Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"We call that Sudden Death," Rooks said, and laughed as Fisher dropped the leaves and squawked.

But after that they showed him how to find potato beans and hawthorn buds and wild plums; and how to split roots and roast them and how to beat berries off the bushes. They tore up some weeds and said they were good for tea. They told him to crush the leaves and smell his fingers.

He put his fingers into the front of his mask and said, "Chewing gum. Toothpaste. Room freshener — the stuff you squirt in the bathroom. What is it?"

"Mint."

He did not hate them anymore. He pitied their foolishness and simplicity, and he wanted them to succeed, so that he would make it home. But they were aliens: savages didn't think ahead — illegals never made plans.

It was bright late afternoon when they stopped to make camp. They did not speak. Mr. Blue paused and they did the same, and when he began prowling they gathered grass for tufts to sit on, or looked for firewood, or sorted the food— wild food for them, provisions for Fisher.

They murmured as they went about their duties, not seeming to notice they were in a wasteland. It was wilderness! But they turned their backs on it and did their chores. Fisher wondered how long it would be before they died doing that.

"Do we have to sleep on the floor?"

"Not the floor, Fish. The ground. It's called the ground,"

"And, Fish," Valda said. "It's bad manners to talk while you're yawning."

He laughed at this alien talking about manners — she had once tried to stuff her oinkers into his mouth!

It turned cool after dark, but the fire was doused nonetheless, so it wouldn't be seen. There were no planes today, they said, but there had been some recently. They said: Your people must be searching for you, Fish.

Fisher was glad they didn't ask him why. He knew that none of the Allbrights liked him very much, and the Murdicks and the Eubanks and everyone actually disliked him. He thought: If you're indifferent to people they hate you. Now they wanted him back. He had been stolen by aliens— that was the reason. They didn't even know these aliens!

"You see something?" Fisher asked.

Valda was looking at the sky.

"Stars," she said. "Aren't they beautiful?"

"Arcturus in Bootes. The Galactic Equator. Hyades." He pointed. "And that thing that looks like Capella is a satellite. I've got an instrument in my emergency kit that will give me our position to five decimal places. Want the coordinates?" He was still looking at the starry sky. "Talking of pulsars, a few years ago I monitored energy emissions from pulsars in the Crab Nebula." Then, "Betelgeuse—"

He kept talking. At last he said, "Yeah, beautiful." And then they gave him a blanket and gathered themselves into a pig-pile under blankets to sleep.

Fisher crept away from them and lay in the darkness. It was always so noisy in the open air. Where were the solitude and silence people always talked about? The air crackled with the sound of beetles and locusts, and there was a continual rustle of insect wings.

Without asking whether it was all right they had placed their trust in him. You'll figure something out. He was grateful for their silent ways. What if they had asked him point-blank what his strategy would be? He would have had to admit that he didn't know how to get back to New York without a bird or a rotor; that he was afraid they would fail; that failure might mean dying. He had never walked anywhere. He might have said, "Let's stay right here in O-Zone and figure this thing out." But they had not asked.

It grew colder, and though they were sheltered by the sides of the pan, and there was no wind, Fisher shivered in his suit. The suit was in tatters — the elbows torn, tubes showing in the knees, the collar fastening gone. His helmet made his head hot, but when he took it off the cold penetrated to his skull.

From the pile of six aliens came the low rumble and flutterblast of snores. Fisher was wide-awake with discomfort, squatting in the dust and listening. He hesitated, and then he crawled forward and took his helmet off. An owl called out three clear hoots from a treetop. Fisher burrowed into the pig-pile between Mr. Blue and Valda, and sighed, and was soon asleep in that warm space.

This walk across O-Zone was not proving as bad as he had feared. Until now, he had kept himself apart from Mr. Blue, from everyone except Valda — that crazy spasm of hers; but she hadn't repeated it. Except for that, he had been alone, almost from the moment of his abduction.

Now solitude was not possible. The walking was hard, food and water were limited, and the nights were chilly. So he became one of them — walking in the column during the day, kneeling around the fire in the late afternoon, and part of the pig-pile at night. It vaguely disgusted him, but he had no choice. How else could he survive? He could not separate himself from them. Alone, he would die of exposure.

He came to see that these people survived because they had made themselves into an organism. It had been an accident, like the accumulation of a ball of fluff. They had been lucky in O-Zone; they had found everything they needed, they had lived by raiding the ghost towns, and they had stayed away from the areas of high radiation. The organism was a simple and fairly horrible thing: it was a blob, but it worked. It made headway through the wilderness, and when Fisher was part of it he felt anonymous.

They came to one of those towns — Talmadge, it was called, and on that same sign, Visit the Distillery and the Old Undershot Mill. But Rooks said he didn't see any Old Mill, and Gumbie said, "There's an ice-cream parlor." Talmadge had a town hall and a creek running through it — a trickle, but it had once been deep, from the look of the dam. The wrecked building on the dam must have been the mill. The town seemed full of bees, which gave it a hot, sleepy atmosphere. The lizards did not move from the sunlit shingles where they clung. The board fences had fallen.

"You're always talking about going to the bathroom, Fish," said Echols.

It was true: he used that expression whenever he unzipped his suit.

"Here's your chance," Echols said. He was pointing to a sign, Rest Rooms.

The main street was in good shape, but the gutters were weedy, and the trees had burst the sidewalks with their roots.

"I'd like to look in some of those houses," Fisher said.

"You wouldn't find much," Valda said. "We've looked ir lots of places like this. Even lived in some."

"We don't need anything here," Mr. Blue said.

They walked through the town without entering a building, without disturbing anything, and it seemed to Fisher as though the town was not dead but asleep, and they had not woken it.

Afterward, he had a vivid memory of the town — its still-white houses, and the sturdy bridge over the creek, and the shady streets. It was a decent place. It hadn't been vandalized. No evidence of aliens having raided it. The people from Talmadge had moved out their belongings, and locked their houses, and driven off. It was in a curve of the road, its lilacs were huge and untrimmed, the houses had porches. You probably wouldn't even need a breathing mask here. Fisher hadn't been afraid: Talmadge was a pretty little place — he congratulated himself on thinking that was so— and it was still in his memory, sunny and buzzing.

But he admitted that there were times when he was afraid, It was intelligent fear, he told himself. These aliens hadn't thought ahead — they solved problems when they encountered them: they did not anticipate them. Mr. Blue was fine, but he was only a twig they clung to. It was so far an organism without a brain.

"You do everything the hard way," Fisher said.

"That's the best way, the hard way," Mr. Blue said.