Herr Doktor Professor Schevchenko was not passionate about anything in his life for a long time.
He loved his job at Bunzen Burnner University but got accustomed to day-to-day discoveries in his libidomics lab.
Yet, today was a special day and he bet that something needs to be done today out of pure passion. Something extraordinary.

Walking by empty shelves of a butchery store on the corner of Prinz Eugen von Savoyen and Kronprinz Wilhelm strasse, he started thinking about food.
He worked late yesterday and missed the closing of the Parteikanzelarie office where University professors picked up food rationing stamps.
He started thinking about a big casserole filled with salad de Olivie. Professor imagined the casserole so vividly that he fantasized him being that dude Olivier and, at the same time, a part of the salad - a sort of a slightly oblong green pea swimming in mayonnaise between potatoes chips.

With this thought he entered a lab, landed his thin uninfatuated body on a large old oak chair behind his desk and started reading morning mail. All of a sudden, the door opened and his post doc Kate entered office.

"Morgen, Herr Doktor Professor" - she sang with a slight aspiration. Without venting other words, she put in front of him a big Meissen mug filled with a freshly brewed Columbian (not Erzatz!) coffee and a small piece of American-style cheesecake wrapped in a glossy paper. Professor knew that Kate has family in Sweden; and from time to time they sent her some morsels of delicious food long forgotten in Reich. Professor took a sip from coffee mug and carefully extricated the cheesecake out of the glossy paper.

He looked at the paper and got frozen in amazement. It was a wrapper from Rot Front chocolate he liked so much when he was young.
He opened a secret compartment in his cabinet bottom-up drawer, took out a 4L bottle with ethanol he used as a solvent in his old Dr. Meich chromatograph only to solve difficult analytical cases, added a large droplet of ethanol into his coffee.

Then, fighting with a strange confusion, he open the jar with berries he kept behind his desk as a remedy from scurvy and placed 23 cranberries on a fresh handkerchief in a form of the five-pointed star. It suddenly resembled him the hands, arms, and head of a person. Small coffee spill at the one of the berries picturing the person's head produced a resemblance of a short pointed beard "a la" Leon Trotsky.

Finishing macabre manipulations with berries, Herr Professor began drinking coffee filling his empty stomach with cheesecake and sour berries.
He though about an old time... taking yeast from an Petri dish, cracking it into proteins, separating the proteins in gel...
Pipetting... pipetting... pipetting ... ten hours in a row like a damned graduate student.

He remembered all those 316 gel spots he analyzed. Incredible success in the end..
Each gel spot provided him with dozens of new citations for so many years.

He recalled working on ions with two physicians from Canada... where are now those two fellows? they might be detained in Singapore where they flew to work in a Red Star/Red Cross hospital and get detained by Japanese during blitzkrieg that moped up all British forces in South-East Asia.

Time flies... it flies especially fast when you're having fun...

Donnerwetter, mensch, it really flies fast - in a blink of an eye that noticed a nasty crack on a microchannel plate.

Professor armed himself with an ink pen and slowly drew several symbols in his log book: numbers 2 and 3, then slash, again number 2, and eventually the star.

Here, the day began. The passion of the morning has not been gone and stayed with Herr Professor till the evening.

It also stayed with Kate who in the late night twittered to the secretary of Rot Front the information Professor left on her desk during the lunch time -
it was scratched on the Rot Front wrapper she gave him in the morning. Among all those numbers, names of regiments, and their movements she noticed frequently repeating combination 2322012.

And nobody new, nor Kate, nor Herr Doktor Professor, neither even Herr Superintendant of Rot Front factory how many days have left before the final victory.