#this arc has been finished since i posted episode 017 but i really dragged my feet on editing this one

[faces-in-unexpected-places]

Do You Have the Time? Episode 020: Experiment One, Trial Two

Synopsis: Leslie and Leopold shoot the shit together, then they really break some new glass ground in their next phase of experimentation.

[April 24th, 2018, 15:22]

           Leopold sat at the lab bench with their half-finished time machine concoction sitting at it. He was currently working on a method of attaching the pipe to a small, DC motor they had purchased. Leslie pulled up a chair behind him as he worked and alternated between taking bites from two separate cups of ice cream. She was holding both of theirs. They wound up with extra time before Jeremy was done teaching, so they decided to take themselves out to a little treat.

           “I’m not sure what we’d do without you, Leo,” Leslie said, “You’re always making all of these contraptions out of bits and pieces of things you find. I’m not sure Jeremy and I would be able to get by without all your little gadgets… Maybe Jeremy could make some. But he has really only made IO who is a much more traditional kind of robot,” she chuckled.

           “Well, you’ve got Marie to thank for that too, actually,” he mumbled in his concentration.

           “Oh really? Was she a scientist too? Or an engineer?”

           “Goodness, no,” he laughed, “Quite the opposite. She was an artist! She did all kinds of pieces. Music, paintings, sculptures, sewing, you name it. She always told me ‘you could make anything, if you really wanted to!’” he chuckled, “I put that thought to good use ever since then,” he sighed yearningly.

           “She inspired you to make these kinds of things?” Leslie asked.

           “You could say that.”

            “She told me that I didn’t remind her of ‘normal scientists’, whatever that meant,” he chuckled, “Said I had something special that they didn’t, but I think she was just in love with me,” he brushed off.

           Leslie snorted.

           “Oh, just that?”

           “She told me I should try inventing things. I made a couple of fun little contraptions for her. I’m pretty sure she just wanted me to make one of those Dr. Seuss machines where something goes in and something comes out, but what happens inside is a total mystery.” he laughed, “It is fun though, I’ll admit. If anyone supported me working on the floor, writing with colored pencils, and making silly machines to make my research easier, it was Marie.”

           “Huh. So that’s why you’re so eccentric,” Leslie said with a mouth full of ice cream.

           Leopold spun around in high alert.

           “Are you eating my ice cream, too?” he accused.

           “No,” Leslie said defensively, holding the ice cream in her mouth.

           “Yes, you are, I can see it on your mouth!” he pointed to her face, “Stop that, you little weasel!”

           Leslie stood up, holding both cups of ice cream, and scurried away.

           “They were melting, I had to do something!” she spoke through a mouth full of his ice cream.

           “Yeah, you’re supposed to tell me, so I can eat it!” he laughed and chased after her.

           “Wait, wait, wait,” she put her hands out cautiously, “Wait… wait…” she swallowed another gulp, “There was a reason, I can explain…”

           He stopped.

           “Okay then, please do Ms. Goodchild.”

           “…It was just so good!” she pleaded.

           Leopold playfully swatted at his ice cream and Leslie squealed. She gave up the cup away from her and devoured what was left of his ice cream, which wasn’t much. They laughed and he took a break from building the machine. Leslie offered her own cup to him when he finished his.

           “You want mine too? I ate a lot of yours; I don’t need to be eating this much ice cream.”

           “Oh, nonsense, live a little! Eat it while you’re still young,” he encouraged, “Your body can still afford it,” he joked.

           “What do you mean, you look great for your age!” Leslie exclaimed.

           “Heh, see, Leslie, it’s already a red flag if you have to say ‘for your age’.”

           “Old or not, you could definitely be worse off. Compared to the other old guys here? You’re doing fine,” she judged.

           “Though, you still just implied that I am in fact, ‘an old guy’,” he chuckled.

“Older, maybe, sure, but you look great, you’re smart, and tall, and you still have some hair!”

           Leopold scoffed.

           “Still have some hair?” he repeated.

           “Yeah, that sounded better in my head,” she uttered to herself, “I didn’t really mean it that way, sorry!”

           Leopold shrugged and waved her apology away.

           “But everything else I did mean! I mean, you can’t tell me you haven’t noticed that you’re turning Martha’s head.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Oh goodness, you’re such a man,” she joked, “She always asks about you when I talk to her. I bet if you asked her on a date, she’d say yes,” Leslie lovingly nudged.

           Leopold nervously laughed.

           “Even if I was ‘turning heads’ – which I don’t believe I am – I’m sure they’re just passing thoughts, Leslie. She probably has a husband of her own–”

           “Nope. Divorced ten years ago,” she quickly rebutted.

           “Okay, maybe so… but I’m still ten years her senior! Something like us would look out of place, I’m sure.”

