O-Zone

1

THE FIRST THING these people always asked whenever they went out, was where were "they"?

But there was no one here in O-Zone — no aliens, and no Owners except themselves.

It had taken the travelers just under two hours to fly the fifteen hundred clicks from Coldharbor Tower in New York City to the large sealed-off territory in the midwest designated Outer Zone. They had decided to fly in a highballing style and to keep together; it was their party mood — New Year's. The four jet-rotors were bunched in the flight envelope like a swarm of insects. The eight travelers looked insectile themselves in the last low-altitude phase, with their masks on. These days it was seldom safe to travel in such a dense formation, making an easy buzzing target. Even aliens who had little else had weapons — Starkies had rockets, one of the travelers said. Yet they knew there was no one down below now, and no one else alive for the next three hundred clicks.

"No Starkies, no Skells, no Trolls," Hooper Allbright said over his radio to the rest of them. "No Shitters, no Diggers, no Roaches. Not even any Federals!"

He was photographing it all through the sting in his nose cone,

"And I don't see any Owners either."

The precise pattern of old highways, like wheel tracks, passed beneath.

Traveling high in rotors gave them a point of view. They watched the earth through ground-screens in the cockpit.

The land was small and scarred, and inhabited by people who looked like flightless ants. They could see the tops of their heads.

"We're the only taxpayers here, so let's enjoy ourselves," Hooper said. "It's better than home!"

There was a squawk on the mike, a shrill heep-heep, which he silenced by continuing.

"I like to think places like this are beyond criticism."

In another aircraft, his nephew Fisher said, "Keep flying, shit-wit."

Hardy Allbright glanced back at Fisher and frowned: the radio was open, the mike was live. Heep.

"Who said that?"

"This is the unthinkable," Hardy piped up. "But officially this place is not on the map. That's why it's not illegal."

"I thought you had an Access Pass," came a nagging voice from another rotor. It was Willis Murdick in his new Welly.

"The Access Pass is for the Red Zone," Hardy said. "O-Zone doesn't exist. Hasn't for fifteen years."

"You could grow old here!" Hooper was saying. "All you have to do is keep your clothes on."

"Ground temperature's twenty-two cents," Hardy said, from his cockpit. "Forty or fifty years ago you'd have worn winter clothes here at this time of year. Bare trees. Frost in the morning. It was cold all over. You'd have needed mittens."

"But you wouldn't have needed weapons fifty years ago," Moura said.

Murdick's voice exploded on the line: "Peace-keeping weapons! Hey, listen, they work! We're living in the longest period of peace known to the world!"

They were looking down from their rotors at the odd worn and grown patches that might have been city-stains and a discernible pattern of trees in some valleys that made them look like wild gardens. The roads were decayed, but their straight lines were still visible in the wilderness. Tipped-over light poles lay across them, and junked cars that might once have served as roadblocks during the emergency; and bridges — broken-backed.

War had not done that: people had, and weather, and time. This small abandoned part of America had come to resemble the rest of the world. One third of the state had been contaminated and closed off by an excursion of nuclear waste.

Hooper's mike was still going heep-heep whenever he opened it, but he fought the heeping to protest.

"You think just because there hasn't been a world war or a nuclear explosion the world's okay. But the planet's hotter and a whole lot messier, and that leak was worse than a bomb. And look at crime. Look at the alien problem. Look at money. Forget war — war's a dinosaur. The world is much worse off."

"I'm not worse off," Murdick said, from his rotor. "Neither are you."

"Willis, what kind of a world is it when there are some simple things you can't buy with money?" Hooper added, "I hate that."

Yet he knew that Murdick was right. As travelers they were exceptional. Who else had such freedom to range so far and see so much? It had all been a gradual slide into ruin, though they only noticed it when they left home — flew out of New York City and looked down.

