Paul Theroux - O-Zone

But he was too weak today to lift the boxes, and anyway he had a solution.

He said, "I need a deep hole with a twenty-centimeter radius about two meters above the cave entrance. Stick a beam in and suspend my machine from it."

Mr. Blue and Gumbie and Rooks had wandered over to hear the discussion, because they knew that Echols had a scientific background and was perhaps a match for Fisher.

Echols said, "If you chipped away for two months you wouldn't get a hole that size. That's solid limestone."

"You've tried it, eh?"

Echols nodded and smiled at the boy. He said, "I'd be glad to lend you my tools."

"Keep your wonky tools," Fisher said, and went into his chamber in the cave and returned with the particle beam.

"Stand back," he said. He aimed it over their heads and made an adjustment on the magazine and fired, blasting a smoking hole with a twenty-centimeter radius two meters above the cave entrance.

"Fuck-wits," he said, and jammed a log into the hole.

He set up his lifting machine, and all that afternoon, and all the following morning, as he hoisted the boxes, he reflected on the drama of what he had done. And he fantasized about doing it differently — saying he was going to blast a hole in the rock, and then turning the particle beam on the aliens and wiping them out. It was a valuable fantasy, because at the end of it he had showed himself that it was impossible. Wiping them out meant only that he would be alone, on the ground, in O-Zone, and that, he knew, was much worse than being their prisoner.

"You ain't working," Rooks said, the day after Fisher had completed the lifting of the boxes.

Fisher was not surprised by Rooks's annoyance. The moment he had finished with his lifting machine, Fisher had picked it to pieces and scattered it, so that they would not be able to use it without his advice. He had left the log in place, not for any practical reason but rather as a reminder of the violence that was contained in his particle beam.

"I've done my work," Fisher said. "I'm finished."

"We're never finished,*' Rooks said.

And now Fisher realized that he hated Mr. Blue much more than Rooks, for it had been Mr. Blue who had assigned Rooks the job of supervising him.

"You're needed at the forge," Rooks said.

They called it a forge, but it was no more than a sheltered niche in the hillside where a fire was kept burning. "Tin bashing," Gumbie called it. They heated pieces of metal and hammered them flat. Mr. Blue said he planned to use them for armor plate, but Fisher suspected that it was just another way of his keeping the other aliens busy. He hated it for its crudity, its jailbird routine.

The metal was mostly cans and containers, and they heated them by filling them with hot coals and attaching wires to them and swinging them so that the rushing air acted like a bellows and got them white-hot. Then they were easily flattened.

These days there were three or four of the aliens at the forge, swinging cans of coals, stacking pieces of metal or bashing it on the anvil.

"This is what you call centrifugal force," Gumbie said, though the word came out sounding like centuryfiggle. He was spinning a can on a whistling wire.

"Bullshuck," Fisher said.

"He never heard of it," Gumbie said.

"It doesn't exist."

Gumbie said, "You think you know everything, but you don't. Everybody knows this is centrifugal force!"

"Then everybody's wrong," Fisher said, and he was never colder than when he was correcting someone, because he believed that to need correction the person must be a fool. "There is no such force. It's just a device causing a circular motion, and if the device is removed, Newton's First Law is obeyed and the object moves off at a tangent to the circle at the same speed it's been swinging. It's an apparent force, dong-face, like aliens are apparent human beings,"

And that same day, Fisher found a way of using the particle beam to heat the pieces of metal and even to melt them over the anvil, so that there was no need to use hammers on them.

He believed that he had begun to succeed with them. It was now obvious to them, he knew, that he was intelligent, and certainly not the dip they once accused him of being. More than that, he had proven that he was useful. He felt that it was far harder for a Type A to prove his intelligence to an alien than to prove it to an Owner or someone legal. After almost two weeks of living with them in their complicated cave he had become stronger: he was eating regularly from his own provisions. He saw that it was within his capacity to be physically stronger and more agile than any of them. All he lacked was practice, but this exercise had the effect of building his muscles. He had always thought of himself as inadequate. But he had not tried. He was a Type A, and already, feeling fitter, he had visions of overpowering them and making his way out of O-Zone.

He was not fully convinced that they had no plans to harm him, but as the days passed and the weather grew hotter, he wondered what their plans were for him and for themselves.

In his room, he had a rope bed and a wooden chair and stolen rugs. He still wore his suit most of the time and, often, his helmet, in order to listen for broadcasts. But the range of this radio was pathetic — you could scream farther than it could transmit; and if there were planes, they flew at such a high altitude he could not hear them. Now and then he heard a wasp or a fly and believed it was an aircraft come to rescue him.

He had a window, a round eye that was dazzled all day by the bright valley and the blue sky. He had blasted it through the rock with his particle beam, hoping the aliens would be afraid when they saw the limestone spatter.

Sometimes he believed that he was their secret leader— that they were on the point of recognizing his true strength and then serving him, carrying out whatever orders he gave them, as he had commanded Hooper before that hopeless porker left him exposed. As their leader he would use them to escape from O-Zone, and the moment he was safe he would burn them all, for the uncertainty and fear they had subjected him to.

Sometimes he believed that he was their burden, their pest. Although they had stolen him, they made him feel like an intruder. He was their alien.

And it was no good that he simplified the tasks that were set for him. When he had solved one set of problems, they came up with others. He couldn't win, and so he dragged his feet, and used the hammer and the ax, and refused to simplify them. He saw that they were merely killing time. Aliens were deficient in most skills, but that did not matter, for like animals they had so much time they had no notion of time passing. They were dominated by hunger, danger, and fatigue.

Fisher too was losing his sense of time. Once, he had an awareness of the rhythm of a week. A Monday was unmistakable, and so was the length of a Wednesday and the promise of a Friday and the stillness of a Sunday. But these aliens had no days off, and because the routine was the same, the days were the same. He always knew the date but seldom the day of the week, and he was often appalled to see by his watch that it was Saturday and he was plucking the feathers out of a wild turkey that Echols had snared. That was another thing. They gave him the worst jobs to do, and then they stood around talking about him as if he were deaf, just the way they had when they'd first snatched him from the rotor.

"The question is what to do with him."

Him only meant one person here.

"Make him take a hike," Rooks said.

"He's a germ — he's infecting us," someone said, behind the helmet, out of Fisher's line of vision.

"Push him over the edge." Was that Gumbie?

"Why do you want to keep him so much?" Echols said.

Mr. Blue said, "I want Biigh back."