Even in the recent past, life in the small town of Elista, located in the Kalmyk ASSR, proceeded in the usual measured spirit. However, the idyll reigning here began to crumble rapidly when, on an ordinary day, Kirsan Ayushev, who works as a pediatrician at a children's hospital, suddenly begins to observe a strange ailment in his many young patients. How great is his surprise when he realizes that this disease is an HIV infection. To verify his suspicions, he decides to secretly send test tests to one of the capital's laboratories.

Who would have thought that one of the usual days, the capital's epidemiologist and an ordinary provincial pediatrician would have to join a single team and solve a more than serious problem. And now Dmitry Goncharov and Kirsan Ayushev have been painstakingly working for a long time, trying to find a way out of this unpleasant situation. The already uneasy atmosphere begins to strain even more when the two find themselves at some point in an impasse. Indeed, in general, HIV infection still belongs to a number of incurable infections that do not respond to any drug known to Soviet medicine.