It was a meaner, more desperate and worn-out world. It had been scavenged by crowds. Their hunger was apparent in the teethmarks they had left, in the slashes of their claws. There was some beauty in the world's new wildernesses, of which O-Zone was just one; but its cities were either madhouses or sepulchres. Fifty years ago was simply a loose expression that meant before any of them had been born. It meant another age. And yet sometimes they suspected that it had closely resembled this age — indeed, that it was this one, with dust on it, and cracks, and hiding aliens, and every window broken: smoke hung over it like poisoned clouds.

But whatever desperation and ruin these travelers saw in the United States they knew it was much worse elsewhere. They had seen that the chaos and despair of other places— the hideous inconvenience of poverty — had made America, even in this condition, seem majestic.

Hooper was leading them in his Flea, a double-seater, but he flew alone. He had worn his mask the whole way: bat ears, a snout, a chrome throatpiece, and a wide tinted faceplate. He had taken charge, keeping radio contact with everyone and chattering throughout the entire trip. The party in O-Zone was his idea.

"Who knows — this whole place will probably be reactivated in a few years."

"It's a relief to talk about the future for a change!"

"That's all anyone talks about!"

"Because the past is a mystery. At least the future's familiar."

"Stop wobbling, Hardy," Hooper said. "You'll make yourself sick."

The spiraling motion was for the camera's sake. In his rotor, Hardy was also shooting — making a tape of the trip through this prohibited area. It was for his own reasons and also because he did not really trust Hooper to complete his tape. Hooper might decide tonight that he hated the whole place, or that he was bored and was leaving immediately. "Nuke it!" he might say, and go back and take his tape with him. Or he might wipe it and say he had never really wanted it and why had Hardy given him this stupid job to do? It would be just like Hooper to say without warning, "I've seen enough of this desolation — I'm reversing engines."

Once, on a long flight to a cluster of his warehouses in California — this was somewhere near Landslip, at a time when he still made inspection visits — Hooper had simply vanished off the screen. He radioed to Hardy in California, "Don't expect me."

Later, Hardy asked why and said, "Were you on a shoot?"

Hooper said he had been fascinated by a particular valley and had seen a good place to land.

That grin of his! He had a space between his two front teeth that was as wide as a ten-dollar coin.

"I just wanted a piss and a scratch," he said.

Now Hooper was saying, "You're endangering the rest of us, banging your ship around like that."

"Sorry, Hoop." Hardy straightened his rotor and made an adjustment to his camera.

"Goddamned rotation — all elbows."

"I won't do it again."

The apologies came easy. There could be none of the misunderstandings of friendship. And it wasn't love or a lack of pride. They had had almost forty years of this, but that was not the point either. The two men were brothers: Hardy and Hooper Allbright were imperfect versions of each other.

"You put the camera on the wrong setting," Fisher said.

Fisher — Hardy's boy — did not look like either of them. But this boy was never judged, never measured, never assessed, and if he was compared it was with himself at an earlier age.

"I'm the human being in the decision-loop," he said.

Today he was navigator, and he knew he was blazing a trail. But programming the new flight path was not a privilege for him, it was a necessity, he said. "Who else has the math or the memory?"

Hardy put Fisher's fussing down to nervousness, but it was not the responsibility for all the navigation — that was a problem with an exact solution, and exactitude made him arrogant, not nervous. No, the reason for the boy's odd squawking was that he was fifteen years old, and this was the first time he had been outside New York City. He seldom left the Coldharbor Tower, and never alone.

He had come today because, Hardy had said — truthfully, as far as he knew — that Fisher was the only person who could get them to O-Zone.

"We're in your hands, Fizzy. We'll be lost without you."

And so the boy had agreed.

"It's a landmark trip," Hardy said. He was speaking to Moura, his wife, who shared the controls. "This isn't just a New Year's party. This is exploration and discovery. This is a new land. We're the first people here."

Fisher said, "How is that different from any other longitudinal field study?"

"There's a lot of romance associated with this place," Hardy said. "The wilderness, the secret transferral of the nuclear waste, the fact that it was all in caves — big strange toothy limestone caves, boy. And then the leaks and the contamination, and half the state evacuated and closed off. Amazing! And it was kept closed, like a secret garden, and given a perimeter and a new name. So the most dangerous, empty, and primitive part of the world was right here in the United States. It was unknown — that's where the romance came from."

