2nd BRIEFING ; CRYSTAL LEAN

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"..Does it work?"

"No."

"No?"

"No."

"Will it work?"

"Yes."

"Yes?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"We have the ingredients now Sir.

Tests were conducted on the Skull taken and subsequently returned to P7X 377. They looked at its usual macroscopic characteristics, refraction, roto and in versions, rotations. I'm told they also studied its conduction and piezo though not pyro electrical properties. Class was established, its system, and they verified the unification of the atomic stacking.

Anyway, they didn't come up with even a fizzle. This time all the stops have been pulled out. We've applied physics, astro and high energy physics and geochemistry to the determination of the golden coloured Crystal Skull. The one recently brought back from P7X 377 by Nicolas Ballard. It was.."

"Dr Lee?"

"Oh err, I thought I'd just bring the room up to date on the.."

"Look Lee, you're doing a grand job, super, but we're all extremely busy right now. You may have noticed some commotion around you, around the Base, that's a code enforcement. Trust me, everyone in this room is up to date. Unless you have something constructive.."

"Oh err.. ..General, Generals. Yes, right, we now have complementary materials in the shape and form of samples recovered by Major Pierce and his group, from the dig site in Cuello, Belize, the place Nicolas Ballard found the Ballard Skull.

These, together with examinations using the very latest super-sensitive analytical tools, if you remember the second day Mr Equalsee was here, he left to go and use the electron mono chromator and synchrotron, this provided us extremely helpful, real-time data on the atomic structure."

General O'Neill whispered to General Hammond.

"Dig in George. Take you're shoes off if you like."

"The real breakthrough came when Colonel Carter made the discovery. That was actually the same day Mr Equalsee took the Skull off Base for the second time. He brought back truly incredible results.."

General O'Neill quietly left his seat and headed towards his office. He indicated for Lieutenant Bowkervale to enter his office using the corridor access.

"Whats up?"

"General I'm sorry to disturb you but you did say you wanted to be notified when the NID telephoned."

"Yes I did.."

"Sir they're holding on line seven."

"Okay. Get back onto them, tell them I'm busy, whos callin'?"

"Sir an agent Peanna."

"Tell her I'm in a meeting, find out the details of the D.C. conference and keep her on the line for confirmation."

Lieutenant Bowkervale went back to his office and General O'Neill waited in his office for the aide to report back. He silently opened the Briefing Room door. Words were pelting out of Doctor Lee's mouth with no sign of let up…..

"..along with the optical instruments he used Differential Scanning Calorimetry, DSC, which is an excellent tool for that specific.."

He quickly closed the door shut.

"Sir, day after tomorrow, a.m. Washington, D.C."

"Splendid Lieutenant, done."

"Sir I'll confirm an O ten hundred hours meet for you. I'll make a note in your appointments book."

"Okay.. ..but you will remind me as well?"

"Definitely Sir."

As quietly as he left the Briefing Room, he returned. Doctor Lee was still talking.

"..electron microprobe analysis. It happens when the element is bombarded by electrons. I understand to obtain these results he used both neutron and X-ray radiation diffraction. I haven't actually seen the machines Mr Equalsee used but I beli.."

"Shiver mi timbers Lee, lets have it!!"

"Oh err, yes Sir. Samples have been analysed by Mr Equalsee, Doct.. ..Colonel Carter, Teal'c, Doctor Jackson and myself, we have the results. Oh, in the first place I should say the material the golden Crystal Skull is made out of is Apophy."

"Apophis!! The Crystal Skull is made out of Apophis??"

"No General, Doctor Jackson thinks it could be named after him though, Apophy, Apophylite. It's a silicate, it stacks in the tetragonal crystallographic system class of Ditetragonal Dipyramidal. And very interestingly it contains both the metal elements, potassium and sodium."

"Um!"

"Apophy is one of the ingredients to get the Skull, this Skull, working. Doctor Jackson worked with Svi and Teal'c on everything brought back from Belize, and from that they found another of the required ingredients in those samples. Doctor Jackson?"

"Sure. Thanks Bill. Svi left the day after Professor Heslop. Before he went Sam ran through the Skullduggery Report with him. All his findings are present and accounted for. Plus you've just been given a very detailed account of the methods he used.

