Paul Theroux - O-Zone

"I fixed the helmet!" he cried. And then, promising and pleading, as if bargaining for his life, "I can patch the particle beam!"

"You'll need that beam, sonny," Martlet said, with his lips drawn tight and his eyes like ice. "You'll need some muscle."

He started to say more, but Mr. Blue glanced at him and he swallowed it all.

Echols said, "Switch off, Fish."

"I was getting their bleeps," Fisher said, and moved his thumb over the pressure switch on the helmet.

"And they're getting yours."

An alien telling him that! Fisher felt Echols was challenging him. For the third or fourth time since his abduction, Fisher suspected that this man might be intelligent. And yet when he looked hard at the man's lank tied-back hair and cut-off sleeves and bruised hands and big sniffing nose, he could not believe it. Echols' words were like the muttery and ambiguous woof and growl of a so-called talking dog: it wasn't intelligence, it was just a certain kind of noise, and it meant nothing. You were a fool for trying to translate it into something sensible.

"Their scanners can pick up any frequency," Echols said.

He had very yellow teeth — they all had — and so their smiles were never a reassurance.

"I wasn't emitting a signal."

"They have energy-sensitive scanners. You were switched on. They could have heard."

Fisher again looked at Echols with interest. How could this yellow-fanged savage have figured that out? His toes stuck way out of his broken sandals! And the insane thing was that the dong was right: if the Diggers had that sort of scanning equipment — but how was he to know that? — you couldn't listen without being detected, at least not with this wonky helmet. Jt was like making noise or giving off a smell: if you were switched on they'd find you. Hooper had left him with nothing!

"But that gives me an idea," Echols said. "Leave a bleep behind — leave something here to throw them off. Diggers are pretty cautious, and they only hunt at night. They'll stalk it slowly, and that will give us time to get away." Echols turned to Mr. Blue and added, "We can hide somewhere and work on the beam. Martlet's right — this weapon has muscle."

"We've got nets and axes. We've got knives," Rooks said. "We can beef those Diggers."

Mr. Blue said nothing, but as always his silence made him authoritative. He had a lordly way of listening.

Fisher said, "If we leave this helmet behind, I won't have a scanner to find the fault in the weapon. I need my tools."

Echols was smiling, and Fisher thought: Why is this savage making that ugly face at me?

"Not the whole helmet, Fish. Leave an energy cube behind — just one cell on a wire. Then we move out."

The science of this and its obvious truth from such a ragged man made Fisher resentful. He said nothing more, but instead broke open his helmet hatch and took out a cell and gave it to Echols.

"That's it," Echols said.

Fisher hated the way this man had taken charge, and Echols only spoke to Mr. Blue, no one else, and Mr. B was nodding as if to say: It's all yours, Echols, you get us out of this. But whose helmet was it? Whose cells? And who had fixed it, using nothing but his calculator and his thumbs?

Fisher said, "You know that stuff because I told you, right? Because, listen, none of that is news to me. Theory of Subsequence — ever hear of it? It's mine. I developed it. I'll bet you've never heard of it."

"Instead of leaving an energy cube behind, why not leave that mangy little brat?" Martlet said. "With his ankles spliced."

The boy was startled and weakened hearing the crude words he had dreaded. They did want to dump him!

But Echols was suspending a cell from a wire on a low tree branch. "They'll smell this and chase it."

"I can hear them," Fisher said. He had put on the helmet again and was yakking through the open hatch at the front — the faceplate was up. "They're circling, they're bleeping, they're setting up a kind of search pattern."

They're looking for me, he thought, and saw them — red-eyed Diggers moving hunched over in ragged packs, dirty salivating kids and old men stepping on their beards and scratching.

He was still talking, but no one was listening to him. Mr. Blue was giving orders to carry the food they had gathered: hickory nuts, plums, pole greens, potato beans, and a pile of skinned animals — all the trouble they took with these poisonous parcels of garbage! Fisher had noticed that they stuck it into their mouths without commenting on it — obviously because you'd be sick if you paid any attention to it.

"Leave the sealed provisions buried," Mr. Blue said.

All the good stuff! The pure water and glucose, the meal bags, the tubes of textured food, the chocolate. Fisher wanted to say: That food belongs to me! You have no right— But Mr. B was still whispering his orders in a hurried way: move to higher ground, he said, on the ridge that lay well inside their quarter, and even if the Diggers were not fooled by the pulses from the energy cube, and they went on searching, this high exposed ridge would be the last place they'd look.

They picked up and left with no ceremony, climbing fast in the dark. The rocks and trees were speckled with moony highlights, but the path was hidden.

"No lights," Mr. Blue said when Fisher switched on his helmet light. Fisher didn't hear those words, but he heard Mr. B's knuckles rapping on his dome.

"I can't walk without this!" Fisher's voice was shrill with terror. He had been wound up again by the fear that he would be caught by Diggers. "I can't even see!"

"If we wait till the moon is high they'll catch us."

"You want me to walk in the dark!" Up went his faceplate.

In the soft voice he used for his most serious statements Mr. Blue said, "They're very hungry people, so consider the alternative."

The weak light from the fragment of moon — it looked to Fisher like a nail-paring — and the scattered droplets of dew glowing on the ground gave the boulders and bushes a dim watery look. They were lost: the landscape made no sense here. People with sophisticated tracking equipment and satellite photos got lost here — Hooper, for example. And Hardy didn't even dare!

The horrific thought was that he was in O-Zone — a prisoner of aliens. Only one fact made that thought bearable: that somewhere out there were hungrier and more violent aliens, sniffing toward them.

He watched his aliens moving quickly and without a sound up the hillside. He wondered why they didn't stand their ground and burn all intruders, and then he remembered their weapons-axes and knives and hairy homemade ropes. They had no choice but to run into the darkness!

"I'm blind," he said, kicking his feet and stumbling on the path. But there was no path, that was the problem. "I'm blind!"

They did not pause and pity him, as he had hoped. They kept him moving, jerked him along, and hissed at him to be quiet, and when he slowed down they pushed him.

For Fisher this was like climbing through the black baffles of a stairwell in a dark tower. It was worse when they stopped to rest and he could not make out their faces in the murk. Then someone snatched his mask — Echols, who pretended to be so smart.

"They're converging," Echols said, holding an earpiece to his head. "They sound like a swarm of bees."

Fisher said, "Hey, porky, whose helmet is that?"

Echols said, "I can hear them buzzing."

"Huh, dong-face? Did you ask permission to use that helmet?"

He was not angry, but rather panicky and talkative because he felt so naked without the thing on his head.

"We should have helmets," Valda said. "We should have masks like Owners."

"We have a weapon — that particle beam," Echols said.

"I might decide not to fix it," Fisher said.