Five days a man goes deep into the southeastern steppe of the Soviet Union. On the way, he imagines himself either a steam engine driver, a prospecting geologist, or “another organized professional being, just to take his head with an uninterrupted thought and distract the longing from his heart” and thinks about rebuilding the globe to discover new sources of energy. This is Nikolay Vermo, who has tested many professions and was sent as an electrical engineer to a meat and sovkhoz. The director of this state farm, Umrishchev, having met a business traveler, identifies Nikolai Vermo to a distant edge. Umrishchev gives Vermo his advice - “not to meddle”, because the age-old passion-suffering, in his opinion, stems from the fact that people “tirelessly, breaking the size of calm.”
Together with Nikolai, a young woman, the secretary of the herd parte Nadezhda Bestaloeva, is going from the farm to the far edge. Nikolai tells her how often it becomes boring because feelings do not come true, and when you want to kiss someone, the person turns away ... Bestaloeva answers that she will not turn away. When they kiss, Umrishchev rides a horse and says: “Are you already sewing?” Nadezhda promises Umrishchev to reckon with him, because a milkmaid has strangled herself on the edge.
The Parent Courtyards herd has four thousand cows and a large number of living animals, being a reliable source of meat food for the proletariat. When Vermo and Bestaloeva come to the edge, Umrishchev is already there. After tasting the bread, he gives the instruction "bake more delicious bread." He points to the ground: "Tearing a blade of grass on a pedestrian path, otherwise it hits the legs and makes it difficult to concentrate." Umrishchev holds a meeting of herd workers, which discusses the victory of Soviet power over capitalism. Old woman Kuzminishna, who began to call herself Federalova, speaks of her pity for the federal republic, for which she walks day and night and finds out where what is and where there isn’t anything ... The senior guru rights of God is afraid that the old woman knows about his secret exchanges of good cows on thin kulak, but calms down: no charges are brought against him.
The next day, the milkmaid Aina is buried. Aina learned about Deva’s affairs with fists, who, with the knowledge of the layman, exchanged their cows for fattened state farms, and also extradited them on pastures. Bozhev beat up the witness of his crimes and once raped. Aina, unable to bear the abuse, strangled herself. Bestaloeva guesses the true causes of this suicide. Vermo goes ahead of the procession, playing the harmonica according to Beethoven's “Appassionatus”.
A commission led by the secretary of the district committee comes to the mound to investigate. Aina's brother is telling everything. God is judged and shot in a city prison. Umrishchev is sent to another collective farm, where he, as an opportunist, does the opposite to his convictions in order to get it right ... Bestaloeva becomes the director of the meat farm, who takes Federalistovna as her assistant and appoints Nikolai Vermo as chief engineer.
There is not enough water on the edge, and Vermo invents to burn the ground with a voltaic arc to get to the buried waters - the juvenile sea. At a meeting of the asset, Bestaloyeva gives orders to Nikolai to do earthwork for now, and she decides to go to the region for equipment and building materials, in order to increase the delivery of meat several times with the receipt of groundwater in the future.
The meat and cattle farm is undergoing technical reorganization: cows are killed by electricity in the tower, manure is briquetted to obtain combustible material, a wind turbine is installed to receive electrical energy. With a volt aggregate, Nikolai Vermo drills a well, reaching the water that glows below, underground. With this unit, he cuts plates from the ground for the construction of housing for people and shelter for livestock. The work of engineer Nikolai Vermo takes a delegation from Moscow.
In late autumn, a ship departs from Leningrad, on board of which are engineer Vermo and Nadezhda Bestaloeva. They were sent to America to test the idea of ultra-deep drilling with a volt flame and learn how to extract electricity from a space illuminated by the sky. On the shore they are escorted by Federatovna and Umrishchev, whom Federatovna has long been ideologically re-educating, carried away by the patient negative old man and becoming his wife. In the evening, going to bed in a hotel, Umrishchev asks Federatovna if there will be dusk on the earth when Nikolai Edwardovich and Nadezhda Mikhailovna begin to make their electricity from daylight.
"Here the lying Federatovna turned to Umrishchev and scolded him for opportunism."
