The Double Disappearance of Col. Sheppard, by Sophonisba, Ch. 2 [doppelganger challenge]

[saphanibaal]

-title- The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard, Chapter Two
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. Silly. Fusion. Strong language. Humor relating to primary and secondary sexual characteristics. It shouldn't be necessary to read Chapter One to enjoy this.
-timeframe- Takes place during second season, sort of, after "Epiphany."
-characters- John, Rodney, Lorne, Cadman; cameos by Zelenka, Ronon, Elizabeth, and unnamed personnel
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Neither, sadly, is Steve Senn's The Double Disappearance of Walter Fozbek, on which this is based, in any sense -- I'm still uncertain of the status of my requested extension on the interlibrary loan. At one point, Lorne makes a reference to Dinosaur Comics.
-word count- 5056
-summary- Meanwhile, back on the home front, Rodney meets a very differently-shaped Lt. Col. Sheppard.

The Double Disappearance of Colonel Sheppard
Chapter Two
(Rodney)

The fair and perilous Lost/Silver City of the Ancients/Ancestors, better known as "Atlantis" to the humans who had followed it out to its new home galaxy, lived up to its accompanying adjectives so well that it had only taken one emergency too many to train Dr. Rodney McKay to wake up instantly whenever the headset on his nightstand went off.

"McKay, to my quarters, please." Major Sheppard's tight voice -- oops, Lt. Col. Sheppard, it wasn't as if Rodney could be expected to remember random military titular fluctuations when his sensory centers were still switching back to real-time input from virtual -- cut him right out of a perfectly wonderful dream: the King of Sweden (in ceremonial robes) and Lt. Col. Samantha Carter (in an off-the-shoulder white gown) were presenting him with the Nobel Prize in front of the other members of Atlantis Recon One past and present. Granted, the bit where Ford and Ronon had been looking sort of bored was mildly bothersome, although entirely made up for by the discreet way Teyla was elbowing them for it (astute and discerning woman, Teyla); and he wasn't quite sure why the royal presenter appeared to be not Carl XVI Gustaf but Gustav II Adolf, but the glances the latter had been exchanging with Major Sheppard had been...

Had been --

Well, Rodney'd forgotten what they had been, and that was that. All in all, though, it was more than enough to eminently qualify him for a certain non-dulcetness of tone as he dragged his language centers together enough to reply, "...do you have any idea what time it is? What sort of emergency..."

"It's not an emergency, but something's happened I want you to take a look at."

"I presume I'll have time to get dressed?"

"Sure. Nobody deserves the sight of your scary p.j.s anyway."

"You know not whereof you speak," Rodney huffed, and shut his radio off. Except for the times when he was tired enough to zonk out in his underwear -- which was perfectly decent underwear, no holes or anything, except perhaps for a few tiny ones along the waistband -- or, more uncomfortable, his clothes, he had perfectly sane, sensible, subdued, and above all comfortable pajamas. Even the insanely comfortable and warm rabbitswool ones from P9M-637 that Ford had acquired and given to him for his birthday, despite being adorned with rows and rows of large daisy-petaled smily faces and caricatures of cows with their exaggerated features of bovine placidity, failed to achieve true garishness without artificial dyes.

Still, "time to get dressed" was a luxury he hadn't fully appreciated for years before coming to Atlantis, and he took it, ducking into his shower for a brief freshening up and drinking a cup of water before putting his uniform on, sticking a scanner into a pocket, and heading over to Colonel Sheppard's room.

"So what is i--YARGHKH!"

Which was a perfectly reasonable response to the fact that your -- uh -- Sheppard's room was full of a large bird-dinosaur thing wearing a black wifebeater, sitting on Sheppard's bed, tapping feet each laden with a gigantic curved claw like some sort of shoe toe decoration, and picking at his guitar with claws protruding from its wings.

"McKay," Sheppard said from somewhere, as the bird-thing's beak -- tan-colored beak, with blue spots on top -- opened and revealed lots and lots of sharp pointy teeth. "It's me."

