In Search of a Substitute (2)
Alexei Evgrafovich Favorsky.
He had been Butlerov's prize pupil — and Butlerov was the pioneer of Russian chemistry, the man who invented the theory of chemical structure and first introduced the double bond into structural formulas. Favorsky had worked in that laboratory until the old man's dying day.
Now he held the chair of organic chemistry at the Leningrad Polytechnic, and he was one of the few chemists alive who could put the compounds I needed into my hands with the least amount of trouble.
"...I never imagined Yasha would be acquainted with His Excellency Favorsky."
"No — we've never met. I've only heard the name, and the work."
"...I see."
"If you wouldn't mind, Katya, could you tell me a little about him?"
"...In the days of the Empire, His Excellency Favorsky was an Actual State Councillor. Under the decree abolishing the estate system, he is nothing more than a department chair at the Polytechnic now, of course."
Actual State Councillor. A civilian rank equal to a major general in the army, or an admiral in the navy. The Ivin family in Tolstoy's Childhood had been a house of Actual State Councillors. Men of that rank held the vital offices of the state, and though the title was never official, people called them high dignitaries all the same.
"An Actual State Councillor..."
"The Kremlin has flown a red flag for eight years now, but they are still here — unerased, at the very center of a Union that preaches equality for every living soul."
Katerina's hands tightened on the wheel.
"The Revolution brought down the Winter Palace, seized the nobles' estates, and made the very word class itself a crime. What it could not seize was what people carried in their heads."
She was right. The Empire had fallen, but the Union that rose in its place still ran on the strength of a thin elite stratum — the bourgeois specialists. Lenin had ordered that they be bound to the Union even if it meant paying them handsomely, and in material terms they had grown richer than they ever were as nobles of the Empire.
A curious landscape: a country that declared all men equal, in which the men of the old ranks ate better and lived better than the workers. The workers, naturally, did not look kindly on it. And so, somewhere between the 1920s and the 1930s, the proletariat and the young Party members would turn on these people, purge them from political life, and take the vacant seats for themselves. The sociologists would come to call the phenomenon Spetseedstvo — the hunting of specialists.
When did Favorsky die...? Was he caught in the Spetseedstvo? ...Damn it. I can't remember.
Human memory is finite, and it evaporates easily. I could rattle all of this off now like some all-knowing sage, but I could not swear what would remain after a year, after five, after ten.
So I have to hurry... There isn't much time.
While I still held the advantage of knowing, I had to wring every drop of use from that knowledge — before the young, inexperienced, uneducated workers climbed into high office on the back of Spetseedstvo. And if I could draw these bourgeois specialists into my own camp while I was at it, so much the better. Perhaps this evening's errand would be the first stone in that foundation.
"We're here, Yasha."
Katerina had stopped the car at the corner where Zagorodny Prospect 49 crossed Moskovsky Prospect 26. I stepped out and looked at my wristwatch.
Eight in the evening. The sky, however, still wore the face of three in the afternoon.
A memory surfaced without warning — my first trip to Europe. I had sat in an airplane for a full thirteen hours to reach my younger brother, who was living in Kraków. The university he attended was some six hundred years old, famous as the alma mater of Copernicus and John Paul II. I had walked the university streets beside him then without any particular feeling. It had been raining, of all days. The flagstones were treacherously slick, and the walls gave off the smell of old things.
Stone, and paper, and chalk...
That was when I learned that if enough generations of people come to a building to learn something and then leave, the place itself takes on the smell of the past. My brother had wanted to show me the library. I was hungry. In the end we sat in the square and ate lukewarm beer and sausage. An ordinary day. Nothing in it. Perhaps the memory had risen so suddenly because a similar scent was drifting down this corridor now.
I looked up at the sky. The street where I had laughed and shared sausage with my brother was a place I would never see again. A hundred years. A full century stood between us. My brother had not been born, and if he ever was, I would already be dead. The same would be true of my parents.
A bitter thought.
"Yasha...?"
Katerina had turned to look at me, her face drawn with concern.
"Is something wrong?"
"It's nothing, Katya."
I started walking at once, and she fell in beside me.
Homesickness, is it... Experiencing it for real is a headache.
