Sabine Bauer - Mirror, mirror

"You were saying?" he murmured.

Zelenka had gone pale with shock. "I didn't think it was that bad yet."

"Yeah, well. I guess we ought to hurry up."

"Dr. Zelenka?" one of the geeks said from the back.

Radek turned around. "What?"

"Perhaps it's advisable to set up in here. It would save time, and I understand that the ship has a device that allows it to improve the air quality."

The man had a point, though John couldn't help suspecting that there was a pinch of self-preservation involved as well. He exchanged a quick look with Zelenka, who shook his head. "We have to have access to both the Stargate and the dialing console. Besides, I don't think those people up there would take it quietly if they saw us holing up inside the jumper."

Zelenka had a point, too. They could all do without another run on the ship, which was virtually guaranteed to happen the moment the evacuees so much as suspected that they were trying to barricade themselves.

Not happy but willing to bow to reason-for now-the geeks gave identical dejected nods and began to unload.

Half an hour later, the computers were up and running and connected to the mysterious gadgetry, and Zelenka sat hunched over a keyboard, a still cranky Selena hovering by his shoulder. If John had correctly understood the tirade she'd launched at Radek as soon as she'd entered the tent, she now was pissed that they'd defied her bleak predictions and returned from the city alive. The geeks scurried, obeying murmured orders, pulling wires, and calibrating things.

John was itching for some way to make himself useful, if only to take his mind off the deepening nightmare outside, but there was no more flying or commanding or general soldiering to be done. He had to hand over the reins, and if he was perfectly honest about it, the loss of control bothered him as much anything else.

"How long will it take?" Elizabeth had appeared by his side like a ghost. Dark smudges under her eyes made her look tired and wan, and he couldn't say if it was fatigue or the lack of oxygen. Probably both. Her breath came in short, shallow bursts.

"No idea." He went for a smile. "Considering that Radek's been working on this for the past three decades, I figure he's due for a breakthrough… oh, within the next ten minutes or so."

"Let's hope you're right." Her answering smile was as unconvincing as his own must have been. "The doctors up in the camp have set up oxygen stations. They're limiting supplies to the elderly and the children, but it's still not going to last long."

The little ones will go first. Soon.

He stared at Zelenka's back, willing the scientist to work faster. As if in response, Radek looked up at one of the geeks, nodded wordlessly. The man-John had been told his name and promptly forgotten it, because there were only so many details his head could process right now-pushed past them out of the tent and toward the dialing console that stood a couple dozen meters up the slope. The crowd along the perimeter stirred, murmuring and expectant. The Stargate, shrouded in unnatural gloom, seemed to share their expectation.

A little hesitant at first, the technician dialed an address, and there were more murmurs as the chevrons lit up one by one. The wormhole established alright, but the event horizon oozed outward sluggishly; a large ferocious animal objecting to being awakened. An off-color animal.

"What in God's name is that?" Elizabeth whispered.

"Propanakrale!" yelped Zelenka, and John assumed that, whatever it meant, it echoed his own and Elizabeth's reactions.

Viscous black and orange swirls pumped through what should have been a clear blue, watery surface, as if they were trying to mirror the sickly colors of the sky. The whole arrangement conveyed the distinct impression that it was damaging to a person's health. If the gate had looked like this when Dr. Jackson first opened it, nobody in their right mind would have gone through, no matter how intriguing the prospect of intergalactic travel.

"What is this, Radek?" Elizabeth asked again.

"It's…" The syllable seemed to get stuck somehow, and he cleared his throat and tried again. "It must be Charybdis. It's entropic effects are beginning to disrupt the space time continuum. I never thought it would progress this quickly." His fingers danced over the keyboard, chasing graphs and figures across the monitor screen. At last the images froze. "There! You see, recent data had made me suspect that something was causing the Stargate system to operate through time rather than space. This shows that it's definitely happening. Every time you dial coordinates, you will reach a different timeline, not a different location."

"But that's…" Elizabeth shook her head. "Radek, God knows I'm no scientist, but that seems to be a huge leap to me. We're talking about time travel here, and even the Ancients"-she shot a quick glance at Selena and amended-"I mean our Ancients, weren't able to get a handle on that. The machine they built never worked properly."

"You're right." Zelenka's sudden enthusiasm suggested that, at least for the moment, he'd clean forgotten about the mess they were in. Lucky man. "And I even think the Ancients' tampering accelerated the spread of the disease that apparently killed them all. Basically they must have caused a similar problem to what we're looking at here; entropy, only on a vastly reduced scale."

Weir tried again. "But-"

"On a quantum level," said Zelenka, answering her initial question, "time is immaterial. Everything happens instantaneously. You might say that dimensions as we define them don't exist. At the very least they don't matter. So it's not a big leap at all between space and time-or between the Stargate as a means of intergalactic travel and the Stargate as a time machine. What I can't explain is why the wormhole did transport you when it won't transport other travelers. It could be some kind of safeguard against the Grandfather Paradox, in which case it may be possible to circumvent it, although-"

It started as a soft growl, gradually overlaid with a brighter rattle as the tent, the equipment, the world at large began to shake. The term death knell leaped into John's mind, and he couldn't shake it off again. Selena's shout broke through the noise.

"Shut it down! Radek! Disengage the wormhole! Look!" She was staring, horror-struck, at a different monitor, the one that showed a breakdown of the atmospheric composition. There were spikes and troughs, denoting elements, and some of those spikes-no idea what they stood for; chemistry wasn't John's thing-were climbing unchecked even as they looked. "It's the Stargate! The Stargate is poisoning the atmosphere"

It sure looked like it, though in actual fact it probably was more complicated than that. If John had understood Zelenka's theory correctly, then there was a chance that any activation of the gate would speed up the entropy-just like the fault had opened up almost immediately after he and Elizabeth had arrived here. In plain English that meant the Stargate made stuff worse.

Obviously Zelenka agreed. His hand slammed down on a small peripheral switch, and that orange and black obscenity collapsed in on itself. The relentless climb of the spikes on the monitor slowed to a crawl. Not so the tremors. Once stirred, the earth would keep going until it was finished, John supposed. Except-

He was already running before anyone else had recovered from their shock. Shouts of surprise slid off his back like water, and he leaped out of the way of the geek who approached the tent on a collision course with him. The rear hatch of the jumper still stood open, which was a small blessing. A few seconds saved right there. He slapped the hatch release racing past, barely hearing the hum of the closing door as he flung himself into the pilot's seat. Coming to life at a mere thought, the small ship lifted off, and turned its nose toward the gate.