Roadside Picnic

  “That’s much better,” said Noonan. “I see that even among the scientists there are decent men.”

  “Or here’s another one. The Visit did take place, but it is by no means over. We’re actually in contact as we speak, we just don’t know it. The aliens are holed up in the Zones and are carefully studying us, simultaneously preparing us for the ‘time of cruel miracles.’”

  “Now that I understand!” said Noonan. “At least it explains the mysterious bustle in the ruins of the factory. By the way, your picnic doesn’t account for that.”

  “Why not?” disagreed Valentine. “Some little girl might have dropped her favorite windup doll.”

  “Now cut that out,” said Noonan emphatically. “Some doll—the ground is shaking. Then again, of course, it could be a doll … Want some beer? Rosalie! Come here, old lady! Two beers for the xenologists! It really is a pleasure to talk to you,” he told Valentine. “A real brain cleansing—like someone poured Epsom salts under my skull. Otherwise, you work and work, but you never think about why or what for, grapple with what might happen, try to lighten your load …”

  They brought the beer. Noonan took a sip and, looking over the foam, saw Valentine with an expression of fastidious skepticism, examining his stein.

  “What, you don’t like it?” he asked, licking his lips.

  “To be honest, I don’t drink,” said Valentine with hesitation.

  “Oh yeah?” said Noonan in astonishment.

  “Damn it!” said Valentine. “There has to be one nondrinker in the world.” He decisively pushed the stein away. “Order me a cognac, then,” he said.

  “Rosalie!” Noonan shouted immediately, now completely mellow.

  When they brought the cognac, Noonan said, “Still, it’s not right. I won’t even mention your picnic—that’s a complete disgrace—but even accepting the hypothesis that this is, say, a prelude to contact, it’s still no good. Bracelets, empties—those I could understand. But why the slime? Or the bug traps or that disgusting fuzz?”

  “Excuse me,” said Valentine, choosing a slice of lemon. “I don’t exactly understand your terminology. What traps?”

  Noonan laughed. “That’s folklore,” he explained. “Stalkers’ jargon. Bug traps—those are the areas of increased gravity.”

  “Oh, the graviconcentrates … Directed gravity. Now that’s something I would enjoy discussing, but you wouldn’t understand a thing.”

  “Why not? I’m an engineer, after all.”

  “Because I don’t understand a thing myself. I have a system of equations, but I haven’t a notion about how to interpret it. And the slime—that’s probably the colloidal gas?”

  “The very same. You heard about the catastrophe in the Carrigan Labs?”

  “I’ve heard something,” Valentine replied reluctantly.

  “Those idiots placed a porcelain container with the slime into a special, maximally insulated chamber. That is, they thought that it was maximally insulated, but when they opened the container with the mechanical arm, the slime went through the metal and plastic like water through a sieve, escaped, and turned everything it touched into the same slime. The tally: thirty-five dead, more than a hundred injured, and the entire laboratory is completely unusable. Have you ever been there? It’s a gorgeous building! And now slime has seeped into the basement and lower floors … That’s a prelude to contact for you.”

  Valentine made a face. “Yes, I know all that,” he said. “But you have to admit, Richard, that the aliens had nothing to do with this. How could they have known about the existence of military-industrial complexes?”

  “Well, they should have known!” said Noonan didactically.

  “And here’s what they’d say in reply: You should have long since gotten rid of military-industrial complexes.”

  “That’s fair,” agreed Noonan. “Maybe that’s what they should have worked on, if they are so powerful.”

  “So you’re suggesting interference with the internal affairs of mankind?”

  “Hmm,” said Noonan. “That, of course, could lead us all sorts of places. Forget about it. Let’s return to the beginning of the conversation. How is it all going to end? Say, take you scientists. Are you hoping to acquire something fundamental from the Zone, something that could really revolutionize our science, technology, way of life?”

  Valentine finished his drink and shrugged his shoulders. “You’re talking to the wrong man, Richard. I don’t like empty fantasies. When it comes to such a serious subject, I prefer cautious skepticism. Judging from what we’ve already acquired, there is a whole spectrum of possibilities, and nothing definite can be said.”

