can’t get too involved with Brank’ox. If we wanted some privacy, we’d have to go into the jungle. And that carries with it a lot of problems of its own.
Jennifer is already asleep, but despite my exhaustion, I toss and turn for a good while.
I’m leaving Xren the first chance I get. That’s been my guiding light for my entire time here. Leaving and going home to Earth has been my only goal, the only thing I’ve been looking forward to.
But what will my life on Earth be like if I know I’ll never see Brank’ox again?
I kick my fur off me, unable to get comfortable. “Just one problem after the other,” I mutter to myself.
I wish I had his out-of-tune harp sounds to soothe me. In fact, I just plain wish he was here right now.
- - -
The next morning, I open the pots. I didn’t mark them, so I don’t know what it is I’m opening.
The first one is the sap that I hope is kind of rubber-like. I try to pour it out, but it won’t budge. Poking into the pot with a stick, I realize it’s gone all firm.
I smash the pot against the workbench, and as the broken pottery falls away it leaves a hemisphere of a gray, dirty-looking material. It’s pretty heavy, and it could well be something that resembles rubber. It smells pretty bad, though.
I toss it at a rock, and it bounces back pretty well. I guess it could be rubber, but I have no idea how to make sure. It might not even matter. If it bounces and it’s waterproof, then who cares if it’s the kind of rubber I know from Earth? It can probably be used, anyway.
Satisfied, I break the other rubber pots and put the three half balls to the side.
Now the guano. If I remember correctly, the way to extract the saltpeter is to mix it with a solvent that will leach the saltpeter from the rest of the unpleasant matter. I’ll try with water first, then some kind of nitrate. I have a lot of experimentation ahead of me.
The fool’s gold is almost all sulfur, but there is also a good amount of iron that should be removed to get pure sulfur. It should be enough to heat it up. I don’t remember the melting point of sulfur, but it pretty much has to be lower than that of iron. Maybe I can use steam to dissolve the whole thing.
I spend several happy hours experimenting with the substances and forgetting the world around me. This is more what I wanted my life as a chemist to be like, instead of the boredom of setting up a spreadsheet just right.
But the wood I burned for soap needs seeing to as well. Now that I know how to make both lye and how to treat the dinosaur fats to turn it all into soap, I can actually just show someone and they can do it while I stay busy with the new chemicals.
“You look like you’re in your element,” Delyah says, sauntering up with her sleeping baby girl on her shoulder.
“It’s fun,” I admit. “This is more what I wanted my life as a chemist to be. It’s like playing with a real-life chemistry set for kids.”
She chuckles softly so as not to wake up her baby. “If you say so. Looks more like you’re playing with dirt. And things worse than that.”
I smile. “Yeah, there is some actual crap here. But I think we can turn it into useful stuff. Like fertilizer for the new fields.”
“So, what did you get? Did you find rubber?”
I show her one of the half balls. “If it’s not rubber, then it’s something pretty similar. It was actually flowing like sticky milk just two days ago. Now it’s like this.” I bounce the lump off my rocky workbench. “If nothing else, I guess we can make baseballs or tennis balls from it.”
“Cool,” Delyah says. “Maybe at some point we can set up a baseball league. I remember all the army bases I grew up in, they all had a diamond. Like, they built that before anything else, almost. Just playing for the heck of it, with nothing much at stake. It does a lot of good for a group.”
“The cavemen will take to it like fish to water. Or maybe set up a football league for them. I mean, it would be fun to watch. Clothing optional, of course.”