Translated from the Russian By Leonid Kolesnikov

It all began on a Saturday evening when tired from my mathematical pursuits I took up the local evening paper and came across this advertisement on the last page:

Kraftstudt & Company Ltd.

accept orders from organisations and individuals for all manner of calculating, analytical and computing work. High quality guaranteed. Apply:

12 Weltstrasse

That was just what I needed. For several weeks I had been sweating over Maxwell equations concerning the behaviour of electromagnetic waves in the heterogeneous medium of a special structure. In the end I had managed by a series of approximations and simplifications to reduce the equations to a form that could be handled by an electronic computer. I already pictured myself travelling up to the capital and begging the administration of the Computer Centre to do the job for me. For begging it would have to be, with the Centre working full capacity on military problems and nobody there giving a damn for a provincial physicist's dabblings in the theory of radio-wave propagation.

And here was a computer centre springing up in a small town like ours and advertising for custom in the local paper!

I took up the receiver to get in immediate touch with the company. It was only then I realised that apart from the address the advertisement gave no particulars. A computer centre not on the telephone! It just didn't make sense. I rang up the editors.

"Sorry, but that was all we received from Kraftstudt," the secretary told me. "There was no telephone in the ad."