Terkin, killed in battle, is born into the next world. It’s clean, like a subway. Accounting table, check table, pitch table. Terkin requires a certificate, they require a photo card, a certificate from a doctor. Terkin is undergoing medical treatment. Everywhere signs, labels, tables. Complaints are not accepted here. The editor of Grobgazeta does not even want to listen to Terkin. There are not enough beds, they don’t give drink ...
Terkin meets a frontline comrade. But he seemed not happy with the meeting. He explains to Terkin: there are two other worlds - ours and the bourgeois. And our other world is “the best and the most advanced.”
Comrade shows Terkin the Military Department, Civil. Nobody does anything here, they just manage and take into account. Cutting into dominoes. "Some members" discuss the draft of the novel. Immediately - "fiery orator." Terkin is surprised: why is all this necessary? “Nomenclature,” explains a friend. A friend shows the Special Department: here the dead in Magadan, Vorkuta, Kolyma ... The Kremlin leader manages this department. He is still alive, but at the same time “with them and with us,” because “during his lifetime he erects monuments to himself.” The comrade says that Terkin can get a medal, which he was awarded posthumously. He promises to show Terkin the Stereo Pipe: this is only “for the afterlife”. A neighboring, bourgeois that light is visible in it. Friends treat each other with tobacco. Terkin - the present, and a friend - the afterlife, smokeless. Terkin remembers everything about the earth. Suddenly a siren is heard. It means - state of emergency: leaked alive to that light. He needs to be placed in the "waiting room" to become a "full dead man." A friend suspects Terkin and says that he should report to his superiors. Otherwise, they may send him to the penal battalion. He persuades Terkin to abandon the desire to live. And Terkin thinks how to return to the world of the living. The comrade explains: trains carry people only there, but not back. Terkin realizes that the empty go back. A friend does not want to run with him: they say that on earth he might not fall into the nomenclature. Terkin jumps on the bandwagon empty, they do not notice him ... But at some moment both the bandwagon and the train disappeared. And the road is far away. Darkness, Terkin goes to the touch. Before him pass all the horrors of war. Here he is at the very border.
... And then he hears through a dream: "A rare case in medicine." He is in the hospital, above him is the doctor. Beyond the walls is war ...
Science is amazed at Terkin and concludes: “He will live another hundred years!”