"Know what I think about that?" Fisher said.

Hardy wondered whether he had gone too far — the boy hated listening to him.

"That you're a tool," Fisher said.

"I was talking about the past."

"A complete tool."

"Stop quacking, Fizzy," Moura said, because the boy had begun to laugh. He laughed without smiling.

"What a dimbo," Fisher said. "Didn't you believe your satellite imaging?"

"Watch the video readout," Hardy said. "I want good pictures!"

The boy ignored this. He could be relentlessly rude, and one aspect of his rudeness was that he was deaf to friendly cautions. He hung on his safety harness just behind Hardy and Moura — navigating, squawking the coordinates, reading the video. He dangled, like a bundle of badly fitted software, setting them straight. Some of his rudeness Moura found almost charming, because he was innocent throughout and still so young, even if he was not small anymore. But he could be strange. He often said something or did something and then it was clear you did not know him at all.

"Romance! Adventure!" he said. His eyes became wicked with mockery. He was a good-looking boy but too fidgety and nervous to be called handsome. He was never still, and his questions were incessant.

"When I was your age I couldn't just key into my own satellite like that, and even if I had, it would have given me a big monochrome aerial shot, like a cheap road map."

"Why didn't you enhance it on your computer?"

"My computer was so old it had moving parts," Hardy said.

But Fisher hadn't heard. He was looking at the ground-screen. "'Like a secret garden'! You dong!"

"I used to think it was a kind of wasteland," Moura said. "I never imagined this."

Fisher had opened his mouth to mock; but she spoke first and silenced him.

"Something that's been lost — that you can't see or touch or ever have again — can grow in your mind and acquire wonderful associations. It can become almost magical."

But this, the Outer Zone — O-Zone — was an emptiness. They had left the Red Zone Perimeter and identified themselves with their Access Pass and had been allowed to proceed. For over fifteen years it had been forbidden for anyone to enter O-Zone or even to overfly it. It had been a deadly place. The earth, the air, the water — everything here had been dangerous with radiation. The nuclear waste that had been stored in the caves had got loose, the cylinders had cracked and hemorrhaged — perhaps an accident, perhaps sabotage; everyone had a theory — and this great tract on the Ozark Plateau had been soaked in contamination. But that danger and the rumors of devastation had been its protection. Its peril had kept it lovely. Its name was a fright. O-Zone became a new word for a special wilderness — a place that had once been wooded and parklike and settled, and was now a prohibited area, dangerous and empty, with burst-open roads and fallen bridges and a reputation for poison.

"The average radiation level here has been measured at two-twenty rems," Fisher said. "In New York the daily dose is point one! If we didn't have survival suits we'd die here!"

"It's O-Zone National Park, Fizzy," Hooper said over the radio.

All the lines were open. The conversation carried from rotor to rotor.

One of the Eubanks said, "It looks all right to us!"

"This place was so radioactive it used to be luminous," Fisher said. "It gave off a greenish glow!"

"— before you were born," Willis Murdick was saying.

It was an immense and overgrown ruin, without people. And now that it was bright on their ground-screens they began talking of how the irradiated plants and flowers had had a freakish beauty, and one of the other women — either Rinka or Holly — was describing what it had done to the columbines and bloodroot and wild asters, the walnut trees and the dogwoods.

Fisher said, "I won't believe that until I get some specimens."

"Those trees scare me," Moura said. "I never see a tree without thinking there's someone behind it."

"The trouble with you," Fizzy said, "is you only get one idea at a time." And then he put his glove on the screen and said, "What's that scab down there on the ground?"

Hooper's voice rang in their earphones. "It's a city-stain. They're brighter out here, because they've been left for so long."

"Someday New York might look like this."

"Never!" Fisher shrieked. "Who said that!"

What had been a city was now a low wrinkled wheel of luminous dust, softened and tumbled apart and lying in the sea of green treetops. It was in places struck with color, the footprints of collapsed houses; and some spikes and stools of buildings — and a few half-towers — were visible at its center. Throughout the stain was the faint tracing of the geometry of parks and squares and roads. The river still ran and had an innocent tinfoil gleam, but Hooper said that the river had carried tons of irradiated slush out of the caves and floated it forth.

