Roadside Picnic Read online

  So, as I said, we’re standing in the repository, I’m looking at him, the way he’s gotten, how his eyes have sunk in, and I feel sorrier for him than I can say. And then I decide. Except I don’t really decide—it’s like the words tumble out themselves.

  “Listen,” I say, “Kirill …”

  He’s standing there, holding up the last empty, and looking like he wants to crawl right inside it.

  “Listen,” I say, “Kirill. What if you had a full empty, huh?”

  “A full empty?” he repeats, knitting his brows like I’m speaking Greek.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s your hydromagnetic trap, what’s it called? Object seventy-seven B. Only with some shit inside, blue stuff.”

  I can tell—I’m starting to get through. He looks up at me, squints, and there in his eyes, behind the dog tears, appears a glimmer of intelligence, as he himself loves to put it. “Wait, wait,” he says. “A full one? The same thing, except full?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Where?”

  My Kirill’s cured. Good as new and ready to go. “Let’s go have a smoke,” I say.

  He promptly stuffs the empty into the safe, slams the door, gives the lock three and a half turns, and comes back with me to the lab. For an empty empty, Ernest would give four hundred bucks in cash, and I could bleed the bastard dry for a full one; but believe it or not, that doesn’t even cross my mind, because in my hands Kirill has come to life again—he’s buzzing with energy, almost bursting into song, bounding down the stairs four at a time, not letting a guy light his cigarette. Anyway, I tell him everything: what it looks like and where it is and how to best get at it. He immediately takes out a map, finds this garage, puts his finger on it, gives me a long look, and, of course, immediately figures me out, but then that isn’t so hard …

  “You devil, Red!” he says, smiling at me. “Well, let’s get this over with. We’ll go first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll request a hoverboot and a pass at nine, and by ten we’ll be off. All right?”

  “All right,” I say. “And who else will we take?”

  “What do we need another guy for?”

  “No way,” I say. “This is no picnic. What if something happens to you? It’s the Zone. Gotta follow the rules.”

  He gives a short laugh and shrugs. “Up to you. You know better.”

  No shit! Of course, that was him being generous: Who needs another guy, we’ll go by ourselves, we’ll keep the whole thing dark, and no one will suspect a thing. Except I know that the guys from the Institute don’t go into the Zone in pairs. They have an unwritten rule around here: two guys do all the work while the third one watches, and when they ask later, he vouches there was no funny business.

  “If it were up to me, I’d take Austin,” Kirill says. “But you probably don’t want him. Or would he do?”

  “No,” I say. “Anyone but him. You’ll take Austin another time.” Austin isn’t a bad guy, he’s got the right mix of courage and cowardice, but I think he’s already doomed. You can’t explain this to Kirill, but I know these things: the man has decided he’s got the Zone completely figured out, and so he’ll soon screw up and kick the bucket. And he can go right ahead. But not with me around.

  “All right, all right,” says Kirill. “How about Tender?” Tender is his second lab assistant. He isn’t a bad guy, a calm sort.

  “He’s a bit old,” I say. “And he has kids …”

  “That’s OK. He’s been in the Zone already.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Let it be Tender.”

  Anyway, he stays there poring over the map while I race straight to the Borscht, because my stomach is growling and my throat is parched.

  The next day I get to work at nine, as usual, and show my ID. The guard on duty is the beefy sergeant I pummeled last year when he made a drunken pass at Guta. “Hey,” he says. “They’re looking all over the Institute for you, Red—”

  I interrupt him politely. “I’m not ‘Red’ to you,” I say. “Don’t you try to pal around with me, you Swedish ape.”

  “For God’s sake, Red!” he says in astonishment. “But they all call you that!”

  I’m anxious about going into the Zone and cold sober to boot. I grab him by the shoulder belt and tell him exactly what he is and just how his mother conceived him. He spits on the floor, returns my ID, and continues without any more pleasantries.