I forced the thought aside and kept going. At the far end of the corridor, a room leaking yellow light came into view.
"There."
The closer we drew, the thicker the sour smell of acid became. Then a sharp breath of alcohol spread through the air, mixed with the smell of something being heated. We stopped in front of the door.
A clink of glass from inside. Someone was running an experiment.
A small nameplate hung beside the laboratory door.
He was in there. I took off my hat, held it in my hand, and opened the door.
A long, low creak.
The laboratory was a room full of rising steam. Every window that could be opened had been opened, but a row of distillation apparatus along the long workbench kept breathing out vapor, so the windows were doing no real good. The glass tubing wound like a snake, and at its end an unidentified liquid was falling drop by drop into an Erlenmeyer flask.
A white-haired old man stood in front of it with his back to Katerina and me. His spine had a considerable bend. His forearms were a patchwork of cuts and what looked like old pockmarks — though a closer look at the skin below his rolled sleeves told me they were not pockmarks at all, but ancient burn scars.
He held a thermometer in one hand and a small Erlenmeyer flask in the other. He never took his eyes off the thermometer's scale as he poured from the flask into a test tube with his free hand.
A sharp hiss. Reddish-brown vapor the color of dried blood billowed up the glass tubing. While it drifted out through the open windows, the white-haired old man did not even seem to breathe. He did not look away from the thermometer.
"Hhk—"
That was Katerina, drawing a deep breath beside me.
"Stop!!!"
The old man spun on us and roared. Katerina seemed to hold her breath without meaning to. He lunged away from his station, snatched something from a workbench drawer, and flung it at us.
A gas mask, and a cloth soaked in water.
"Put that on, or get out. Now."
I caught it on reflex.
"...Aren't you going to ask who we are?"
"Didn't you see Lebedev and Ipatieff outside?"
"There was no one outside the laboratory."
"No? Then shut up and put the gas mask on first."
He had already turned back to his thermometer.
"I don't feel like hauling out a corpse."
At the word corpse I clapped the wet cloth to my mouth and pulled the gas mask on. Through the lenses I studied the bench with care. The vapor climbing the glass was shifting from brown toward something clear.
One of them looks like a fractional distillation. The other...
"Bromine...?"
"...So you know bromine."
The old man's hand stopped. His eyes came around to me.
"Are you a chemist as well?"
"...I'm not a chemist."
"Then what are you?"
"Production supervisor at the Red Triangle Third Galoshi Factory. Yakov Svanidze."
"...What's a production supervisor doing here."
Favorsky tipped his head, genuine puzzlement on his face. I did not waste the opening.
"I'm looking for something to replace benzene on the factory floor."
"Benzene. So you're after an organic compound that will dissolve rubber."
"Yes. I believed that Professor Favorsky — the man they call the father of organic chemistry — would find me the answer."
"The father of organic chemistry..."
The old man smiled.
His footsteps came toward me with the look of a man who has just found a new toy. He seized my hand in both of his.
"...These hands are rather soft for a factory man."
He did not let go. He simply stared, through the glass of the gas mask, into my eyes.
"Those eyes of yours..."
His own eyes narrowed.
"You came here asking me for a method, but you already know the answer. Or at the very least you've guessed it, and you haven't the certainty. Am I right?"
I looked down at him, startled. Favorsky grinned and stepped aside.
"How did I know? Underestimate an old man and you'll regret it."
His footsteps again, unhurried.
"So we'll do it this way."
He picked up a record sheet from the workbench and tore it cleanly in two. One half, and a stub of pencil, he held out to me.
"Write down the compound you mean to use in place of benzene."
"...I beg your pardon?"
"Name or formula, I don't care. You're not a chemist anyway."
"Yasha..."
Katerina had turned to look at me. Behind the gas mask, I could see her eyes waver.
"All right."
I took the paper with more confidence than I felt. Katerina hovered as if she wanted to say something, then took half a step back.
I accepted Favorsky's pencil stub, started to write the name of a chemical, struck it out, and wrote something else.
"Finished?"
"...Yes."
Favorsky pinched his own scrap between two fingers.
"Unfold it."
We opened the papers at the same time.
That was what the old man had written.
And on mine...
A benzene ring and a single methyl group. The condensed formula of toluene.