Happiness for a stalker just released from prison is to lead others to the Room. This time he leads the Professor (Grinko), a physicist researcher, and the Writer (Solonitsyn) in a creative and personal crisis. The three of them penetrate through the cordons into the Zone. The stalker leads the group carefully, in a roundabout way, probing the way with nuts. The phlegmatic Professor trusts him. The Skeptical Writer, on the contrary, behaves defiantly, and, it seems, does not really believe in the Zone and its “traps,” although the encounter with inexplicable phenomena somewhat convinces him. The characters' characters are revealed in their dialogues and monologues, in the Stalker's thoughts and dreams. The group passes the Zone and on the threshold of the Room it turns out that the Professor was carrying with him a small, 20-kiloton bomb, with which he intends to destroy the Room - a potential fulfillment of the wishes of any despot, psychopath, scoundrel. The shocked Stalker tries to stop the Professor with his fists. The writer believes that the Room still fulfills not beautiful, well-thought-out wishes, but subconscious, petty, shameful ones. (But, perhaps, there is no fulfillment of desires at all.) The professor ceases to understand “why then go to her at all,” unscrews and throws out the bomb. They are coming back.