Then we arrived in Tashkent late at night, coming after a stop of two days in Moscow. The streets of the fourth largest town of the Soviet Union were absolutely empty. Something was going wrong, we felt it. Isolated, in the deep dark night, a military car traverses the space that I can see from the hotel window, and disappears. Next day we will learn a whisper that there are fights in the mountains. We knew that the end was close (we are in 1989) but this was more than we could stand: if in the Soviet Union there are fights then this can only happen because the Soviet Union needs that for who knows what misterious utility. No war is spontaneous: all wars are carefully organized. What are they doing with that?

We are in Uzbekistan at a conference on lasers. In my spare time I go to the market where I see an incredible variety of fruit. A black cat walks with suspicious caution along the walls. 'Look', I say to an English colleague: 'this is a colonel of secret services kgb, in usual disguise'. He believes me and the cat does not deny.

The streets are called makhala, familiar sound and I discover with surprise facial characters that I know from Romania, from Levant. The laser people here are very good and also friendly. They take us in a trip to Samarkand. We traverse a land that can respond to any desire of visiting the Moon: only rocks, sand, dust, no tree, no trace of water. Then, where is all the fruit coming from? Probably from hard work and a dramatic history. Samarkand is impressive: the central place is surrounded by madras: Mosques/universities. They have been build by Ulug Bey, the son of Timur Lenk, a dinasty of assassins, according to present day criteria. We see the remains of his astronomical observatory, a huge construction for that time, confirming the beneficial consequences of having a scientist as king, far different of all the present day situations. However, Ulug Bey was also a professor of astronomy and there is no telling on what could happen to a student of moderate knowledge, in those violent times.

We visit the tomb of Timur Lenk found by Gerasimov. There are few photos on the wall: they show the group of scientists that discovered this place, they are all happy, which I understand. Close to the photos, on the wall, a small paper mentions that they have found a warning: it was said that the one that will open this grave will bring on his people a deep misfortune that will come without delay. The place was escavated on 19 June 1941. On 22 June 1941 Germany attacked Soviet Union and so started a war in which twenty millions soviet people died.

I try to stay deterministic.

However if this is true then one should watch more carefully the program of future excavation of the History Section of the Acadamy. It may look innocent, like that cat, but the subtle flow of verity is unpredictable. Fantastic tragedies are lying under the surface of things, ready to act, and a small grave of an ancient king just have to choose one. This is valid also for the other discoveries, the science is full of examples. Most of us, scientists, we excavate in regions where nobody has ever placed any treasure, but few are luckier. When one opens the door of a new theory, he should immediately look for some warning. For nuclear energy they didn't.