Paul Theroux - O-Zone

Murdick said, "You mean Fizzy's alone there?"

* * *

Hardy stayed away from Earthworks in his chartered rotor, looking for sites for a backup Asfalt project, in case Project O-Zone should fail. Murdick still went hunting; he left early and angry, and returned unusually silent and somewhat shamefaced. Holly looked for men. Out walking on the beach, she surprised the Haystack, who was sunning himself. He spoke to her in German: he had the loud breathing of a lazy animal. Before he could rise, Holly knelt and straddled him, and sat on him until he stopped struggling. "See?" She shook her breasts. "Googly eyes!" She left smears of her paint on every part of him.

Hooper and Bligh hiked beyond the gardens of the compound. Hooper said they must be in the jungle, but at midday they came to a high fence, and they saw faces flickering in the leaves beyond it. They called out, but the faces vanished.

Hardy returned from his traveling and swore to the others that it was safe to visit the interior of the country. He had seen evidence of animals, he said.

"Count us out," Hooper said. Bligh was his excuse. He wanted to be alone with her, to watch her, to film her.

But the rest went to look for wild animals in the area where Hardy had seen the tracks. Spinning above the tall palms and green grass of Earthworks they saw how small an area they were living in. It was tiny, really; a narrow ribbon of green on the coast. Behind it, the land sloped rapidly away and degenerated into scrub — thorn bushes, and low yellow flat-topped acacias, and cactuses. Gravelly basins as large as valleys lay baking where there had once been lakes. There was no water here at all. Hardy had located several sites for possible thermal-mountain projects. But what was the point here, and who would pay for it? The dark world was full of wastelands and deserts like this. He saw it as the inevitable senility of the planet. Let it die, he thought — Africa was half-dead anyway. But America was different: and now that island of O-Zone could be reactivated.

They looked for gazelles — gazelle tracks and some droppings had been seen here in the long smooth hills of this new desert. They saw skeletons, large exciting ones — thick black buffalo horns growing out of wide skulls, and smooth neat hooves, and the tumbled bones of other creatures. Several animals lay twisted and shrunken in the sacks of their own leathery hides.

All the way to the horizon it looked as if it had once been covered with water — an ocean of it; and the tide had gone out, leaving this dry strand and these dead drowned-looking animals and cracked stones. Now it was blazing — the bones most of all.

They found a steep hill and put the rotor down on its shady side so that they could eat their lunch in the cool shadow of the ridge. The food was served by Holly and Moura.

"We should have brought an African to do this," Holly said.

"There's one," Hardy said, looking up at the embankment.

"Are you kidding?" Murdick said.

It was a small solitary creature on spindly legs and it had appeared from behind an orange sandstone slab. While it moved it was an animal, but when it stopped and raised its head toward them they saw it was human — and it was not the child it seemed.

It crept forward on its hands and knees, with its mouth open. Its few teeth were broken and fanglike in its dark gums, and its skinny arm was out: it was a shriveled man.

"It's an alien," Holly said. "Get him away."

Murdick chucked a hunk of bread at him — not to attract him but to make him stop crawling. It worked. The African seized it and began gnawing.

Hardy said, "There are thousands of them in the north, just like that."

"They can't burn them fast enough," Murdick said, "They're like locusts. I'm surprised he's the only one here."

It was then, because he said those words, that the party looked around and saw the others — fifty, sixty, probably more — it was impossible to count them. They were a mass of dusty rags and death's-heads, big and small, moving slowly, close to the ground. Their faces were sunken and hollow, and their frail skeletons showed through their skin.

"It's all aliens!" Holly shouted, and she stood up — naked, the paint gleaming on her body.

The starved people shrieked, but they were so weakened their voices were like the cries of small birds. They held up their hands, clutching the air. They were still moving.

Hardy led the travelers back to the rotor; and their desperation saved them, because in their hurry to get away they left all their food. The poor creatures pounced on it and ignored them. And then the travelers were safely in the air, and underneath them was the mass of scavenging people that had swarmed out of the crack in the hillside.

Murdick said, "For a minute there I thought they were going to hoist a spear into my guts!"

"They didn't have weapons,"Hardy said, "It was a feeding frenzy."

At the rotor pad in the Earthworks compound, Holly said, "That shouldn't have happened! All those aliens! I hated that!"

Moura helped her out of the rotor and took her to her hut.

"They weren't supposed to be there," Hardy said. "Why are they leaving the northern sector?"

"Same reason the buffaloes left," Murdick said, and lowered his voice. "To get away from the hunters."

And Hardy guessed from the conspiratorial tone that Murdick was one of the hunters. In such circumstances, what good was a thermal mountain? Hardy imagined bringing wet weather here. There would be millions more Africans then. It would be like rehydration, and then the hunters would be out, chasing scavengers, shooting poachers. Hardy did not want that. He wanted O-Zone and its emptiness.

"Fizzy could have made a terrific tape of them," Murdick was saying in an admiring way. "From the air! With mirrors!"

"Fizzy could have prevented it," Hardy said. "Holly's right. That shouldn't have happened. They might have mobbed us. But Fizzy would have seen them. He's developed a program for spotting humans from very high altitudes, and he can describe them and build data based on their spoor, their shadows, settlement patterns, what-have-you."

"Is that what he's doing in O-Zone?" Murdick asked. "Looking for the aliens?"

"No," Hardy said in an energetic riddling voice, as if he were confounding Murdick with an obvious truth he'd overlooked — Murdick himself had said they'd burned them all down! "Because there are no aliens in O-Zone."

The dinner gong was being rung. It was sundown: torches were being lighted along the paths, and bats were tumbling like swallows in the sky. Murdick waited for the dinner gong to stop, and then he spoke.

"O-Zone's leaping with aliens," he said.

That was the day that Hooper flew inland to the capital in a hired jet-rotor. He took Bligh and watched her closely, photographing her when she was not looking, and filming her face on the rotor's own recording monitor. He wanted Bligh to enjoy herself, and yet he also wanted her to be shocked and fearful in this precarious-seeming place. He felt they were perfectly safe — much safer than it was possible to be in O-Zone. And yet the African landscape looked vast and desperate: it was dust bowls and high plains, it was strewn with stones, a land without topsoil. He wanted Bligh to believe that the danger was real, and still for her to feel secure: he wanted to show her that she could trust him.

"There used to be lions here," Hooper said.

He had been here before, but purely to buy industrial diamonds for an item in his mail-order catalog. But now with Bligh he felt a greater satisfaction: her presence enlarged his interest. Already he had come to depend on her!

"Most of the animals are gone," Hooper said. "Starved, killed, eaten, made into handbags."

"There are plenty of birds," Bligh said. "I've never seen so many."