Characters in Roadside Picnic

Redrick Schuhart

Known as Red. A stalker from Harmont who makes illegal night runs into the Zone to bring out alien artifacts; begins the book as a young lab assistant at the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures.

Guta Schuhart

Red's girlfriend and later his wife, who holds the household together against the town's prejudice toward stalkers and their families.

Richard Noonan

Dick Noonan, who supplies equipment to the Harmont branch of the Institute and is secretly employed to work against the black market in artifacts. A family friend of the Schuharts.

Valentine Pilman

The physicist who established that the six Visitation Zones lie on a single trajectory, and who advanced the roadside-picnic theory: that the Visitors stopped, discarded their rubbish and left without noticing humanity at all.

Burbridge

Nicknamed the Vulture (the Buzzard in some translations). A veteran stalker, grasping and willing to betray a companion, yet devoted to his own children.

Arthur Burbridge

Burbridge's son, a handsome recent law graduate his father intended for politics, who accompanies Red on a run into the Zone.

Red Schuhart