And that latest scandal — Arkady Arkadievich winced — it was so fresh and unpleasant. Krivoshein had argued against the institute's scientific secretary's defense of his dissertation at the nearby construction design bureau six weeks ago. Without telling anyone ahead of time, he had gone to an outside organization and shown up one of his own colleagues! That was a slur on the institute, on Academician Azarov himself…. Of course, he himself shouldn't have been so easy on the dissertation in the first place and shouldn't have reacted so positively to it; but he rationalized it by saying that it would have been nice to have a homegrown institute Ph.D., and that dissertations worse than this one had been passed. But Krivoshein! Arkady Arkadievich let him know in spades that he was not inclined to keep him in the institute. But now was hardly the time to be bringing all this up.

There was a lot of activity in the lodge. The thought of going in there now to look at it, deal with it, and explain things gave Arkady Arkadievich a sensation not unlike a toothache. “Krivoshein again!” he thought fiercely. “If he's at fault in this incident as well…!” Arkady Arkadievich went up the steps, quickly walked down the narrow corridor crammed with crates and apparatus, entered the room, and looked around.

The large room with six windows only remotely resembled a laboratory for electronic and mathematical research. The parallelepiped generators made of metal and plastic and the oscilloscopes with ventilation slots in their sides stood on the floor, tables, and shelves, mingling with flasks, jars, test tubes, and bowls. There were dozens of test tubes huddled on the shelves and cluttering up the boxes of selenium rectifiers. The middle of the room was taken up by a shapeless apparatus overgrown with wiring, tubing, and extension cords; a control panel was barely visible through the spaghetti. What was that octopus?