Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"When I give the signal, hover," he said. He was holding his watch dial against his faceplate in order to see it.

Murdick said, "If anything happens to this ship—"

"Shut up and hover!" The command rattled their earpieces.

"We're steady," Hooper said.

"Start the descent and don't deviate!"

There was always a nag of insolence in his orders.

"Drop it!" he said, just as Murdick recovered and began to complain. "There's an old sinkhole here. And cut the engine as soon as we're down."

They plunged slowly, spinning and tipping slightly, landing like a helicopter, but using jet-thrusters. Then they touched, the thrusters beating against the ground, and Fisher was squawking for them to cut down the noise and kill the lights so that they would be hidden. They had dropped into this hole in the woods. Darkness lay against the portholes and seemed heavy on the hatches.

Hooper screwed open the hatch and switched on his external sound. A gusty breeze barged through the high leafy boughs they could not see.

"They're going to find us," Murdick said.

"Not if we find them first," Hooper said. "Grab that energy cube, Fizz."

"The captain doesn't carry gear."

"You're not captain on the ground — I am. Now pick it up."

They dropped lightly to the ground and set off in the dark. They were afraid to go very far from their aircraft, and yet the hickory woods rose all around them — they needed high ground to see the aliens. Fisher had plotted the route: the landing in the sinkhole in order to hide the rotor; the circular way out; the climb to a vantage point just above the meadow and field where he had seen the aliens on the tape.

Murdick kept stumbling and grunting. He heaved himself at bushes and caught his toes against small boulders and tripped. He blamed it on bad directions, he muttered about the darkness, he damned his new boots. Earlier he had boasted about the boots, their thermostat feature, their built-in pedometers. "They're state-of-the-art," he had said. "Godseye got a special consignment." But they made him clumsy on the narrow track. His grunts and squelchy curses made him sound in the others' earphones as though he were slowly falling down a long flight of stairs, and bumping on each step.

He said, "It's the wrong terrain!"

"You mean the wrong boots," Fisher said, behind him.

Hooper listened to them squabbling. Fizzy was just as boastful and equipment-conscious as Murdick, but his confidence exasperated the older man, who, aiming to compete, deceived himself and became lost in exaggeration. It was not the boy's wild-sounding talk that disturbed Murdick but rather the fact that he was always right.

"At least they're safe," Murdick was saying. "My feet are completely sealed."

"You're so worried about radiation you can't even walk straight!"

Fisher talked back without letup; he had never outgrown the childish habit of reacting to everything, and he often teased until it became torture. He made no allowances for a person's simplicity or weakness. When he heard a yelp of pain he went on squeezing, and so he could seem cruel in an apelike way.

Murdick was having difficulty concentrating. He gulped as he stumbled, and swallowed his replies.

Up ahead, Hooper told them to take care. Monitoring each other, in their masks and helmets, they were almost deaf to outside noises unless they deliberately amplified them. Hooper listened to the commotion of their footsteps crashing through the thickness of leaves and dead sticks and briars. They had no light, there was not much moon. The risks excited in Hooper a sense of nakedness and a wilder sense of freedom. This was like launching himself off a cliff and trying to fly. He was very sorry his only witnesses were the boaster and the brat.

Murdick was saying in worried tones, "Well have to find our way back on this awful path to get to my Welly."

"You might not make it back," Fisher said. He got courage from Murdick's fear, and taunted him. "If you don't reach the ship in time, we'll have to leave you behind. That's the rule."

"This isn't space travel," Murdick said in a pleading voice.

"It's much greasier, it's more dangerous. You'll reach chokepoint and jeopardize the whole mission if you make us wait."

Breathless from kicking his big boots through the low dense bushes, Murdick gasped, "You can't leave me! It's my ship!"

"Shut up, both of you," Hooper said. He turned and they saw his towering body outlined against the star-grains in the fuzzy night sky. "I'll switch you off and lose you."

He then hurried forward and shortly after said, "Here we are."

It was lighter on the thinly wooded knob, but they could not risk the open — not even the dusty glow of pale moonbeams. They found a grove of bushes tike a large leafy basket on the upper side of the knob and crouched there, inside, kneeling and balancing themselves with their elbows. It was just before five, in the predawn dampness.

"Your yawning drives me crazy," Murdick said.

Fisher had been growling and gargling into his mask. He did not stop. He had discovered one more way of enraging Murdick.

"I hate the dark," Murdick said. He was genuinely afraid, and his bad nerves made him pathetically truthful, even shameless.

Hooper said nothing. He was sighting out of the grove with the double-barreled object Murdick had called his burp gun when he had given it to him.

"You've got irons," Fisher said to Murdick. His own fear was returning and making him shiver in this stillness. "What are you so nervous about?"

"We could be sitting in poison." Murdick sensed that he had torn his suit on briars on the way up. He imagined the thorns like rusty spikes tipped with radiation and that the slightest scratch meant death.

"This isn't an iron," Hooper said. "It's a camera. Right, Willis?"

"That piece is regulation Godseye," Murdick said. "It's got thermal imaging."

"You didn't answer the question," Fisher said. "Didn't you hear me when I told you I'm a theoretical physicist? That looks like a particle beam to me, shit-wit."

In the darkness, Murdick breathed hard and blinked at the dial of his watch, and still in the darkness, crouching and grunting, he said, "I don't have a college education, because I don't need one. Listen, at least I'm not a freak. I didn't come out of a test tube."

"He thinks people come out of test tubes! Murdick, you are such a tool."

"Listen, I'm doing all right for myself. I've been around. I don't have to read about things in books. I've seen them, I've shot them, I've brought them back. I've stuffed them."

"Stuff this, porky."

Each time they spoke, Hooper had to readjust the sight and take a new reading.

"A lot of people," Murdick said — his voice had gone hoarse and threatening now—"people with a technical and scientific background, aren't worth anything in a crisis. In fact, most of them are wacko. But me — I've got money. I've always had money. That's all a sensible person needs."

"Hooper's net worth is ten digits! Why are you such a tool?"

By saying nothing, Hooper made them self-conscious and shamed them into silence.

Before they were fully aware of it the air around them was fogged and then washed with dawn. The sky lifted, and from a low roof turned into something light and limitless, and it intimidated them with its clarity.

Below them was the meadow they had seen on the tape, but it was messier, with muddy hoofed-over patches and protruding clumps of grass. The woods beyond looked pathless and showed fallen oaks, with redbuds and dogwoods growing beneath. Though it had an appearance of danger and disorder, scaring Murdick and Fisher tike an ugly mask, Hooper still felt thrilled by its wildness, the way it seemed young and untouched.

But as it grew light they all felt punier, and soon as spooked as they had felt at Firehills, Their equipment was no good to them here, the woods made them feel like savages, the landscape reduced them, and anxiety made them simple-minded. Then they were in full light of day, three lost souls sighting across the grass.