Roadside Picnic Read Online Free PDF

cable, hanging down almost to the ground and overgrown with cotton.
    So we made it to the end of the street and the turn nice and easy. Kirill looked at me: should he turn? I signaled: as slow as possible! Our boot turned and inched over the last feet of human earth. The sidewalk was coming closer and the boot’s shadow was falling on the bramble. That’s it. We were in the Zone! I felt a chill. Each time I feel that chill. And I never know if that’s the Zone greeting me or my stalker’s nerves acting up. Each time I think that when I get back I’ll ask if others have the same feeling or not, and each time I forget.
    All right, so there we were crawling quietly over what used to be gardens. The engine was humming evenly under our feet, calmly – it didn’t care, nothing was going to hurt it here. Then old Tender broke. We hadn’t even gotten to the first pylon when he started gabbing. All the greenhorns usually run off at the mouth in the Zone: his teeth were chattering, his heart thumping, his memory fading, and he was embarrassed and yet he couldn’t control himself. I think it’s like a runny nose with them. It doesn’t depend on the person at all – it just flows and flows. And what nonsense they babble! They flip out over the landscape or they express their views on the Visitors, or they talk about things having no relation to the Zone – like Tender, who got all wound up over his new suit and couldn’t stop. How much he had paid for it, how fine the wool was, how the tailor changed the buttons for him ... 
    “Shut up.”
    He looked at me pitifully, flopped his lips, and went on: how much silk it took for the lining. The gardens had ended by now, the clayey lot that used to be the town dump was under us. And I felt a light breeze. Except there was no wind at all, and suddenly there was a gust and the tumbleweed scattered, and I thought I heard something.
    “Shut up, you bastard!” I said to Tender.
    No, he couldn’t shut himself up. He was on the pockets now. I had no choice.
    “Stop the boot!” I said to Kirill.
    He braked immediately. Good reflexes, I was proud of him. I took Tender by the shoulder, turned him toward me, and smacked him in the visor. He cracked his nose, poor guy, against the glass, closed his eyes, and shut up. And as soon as he was quiet, I heard it. Trrr, trrr, trrr ... Kirill looked over at me, jaws clenched, teeth bared. I motioned for him to be still. God, please be still, don’t move a muscle. But he also heard the crackle, and like all greenhorns, he had the urge to do something immediately, anything. “Reverse?” he whispered. I shook my head desperately and waved my fist right under his visor – cut it out. Honest to God, with these greenhorns you never know which way to look, at the field or at them. And then I forgot about everything. Over the pile of old refuse, over broken glass and rags, crawled a shimmering, a trembling, sort of like hot air at noon over a tin roof. It crossed over the hillock and moved on and on toward us, right next to the pylon; it hovered for a second over the road – or did I just imagine it? – and slithered into the field, behind the bushes and the rotten fences, back there toward the automobile graveyard.
    Damn those eggheads! Some thinking to lay the road over the dump! And I had been really sharp myself – what was I thinking of when I raved over their stupid map? “Low speed forward,” I said to Kirill.
    “What was that?”
    “The devil knows. It was, and now it’s gone. Thank God. And shut up, please, you’re not a human being now, do you understand? You are a machine, my steering wheel.”
    I suddenly realized that I was running off at the mouth. “Enough. Not another word.”
    I wanted another drink. Let me tell you, these diving suits were nonsense. I lived through so much without a damn suit and will live through so much more, but without a big glug at a moment like this – well, enough of that!
    The breeze seemed