"Wh--where?" Which was not stuttering, it was a perfectly natural thing to happen when one began to say something and then changed one's mind a little halfway through.

"Here. On the bed. Holding the guitar." One wing lifted to the anthropoornithoid predator's throat and pulled a chain with dogtags out of the shirt, holding it out.

"On the off chance that that isn't you," Rodney said, far more calmly than he felt it deserved, " you should know I'm not going that close to something that could eat my face. Or should that be 'on the chance that it is you'? Given that if you're not you you have a perfectly good excuse for not knowing -- "

"McKay," the Sheppard-bird said, and unclasped the chain, putting down the guitar. The feathers on top of its head looked... rather like Sheppard's hair, actually; its body feathers were a sleek, overlapping, gold-brown covering, with a darker stripe running down its -- his? -- spine, as was made clear from the moving around and fiddling with the chain before the bird finally tossed them to him.

According to the uppermost tag, the possessor of same was one John Sheppard, United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Number -- well, Rodney wouldn't have recognized the correct number no matter what, it wasn't as if the human Sheppard was in the habit of showing his dogtags off to all and sundry. Or lying around shirtless where people could casually read them. The few times he'd seen Maj-- Lt. Col. Sheppard without his shirt, he'd generally been too busy keeping from dying, keeping Sheppard from dying, or avoiding being splashed by idiotic Marines or life-sciences types who thought that vacation days were excuses to act half their age. If that.

Rodney shrugged and tossed them back to Sheppard, speaking before he finished putting them back on. "So how'd you manage to turn yourself into a bird and why wasn't there any warning?" After all, the time Sheppard had turned himself into a bug (worst days of Rodney's life, until they were superseded by the next worst days of Rodney's life and then by the Day Sheppard Got Stuck In Overclockland, which had been a special kind of awful all on its own), it had happened slowly. There'd been signs. He hadn't just woken up all blue and scaly one day.

"Really, McKay, bird? Am I going around calling you 'human'?"

"I am human." Rodney walked into the room proper, letting the door slide shut behind him. "I think maybe you meant 'ape,' if you wanted a larger subset, but you can't get much more of a common denominator than 'human' -- unless you want to get into 'Canadian' or 'white' versus 'First Nations' and all that. Human. Like you used to be, before you turned into this, uh, whatchamacallit."

"Saur. Well, Great Raptor, specifically, but -- and I've always been a saur. I was hatched a dinosaur. You were a saur yesterday. Johnny Cash was a saur yesterday. Tolstoy was a dead saur yesterday, plus his name was Draco and his book was sturdy enough that people could actually read it. I thought you'd be squawking about getting turned into a -- wait. You call yourself human?"

Sheppard did not mean that the way that sounded. Sheppard could not mean that the way that sounded -- "As opposed to what, exactly?"

"Uh, Ancient? Or, I suppose, Alteran..."

"Hello, non-Ancient here, had to get the gene therapy to work half the technology, born on Earth within the last century rather than millennia earlier, not all self-righteous about 'Oh, yes, I know the answers you seek, but I'm not going to tell you because I'm too in love with my own immortality' -- need I go on?"

"So," Sheppard said -- and yes, Rodney might as well admit it was him, he even had the slouch as down as wings and a stiff tail with tigerlike stripes (chestnut on tawny feathers, rather than graphite-gray on ash-grey fur, but otherwise not too different than Rodney's sorely missed cat) would let him, since when did dinosaurs have wings? -- "either everything and everyone's changed and I'm the only one immune for some reason, or I somehow slipped into an alternate dimension where everyone's feral descendents of Ancients, with or without wholly unsubstantiated prejudgments of the Order Dinosauria, or -- " He stiffened.

"Or?" Rodney was suddenly, fiercely aware of the inherent danger in the so-called dinosaur he was speaking to; a danger worse because it was not alien, but somehow intensely Sheppardesque.

"Or you're about to jump me and eat thirty years off the end of my life."

