Paul Theroux - O-Zone

Fisher held his head lopsided and continued to stare with a crooked intensity at the lozenge of granite on the rock wall. It gave him strength, but still he whimpered as though he were grieving.

"He's more than wacko," Gumbie said.

He heard it and said nothing.

Mr. Blue said, "They're probably glad to get rid of him. They might have taken him out here to dump him, like they dumped all those others. Only he had connections, so instead of blasting him out of the rotor they set him down gently."

"And then that rotor just highballed out of here."

Hooper hadn't come back. He had abandoned the captain and aborted the mission. He had disobeyed orders!

The young woman called Kylie asked in a small voice, "Why did they take Bligh?"

"She might have gone willingly," Mr. Blue said. "She hasn't been right since those phantoms burned Murray and Blayne. And she freaked when we couldn't find the bodies."

Valda said, "What do we do if they come back for Fish?"

"No one's going to come back for him," Rooks said. "Would you go anywhere for him?" And he started to laugh.

That was the second day. In the evening they tried to feed Fisher again. He would not open his mouth. He ground his teeth. He would not drink. His gaze was fixed to the wall. He was solving problems. He was reporting Hooper for disobedience and making sure he never flew another mission ever again. Fisher's face was very dirty.

"Flatten him. I don't want him squatting there all night."

But when they dragged Fisher down he struggled — not against them, but their touching him triggered a fit, and he thrashed on the ground. Finally they got him into the bag. He squawked and tried to stretch. They stepped on him, jamming him down with their cheesy feet.

"As if we don't have enough worries!"

No food, no sleep — Fisher was dreadfully cold. And now his whole body hurt from their kicks. Strangely, the pain had driven out some of his fear. They dragged him near the fire but it only heated one side of his body: burned it — while the other side ached with cold.

"What do you say, Mr. B?"

He had been silent for a while, thinking. Then he said in a decisive way, "Okay, let's sell him."

The started their march at dawn. Fisher had hardly slept — the darkness made him think he was going to die. He had watched the moon swing and dissolve. Let's sell him, Mr. Blue had said. Fisher had the idea that if he was sold he was saved. That hope kept him marching.

They walked slowly through thin woods of cedar and short-leaf pine toward one of the round hills in a low range of them. Their circling and climbing took them the whole day. Fisher refused to eat anything except two wild plums which he peeled himself by picking flaps of skin away. He did not speak. Carefully, in fastidious steps, balancing himself in his torn boots and choosing his way, he walked in the middle of the file. He calmed himself by considering various methods of killing these people after he was safely rescued. He favored stunning them and then atomizing them, one by one, leaving the trees intact.

They camped under a limestone hill in the late afternoon. All that walking and they still weren't there? They did not build a fire. They muttered about hunters and searchers. They had carried all the stolen provisions but they did not open them. They ate meat strips and potato beans, and when the whole sky was black they lay in the leaves they had heaped.

For most of the night Fisher was awake, listening to their snores and gasps. He was now too weak to escape — they did not even trouble themselves to cram him into the rope bag or to tie him up. They left him squatting in his own pile of leaves. He imagined them thinking: How can this cripple get away? It demoralized him to know that they had not bothered to secure him while they slept. It was another sign of their contempt. He was too simple and stupid to save himself, they figured. He hated them, and pitied himself, and despised Hardy and Moura for the shortsighted fertility arrangement they had made. If they had been shrewder he would have been different — powerful, never afraid, taller, nothing missing.

He was impatient for the sun to come up. He wanted to move on. The prospect of change gave him confidence. At least the new people would not eat him. You didn't buy someone and eat him! He knew he would be handed back to Hardy and Moura for a ransom and then he would start proceedings against Hooper for dereliction of duty — a huge lawsuit — and bring him down. Sometime he would return here and burn them all.

His anger gave him life and restored his thirst.

"Who's that moving?"

It was the mutter of the little man Gumbie standing watch.

"That you, Fish?"

Fisher grunted "Yum," and Gumbie turned his back on him. That was how much they cared. And Gumbie was cracking something in his teeth. There was no greater show of indifference than a guard eating in front of a prisoner. Eating demonstrated a brainless absence of fear. Gumbie was eating like an ape. He was hunkered down, with his elbows out. He seemed to be crunching bones and blowing the broken pieces off his big lips.

"What are you eating?"

"Pine nut," Gumbie said, turned to the boy.

They were both pale blue in the moonlight.

"Crack one for you?"

Frog-eyes, they called this man — Froggy — because of the protruding hoods of his eyelids, and there was always a froggy frown on his big mouth. Fisher suspected from his unresponsive alertness — staring and never seeing anything— that he was dimwitted. He felt safe in the presence of this small man's inaction.

Fisher said, "I want a drink."

"There's a jug in the cooler."

"Not from the jug," Fisher said. "Get a sealed can."

"Mr. B said don't touch the provisions."

"I'm captain," Fisher said, steeling himself.

Gumbie went pah spitting nutshells.

"And if I die," Fisher said, "you won't be able to sell me."

Without a word, Gumbie rummaged in a bag and brought out a can. He handed it to Fisher, who sat down and fumbled with it. He had never opened a can without tongs or clean gloves. Finally he unsealed it, splashing some of it on his sleeves. He drank it so fast it went down his throat like liquid flapping through a pipe — the sound of a drain.

It was his first drink for two days. It cleared his head and strengthened him. He saw this as a victory, something to be enjoyed. He was alone in O-Zone with eight aliens! He was sorry there was no one he could tell — not to boast but simply to have on the record: an Owner, Type A, on his first mission actually living with hostile aliens. He thought: I'm not dead yet!

More than ever he wanted to be rescued, so that he could return and thunder down and kill all these people, especially this half-wit, Gumbie.

He said, "Where are we going?"

"Like Mr. B said, we're selling you, fella."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yump."

"Who's going to buy me?"

Gumbie was crunching a pine nut. He blew and swallowed, then paused, picking nutshells from his lips. He was thinking.

"Some Diggers in the town over there."

"Which Diggers, which town?" Fisher sensed that Gumbie was weakening. "I'll give you a swig if you tell me. It's glucose. It's real sweet."

A snort rattled out of Gumbie's hairy nostrils.

Gumbie then uttered an extraordinary sentence.

"The Bagoon family at the Mooseworks Pit in Varnado, near Summerville."

Fisher repeated the words to himself. They seemed to say everything, and yet they told him nothing.

"Now give me that swig," Gumbie said.

Gumbie's suckings and swallowings on the nozzle were too much for Fisher. They were monkey noises, they made the boy think of germs, and of viruses for which there were no known cures. He went and lay down on his leaves.