           “She’s 55 Leo, not a teenager,” she brushed off and giggled, “Technically the youngest age you can date is 39 because 64 divided by 2, plus 7 is 39.”

           Leopold narrowed his eyes at Leslie who was all too invested. She had an answer for everything. Almost like her answers were pre-thought out. She realized that he was catching on and reeled herself back into her chair. Apparently, she’d leaned more and more forward the longer they talked.

           “How much have you thought about this?” he asked, suspiciously.

           “What life plan?!” she blurted out.

           “You’re putting together a life plan for me?” he cracked up.

           “Uh, I didn’t say ‘life plan’, I said… ‘wife plan’,” she blurted out, “Oh, god, it’s the same thing,” she murmured to herself.

           Leopold laughed, rolled his eyes, and slapped his knee in amusement.

           “Well, that’s very sweet of you, Leslie. But you know, since Marie… I haven’t really been interested in… ‘getting back out there’, or anything. She was the love of my life… I think she was the only one,” he softly resolved.

           “Mmm, I guess, but… if she’s looking down on you right now… I bet she wouldn’t mind if you…”

           “If… what?”

           “You know…” she winked with a wide-open smile.

           “Oh my god! Leslie!”

            “What!?” she laughed.

            “You were so innocent when I took you in! Where did it all go? I surely know that I didn’t do anything with it!” he joked.

           “Oh, I was like this long before I met you,” she dismissed, “I was just thinking it, instead of saying it, so I didn’t want to drive you away.”

           “You mean a strange old man walks up to you wearing a bow-tie and suspenders, says ‘hey I know we’ve just met, but I’m building a time machine, and have no employees, but you look the part, so I’ll pay for your classes if you work for me’ and you thought ‘what a conventional fellow who has not said anything out of the ordinary, I better not be too weird around him in case it drives him away’?”

           “Yup!” Leslie happily answered, without a second thought.

           “Well, I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but since you’re the one who started it…” he grinned and changed the subject.

           “Oh no.”

           “You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed how the boy looks at you.” he used her own words against her with a proud smirk.

           Leslie glued her eyes to the ceiling and shrugged.

           “I know not of who you speak,” she shook her head, her skin turning red.

           “Oh, you know well and good that the only one I call ‘boy’ is Jeremy.”

           “Jeremy Brilliant?” she continued playing dumb, “Oh, yeah, he’s a good guy,” she said, attempting to sound nonchalant.

           “Based on my calculations the youngest age you can date is 21. If I recall correctly, I believe Jeremy is–”

           “–24, yes, I am aware,” Leslie cut him off, bashfully.

           “Oh. So, seems you are.”

           “Eh, oooh, shouldn’t have said that,” Leslie mumbled to herself.

           “I bet if you asked him on a date, he’d say yes,” Leopold smirked.

           “Oh, is this funny to you? This is fun?” Leslie sassed with rosy cheeks.

           “A little bit, yeah,” he snickered.

           She rolled her eyes and laughed wryly. She took a deep breath and composed herself. Her voice was low as a precaution if he suddenly came through the door.

           “While I don’t exactly doubt that… something could happen…”

           “Mhmm.”

           “Emphasis on could…”

           “Of course.”

           “We’re friends…” she said softly yet decisively, “And I like what we have, so I don’t plan on changing it.”

           “Oh, no?”

           “Nope! I’m doubling down with that.”

           “Okay,” he accepted.

           “And besides, he’s doing his research here, dating someone you’re working with can be risky, and we’ve got bigger ideas, anyway! We’re all working really hard for this time project. It would be a distraction.”

           “Fair points, no judgement,” Leo threw his hands in the air, “Sometimes things just happen, though…” he shrugged and trailed off.

           “Maybe so, but it’s a moot point because any feelings that may or may not be there are pushed way deep, deep down and aren’t relevant to our research! Sooo, let’s get to work on it! We have to work fast, anyway, right?”

           Leopold chuckled and pulled his seat back up to the machine on the lab table and motioned for Leslie to follow. And she did.

           “You are right. Let’s get to work, poppet.”

           The industrial DC motor was about the size of Leslie’s torso. She held it still while he fit the pipe around the protruding rotor. It was structurally the same as their cranking method, but instead, the battery-powered rotor would spin the pipe, rather than the crank. Leopold dug around under the lab bench to find the box that the motor came in. He found the product specifications on the box. The DC motor had a resistance of 2.5 Ohms and could be powered with up to 220 volts.

           But no batteries were included.

           Leopold threw his head back with wry chuckle. Leslie asked what the matter was, and he pointed to the print on the box. She frowned.

           “Oh.”

           “We should have read more carefully,” Leopold sighed.