"Oh, for --! I'm not a Wraith. Wraith have bleached skin -- "

Sheppard eyed him up and down -- eloquently, Rodney thought, suddenly conscious of his laboratory-pale face and hands, and he hastily went on.

" -- and blue blood and therefore tongues, and long white hair, and big long claws on hands with obscene-looking mouths in them, and their own sharp pointy teeth, lord knows why, it's not like they need them to chew their food -- "

"They use them to bite their way out of their carriers when they've grown to term," Sheppard said helpfully, "and to eat solid food when they're little and can't feed yet."

"Carriers?" Rodney asked, sidetracked.

"Yes, kind of like that one species of spider that lays its eggs in live wasps, or is it a wasp that lays its eggs in live spiders? A Wraith Queen uses her ovipositor, which -- "

"Okay, okay, hold it! Can I just say, first, much too much information, and second, ewwww."

"Anyway. So. Alternate dimension where everyone's some sort of human, like that one Star Trek episode with the barbaric Starfleet not-uniforms and topless female personnel."

"Topless?!" Rodney's mind, usually well-trained, found itself boggling. "They aired that? On public television? In the '60s?"

"I take it your dimension's more prudish?"

"I'll say." And how unfair was that? "Anyway! If you're here -- and how'd that happen?"

"Haven't the foggiest. I woke up, and here I was."

"Then where's Col. Sheppard? The one I know?"

"... in my universe?"

"Oh, great. We'd better start looking into this." He clicked his radio on. "Radek?"

"Of course something would arise just when I was about to go to bed," Radek answered as Sheppard looked down at himself -- was that some sort of string tied at the Colonel's waist?! -- and said plaintively "...can I get dressed first?"

"Yes, yes, of course," Rodney said absently, waving a hand at Sheppard.

"Thank you," Radek murmured.

"Not you! I need you to check the power logs for last night, with particular reference to the Colonel's room."

"Is something the matter?"

"Yes. No. Not precisely -- meet me at the infirmary after you've checked things out, I'll explain there." His eyes were drawn irresistibly to where Dinosheppard had risen and started to make his way to Sheppard's clothes drawers. "Colonel. I'd never have figured you for string thong underwear."

"What other sort of underwear should I be wearing?" Sheppard's voice was much, much too reasonable for the topic.

"Perhaps you should remember to turn off your headset before defacing hardworking scientists' mental viewscreen with appalling images, yes?" Radek suggested tartly before clicking his own off. Rodney spluttered at the empty channel.

"No, seriously, what?"

"Boxer shorts?" Rodney McKay was a scientist of internationally recognized genius (provided that one took "internationally" to refer to an appropriately small subset). He had three separate doctorates and half the work done for a fourth one. He worked with technology and equations so fiendishly complicated that perhaps ninety people at the very most could even hope to understand it. He had walked the surfaces of alien worlds lightyears from the planet Earth, or even from the Milky Way. And yet somehow here he was, discussing underpants with an alleged dinosaur.

Once the underwear controversy was settled (apparently, dinosaurs liked underwear that fit snugly around their tails, which, yeah, made sense once brought up), Sheppard started untying his own after a helpless look at human-Sheppard's boxers.

"People actually wear these?"

"They're very comfortable. I do myself. Lots of room to breathe."

"I presume you don't mean you've got nostrils there... "

"I take it you slept through biology class's mammal unit?"

"Well, humans are extinct, at least on Earth," Sheppard pointed out reasonably. "There was nothing to prove they're as much like modern apes as the paleontologists think they are."

"We're very like, only smarter and better looking," Rodney pointed out absently. "For example, many of us are smart enough not to bind our genitalia up in uncomfortable fabric."

Sheppard shook his fabric out and put it back on other-side-down. Rodney caught a vague glimpse of --

Of --

"You're not from an alternate dimension where you're a girl, are you? Uh, woman?"

"Uh, no. I've always been a guy. See my large robust body and big deep voice?"

"It is physically impossible to see a voice," Rodney huffed. "Is that how you tell each other apart?"

