An uncle who owned a Russian bakery chain had come to his rescue, offering to back him in return for a share of the profits, if any. Kozlov had jumped at the chance, and within a year he had turned out his first prototype. Two years after that the company he’d originally worked for came back, hat in hand, to apply for a license for its use. And in another ten years every major detergent maker and toothpaste producer in Europe and the United States was using the Kozlov method in their research and production departments. Not long after, this gifted foreigner of little formal education, working in his own laboratory, developed a new, non-petroleum-based surfactant that had the detergent-makers lining up on his doorstep all over again.

By the age of fifty-five, Kozlov was an extremely rich man. He was also a confirmed iconoclast, with a ferocious disdain for the scientific and bureaucratic establishments. A three-time divorce, but still a romantic through and through, he sold out to his uncle, bought a dry-moated, sixteenth-century castle high on a hill on St. Mary’s Island, and retired to live out his days in brooding, baronial splendor. This lasted the restless and intellectually curious Kozlov all of two months, by which time he had developed an interest in natural history, devoting himself with typical Kozlovian intensity to the particular study of the abundant mosses and liverworts to be found in the unusually temperate climate of the Scillies.

In a year he’d learned all there was to know, or all he wanted to know, about the habits of Telaranea murphyae and Lophocolea bispinosa and their kind. Restless and bored, feeling himself getting old before his time, he cast about for a way to marry his newly awakened interest in the natural environment and his old anger at and contempt for bureaucracy and academia.