiredly. "Poor devils."
It seemed the authorities were on to the situation without being alerted, though whether the soldiers were there in any official capacity was anyone's guess. Radek assumed they merely were fugitives like everybody else-any kind of societal structure had gone out the window weeks ago, even if, mercifully, the disorder had stopped short of rioting and violence-and they simply chipped in because they felt it was their duty. They pushed through the throng, where necessary shoving people aside physically, and at last plowed their path to the dialing console. In their majority, the people pawing the device stepped back as soon as they saw the officers approach, but a handful, including the man attempting to get into the maintenance hatch, kept prodding, kicking, and poking.