Paul Theroux - O-Zone

The pilot's expression softened to pleading.

"Aliens!" Fisher said, intending to explain.

It was a short flight, less than an hour, but for nearly the whole of that time Fisher ridiculed the plane's instruments.

"These were obsolete twenty years ago! It's all needles! It's got bells and whistles!"

The pilot said they were low on fuel. Fisher saw it was true, and mocked him for not carrying a spare tank. Then he demanded to be taken down.

"Going down by hand! What a toilet! This is like driving an old car. You're actually using your feet, you willy!"

There was no airport nearby. They came down on a back road in Ohio, rolling past a sign that said "Bixby 4 km."

"Take anything you want — but please—" But the pilot said no more; he was too ashamed to say Don't hurt me.

"We don't collect antiques," Fisher said.

The others laughed, and over the next two days, hiking across fields by night, and sleeping by day, they repeated the sentence; and Fisher was proud of having pleased them — but what was the joke? All this time he was directing them, taking his bearings from the stars and monitoring police broadcasts. Roadblocks were common here on the interstates, but by following Fisher's directions they kept on back roads.

On several occasions, hearing low-flying aircraft or ground vehicles approach, they evaporated. Each time it happened quickly, without a word, and yet the method varied. The first time, they scattered and sank into the fields; the second time, they gathered, pressing themselves together, and moved in a mass and evaporated that way.

Fisher was impressed by these escapes — he called them monkey maneuvers. But he was prouder of the listening devices in his helmet, and his skill with radio navigation, and his reckonings by the stars.

"Think Bligh could do this?"

He meant: What good was she? He had always resented being swapped for an alien.

"Bligh wouldn't have to do that," Rooks said. "If Bligh was with us, we wouldn't be here."

"You'd be lost without me!"

Mr. Blue said, "If we didn't have you, we wouldn't need you. I told you, you're the problem."

"I'm the solution!"

But he was enjoying himself now. Being on the ground had corrected many of his misconceptions. He did not feel like a prisoner any longer.

"Next stop is Pittsburgh." He laughed, twisting his face into a frown, and the noise came out of his helmet. "It's a sealed city!"

"I'm going to miss that laugh of yours," Echols said.

Fisher explained that unlike Guthrie or Loogootee or Seymour or Marengo — those sleepy towns in the cornfields — Pittsburgh was very secure. It had rivers and bridges; all the access roads had checkpoints. Like New York, its physical features had helped make it secure. It was a natural fortress.

"You can't get in without an ID," Fisher said. "Without IDs you don't have a legal existence. They don't have any qualms about killing you, because you guys are already dead. But not me! I just flash my disc and they start saluting."

"Where are we?"

"Near Somethingopolis."

"We're skipping Pittsburgh," Mr. Blue said.

In their detour around the city that night they were slowed by fences, and rushing one in the darkness, Valda stepped on a rusty spike, injuring her foot. It was a deep cut, exposing the bone in one of her toes — raw meat and tattered skin.

"That's what you get for laughing at my boots," Fisher said. "You're not in O-Zone now, you know."

A new person had emerged in him over the past week or so — ever since crossing the Red Zone Perimeter. It had first seemed like a mood, and then a phantom, and now it had asserted itself and possessed him. It was older, bossy, mocking, confident: the "Batfish" from Guthrie, the copilot from Marengo. His voice was taunting and loud, his elbows stuck out, his helmet clattered on his head when he walked. I live here, he seemed to say. I know better. But he had also mastered many of the aliens' own skills. He could find food, he could sleep on the ground, he could evaporate when they did. He was stronger than the younger Fisher, but he was just as intelligent, and Fisher thought: When my brain turns to mush and I can't do any advanced math, I'll still be strong.

"If you don't get an antitetanus shot within forty-eight hours, you're risking lockjaw."

Valda worried and limped, keeping one shoulder high, and Fisher was so intrigued by her silent suffering he knocked his head against a low branch.

"Didn't hurt!" he cried, and it hadn't — he wanted them to think he was being brave. But he had cracked his radio, and thereafter its hum made it almost unintelligible.

"It hammered my accumulator!" he complained. He had been listening to Owners' and police broadcasts. Now, he said, he'd have to make a trip into Pittsburgh to find another accumulator.

"This is the best helmet you can get," he said. "It's better than most human heads!"

"Wait up," Mr. Blue said. He was looking at the lighted sky, a pile of yellow clouds: it was all they could see of Pittsburgh.

Fisher said, "We can't travel without a radio. And Valda's going to get muscle rigidity and tonic spasms. Lockjaw's a misnomer that some dimbo gave it. It's tetanus. The neuro-toxic component's called tetanospasmin. It's one of the deadliest poisons known to man." Fisher grew excited as he spoke. "No one else can go with me! They'll get arrested! They'll get nuked!"

Echols was saying to Mr. Blue, "Is this a good idea?"

But Fisher gloated. "If Valda doesn't get a jab she'll be foaming at the mouth! And you'll need my radio to keep away from Feds and security people. I'm giving you raw data."

"He might not come back," Echols said. "What'll we do then?"

They had started talking to each other about him, as if he was deaf and didn't matter. Aliens!

"We'll put cowshit on the wound," Mr. Blue said. "Cowshit's great for tetanus."

"You horrible dim fucking willy," Fisher said — his wonderment gave a lilting tone to his abuse—"that's the sickest thing I've ever heard in my life."

"And yet it's true."

They were seated on the ground in the early-morning darkness with their backs against a grassy bank, preparing themselves for the dangers that daylight always presented. The aliens were silent, like small children or animals under a heavy falling sky of terrible blackness. They had never looked stranger or more savage.

When Fisher looked again they were gone: evaporated.

"Cowshit!"

He had thought of saying good-bye, or thanking them, because he had no intention of going back to them. It wasn't stealth that prevented him, and not the idea that they might conclude that he was running off, and seize him — no, he just didn't feel strongly enough about them to bother shifting his faceplate so they could hear him.

They had terrorized him, they had pushed him, they had forced him to walk and tried to wear him out, and then when they had needed him they had turned to him blankly and said, "Help." He had steered them out of trouble. And they had stolen him from Hooper's rotor! What was there to thank them for? He wondered whether they were really convinced of his intelligence. Possibly Mr. Blue and Echols realized that he had some power, but the others weren't bright enough to understand his special qualities. It took brains to appreciate brains.

That was why he had said, "I don't know what I'm going to do without you folks."

Because sarcasm was always best when it was used on people who didn't understand it.

Then he said sharply, "Don't even think of following me. If they catch you near that city, you'll get burned."

He could have disguised his feelings and said, "I won't be long." Instead he turned his back on them. He wanted them to suspect that he might not return; he wanted to put them in suspense. They deserved to worry for all the worry they had caused him. Would they, as aliens, be conscious of the fact that he had not said good-bye or thank you?