           “Maybe we can find some batteries in the stock room?” she suggested.

           “Hmm…”

            Suddenly Leopold thrusted himself out of the chair and headed to the stockroom, motioning once again for Leslie to follow. They dug through as many cabinets as they could count until they came across a bag of nine-volt batteries and copper wires. The wires were insulated with rubber of various bright colors, but the conductive tips of the wires were exposed. Leopold laughed triumphantly and began scavenging the materials. He brought them back to the lab bench with Leslie’s help.

           “Alright Leslie, it’s time to think all the way back to your first physics class,” he began, “What do you remember about electric circuits?”

           “Oh, mmm, uhh, hold on!” she hummed and hawed and ripped a piece of paper out of her nearby notebook. She wrote ferociously.

           “Okay, so… We use Ohm’s law!”

“That’s right! And what is Ohm’s law?” Leopold quizzed.

“Mmm…” Leslie tapped her pen against the table, “Voltage is equal to current multiplied by resistance!” she called out as soon as she wrote it out.

           “Exactly! Do you remember what each factor is?” he pressed as he began lining up the batteries.

           Leslie spoke almost as if she was regurgitating information that was instilled in her mind long ago.

           “Voltage is the amount of potential a battery has to generate electricity… the current is how much electrical charge passes through something for a defined amount of time; it’s sort of like how quickly or strongly the electricity is flowing. And resistance… is, well, how much the object being powered resists the flow of the electrical current. The more it resists, the hotter it gets… right?” she asked.

           “You hit the nail right on the head,” he gleamed proudly, “Good for you for never forgetting your roots!”

           “So… are we really going to power this giant motor with nine-volt batteries, though? It seems… impractical,” she chuckled.

           “Eh, well, it’s all we’ve got, currently. But if we have enough of them, it should make no difference, right? Because if we just wire all these nine-volts together, their voltages are additive. It starts out as nine, then to eighteen, then twenty-seven, and so forth.”

           “…All the way up to 220?” Leslie asked apprehensively.

           “Yeah,” Leo sighed tiresomely, “…We’re going to need a lot of batteries.”

           “Oh, I remember, because the more volts there are, the stronger the electrical current—”

           “And the faster the pipe will spin to make the cosmic strings, you got it!”

           Leslie joined Leopold in his venture to connect all the batteries together with the wires. One end of a copper wire touched the positive terminal of a battery, then the other end of the wire bridged its way to the negative terminal of the next battery. They continued this pattern, linking about 20 nine-volt batteries total. They had essentially made a 180-volt battery from many smaller batteries. Leopold grinned and subtly bounced up and down in excitement at the circuit. Just as they were about to complete the circuit by connecting the opposite ends to the motor, Jeremy walked in.

           Leopold twirled around, beamed, and waved him over.

           “Oh, you have got the most perfect timing, boy! Come, come, look at this!” Leo gestured widely with his arms at the array of batteries. Jeremy vacantly dropped his backpack on the ground and floated over to their lab bench. Leslie frowned at him, sensing something was wrong.

           “What is it?” he asked with a hollow tone.

           “We’re about to start trial two. Automating the spinning of the cosmic string!”

           “Cool,” Jeremy stated and donned his lab coat. Leslie gathered the aluminum and iron oxide powders and together, they filled up the next ceramic pot in the metal bucket complete with the magnesium ribbon fuse. Jeremy lit the fuse and carelessly drifted away, from the reaction. Leslie grabbed him by the wrist and ushered him to the other side of the room, behind Leopold who was about to complete the circuit. The brilliant red, orange, and yellow sparks of the reaction filled the bucket and illuminated the surrounding area like all the other times before.

           Leopold feverishly connected the last wires to the motor. It emitted a deep humming sound as it powered up, and the rotor began whirling faster and faster. The pipe they had fixed to the rotor shook about in its place. Leopold gave the fiery bucket an elbow in the direction of the whizzing pipe. Just as the pipe began glowing red hot at the tip closest to the reaction bucket, the powerful vibrations caused the pipe to tremble to the very edge of the rotor. The intense rotation flung the pipe off the motor and towards Leopold. Leslie tried to yell “watch out!”, but the anxiety and surprise translated her words into “Waaaahh!”. She hustled herself and Jeremy to the other side of the lab bench, away from the chaos.

           Leopold quickly ducked for cover. The pipe closely grazed the top of his head and crashed through the large window behind him that peered into his office. Shards of glass pattered over his desk like rain drops. The ceramic pot combusted in the metal bucket once again, spitting chunks of ceramic out the top. Shortly after, the motor died out and the swirling rotor slowed to a stop. The remainder of the thermite reaction snapped and crackled in the metal bucket like a dying campfire.

