This story is told by an academic S. Yuryshev, the head of the applied biochemistry university. Its events take place in the 1920s, in the Civil war, when he, being a geologist, goes to search for copper in coal mines which belonged to Stasov, the merchant, and in the 1970s, when he becomes the university head. He consigns all his reflections and actions to his past, to revolutionary romance of the 1920s. The discovery of a new chemical element became the deed of his life. He believes in getting it even after the explosion in the laboratory takes his best friend’s life, when his adult stepson also becomes a chemist and gets an injury while making experiments. He believes even when the testing on war polygon fail again.