The Astronauts
Stanisław Lem
 The introduction describes the fall of Tunguska meteorite (1908) and subsequent expedition of Leonid Kulik. The hypothesis about the crash of a spaceship is mentioned. Fast-forward to the year 2003. Communism has won worldwide and humankind, freed from oppression and chaos, is engaged in gigantic engineering projects - irrigation of Sahara, construction of a hydro-energetic plant over the Strait of Gibraltar, and the ability to control the climate. The latest project is to thaw the Antarctic and Arctic regions by artificial nuclear-powered "suns" circling above. During the preparation of earthworks in the Tunguska area a strange object is found and later identified as an extraterrestrial data record. The record contains details about the travel of the spaceship from Venus (which crashed in Tunguska) and the data ends with an ominous message: "After two rotations the Earth will be radiated. When the radiation intensity drops to half, the Great Movement will commence." Scared, the government of the Earth (consisting of scientists) decides to send the newly built spaceship Kosmokrator (equipped with vacuum tube-based computer Marax) to Venus. After a few weeks the international crew of Kosmokrator arrives on Venus but finds no traces of life, only strange, half-destroyed technological structures like the White Globe, a giant anti-gravity device. It turns out that Venus was inhabited by a warlike civilization planning to occupy the Earth. Before they managed to destroy the life on Earth they themselves perished in nuclear civil war, leaving only ruins of the cities and scattered electronic records.