Paul Theroux - O-Zone

She had come quite near to him. She held her hand out in a peacemaking gesture.

"You porker!" Fisher said, and shoved the door aside. "You porker!"

Now he had what he wanted; but he wondered what to do with it. Yet he felt strong again, walking freely through the sealed city. And that porker had taken him for an alien! Each time he passed a public telephone he thought of Moura and Hooper and how they had let him down. They were too incompetent to find him. They hadn't even reported him missing. But their indifference had given him strength.

He thought of calling them and saying; You are such total fuck-wits everything has to be proven to you!

He laughed at this — his laughter was mirthless and energetic, like someone trying to blow out a small fire. But the effort of it gave him confidence.

The aliens were huddled under the evening sky. Thoroughly stupid people needed to be shown everything. He had shown the aliens he was strong by leaving them and penetrating this city on his own. There was a way he could show them he was even stronger: by returning. And they needed his medicine, they needed his helmet, they needed him.

"Excuse me, sir," the security guard said at the bus station as Fisher was boarding. "Step over here — we'll have to run your ID through the filter."

"Where the heck have you guys been!"

The guards did not laugh. The station was thronged with homeward-bound commuters. The guards stuck to the routine of their random check: filtering the disc, doing the numbers.

"You're a long way from home, Mr. Allbright."

"I've been traveling," he said. He decided not to arouse their curiosity with the word "mission." They were staring at his dented helmet and his patches of sticky tape. He said, "Wear and tear. Ha!"

"Notice any illegals in your travels?"

"Aliens — you mean real aliens?" he said, and swallowed and waited for their full attention.

"Any kind."

"No," he said.

Saying that, he transformed the people who were hiding and waiting for him. He made them better, he made them worthy of him; he appreciated them. And they needed him! He felt gladder — he had rescued them again. Now he was returning to them as a friend. Saying no to those cops proved it.

They were much angrier now — Sluter and Meesle especially; Murdick was nibbling in fury. And they flew the gunship recklessly, battering the turbulent air. They had received an all-points alert from Marengo — the airport had not been specified — and when they landed in the town center they were surrounded by armed men. One of the men said, "We don't care who you are or what you want — just get out of here, right now, and take that bug off the lawn."

Then a warning shot went twangling past the Godseye gunship.

"They think we're aliens!" Sluter cried as he spun the rotor into the air.

It was another bad day. The tension brought on by their frustrated pursuit worried Hardy. They had started out looking for Fizzy, talking of rescue; but now they talked about little except the criminality of aliens. Hardy was reluctant to give them any more information, and he didn't blame the vigilantes in Marengo for sending them away. He did not trust them anymore.

He radioed Moura from the gunship — the troopers would not allow him to use any telephones on the ground.

Seeing them adjusting the phones on their helmets, he said, "Don't eavesdrop."

Sluter said, "If we want to listen, we will. We've got her number, she's got ours. We don't need you, remember. But you need us. Why don't you jigs understand that?"

They heard everything of the conversation — that Moura had been phoned by Fizzy, that he seemed either very calm or very crazy, that she had traced the call to a public phone in Pittsburgh. "He said he was on some sort of mission."

"He could be wacko," Meesle said, without the slightest pretense of discretion. Hardy had just switched off.

He hated them, but without them what hope had he of finding Fizzy and freeing him from the aliens? Godseye was his punishment for the secrecy he had imposed on himself. Even Hooper had been excluded. Yet Godseye seemed a little too eager now.

Hardy said, "What are you going to do?"

"Find them!"

"I only want you to find Fizzy."

"If we can tell him apart."

"I don't care about the others. I'm not pressing charges."

They snickered at his innocence and headed for Pittsburgh. It was still only the middle of the afternoon, and there was plenty of daylight left.

Hardy was surprised, as he had been at the Red Zone Perimeter and elsewhere, by how easily these men picked up information. Over Pittsburgh, they radioed State Security and then the city police. As soon as they gave their code and identified themselves as Godseye troopers they were told everything. Hardy was appalled to think that an organization so vicious and bad-tempered had such good relations with legitimate police.

"Typical aliens," Sluter said. "They've left tracks all over the place. Three sightings in the city, a suspicious incident in the hospital, and detentions at two security checks. That proves it. Your alien sticks out like a real wolfman."

"What alien?" Hardy said. "He was describing Fizzy!"

Murdick said, "Maybe it's not him. Maybe it's an alien dressed in his clothes. Maybe they decided to eat him, and used his ID."

The furious smile on Hardy's face was intended to intimidate Murdick.

"'Eat' is just a figure of speech," Murdick said, backing away.

"Why don't you say what you mean, Willis?"

"Okay, maybe they killed him."

Meesle said, "Some of these kids that are kidnapped get twisted around. They begin to identify with their captors. Listen, we've got documentation — romances, marriages, slave relationships, puppet phenomena. Or they turn into animals. The average person can't take too much captivity."

"Fizzy isn't average," Hardy said.

"That's what we mean," Sluter said — and Hardy saw that Meesle and Sluter had doubled up on him. "It could be worse in his case."

They had hoisted their gunship over Pittsburgh. They collected the information about the sightings, and received a soundprint that was very blurred: it looked like a rotting Martian, or a collapsed Astronaut in secondhand space gear — the person's head deep inside the shadowy helmet.

Was that Fizzy after his ordeal?

"That's your career criminal," Meesle said. "That's your omnifelon. That's your animal. We're talking woof-woof here."

He stuck the smudged picture over the control console.

"Where are we going?" Hardy said, feeling the gunship gather speed as Sluter clutched at the controls.

"This is the bus route they mentioned."

The stripy road patterns moved across the ground-screen.

"A young, very dirty boy, wearing a helmet with a smeared faceplate." Meesle was quoting the security report and, Hardy felt, taking too much pleasure in it. "Extensive damage to new-model suit. Scarring on helmet. Boots plugged with filler. A loud voice. A noticeable laugh."

Murdick said, "Guess they didn't eat him."

At this high altitude, visibility through the windows and portholes was so poor they had to rely on the ground-screen and the infrared sensors and heat-seekers.

"There's no security out here. They could be anywhere. And we're going to run out of road in a minute." No sooner had he finished speaking than Meesle pushed up his mask and lowered his face to the screen. "Hold it. I've got a cluster."

"Count them."

"Seven. Isolated. Way off the road. Probably jigs, probably jabbering — they're always jabbering to themselves, never listening."

"We're going down."

"Be careful," Hardy said. "Fizzy's a very excitable kid."

"I'm getting a little tired of you," Sluter said, accelerating the dive, and his anger showed in the tilt of the gunship.