In the two hundred and thirty-fourth laboratory of the research and development bureau, developing the fuck knows what to please friends and fear enemies, for some reason there was a terrible shortage of cang pencil. Especially valued were the pencil type pull-push, where the griffle could be inserted on two sides and wrapped with blades of varying thickness. "Shooters" draw much faster - this will tell you any person who knows how to use a culman.

The Soviet pencil industry in the person of the design bureau could cover the deficit, but did not want to.

You have a pencil one for six months and that’s all. Grizzlies and blades take as much as you want, Wattman paper you want to save, thinking in your head, and I will not give pencil, do not ask. I gave it the last time, and you stitched it in your ears, or forgot it in the toilet cabin. No, no and no, and there is nothing to persuade me, I know where you are spending all the laboratory alcohol.

Something was wrong with the pencil. The week. The Month. A maximum of two months and the pencil mysteriously disappeared. Different brands and different hardness. Regardless of size and design. Drawing became uncomfortable, labor productivity fell and wooden scraps on the floor. The inscriptions on the body of the product "stolen from me" and "who denies - will fall asleep" did not help.

- You know what Sasha, - said the designer of the second category and chairman of the council of young specialists in one person to his colleague, if we and you from each salary will buy a pencil pencil each we will not ruin. And in a few months, the surrounding space will be saturated with material objects to such an extent that they will stop disappearing.

- You are right Yuri, - replied to him the newly elected secretary of the Komsomol organization and the designer of the first category, cheering in front of the sympathetic technician-laborator Olga Alexandrovna, - in order not to ruin with the guarantee I propose to do this in turn. Thus the saturation of space will happen a little later, but for eternity it is a perfect nonsense.

So we agreed. During the conversation, I heard nothing, watched from a distance the leader of the group, Viktor Nikolaevich, who also suffered from a shortage of cang pencil.

The salary was issued today, the next day Sasha brought five contractual office products, put four on the table, and one immediately started drawing the assembly drawing of the press form for the product "Granat".

How about the process? I asked Yuri’s friend during the overdose, is the space saturated?

"Even as full," Sasha pulled a cigarette "Cosmos," I had two pencils missing before lunch. He seemed to have gone nowhere. To the first department and the library for the reference book. And most importantly, there is no one in the laboratory except Olga and Viktor Nikolaevich, in the journeys all. I'll go back to the first department now, I'll leave the pencil on the table, and you'll see.

Yuri looked at it. The leader of the group approached the table, looked at the drawing and shyly looked around and put the pencil in the load pocket of the coat. There were three pencil pockets in that pocket.

Friends discussed the situation.

Is he a kleptoman? "Can not the leader of the group, a communist, a candidate of science, and an elderly man, who is forty-three years old, throw pencil for profit?

- Or a schizophrenic, - supported him Yuri, also confident in the moral qualities of Viktor Nikolaevich, - on this you will not earn much.

The discussion was interrupted by the unexpected appearance of a forty-three-year-old elder, a candidate of science, a communist, and the leader of the group.

The comrades! “He started from a distance,” came the time of a tough and difficult conversation for me, which cannot be avoided. Everyone knows that in the laboratory the cangue pencil is missing. Today I conducted an experiment and realized that the cause lies in Sasha, who was recently mistakenly elected secretary of the Komsomol organization.

What did you do, Viktor Nikolaevich? He asked Sasha.

- And from the fact that I have you today experimentally upper four pencils, and you didn't even get upset. Where do you get so many unplanned office questions?

Thus the philosophical experiment on the material saturation of space faced a counter-experiment in the field of ethics. That only emphasizes the scientific nature of this laboratory.