In this book, Alexander Pokrovsky offers readers his recent writings. Among them is the short novel “The System”. This is the name of a closed institution where young people, future submarine officers, are taught to live according to the laws of valor and sacrifice. How they exist there, how they understand each other and the world, how inexorable time absorbs them, the author tells, exploring the shades and features of existence in an environment where the strength and pressure of life, together with human multiplicity and weakness, form a single substance.