  “Rosalie, more cognac!” yelled Noonan. “Well, all right, let’s try another tack. What, in your opinion, have we already acquired?”

  “Amusingly enough, relatively little. We’ve found many marvels. In a number of cases, we’ve even learned how to adapt these marvels to our needs. We’ve even gotten used to them. A lab monkey presses a red button and gets a banana, presses a white button and gets an orange, but has no idea how to obtain bananas or oranges without buttons. Nor does it understand the relationship between buttons and oranges and bananas. Take, say, the spacells. We’ve learned to apply them. We’ve even discovered conditions under which they multiply by division. But we have yet to create a single spacell, have no idea how they work, and, as far as I can tell, won’t figure it out anytime soon. Here’s what I’d say. There are a number of objects for which we have found applications. We use them, although almost certainly not in the ways that the aliens intended. I’m absolutely convinced that in the vast majority of cases we’re using sledgehammers to crack nuts. Nevertheless, some things we do apply: spacells, bracelets that stimulate vital processes … all sorts of quasibiological masses, which caused such a revolution in medicine … We’ve gained new tranquilizers, new mineral fertilizers, we’ve revolutionized astronomy. In any case, why am I listing them? You know it all better than I do—I see you wear a bracelet yourself. Let us call this group of objects useful. You could say that, to a certain extent, these objects have benefited humanity, although we can never forget that in our Euclidean world every stick has two ends …”

  “Undesirable applications?” inserted Noonan.

  “Exactly. For example, applications of spacells in the defense industry … Let’s not get off track. The behavior of each useful object has been more or less studied and more or less explained. Right now we’re held back by technology, but in fifty years or so we will learn how to manufacture these sledgehammers ourselves, and then we’ll crack nuts with them to our hearts’ content. The story’s more complicated with another group of objects—more complicated precisely because we can’t find any application for them, and yet their properties, given our current theories, are completely inexplicable. For example, take the magnetic traps of various types. We know they are magnetic traps, Panov gave a very witty proof of that. But we don’t know where the generator of such a strong magnetic field could be nor understand the reason for its amazing stability; we don’t understand a thing. We can only make up fantastic conjectures about properties of space which we’ve never even suspected before. Or the K-twenty-three … What do you call those pretty black beads that are used for jewelry?”

  “Black sparks,” said Noonan.

  “Right, right, black sparks. Good name. Well, you know their properties. If you shine a light at such a bead, the light will be emitted after a pause, and the length of the pause depends on the weight of the ball, its size, and a number of other parameters, while the frequency of the emitted light is always less than its original frequency. What does this mean? Why? There’s an insane idea that these black sparks are actually vast expanses of space—space with different properties from our own, which curled up into this form under the influence of our space …” Valentine took out a cigarette and lit it. “In short, the objects in this group are currently completely useless for human purposes, yet from a purely scientific point of
view they have fundamental significance. These are miraculously received answers to questions we don’t yet know how to pose. The aforementioned Sir Isaac mightn’t have made sense of the microwave emitter, but he would have at any rate realized that such a thing was possible, and that would have had a very strong effect on his scientific worldview. I won’t get into details, but the existence of such objects as the magnetic traps, the K-twenty-three, and the white ring instantly disproved a number of recently thriving theories and gave rise to some entirely new ideas. And then there’s also a third group …”

  “Yes,” said Noonan. “Hell slime and other shit.”

  “No, no. All those belong either to the first or the second group. I meant objects about which we either know nothing or have only hearsay information, objects which we’ve never held in our hands. Ones that were carried off by stalkers from under our noses—sold to God knows who, hidden. The ones they don’t talk about. The legends and semilegends: the wish machine, Dick the Tramp, happy ghosts …”

  “Wait, wait,” said Noonan. “What’s all this? I understand the wish machine.”

  Valentine laughed. “You see, we also have our work jargon. Dick the Tramp—that’s the same hypothetical windup doll which is causing havoc in the ruins of the factory. And happy ghosts are a kind of dangerous turbulence that can happen in certain regions of the Zone.”

