A question about Roadside Picnic

Having played and enjoyed the game STALKER I was inspired to read the book it was loosely based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers.

On reading the wikipedia summary it mentioned a plot point that I didn’t catch on reading the story and I was wondering if I did miss it or it wasn’t actually mentioned.

The wikipedia entry states that the only method of a Stalker reaching the wish giving Golden Ball was to get another stalker to unknowingly sacrifice himself by activating a defense mechanism surrounding the ball, which then shuts down for a period and then enables the stalker to pass.

When I read the story from this scene I just assumed that the main character didn’t know the safe path to the device, not that he knowingly sacrificed his comrade to reach it.

I can’t read the book again unfortunately because I’ve given it away!

I can’t answer the question for you because I haven’t read the book myself yet, but if you really do want to re-read it yourself, you can download it for free from the Strugatskys’ own website: http://www.rusf.ru/abs/english/

More precisely, the game was based on the movie Stalker (which was based on the novella Roadside Picnic) as well as on Roadside Picnic, so you might want to watch the movie also:

Also, note that there are now three games in the Stalker series.

You may also be interested in the 1979 movie Stalker that also provided a lot of inspiration to the game as well.

It’s been a while since I read it, but I didn’t think that the sacrifice of someone was a necessary condition of entry. I think it was something they were aware of, though — if it did happen, they knew it’d be safe to go — and it weighed on their minds knowing that they could profit from someone else’s misfortune.

On edit:
Apparently the movie was novelized by the Strugatskys, according to the wiki page linked to. So maybe some of those details mixed together.

To be exact, the Strugatsky brothers wrote a short novel Roadside Picnic. The movie Stalker was based on it. The brothers then wrote a novelization of the movie, which was also called Stalker. The novelization was quite short, not really a full-length novel.

That’s the part that confused me, the wikipedia article states that someone has to be sacrificed to reach the object safely, I don’t recall reading that in the book which was why I was wondering.

Thanks for the answers everyone, the whole Stalker story seems to be some kind of meta thing! I need to check the movie out, I thought the story of Roadside Picnic was fairly forgettable but the authors described an interesting story-world and raised an interesting questions about what really happened to cause the phenonemon, if the answer can even be known.