Okay, the temple, pyramid, where Nick found the Ballard Skull, SG-6 and 15 found it using geothermal.. ..whatnots. Its been almost completely levelled, theres really not much left of it at all. Major Pierce brought back samples of the stone work as well as grasses and plant life that had built up against the main concentration of stones.. ..rubble. We have soil samples and rock specimens, the nearest protruding rock etc.

Sam thought it would be a good idea to bring back a couple of jars full of air taken from more or less round the main concentration of where the em, I expect the main central part of the pyramid would have stood.

Ingredients! Yeah right, okay. Iridium! A fair amount of it. It's a member of the platinum group metals. Its possibly the densest element on Earth. Its also extra-terrestrial in origin. Did I mention it's a metallic element, just like potassium and sodium.

Iridium, it means rainbow, you know the things the Ancients and Asgard were thought to travel by."

"Doctor Jackson I don't see the significance. If you're saying Major Pierce brought iridium back in his sample bag.. ..I mean after all isn't there supposed to be a layer of iridium covering the Earth, well a sedimentary layer in the Earth's crust. The K em, the K.."

"You're right about that Major Davies, that layer, K-T Boundary, is settled in between the Tertiary and Cretaceous eras. The iridium deposit in the K-T is ejecta.. ..fall out from 'the devil's tail', the 'Chicxulub' meteor."

"Doctor Jackson Chicxulub is by the site of the largest meteor impact, on the Yucatan peninsula, not so far from Belize?"

"Yeah General, that's where it landed. Scientists attribute that meteor with the extinction of the Dinosaur."

"But Doctor Jackson I'm still not.."

"Yeah yeah sorry Major Davis. Major Pierce didn't bring us back samples of the K-T boundary, no, he brought us back a one meter deep, 3" dia, pole section of soil.. ..earth. That's where Svi found heavy deposits of iridium. We only have sections from around the ruin so we can't compare content with samples from further afield. But as far as ingredients go, we didn't have any iridium in the lab when we tested the P7X 377 Skull. But now with the golden Skull we have iridium.

"You think that could be the spark we've been looking for Daniel?"

"The spark or the match Jack, definitely significant. Turns out the Cavern, P7X 377 pyramid is full of iridium as well as the other metal stuff..

..The golden Crystal Skull, by the way we've only discovered one Skull, Nick's Skull, of this particular ilk on Earth. Svi said the coloration in the Skulls, pinkish, golden, he said its due to trace elements."

"Daniel I thought the Skull was just made of crystal, well made of itself."

"It was Jack.. ..until we looked deeper, a lot lot deeper. Sam will fill you in on that in a bit. We think these trace elements, another ingredient, are in actual fact the main ingredient!

Anyway, back then the Skulls would have been placed in pyramids, temples, in fairly cool conditions, even in the hot day temperatures, inside the pyramids themselves would have been very cool, due in part to the type of construction material, thick solid brick.. ..stone.

Previously, when we studied the P7X 377 Skull, we did so in labs where the room temperature was many many more degrees higher than what it would have been in the natural pyramid surrounds of Mesoamerica a couple of thousand years ago.

Okay now given that fact, Sam had a brain wave, which has since led to some staggering discoveries, em, leaps and bounds.

Sam I think its probably best if we hear about your discovery from you, maybe throw in an overview of the Skullduggery Report."

"Yep. Thanks Daniel, Doctor Lee.

Generals. Basically I was considering Major Pierce's observations that although the weather was very hot during their short expedition in Cuello, the temperature inside the remainder of pyramid ruin was considerably cooler.

Mesogenic Sirs!"

"Nutshell parlance if you will Colonel."

"Sir we were reading elements which weren't evidently present. As Svi pointed out, the coloration in the Skull is due to trace elements. Unyet all our initial analyses reveal that apart from Apophy no other elements where present. This was the first give away that we weren't picking up something that must actually be incorporated into the composition of the Crystal Skull. We then introduced a thermal environment to represent conditions in the pyramid during the Mayan period.

Sirs when we studied the P7X 377 Crystal Skull we never considered the fact that the Crystal Skull itself possessed more than one state."

"It does?"

"Yes Sir it does. Liquid Crystal Sir. Mesogenic."

