Dancing Naked in the Mind Field Read Online Free PDF Page B

hydrogen bromide, a corrosive gas with a pungent odor. We were venting the gas through a wall fan into the humid southern night. Around one o’clock we took a beer break and discovered that the entire neighborhood was enveloped in a choking white cloud of hydrogen bromide. We figured the cloud would be dispersed by morning when the neighborhood awoke. Unfortunately, we had killed a large camellia bush that was growing under the fan.
    We kept working. The phenacyl bromide crystallized and we started filtering it out of the ether. By that point it had begun to smell extremely pungent. I asked, “Al, what were you saying about the properties of this stuff?”
    “Org Syn
said it was a lachrymator.”
    “What’s that?”
    “It’s like a tear gas.”
    That didn’t make sense to me. “This is a solid, not a gas.”
    “I know, that’s why I wasn’t worried.”
    “My eyes are stinging, Al.”
    “Mine too. It’s a fucking tear gas, even if it is a solid.”
    We went outside and washed our faces with the hose, but it was not all that effective. Phenacyl bromide was scarcely soluble in water. Like oil, it would sort of spread around in water, but it wouldn’t wash away.
    The night air was quiet, liquid and thick, a typical summer night in Columbia. Our faces were burning. The floral smells of the night—azaleas, camellias, rhododendrons, night-blooming jasmine—had been replaced by something wicked.
    We ducked back into the garage and took the several hundred grams of phenacyl bromide off the filter and put it on trays that we set on the washer and dryer. The crystals drying in the trays looked perfect. We had made another organic chemical. We closed the door and left the exhaust fan on high. It was 3:00 A.M .
    Exhausted, but still remembering a modicum of conscience, we taped a DO NOT ENTER sign to the door. Backing out of the driveway, I could see blackened leaves gently blowing off the camellia. Oh well, Al’s mother had more camellias than she needed.
    The next day, while Al and I were at our day job, his grandmother went into the garage to do the laundry. The moment she opened the door, the drying phenacyl bromide fumes hit her in the face like mace. When I arrived that evening, Al’s mother looked at us as if we were grandmother abusers. Al’s grandmother was not speaking to him. The good thing about gassing Al’s grandmother was that if anyone had complained that we had killed a big bush, we could respond, “Well, maybe, but at least Ganny’s still alive.”
    We moved the lab. Al’s brother-in-law, Frank, had some land about twenty miles out into the country, where you could do just about whatever you wanted to do. We built a lab out of an old chicken coop and worked there for the next two summers.
    At Georgia Tech I worked in a lab run by E. C. Ashby. He was interested in reductions with light-metal hydrides, whichmeant that he liked to work with solutions in ether that would explode on exposure to moisture. Moisture was plentiful in Atlanta in the summer. When we were done with some experimental solution of lithium aluminum hydride, we would have a problem as to where to put it. Ashby’s solution was to take the well-sealed flasks home and host a party for the lab on the Fourth of July. The flasks would be floated out on his pond, and graduate students would shoot at them with a .22.
    I was just an undergraduate and unaware of Ashby’s Fourth of July event. I had been working with lithium aluminum hydride, and I thought it was my responsibility to get rid of it. To do that in the lab required a long tedious procedure, but outside the chemistry building there was a drain in the alley. I combined all the solutions in a single two-liter beaker, covered it with aluminum foil, and carried the beaker outside to the drain. I dumped it quickly, stepped back, and waited for the flames. Nothing happened.
    I stood nearby. Two minutes passed. Maybe the ether had evaporated and the hydride had not yet combined with