"I'm reducing speed and going in to shoot," Hooper said.

"You porker," Fisher said. "You're freaking up my program."

The others hovered just behind Hooper's rotor. They approached the city-stain, going slower and hanging together in the same companionable flight pattern — the Eubanks in their Hornet, the Murdicks in their Wellington, Hardy and his wife and boy in their Thruster Three, and Hooper in his two-seater Flea.

The city-stain revolved under them as they crossed four clicks of ruined houses which had lost their paint, and many of them their roofs. Most had been engulfed by their gardens and looked like old tombs or burial mounds. The roads had been narrowed into tracks by overgrown bushes, and many low buildings had been engorged by thickets of trees, giving the impression of hillocks and humps. The taller buildings were staring things with gaping doors and empty window holes; and yet they seemed to have an elderly dignity and a stillness that amounted almost to loveliness. They were stark and grave in the emptiness and clear air, and among the finely printed shadows they were neither dead nor alive, but appeared monumental. It was a stricken city that had been abandoned, but it had not yet fallen into total ruin. Its abandonment — it was clear from the images on their ground-screens — its desertion, had been a form of preservation. It was at last people that brought cities down.

The travelers continued to track across it, bemused by its gloomy beauty.

Straining forward on the straploops of his harness, Fisher said, "Do we have to go so slow here?"

"What do you want to do?"

"Finish the trip at top speed and then watch the raw tape of it in a unit somewhere."

"Kids," someone said.

"This is more fun, Fizzy."

"Fun," Fisher said, making the word sound stupid. "The camera's more efficient. We'll have more data — we'll see more. If it's on tape we can stop."

"Willis and I can see plenty!"

It was mostly intact, but it was hollow — a ghost city. Some of its structures had fallen and soaked into the ground; the land looked saturated with those ruins. The rest had not been destroyed, only deserted and blurred. It was one of many in O-Zone. What was its name?

"That information's classified," Hardy said to Moura, who had asked.

"Isn't it on the map?"

"The map of O-Zone is blank," Hardy said.

"Because of the military installations on the perimeter," Hooper called out.

"Bullshuck," Fisher said. "It's because of Roaches and Trolls and the risk of looters when it's reactivated. Anyway, officially it doesn't exist, so how can you have a map of something that doesn't exist?"

The buildings close-up had a softly bulging and bearded look. Dust that had been whirled against their walls had sprouted grass and weeds, and there were plants and bushes on knobby stalks poking out of odd corners of the brickwork.

"We'll come back sometime and look around."

"What's the point of doing this twice, you dimbo!" Fisher said.

Moura turned and looked at him. She wondered whether he was frightened. He had never been out of New York, and here he was in O-Zone!

There was no energy here, the still city-stain had no light source of its own, and so it was full of natural shadows — they seemed to be in all the wrong places. Moura knew that Fizzy was not used to this; she was hardly used to it, the hiding stripy darkness. There was ferocity in it — it seemed tigerish and threatening, and it tempted her with the pleasure of risk. The thickened foliage looked full of secrets — the black oak and slippery elm — as if a lumpy green blanket had been drawn across half the flattened city.

Hooper had been narrating in bursts over the radio in his friendly bullying way as they had descended. Now he was saying, "Check those roads, check those parks — hey, can you believe those compounds?"

He meant that it was a marvel that the roads were so narrow and unprotected. Even before they had fallen into ruin they could not have been safe — that surprised everyone. No fences, no walls, no barriers, no sign of checkpoints. The parks were densely wooded in a sinister and concealing way, and the yards and gardens of houses were open to the road. It had apparently been a city without walls. It was not tragic, merely a pathetic phenomenon — no lights and too many shadows.

