39 pages • 1-hour read
Roadside Picnic
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Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary
Five years pass. Redrick no longer works at the Institute, having returned to being a stalker on a full-time basis. He and Guta are married. Their daughter, Maria—whom they affectionately call “the Monkey”—is a happy, intelligent, and normal child, save for completely black eyes and a layer of yellow fur covering her entire body.
One of Harmont’s oldest and most accomplished stalkers is the Vulture Burbridge: “He was the last of the old stalkers, the ones that began the search for alien treasures immediately after the Visit, when the Zone wasn’t yet called the Zone” (70). He’s named Vulture because he is known to use his stalking companions as bait for bug traps and other perils in the Zone.
During an excursion into the Zone, the Vulture accidentally steps in a puddle of a corrosive substance known as hell slime. As the slime eats away at the Vulture’s lower legs, Redrick carries him to a gap in the recently built nine-foot wall separating the Zone from the rest of Harmont. Unfortunately, patrols are nearby flashing searchlights, forcing the pair to hide for two hours. During this time, the Vulture begs Redrick not to leave him. If Redrick stays and finds a way to save his life, the Vulture promises to reveal the location of the legendary Golden Sphere, a Zone artifact capable of granting wishes. It’s purported that the Vulture himself used the Golden Sphere to wish for a pair of intelligent and beautiful children, Arthur and Dina.
When the patrols finally leave, Redrick carries the Vulture out of the Zone to a Jeep hidden under some branches on the side of the road. It is 6 o’clock in the morning when the pair arrives back in town, and the Vulture demands that Redrick drive him immediately to the Butcher, a doctor he hopes can save his legs. While the Vulture survives the ordeal, the Butcher amputates his legs below the knees.
After dropping off the Vulture, Redrick returns to his apartment where he lives with Guta and the Monkey. Redrick has only an hour to spend with his wife and daughter before he meets with a buyer for the artifacts (“swag”) he and the Vulture just smuggled out of the Zone.
Redrick arrives at the Metropole Hotel 20 minutes before his meeting and decides to have coffee at a cafe across the street. He panics when he sees an old coworker named Richard Noonan exit the hotel and approach the cafe. Noonan suggests that Redrick return to work, but Redrick says, “There’s nothing for me to do at your Institute. It’s all automated now, the robots go into the Zone, the robots, I suppose, also get the bonuses. And lab assistant salary—that won’t even cover my tobacco” (81). Despite the offer, Redrick isn’t interested. In returning to the Institute.
With a suitcase full of Zone artifacts, Redrick enters a hotel suite at the Metropole occupied by his client, a wealthy middle-aged man named Raspy. While Raspy is happy to pay handsomely for the artifacts—one of which appears to be a ring capable of perpetual motion—he is disappointed at Redrick’s failure to smuggle out a sample of hell slime. Raspy intends to sell the slime on the arms market as a weapon of mass destruction.
Redrick takes a taxi to the Burbridge cottage to give the Vulture’s cut of the money to his beautiful daughter Dina. When Redrick tells Dina everything that happened, she derides him for helping her father and not letting him perish in the Zone.
Later that day, Redrick visits the Borscht. The bartender Ernest is in a state of high anxiety, his hand shaking as he pours Redrick a beer. As a vicious-looking goon stands up and blocks the exit, Ernest says, “Let’s go for a walk” (97). Redrick follows Ernest to a back room occupied by Captain Quarterblad, a police investigator who specializes in arresting stalkers. Quarterblad forces Redrick to open his briefcase, which still contains a few items of Zone contraband that Raspy didn’t buy. Redrick also empties a bundle of cash from his pockets, most of which falls on the floor. Captain Quarterblad says, “Pick up the money, stalker” (99). On the floor on his hands and knees, having picked up most of the cash, Redrick pulls on a copper ring embedded in a groove in the floor which releases a trapdoor. Redrick plummets to the wine cellar below and escapes through a dark narrow passage.