  “First time I’ve heard of them,” said Noonan.

  “You see, Richard,” said Valentine, “we’ve been digging through the Zone for two decades, but we don’t even know a thousandth part of what it contains. And if you count the Zone’s effect on man … By the way, we’re going to have to add another, fourth group to our classification. Not of objects, but of effects. This group has been outrageously badly studied, even though, in my opinion, we’ve gathered more than enough data. And you know, Richard, I’m a physicist and therefore a skeptic. But sometimes even I get goose bumps when I think about this data.”

  “Living corpses …” muttered Noonan.

  “What? Oh … No, that’s mysterious, but nothing more. How can I put it? It’s conceivable, maybe. But when, for no reason at all, a person becomes surrounded by extraphysical, extrabiological phenomena—”

  “Oh, you mean the emigrants?”

  “Exactly. You know, statistics is a very precise science, despite the fact that it deals with random variables. And furthermore, it’s a very eloquent science, very visual …”

  Valentine had apparently become tipsy. He was speaking louder, his cheeks had turned rosy, and the eyebrows above the dark glasses had risen high in his forehead, wrinkling his brow. “Rosalie!” he barked. “More cognac! A large shot!”

  “I like nondrinkers,” said Noonan with respect.

  “Don’t get distracted!” said Valentine strictly. “Listen to what I’m telling you. It’s very strange.” He picked up his glass, drank off half in one gulp, and continued, “We don’t know what happened to the poor people of Harmont at the very moment of the Visit. But now one of them has decided to emigrate. Some ordinary resident. A barber. The son of a barber and the grandson of a barber. He moves to, say, Detroit. Opens a barbershop, and all hell breaks loose. More than ninety percent of his clients die in the course of a year; they die in car accidents, fall out of windows, are cut down by gangsters and hooligans, drown in shallow places, and so on and so forth. Furthermore. The number of municipal disasters in Detroit increases sharply. The number of gas pump explosions jumps by a factor of two. The number of fires caused by faulty wiring jumps by a factor of three and a half. The number of car accidents jumps by a factor of three. The number of deaths from flu epidemics jumps by a factor of two. Furthermore. The number of natural disasters in Detroit and its environs also increases. Tornadoes and typhoons, the likes of which haven’t been seen in the area since the 1700s, make an appearance. The heavens open, and Lake Ontario or Michigan, or wherever Detroit is, bursts its banks. Well, and more to that effect. And the same cataclysms happen in any town, any region, where an emigrant from the neighborhood of a Zone settles down, and the number of cataclysms is directly proportional to the number of emigrants that settle in that particular place. And note that this effect is only observed with emigrants who lived through the Visit. Those who were born after the Visit have no impact on the accident statistics. You’ve lived in Harmont for ten years, but you moved here after the Visit, and you could safely move to the Vatican itself. How do we explain this? What do we have to give up—statistics? Or common sense?” Valentine grabbed the shot glass and drained it in one gulp.

  Richard Noonan scratched behind his ear. “Hmm,” he said. “I’ve actually heard a lot about these things, but frankly, I’ve always assumed this was all, to put it mildly, a bit exaggerated. Someone just needed a pretext for banning emigration.”

  Valentine smiled bitterly. “That’s quite the pretext! Who would believe this lunacy? No, they’d make up an epidemic, a danger of spreading subversive rumors, anything but this!” He put his elbows on the table and looked unhappy, burying his face in his hands.

  “I do sympathize,” said Noonan. “You’re right, from the point of view of our mighty positivist science—”

  “Or, say, the mutations caused by the Zone,” interrupted Valentine. He took off his glasses and stared at Noonan with nearsighted dark eyes. “All people in contact with the Zone for a sufficiently long time undergo changes—both in phenotype and in genotype. You know what stalkers’ children are like, you know what happens with stalkers themselves. Why? What causes the mutations? There’s no radiation in the Zone. The chemical structure of the air and soil in the Zone, though peculiar, poses no mutation risk. What am I supposed to do under these circumstances—start to believe in witchcraft? In the evil eye? Listen, Richard, let’s order another round. I’ve really gotten a taste for it, damn it …”

  Richard Noonan, smirking, ordered another shot of cognac for the laureate and another beer for himself. Then he said, “All right. I am, of course, sympathetic to your turmoil. But to be honest, I personally find the reanimated corpses much more disturbing than your statistical data. Especially since I’ve never seen the data, but the corpses I’ve seen, and smelled them, too.”

