Paul Theroux: O-Zone

"This is a cancer factory," the boy said. "Take off your helmet and your gums will bleed."

"There are mutants here!" Hardy said.

"There are mutants all over. I've seen them in New York," Hooper said. "Hairless rats. Blind squirrels. They don't live long. It doesn't mean anything." He went close to Fisher, who was still kneeling over the deformed squirrel in the bag. "How's our friend doing?"

"I'm performing a biopsy. This is raw tissue."

"I thought it was bubble gum. Good thing I didn't chew it."

"I don't think you meant that," Fisher said, glowering at his uncle. "I'm working on the theory that the squirrel's not a genetic mutation, but a chromosomal aberrant—"

"That'll make me sleep a whole lot better," Hooper said.

"— and that it might have been dead before it hit the beam."

"That doesn't make any sense at all," Hooper said. "Listen, Fizzy, do you know where you are?"

"You dong!" Fisher howled as Hooper left, but his mask turned the howl into a honk.

Hardy thought: I've spent the whole day losing arguments; and then: You're all mutants.

Fisher said that simply filling the cracks in the walls was not enough protection. He told Hardy to get out of the unit, and he released a cloud of plastic sealer into the rooms and slammed the main door.

"It sets in seconds," Fisher said, and then showed Hardy how it had given the whole unit a hard glaze on every surface. "It's not just dust — we're dealing with carcinogens. You want a party? Or would you rather have terminal cancer?"

"We could probably take our masks off," Hardy said as they moved in cushions and sleep capsules and personal bags.

"Probably," Fisher said. "Only I'm not going to." He made a face at Hardy. "Because I'm not a fuck-wit."

Hardy said nothing. If he did, he might scream at the boy. Did Fizzy know how near he sometimes came to being hit? Yes, he was intelligent, but Hardy often saw him as a rather pathetic creature — a big dumb animal with an overdeveloped brain and backward in every other way. But he was a brilliant navigator. And he was only fifteen. And this was his first time away from home.

Yet Hardy often wanted to scream at the boy and hit him— not hard, but hard enough to make him think before he delivered an insult. The boy had never been hit!

Outside — he could not stand another second in the unit with Fizzy saying, "I'm taking this side of the room for my mainframe" — Hardy watched the Murdicks setting up their bubble shelter. It was not enough that they had the largest and most expensive rotor — a big black levitating Welly that doubled as a gunship — or that Willis had brought an array of new weapons; he had also insisted on taking charge of the provisions. And he had refused to move into a unit in Firehills. He had brought his own unit.

Holly Murdick said, "I think it's super when a person really knows what he wants and then knows how to get it."

"Your best work is always done in complete comfort," Willis said. "But comfort isn't a question of money alone. It also takes great imagination."

His bubble shelter was an inflated dome that was kept tight by a pump that fed it pure air from tanks that he had brought to O-Zone — many tanks, for he believed that the air in O-Zone was unbreathable. He had set up the bubble on the terrace near the empty swimming pool that was now a great sink of vines and flowers.

"And we saw some snakes in there," Holly said. "Willis is going to lay down some poison, before they poison us."

"They're harmless," Hardy said. "Just glass snakes, legless lizards, and salamanders."

"We're not taking any chances."

What was there to fear here? Hardy looked west of Firehills, where the sun was sliding through a buttery cloud. The landscape was open, with forested knobs and steeply mounded hills. But you could not look anywhere on this empty-seeming land without thinking of the world of caverns that lay beneath it like a vast dripping and deserted subway. The wilderness had reestablished itself and taken hold of O-Zone and buried it in leaves and branches. But what impressed Hardy most were the clusters of abandoned buildings — so well made, so firmly forgotten in the eerie stillness of the dust-smothered towns. And it seemed so absurd that Murdick had brought a bubble shelter to a place where every dwelling was empty.

Willis dragged himself out of the bubble's front valve.

"I should be making a tape of this," he said.

When Moura, Hooper, and the Eubanks gathered to admire the bubble, Holly and Willis obliged them by scrambling in and out of the valve, showing off the bubble's accessories. Its chief feature was its transparency — and the illusion that it was entirely empty. It shimmered like a window: nothing behind it. And when Willis entered, he vanished, and yet the interior of the bubble appeared to be visible. Holly entered, and vanished — the sun shone through the bubble — and then she emerged, and Willis poked his head out of the valve.

"And that's not all," he said. "We've got some real surprises for you people."

"Willis picked it up in New York," Holly was saying to Rinka. "He knows an outfitter. Isn't it neat?"

Willis pulled his head into the valve.

Hooper said, "You just sort of evaporate when you get inside."

"But I can see you!" It was Willis' muffled voice.

"It's expandable, too," Holly said.

"You all right in there, Willis?" Barry Eubank said.

"It's a downstroke strobe effect, you herberts," Fisher said, and he walked toward them. In his swollen helmet, his gloves, his padded suit and big boots he looked like a deep-sea diver — and the greenish afternoon light helped, too, as Fisher plodded toward them as if through fathoms of water, and in a watery echoey voice he continued, "It's done by negative projection in the double layer — the seams are wired. If you put an infrared light on it you'd see everything!"

"Except aliens don't have infrared lights," Barry said.

"Or if they do, they don't have juice to run them with," Rinka said.

"What planet are you on, porky?" Fisher said, turning on Rinka and gurgling through his faceplate. "There are Skells that have jump jets, pilotless aircraft, heat-seeking rockets, nerve gas, and satellite links!"

"They don't have clothes!" Willis said. He was just out of the valve, on his hands and knees, and turned his face up awkwardly like a spaniel.

"If you've got nerve gas you don't need clothes!"

In Fisher's voice, Hooper said, "If you've got nerve gas you don't need clothes."

He was a perfect mimic. He did not use exaggeration — if anything, it was understated. It was expert playback, and because it was such an accurate echo, and not overt mockery, it seemed especially cruel.

"Relax," Hooper said in a silencing voice when Fisher faced him — the boy was grunting with anger. "I always have the impression you're being hostile when you give us information. I mean, don't shoot it at us, okay?"

"This is your soft-dome model," Willis was saying to the others. "You can actually double its size by just increasing your air pressure and paying out more bubble. Plus, you've got air and temperature control, but with thermal skin there's hardly any heat loss."

"We're thrilled with it," Holly said.

"You should get one," Willis said, and grinned at his gleaming igloo. "You'd be doing yourself a favor. It's solid comfort from top to bottom, and they're developing one with a toilet feature."

"It's no more than a glorified tent," Fisher said. "It's a gimmick. It needs a huge power supply or else it won't stay inflated, and without sufficient power it loses its transparency. I don't think it's comfortable, and I know it's not safe."

Hardy said, "What are you worried about, Fizz?"

"Anyone could slash it."