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It had taken me the better part of an hour to make it from the Control Tower to the other tower before, but that was during a massive sandstorm that I had to fight against to move anywhere. Since there was no sandstorm I didn�t expect the trip to take that long, which was good because, even without sand flying around my at a hundred miles an hour, it was not a walk on the beach by any stretch of the imagination. Though� I�ve never exactly been a �walk on the beach� kind of guy. �Cause I hate sand and dad said that swimming at the beach was something poor and uneducated people did�he was a snob and an ass but he was my dad so, even though we disagreed on basically everything, I did try not to piss him off with every step, though there were some times, like with school, that I had to make my own decision, despite the consequences�so the only times Dave and I would get to swim anywhere but a heated indoor pool were when mom would take us on one of her weekend getaways that she always told dad were trips to antique stores in Connecticut but were usually trips to Hilton Head or Malibu, depending on which coast we were living on at the time. The first time I�d actually enjoyed swimming was when we first started utilizing the Mainland back on Lantia, when Ford and Elizabeth and Kate Heightmeyer and I took it upon ourselves to teach the Athosian children how to swim, something they had never learned back on Athos because the only body of water they could have learned to swim in was �dangerously close� to the Ancient ruins that they feared would bring the Wraith to them.
Apparently heatstroke makes me babble, even within my own brain. I made a mental note to mention that to Keller when I got back to my time; the amount of time I�ve spent in direct sunlight, painfully direct sunlight, since getting flung forward in time has been excessive to an insane degree.
The cooler air made it easier for me to move, and, while I would have given pretty much anything for a bottle of water, I found I was making pretty good time over the dunes that had built up since I had been over the same area what felt like not that long ago.
Fortunately, despite what Rodney might have to say, my sense of direction was impeccable, which was good because the sun was so freaking bright that even if I hadn�t had my eyes mostly shut behind my aviators I wouldn�t have been able to see the Control Tower in front of me for all the glare. I probably would have walked right into the damn thing if the sun hadn�t been blocked, just a little, by the tower, and the slight semblance of shade was as much of a shock to my system as the cool air bubble thing Atlantis set up for me. Still it was painfully bright, and I had to feel my way along the wall to the door. It took me two passes of the wall before the toe of my boot hit something and when I bent to investigate I realized that I�d hit the top corner of the door.
�Shit.�
I had to actually dig my way down to the door; the sand had built up so much. I was half tempted to attempt climbing up to the nearest balcony�from there it was two flights of stairs and a few corridors to the Control Room�but as much as I hated sand I hated the thought of falling off the side of the tower because I was too weak to haul my own weight up. As much as I didn�t want to think I couldn�t superhero my way out of digging down to the door, if Batman fell he had a grappling hook and implausibly strong yet lightweight cable to catch him before he went splat or thud or any other comic-book-ish onomatopoetic exclamation.
I�d managed to dig down to the top of the door and, not wanting to waste more time and energy digging, I tried to force the door open, hoping it would open enough, despite the pressure the sand was putting on it, to let most of the hot, heavy, stubborn sand to just slide into the corridor and out of my way.
Using one of the random outcroppings�the ones I used to help me Batman my way up to the Control Room during the quarantine�I held on tight and tried to push the door open with my feet. I looked like a total idiot, I�m sure, but it worked� a little. Until the outcropping thing I�d been putting so much pressure on broke off from the wall and I ended up flat on my back in the sand, the wind knocked right out of me.
As I was lying there, trying to catch my breath, my mind started flashing back.
One day, a stolen handful of minutes out on our balcony, early in that first year, mere weeks after our arrival in Atlantis, Elizabeth trying to convince me of her beliefs that I�d been sceptical of at the time.
�She�s a living thing, John. Atlantis is alive. Can�t you feel it?�
Talking to Elizabeth in her office during the ten hours we were waiting for Rodney to get back from the