Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

I went into the Zone at night was three months ago; the swag is mostly gone, and the money is mostly spent.

come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success; come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else—that’s fate.

Of course, fire, toxic gas, and bullets—these are only Earth perils. The Zone doesn’t have those; in the Zone you have other worries.

Alive. I got out. The Zone let me out. The damned hag. My lifeblood. Traitorous bitch. Alive.

What’s so great about your Europe? The eternal boredom? You work all day, watch TV all night; when that’s done, you’re off to bed with some bitch, breeding delinquents. The strikes, the demonstrations, the never-ending politics . . . To hell with your Europe!”

The fat man tried to light a cigarette, but the old lady tore into him and continued berating him until the fifth floor, where she got off; and as soon as she got off, the fat man finally lit up, looking like a man who had defended his rights, and then immediately began to cough, wheezing and gasping,

they came in droves but ended up as taxi drivers, waiters, construction workers, and bouncers in brothels—yearning, untalented, tormented by nebulous desires, angry at the whole world, horribly disappointed, and convinced that here, too, they’d been cheated.

That’s the fashion in town nowadays—parties around the clock. A vigorous generation we’ve raised, hardworking and untiring in their pursuits . .

“Feel free to smoke,” offered General Lemchen, lowering himself back into the armchair. “No thanks, I don’t smoke.” General Lemchen nodded his head with a look that suggested his worst suspicions had been confirmed,

“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.”

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.”

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.’”

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

What’s the damn point of my engineering degree if I can’t even figure out a cunning way to catch that legless bastard . . .

People imagined all sorts of things. In reality, nothing was ever the way people imagined.

“Ooh, you’ve gotten fat, fatso! Growing your ass in bars . . .

Five hundred thousand . . . What the hell do I need five hundred thousand for? What, am I going to buy a bar? A man needs money in order to never think about it.

And an idea, which had previously seemed like nonsense, like the insane ravings of a senile old man, turned out to be his sole hope and his sole meaning of life.

“What’s that in your back pocket?” he asked casually. “A gun,” grumbled Arthur, and bit his lip. “What’s it for?” “Shooting!” Arthur replied defiantly.

I, Redrick Schuhart, of sober judgment and sound mind, will be making decisions about everything for everyone. And all the rest of you, vultures, toads, aliens, bonys, quarterblads, parasites, raspys—in ties, in uniforms, neat and spiffy, with your briefcases, with your speeches, with your charity, with your employment opportunities, with your perpetual batteries, with your bug traps, with your bright promises—I’m done being led by the nose, my whole life I’ve been dragged by the nose, I kept bragging like an idiot that I do as I like, and you bastards would just nod, then you’d wink at each other and lead me by the nose, dragging me, hauling me, through shit, through jails, through bars . . . Enough!

Riffraff. I was born as riffraff, and I’ve grown old as riffraff. That’s what shouldn’t be allowed!