"Wow! That seems awfully fast! I thought we didn't have to do this until the spring?", she commented.
I looked around the room. At the other end of the basement was some old furniture. I led her over there and sat down on a ratty old couch. She sat down next to me. I leaned back into the corner and said, "You'd be surprised how quickly the time will go. Listen, you want an A on this, right?"
"I need an A on this.", she replied ruefully.
I didn't react to that, but I admitted, "And I want to win this, not just get an A, so we have to do more than you'd think. First, we're probably going to have to suck down about a thousand cigarettes to get a batch of tar to take over to Towson State. I don't know how long it will take to smoke a cigarette, but even if we do one a minute, that's three packs an hour. It might take us a couple of weeks to smoke fifty packs."
Shelley blinked at that. "Wow!"
"It gets worse. That first batch of tar will go to Towson State, but they'll be using it all. We won't get anything back, which means we'll need to make another batch for the demonstration of the project. Maybe even two batches." Even so, I was privately worried we still wouldn't win. We could win the Nobel Prize with the science, but Mike Misner could still beat us with even a half-assed project. You just can't beat an incubator full of baby chicks for cuteness.
Shelley saw my worried look and smiled at me. "Hey, we're going to win, I just know it! You're too smart to do anything else!" Then she leaned over and kissed me again, only this time not on my cheek but on my lips. "I'm telling you, we're going to win!"
I smiled and licked my lips. I hadn't been kissed by a girl since Marilyn died on my first trip through eternity. I liked it, and the hormones going through me were not all that much under control. "Wow, is that how you plan to keep my morale high?"
She waved her arm at the room. "I'm not just good for facilities and logics, but I can also handle morale."
I grinned. I could have explained the difference between logics and logistics, but I didn't think that would be all that productive. On the other hand... "You know, I still think there's an awful lot of work to do. I'm just feeling really depressed about it." I moaned theatrically.
Shelley waggled her eyebrows at me. She shifted on the couch and crawled over me, and this time the kiss lasted a good deal longer. Then she sat back down on her heels. "Feeling better?"
"Some, but you know, it kind of comes and goes. I think I need another treatment." I reached out and tugged her towards me. She crawled back on top of me and I stretched out. We began kissing again, and this time I slipped her a little tongue. Shelley instantly responded, and our tongues began dueling. We necked for another hour or so, until we heard a door open upstairs and the floor creaking. We separated, grinning, and got ourselves back in order.
I stood up and tucked my shirttails back in. "I hate to say it, but I think we're going to have to work on my mental depression some more."
Shelley licked her lips lewdly. "I know cures you wouldn't believe!" She checked her own shirttails, and then grabbed my hand. "Come on, we need to go upstairs. I think my mom is home." I allowed myself to be dragged upstairs to meet first her mother, and then her father when he came home.
Shelley's parents were both heavy smokers. Nobody had ever heard of second hand smoke in those days, but you could probably get lung cancer just by walking through the house. Both her parents smoked two packs of Marlboros a day, and the house reeked of tobacco. Shelley didn't smoke, and when I got done with this project, she'd never want to. Mr. Talbot drove me home, since he hadn't even taken off his coat. The way he and Mrs. Talbot coughed, I hoped Shelley wouldn't be an orphan before she graduated.
I suspected my father would end up quitting by the time I got through with this project, also. He smoked two packs a day of L&Ms, and had done so since he was in the Navy. He ended up quitting when I was in high school, and then took up cigars for another ten years, before quitting that, too. The curious thing was that for all that the anti-smoking zealots complain about the dangers, and God knows, it's a deadly habit, not everybody who smokes gets cancer. Dad lived until he was 75 and never had a problem with his lungs. I smoked 26 years and when I had to quit I had a lung test and found I had the lungs of a teenager. Marilyn was seriously peeved with me about that. She wanted me to have something dreadful, but curable, so she could sit there and tell me, 'I told you so!' It might eventually kill 95% of the people who smoked, but Dad and I were in that other 5%. Then again, I seemed to have been recycled due to a heart attack, but was that because of smoking or the lamp?
That Saturday Dad and I drove up to a local hardware store and went through the plumbing section. This was all long before the days of Home Depot or Lowes. Hardware stores were much smaller. There was an ample supply of pipes and fittings, and while I would have preferred stainless steel, it just wasn't available. I settled on galvanized. I bought enough parts for three different filters.
Monday afternoon I rode the bus home with Shelley again, and we headed down to the basement. I had the bag of pipe fittings in my backpack, along with a big package of surgical cotton balls. I laid everything out on the table. "I tried this all at home over the weekend, but we need to try it here and see if it actually will work. We need to hook it up to the pump and see if it can work."
"Okay, but what exactly do we have?"
"This is the body of the filter.", I said, holding up a piece of 1" galvanized steel pipe, six inches long and threaded at both ends. I then grabbed an adapter, which converted the 1" pipe to ¼" pipe, and threaded that onto one end. "So that end goes onto the pump. Now, we drop in this piece of wire mesh." I held up a small round piece of wire mesh.
"Where did you get that?"
I shrugged. "I think it's supposed to be a sort of garden fence wire. It's bigger than screen for windows but smaller than chicken coop screen." I dropped it down the pipe and jiggled it, then glanced inside to see if it lay flat. "All it does is hold the actual filter in place."
"The cotton balls, right?", she said pointing at the bag.
"Exactly." I reached over and grabbed the bag, and then ripped one end open.
"If we just drop the balls in there, won't the smoke go around them?"
I eyed her curiously. Actually, that was a very good question. Shelley might not be as dumb as she let out. "That's actually something we should think about. Maybe we should pull some of the balls apart before stuffing them into the tube." Shelley nodded and we each took a handful and pulled the balls apart into a mass of cotton. I held the tube upright while she pushed it down inside.
I really wasn't sure how much we wanted to fill it. Too much would make the draw too hard for the vacuum pump. Too little meant we wouldn't capture enough tar. We would also have to keep an eye out on how the pump functioned after tar started accumulating and clogging the filter. I was just guessing when I stopped Shelley and put the other end cap on.
"Now we attach the filter to the pump." I twisted the adapter onto the business end of the vacuum pump.
"And the cigarette goes on the other end. How does that work?"