"Well, it's not as if you can tell whether someone has primary sexual characteristics that come out or stay in unless they're having sex at the time, and I don't know about you, but there are any number of people I do not want to know that well." He cocked his amazingly large head to one side, peering at the contents of one drawer. "Also clothes help a lot."

"When you put it that way, I suppose humans aren't that much different, but it's not as if there are any other dinosaurs here for me to compare you to. What are you looking for?"

"Something I can put on," Sheppard grumbled. "I suppose I could just tie one of the jackets around my neck so people know it's me, but I don't really feel like wandering around half-naked if I can help it..."

"Oh. Wait, he should have around somewhere... I know I've still got mine, I can go back and get it if we can't find his... aHA!" Rodney triumphantly unearthed the length of wraparound skirt they'd each been given on the moon with the peach cinnamon rolls where Ronon had had to pretend to be married to Teyla to discourage luststruck alien women. "This wraps with this end out..."

"So the ruffle spirals up. I remember."

The skirt wrapped considerably fewer times than it did on its previous wearer; Sheppard wound it under his tail twice and then over. Rodney would have thought that would bite in the tailpit, but presumably Sheppard knew what he was doing.

"So. Ready to go out and be tested?"

Sheppard looked thoughtfully at the edge of his wing -- the feathers appeared to be docked in a relatively neat row -- nodded to himself, and said "Shoes -- wait, what's this about being tested?"

"I take it you're a healthy, uh, big raptor?"

"Great Raptor, and yeah."

"Well, presumably you're interested in staying that way -- and your feet aren't going to fit into the colonel's boots, I don't think your hands would fit into the colonel's boots, even if you are short a finger -- " besides, the skin of said wings started just below the claw of his little finger, not to mention the webbing between the fingers proper; although even that probably didn't take up as much sheer space as the oversized claws on his second toes -- "and as unscientific as medicine is its practitioners do work better with baseline readings for 'healthy condition' to start with. It's not as if we're used to treating people with feathers, and I bet there are all sorts of problems that can happen with feathers alone... I wonder how the other me deals with them?"

"Oh, you've lost nearly all of yours," Sheppard said cheerfully, putting the guitar back in its case.

"What?!"

"Well, of course, you're a tyrannosaur, that's what they do. Tyrannosaur feathers start turning into scales when they hit puberty, McKay gets all huffy about it being a sign of maturity and me obviously being a case of arrested development, but..."

"Yes, yes, we're all familiar with your inner three-year-old -- you're a, a Great Raptor, but I'm a T. rex?"

"...wow, McKay, I knew you never forgot your species, but I didn't realize it transcended realities."

"It's the only species of Tyrannosaurus I know, never mind that now, what's with the two different types of dinosaurs?"

Sheppard stopped, holding the uniform jacket in one webbed and feathered hand. "I didn't think," he said slowly.

"Obviously."

Sheppard whacked him on the shoulder with the jacket, a little harder than Rodney was used to. "I meant -- humans are all in the same genus, aren't they? Other apes like chimpanzees and such aren't humans, so..."

"Yeah. Homo."

"Don't you mean 'Humanus'?"

"Homo sapiens sapiens, here."

"Full of yourself much? And I thought 'homo' was Latin for 'saur,' usually 'male saur'; it's in 'homicide' and uh, uh, 'ad hominem.'" Sheppard tested the knotted sleeves around his neck, hooked the headset on the nightstand over one of them, and began trying to drape the jacket proper about his shoulders so that the black panels showed.

"It's the official subspecies name. It comes from Latin meaning 'man.' What's 'ad hominem,' anyway?"

"It's, uh, I think it's some sort of describing word for when you attack an idea by attacking the person who came up with it, like 'What can a guy wearing a pig skull on his head know about cooking spanakopita?'"

"Hey! I took that back, I told you I took it back when I tasted the spanakopitakia, you needn't keep rubbing it in -- "

"And anyway, we have people from fifty-four different genera in our Atlantis. No, wait. I wasn't counting the people who just came in on the Daedalus. Fifty-seven. I take it your Atlantis isn't oversupplied with dinosaurs?"

