260. At Liberty
Amy suddenly recalls that a cubic centimeter is a milliliter; the two terms are interchangeable. She adds 50 milliliters of HCl to the mixture. As she goes to stopper the bottle and put it away, her hand slips and a large amount of acid spills onto the thigh of her right pant leg! It immediately begins to foam and vapor wafts off of it. Amy feels her leg getting warm in the affected area.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Amy says, “This is why I hated Chem!” She looks around frantically, but can’t find any wash stations. She feels the material growing thin and starts to feel a light burning as the acid soaks through her jeans and begins to contact her skin.
Thinking quickly, Amy decides she has to get the acid as far away from her skin as possible, and right now that means getting those pants off. Amy’s modesty wars with her sense of self-preservation as the acid burns ever closer to her tender flesh. At last Amy hits upon a compromise. She reaches into her backpack and pulls out her pocket knife. Selecting a large blade she stabs a hole into her jeans just above the acid, being careful not to slice into her body. She then begins cutting off the leg of the jean. After a few moments the leg has separated from the rest of the jeans. She quickly pulls the leg off, over her boot, and throws it into a steaming pile on the floor.
“Whew!” thinks Amy, “That was close!” She looks at herself. She now has one leg nearly totally bare, save for a scant inch of preserved material that just barely covers the part of her leg that connects to her butt. The other leg remains fully clad, ankle-to-thigh.
“Well, now I look ridiculous!” thinks Amy, rolling her eyes, “I suppose I might as well even it out…” Taking the knife in hand again, she estimates roughly where to cut her left pant leg to keep the look symmetrical and then goes to work. Soon Amy is wearing a pair of tiny cut-off jeans. “Well,” she thinks, “at least it’s warm in here. And I guess I have the legs to pull off shorts…”
Crisis averted, Amy returns to the task at hand. She follows the remaining directions from the book. After about an hour she finishes and now possesses a big bottle of herbicide. She walks over and hands it proudly to Doctor Carluzzo. He’s so obsessed with his work that he doesn’t seem to notice Amy’s wardrobe malfunction.
“Hmm, let’s just give it a little test…” the doctor walks over to a houseplant sitting in a pot on a nearby table. He dabs a couple of drops onto the leaf. The plant quickly turns brown and shrivels up into a shadow of its former self.
“Excellent! You’ve already proven to be worth the trouble! Anything else you can do for me before you die is just gravy, now!”
Amy gulps. Doctor Carluzzo is certainly… unreserved in his comments.
“I’ve not thought of anything else for you to do yet. You’re at leave to do what you wish. There’s a cot in the corner for you to sleep on. Just don’t touch anything! Except the cot. You can sleep on that.”
Amy wanders around, looking at things. For a ratty old cot, it DOES look quite tempting. Amy’s not sure what time it is, but it’s probably quite late. A snooze might be just what she needs. Next to the cot is a large rod with a ball at the ends and several rings around its middle. “Those are called toroids!” Amy thinks to herself, somewhat sleepily, “‘Toroid’ is physics talk for ‘donut.’” Amy has now used everything she can remember from physics class.
Amy sits on the cot and glances over at Doctor Carluzzo. Both he and his monster are fiddling with a large machine, big enough for someone to fit inside of. A label on the side reads “Miniatron 5000.” Out of the corner of her eye, Amy swears she sees a small bolt of lightning coming from the rod she examined earlier, but when she looks at it again nothing happens. Oh well.
What should Amy do?