Paul Theroux - O-Zone

The bodies were wrapped in ragged clothes, and under the bright light of the gunship they lay like a burst bag. Hooper said, "I'll go."

"On the ground," Murdick said, as if thinking out loud at the audacity of it.

"I've been there before."

They set him down gladly, and encouraged him, saying they would burn anyone who came near him. They sounded violent: they probably meant it. Their dread of being exposed on the ground had made them murderous. "Snake-Eaters" said it all. It made Hooper feel superior to them — braver, smarter, more sensible; and he was pleased because they must have known this, and there was nothing they could do except take the same risk themselves. They didn't dare. Snake-Eaters!

He took his time looking over the figures. In spite of the thickness of the rags they were poorly clothed for the weather. Had this been an attempted rape? It was impossible to say. It was an abduction, there was no doubt of that — the commonest crime these days: stealing people, for any one of a thousand reasons. Hooper dug the woman's face out and uncovered it. She was ruined-looking but young, possibly an addict. She was no Skell. He found proof — an identity disc.

The man was frowning and very pale, with the sudden cut-down look of a dead animal, wearing a surprised expression of useless effort in his frown. His eyes were open and empty.

The young woman had suffered pain, the lower edge of her face was twisted aside, and Hooper saw that it was this agony that made her seem old. From her date of birth on her ID Hooper calculated that she had just turned sixteen.

"They're both dead," Hooper said into his mike.

"Get aboard," Sluter said, "or we'll leave without you."

But Hooper still took his time, mocking them by being slow, reproaching them with their own cowardice. They were afraid of the ground!

"He thinks he's a meat inspector," Meesle said.

Smiling up at the spotlight, Hooper palmed the ID; and then he signaled for them to open the hatch.

"She must have had a bad heart," Murdick said. His voice was screechy and defensive. "I blasted the guy, but some of the shocks must have brushed her as I swept it sideways. It's supposed to have a narrow focus."

"Two more clams," Meesle said. "Which reminds me. What about their IDs, Mr. Allbright?"

"No IDs," Hooper said.

"Then they're not clams," Murdick said, "They're Roaches. See? It didn't matter!"

But he was pacing the belly of the gunship, looking for a place to stow his weapon.

"It's got to be a design fault," he said. He seemed disgusted with the weapon, and held it lightly, as though he wanted to get rid of it. "Or maybe I had it turned too high. You should see the circuitry."

"Give me that thing," Hooper said, and snatched it.

"This mission is complete," Sluter was saying over the intercom — and the gunship was rising again. "We are proceeding back to base, to go cold. Blindfold and secure the passenger."

The sleep chamber inside Hooper's unit in Coldharbor was dark and soundproof. He gave himself a "kind" injection and stayed in his sleep capsule for the next twenty hours, kept all his windows blacked, re-routed his messages — Allbright business. In spite of the injection, an equalizer, he dreamed badly of the Godseye hunt. The drug perhaps worsened the effects, by making his terror into clownishness. He had always been frightened of clowns, and dolls, and most masks. Now he saw terrible masks. He heard wounded notes played on a stringed instrument. The last stage of the dream was all struggle — thick gloves, and slow legs, and clumsy shoes. When the four clowns glared at his guilt — they knew what he was thinking — he tried to laugh. It made an awful sound. Even he hated it, and at last he woke himself with this hideous laughter.

Awake, he could endure that fear, but the experience of it aroused his pity for Fizzy. In his garden, a glassed-in room tall enough for a grove of full-grown bamboos and wide enough for a lily pond and a fountain, Hooper felt stronger. He strolled; he marveled that his fear was gone; but he kept seeing Fizzy's face.

"Poor Fizzy."

The panic Hooper had felt on the mission had given him a taste of what the boy's life was like. Everything was a threat! For example, one day, working at Pap — the name he had given his computer mainframe — a little crust of snot had dropped out of Fizzy's nose. Seeing it fall on a pressure key, Fizzy had squawked at it. He stood up in fright, rising on his tiptoes, shocked and disgusted — and what a sour face! He tried to go on working, but he paused, uttering nauseated groans, and avoided touching that key.

The boy had a well-known horror of dirt, of strangers, of surprises. Anything unexpected was a shock. It was the reason he never went out alone. The memory of Fizzy's fastidiousness made Hooper ashamed of himself — his behavior the other night. Fizzy limped and squawked, yet for all his little-boy rage he was truthful. His superstitions proved that he was innocent. But Hooper himself had no excuse.

Hooper walked through his glassed-in garden, squinting at the hot colors of the flowers, pushing the overhanging palm leaves, feathery shapes that went on swaying after his hand left them. Peeping through the greenery were marble statues — a headless woman, a Chinese lion; and at the far side of the lily pond, a nymph pouring water — his fountain. There were rotors and loud planes motorboating in the gray sky outside, but it was always quiet in the humid heat of this garden. It had always consoled him in the past; but now he saw that his isolation had made him naive.

He had been naive about Godseye, and realizing it shamed him and made him feel lonely. This lonesome feeling also contained a vision of himself as ridiculous and selfish. He had always known that the city was corrupt — and dangerous too, though not in a filthy obvious way like those dark parts of New Jersey and Brooklyn and the no-go zones of America where there were ruins and no skylights and even the police were dangerous. But now he was close to home, on New York's perimeter, and that made his loneliness so much worse. When have I ever been lonely? he wondered. And why now?

He made for his office and his computer terminal. But he did not work. He took out the ID disc of the murdered girl, and held it until it heated his hand. He wanted to rid himself of his sickening and poisonous feeling of criminality, but he could not bear to focus on what he had done and seen.

He wanted to be innocent. He was innocent, in a way. His friends had always assumed that being so wealthy and worldly, he knew all about hunters, all about death squads and vigilantes and weapons, and all the workings of the security net. But he had known nothing. Those troopers were at once so bold and so stupid! Their secrecy irritated him, their arguments were illogical. From one point of view it had seemed boring, pointless, masonic in its foolish rituals and routines. And those horror-masks! But no — it had been a real hunt, committing real murders: he had seen those people fall, and heard the hunters rejoice. "Burn him down!" The masks had been truthful — truer than the men's faces, the skull and the demon. Cowards of their kind made the worst murderers; and Hooper knew that he had been a coward himself.

It was not evil, it could be explained: it was bad and ugly and cruel. What haunted him was the knowledge that they would all get away with it. He deserved that to be turned into a punishing memory, and guiltily wished it upon himself; but he also felt reprieved — a sense of relief in waking up in his own apartment, among familiar things, his unit, his office, his garden. The worst of being with murderers was in afterward noticing his similarity to them.

They were efficient and powerful, they had either money or else connections; they felt they were securing their own city — they were Owners. They had everything they wanted. But power could also represent useless muscle. All this time, ever since he had crawled out of his sleep capsule, he had been opening and closing his hands, grasping air. Then he gave up. His hands were heavy; two thick things lying in his lap as he sat at his terminal.