           The room was inert with the wreckage of trial two.

           Leopold’s old body staggered to its feet. He glanced over his shoulder to his office, then to the motionless motor. He sighed. Leslie and Jeremy popped up on the other side of the lab bench. Leopold tightly rubbed his face with an agitated expression.

           “I thought we were breaking ground for a second, but then every single part of that experiment just failed,” he muttered to himself, “Damn it,” he enunciated aloud.

           “Are you okay?” Leslie redirected his attention.

           “Yeah, I’m fine,” he exhaled and felt the top of his head, “I think that pipe may have… skinned the top of my head. A bit of a blessing, considering. What I want to know is why the motor stopped. Did the circuit break?”

           Jeremy and Leslie investigated the circuit. Leslie frowned and shook her head.

           “It looks fine to me.”

           “The batteries are all dead,” Jeremy declared with a flat tone.

           “Alright, how do you figure?” Leo cross-examined and approached the motor, still burning off his frustration.

           Jeremy scoffed.

           “Because you used twenty nine-volts. Look at the capacity on them. Half an amp hour. How many amps are you running through this circuit?” he disputed.

           Leopold glanced up to the ceiling while he did the math in his head. They could hear him mumbling the numbers to himself.

           “A hundred eighty volts over two and a half Ohms is… Eighty? Eighty-eight? I think it’s eighty-eight amps.”

           “So, half an amp hour over eighty-eight amps is how much?” Jeremy asked.

           Leslie started calculating on her phone. The current circuit could only sustain itself on their array of nine-volt batteries for 0.005 hours, which was approximately 20 seconds.

           “Oh…” Leslie muttered and glanced up at them both, “He has a point, Leo. The capacity on these nine-volts is so low that because they’re putting out so much electricity at once, they can’t sustain it for longer than a few seconds. We used up all the juice in these batteries in an instant because spinning the pipe that fast pretty much sucks all the energy out of them right away.”

           “Awww… he is right,” Leopold groaned, “I forgot about the capacity. How did you figure it out so quickly, boy?”

           “IO went through a lot of batteries before I found a decent rechargeable one for him to use,” he explained, “And I also just taught a lab on electric circuits an hour and a half ago.”

           The lab was motionless while they all processed the results of trial two. Leopold exhaled in mild frustration and glimpsed at his disheartened team. He shook the failure off the best he could. He put on a brave face and shrugged.

           “It’s nothing we’re not already used to, right Leslie?” he broke the silence.

           Her concerned expression broke, too. She anxiously chuckled once she felt that Leopold’s frustration wasn’t going to escalate any further.

           “It wouldn’t be us if we didn’t fail at least once in every phase, first,” she added.

           “We’re going to get there,” he responded, calmer and more certain of himself, “We’ve seen the strings. At least part of one. We know we can produce them, somewhat. They’re just not stable enough to last beyond the pipe for more than a few seconds. But we can do better with this,” he gestured to the motor, “We just have to keep at it. We can’t give up that easily. If time travel were easy, everyone would be doing it. Right?”

           He and Leslie chuckled together. Jeremy held a barely noticeable smile.

           “Good work, you two. As always,” Leo perked up, “So what do we know…?” he murmured to himself.

           “We need better batteries,” Jeremy claimed, “Ideally with higher voltage and amp hours so we need less to produce the electric current and so that the motor lasts longer,” he summarized.

           “And we also need to keep that pipe on the rotor,” Leslie mentioned, “We can’t have anyone’s head come that close to being taken off, again!”

           “Yeah…” Leopold muttered and glimpsed back at the pipe covered in broken glass in his office, “So how do we get it to stay on?”

           “…Super glue?” Leslie humorously suggested.

           “Huh. Yeah, maybe,” Leo thought out loud.

           “Oh, pfft, I was mostly joking!”

           “It’s worth a try,” Jeremy supported, seeming slightly more optimistic.

           “One of you Google what the strongest super glue is, and I’ll add it to the shopping list,” Leo said.

           He scribbled away on their chalkboard, jotting down the need for batteries and super glue. He wrote down twelve- or twenty-four-volt batteries with five-hundred amp hours. Leslie announced that Google said the best glue was Loctite Super Glue. Leo marked it down.

           “We should make sure to have acetone on hand, too. Just in case we need to remove the glue from anywhere,” she added.

           Leo nodded and wagged his finger at her quick thinking.

           “Looks like we’ve got another trip to make,” Leo observed, “Why don’t you two head out for a while and find those things; I’ll stay behind and clean up this mess.”

           Leslie stalled to triple-check that Leo was truly okay with staying behind to clean, but he insisted that they move on without him. She and Jeremy took their essentials and Leopold ushered them out the door.