  Valentine gave a careless wave. “Oh, you and your corpses …” he said. “Listen, Richard, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? After all, you’re an educated man. Do you really not see that from the perspective of fundamental principles, these corpses of yours are neither more nor less astonishing than the perpetual batteries? It’s just that the spacells violate the first principle of thermodynamics, and the corpses, the second; that’s the only difference. In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality—that’s actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts … or Rubinstein’s monsters … or is that Wallenstein?”

  “Frankenstein.”

  “Yes, of course. Mrs. Shelley. The poet’s wife. Or daughter.” He suddenly laughed. “These corpses of yours do have one curious property—autonomous viability. For example, you can cut off their leg, and the leg will keep walking. Well, not actually walking but, in any case, living. Separately. Without any physiological salt solutions. Anyway, the Institute recently had a delivery of one of these … unclaimed ones. So they prepared him. Boyd’s lab assistant told me about it. They cut off his right hand for some experiments, came in the next morning, and saw—it’s giving them the finger!” Valentine laughed uproariously. “Hmm? And it’s still at it! It just keeps making a fist, then flipping them off. What do you figure it’s trying to say?”

  “I’d say the gesture is pretty transparent. Isn’t it time for us go home, Valentine?” said Noonan, looking at his watch. “I have another important errand to run.”

  “All right,” Valentine agreed enthusiastically, vainly attempting to stick his face into the frame of his glasses. “Ugh, Richard, you’ve really gotten me drunk …” He picked up his glasses with both hand
s and carefully hoisted them in place. “You drove?”

  “Yes, I’ll drop you off.”

  They paid and headed toward the exit. Valentine held himself even straighter than usual and kept smacking his temple with his finger—greeting familiar lab assistants, who were watching one of the leading lights of world science with curiosity and wonder. Right by the exit, greeting the grinning doorman, he knocked off his glasses, and all three of them quickly rushed to catch them.

  “Ugh, Richard,” Valentine kept repeating, climbing into the Peugeot. “You’ve gotten me shame-less-ly drunk. Not right, damn it. Awkward. I have an experiment tomorrow. You know, it’s curious …”

  And he launched into a description of the next day’s experiment, constantly getting sidetracked by jokes and repeating, “Got me drunk … what a thing! Totally wasted …” Noonan dropped him off in the science district, having decisively put down the laureate’s sudden desire to top things off (“What damn experiment? You know what I’m going to do with your experiment? I’m going to postpone it!”) and handed him over to his wife, who, upon observing her husband’s condition, became highly indignant.

  “Guests?” rumbled the husband. “Who? Ah, Professor Boyd? Excellent! Now we’ll hit the bottle. No more shots, damn it—we’ll drink by the cup. Richard! Where are you, Richard?”

  Noonan heard this already running down the stairs. So they are scared, too, he thought, again getting into his Peugeot. Scared, the eggheads. And maybe that’s how it should be. They should be even more scared than the rest of us ordinary folks put together. Because we merely don’t understand a thing, but they at least understand how much they don’t understand. They gaze into this bottomless pit and know that they will inevitably have to climb down—their hearts are racing, but they’ll have to do it—except they don’t know how or what awaits them at the bottom or, most important, whether they’ll be able to get back out. Meanwhile, we sinners look the other way, so to speak … Listen, maybe that’s how it should be? Let things take their course, and we’ll muddle through somehow. He was right about that: mankind’s most impressive achievement is that it has survived and intends to continue doing so. Still, I hope you go to hell, he told the aliens. You couldn’t have had your picnic somewhere else. On the moon, say. Or on Mars. You are just callous assholes like the rest of them, even if you have learned to curl up space. Had to have a picnic here, you see. A picnic …