  “Redrick Schuhart,” he says, “you are ordered to immediately report to the chief of security, Captain Herzog.”

  “There you go,” I say. “Much better. Keep plugging away, Sergeant—you’ll make lieutenant yet.”

  Meantime, I’m shitting my pants. What could Captain Herzog want from me during work hours? Well, off I go to report. He has an office on the third floor, a very nice office, complete with bars on the windows like a police station. Willy himself is sitting behind his desk, puffing on his pipe and typing some gibberish on his typewriter. Over in the corner, some sergeant is rummaging through a metal cabinet—must be a new guy; I’ve never met him. We have more of these sergeants at the Institute than they have at division headquarters, all of them hale, hearty, and rosy cheeked. They don’t need to go into the Zone and don’t give a damn about world affairs.

  “Hello,” I say. “You requested my presence?”

  Willy looks at me like I’m not there, pushes away his typewriter, puts an enormous file in front of him, and starts flipping through it. “Redrick Schuhart?” he says.

  “That’s my name,” I answer, feeling an urge to burst into nervous laughter.

  “How long have you worked at the Institute?”

  “Two years, going on the third.”

  “Your family?”

  “I’m all alone,” I say. “An orphan.”

  Then he turns to the sergeant and orders him sternly, “Sergeant Lummer, go to the archives and bring back case 150.” The sergeant salutes him and beats it. Willy slams the file shut and asks me gloomily, “Starting up your old tricks again, are you?”

  “What old tricks?”

  “You know damn well what old tricks. We’ve received information on you again.”

  Aha, I think. “And who was the source?”

  He scowls and bangs his pipe on the ashtray in annoyance. “That’s none of your business,” he says. “I’m warning you as an old friend: give up this nonsense, give it up for good. If they catch you a second time, you won’t walk away with six months. And they’ll kick you out of the Institute once and for all, understand?”

  “I understand,” I say. “That much I understand. What I don’t understand is what son of a bitch squealed on me …”

  But he’s staring through me again, puffing on his empty pipe, and flipping merrily through his file. That, then, signals the return of Sergeant Lummer with case 150. “Thank you, Schuhart,” says Captain Willy Herzog, nicknamed the Hog. “That’s all that I needed to know. You are free to go.”

  Well, I go to the locker room, change into my lab suit, and light up, the entire time trying to figure out: where are they getting the dirt? If it’s from the Institute, then it’s all lies, no one here knows a damn thing about me and never could. And if it’s from the police … again, what could they know about except my old sins? Maybe the Vulture got nabbed; that bastard, to save his sorry ass, would rat on his own mother. But even the Vulture doesn’t have a thing on me nowadays. I think and think, can’t think of a thing, and decide not to give a damn. The last time I went into the Zone at night was three months ago; the swag is mostly gone, and the money is mostly spent. They didn’t catch me then, and like hell they’ll catch me now. I’m slippery.

  But then, as I’m heading upstairs, it hits me, and I’m so stunned that I go back down to the locker room, sit down, and light up again. It turns out I can’t go into the Zone today. And tomorrow I can’t, and the day after tomorrow. It turns out the cops again have me on their radar, they haven’t forgotten about me, and even if they have, someone has very kindly reminded them. And it does
n’t even matter now who it was. No stalker, unless he’s completely nuts, will go anywhere near the Zone when he knows he’s being watched. Right now, I ought to be burrowing into some deep dark corner. Zone? What Zone? I haven’t set foot there in months, I don’t even go there using my pass! What are you harassing an honest lab assistant for?

  I think all this through and even feel a bit of relief that I don’t need to go into the Zone today. Except how am I going to break it to Kirill?

  I tell him straight out. “I’m not going into the Zone. Your orders?”

  At first, of course, he just gawks at me. Eventually, something seems to click. He takes me by the elbow, leads me to his office, sits me down at his table, and perches on the windowsill nearby. We light up. Silence. Then he asks me cautiously, “Red, did something happen?”