Redrick makes it to the southwestern outskirts of town and hides the cash under a telephone booth at an abandoned gas station. He also hides a small porcelain container filled with hell slime. The only reason he told Raspy he failed to smuggle out the hell slime is that he fears the kind of weaponry humans will try to make out of it. However, now facing a three-year jail sentence, Redrick decides to sell it so that Guta and the Monkey don’t starve while he’s in prison. He calls Guta and explains the situation, saying, “Hang in there and don’t worry. Married a stalker, now don’t complain” (103). Redrick then calls Raspy, tells him the location of the hell slime, and instructs him to give every penny of its sale price to Guta.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Here, the authors begin to probe in earnest the moral character of their protagonist. Throughout Chapter 1, the authors portray Redrick largely as a hard-nosed anti-hero worried about his own survival above all else. Like similar heroes across detective and film noir genres, Redrick soon reveals himself as a man with a moral compass that extends beyond his own well-being. However, the exact parameters of this compass aren’t immediately clear. Like many human beings, Redrick’s precise moral foundations are often situational and shaky.
For example, Redrick’s decision to quit his job at the Institute after Kirill’s death goes unexplained. Later in the book, Redrick tells himself that his refusal to abandon his life as a stalker stems from an individualistic desire to buck the status quo. But there is evidence to suggest that Redrick’s departure from the institute is driven at least in part by his guilt over allowing a respected co-worker to die on his watch. That Redrick goes to such great lengths to save a scoundrel like the Vulture—despite the Vulture’s reputation for abandoning men in his position—lends credence to this view.
One could also argue that Redrick quits the Institute because being a full-time stalker pays better. This is true to a point. But if all Redrick cares about is money, that doesn’t explain why he refuses to sell Raspy the much-coveted hell slime sample until it becomes necessary to do so in order to support his family while he’s locked away in prison. In Redrick’s own hierarchy of needs, his family takes top priority over both material wealth and a desire to protect others from the horrors of the Zone.
The hell slime scenario also highlights one of the novel’s major themes: technology’s impact on the military-industrial complex. Popularized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower during his 1961 farewell address, the term “military-industrial complex” refers to an unspoken alliance between industry and the military that can affect a nation’s foreign policy in ways that aren’t always in the public’s interest. For example, with a vested interest in the manufacturing of weapons of war, the defense industry may work in concert with the military in order to urge the federal government to take a more aggressive stance toward rival nations. Technology, meanwhile, plays a mixed role in this arrangement. On one hand, many of the technologies developed during the Cold War resulted in a direct benefit for American civilians, particularly in the field of aviation. On the other hand, technologies designed for commercial or civilian benefits become weapons of war frequently utilized by the military. Recent examples of this include Google’s participation in developing artificial intelligence for the U.S. military’s drones—actions that resulted in an internal revolt at the company in which 4,000 employees signed a letter urging CEO Sundar Pichai to abandon the project (Bergen, Mark. “Inside Google, a Debate Rages: Should It Sell Artificial Intelligence to the Military?” Bloomberg. 14 May 2018).
For Redrick, this conflict over whether to supply hell slime to a man who is certain to sell it to the military takes on an even more dramatic shape, seeing as how the technology in question is a substance so corrosive it’s named after the domain of Satan himself.
When considering these choices—supporting family and doing the right thing, or surviving financially and indirectly causing suffering—the novel’s historical context comes into play. The Strugatskys wrote Roadside Picnic during the capitalist-communist dichotomies of the Cold War era. In the Afterword of the 2012 edition of Roadside Picnic, Boris Strugatsky considers the surprising amount of difficulty he and his brother met while trying to publish the book in the Soviet Union without extensive edits, writing, “It certainly didn’t contain any criticism of the existing order and, on the contrary, seemed to be in line with the reigning antibourgeois ideology” (203). Boris later goes even further, describing the world depicted in Roadside Picnic as one of “decaying capitalism and triumphant bourgeois ideology” (207). And yet, in her Foreword to the 2012 edition, science-fiction author Ursula Le Guin writes:
What [the Strugatskys] did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology—something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write (ii).
Indeed, as the book progresses, it becomes clear that Roadside Picnic is neither a full-throated endorsement of the Soviet state nor a full-throated condemnation. However, the book still raises interesting debates about the dehumanizing effects of market-based economies, as well as these economies’ reliance on criminals like Redrick in order to function.
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