Paul Theroux - O-Zone

All this time Fisher had been silent, bumping and tripping Hooper as they walked the perimeter of Firehills.

"What a shame we can't live here forever," Hooper said.

Something careless and lighthearted in Hooper's tone made Fisher stiffen.

"I'm afraid," the boy said, and sucked air.

Hooper put his hand on Fizzy's shoulder and felt the boy recoil slightly and then draw nearer to him and relax slightly, comforted by the simple touch of Hooper's glove. Hooper wanted to hug him for responding that way, but he didn't want to frighten him. Usually the kid hated to be touched! But he saw into Fizzy's loneliness, his isolation in his study at Coldharbor, He had a clear memory of seeing Fizzy bent over Pap, and he found the posture pathetic — not like someone driving the computer but rather like a fearful little Skell praying at an altar.

"We'll be all right here," Hooper said. "You're captain. I'm chief of ground operations. I'm responsible for your safety."

He had never been closer to the boy. He felt powerful as his protector and in an intense imagining he saw Fizzy as his own son, and wanted to hold on to him. It gave him heart to continue searching for that girl, because in seeing Fizzy as his son he took possession of the girl, too, and saw her as his wife. In that moment at Firehills — the green woods blazing around them and the sharp smell of dry dust in the air and the solitary rattle of a woodpecker — Hooper understood what it was that he lacked on earth: simply, a family that needed him.

It put him in a generous mood, and that generosity helped him see the boy clearly. Fizzy was a calculated product — the result of a plan. He had a type number; he had been designed; he had specifications and predictability. He had done everything that had been required of him. But he had not lived. His mind was a vivid island of intelligence in an innocent body. Now inexperience made him dumb, though it had never done so in New York. Faced with the real world of dust and insects and empty valleys, and the prospect of aliens, he felt terror.

That was proof of his worth. His fear was his humanity. His fear would save him. When Fizzy said, "I'm afraid," Hooper loved him.

And later, after sunset, when Hooper said, "I need you, captain," he meant it. Only Fizzy could read the videotape for aliens, only Fizzy could operate the scanner program. Without Fizzy's wonderful brain, Hooper knew that he would be blind and stumbling in this wilderness. He would never find that pretty girl. Fizzy was inarticulate and strange, gulping and farting in the echoey corridors of Firehills; but he could speak to these machines and get answers.

In the operations room — it was Fizzy's idea — they hung a row of monitors and installed a computer console. Fizzy looked at home here. His breathing was better. He didn't quack, he didn't grunt. He ran the videotape of their inbound trip and watched the main screen.

"Explain how these bleeps work."

"I can't, because you don't know the first thing about stealth or radar avoidance."

"1 know about sneaky people."

Fisher said, "Alien clandestine exfiltration, you mean."

Hooper had to bite his lips to keep from smiling. "How do I find an alien on this thing?"

"You'd never understand."

The selfish little snarl in Fizzy's voice gave Hooper a lift. Fight, he thought — fight and live.

But he spent the second day dragging Fizzy up to the roof, and he took sightings on every side, while Fizzy knelt behind the parapet. The third day they were airborne, flying through the markers on a grid they had traced over this part of O-Zone.

Fizzy said, "Do we have to do this?"

"Hardy said so."

"That porker."

"He wants us on the ground, too."

"I'm not going on the ground until I'm sure we're alone."

At night, behind blacked-out windows in the sealed operations room at Firehillls, Fisher scanned the videotape for aliens. He grunted, he gasped, he found no one.

Before they set off in the morning, and every night using starlight scopes and infrared sensors, Hooper wandered through the corridors of Firehills, looking for treasures. Everything he found was a treasure. He was like a beachcomber searching the tidemark for something familiar. He enjoyed being in these low buildings, among collapsed and dusty furniture, and old pictures, and faded paint, and brittle magazines. Firehills was a museum of recent artifacts — not very old, but how dated and useless! And their frivolity condemned him — the left-behind shoes, the cracked mirrors, the thick broken televisions and sunburned curtains. Nothing was so harsh as time in dimming brightness, or in shrinking objects into triviality, or in grinding great things very small. Time was an impartial leveler of everything. And what reproached Hooper here was that much of this junk was Allbright's merchandise, bought before he had introduced his cable catalog, and unpacked here to molder in the ruin and radiation. He saw his name on the lining of a lampshade, on the label of a towel, and printed on the dome of a dead bulb.

He thought how you had to look hard for ruins in America, and you were lucky if you found them, because they didn't last. When they were gone, they were gone for good — not like the ruins in Europe, but more like the mud huts in Africa, which simply crumbled and became earthworks again, with trees growing out of them. And when the ruins were gone you were lost, the past was a mystery, and not even the future was familiar. He thought: I need a family.

He had found his way to a sun-faded room at the top of the second tower and was looking off the balcony at the distances of trees.

"Hooper!"

Fisher's voice rang on the helmet phones.

"I've got a bunch of aliens here!"

Hooper found the boy rigid at his mainframe, his goggles misted, his mask and faceplate fogged — he was breathing hard, grunting, as if trying to speak.

The aliens were not in the old place, near the flat valley, that enormous depression surrounded by bluffs, where they had looked for huts. They had moved out of the valley and were in a heavily wooded part of O-Zone. They had built flimsy shelters — that was the meaning of those freckles on the screen; the hot pinpricks were humans. They were nearer to Firehills — not more than fifty clicks away.

"A bunch?" Hooper said. "A whole bunch?"

He smiled at the back of the boy's helmet, and still murmured the ridiculous word. The boy had never been so imprecise before. There was hope!

"Three," Fisher said, and grunted again. "I'm pretty sure the rest of them are hiding. There are lots of caves in those rocky hills nearby."

"Nothing to worry about." Hooper was relieved that Fizzy had spotted them. He would not have been surprised, after those killings, to find that the aliens had fled O-Zone. But it seemed they had only shifted away from the valley — if they were the same ones.

"Aliens!" Fisher said, fogging his faceplate again. "We didn't come here for them. We're shooting a video for Hardy. We're on a shoot!"

"We'll still have to go on the ground."

"I'm not going on no fucking ground if those dongs are there!"

"Take it easy, Fizz. They're probably a different bunch."

"They're the same ones from the meadow!" In his threatened mood, Fisher had begun to quack again. "I identified them. Two net-men and that skinny girl—"

Hooper lowered his face to the pinpricks that Fisher had enhanced on the monitor, and he warned himself against reacting.

"Hooper! You're responsible for my safety!"

"Stop worrying."

"I'm worriedr so how can I stop?"

"I need you, Fizz. I'm not going to let anything happen to you. You're my navigator. I can't go anywhere without you."

"I'm the captain!"

"Leave them to me," Hooper said, still nodding. "I can deal with them."