Richard Noonan scratched behind his ear. “Hmm,” he said. “I’ve actually heard a lot about these things, but frankly, I’ve always assumed this was all, to put it mildly, a bit exaggerated. Someone just needed a pretext for banning emigration.”
Valentine smiled bitterly. “That’s quite the pretext! Who would believe this lunacy? No, they’d make up an epidemic, a danger of spreading subversive rumors, anything but this!” He put his elbows on the table and looked unhappy, burying his face in his hands.
“I do sympathize,” said Noonan. “You’re right, from the point of view of our mighty positivist science—”
“Or, say, the mutations caused by the Zone,” interrupted Valentine. He took off his glasses and stared at Noonan with nearsighted dark eyes. “All people in contact with the Zone for a sufficiently long time undergo changes—both in phenotype and in genotype. You know what stalkers’ children are like, you know what happens with stalkers themselves. Why? What causes the mutations? There’s no radiation in the Zone. The chemical structure of the air and soil in the Zone, though peculiar, poses no mutation risk. What am I supposed to do under these circumstances—start to believe in witchcraft? In the evil eye? Listen, Richard, let’s order another round. I’ve really gotten a taste for it, damn it…”
Richard Noonan, smirking, ordered another shot of cognac for the laureate and another beer for himself. Then he said, “All right. I am, of course, sympathetic to your turmoil. But to be honest, I personally find the reanimated corpses much more disturbing than your statistical data. Especially since I’ve never seen the data, but the corpses I’ve seen, and smelled them, too.”
Valentine gave a careless wave. “Oh, you and your corpses…” he said. “Listen, Richard, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? After all, you’re an educated man. Do you really not see that from the perspective of fundamental principles, these corpses of yours are neither more nor less astonishing than the perpetual batteries? It’s just that the spacells violate the first principle of thermodynamics, and the corpses, the second; that’s the only difference. In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality—that’s actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts… or Rubinstein’s monsters… or is that Wallenstein?”
“Frankenstein.”
“Yes, of course. Mrs. Shelley. The poet’s wife. Or daughter.” He suddenly laughed. “These corpses of yours do have one curious property—autonomous viability. For example, you can cut off their leg, and the leg will keep walking. Well, not actually walking but, in any case, living. Separately. Without any physiological salt solutions. Anyway, the Institute recently had a delivery of one of these… unclaimed ones. So they prepared him. Boyd’s lab assistant told me about it. They cut off his right hand for some experiments, came in the next morning, and saw—it’s giving them the finger!” Valentine laughed uproariously. “Hmm? And it’s still at it! It just keeps making a fist, then flipping them off. What do you figure it’s trying to say?”
“I’d say the gesture is pretty transparent. Isn’t it time for us go home, Valentine?” said Noonan, looking at his watch. “I have another important errand to run.”
“All right,” Valentine agreed enthusiastically, vainly attempting to stick his face into the frame of his glasses. “Ugh, Richard, you’ve really gotten me drunk…” He picked up his glasses with both hands and carefully hoisted them in place. “You drove?”
“Yes, I’ll drop you off.”
They paid and headed toward the exit. Valentine held himself even straighter than usual and kept smacking his temple with his finger—greeting familiar lab assistants, who were watching one of the leading lights of world science with curiosity and wonder. Right by the exit, greeting the grinning doorman, he knocked off his glasses, and all three of them quickly rushed to catch them.
“Ugh, Richard,” Valentine kept repeating, climbing into the Peugeot. “You’ve gotten me shame-less-ly drunk. Not right, damn it. Awkward. I have an experiment tomorrow. You know, it’s curious…”
And he launched into a description of the next day’s experiment, constantly getting sidetracked by jokes and repeating, “Got me drunk… what a thing! Totally wasted…” Noonan dropped him off in the science district, having decisively put down the laureate’s sudden desire to top things off (“What damn experiment? You know what I’m going to do with your experiment? I’m going to postpone it!”) and handed him over to his wife, who, upon observing her husband’s condition, became highly indignant.
“Guests?” rumbled the husband. “Who? Ah, Professor Boyd? Excellent! Now we’ll hit the bottle. No more shots, damn it—we’ll drink by the cup. Richard! Where are you, Richard?”
Noonan heard this already running down the stairs. So they are scared, too, he thought, again getting into his Peugeot. Scared, the eggheads. And maybe that’s how it should be. They should be even more scared than the rest of us ordinary folks put together. Because we merely don’t understand a thing, but they at least understand how much they don’t understand. They gaze into this bottomless pit and know that they will inevitably have to climb down—their hearts are racing, but they’ll have to do it—except they don’t know how or what awaits them at the bottom or, most important, whether they’ll be able to get back out. Meanwhile, we sinners look the other way, so to speak… Listen, maybe that’s how it should be? Let things take their course, and we’ll muddle through somehow. He was right about that: mankind’s most impressive achievement is that it has survived and intends to continue doing so. Still, I hope you go to hell, he told the aliens. You couldn’t have had your picnic somewhere else. On the moon, say. Or on Mars. You are just callous assholes like the rest of them, even if you have learned to curl up space. Had to have a picnic here, you see. A picnic…
How can I best deal with my picnics, he thought, slowly navigating the Peugeot along the brightly lit streets. What would be the most clever way to go about it? Using the principle of least action. Like in mechanics. What’s the damn point of my engineering degree if I can’t even figure out a cunning way to catch that legless bastard…
He parked the car in front of Redrick Schuhart’s building and sat behind the wheel for a bit, thinking about how to conduct the conversation. He took out the spacell, climbed out of the car, and only then noticed that the building looked abandoned. Almost all the windows were dark, and there was no one in the park—even the lights there weren’t lit. That reminded him of what he was about to see, and he shuddered uncomfortably. It even crossed his mind that it might make sense to call Redrick up and ask him to meet in the car or in some quiet bar, but he chased the thought away. For a number of reasons. Besides, he told himself, let me not become like those pitiful scum who have fled this place like rats from a sinking ship.
He entered the building and slowly walked up the long-unswept stairs. All around him was a vacant silence. Most of the doors on the landings were ajar or even open wide—the dark entryways beyond them gave off a stale odor of dampness and dust. He stopped in front of the door to Redrick’s apartment, smoothed down the hair behind his ears, sighed deeply, and rang the doorbell. For a while there was no sound behind the door, then the floorboards squeaked, the lock clicked, and the door softly opened. He never did hear footsteps.
In the doorway stood the Monkey, Redrick Schuhart’s daughter. Bright light fell from the foyer into the dimly lit landing, and for a second Noonan only saw the girl’s dark silhouette and thought how much she had grown in the past few months. But then she stepped farther back into the apartment, and he saw her face. His mouth immediately became dry.