Experimental Near-Death in Moscow. A terrific example of a great scene cut from the "Russia" chapter purely for narrative clarity. (Again: Without knowing the book, this scene will be completely meaningless.) Turin is in the Moscow office of the chemist Elias Burshetsky (we changed the Russian scientist's name to protect him; this is actually my great-grandfather's name, a man who, with his wife Rose, emigrated from the Russian shtetls in the late 1800s). Turin has picked up from this scientist a slightly contraband ultra-rare molecule called a deuterated decaborane, and smelled it, and to his immense relief the smell confirms his Vibration theory. Then suddenly, out of the blue, he finds himself faced with a different and hostile molecule.

Burshetsky was serving Turin biscuits (Turin, nervous, holding his decaborane with its comforting sulfur smell and now just wanting to get the hell out, was trying to chit-chat). The Russian said offhand "Oh ve can make for you many ozerr compound, like carborane." It was a kind of borane that contained a couple extra carbon atoms thrown in. Turin was there for a decaborane, not a carborane, but he said, more to be polite than anything, "Oh, that'd be interesting."

The Russian chemist regarded him. Would Turin like to smell it? "Iz harmless."

Sure, said Turin. (Hm, he'd never, he realized, actually smelled a carborane. Many other boranes, but never this one...)

He watched Burshetsky get up, go to his cupboard, and get out a little glass container with the molecule in it. He passed it to Turin, who smelled the carborane...

And it smelled of camphor. Camphor! Alarm bells started shrieking. Here he was, holding a borane, the molecules that all vibrate at 2500, sulfur's vibration, and which all (until this very second at least) smell of sulphur, as Turin's theory absolutely says they have to- and there's no goddamn sulfur smell at all.

He was freaking out, absolutely panicking. He'd come all the way to Moscow to smell one thing, a marvelous creature that entirely confirmed his theory, and he'd run headlong into a monster. His life flashed before his eyes. Why in the Lord's name did this borane not smell of Sulfur? Sweat pouring he said wildly to Burshetsky, "You say carboranes are really stable in water." And Burshetsky replied calmly, "Oh yes, stable for ten year." And at that, finally, he started remembering his chemistry.

There are some molecules that, if you put them in water, decompose violently. The reason: They've got huge partial charges on their atoms, water is attracted by the charges, and the thing blows itself to pieces. And what makes them blow apart, the partial charges, happens to also be what make them… smell. So Turin took a deep breath and asked Burshetsky what the partial charges were on this terrifying molecule. Burshetsky looked at him, picked up a pencil, looked around for a piece of paper. He drew a zero and a zero. Turin's panic flooded out. It made sense.

And suddenly he had a vision, and several things came together in an instant, and he realized he had escaped death by an inch, but not in this office in Russia, rather years ago, at the very beginning of the entire story.

In the BBC's Horizon documentary, when you're watching them interview John Amoore, Mr. Shape, the camera catches him at his desk, so you can just see the desk top. Sitting right in front of him you see a plastic model of a carborane, the monster. And (Turin now recalled; the BBC had actually used this tape) at one point he says to the camera "Turin's a braver man than I am to smell these things, I don't smell them, but I understand that carboranes smell of camphor." Which Turin had totally forgotten. The reason Amoore says it- the reason he's got this particular molecule on his desk- happens, completely and totally coincidentally, to be that Amoore's Shape theory held that sphere-shaped molecules should smell of camphor. Carborane just happens to be beautifully sphere-shaped. And it smells of camphor.

What made Turin weak-kneed, sitting there with his chest heaving, was the sudden, astounding, simple, and completely stupid realization that years ago, in the very first experiment he did on his newborn theory, it had almost died. Here was a totally harmless borane that you could drink, for Chrissake. And you can buy it anywhere. He'd been searching for a borane and had opened the Aldrich catalog, and there'd been two and only two boranes, decaborane and carborane, that didn't burst into flame. The only reason he'd ordered the decaborane ("smells like boiled onion, Luca!"), the only reason he had thank God just ignored the carborane ("I understand that carboranes smell of camphor...") was that he'd been browsing his Cotton & Wilkenson in bed, and C&W had a small section on decaborane. So he'd figured OK, well, might as well pick that one.

It was the tiniest bit of pure fate. Had he played it safe and ordered Amoore's camphorous carborane from Aldrich instead of the toxic decaborane that smells of Sulfur without any Sulfur in it (Amoore: "He's a braver man than I"), if he had done the sensible thing and smelled the one borane that doesn't kill you… he would have junked the entire Vibrational theory at the start. Boranes, he'd have thought, didn't smell of Sulfur. His prediction would have been wrong. He would have heaved a sigh, and given up, and thrown it in the trash. It's spherical, it smells of camphor, Amoore's right, the hell with it. And none of this story would have happened.

Amoore had played it safe. But in being safe, John Amoore focused on the only borane that doesn't smell of Sulfur. And so got it wrong. By the skin of his teeth.

Turin sat there for a few minutes, just breathing. He thought: I am really getting too goddamn old for this.