The pilot's thoughts had been similarly gloomy ever since the sudden loss of communication with the mother rocket, due to the influence of the nearby dead forest, from which the incessant radiation had eliminated any possibility of contact. In this situation, until Smith saw the Kosmokrator passing overhead, he could not take off, because then his efforts to find the rest of the crew would be left to chance.
My boss in the central air service had a favourite question he usually posed to novices: what should a pilot do in case of a forced landing in the wilderness, in the mountains, or in the desert? Everything possible, was the answer. – And then, if that's not enough? – Then what is impossible! – It may sound a little simplistic and naive, but one of my colleagues came out of the volatile sands where he had crashed his postal machine, after a five-day march, without having a drop of water in his mouth, although scholars say that a man dies without water before. When he was asked what he thought of whilst walking, he quoted a saying of our chief.
In this fragment, the erudite Stanisław Lem included two real-life stories described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Planet of Men: the fate of the author of the above-mentioned book who went missing during a flight (January 1936) and was found after four days spent wandering through the Libyan desert. Lem connected this episode with an earlier superhuman feat of the writer’s friend, aviator Henri Guillaumet, who was surprised by a snowstorm in the Andes (on Friday,13th June 1930). Wrapped in a parachute, Guillaumet spent two days in a cavity dug under the wing of a downed aeroplane, so that after the snowstorm stopped, he would make his way across the Argentinean Andes for five days and four nights, until he reached the first human habitation.
Pilot Robert Smith from The Astronauts took with him intriguing metal ants back to the base on the Kosmokrator, which after research turned out to be carriers of collected information. In turn, the river of electrically charged plasma encountered by the scientists was recognised by them as a source of energy for gigantic, but strangely useless devices. From reading these 'ants', scientists learned about the tragic fate of former inhabitants of Venus.
The planet, possessing gigantic industrial structures and highly developed technology, as a result of unsatisfied ambitions of the leaders, which in time led to friction between them at the very top of power, divided into competing political-military factions. In time, this brought them to fratricidal war. In armed clashes, they constantly resorted to better methods of fighting, as well as to an arsenal of increasingly advanced weapons, until finally the inevitable happened – the use of nuclear energy. All the astonishing forms encountered by Earthlings on the planet Venus were therefore glass-crystalline remnants of the self-destruction of its inhabitants.
The intention of conquering the Earth by belligerent Venusians also failed. In the ruins of the lost civilisation, the astronauts came across plans to conquer our planet by eliminating all living organisms on it. A gigantic spaceship with nuclear weapons on board left Venus and about ten kilometres above the Earth itself, it refused to work and exploded, the effects of which – according to the writer – can still be seen today in the taiga of central Siberia on the banks of the Tunguzka Stone River.
Stanisław Lem’s early novel was an unexpected success for the budding science fiction author, but he did not like it very much (and neither did he like the 1959 film adaptation, a Polish-English co-production entitled Silent Star, directed by Kurt Maetzig), which is why the writer was reluctant to republish The Astronauts for many years. He broke through only in 1972, when in a short foreword he explained the circumstances of the creation of the book and justified his reluctance to revise its content, thanks to which we can still enjoy reading this novel in its original, if not rather naive, form. However, the fact that The Astronauts is by no means a history or a library brick covered with dust proves the interest of newer and newer generations of readers who gain knowledge about the difficult times in which the pioneer of modern science fiction started his career.
Originally written in Polish by J. Kowalczyk, translated into English by P. Grabowski, December 2021