About the book: 1980 / The Cambrian - the oldest geological layer, a petrified sea - should produce oil! The hero of the book, a young scientist Vasily Zyryanov, together with his comrades and volunteers, is exploring Siberian oil. As a teenager, Zyryanov worked as a pilot on the northern rivers, now he has become a scout for the Cambrian Sea, the oil of which is so needed by the Five-Year Plan. The action of the novel by Fyodor Pudalov takes place in the 1930s, but among the heroes there are people who do not know what is happening in Russia. These are the inhabitants of an ancient settlement of Russian people lost in the taiga. One of them, Nikolai Ivanovich Menshik, unexpectedly finds himself in the new, Soviet century. The author of the novel reveals a whole layer of life of Russian settlers in Siberia, also a kind of “Cambrian”. Ancient features of life, the flexible and expressive language of our ancestors coexist in the book with the life and speech of contemporaries.