"Fifty-seven?" Rodney stepped back into the doorway. "And given that all the dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago -- unless you count birds, the way Wagner was suggesting -- "

"Birds are dinosaurs, they just aren't SAURS. And yeah, fifty-seven."

"But that doesn't make sense. Intelligent species evolved from fifty-seven different genera on the same planet?"

"There are actually two hundred or so genera of sentient dinosaurs," the dinosaur told him, "not counting the extinct ones and bird birds, which don't have saur-level intelligence."

"But, but... didn't they compete? I thought human-shaped people evolving twice was pushing it, but Sam Carter's probably right that the Asgard had something to do with it -- "

"Twice?"

"Well, the Ancients." Really. Even this feathery Sheppard had admitted that Ancients were built on the general plan.

"So there isn't a direct link, then... although aren't the Asgard related to the Ancients? They certainly look more like each other than you look like me."

"Having early chosen not to go into a field where I'd bake my brains out digging old bones out of deserts, I wouldn't know." Rodney walked out the door and into Ronon.

"Easy," Ronon rumbled, catching Rodney with a hand that stiffened on his shoulder, swiftly and steadily moving him aside. "Where's Sheppard?"

"Apparently, switched with one from a parallel dimension where we're all different kinds of dinosaurs."

"Sorry?" Dinosheppard offered, not-hands spread and open.

"I'm taking this new one to get checked up before we try to figure out how to send him home. In case he gets sick or something. You can stop looming over my shoulder anytime, Ronon."

"Also, it might be an idea to tell other people I'm me, so nobody freaks out or anything."

Ronon snorted. "Not like you're acting crazy."

It was amazing how well Sheppard's shrug translated to the coelurosarian model.

"Sorry to miss our run."

"Wasn't your plan."

"Yeah, but I hope the other me's apologizing to my world's Ronon on my behalf."

Ronon stared at him for a moment and then turned down the corridor. "I'll get the others," he explained, feet shifting smoothly into some portion at least of his morning run.

Sooner Ronon than him, as Rodney always thought. He shrugged and started for the infirmary, Sheppard leaning forward as he fell into step beside him.

Rodney shot the alternative version of his friend a startled look. Apparently saurs walked bipedally but not upright; while Sheppard's head was well above the level of his hips, it was now carried well forward of his feet and his tail stiffly out behind for balance, although he was not as parallel to the ground as the Tyrannosauri on the alpha site that wasn't --

"Wait, wait, what about the other dinosaurs?" Rodney blurted out.

"Uh, do you mean dinosaurs that aren't Great Raptors, or dinosaurs in Pegasus, or what?"

"In Pegasus."

"Well, the Ancients seem to have been even busier seeding the worlds of Pegasus with saurs than they were in the Milky Way, although the Wraith have culled some of them to nothing -- I take it they seeded them with humans here?"

"Yeah," Rodney justly ignored the inaccuracy that might have implied that the Wraith had been seeding humans, "but I meant the T. rexes on the alpha site that wasn't."

"If there ever were any, they probably got eaten by the humans."

"There were humans there in your world?"

"Eight-foot tall ones with long arms and stringy manes -- Ford thought they looked like Humanus canadensis. They started hooting and chasing us, and we hoofed it back to the Gate, shooting as we went."

"Huh. What's Homo canadensis, anyway? Never heard of that species. We were chased off it by tyrannosauri -- they were about five meters tall and twice as long and didn't look smart, just hungry. I don't think they had any feathers, either, although most of my attention was kind of taken up by the thirty-centimeter teeth and their running speed."

"Ah, doing a 'McKay on meatloaf night' impression."

Rodney snorted.

