Roadside Picnic

  “Working both sides, bastard?” hissed Noonan right into his eyes, which were white with terror. “Burbridge is swimming in swag, and you bring me little beads wrapped in paper?” He turned around and smacked Hamfist in the face, taking care to hit the sore on his nose. “I’ll have you rot in jail! You’ll be living in shit … Eating shit … You’ll curse the day you were born!” He took another hard jab at the sore. “How is Burbridge getting swag? Why do they bring it to him but not to you? Who brings it? Why don’t I know anything? Who are you working for, you hairy pig? Tell me!”

  Hamfist opened and closed his mouth like a fish. Noonan let him go, returned to the armchair, and put his feet up on the desk.

  “Well?” he said.

  Hamfist noisily sucked the blood in through his nose and said, “Really, boss … What’s going on? What swag does the Vulture have? He doesn’t have any swag. Nowadays no one has swag.”

  “You’re going to argue with me?” Noonan asked with seeming affection, taking his feet off the desk.

  “No, no, boss … I swear,” said Hamfist hastily. “Honest to God! Argue with you? I never even considered it.”

  “I’ll get rid of you,” said Noonan gloomily. “Because either you’ve sold out, or you don’t know how to work. What the hell do I need you for, you lazy bum? I could get dozens like you. I need a real man for the job, and all you do is ruin the girls and guzzle beer.”

  “Wait a minute, boss,” argued Hamfist, smearing blood around his face. “Why attack me all of a sudden? Let’s try to get this straight.” He gingerly felt the sore with his fingertips. “Burbridge has lots of swag, you say? I don’t know about that. I apologize, of course, but someone’s been pulling your leg. No one has any swag nowadays. It’s only the raw kids that go into the Zone, and they almost never come back … No, boss, I swear someone’s pulling your leg.”

  Noonan was watching him out of the corner of his eye. It seemed that Hamfist really didn’t know a thing. Anyway, it wasn’t worth his while to lie—the Vulture didn’t pay well. “Those picnics of his—are they profitable?” he asked.

  “The picnics? Not very. He isn’t shoveling it in … But then there’s no profitable work left in town.”

  “Where are these picnics held?”

  “Where are they held? At various places. At the White Mountain, at the Hot Springs, by the Rainbow Lakes …”

  “And who are his clients?”

  “His clients?” Hamfist felt his sore again, glanced at his fingers, and spoke confidentially, “Boss, if you’re thinking of getting into that business, I’d advise against it. You can’t compete with the Vulture.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s his clients; he has the police—that’s one.” Hamfist was counting on his fingers. “The officers from headquarters—that’s two. Tourists from the Metropole, White Lily, and the Alien—that’s three. And his advertising is good, the locals use him, too. I swear, boss, it wouldn’t be worth it to get involved. And he pays us for the girls—if not that generously.”

  “The locals use him, too?”

  “Young men, mostly.”

  “And what do you do there, at the picnics?”

  “What do we do? We go there by bus, see? They already have tents, food, and music set up. Then everyone amuses themselves. The officers mostly enjoy the girls, the tourists troop off to see the Zone—when it’s at the Hot Springs, the Zone is a stone’s throw away, right over the Sulfur Gorge. The Vulture has scattered horse bones over there for them, so they look at them through binoculars.”

  “And the locals?”

  “The locals? The locals, of course, aren’t interested in that. They amuse themselves.”

  “And Burbridge?”

  “What about Burbridge? Burbridge is like everyone else.”

  “And you?”

  “What about me? I’m like everyone else. I make sure no one’s bothering the girls, and … uh … well … Anyway, I’m like everyone else …”

  “And how long do these things last?”

  “It varies. Sometimes three days, sometimes a whole week.”

  “And how much does this pleasure trip cost?” asked Noonan, now thinking about something else entirely.

  Hamfist said something, but Noonan didn’t hear him. There it is, my oversight, he thought. A couple of days … A couple of nights. Under these circumstances, it would be simply impossible to keep track of Burbridge, even if you were completely focused on doing so and weren’t busy cavorting with the girls and guzzling beer like my Mongolian king. But I’m still missing something. He’s legless, and there’s a gorge … No, something’s off.

  “Which locals come frequently?”

  “Locals? As I said—mostly young men. The hoodlums of the town. Like, say, Halevy, Rajba, Zapfa the Chicken, and what’s his name … Zmig. Sometimes the Maltese. A tight-knit crowd. They call it Sunday school. ‘Let’s go to Sunday school,’ they say. They’re mostly in it for the women tourists—that’s easy money for them. Say an old lady from Europe shows up—”

  “‘Sunday school’ …” Noonan repeated.

  A strange thought suddenly occurred to him. School. He got up.

