Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"Subject G," Fisher said. "One of the survivors. She's about fifteen."

She was smiling. Hooper envied her her happiness, and for that instant he wanted everything she had. But she had nothing. Hooper thought: Yes, I want that — I've never had nothing. He saw an unassailable safety in that simplicity, and he was aroused. But it was more than wanting to possess her. He wanted to be her. He wanted to live her life. She was welcome to his. She would think this was crazy, because he was wealthy and considered powerful — an Owner, after all — and had an apparently pleasant life. She could have it! It no longer interested him.

And Hooper, who had never loved — did not believe love existed apart from sexual desire, and that desire itself burned it away — Hooper began to speculate. Perhaps that is what it is, he thought: sharing someone else's life, living it, serving it, believing in its value — challenging yourself with this new person by offering everything that person wants. And the lack of love was the empty prison of your own life lived alone.

He did not think he was such a fool. That alien — that savage — must have felt the same. He felt powerful again and saw the use of his strength: I can give her everything she wants. But although in that instant he had started to live her life and be with her, he could not imagine what she might want. And she was far away, not in space but time. She might be infectious — many of them were diseased. She might not speak English. She might be a psychopath.

She's lost, he thought, and pitied her. And then he began to worry: Or am I?

All this took a few seconds, and some of it he remembered later and put in its proper place, the blaze of those seconds.

"It's jammed!" Fisher said.

The girl completed her leap, and bounded over the fallen tree trunk, and ran out of sight.

"I was thinking," Hooper said. He had remembered his unspecific wish in O-Zone to take something of it back to New York. Now desire had made that wish specific.

"Move it forward to the burn."

"No. I want to watch it slowly."

He glimpsed her through the trees. She was lingering in the woods, watching the men in the meadow. He was aroused by her peculiar health and by her carelessness. He loved her old clothes. And she was dangerous!

"Quit pausing it!"

"I'm trying to get a fix on these people."

"They're not people — they're aliens. They're really dim-bos and they're probably sick. No masks, no gloves, and look at that footgear. They're running around practically stark! They're almost pure monkey!"

Hooper said nothing. The tape still whirred.

"They sleep under trees! They don't even make camps! No technology!"

Hooper sat forward. He had just seen her again, her hand on her face — she was thinking. What was she hoping?

Whatever she wanted. . But Fizzy was still talking, and Hooper could not finish the thought.

"They're really dirty," Fisher was saying. "Hey, dong-face!"

Hooper had killed the picture. He fumbled with the electronic mouse in his hand and moved the tape up to the moments just before the shooting.

"If it weren't for me you wouldn't even be watching this. I cracked the seal, I decoded it, I developed—"

"If you say one more word, I'll kill this thing," Hooper said. "I'm showing you the burns, and that's all."

Fisher started to reply, but a male alien filled the screen and commanded his attention. Murdick's hands became visible, then the helmet, and the terrified face in the mask. No wonder Murdick wanted this tape — it showed more clearly than Hooper had seen at the time what a coward Murdick was. Murdick was trying to smile at the alien. The trooper in Godseye was about to grovel.

And then the alien was in focus — his beard, his sinewy shoulder, his net. The blast came — a hiss preceded it on the tape — and the alien was changed from a solid substance to a jelly, and trembled deep red and contracted, withering and fusing to a tiny doll image of its bigger self. It flew apart, disintegrating, a mist becoming a gas. The fine spray of the destroyed man slightly darkened Murdick's suit.

And the second alien, just the same, losing his look of surprise and vanishing in a mist. He was enclosed, then gone.

"What a weapon. . what amazing burns!" Fisher said. "How about the rest — the early part you skipped?"

Hooper could not answer immediately. He was nauseated by the deaths. Seeing them like this, in slow motion, frightened him, too. No wonder a camera was part of the weapon: there was no other way of knowing who the victim was.

He removed the cartridge from the video unit. He was still trying to think.

"The chase," Fisher said. "How about the chase?"

"You're too young for that stuff."

Fisher laughed, because he was not really interested in those animals, he said, and he told Hooper that he had spent a whole day out on the streets alone.

"You've done it once," Hooper said.

"I'd go out again anytime," the boy said. But trying too hard to sound brave, he sounded terrified.

Hooper went back to his own tower and watched the tape four more times. It maddened him that he could not copy it or print from it. He did not watch the burns — they had badly upset him. But the girl: he watched her closely, concentrating hard. She did not know him, she had never heard of him. And she was a stranger. He wanted her. It had been years since he had really wanted anything, and until that moment he had never wanted any person.

He tried saying it a number of ways, but nothing worked until he whispered, "She needs me," and then he saw her face again.

Going out, Moura approched the Coldharbor main gate and saw the security guard inside reading a book. Captain Jennix was not a captain in the Coldharbor Security Force but rather in his local "ship." The man's title irritated Hardy, who had once told Moura, "'Captain' means something, which is why I will not call that man 'captain.' He's not an Owner, he's never been in the service, and he's done nothing to earn that rank. Frankly, I think all these Pilgrims and Rocketmen are crazy in an uninteresting way." Moura still didn't know what "captain" meant.

Captain Jennix was a youngish man, thirty or so, who called himself a Starling. He had a very small head, and unfunny blue believer's eyes, and wore an immaculate uniform. He had a way of glancing skyward and talking about "the program" and "weightless motion" and "emigration" — he meant into space.

He looked up from his book and spoke to Moura in his flat plodding way. "Preparing my mind for the mission."

You didn't ask about the mission — not because it was awkward and imaginary, but because they would keep you there all day describing it with facts and figures, and they could be fanatical recruiters if they felt they could use you. Moura was aware of Captain Jennix's interest in Hardy, and so she was always very circumspect.

He was smiling at her, showing her the title of his book, The Time Lords of Titan. She wanted to laugh, but his passion frightened her, too. The books were always science fiction, and they always seemed years out-of-date.

"Read it?" Captain Jennix said.

"No thanks," she said, to be ambiguous and polite.

"I've got lots of others you might like," and stooped and brought out a stack of paperbacks with lurid covers showing troopers and Pilgrims and lunar settlements. Captain Jennix showed them to her title by title: The Settlers of Planck, Beneath the Ocean of Storms, The Synodic Month, The Lunar Pole, The Gardens of Tranquillity, Crossing Mare Frigoris, Mission to Fertility—

"Please," she said. They were like a peculiar form of devotional literature, and she found them singleminded and upsetting.

"It's unusual to see you out on a Sunday morning," Captain Jennix said. He had the Pilgrims' belief in strict routines.