 Top astrophysicist Sasha Greenberg has spent the past 17 years working in the United States. An invitation to speak at a Congress on Cosmology in his native Moscow brings him home for the first time to confront colleagues, and unanswered personal questions. As Russia undergoes perestroika, public and private lives are radically re-assessed and Sasha sees the social and sexual upheavals as a crisis of civilization, and a reflection of his own obsessive studies into the nature of the Universe itself. A starship crashed on an uninhabitate planet and its crew had to abandon it. Years later the survivors and their children try to return to the ship and send a distress signal. But for that they must go through a very dangerous mountain passage.