  “All right,” he said. “To hell with these picnics. That’s not for us. What you do need to know is that the Vulture has swag—that’s our business, pal. That we simply can’t allow. Keep looking, Hamfist, keep looking, or you’ll be out on your ass. Figure out where he gets the swag and who supplies it to him—then beat him by twenty percent. Got it?”

  “Got it, boss,” Hamfist was already standing at attention, devotion on his blood-smeared mug.

  “And stop ruining the girls, you animal!” Noonan roared, and left.

  Standing by the bar in the hall, he leisurely sipped his aperitif, chatted with the Madam about the decline in morality, and hinted that in the very near future he was planning to expand the establishment. Lowering his voice for effect, he consulted her on what to do about Benny: the guy is getting old, his hearing is almost gone, his reaction time is shot, he can’t manage like before … It was already six o’clock, he was getting hungry, but that same unexpected thought kept boring and twisting through his brain—a strange, incongruous thought that nonetheless explained a lot. But in any case, much had already been explained, the business had been stripped of its irritating and frightening aura of mysticism, and all that remained was chagrin that he didn’t think of this before; but that wasn’t the important thing, the important thing was the thought that kept spinning and twisting through his brain and wouldn’t let him rest.

  After he said good-bye to the Madam and shook Benny’s hand, Noonan drove straight to the Borscht. The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places. A new breed of stalker has appeared—armed with technology. The old stalker was a sullen, dirty man, stubborn as a mule, crawling through the Zone inch by inch on his stomach, earning his keep. The new stalker is a tie-wearing dandy, an engineer, somewhere a mile away from the Zone, a cigarette in his teeth, a cocktail by his elbow—sitting and watching the monitors. A salaried gentleman. A very logical picture. So logical that other possibilities don’t even occur. And yet there are other possibilities—Sunday school, for one.

  Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can’t do a thing! We can’t stop it, we can’t slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It’s not because we do bad work. And it’s not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn’t the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

  The Borscht was brightly lit and fu
ll of delicious smells. The Borscht had also changed—no more boozing and no more merrymaking. Gutalin didn’t come here anymore, turned up his nose, and Redrick Schuhart had probably stuck his freckled mug inside, scowled, and went off. Ernest was still in jail; his old lady was enjoying being in charge: there was a steady respectable clientele, the whole Institute came here for lunch, as did the senior officers. The booths were cozy, the food was tasty, the prices were moderate, the beer was always fresh. A good old-fashioned pub.

  Noonan saw Valentine Pillman sitting in one of the booths. The Nobel laureate was drinking coffee and reading a magazine folded in half. Noonan approached. “May I join you?” he asked.

  Valentine raised his dark glasses at him. “Ah,” he said. “Feel free.”

  “One second, let me wash my hands,” said Noonan, remembering the sore.

  He was well known here. When he came back and sat down across from Valentine, there was already a small grill with sizzling barbecue and a tall stein of beer on the table—neither warm nor cold, just the way he liked it. Valentine put the magazine down and took a sip of coffee.

  “Listen, Valentine,” said Noonan, cutting a piece of meat and dipping it in the sauce. “How do you think it’s all going to end?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Visit. Zones, stalkers, military-industrial complexes—the whole stinking mess. How could it all end?”

  For a long time, Valentine stared at him through his opaque black lenses. Then he lit up a cigarette and said, “For whom? Be more specific.”

  “Well, say, for humanity as a whole.”

  “That depends on our luck,” said Valentine. “We now know that for humanity as a whole, the Visit has largely passed without a trace. For humanity everything passes without a trace. Of course, it’s possible that by randomly pulling chestnuts out of this fire, we’ll eventually stumble on something that will make life on Earth completely unbearable. That would be bad luck. But you have to admit, that’s a danger humanity has always faced.” He waved away the cigarette smoke and smiled wryly. “You see, I’ve long since become unused to discussing humanity as a whole. Humanity as a whole is too stable a system, nothing upsets it.”

  “You think so?” said Noonan with disappointment. “Well, that may be …”

  “Tell me the truth, Richard,” said Valentine, obviously amusing himself. “What changed for you, a businessman, after the Visit? So you’ve learned that the universe contains at least one intelligent species other than man. So what?”

  “How can I put it?” mumbled Richard. He was already sorry that he started the subject. There was nothing to say here. “What changed for me? For example, for many years now I’ve been feeling a bit uneasy, apprehensive. All right, so they came and left immediately. And what if they come back and decide to stay? For me, a businessman, these aren’t idle questions, you know: who they are, how they live, what they need. In the most primitive case, I’m forced to consider how to modify my product. I have to be ready. And what if I turn out to be completely superfluous in their society?” He became more animated. “What if we’re all superfluous? Listen, Valentine, since we’re on the subject, are there answers to these questions? Who they are, what they wanted, if they’ll come back …”

  “There are answers,” said Valentine with an ironic smile. “Lots of them, pick any you like.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “To be honest, I’ve never let myself seriously consider it. For me, the Visit is first and foremost a unique event that could potentially allow us to skip a few rungs in the ladder of progress. Like a trip into the future of technology. Say, like Isaac Newton finding a modern microwave emitter in his laboratory.”