"That's what now?"

"Sir this discovery meant that every characteristic element we'd examined up to that point applied only to the Skull in its solid state."

"Liquid crystal Colonel Carter, wouldn't the Skull turn to ..?"

"..Mulch, no Sir. Even though its not solid its also not liquid. The Skull's liquid crystal phase has strong orientational but weak positional order. The golden Crystal Skull's mesogens, molecules, have a high intrinsic orientational order so its mesogenic state, its liquid crystal phase, is nigh impossible to detect.

Sirs, a whole new world is opened up to us when we examine the Crystal Skull at much lower temperatures. Its mesogenic state has revealed the trace elements that were not evident in the solid state.

As Doctor Lee mentioned, in detail, Svi subjected the golden Skull to all manner of atomic imaging. As well as discovering the trace elements present in the Skull we have also discovered a number of its subphases.. ..morphism. Daniel, thanks."

Daniel livened up the projector and showed a couple of slides of scanned images of molecular structure. They sort of looked like pictures of old flaking paint off a dry rot door, but in magnified high resolution, very high and very magnified.

"Thanks Daniel. I should point out that strictly speaking the Skull does not conform to thermotropic mesophasing, The Skull's crystal is neither enantiotropic or monotropic.."

"Thanks for that Carter because I tell ya, I was just wondering about that very same point."

"Interesting isn't it Sir?"

The General didn't say a word but the Colonel read his lips, 'hurry up Carter'.

"Okay moving on. Using optical polarizing microscopy we can see from the images the Apophy mesogens are lined up in this direction. Now its between these gaps, these layers here that we find one of those subphases I mentioned."

General O'Neill looked like he wanted to ask how long was this going on for, but instead he sat tight. Colonel Carter talked them through a computer driven simulation of the Crystal Skull's phase transition as the laboratory room temperature was reduced. You really could see things, atoms and stuff, moving and changing inside the golden coloured Crystal Skull.

If was very encouraging for everyone in the Briefing Room. They had come under attack from a new emerging enemy, the Nebulium. Getting the upper hand was something they were all pushing hard for. The SGC big brains had done an extremely cracking job.

"Generals, inside one of the Crystal Skull's subphases we've discovered another mineral. Its Moldavite and it is not in liquid crystal phase, its solid state. Absolutely amazing. It practically hides itself from view, it lines up in between the Apophy molecules in such a way you could almost call these Moldavite molecules 'sleepers'.

Moldavite is extremely rare on Earth, seems to be named after the Vltava ( Moldau) river valley in old Czechoslovakia, that's where amounts of the mineral have been found on our planet. Its extra terrestrial in origin and yes Daniel just like the iridium it contains impurities, metals, in particular potassium and sodium. Moldavite doesn't have its own crystal system as its amorphous.. ..amorphous glass, silica."

"So Colonel are you saying theres something inside the Crystal Skull?"

"Em, err.. ..General Hammond.."

"Carter that is what you've just said isn't it?"

"Em, yes Sir, its just that em.."

"What?"

"Well it.. ..putting it like that, it sounds so simple."

"Yeah, nice in'it?"

"Sir."

She laughed, appreciating that even her nutshell parle needed a lot more than an average set of tungsten nutcrackers to get beyond the sciential and onto the simple denotation of her words.. ..the bottom line if you will.

"Colonel Carter is there any significance here, you mentioned the coloration but does this elusive element actually do anything?"

"Yes General it does an awful lot. We believe without it the Skulls would not qualify as transportation devices. You could say that once we work out the Skull perturbations we could, theoretically, get it to work."

"Can we build our own Crystal Skull?"

"Sir crystals build up one atom at a time. Yes we can build, grow our own crystal skull, well crystal and then have it cut into the shape of a skull. But it wouldn't be a teleportation device. The difficulty, and I do stress difficulty, would be to replicate the insertion of Moldavite molecules and have them sit precisely between the layers of Apophy molecules. Judging by the highly, highly ultra-sophisticated way in which the golden Skull has be designed, atomically, we can't copy it's mesophases. General theres no way on Earth we could ever replicate it."

"We know a lot of places now Carter, maybe we can't build it one Earth but how about one of our allies?"

