stimulant

turning left off the main road into the campus, the campus that has been the workplace for the last twenty six years. There is fog, and the big Mercedes coming in from the opposite direction and turning right just takes the right of way.
Size matters.

There are building sites everywhere on campus, find a spot to park the blue car, use a temporary parking space,
Crunch across the gravel to the basement entrance, find that it is still locked, so take another entrance, fifty metres away.
There is a pendulum hanging from the ceiling here, a pendulum with a dial underneath it. Foucault's pendulum, a small version, but for real. It hangs from the high ceiling in a stairwell, swinging back and forth, friction counteracted by the cunning use of an electromagnet. Climb the stairs,  watch the pendulum go back and forth, steadily and silently. The dial on the stairwells floor shows the current direction of the swinging pendulum with a cunning mechanism using blue diodes to mark the direction of the pendulums swing.
Walk through the passage on the bridge between the two buildings, looking out onto the foggy yard below through the round porthole - like windows.
The refuse collectors have just arrived, a big dumpster backing into the yard.

It is just past six in the morning, the building has not been awakened yet.

In the office, turn on the coffee maker.
Coffee is a favourite drug.
A stimulant
As stimulant so needed