Roadside Picnic Read online

  “Zombies,” Noonan said.

  “What? Oh, no, that’s merely puzzling. How can I put it—at least, that’s imaginable. I mean when suddenly for no reason at all things start happening, nonphysical, nonbiological phenomena.”

  “Oh, you mean the emigrants.”

  “Exactly. Statistics is a very precise science, you know, even though it deals with random occurrences. And besides, it’s an eloquent and beautiful science.”

  Valentine seemed to be tipsy. His voice was louder, his cheeks were red, and his eyebrows had crept up high over his dark glasses, wrinkling his forehead into a washboard.

  “I really like nondrinkers,” Noonan said.

  “Don’t get off the subject!” Valentine said. “Listen, what can I tell you? It’s very strange.” He raised his glass, drank half in one gulp, and went on. “We don’t know what happened to the poor Harmonites at the very moment of the Visitation. But now one of them decides to emigrate. Your most typical man in the street. A barber. The son of a barber and the grandson of a barber. He moves, say, to Detroit. He opens up a barbershop and all hell breaks loose. Over ninety percent of his clients die during a year: they die in car crashes, fall out of windows, are cut down by gangsters or muggers, drown in shallow waters, and so on and so forth. A number of natural disasters hit Detroit and its suburbs. Typhoons and tornadoes, not seen since eighteen-oh-something, suddenly appear in the area. And all that kind of stuff. And such cataclysmic events take place in any city, any area where an emigrant from a Zone area settles. The number of catastrophes is directly proportional to the number of emigrants who have moved to the city. And note that this reaction is caused only by emigrants who actually lived through the Visitation. Those born after the Visitation have no effect on the disaster and accident statistics. You’ve lived here for ten years, but you moved in after the Visitation and it would be safe to relocate you even in the Vatican. How can this be explained? What should we reject? The statistics? Or common sense?” Valentine grabbed the glass and finished his drink in a gulp.

  Richard Noonan scratched his head.

  “Hmmm, yes. Of course, I’d heard all that before, but I, uh, assumed that it was all, to put it mildly, exaggerated. Really, from the point of view of our highly developed science…”

  “Or, for instance, the mutagen effect of the Zone,” Valentine interrupted. He removed his glasses and stared at Noonan with his dark, myopic eyes. “Everyone who spends enough time with the Zone undergoes changes, both of phenotype and genotype. You know what kind of children stalkers can have and you know what happens to the stalkers themselves. Why? Where is the mutation factor? There is no radiation in the Zone. While the air and soil in the Zone have their own specific chemical structure, they pose no mutation dangers at all. What should I do under the circumstances—believe in sorcery? In the evil eye?”

  “I sympathize. But, frankly, I am much more upset by corpses come to life than by your statistics. Especially since I’ve never seen the statistics, but I have seen the zombies—and smelled them.”

  Valentine waved away the statement.

  “Bah, your zombies. Richard, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are an educated man, after all. First of all, they are not corpses. They are moulages—reconstructions on the skeletons, dummies. And I assure you, from the point of view of fundamental principles, your moulages are no more amazing than the eternal batteries. It’s just that the so-so’s violate the first law of thermodynamics, and the moulages violate the second. We’re all cave men in one sense or another. We can’t imagine anything scarier than a ghost. But the violation of the law of causality is much more terrifying than a stampede of ghosts. And all the monsters of Rubenstein, or is it Wallenstein?”

  “Frankenstein.”

  “Of course. Frankenstein. Mrs. Shelley. The poet’s wife. Or daughter.” He suddenly laughed. “Our moulages have a curious property—autonomie life capability. For example, if you cut off some part of their bodies, the part will live on. Separately. Without any physiological solutions to nourish it. They brought one like that to the institute recently. A lab assistant from Boyd told me about it.” Valentine laughed uproariously.

  “Isn’t it time we headed for home, Valentine?” Noonan asked, glancing at his watch. “I still have some important business.”