"The great races, that's always a yes. But convincing them to build one for us.. ..as for our other allies, Sir I'm not even sure the Tollen could replicate it, but then they always seem to end up surprising us."

"Yes they do Colonel. Right so we can't make one, but you think you can get this one fired up?"

"Yes Sir we can. Weights and measures General. As Doctor Lee said earlier, we have the ingredients. We've studied all of Svi's work and now believe we know how the Skull operates. The occurrence of meteoroidal amorphus Moldavite molecules interacts with the Skull's Apophy in such a way that when the Skull is charged.. ..enters into a mesophasal conversion, the Moldavite particles interfere with the Crystal Skull's birefringant properties. The Moldavite makes the Skull transmit certain wavelengths and absorb others.

The Moldavite arrests the perpendicular, the slower stream of polarised light passing through the Skull when the Skull fires up. This action effectively barricades the flow of light and refracts it along a synthetic route, direction. Hence the massive display of lights shooting out in all directions when the Skulls charged.

Generals, Sirs, We believe this creates a type of directed filter system within the Skull in which only certain light, electro-magnetic energy, is allowed to pass through. The light.. ..energy, that is allowed to pass through doubtless emerges through a receiving Skull at some other destination. The receiving Skull translates the light signature into material energy. A traveller.

Who knows how many Skulls there are. There could be many crystal pathways to countless human.. ..iod colony's located at Nine Chevron addresses.. ..I mean extra galactic places outside our system."

"Very informative Carter. Excellent work, all of you. Very well done."

"Obviously a tremendous amount of work has gone into this Report, we couldn't have hoped for a better outcome, well done people."

"Thank you Sirs, it wasn't easy but we all pitched in."

The Briefing Room was full. All the SG Team leaders were present. And there were people from Research and also Logistics, as well as a few people from the labs on twenty and twenty one.

"Daniel can you tie up please."

"Yep will do, thanks Sam."

"Well you've now all had everything we've got on the Skull. Yes we will make it work, just a mater of time and Bill's got his Team working fast on that."

Colonel Carter noticed General O'Neill. He appeared to be agitated. He was lightly knocking his left hand against the table. kneading it, and bending his fingers forwards and backwards,

"General?"

"Carter?"

Without paying attention to his hand he repeatedly flexed his fingers.

"Sir?"

He sat back in his chair.

"Whats up Carter?"

"Your hand Sir, is there something wrong?

He blushed crimson as if caught out on something.

"No its nothing. Pins and needles. Don't worry about it, it'll be alright in a minute, thanks Carter."

"Sir."

Daniel was still wrapping up.

"In relation to the Skull's light filtering method, as Sam said, we suspect the insertion of a second, non crystallic element creates a low pass filter, meaning, natural matter can pass through the crystal. But infected matter will be filter out, it won't be transmitted.. ..teleported.

We think this is why Nick, after using the Crystal Skull to return to Earth, was no longer infected. The infection was essentially cleansed out of him.

This low pass filter may possibly be an unavoidable downfall of aligning these two extra terrestrial elements into one Skull device, as far as the Nebulium are concerned that is. It means they can only travel via Crystal Skull in their raw form. And because of their aversion to our atmosphere, that's actually a very good thing."

High technical tutu was aplenty throughout the whole of this long, tough, Brief. But man o man they, SG-1 and the experts, had done deucedly clever work.

Before closing the Brief the Generals listened to Daniel summarising Teal'c's and his own, as well as Sam's, Bill's and Svi's theorises on transport using the Crystal Skull device.

They would have it that the Ballard Skull, which was still on display and now monitored twenty four seven by TIGETS, in the Smithsonian, can definitely be used to enter the P7X 377 pyramid.

Added to that, Nick had been received back to Earth via the Ballard Skull, that device was therefore a teleportational transceiver, a two way transport device.

They were all certain that Nick used the golden coloured Crystal Skull whilst inside the P7X 377 pyramid, to exit the pyramid. Which would suggest that to get back to Earth from inside the Mayan Pyramid using the golden coloured Crystal Skull as a transportation device, you would actually need two Skulls, one located in the Pyramid, the origin, and one located on Earth, the destination.

A kind of transceiver arrangement.

A bit like the StarGate..

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© Richard Dean Anderson all rights reserved June 2006