Arkady Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic

The houses in the Plague Quarter are peeling and lifeless, but the windows are mostly intact, only so dirty that they look opaque. Now at night when you crawl by, you can see the glow inside, as if alcohol were burning in bluish tongues. That’s the hell slime radiating from the basement. But mostly it looks like an ordinary neighborhood, with ordinary houses, nothing special about it except that there are no people around. By the way, in this brick building over here lived our math teacher, the Comma. He was a pain in the ass and a loser, his second wife left him right before the Visit, and his daughter had a cataract in one eye—I remember we used to tease her to tears. During the initial panic, he ran in nothing but underwear all the way to the bridge, like his neighbors—ran for four miles nonstop. After that he got a bad case of the plague, which peeled his skin and nails right off. Almost everyone who lived here got the plague. A few died, but mostly old folks, and not all of them either. I, for one, think it wasn’t the plague that did them in but sheer terror.

Now in those three neighborhoods over there, people went blind. That’s what people call them nowadays: the First Blind Quarter, the Second Blind Quarter… They didn’t go completely blind but rather got something resembling night blindness. Strangely, they say they weren’t blinded by a flash of light, though it’s said there were some bright flashes, but by an awful noise. It thundered so loudly, they say, that they instantly went blind. Doctors tell them: That’s impossible, you can’t be remembering right! No, they insist, there was loud thunder, from which they went blind. And by the way, no one else heard any thunder at all…

Yeah, it looks like nothing happened here. That glass kiosk over there doesn’t have a single scratch on it. And look at that stroller near the gates—even the linen in it looks clean. Only the TV antennas give the place away—they’re overgrown with wispy hairs. Our eggheads have long been hankering after these antennas: they’d like to know, you see, what this hair is—we don’t have it anywhere else, only in the Plague Quarter and only on the antennas. But most important, it’s right here, beneath our very own windows. Last year, they got an idea, lowered an anchor from a helicopter, and hooked a clump of hair. They gave it a pull—suddenly, a psssst! We looked down and saw that the antenna was smoking, the anchor was smoking, even the cable itself was smoking, and not just smoking but hissing poisonously, like a rattlesnake. Well, the pilot, never mind that he was a lieutenant, quickly figured out what’s what, dumped the cable, and hightailed it out of there. There it is, their cable, hanging down almost to the ground and covered with hair…

We glide slowly to the end of the street, at the bend. Kirill looks at me: Should I turn? I wave him on: Go in lowest gear. Our boot turns and drifts in lowest gear over the last few feet of human land. The sidewalk’s getting closer and closer, there’s the shadow of the boot inching over the brambles… Here’s the Zone! And instantly a chill runs down my spine. I feel it every time, but I still don’t know whether it’s the Zone greeting me or a stalker’s nerves acting up. Every time I figure I’ll go back and ask others if they feel it too, and every time I forget.

All right, so we’re drifting peacefully above the abandoned gardens, the motor under our feet is humming steadily and calmly—it doesn’t care, nothing can hurt it. And here my Tender cracks. We don’t even make it to the first marker before he starts babbling. You know, the way novices babble in the Zone: his teeth are chattering, his heart is galloping, he’s out of it, and though embarrassed he can’t get a grip. I think this is like diarrhea for them; they can’t help it, the words just keep pouring out. And the things they’ll talk about! They’ll rave about the scenery, or they’ll philosophize about the aliens, or they might even go on about something totally irrelevant. Like our Tender here: he’s started in on his new suit and now just can’t shut up about it. How much it cost and the fine wool it’s made of and how the tailor changed the buttons for him…

“Be quiet,” I say.

He gives me a sad look, smacks his lips, and goes on again, now about the silk he needed for the lining. Meanwhile, the gardens are ending, we’re already above the clay wasteland that used to be the town dump, and I notice a breeze. There was no wind a moment ago, but suddenly there’s a breeze, dust clouds are swirling, and I think I hear something.

“Quiet, asshole,” I tell Tender.

No, he just can’t shut up. Now he’s going on about the horsehair. All right, no help for it, then.

“Stop,” I tell Kirill.

He stops immediately. Quick reaction—good man. I take Tender by the shoulder, turn him toward me, and smack him hard on his visor. He slams nose first into the glass, poor guy, closes his eyes, and shuts up. And as soon as he quiets down, I hear: crack-crack-crack … crack-crack-crack … Kirill is looking at me, jaws clenched, teeth bared. I hold up my hand. Don’t move, for God’s sake, please don’t move. But he also hears the crackling and, like any novice, feels the need to immediately do something.

“Go back?” he whispers.

I desperately shake my head and wave my fist right in his visor— Cut that out. For God’s sake! You never know which way to look with these novices—at the Zone or at them… And here my mind goes blank. Over the pile of ancient trash, over the colorful rags and broken glass, drifts a tremor, a vibration, just like the hot air above a tin roof at noon; it floats over the mound and continues, cuts across our path right beside a marker, lingers over the road, waits for half a second—or am I just imagining that?—and slithers into the field, over the bushes, over the rotten fences, toward the old car graveyard.

Damn these eggheads, a great job they did: ran their road down here amid the junk! And I’m a smart one myself—what on Earth was I thinking while mooning over their stupid map?

“Go on at low speed,” I tell Kirill.

“What was that?”

“God knows! It came and went, thank God. And shut up, please. Right now, you aren’t a person, got it? Right now, you are a machine, my steering wheel, a lever…”

At this point I realize that I might be getting a case of verbal diarrhea myself.

“That’s it,” I say. “Not another word.”

Damn, I need a drink! What I’d give to take out my flask, unscrew the lid, slowly, deliberately put it to my mouth, and tilt my head back, so it could pour right in… Then swirl the liquor around and take another swig… I tell you, these specsuits are a piece of shit. I’ve lived for years without a specsuit, Lord knows, and plan to live for many more, but not having a drink at a time like this! Ah, well, enough of that.

The wind seems to have died down and there are no suspicious noises; all we hear is the engine humming steadily and sleepily. Meanwhile the sun is shining, the heat is pressing down… There’s a haze above the garage. Everything seems fine, the markers are floating by us one by one. Tender’s silent, Kirill’s silent—they are learning, the novices. Don’t worry, guys, even in the Zone you can breathe if you know how. Ah, and here’s the twenty-seventh marker—a metal pole with a red “27” on it. Kirill looks at me, I nod at him, and our boot stops.

The fun and games are over. Now the most important thing is to stay completely calm. We’re in no hurry, there’s no wind, and the visibility is good. Over there’s the ditch where the Slug kicked the bucket—you can make out something colorful in there, maybe some clothes of his. He was a lousy guy, rest his soul, greedy, stupid, and dirty; that’s the only kind that get mixed up with the Vulture, those the Vulture Burbridge spots a mile away and gets his claws into. Although, to be fair, the Zone doesn’t give a damn who the good guys and the bad guys are, and it turns out we gotta thank you, Slug: you were an idiot, and no one even remembers your real name, but you did show us smarter folks where not to go… OK. The best thing, of course, would be to get to the pavement. The pavement’s flat, you can see everything, and I know that crevice in it. Except I don’t like those mounds. If we head straight to the pavement, we have to pass right between them. There they stand, smirking and waiting for us. No, I’m not going between the two of you. That’s the stalker’s second commandment: it has to be clear for a hundred paces either to your left or to your right. Now what we could do is go over the left mound… Although I have no idea what’s behind it. According to the map there’s nothing there, but who trusts maps?