  “Let’s go.” Valentine tried hard to insert his face into the glasses and finally had to take the frame with both hands to put them on his nose. “Do you have a car?”

  “Yes. I’ll drive you.”

  They paid the check and headed for the door. Valentine kept making mock salutes, greeting lab workers who were curiously watching one of the great men of world physics. At the door, greeting the broadly smiling doorman, he knocked off his glasses, and all three of them scrambled to catch them.

  “Tomorrow I’m running an experiment. You know, it’s an interesting thing…” Valentine was muttering as he climbed into the Peugeot.

  He went on to describe the experiment. Noonan drove him to the science complex.

  They’re afraid, too, he thought, getting back into the car. The highbrows are also scared. And that’s the way it should be. They should be more afraid than all us regular folk put together. We don’t understand a thing, and they understand how much they don’t. They look into the bottomless pit and know that it’s inevitable, they must go down into it. Their hearts catch, but they must go down, and descend they do, but how, and what will they find at the bottom, and most important, will they be able to climb out? Meanwhile, we mere mortals look the other way, so to speak. Listen, maybe that’s how it should be. Let it all run its course, and we’ll just get by on our own. He was right: humanity’s most heroic deed was surviving and intending to survive. But he’d still tell the visitors to go to hell, if he could. Why couldn’t they have had their picnic somewhere else. Like the Moon. Or Mars. You heartless trash, he thought, just like all the rest, even if you do know how to curl up space. So they had themselves a picnic. A picnic.

  What’s the best way to deal with my picnickers? he thought, driving slowly down the brightly lit wet streets. What would be the cleverest way to handle it? Following the law of least action, like in mechanics. What the hell use is my blankety-blank engineering degree if I can’t even figure out the best way to trap that legless son of a bitch?

  He parked in front of the house in which Redrick Schuhart lived and sat in the car, planning his opening gambit. Then he removed the so-so, got out of the car, and only then noticed that the house looked uninhabited. Almost all the windows were dark, there was nobody in the park, and even the lights in the park were out. It reminded him of what he was about to see, and he shivered. He even considered the possibility of phoning Schuhart and talking with him in the car or in some quiet bar, but he rejected the idea. For a whole lot of reasons. And besides, he said to himself, let’s not behave like all those characters who ran out like rats deserting a sinking ship.

  He went into the main entrance and slowly up the unswept stairs. It was quiet and many of the doors leading from the landings were ajar or wide open. It smelled damp and dusty in the apartments. He stopped before Redrick’s door, smoothed his hair, sighed deeply, and rang the bell. It was still behind the door for a while, then the floor creaked, the lock turned, and the door opened quietly. He hadn’t heard the footsteps.

  Monkey, Schuhart’s daughter, stood in the doorway. A bright light fell from the foyer onto the landing, and at first Noonan could only see the girl’s dark silhouette. He thought how much she had grown in the last few months. Then she stepped back into the foyer and he saw her face. His throat went dry for a second.

  “Hello, Maria,” he said, trying to be as gentle as possible. “How are you, Monkey?”

  She did not reply. Silently and soundlessly she backed away from the door into the living room, looking at him from under her eyebrows. It looked as though she did not recognize him. To tell the truth, he couldn’t recognize her either. It’s the Zone, he thought. Damn.


  “Who’s there?” Guta asked, looking out of the kitchen. “God, it’s Dick! Where did you disappear to? You know, Redrick is back!”

  She hurried over to him drying her hands with the towel slung over her shoulder. Still as beautiful, energetic, strong, but she looked strained somehow: her face was thinner, and her eyes looked… feverish, perhaps?

  He kissed her cheek, gave her his raincoat and hat.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just couldn’t get away to come over. Is he in?”

  “He’s in,” Guta said. “There’s somebody with him. He should be leaving soon, they’ve been talking a long time. Go on, Dick.”

