Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"We don't need him, Mr. B."

"Who knows? He's a fair specimen. We might be able to do something with him. Maybe use him for a swap."

Fisher was pleading, "Find Hooper. He'll give you anything you want. He's responsible for my safety—"

But they did not reply. They said nothing to him. It unnerved him, and he began to doubt that he was making any sound at all. Was he only imagining the words and his voice just an unintelligible mutter?

Their ignoring him was worse than if they had threatened him with their full attention. It made him motionless, it kept him rigid. It's driving me crazy, he thought. They'll let me die. He whimpered — it came out of his nose as a hum. He tried to speak — Who are you? — but his lips would not move. They were talking about food — the boxes they had lifted from the rotor; they wondered whether to eat them. They examined the thick wrappers and the seals on the bags: they could store them, they said, for a time when they might be even hungrier.

"Who are you?" Fisher whimpered, but now he was convinced that the question had not left his head. "Let me go!" It didn't matter what he said — they couldn't hear. "I hate you!"

They went on talking.

"You're aliens," he said.

This word roused one man. "You're the only alien here,

piggy."

Fisher screamed to himself: Herbert!

"And take him back to that rotor and swap him for Bligh," Mr. Blue was saying.

Yes, hurry, Fisher pleaded to himself, too fearful to speak again. The man had terrified him by calling him "piggy."

The woman Valda said, "Bligh and some equipment. Make a bargain. Maybe some money too. We'll never get another chance like this. He dropped in our lap!"

"He belongs to someone — probably an Owner, from the way he's dressed up. He's worth something."

"I say leave him and walk away. He's going to give us trouble. I can tell from his freaky face."

Freaky face! They were skinny and bug-eyed with hunger, and Fisher had the idea — in spite of what they said — that they were planning to kill him. This fear persisted in his mind with another related one: that they intended to eat him. It was the worst of his thoughts and he couldn't rid himself of it. He had heard stories about cannibals and had usually laughed at them — and he had mocked people who believed such things. But this was his punishment, for he had laughed at the stories of people living in places like O-Zone, too, and that was precisely what these aliens were doing. Their presence defied available data: why weren't they dead?

But Fisher was not impressed with their ratlike ability to survive here, against the odds. If they had a secret, it was a savage secret. They were rats, they would eat anything, they floated, they gnawed, they slept in lizard cracks in this rocky hill. There were no children here, and yet there were men and women: that meant something. Fisher also thought that they were sick and dying from the effect of living among low-level mutagens that had slowly soaked into their bones. They probably knew it, and in this desperate condition had turned into beasts — the sort of vermin that would do anything to survive.

They lived like beasts, he could see that. It was a temporary camp, but that was no excuse. They could have done better than these flimsy shelters propped against tree trunks, and that hole in the hill, and that firepit and foodbox. There were nests of grass and leaves where some of them were sleeping now, because they had been up all night, like rats and monkeys.

It seemed horrible to him that he knew all their names. He had lip-read Hooper's tapes and stored the conversations. He had classified each of these people according to age, sex, and body type; he knew their coloring and how fast they moved and what weapons they carried. Hooper had said that Hardy wanted all this data. Where was Hooper now? I'm responsible for your safety — that's what the porker had said!

"Eat this," Mr. Martlet was saying, showing him a handful of dry turds.

I don't eat stools, Fisher wanted to say.

Martlet (thirty, male, black, stocky) said, "It's meat. Go on."

How could crumbling black strips of stool be meat?

Covering his face, Fisher turned away. He refused a drink, he saw filth in it. He slapped a plate of wild plums from Valda's hands.

"Give him something from those tubes we took out of the rotor," Rooks said.

"No — save them. Their seals will keep them forever. It's better than money. Give him some of those pole greens," Mr. Blue said. "Or some of that cottontail stew."

"He won't eat anything," the woman Tinia said.

From his grass nest Echols said, wagging his beard, "He doesn't recognize any of it as food. We might have to analyze some of that sealed food to see what his diet's like. We don't know what he'll accept and eat."

"Choke him on this," Martlet said with a growl — what was he holding down there? — "Or else let's get rid of him."

Knowing their names made it a greater shock for Fisher to discover that these aliens with identities and ages and body classifications were such animals and stank so fiercely. It was a humiliation for him to consider that all the time he had spent with the computer, sorting and storing data, and scanning and enhancing the images, was for these savages. He had enjoyed the data, and he liked inventing ways of classifying these creatures, but up close he found them unbearable.

So his study was no help to him; it only showed how superficial his data was. All his hours of classifying and scanning had not revealed what he had learned minutes after being abducted: that these aliens were dirty, haggard, foul-mouthed, and ill-equipped. They lived like rats. They scratched. They stank. They were desperate, they were dangerous!

"Are you interested in getting out of here alive?" Mr. Blue said.

Fisher's pale pleading face was fixed on the man kneeling over him at the mouth of the shallow cave.

"Then write what I tell you."

Mr. Blue's words were harsh, but his tone was reasonable. It disconcerted Fisher, because the man's danger was like an echo. They were-peaceable-looking creatures, but on reflection not so peaceable: the aftershock was their ferocity. They were killers — he knew that now. It had not shown in the data, but as their captive Fisher could feel it and smell it.

Mr. Blue was holding a pen and a square of lined paper that had been torn from a pilot's logbook — both items snatched from the rotor.

Sitting up in silence, Fisher took the pen and smoothed the paper against his thigh. It was Hooper's pen — he called it his stylus. The porker was always scribbling with it when he should have been doing something useful, like making sure that no intruders could get into the rotor when it was parked. And why hadn't he found these aliens and blown them away?

"Write exactly what I say," Mr. Blue said. Then in a halting, dictating voice, "'I am being held by a large number of people'—correction—'well-armed people. If you follow instructions they will release me unharmed. There are certain conditions and demands'—you're not writing, Fish."

Fisher had been doodling nervously. This pen and paper were useless; anyway, he could scarcely write, and did not consider it anything but a pointless labor, since he had a voice-printer in the rotor, and even a pocket voice-printer. But the pocket printer had smashed as he had struggled in the net.

All these filthy-faced aliens were staring at him now.

He wrote, Bng hld bi Ig no amd ppl, and then the message appeared to become incoherent. Still stabbing at the paper, Fisher glanced up.

He thought at that moment the man was going to hit him— Mr. Blue had raised his hand.

The bearded man, Echols, snatched the paper.

"This is just a stupid scribble!"