  Now what am I supposed to tell him? “No,” I say, “nothing happened. Well, I blew twenty bucks last night playing poker—that Noonan sure knows how to play, the bastard.”

  “Hold on,” he says. “What, you mean you just changed your mind?”

  I almost groan from the tension. “I can’t,” I say through my teeth. “I can’t, you get it? Herzog just called me to his office.”

  He goes limp. Again misery is stamped on his face, and again his eyes look like a sick poodle’s. He takes a ragged breath, lights a new cigarette with the remains of the old one, and says quietly, “Believe me, Red, I didn’t breathe a word to anyone.”

  “Stop it,” I say. “Who’s talking about you?”

  “I haven’t even told Tender yet. I got a pass for him, but I haven’t even asked him whether he’d come or not …”

  I keep smoking in silence. Ye gods, the man just doesn’t understand.

  “What did Herzog say to you, anyway?”

  “Oh, not much,” I say. “Someone squealed on me, that’s all.”

  He gives me a funny look, hops off the windowsill, and starts walking back and forth. He’s pacing around his office while I sit there, blowing smoke rings and keeping my trap shut. I feel sorry for him, of course, and really this is rotten luck: a great cure I found for the guy’s depression. And who’s to blame here? I am, that’s who. I tempted a child with candy, except the candy’s in a jar, out of reach on the top shelf … He stops pacing, comes up to me, and, looking somewhere off to the side, asks awkwardly, “Listen, Red, how much would it cost—a full empty?”

  I don’t get it at first, thinking he wants to buy one somewhere else, except good luck finding another one—it might be the only one in the world, and besides, he wouldn’t have enough money. Where would a Russian scientist get that much cash? Then I feel like I’ve been slapped: does the bastard think I’m pulling this stunt for the dough? For God’s sake, I think, asshole, what do you take me for? I even open my mouth, ready to shower him with curses. And I stop. Because, actually, what else could he take me for? A stalker’s a stalker, the money is all that matters to him, he gambles his life for the money. So it follows that yesterday I threw out the line, and today I’m working the bait, jacking up the price.

  These thoughts shock me speechless. Meanwhile, he keeps staring at me intently, and in his eyes I don’t see contempt—only a kind of compassion. And so I explain it to him calmly. “No one has ever gone to the garage with a pass,” I say. “They haven’t even laid the route to it yet, you know that. So here we are coming back, and your Tender starts bragging how we made straight for the garage, took what we needed, and returned immediately. As if we went to the warehouse. And it will be perfectly obvious,” I say, “that we knew what we were coming for. That means that someone was guiding us. And which one of us three it was—that’s a real tough one. You understand how this looks for me?”

  I finish my little speech, and we silently look each other in the eye. Then he suddenly claps his hands, rubs them together, and cheerfully announces, “Well, of course, no means no. I understand you, Red, so I can’t judge you. I’ll go myself. I’ll manage, with luck. Not my first time.”

  He spreads the map on the windowsill, leans on his hands, hunches over it, and all his good cheer evaporates before my eyes. I hear him mumble, “Three hundred and ninety feet … or even four hundred … and a bit more in the garage. No, I won’t take Tender. What do you think, Red, maybe I shouldn’t take Tender? He has two kids, after all …”

  “They won’t let you out on your own,” I say.

  “Don’t worry, they will,” he says, still mumbling. “I know all the sergeants … and all the lieutenants. I don’t like those trucks! Thirteen years they’ve stood in the open air, and they still look brand-new … Twenty steps away, the gasoline tanker is rusted through, but they look fresh from the assembly line. Oh, that Zone!”

