Roadside Picnic

by Arkady Strugatsky

Mr. Aloysius Macnaught starts telling him something with numbers, but I’m no longer listening.

Aren’t humans absurd? I suppose we like praise for its own sake. The way children like ice cream. It’s an inferiority complex, that’s what it is. Praise assuages our insecurities. And ridiculously so. How could I rise in my own opinion? Don’t I know myself—

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.”

“A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow 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?”

‘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.’”

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.”

I’ve always wanted to be my own boss, my own man, so that I don’t have to give a damn about anyone else, about their gloom and their boredom