  He took several steps down the hall and stopped in the door to the living room. An old man was sitting at the table. A moulage. Motionless and listing slightly. The pink light from the lampshade fell on his broad dark face, his sunken, toothless mouth, and his still, lusterless eyes. And Noonan smelled it immediately. He knew that it was just his imagination, that the odor lasted only the first few days and then disappeared completely, but Richard Noonan smelled it with his memory—the fetid heavy smell of turned-up earth.

  “We could go to the kitchen,” Guta said quickly. “I’m cooking there and we could chat.”

  “Yes, of course!” he said cheerily. “It’s been such a long time! You haven’t forgotten that I like a drink before dinner, I hope?”

  They went to the kitchen. Guta opened the refrigerator and Noonan sat at the table and looked around. As usual, it was clean and shiny and steam was rising from the pots and pans on the stove. The oven was new, semiautomatic. That meant they had money.

  “Well, how is he?” Noonan asked.

  “The same. He lost weight in prison, but I’m fattening him up.”

  “His hair still red?”

  “You bet!”

  “Hot-tempered?”

  “What else! He’ll be that way to the grave.”

  Guta gave him a Bloody Mary. The clear layer of Russian vodka seemed to float on the layer of tomato juice.

  “Too much?”

  “Just right.” Noonan poured the drink down. He realized that that was his first real drink all day. “Now that’s better.”

  “Is everything all right with you?” Guta asked. “Why haven’t you dropped by for such a long time?”

  “Damn business. Every week I intended to come over or at least call, but first I had to go to Rexopolis, then there was a big to-do, and then I heard that Redrick was back and I thought I’d let you two have some time to yourselves. I’m really hassled, Guta. Sometimes I ask myself, what the hell are we all running around for, anyway? To make money? But what the hell do we need money if all we do is run around making it?”

  Guta clattered the pot covers, took a pack of cigarettes from the shelf, and sat at the table across from Noonan. Her eyes were lowered. Noonan pulled out his lighter and lit her cigarette. And again, for the second time in his life, he saw her hands trembling, like the time when Redrick had just been sentenced and Noonan came over to give her some money—she was in a lot of trouble at first with no money at all, and no one in the building would lend her any. Then there was suddenly money in the house, and quite a bit of it, judging by everything, and Noonan had a good guess as to its source, but he continued coming over, bringing Monkey candy and toys, spending whole evenings over coffee with Guta, planning a new, happy life for Redrick. And then, having heard her stories, he would go to the neighbors and try to reason with them, explaining, coaxing, and finally, at the end of his patience, threatening them: “You know Red will be coming back, and he’ll break you all in half.” But nothing helped.

  “How’s your girlfriend?” Guta asked.

  “What girlfriend?”

  “The one you came over with that time, the blonde.”

  “That’s no girlfriend! That was my secretary. She got married and quit.”

  “You ought to get married, Dick. You want me to find a girl for you?”

  Noonan was about to give the standard reply: “Well, I’m just waiting for Monkey to grow up.” But he stopped himself. It just wouldn’t have come off any more.

  “I need a secretary, not a wife,” he bumbled. “Why don’t you leave your red devil and come be my secretary. You used to be an excellent one. Old Harris still reminisces about you.”

  “I’ll bet. My hand was always black and blue from beating him off.”

  “Oh, so it was like that?” Noonan tried to look surprised. “That Harris!”

  “God!” Guta said. “I could never get past him. My only worry was that Red would find out.”

  Monkey walked in silently, hovering near the door. She looked at the pots, at Richard, then came up to her mother and leaned against her, averting her face.

  “Well, Monkey,” Richard Noonan said heartily. “Like some chocolate?”

  He took a chocolate bar out of his vest pocket and extended the plastic-wrapped package to the girl. She did not stir. Guta took the chocolate from him and put it on the table. Her lips were white. “Well, Guta, you know I’ve decided to move.” He spoke on in a hearty tone. “I’m tired of hotel living. And it’s too far from the institute.”

  “She understands less and less—almost nothing any more,” Guta said softly. He stopped talking, picked up the glass with both hands, and absently twirled it.

