Paul Theroux: O-Zone

Moura said nothing. She was afraid of giving away her real feelings — that she was pleased to see him challenged and defeated by Hooper's decision — obviously they were going to land. Now Fizzy would have to accept things. Who cared if he got angry and yelled? He deserved this: she liked the rare sight of uncertainty on his face.

At his age she had traveled across the world, to some of the wildest places. Today these places were off limits and served merely as names and metaphors for hopelessness or terror. "Africa," people said to scare each other; but she had been there, and not in a colony like Earthworks in Kenya, and not in a rotor either. She had seen Starkies and Skells — they had been more approachable then, less aggressive, rather glorying in their own strangeness, like clowns at a party. That was before IDs, before Owners were classified; and yet there had been risks. She had lived awhile in Europe — not always in a sealed city — and she had traveled to the various landing places in Asia. There were fewer Prohibited Areas then. But she had stayed in Red Zones, she had gone with Hardy on field trips, she had traveled in surface vehicles. And now O-Zone!

Yet this was fifteen-year-old Fizzy's first time out of New York City. She saw that it had made him edgy, and at times unbearable. She was glad. A little suffering might do him good. Everything had always been too easy for him. The really annoying part was that he was navigator — that reassured her, but it also infuriated her.

"It's a hell of a long way to go," he said.

Hardy said, "Too far from home?"

"New York is the center of everything! The rest of the world is Roaches!" He was swinging angrily again on his harness. "We're only going to sleep here. That's all you care about. 'Hook me up. Let's buzz out. Let's go into a coma.' You're worse than Skells!"

Moura smiled, because he was known to be so intelligent, and here he had just made this stupid remark. He slept a great deal, but he was too young and too impatient to appreciate the deep sleep known these days as a coma. It had been one of her first thoughts when Hardy had told her of the possible trip to O-Zone: A coma — sleeping in the wilderness — what dreams we'll have in the safety of that empty place!

They were still circling the buildings. The tallest were only twenty stories high, and their stone was soft and slightly pockmarked, terra-cotta-colored, with gilded seams from the afternoon sunlight, and russet-colored where there was shadow. They stood isolated on a low islandlike hill that was banked and terraced with stone oblongs and low walls. The land rose to a shallow flat-topped knob of wide pinky-gray steps that had resisted the bushes and prevented the spread of trees — dwarf hackberries and maples here. The pair of landings at the top of the step were each as long and broad as a football field, two flanking plazas providing a platform for the buildings. Now that they had made a complete circuit they saw that the buildings were like bookends on a broad shelf — no books — and the shelf surrounded by greenery.

Below the terraces and the plazas, and all around, were dense pine woods, with some black oaks towering, and little half-glimpses of abandoned structures, small and fragmented enough to seem like memories of what they had been. From this height — the travelers were circling just above the tops of the buildings — the old overgrown roads crisscrossed the woods like green seams.

"They look solid — no distress marks in the structures, no cracks visible, no subsidence, no evidence of fire or vandalism. The roofs are intact."

Hooper was speaking to all the other rotors.

"That's one good thing about radiation," he said. "Sure keeps the riffraff out."

"He thinks he can detect high-level mutagens by just looking," Fisher said. "What a porker."

"It's beautiful," Moura said. She saw in it everything that was lacking in New York and their own tower — silence, emptiness, natural light, wild trees.

"Looks like a great place for a party," Holly Murdick said. "We can have an old-fashioned New Year's!"

They were low enough now to look directly at the buildings without using the ground-screen. They had probably been regarded as towers when they were built, but they were not very old — not much older than O-Zone itself. They might have been finished just before O-Zone was declared a Prohibited Area. It was possible they had never been occupied. There were no signs of use, only of weather and neglect, and the effects of boisterous foliage. The brickwork was spotted with white lichens, and the empty blue-tiled swimming pool was cracked. The ornamental garden on the south terrace was overgrown in a strangely symmetrical way — the azaleas and junipers bursting from the edges, and lengths of red-leafed vines spilling into the pool. The thick untended trees had the contours of broccoli.

Sumacs and stinkweed had erupted through the main driveway, but Hooper followed it down to the main road— there was a structure he wanted to shoot, he said. It was a gatehouse, and beside it a large flat slab of stone with letters cut into it.

"It's got a name," he said.

The sign said "FIREHILLS", and beneath that, "Residents Only."

"Guess that means us," someone said.

They were not ordinary travelers; they were wealthy, they were city people, they were Owners. They had a passion for protection. There was no one here, there had been no one here for years, there could be no intruders, because O-Zone was prohibited and empty: it was on that basis that they had planned this New Year's trip. But their habit of security was so strong that they began laying out soft wires and alarms as soon as they hit the ground.

Hooper had spun his rotor down beside the stacked buildings on the hill — he saw that the plaza shelf would both hide them and give them a view of the surrounding countryside. Then the rest of them rifled in, and on the ground the rotors had the appearance of spiders — black bulgy bodies and pop-eyes and fangy jaws and slender bow legs.

"— lick this into shape," Hooper was saying as he paced on the terrace in full sunshine. "We'll be okay here" — but he went on fussing.

Even before the last rotor was unpacked Hooper had hoisted the power supply and set up the first eye. The seven remaining eyes were installed immediately after, and it was only then that the travelers felt safe.

Each eye was a multifaceted ball on a stalk, and any movement it detected caused a blink that tripped a signal and activated a beam. It set a tape going and made a sound-bite of everything it stunned. The soft wire was a separate system with its own lethal beam. These systems were powered by the energy cube on the roof — and it was put there not for the stronger rays of the sun or the absence of shadows, but because it was out of reach of any intruder. When the beams were fixed and the cameras positioned and all the circuits in working order, the travelers began to claim various rooms in Firehills for themselves.

They did not question the effort and expense involved in wiring the place. It did not matter that it took them longer to secure the area than it had for them to fly from New York. It was a ponderous instinct. They carried out the job efficiently, following a diagram provided by Fisher's computer — not only because Fizzy was the most intelligent of the travelers or because he had redesigned the security unit on their tower at Coldharbor, but because he was the most fearful of them and the one most likely to provide a complete profile of the weak spots in Firehills.

"Aren't you overdoing it a little, Fizz?" Hardy said as Fisher printed the design for a new circuit and prepared to bring it to Hooper.

"The system's specified on the pass," Fisher said in his quacking voice. "All overnight landings have to be secured!"