Paul Theroux - O-Zone

But Sluter urged the witness to continue. "Where were they seen?"

This was at Arthur's Rod and Gun on the Service Road entrance. A woman passing on her way to the wedding had seen some people fiddling with the steel shutters. She had thought it was kids. There hadn't been aliens here for years— high-school kids sometimes caused trouble, but aliens were the last creatures she would have expected, though one alien had apparently worked in the box factory for years without anyone knowing.

"You mentioned kids," Hardy said. "So there might have been a young boy among them?"

"Nope," the woman said, and Hardy hated her certainty. She said she had thought they were kids, but later she realized they were adults behaving like kids, as aliens did.

A man stood up and said he was Arthur, the owner of the shop, and that he could confirm that there had been damage to the lock on the steel shutters. Nothing had been stolen from him.

But Fizzy would have been able to burst a lock, Hardy thought, and again began to doubt that the boy had been among the aliens the woman had seen.

"It doesn't look too good for your kid," Meesle said, rubbing it in with a sort of cruel commiseration. "They might have chewed him up and spit out the pieces."

Hardy looked fiercely into the black faceplate: there was no face visible.

"But they're not going to chew us up," Meesle went on, defying Hardy.

It was now three in the afternoon. When the Godseye gunship landed just before noon it seemed that the only sighting had been at the Grange Hall — the aliens plundering the reception, stuffing their mouths with food, and warning the wedding guests to keep away. There was one story.

Murdick had said, "Let's go after the bastards!"

But Sluter said no. "Everyone's story is the same," he said. "That proves they're lying."

So he had held the hearing in the courthouse; and more sightings were remembered. You don't forget a thing like that, one man said, contradicting himself. The aliens had been seen behind the town hall, near Jack's Tractors and the Redemption Center and the firehouse; at the baseball field, near the War Memorial and on the way to the high school. Some people had seen two or three, others swore there were a dozen, and one man had seen twenty, marching four abreast like a color guard. They were bearded, they were black, they were dark, they were ragged, they were doglike; you couldn't see their eyes.

One man denied these various descriptions. "They blended in perfectly," he said. "They could have been citizens of Guthrie — let me finish! — on their way to the wedding. That's why I wasn't suspicious."

A woman said that she had seen some men, stark naked, at her bedroom windows. They had climbed up to the windows and stood with their feet against the sills, pressing their bodies against the glass and darkening the room. While she was speaking, the woman became short of breath and began to sob, and then she broke down completely, uttering a little threadlike wail that resembled a distant cry in a tunnel,

"This unfortunate woman is not responsible for what she is saying," another witness said.

Sluter said, "She's clinical."

"She was evacuated from O-Zone," the witness said.

"Some of those people settled here in Guthrie. Most of them died."

A tally was made of everything the aliens had stolen. It was a very long list, and it included food, weapons, clothes, and electronic equipment.

"And you say they left town on foot with all this stuff?" Hardy asked.

When they were challenged, several more of the townspeople contradicted what they had said, or withdrew their testimony.

"Why don't you just go after them, and leave us alone?" a man said, exasperated by the questioning.

"We want to know the size of the problem," Sluter said. "We need some more numbers."

Hardy guessed that, faced with these different versions of the alien invasion, the Snake-Eaters were becoming nervous and perhaps afraid — and he knew this was worse, because it would make them uncontrollable. He had long ago decided that it was ignorant cowardice that had turned them into killers. They were afraid of the aliens, and hated them, and because Fizzy was with them he seemed like just another fugitive.

Slipping out of the courthouse by a side door, Hardy stepped into the glace of afternoon sunlight. The air tasted of hot painted shingles and the sweet-sour tang of fresh grass clippings. He passed a telephone cubicle and dialed Moura in New York. His call was shunted to the answering machine.

"I'm standing on the main street of a town called Guthrie. We haven't found Fizzy yet, though there's apparently a band of aliens roaming around. They were here this morning. But I don't know whether he's among them. Call me on the Godseye number if you get another message from him."

He wanted to say more, and imagining the tape spools turning in the machine, he was reminded of his hesitation. He glanced up and down the street.

"They have fire hydrants and streetlights."

There were trees planted by the roadside, and neither the ftrehouse nor the police station was fenced in.

"Guthrie is indescribable, Moura."

Some children passed him and then turned and stared at him.

"They think we're aliens here."

After he hung up he looked more closely at the town. It wasn't indescribable — he hated the word anyway, as a result of Fizzy mocking it: Nothing is indescribable! But the town was not like any be had seen for years. He realized he had traveled too much in poor countries, his work had taken him too far afield, he had neglected the heart of America. They were still walking around in overalls here, digging potatoes, burning wood, driving cars. Guthrie resembled Winslow in its small size and its lack of security. In its way it seemed a fine old town, even if here and there it was a bit battered.

A great fear had come and gone, taking some people with it and leaving a few landmarks, like the watchtowers and the checkpoints. That was about fifteen years ago — the terrible alien scare that occurred at the same time as O-Zone was declared a Prohibited Area, the two events in Hardy's lifetime that had changed the country most. But that was the past: Guthrie was asleep again. It wasn't worth plundering, it wasn't touched by the world, and it had simply continued to exist without much crime or much technology. It was a town that stayed home — and that was so rare in the world. The townspeople were largely unguarded and respectable. Today was one of their terrible days: they were reminded of their old fear.

But they would brighten up. Many of them were old folks, who would have been shocked to see New Yorkers in masks, or painted, or stark naked in jewels, or wearing nothing but aprons. Even these Godseye helmets and faceplates seemed to startle them, and the gunship parked on the lawn in front of the town hall was still attracting attention hours after it had landed. No one seemed to mind that its presence had snarled traffic and that the Godseye troopers were a greater source of interest than the aliens had been.

The people in Guthrie seemed decent — and they were not very angry. They carried weapons, of course, but that was an old habit and a hard one to break.

A woman who had seen Hardy at the courthouse stopped him on the sidewalk and invited him to her house.

"Want a piece of pie?"

The sentence was so strange to him he found himself saying no and translating it to himself; and then he laughed at its beauty.

The afternoon sun shone on Guthrie without heating it much this fading day in late spring. A light flutter ran through the leaves in the trees above Hardy's head, and a ripple in the ivy on the brick wall of the library made it seem like a curtain swelling in the breeze. He heard the taunt of children's voices several streets away. He had the strong sense that the town was alive. It was not only the children and the lawns and the people gathered on the sidewalks chattering about the aliens and the troopers — but the very houses looked alive. There was something handmade and human about their chimneys and windows, their fences and gardens. You could smell cooking here. No rotors in the sky — he hated the thought of that racket in New York.