Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo.

Roadside Picnic is a “first contact” story with a difference. Aliens have visited the Earth and gone away again, leaving behind them several landing areas (now called the Zones) littered with their refuse.

Most of the mystifying debris is extremely dangerous. Some proves useful—eternal batteries that power automobiles—but the scientists never know if they are using the devices for their proper purposes or employing (as it were) Geiger counters as hand axes and electronic components as nose rings.

A black market flourishes; “stalkers” enter the forbidden Zones and, at risk of various kinds of ghastly disfigurement and death, steal bits of alien litter, bring the stuff out, and sell it, sometimes to the Institute itself.

In the traditional first contact story, communication is achieved by courageous and dedicated spacemen, and thereafter ensues an exchange of knowledge, a military triumph, or a big-business deal. Here, the visitors from space, if they noticed our existence at all, were evidently uninterested in communication; perhaps to them we were savages, or perhaps pack rats. There was no communication; there can be no understanding.

The Zones are affecting everyone who has to do with them. Corruption and crime attend their exploration; fugitives from them are literally pursued by disaster; the children of the stalkers are...

But so far, one thing is clear to me: he’s absolutely determined to dismantle an empty, dissolve it in acid, crush it under a press, or melt it in an oven.

No stalker, unless he’s completely nuts, will go anywhere near the Zone when he knows he’s being watched.

Nothing will happen as long as you are with me, and if it does, well, we only die once.

“What exactly is wrong with his legs?” he asked, emerging from the bathroom with a huge towel draped over his shoulder. He was carefully wiping his long nervous fingers with a corner of the towel. “Got into the slime,” said Redrick. The Butcher whistled. “So, that’s the end of Burbridge,” he muttered. “Too bad, he was a famous stalker.” “Nah,” said Redrick, leaning back in his chair. “You’ll make prostheses for him. He’ll hop through the Zone on prostheses yet.”

Back then, he had absolutely no interest in his children, but he was already a piece of scum: when drunk, he got some vile pleasure out of beating his wife, loudly, so everyone could hear . . . Eventually, he beat her to death.

And nobody intervened... Why????

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.

“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.”

intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts.”

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.”

Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.”

The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing . . .

“A roadside picnic.”

‘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.’”