"And H-can is a kind of human that, uh, actually probably looked a lot like you -- same sort of proportions, big forehead, flattish back of head, prominent chin, comparatively skinny bones, although most of the reconstructions are furrier and even the H-cans on M1M-316 had manes that went all the way round their chins, like your Ronon's, although they didn't neaten them into ropes like his. I think it got the name because the first fossils were found in the Canadian Rockies somewhere, so it might be the same thing you called 'sapiens.'"

"Ronon's hairstyle is called 'dreadlocks' -- and I, unlike him, and like most of the men in Atlantis, shave. Food and stuff can get in your beard -- "

"What is a beard?" Sheppard asked plaintively.

"Hair on your chin."

"Oh. Like whiskers. Is f-- hair under your nose beard too?"

"No, it's a mustache. Both of them together are still whiskers. And the point is that whiskers are hard to keep clean, what with being next to a major bodily orifice and all, so it's easier to just shave them off and not have to, plus a beard makes my chin itch like crazy, plus most modern militaries like their men to be clean-shaven because it looks neater and takes away another mark of individuality, like the haircuts."

"Oh. Like keeping one's arms trimmed. Does shaving your upper forehead cut down on sweat and odor, or is it to help keep you from overheating?"

Rodney glared at him and stalked on.

After they had passed through the transporter -- which had seemed a little sluggish until Rodney thought harder about the infirmary, it was almost as if he'd been walking with Elizabeth or at least someone on the lower end of the ATA spectrum -- he was about to break the silence with something that would zing Sheppard back thoroughly and well when voices drifted to them from round the bend in the corridor. Lorne, Cadman, and someone he didn't recognize, maybe they were new.

"In some ways, it's just like the SGC," Lorne said. "Gate teams are close, gate teams are partners, and the first-ranked team is closer than most."

"Is that what they're calling it these days?" the other guy said snidely.

"I suggest you try to think with your brain instead of your dick for once." Cadman's voice conveyed infinite world-weariness. "SG-1 or AR-1 would die for each other. They'd kill for each other. They'd talk about their feelings for each other."

"Granted, our lieutenant colonel sucks so badly at that last he has his own Schwartzchild radius," Lorne murmured, "but he'd make the effort for them."

Sheppard coughed noisily as they went round the bend, and then stopped dead, staring.

Lorne, Cadman, and two of the latest batch off the Daedalus, dressed in jogging shorts, T shirts (or, in Cadman's case, a sports bra), running shoes and sidearms, jumped and dropped their hands to their weapons. The two latter began to draw them.

"Hey!" Rodney yelped. "This is Sheppard!"

Sheppard, still staring at Cadman, straightened, letting his tail thump to the floor. One hand absently began tugging at his skirt, holding it away from the calf on which he'd strapped human-Sheppard's thigh holster.

Lorne and Cadman saluted, coughing meaningfully when their new subordinates were slow to follow.

"At ease," Sheppard told them once they had.

"This isn't your year for transformations, is it, sir?" Major Lorne said sympathetically.

Sheppard blinked, turning his head to Rodney in an expression it took him a little while to map to McKay, tell me you understand what he's talking about.

"No, no, ours switched with this one from Dinosaur Dimension. Ronon's telling people, Sheppard's going to the infirmary for a baseline workup and then to the labs where we can figure out how to reverse the process. Oh, and it's pronounced 'Schwarzschild,' by the way."

"What does Dr. Weir say?" Cadman wondered, apropos of nothing.

"It's early yet." Rodney blinked at her. "I'll call her when I have something solid to tell her."

All four of the human military looked dubiously at him.

"Thanks for the reminder." Sheppard plucked the radio from his sleeve and held it to one side of his face. "Elizabeth? When you're up and dressed and fed, could you meet us in the infirmary?"

"Is something wrong?" Elizabeth sounded tired. She'd always been a morning person, but she'd defined hers as beginning at a sane time (as opposed to this crack-o-dawn that the military seemed to find a wonderful time to get hot and sweaty, and not even in a bed). "Your voice is much fainter than usual."

"McKay's on it, but I thought you'd appreciate the heads-up as soon as possible; it's a bit easier to show than explain."

