Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"Don't you believe it," he said. "There's danger there — it all looks different on the ground!"

"Except Willis never goes on the ground," Holly said.

"That's the reason why!" Murdick said.

It was greener as they traveled farther south, and the lakes, like metal dishes and brimming potholes, were more numerous and blacker by contrast. The grassland ended, the farms became more rumpled and hummocky, and were bordered by snaky riverbanks and the dark shag of pine woods. The towns were tufted in these distances — more good roofs and buildings high enough to cast shadows.

"Sometimes, out here, you get thirty or forty aliens going up to a house and just walking in. What use are dogs or alarms against forty reeking aliens? They just chew their way in and devour the place, and then move on. And on some of these roads—"

Murdick went closer to the screen and found a long straight road.

"— you get your major hijackings. Oh, it's no more than a roadblock — it might be a tree or a tipped-over car or a stack of burning tires. But as soon as that vehicle stops, they're all over it, sinking in their claws and wetting their teeth."

He was pointing to a particular truck, a long double-bodied model.

"Your alien," he said. "Your career criminal."

Hooper said, "I've lost shipments that way. But these days we air-freight most merchandise."

The camera drew back again and gave them a wide angle; but Moura was still looking at the truck, a tiny pair of hyphens in all that browny-green wrinkled land. This truck was heading down an unbroken road, about six lanes, and other vehicles strung out on it too. What Murdick said, and Hooper appeared to confirm, made no sense: Moura could not see where the road started or where it ended, and the only indication that things might be strange down there was the fact that each vehicle, and the truck especially, was followed by a trail of dust. So it was unnaturally dry on the ground, but that wasn't crime, that was just bad weather. She thought: He's trying to frighten us.

But reminding them of the dangers was also a way of reminding them that they had overcome them. At a slower speed and in ground-focus — looking at farmers' faces and at barnyards and at washing hanging on the line — their journey seemed to them remarkable. For long stretches they looked with unselfconscious admiration at what they felt they had accomplished. It was as if by flying over in their speeding rotors and photographing every detail of the terrain, they had taken possession of it, and understood it; and more — that now it had no surprises for them.

"Couldn't this be turned into graphics and color-coded and used for navigation on the ground?"

"Of course," Fisher said, to Hooper, who had asked, "but why would anyone want to take this trip twice?"

Now, emptier, the land seemed enormous. Minutes passed, and only a handful of settlements appeared, and they lay on the landscape like scabs. Murdick said that they were lawless places — most of them, anyway — and that no one was to be fooled by the look of the roads or the condition of the buildings. They were inhabited by the worst aliens — Trolls and Skells that had been dumped or driven there. Many of them had been thrown out of planes and somehow survived, all bashed up, and found others and started breeding a very nasty kind of alien.

"And we've seen Starkies here."

Where he waved his gloved hand was a river of oxbows, and a sloping valley that was hemmed and tightly folded and gathered, like an old-fashioned skirt — all these odd features were watercourses. Murdick's glove hesitated over a great patch of woods the shape of a bird's shadow and splashed with blue. It was beautiful.

"Probably bandit country," someone said.

The towns here seemed lifeless. Hooper wondered if they were bust, for in the same vicinity were compounds of fenced-in families and their fields, or so it seemed to him. He said out loud they were probably fugitives, and the others said, Oh, sure, and were glad to see the land below streaking past.

Some hills had been cleared and on their summits were the domes of observatories and some goggling telescopes and big white dishes — look at all that crockery, Fisher said; and Murdick said: Skelly — that was the proof that aliens had technology.

"There — that sort of irregular star-shaped stain — that's a fortified town."

"Where are we?"

"That sort of cleft-chin shape in the river is the bottom of Illinois."

"And there's the murky Mississippi," Hooper said, and asked for the tape to be speeded up. In the blur and monotony of trees another color swept fleetingly past, but was less a stripe than a moment of shadow, a sort of beat like an eye-blink, a visual blip, much like the river a few seconds before.

"The margin of the Red Zone," Fisher said.

There was silence — no one had seen it, and there was a certain hesitation in their earpieces, the pressure that builds just before something is loudly denied. But no one denied it. The pressure continued as anxiety and mumbling silence.

More woods followed, with torn patches where there were lakes. They were shrunken lakes, ringed with deep shores: O-Zone was famous for having become dry, and this was one of its driest months. There were stains of settlements, some buildings precariously standing, but no other signs of habitation. Although some of these towns were spattered with colored bungalows, you looked closer and saw they were abandoned and scorched. The power lines hung from discolored pylons; the roads were empty; the bridges were down. The woods piled up and became denser and thickly ribbed with overgrown ranges of low hills, the assertion of a rough plateau, with ridges and hollows dividing rugged bluffs.

"O-Zone," Fisher said.

The boy's eyes twitched at the hurrying tape.

"This is the part I like," Hooper said. "Those narrow canyons, the gorges, the velvety folds of land. Please don't call them anticlines."

"Shut-ins is what they call them here," Fisher said.

"How do you stand him?" someone said.

But the tape was still speeding them on through O-Zone.

Among the forested knobs were shadows where nothing else could be seen, and these spaces were pressed deeply into the land, as if old blood had soaked into the ground and still showed. These shadows looked solid and were blindly black, like a depthless lacquer that was a shape without features or details. Where the curves were gentler and had soft bulges and human curves and contours, the crescent shadows lay alongside them, fitting perfectly. In the muscular cushions of green there were scars, but there were no openings among the trees — only the steep lips of old clearings and the tracings of forgotten roads, with the new woods folded over them.

"Caves," Hardy said. "It's all caverns underneath those ridges. This is where it all started."

He slowed the tape and pointed out the creeks and rivers, which flowed from underground rivers in the caves, and what everyone had taken to be springs actually bubbled from caves, and after the incident—"the excursion," Fisher called it — the water had come up hot. The area was dammed and closed and renamed — Outer Zone seemed appropriate for something that was no longer Missouri. Satellite pictures showed it glowing green.

With the tape crawling on, they saw more city-stains and the eruption of trees in what had been plowed fields, and fat green pads where there had been lawns and parks. And among the fallen settlements the slashmarks of ruined highways.

"Wasn't it a great trip?"

"I've got to have a copy of this tape," Barry said. He turned to Rinka. "Show it to the Etnoyers. They'll scream!"

"I want a print of this too," Murdick said.

Hardy aimed the control pistol at the screen and brought the ground even closer, separating the colors and showing the bristling treetops and the areas of water — with the sun slanting on them they were like bottomless holes. The greater the enlargement, and the more detail they saw, the wilder it looked.