  He lifts his gaze from the map and stares out the window. And I stare out the window, too. There, beyond the thick leaded glass, is our Zone—right there, almost within reach, tiny and toylike from the thirteenth floor …

  If you take a quick look at it, everything seems OK. The sun shines there just like it’s supposed to, and it seems as if nothing’s changed, as if everything’s the same as thirteen years ago. My old man, rest his soul, could take a look and see nothing out of place, might only wonder why there isn’t smoke coming from the factories—Is there a strike on? Yellow ore in conical mounds, blast furnaces gleaming in the sun, rails, rails, and more rails, on the rails a locomotive … In short, the typical industrial landscape. Except there’s no one around: no one living, no one dead. Ah, and there’s the garage: a long gray tube, the gates wide open, and trucks standing next to it on the lot. Thirteen years they’ve stood, and nothing’s happened to them. Kirill got that right—he has a good head on his shoulders. God help you if you ever pass between those vehicles, you must always go around … There’s a useful crack in the pavement there, if it hasn’t filled with brambles. Four hundred feet—where’s he measuring that from? Oh! Must be from the last marker. Right, can’t be more than that from there. These eggheads are making progress after all … Look, they’ve laid a route all the way to the dump, and a clever route at that! There it is, the ditch where the Slug kicked the bucket, all of six feet away from their route. And Knuckles kept telling the Slug, “You idiot, stay away from those ditches or there will be nothing left to bury!” A real prophecy that was—nothing left to bury indeed. That’s the Zone for you: 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.

  I take a look at Kirill and see that he’s watching me out of the corner of his eye. And the look on his face makes me do another one-eighty. Screw them, I think, let them all rot in hell, what can those toads do to me after all?

  He doesn’t need to say a thing, but he does. “Laboratory Assistant Schuhart,” he says. “From official—I emphasize ‘official’—sources I have received information suggesting that the inspection of the garage may be of great value to world science. I propose we inspect the garage. A bonus paycheck is guaranteed.” And he’s grinning from ear to ear.

  “What official sources?” I ask, grinning like an idiot myself.

  “These are confidential sources,” he answers. “But I am authorized to tell you.” Here he stops grinning and frowns. “Say, from Dr. Douglas.”

  “Ah,” I say, “from Dr. Douglas. And which Dr. Douglas is that?”

  “Sam Douglas,” he says drily. “He perished last year.”

  My skin crawls. For God’s sake! Who talks about these things before setting out? These eggheads never have a grain of sense … I jab my cigarette butt into the ashtray. “Fine. Where’s your Tender? How long do we have to wait for him?”

  Anyway, we drop the topic. Kirill calls PPS and orders us a hoverboot while I take a look at their map. It’s not bad at all—made from a highly magnified aerial photograph. You can even make out the ridges on the tire lying next to the garage gates. If we stalkers had maps like this … then again, much good it’d do at night, when you’re showing your ass to
the stars and can’t see your own two hands.

  And here Tender shows up. Red in the face, puffing and panting. His daughter got sick, he had to go fetch the doctor. He apologizes for being late. Well, we hand him quite the gift—a trip to the Zone. At first he almost forgets to puff and pant, the poor guy.

  “What do you mean, the Zone?” he says. “Why me?” However, when he hears about the double bonus and that Red Schuhart is coming too, he calms down and starts breathing again.

  Anyway, we go down to the “boudoir,” Kirill rushes off to get the passes, we show the passes to yet another sergeant, and this sergeant gives each of us a specsuit. Now these really are handy. Dye a specsuit any color other than the original red, and any stalker would put down five hundred for it without batting an eyelash. I’ve long since vowed to figure out a way to swipe one from the Institute. At first glance, it’s nothing special, looks like a diving suit, with a helmet to match and a large visor at the front. Maybe it’s not quite like a diving suit, actually, more like a space suit. It’s light, comfortable, not too tight, and you don’t sweat in it from the heat. You can go right through a fire in this thing, and no gas will penetrate it. It’s even bulletproof, they say. 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. Anyhow, truth be told, even in their specsuits people drop like flies. On the other hand, without them it’d probably be even worse. These suits are completely safe from the burning fuzz, for example. And from Satan’s blossom and its spit … All right.