"What have you managed now...? Never mind, I'll be there in five minutes."

"Thanks. Sheppard out."

"So," Lorne said as his commanding officer put the headset away again, "alternate dimension where you're a Utahraptor, sir."

"That wasn't what..." Rodney looked at his friend's counterpart.

Sheppard wrenched his eyes away from Cadman's chest. "I've never heard of a Utahraptor, but then we don't name saur genera or species after states; for all I know, you'd call Major Lorne a Wyomingosaur instead of a therizinosaur."

Lorne blinked. "Utahraptors and therizinosauri, and... "

"He said there were two hundred different kinds of sentient dinosaurs on his Earth," Rodney said helpfully. "Apparently, I'm a T. rex."

Lorne promptly had some sort of a coughing fit.

"Excuse us," the other new guy said, and started jogging on down the corridor. The snide one looked hastily between all the officers and followed his friend.

"The stomping should have clued me in," Lorne said inexplicably.

"I do not stomp," Rodney pointed out.

"I'll walk you to the infirmary," Cadman offered. "To help avoid any further... misunderstandings."

"Thank you, Lieutenant."

"Join you after I finish my run, sir," Lorne said, saluted again, and took off.

"You aren't going to cause a scene, are you?" Rodney said suspiciously.

"Relax, McKay." Cadman rolled her eyes and fell in on Sheppard's other side. "Carson and I had a reasonably amicable breakup, never mind some of the aftereffects, and we're on perfectly friendly terms now."

Sheppard stopped dead for a moment. "Uh," he said, with great significance and no clear meaning whatsoever.

"Cadman started dating Carson right after she was stuck in my head with me -- did that happen in your world? -- and then apparently they broke it off later when I wasn't looking."

"It didn't have anything to do with you," Cadman argued. "There's no reason why I should time my life to spots where you might notice it."

"You -- you -- McKay, you can't tell me these things!" Sheppard nearly yelped. "Wait. Does your Section 654 of Title 10 apply to different species, or is it still only different genera?"

Rodney looked at Cadman. Cadman looked at Rodney.

"Colonel, I'm sure I speak for us both when I say: huh?"

"It sounds like maybe something legal...?" Cadman offered.

"It's the 'We Can Your Ass For Making It Known If You Did It With Someone Of A Different Genus' bit of military law." Sheppard shrugged, which looked really odd when his shoulders were that far in advance of his hips. "Replaced the 'We Don't Want Any Of Them There Deviants In This Man's Military And Will Hunt Them Out' laws, and apparently the common sense of half the personnel who'd managed intergeneral dating before." Sheppard darted a glance at Cadman again. "Or -- of course, I'd always assumed it'd take longer, but are you and Carson Beckett the same species here?"

"Well, duh," Cadman said.

"Hey, there used to be more species of humans running around, how's he supposed to know?"

"You look sort of H-can too," Sheppard said thoughtfully, "and Ronon's what, Neanderthal?"

"Ha!" Rodney puffed himself up. "I've been saying as much for months, glad someone agrees with me."

"I'm fairly sure he's the same species as the rest of us," Cadman said dryly.

"Well, yeah, isn't Neanderthal man Homo sapiens neanderthalensis?"

"I thought it was a different species," Sheppard said.

"How would you know? Yours are all extinct."

"So are our Neanderthals," Cadman argued.

"Ronon didn't look extinct this morning."

"Isn't he too tall to be a Neanderthal?"

"Aren't people from industrial societies taller than, well, cavemen?"

"Lieutenant," Sheppard interrupted the escalating discussion, "you, uh, this, uh, your condition -- it doesn't get in the way of doing your work?"

"Well, no." Cadman blinked. "Things might have been a little awkward for a while, especially with some of his friends on the medical staff, but we can be professional." She nodded, walked up and stuck her head through the infirmary door, and said "Don't freak out, but we now have a Dinosaur Lieutenant Colonel."

"WHAT?"

"Oh, yes," Rodney said, still outside with Sheppard, "very professional."