Paul Theroux - O-Zone

He actually believed that! Fisher said, "Sure, if you're a per-vert."

Mr. Blue said softly, "We are what we are because of our difficulties. We faced them together. If it had been easy we would have come apart. Difficulties showed us how to live here — doing things the hard way. That's why this trip is probably a good idea."

If you're weak you need to stick together, Fisher thought. But he had only noticed this after he had joined them. He told himself he wasn't weak; he felt safer among them. But what next?

They covered the distance, one hundred and twenty-two clicks, in five days.

On that fifth day, Mr. Blue said, "That's the States."

"What the heck?s this?" Fisher said, knowing the man could not say This is our quarter.

"This whole thing's the Territory."

"O-Zone, yeah," Fisher said. "And what's that again?"

"That's the United States."

"You are such an unbelievable tool," the boy said, feeling anxious and abusive.

They were at the edge of the last margin of woods, looking out across the long bald stretch of land that only Fisher called the Red Zone Perimeter.

"It's high security," he said. "It's deadly — there's commandos all over it."

Mr. Blue said, "Don't get upset, Fish. I always figured it was a good thing. It kept people out of the Territory, until recently."

The rest of them watched the flat land with interest, and Fisher gathered that Mr. Blue was probably the only one of them who had seen it before. And yet none of them seemed frightened — because they had no idea of the security here.

"Now what are you going to do?" Fisher asked.

Mr. Blue smiled at him and he wished he had not asked the question.

The man said, "Don't you want to go home, Fish?"

"This thing's lethal! There are aerial patrols with high-resolution cameras! They can shoot on sight!"

Fisher felt shabby and ill-prepared in his tattered suit and bruised helmet. He had not thought about Hooper for days, but he considered how his uncle had flown away without him, leaving him on the ground with these aliens, and all his bitterness and self-pity returned. That fuck-wit, that herbert, that willy. And he hadn't come back! In his anger was a measure of pride that he had done something that Hooper could never have managed: he had survived among these aliens, and more than that, he had walked across O-Zone. Hooper hadn't even been able to pilot his jet-rotor into the zone.

"The thing about those patrols," Echols was saying, "is they're just routine spotter flights. The high-resolution cameras mean that they're flying at tremendous altitudes. They've got so much technology they don't trust the naked eye."

"We're on the ground," Fisher cried.

"We're safer on the ground. If we were in a plane they'd take us out."

"If we walk across that perimeter we'll get burned. It's probably mined."

"No. It's a beam," Echols said. "Ask Mr, B" — and Mr. Blue nodded—"It's the kind of chemical laser you're alway boasting about. It's a red stripe running around the middle You've just got to think of a way of interrupting it."

Fisher glanced around. Their mouths were open, which gave them, he thought, the look of hungry monkeys.

"You can't interrupt it, you dong!" Fisher said, and they shut their mouths. "It's a coherent flow of beta flakes! About ten kilojoules of energy per square centimeter! You don't just stick your hand up and block it!" Fisher turned to Mr. Blue. "This total dick wants to get us all killed!"

"That's why I'm putting you in charge," Mr. Blue said.

A scarcely human sound came out of Fisher's mask: it was a mutter of pleasure, but there was a small squawk of vengeance in it.

"Yeah," Fisher said.

Someone sneezed — the dust was terrible here because of the defoliated perimeter. And not only no trees, it had also been bulldozed flat, the whole boundary.

"Shut up — I'm thinking," Fisher said, and continued thinking aloud, saying, "Because if you could block it you'd be in trouble. They'd pinpoint your interruption and get at you from an attack rotor. No, the best way is to slip under it, We don't know the wavelength — okay, that doesn't matter They're using about four megawatts. I've got six to ten in the short term. That chemical laser is practically on the ground— that's why this place has been leveled, to keep the beam low to prevent any infiltration. Funnily enough, they never thought of clandestine exfiltration."

"What's that?" Gumbie asked.

"What we're doing."

"We'll never slip under something that's lying on the ground, unless we dig under it."

"There's no time for digging," Fisher said. "We bend it instead. Boost it up a meter or so — give it an arch, using an alternative force field."

He saw that their mouths had dropped open again.

"With a counterbeam. It's fiber optics, fuck-wit. The beam bends," He was speaking into their mouths. "This weapon can do it. We just program it to fire a continuous exode full of Antigens."

"I've never heard of those," Echols said.

"Of course you haven't."

"I was a physicist, you dipshit!"

"I only discovered Antigons last year, wang-face!"

And then Echols smiled, and conceded the argument to Fisher and said he wanted to know more. But Fisher said it would take too long to explain, and even then they would probably not understand.

"An exode full of Antigons," Gumbie said. "That's powerful medicine!"

Mr. Blue said, "Give him room."

Fisher had never believed that he would be having this conversation early on a summer afternoon in this wild place of hot dust and still air, on the perimeter of the famous wilderness. He had always regarded himself as a theoretical physicist, dealing in the symbols at the margin of the keyboard and describing hypothetical forces. He had regarded numbers as primitive and misleading, like primary colors; but now he knew what "primitive" meant.

It meant this — these people in this place, sitting in the dust needing to be saved. And not just these aliens. "Primitive" meant everything outside his room at Coldharbor. Compared to the life he had led and the work he had done, all this was the past, and in some cases the distant past. He was with a tribe of savages, but even the commandos and technicians who secured the Red Zone were primitive — just a step up from the aliens. Their goonish delusion was their settled belief that they had the perfect security beam. But it could be bent!

"What if we get chased?"

"We'll unbend the beam and drop it on their heads!" He felt giddy, and then he went breathless again. "But they might try to jump us before we get set up."

"Then well burn them to a crisp," Mr. Blue said.

"Yeah."

The particle beam which Fisher had reprogrammed was mounted on a stone pedestal and secured with wire. Fisher gave the orders, panting and screeching as time passed. By late afternoon he was making his final adjustments. He had grown crankier as he worked-and more abusive. He had begun by shouting "Out of my way!" and "I'm in charge!" and at the end he was crying "Aliens! Aliens!" Then he went silent.

"The light's going."

"What's on the other side?"

"This dip better know what he's doing."

Fisher wasn't listening. He moved as though he was deaf, in a ponderous and mechanical way, and then he said softly, "We'll have to leave this beam to self-destruct, you know." There was steam on the inside of his faceplate, dust on the outside — smears of effort. "Then we won't have a weapon."

"We'll steal one. We'll snatch as many as you want."

"Yeah," Fisher said, and he brightened. "Hey, I keep forgetting you aliens are good at that!"

He did not notice the silence then.

"We've got about eight minutes to get across, and then it's out of power, the weapon self-destructs and the laser straightens — the kink goes out of it. We have to be on the other side by then."