"Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

"Nothing in particular," I said. "Someone squealed on me, that's all."
He looked at me kind of strange, hopped off the sill, and started walking up and down. He ran
around his office and I sat blowing smoke rings in silence. I was sorry for him, of course, and I felt bad
that things hadn't worked out better. Some cure I came up with for his melancholy. And whose fault was
it? My own. I tempted a baby with a cookie, but the cookie was in a hiding place, and the hiding place
was guarded by mean men тАж Then he stopped pacing, came up close to me, and looking off to the side
somewhere, asked awkwardly:
 "Listen, Red, how much would a full empty cost?"
At first I didn't understand him. I thought at first that he was hoping to buy one somewhere. Where
would you buy one? Maybe it was the only one in the world and besides he couldn't possibly have
enough dough for that. Where would he get the money from? He was a foreign scientist, and a Russian
one at that. And then the thought struck me. So the bastard thinks that I'm doing it for the greenbacks?
You so and so, I thought to myself, what do you take me for? I opened my mouth to tell him off. And I
shut up. Because, actually, what else could he take me for? A stalker is a stalker. The more green stuff
the better. He trades his life for greenbacks. And so it looked to him that yesterday I had cast my line
and today I was reeling him in, trying to raise my price.
The thought made me tongue-tied. And he kept staring at me intently, without blinking. And in his
eyes I saw not contempt but a kind of understanding, I guess. Then I calmly explained it to him.
"No one with a pass has ever gone to the garage before. They haven't laid the tracks to it yet. You
know that. So here we come back from the Zone and your Tender brags to everybody how we headed
straight for the garage, picked up what we needed, and came right back. Like we just went down to the
warehouse or something. And it will be perfectly clear to everyone," I said, "that we knew ahead of time
what we wanted there. And that means that someone set us on to it. And which of us three that could
have beenтАФwell, there's no point in spelling it out for you. Do you understand what's in store for me
here?"
I finished my little speech. We sat staring into each other's eyes, saying nothing. Suddenly he clapped
his hands, rubbed his palms together, and announced in a hearty tone:
"Well, if you can't, you can't. I understand you, Red, and I can't pass judgment. I'll go alone. Maybe
it'll go fine. It won't be the first time."
He spread out the map on the windowsill, leaned on his hands, and bent over it. All his heartiness
seemed to evaporate before my eyes. I could hear him muttering.
"Forty yards, maybe forty-one, another three in the garage itself. No, I won't take Tender along.
What do you think, Red? Maybe I shouldn't take Tender? He does have two kids, after all."
"They won't let you out alone," I said.
"They will," he muttered. "I know all the sergeants and all the lieutenants. I don't like those trucks!
They've been exposed to the elements for thirty years and they're just like new. There's a gasoline carrier
twenty feet away and it's completely rusted out, but they look like they've just come off the assembly line.
That's the Zone for you!"
He looked up from the map and stared out the window. And I stared out the window, too. The glass
in our windows is thick and leaded. And beyond the windowsтАФthe Zone. There it is, just reach out and
you can touch it. From the thirteenth floor it looks like it could fit in the palm of your hand.
When you look at it, it looks like any other piece of land. The sun shines on it like on any other part of
the earth. And it's as though nothing had particularly changed in it. Like everything was the way it was
thirty years ago. My father, rest his soul, could look at it and not notice anything out of place at all.
Except maybe he'd ask why the plant's smokestack was still. Was there a strike or something?
Yellow ore piled up in cone-shaped mounds, blast furnaces gleaming in the sun, rails, rails, and more
rails, a locomotive with flatcars on the rails. In other words, an industry town. Only there were no people.
Neither living nor dead. You could see the garage, too: a long gray intestine, its doors wide open. The
trucks were parked on the paved lot next to it. He was right about the trucksтАФhis brains were
functioning. God forbid you should stick your head between two trucks. You have to sidle around them.