Professor Volkov

The hospital was a large, pale building on the edge of Kaliningrad city, and Professor Ivan Volkov was in a room on the fourth floor that had a window looking east over the rooftops. He was a small, compact man with a white beard and the particular vitality of someone whose mind is considerably more active than their current physical circumstances allow. He was sitting up in bed reading a journal article when they arrived, and he looked at Aleksei with the sharp affection of a man for whom this boy was clearly the person he was most glad to see in the world.

Then he looked at Mila and her father and raised an eyebrow.

Aleksei introduced them in Russian and then in English, because the professor spoke it reasonably well, and then Aleksei sat down beside the bed and placed the red amber piece on the bedside table.

The professor looked at it.

He did not speak for a long moment. He picked it up with both hands and held it to the window light, turning it slowly, and the red of it blazed in the grey afternoon sun, and the lizard inside it was perfectly clear.

"Aleksei," he said, in Russian, very quietly.

"Yes, Dedushka."

"Where?"

Aleksei told him. He told him everything, with Mila adding details and her father showing the photographs on his camera, and the professor listened with the focused stillness of someone receiving information they have been waiting a very long time to receive.

When it was finished, the professor was quiet for a moment.

"The man from the mining authority," he said at last, in English, for Mila and her father's benefit.

"His name, do you know it?"

"He did not give it," said Aleksei.

"It does not matter. I know them. They will not move quickly." He looked at the amber. "But they will move." He looked at Mila. "Your father mentioned an emergency research claim."

"Against your existing permit," said Mila. "If you formally notify the scientific committee of a significant in situ find and request priority survey status, the mining authority cannot access the deposit while the claim is assessed. It freezes the site."

The professor looked at her with the expression of someone who has just upwardly revised their assessment of a situation. "You know the permit regulations."

"I read them this morning. My father has his laptop at the field station."

"You read the Kaliningrad amber extraction permit regulations for leisure?"

"For information," said Mila. "I prefer to understand the systems relevant to a situation before I am in the situation."

The professor almost smiled. He looked at her father. "She is yours?"

"Entirely," said Tomasz, with the tone of someone who is frequently surprised by this and is always pleased about it.

The professor thought for a moment. Then he said to Aleksei, "In my desk at home. The blue folder at the back of the top drawer. There is a completed but not yet submitted notification form for the scientific committee. I prepared it three years ago in anticipation of this find. I did not submit it because I had not located the deposit." He looked at the amber. "Bring it here. I will complete the final section and sign it. You will take it to the committee offices in person. Not by post."

Aleksei stood. "I'll go now."

"Take Mila," said the professor. "She knows which drawer."

Mila looked at the professor. He met her eyes with a direct, warm look.

"You understand what this deposit is," he said. "Not just scientifically. You understand that it is forty-five million years of stillness in two centimetres of stone. That the creature inside was alive in a forest that no longer exists, in a world that is entirely gone, and that it is here, now, because the resin closed over it before it could escape, and the resin hardened, and the sea moved it, and the storm uncovered it, and a boy was on a beach at the right moment." He looked at the amber in his hand. "This is what I have spent my life trying to find. And it was found by a thirteen-year-old who happened to be collecting on my beach."

"Twelve," said Aleksei from the door, with a slight emphasis.

"I am thirteen," said Mila. "I had my birthday in May."

The professor looked at her over his glasses. "Thirteen," he said. "Even better."

They brought the blue folder back within the hour, and the professor completed the notification form with the steady, precise handwriting of someone who has been filling in scientific documents for forty years, and signed it, and handed it to Aleksei.

"The committee offices close at five," he said. "You have forty minutes."

They made it with six minutes to spare.