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They found the Professor and Hector in the laboratory.
The older man was fiddling with a cylinder of liquid
nitrogen, the younger one was watching. For someone
stranded so far from home with no reasonable hope of
returning Hector looked suspiciously sanguine.
"Professor," Lea announced, proudly. "We
bring you a solution."
"Good. Excellent. Thank you." He smiled at
them and for a moment Michael thought that he was genuinely
grateful. "To what?"
"To your problem of poor memory retention."
"Oh, that. I was beginning to worry about that
myself."
From her bag she produced a thick black marker pen
and a roll of self-adhesive address labels. She wrote
her name on one of them and stuck it on her blouse.
The Professor watched, attentively. Then she made one
for Michael and another for Hector. He had changed his
outfit and now his garb that was even more remarkable.
He looked like a sickly judo expert dressed for the
opera.
The Professor was evidently pleased with the labels.
"Lea," he read. "Michael. Hector."
Immediately he seemed to relax. "Well done m'dear.
Good thinking." He looked down at the roll of labels.
"How many of those do you have?"
They convened in the main room for a conference.
"I didn't see any thunderstorms today. Does that
mean you cancelled the experiments?"
"Yes," admitted the Professor. "I agree.
We should stop. Can't have the police snooping around."
"Good," said Michael. "Because I bring
you a solution, too."
The Professor nodded. Hector sat in silence with his
frog.
"Or rather, not a solution exactly. More like
a possible solution. There are still some bits we need
to figure out."
Michael knew it was impertinent to try to give advice
but he was comforted to see the Professor lean forward
and listen attentively. Michael took a deep breath and
began his pitch.
"The Professor can't build a time machine because
it isn't safe to test the prototype right now. So I
started to wonder if there's another way that we might..."
he hesitated before he spoke the next word, "'acquire'
a time machine."
"Acquire?" Lea asked.
"Like if someone already has a time machine, just
suppose, could we get them to bring it here?"
The Professor was staring at him. So was Hector.
"What exactly do you mean?" asked the Professor.
His eyes were beginning to glaze a little, the way seemed
to when he was in deepest thought. Part of his brain
was still with them but most of it was elsewhere.
"Well. Either time machines exist or they don't,
right? Hector got here so it makes sense to assume that
they do exist. So anyone who has one can get here if
they want to."
The Professor nodded again. "Assuming they can
move in space as well as time."
"So we just need to make someone want to come
here?" Lea asked. "Is that it?"
"That's brilliant!" the Professor cried.
"How?"
The simplicity of the question silenced everyone. They
looked at each other, hoping that someone would have
a contribution to make. "Not sure," Michael
finally confessed. "That's the hard part. But if
we can solve it, we might be able to get someone to
give Hector a ride home."
The Professor considered the plan. "It would cut
down on the soldering."
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