Livadia Palace (Ливадийский дворец), Crimea. May 1909.
The Black Sea possessed a very different personality from the Baltic. While the northern waters were gray and turbulent, the sea extending before Livadia's terraces was a deep blue, almost indigo. To Alexei's eyes, that color reminded him irresistibly of fresh blueprint ink. It was a color of design, of depth, and of possibilities so marvelous they gave much to think about.
The imperial family had moved south following the aristocracy's annual migration, fleeing Saint Petersburg's consumptive humidity that threatened the Empress's lungs. For Nicholas and Alexandra, Livadia was a sanctuary of peace, a place for picnics and carriage rides. For Alexei, who was about to turn five, Crimea was something much more valuable: it was an operational window to the Mediterranean and, more importantly, the back door to Baku's oil fields.
The May heat was sticky, with a constant buzzing of cicadas filling the air perfumed by cypresses and wisteria.
Alexei was seated on the white stone terrace, his short legs hanging from a wicker chair too large for him. He swung his feet, projecting the perfect image of a bored child while his parents took tea in the lower garden. However, on the wrought iron table before him, there were no toys or storybooks, but a series of diagrams unfolded and held down with stones so the sea breeze wouldn't carry them away.
Professor Stanislav sat before him. The mathematician visibly suffered under the southern sun; his dark wool suit, appropriate for the capital, was torture in Crimea. He constantly wiped his forehead with an already soaked linen handkerchief.
"We've registered the base patents for the fuel injection system you suggested, Your Highness," Stanislav said, instinctively lowering his voice, though the only spies present were some seagulls screeching for food scraps. "Lawyer Kerensky has been very diligent at the registry office. But we have a technical problem with reception."
Alexei took a long sip of his iced lemonade. The glass clinked against his teeth.
"What kind of problem, Professor?"
Stanislav sighed, frustrated, and pointed to one of the schematics detailing a combustion chamber.
"The patent office engineers are confused. And, to be honest, frightened. They say the design assumes internal combustion pressures that no current engine could withstand without becoming a bomb. They allege the cylinder heads would burst at the first cycle."
The professor paused, searching for the right word to not offend his small patron.
"They say it's... science fiction, Your Highness. Fantasy."
Alexei smiled. It wasn't the sweet smile he reserved for his mother; it was that sideways smirk, the smile of someone who knows his subordinate's problem isn't the design but rather the limitation of available materials. The high-compression diesel engine Alexei was trying to introduce prematurely required metallurgy that didn't exist in 1909 manuals.
"It's not fantasy, Stanislav. It's simply a resistance problem," Alexei corrected gently.
He could have given him the exact formula for chromium-molybdenum alloys from the thirties, but that would have been suspicious and uneducational. Stanislav needed to reach the conclusion himself to be able to defend it before the world's scientists.
"Pass me the pencil, please."
Stanislav handed him a graphite pencil. Alexei turned over one of the blueprints, using the blank reverse, and drew a simple cube. Then, inside the cube, he began drawing points and lines connecting them. A crystalline network.
"Imagine normal steel is like... unbaked bread dough," Alexei explained. His voice adopted a pedagogical tone. "It's soft. If you squeeze it hard, it deforms. The molecules slide over each other because they're lazy."
"Bread dough?" Stanislav repeated, blinking behind his fogged glasses.
"Exactly. Now, imagine we want that bread to be hard as rock, capable of withstanding explosions inside." Alexei drew darker, larger points embedded in the network. "If we put very hard 'raisins' inside the dough... the dough can no longer slide. The raisins lock it. They make it strong."
Stanislav leaned over the drawing, forgetting the heat for a moment. His mathematical mind translated the analogy.
"Raisins?" the professor asked, intuiting the keyword was coming.
"Yes. Small quantities of that gray, heavy metal Uncle Pyotr found in the Caucasus mountains," Alexei said, referring to tungsten without naming it chemically, aware that servants might be listening. "And maybe a bit of... What's that light, shiny metal they use for cheap medals and new toys called? Aluminum?"
Stanislav frowned. The combination sounded heretical to classical metallurgy.
"Alloy steel with aluminum and tungsten?" he murmured, mentally calculating valences and melting points. "That would radically change the metal's thermal structure. It would make it incredibly resistant to heat and deformation, yes... but Your Highness, it would be a nightmare to machine. It would be too hard. It would break lathes."
"Then we need harder teeth to bite it," Alexei replied with crushing logic, finishing his lemonade. "Perhaps the Caucasus metal also serves to make the knives that cut the engine metal."
Stanislav stared at the childish drawing of the cube with points. Alexei hadn't given him a formula, but rather had given him a treasure map and a shovel. He had given him the direction to find the hole to dig.
The silence stretched on the terrace, broken only by the distant sound of waves breaking against Crimea's rocks.
"If we manage to stabilize that alloy in the furnace..." Stanislav murmured, and his eyes stopped looking at the child to lose themselves in the indigo blue horizon. The vision of the possible began to replace the fear of the impossible. "We could increase the compression ratio twofold. We could make engines half as large... and three times more powerful."
"Exactly," Alexei pronounced. "Engines for small boats that run fast and don't need coal. Or for armored cars that don't need horses and don't get stuck in mud."
Stanislav nodded frantically, pulling out his own notebook and beginning to scribble chemical formulas next to the child's drawing. The sweat no longer mattered to him.
"We'll call it 'Neva Alloy-1,'" the professor decided with renewed enthusiasm, his pen flying over the paper. "But we won't say what it's really for. I'll register the theoretical composition as an 'experimental proposal for high-pressure industrial boilers.' Something boring."
Alexei nodded, satisfied.
"Well thought. Let it be boring."
The child leaned back in the wicker chair, closing his eyes under the sun.