When he had accepted the offer to direct the Dneprovsk Systemology Institute, Academician Azarov hoped to create a scientific system that would be a continuation of his own brain. In his dreams, he saw the structure of the institute developing along the vertical branching principle: he would give general ideas for research and system construction to the section and laboratory directors, who would work out the details and plan specific projects for the workers, who would try to…. Then he would draw conclusions from the data obtained and produce new fundamental ideas and principles. But reality intruded harshly on his dreams. A lot of it was due to acts of God: the slow — wittedness of some scientists and excessive independence of others; the changes in the construction plans, which was why the storerooms and storage yards of the institute were piled high with unopened crates of equipment; the backbiting among purchasing sections; the arguments that erupted from time to time among the institute's members; and the accidents and incidents…. Arkady Arkadievich thought bitterly that he was no closer now to realizing his dream than he had been five years ago.

The one — story lodge with the tile roof shone white in its idyllic setting among the flowering lindens, whose delicate scent filled the air. There were two cars bruising the lawn by the concrete porch: a white ambulance and a blue Volga with a red stripe. As soon as Arkady Arkadievich was in sight of the lab, he slowed down and started thinking. In eighteen months of its existence he had been in the lab only once, in the very beginning, and only briefly for a general tour, and he really couldn't picture what there was behind the door.

The New Systems Lab. actually, there was no reason yet for Azarov to take it seriously, particularly since it had come about not as one of his pet projects, but as the result of an unhappy series of coincidences: eighty thousand in the budget was “burning” to be used.