  “Newton wouldn’t have understood a thing.”

  “You’d be surprised! Newton was a very smart man.”

  “Oh yeah? Anyway, never mind Newton. What do you actually think about the Visit? Even if not seriously.”

  “Fine, I’ll tell you. But I have to warn you, Richard, that your question falls under the umbrella of a pseudoscience called xenology. Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”

  “Why flawed?” asked Noonan.

  “Because biologists have already been burned attempting to apply human psychology to animals. Earth animals, I note.”

  “Just a second,” said Noonan. “That’s totally different. We’re talking about the psychology of intelligent beings.”

  “True. And that would be just fine, if we knew what intelligence was.”

  “And we don’t?” asked Noonan in surprise.

  “Believe it or not, we don’t. We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It’s a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can’t speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”

  “Yes, that’s us,” agreed Noonan.

  “Unfortunately. Or here’s a definition-hypothesis. Intelligence is a complex instinct which hasn’t yet fully matured. The idea is that instinctive activity is always natural and useful. A million years will pass, the instinct will mature, and we will cease making the mistakes which are probably an integral part of intelligence. And then, if anything in the universe changes, we will happily become extinct—again, precisely because we’ve lost the art of making mistakes, that is, trying various things not prescribed by a rigid code.”

  “Somehow this all sounds so … demeaning.”

  “All right, then here’s another definition—a very lofty and noble one. Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.”

  Noonan grimaced and shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s a bit much … That’s not us. Well, how about the idea that humans, unlike animals, have an overpowering need for knowledge? I’ve read that somewhere.”

  “So have I,” said Valentine. “But the issue is that man, at least the average man, can easily overcome this need. In my opinion, the need doesn’t exist at all. There’s a need to understand, but that doesn’t require knowledge. The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing … Give a man a highly simplified model of the world and interpret every event on the basis of this simple model. This approach requires no knowledge. A few rote formulas, plus some so-called intuition, some so-called practical acumen, and some so-called common sense.”

  “Wait,” said Noonan. He finished his beer and banged the empty stein down on the table. “Don’t get off track. Let’s put it this way. A man meets an alien. How does each figure out that the other is intelligent?”

  “No idea,” Valentine said merrily. “All I’ve read on the subject reduces to a vicious circle. If they are capable of contact, then they are intelligent. And conversely, if they are intelligent, then they are capable of contact. And in general: if an alien creature has the honor of being psychologically human, then it’s intelligent. That’s how it is, Richard. Read Vonnegut?”

  “Damn it,” said Noonan. “And here I thought you’d sorted everything out.”

  “Even a monkey can sort things,” observed Valentine.

  “No, wait,” said Noonan. For some reason, he felt cheated. “But if you don’t even know such simple things … All right, never mind intelligence. Looks like there’s no making heads or tails of it. But about the Visit? What do you think about the Visit?”

  “Certainly,” said Valentine. “Imagine a picnic—”

  Noonan jumped. “What did you say?”

  “A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the me
adow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …”

  “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.”

  “Exactly. A picnic by the side of some space road. And you ask me whether they’ll come back …”

  “Let me have a smoke,” said Noonan. “Damn your pseudoscience! Somehow this isn’t at all how I envisioned it.”

  “That’s your right,” observed Valentine.

  “What, you mean they never even noticed us?”

  “Why?”

  “Or at least they paid no attention.”

  “I wouldn’t get too disappointed if I were you,” advised Valentine.

  Noonan took a drag, coughed, and threw the cigarette down. “All the same,” he said stubbornly. “It couldn’t be … Damn you scientists! Where do you get this disdain for man? Why do you constantly need to put him down?”

  “Wait,” said Valentine. “Listen. ‘You ask: what makes man great?’” he quoted. “‘Is it that he re-created nature? That he harnessed forces of almost-cosmic proportions? That in a brief time he has conquered the planet and opened a window onto the universe? No! It is that despite all this, he has survived, and intends to continue doing so.’”

  There was silence. Noonan was thinking. “Maybe,” he said uncertainly. “Of course, from that point of view …”

  “Don’t get so upset,” Valentine said kindly. “The picnic is only my hypothesis. And not even a hypothesis, really, but an impression. So-called serious xenologists try to justify interpretations that are much more respectable and flattering to human vanity. For example, that the Visit hasn’t happened yet, that the real Visit is yet to come. Some higher intelligence came to Earth and left us containers with samples of their material culture. They expect us to study these samples and make a technological leap, enabling us to send back a signal indicating we’re truly ready for contact. How’s that?”