Roadside Picnic

Tale of a Troika is a very different thing indeed—so different that it might have been written by quite different authors—which is the highest possible tribute to the authors' versatility. How much you like it will depend on your taste for satire and lampoon. It is, in nature, reminiscent of Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, with (and here I confess to a highly subjective evaluation) one important difference: Lem's approach and style are, in comparison, unleavened, no matter how deeply he plunges into the surrealistic and the absurd. The cumulative effect is Kafkaesque horror. The Strugatsky fury—and it is fury: disgust with hypocrisy, with bureaucratic bumbling, with self-serving, self-saving distortions of logic and of truth and of initially decent human motivations—their fury is laced with laughter, rich with scorn, effervescent with the comic spirit. One has to search back to Alice's tea party to find a scene as mad as the chamber of the Troika; yet, in retrospect, one realizes that one has experienced a profoundly serious work, since every bent line illuminates a straight one, all illogic signifies the purity from which it has departed.

A word of appreciation must be extended to Ms. Antonina W. Bouis, the translator of these short novels. Russian I do not know; fiction I do; and I must honor anyone who can so deftly pass emotion, character dimension, even conversational idiom, through so formidable a barrier.

—Theodore Sturgeon San Diego, California 1976

FROM AN INTERVIEW BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT FROM HARMONT RADIO WITH DOCTOR VALENTINE PILMAN, RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS FOR 19..

"I suppose that your first serious discovery, Dr. Pilman, should be considered what is now called the Pilman Radiant?"

"I don't think so. The Pilman Radiant wasn't the first, nor was it serious, nor was it really a discovery. And it wasn't completely mine, either."

"Surely you're joking, doctor. The Pilman Radiant is a concept known to every schoolchild."

"That doesn't surprise me. According to some sources, the Pilman Radiant was discovered by a schoolboy. Unfortunately, I don't remember his name. Look it up in Stetson's History of the Visitation—it's described in full detail there. His version is that the radiant was discovered by a schoolboy, that a college student published the coordinates, but that for some unknown reason it was named after me."

"Yes, many amazing things can happen with a discovery. Would you mind explaining it to our listeners, Dr. Pilman?"

"The Pilman Radiant is simplicity itself. Imagine that you spin a huge globe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie on the surface in a smooth curve. The whole point of what you call my first serious discovery lies in the simple fact that all six Visitation Zones are situated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shots at Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth-Deneb line. Deneb is the alpha star in Cygnus. The point in the heavens from which, so to speak, the shots came is the Pilman Radiant."

"Thank you, doctor. My fellow Harmonites! Finally we have heard a clear explanation of the Pilman Radiant! By the way, the day before yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the Visitation. Dr. Pilman, would you care to say a few words to your fellow townsmen on the subject?"

"What in particular interests you? Remember, I wasn't in Harmont at the time."

"That makes it even more interesting to hear what you felt when your hometown became the site of an invasion from a supercivilization from space."

"To tell the truth, I first thought it was a hoax. It was hard to imagine that anything like that could possibly happen in our little Harmont. Gobi or Newfoundland seemed more likely than Harmont."

"Nevertheless, you finally had to believe it."

"Finally—yes."

"And then?"

"It suddenly occurred to me that Harmont and the other five Visitation Zones—sorry, my mistake, there were only four other sites known at the time—that all of them fit on a very smooth curve. I calculated the coordinates and sent them to Nature. “

"And you weren't at all concerned with the fate of your hometown?"

"Not really. You see, by then I had come to believe in the Visitation, but I simply could not force myself to believe the hysterical reports about burning neighborhoods and monsters that selectively devoured only old men and children and about bloody battles between the invulnerable invaders and the highly vulnerable but steadfastly courageous Royal Tank Units."

"You were right. I remember that our reporters really botched the story. But let's return to science. The discovery of the Pilman Radiant was the first, but probably not the last, of your contributions to our knowledge of the Visitation!"

"The first and last."