Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"Take your time," Mr. Blue said.

Fisher had started to radio Moura. Until then, he had been monitoring the engine of the freight train, the aerial patrols, the transmissions from the towns they had passed.

"Got anything?"

He was fully in charge now. He held up his ragged glove to silence them. He. was on the air. Then he heard Moura's voice, talking fast, like someone who has been waiting a long time to speak.

"I'm in the scab — New Jersey," he said, answering one of her many questions. "Let me give you my position. Ready for my coordinates?"

He paused before relaying the information. He liked seeing the patient trusting expressions of the aliens. They did not realize how tough they were. He clicked his faceplate up.

"She's calling Hardy now. He's out looking for us. A real yo-yo at search-and-scan. All technology — no muscle. We could have found him if we'd wanted. These people are such fuck-wits!"

"That's your father," Echols said, cautioning him.

"I don't have a father!" And he thought: That's part of my strength.

"There's no food here," Gumbie said. He was looking out of the cracked window. "That's why these people are crazy."

"They'll bring us food. Well put it in the bargain!"

Mr. Blue said, "We'll need more than food. What about a truck or something?"

"He wants a vehicle," Fisher said, and made the request sound foolish as he repeated it to the others. "Hey, you won't get far in a vehicle."

Mr. Blue looked uncertain. He sniffed — the smell of this building, its crumbled plaster and burned Moors, its lingering smoke-stink of shit, hung over them and made them itch. But their discomfort here added to Fisher's authority.

"You guys have to be prepared. Not a vehicle-a jet-rotor. Money. A program. I've got a great program — it would get you back there, no hands. You've got guts, but you need a little more technology. Hey, this is the world!"

"And Bligh. We want her," Mr. Blue said.

At her name they looked up at the city. It still gleamed through the mist, and the tops of its towers protruded into clear air and shone, silver and crystal, among the buzzing rotors.

The aliens were impressed by it — dazzled even — and Fisher was disappointed in them and wanted to tell them that this revealed the depth of their ignorance. The city seemed as magnificent to them as a castle, and even looked like one. But it was arid and haunted and sealed, hard to enter and after a time impossible to leave. They did not know that— but, really, how could he hold it against them? He had not known it until recently, and it was they who had shown him the true size of the world. Fisher said, "We'll get everything we want."

They had taken up positions around the blackened building — it seemed more dangerous inside than out, and Fisher knew that if they wanted — if they had to — they could evaporate outside and wait that way: into the mud, behind the decayed houses, into the smoky air. But not yet. Their mission was so far uncompleted. One thing he had noticed, though. They had stopped using the phrase "hand you over."

There were aliens nearby — they could hear their whoops, their dogs, their tin-bashing. There was violence in their very mutters. Their stinking fires were suffocating. And because they could be heard and smelled, but not seen, they seemed turbulent and a greater threat. The rain came down and dribbled into the street and blackened further the poisonous-looking mud.

Fisher said he was trying to get a fix on the rotors. The dark hornets droned, and rose and fell, and some of them settled on the distant buildings. But most of the ones that landed did so on the rotor pads that were moored on the river.

"Not real rotor pads," Fisher explained. "They're just converted barges and lighters. Half of them aren't even safe. And after you put down you need to take a launch into the city."

Again he was describing something they could not see, so they listened very carefully.

"We've got our own pad on the roof of our tower."

"Wedgemere," Valda said, and smiled.

"No, Coldharbor Towers."

It was not a boast anymore. Saying it, he realized how paltry it was. It was a garrison in the Nineties, but so what? For him it had been no more than a safe room where he had spent his childhood with Pap. The journey from O-Zone had helped him discover the pleasure of space. That was his message to Captain Jennix; There's plenty of space on the ground!

The rotors flying very high over there made an odd overlapping sound, like a woolly roar. They nosed in and out of the clouds, and the roar suggested that there were many more up there than could be seen.

The clouds parted in places. They were discolored and ragged, and where they had separated were wisps, and in between a clutch of nose-heavy rotors, one with a curling scorpionlike tail, and another with twin rotors, and the shuttle sausage, and a black gunship with indistinguishable markings.

"I think I have contact."

The gunship detached itself from the passing swarm and dropped lower.

"That might be them."

It circled and came lower still, and then held its altitude and moved in a squarer way, tracing four corners in the air above them.

"They're doing short takes for their computer," Fisher said. "Just checking us out with scans, trying to get a soundbite. Hey, they're probably terrified."

He looked around and saw the others squinting over the cloth masks they had wrapped around their faces, against the smoke and the monotonous stinks,

"It's a big bug," Fisher said, and spoke into his mouthpiece: "Commander to Hardy Allbright. We are the mission from O-Zone. Do you read me? Over."

The rain obscured the gunship, and at times it was lost in a tuft of cloud. Fisher repeated his call. The gunship did not reply, yet seemed to drop lower.

"Give your position!"

The command thundered out of the crackle on his earphones. Fisher looked around him. The others had not heard it.

"This is the commander speaking — mission from O-Zone," Fisher said. "I gave explicit instructions for you to keep your distance. My people don't want—"

"We're talking to you, wolfman!"

"If that's not Hardy I'm not giving my position. Verify at once, or else that's negative, fuck-wit. Over."

Mr. Blue was next to him. He said, "What's wrong?"

Fisher did not want to say that he felt very vulnerable under the rolling gunship. But it was still high, and they were scattered beneath it.

"They could be security," Fisher said. "Maybe they haven't pinpointed us yet. I didn't give them our position."

There was an overtaking sound of human voices that made his skin prickle: some of the others had started to scream at the sight of the descending gunship. It disturbed him and made him want to scream himself.

"I'm going off the air. We've got to lose them."

The gunship was settling lower and turning toward them, whipping the rain.

"Get down!" Fisher said, and he stood up, holding one of the old long-barreled weapons they had brought from Guthrie. He hoped to fire into the throat of the jets and perhaps gag it. Now it had come close enough for its insignia to be clearly visible. He saw the skull and crossbones, the sunburst, the motto.

"Godseye!"

There was a mass of twisted snakes painted on the tail, and weapons protruding from under the black canopy, and howlers mounted on the midsection.

The gunship was shuddering, moving back and forth, beating the rain and spinning it in silver bursts from the rotor blades. The windows were blacked out. Fisher was trying to signal again. Hooper had told him of the Godseye hunt he had gone on, and how stupid and heavily armed the troopers were; how they burned aliens.

He could not warn the others. The howlers had started, deafening them, and the sound made them go small and look very compact. The howling was interspersed with blasts of simulated artillery, the terrible noise intended to paralyze them. But Fisher still wore his helmet, and when he switched it off and sealed it he heard nothing more than a distant whine and an odd popping.