About the book: 1969 / I am a geologist by profession. And it would hardly have occurred to me to write a work of art if I had not once met wonderful people at work who were obsessed with the idea of ​​draining the swamps. I became friends with them. I was captivated by their enthusiasm and wanted to talk about them. This is how this story appeared. There is also a fantastic conjecture in it, but its heroes are taken from life. Their surnames and partly their destinies were changed, but I didn’t want to speculate on anything about their characters. Now Lena and Semyon, or rather, their prototypes, have become older, but I left them in the story as they were imprinted in my memory, having barely entered the path of quest, the path of science.