  “You’re not asking how we’re doing,” she continued. “And you’re right. Except that you’re an old friend, Dick, and we have no secrets from you. And there’s no way to keep it a secret anyway.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?” he asked without looking up.

  “Yes. They can’t do a thing. And one of them said…” She stopped talking.

  He was silent too. There was nothing to say about it and he didn’t want to think about it either. Suddenly he had a horrible thought: it was an invasion. Not a roadside picnic, not a prelude to contact. It was an invasion. They can’t change us, so they get into the bodies of our children and change them in their own image. He felt a chill, but then he remembered that he had read something like that in a paperback with a lurid cover, and he felt better. You can imagine anything at all. And real life is never what you imagine.

  “And one of them said that she’s no longer human.”

  “Nonsense,” Noonan said hollowly. “You should go to a real specialist. Go see James Cutterfield. Do you want me to talk to him? I’ll arrange an appointment.”

  “You mean the Butcher?” She laughed nervously. “Don’t bother. Thanks, Dick, but he’s the one who said so. I guess it’s fate.”

  When Noonan dared to look up again, Monkey was gone and Guta was sitting motionless, her mouth half-open, her eyes empty, and a long gray ash on her cigarette. He pushed his glass over to her.

  “Make me another, please, and one for yourself. We’ll have a drink.”

  The ash fell and she looked around for a place for the butt. She threw it into the garbage can.

  “Why? That’s what I can’t understand! We’re not the worst people in the city.”

  Noonan thought that she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She opened the refrigerator, got the vodka and juice, and took another glass down from the cabinet.

  “Don’t give up hope. There’s nothing in the world that can’t be fixed. And believe me, Guta, I have very important connections. I’ll do everything that I can.”

  He believed what he was saying and he was mentally going over the list of his connections in various cities, and it seemed to him that he had heard about similar cases, and that they had seemed to have ended happily. He just had to remember where it was and who the physician was. But then he remembered Mr. Lemchen, and he remembered why he had befriended Guta, and then he didn’t want to think about anything at all. He scattered all his thoughts of connections, got comfortable in his chair, relaxed, and waited for his drink.

  There were shuffling steps and a thumping in the hall and he could hear the more-than-ever repulsive voice of Buzzard Burbridge.

  “Hey, Red! Looks li
ke your Guta is entertaining someone. I see a hat. If I were you, I wouldn’t leave them alone.”

  Red’s voice: “Watch your false leg, Buzzard. Shut your mouth. There’s the door, don’t forget to leave. It’s time for my dinner.”

  “Damn it, can’t even make a little joke.”

  “We’ve had all the jokes we’ll ever have. Period. Now get going!”

  The lock clicked and the voices were quieter. Obviously they had gone out on the landing. Burbridge said something in an undertone, and Redrick replied: “That’s all, we’ve had our talk!” More grumbling from Burbridge and Redrick’s harsh: “I said that’s it!” The door slammed, there were loud fast steps in the hall, and Redrick Schuhart appeared in the kitchen doorway. Noonan rose to greet him, and they warmly shook hands.

  “I was sure it was you,” Redrick said, looking Noonan over with his quick greenish eyes. “Putting on weight, fatso! Keep putting it away, eh? I see you’re passing the time of day pleasantly enough. Guta, old love, make one for me, too. I’ve got to catch up.”

  “We haven’t even started yet. How can anyone get ahead of you?”

  Redrick laughed harshly and punched Noonan in the shoulder.

  “Now we’ll see who catches up and who gets ahead! Come on, let’s go, what are we doing out here in the kitchen? Guta, bring on the dinner.”

  He reached into the refrigerator and came out with a bottle with a bright label.

  “We’ll have ourselves a feast!” he announced. “We have to treat our best friend Richard Noonan royally, for he does not desert his pals in their moment of need! Even though he is of no help whatever. Too bad Gutalin’s not here.”

  “Why don’t you call him?” Noonan suggested.

  Redrick shook his bright red head.

  “They haven’t laid the phone lines to where he is tonight. Let’s go.”