About the book: year / The Last Frontier - this is what Hawking is called on Earth, the farthest place where a person has set foot. A frozen world, a realm of solid rock and frost, orbiting so far from its star Betelgeuse that it endures an endless winter night. A third of the planet is covered by an ice-bound ocean, a quarter by rows of bare, lifeless rock dunes and cooled volcanoes. Man has built his base in this world: a tiny one-story concrete cube, entwined with wires and life support pipes, as if overwhelmed by fear of an alien world, clinging to the sharp basalt end of the rock, a starship plunged into the frozen ground nearby, and an electric car is hiding behind it. Boris Lipman and Gleb Movshovich met on Earth, then served together on Mars and, in general, worked well together and completely trusted each other, as they say, at least go into reconnaissance. Intelligence is intelligence, and Hawking became a real test for both. Lipman and Movshovich each carried out their own geological research, in addition, they kept mandatory diaries, took turns preparing food from synthetic kits and doing minor repairs, and every three days they enjoyed four hours of free time. They spent it in different ways: Boris curled up on an ottoman under a checkered blanket and read the Strugatskys, and Gleb, putting on his spacesuit, went for a lonely walk. Movshovich simply wandered among the snow, stones and ice under an ash-black sky, and no one knew what the famous scientist was thinking about at this time. In two years, the shuttle was supposed to bring four more new colonists, two Americans and two Chinese women, so the pioneers had only a short time left to hold out.