It represented the naive trust of another age, a kind of fatal innocence and incompetence. Surely this would have finished it even if the radiation had never reached it from those caves. The travelers were amazed by sights like these. They had flown today from a secure city of open spaces and high walls and guarded entry points. They were used to wide, walled expressways, fortified against intrusions and ambushes; they were accustomed to busy skies crisscrossed by their own patrols of aerial gunships. It was not that Coldharbor was a garrison area, but that New York was a sealed city — and this nameless stain beneath them was like a city on its back.

The Eubanks could be heard quarreling in their Hornet.

"Not so close, Barry!" Rinka said. "You don't know what's down there!"

"Hooper's down there! I'm following him on autopilot, so will you please let go!"

And Willis Murdick, Who had gone off the air, suddenly broke into their frequency, saying, "Listen, I've got irons."

"You pretend like you know what's down there," Holly Murdick said.

"Whoever's down there don't matter to me. The closer we go, the easier it is to burn them," Willis said.

"You porker, Murdick."

"And I hope they're listening," Willis said.

It excited them to see the empty sprawling place, its tumbled buildings, the stain of its stone and metal spread beneath their rotors. This was the dangerous past! Narrow roads and hedges and embankments — and what was that glimmer? Was it the poisonous twinkle of radiation's foxfire?

"There's nothing down below," Hooper said.

"Even if there is, I've got irons,"

"But there's no one there!"

He spoke with eagerness and hope, and hearing him, Hardy could almost see his brother grinning and flexing his fingers, as if he'd seen a woman he wanted.

"If there's no one there, it's not dangerous, so why don't you—?" And with that shriek the Eubanks broke radio contact.

Patches of the city were intact and the rest had become part of the enormous oak-hickory woods that surrounded it. To Hardy's eyes, the city was not dead but asleep, wrapped up, protected and snug, and waiting for adventurous travelers to awaken and untangle it.

"It's lovely in a wild way," Moura said. "It's like a town in an old story — it just went to sleep."

"It's full of infection." Fizzy was sulking, not even looking at the ground-screen. "It's carcinogenic from one end to the other."

"Shall we land?" Hardy said in a teasing way to the transmitter, hoping for a listener.

Hooper rose to the challenge and said, "All we have to do is find a hard surface for these rotors."

But this was bravado. He could say anything he liked. He knew it was forbidden to land here.

Hardy winked at Moura. He did not speak — Hooper would hear. Hardy didn't want his brother's submission once again to the strict terms of the Access Pass: protective clothing, sealed conditions, no landings in a city-stain or within thirty clicks, no skin contact, all activities and sightings to be logged, all food and water to be brought in. It was forbidden to leave anything behind, and nothing could be removed.

The two-day trip — the New Year's party — had been Hooper's idea; but it was Hardy who had been granted the pass, to carry out what Fisher insisted was a longitudinal field study. An air corridor through O-Zone had not yet been approved, and yet Hardy — to everyone's surprise — received permission to land. These days, access to O-Zone was rarer than a moon landing, and it was the fact that they would be the first — even if they were only party-goers — that roused Fisher and persuaded him to agree to be navigator. No one asked why Hardy, of all people, secured the pass in the first place.

"— probably bursting with fabulous old treasures," Hooper was saying. "Want to follow me down?"

Hardy smiled at the way Hooper's rotor kept unwaveringly on a safe course as he threatened this rashness. And then he was startled by a squawk from the rear seat, where Fisher had stiffened in his harness.

"This is officially a degraded area!" the boy said. "It's a bone-valley, there's been an excursion, it's marbled with plutonium! You can't land here — they'll revoke Hardy's pass, and the Federal—"

"You sound just like your father," Hooper said.

"He's not my father, you fuck-wit!"

"Murdick here," came the gummy voice. "I don't see why my wife and I have to listen to this."

"It's dangerous!" Fisher was still hollering, his big square teeth showing in the faceplate of his mask. "I've studied these places! You could contaminate us — taint the rotors — and they wouldn't have to let us back into New York. We'd be quarantined!"

"See, that's what he's really worried about. He really wants to go home. Why did we bring this little shit?"

"Who said that? I'm navigator! You wouldn't have got here without me!"

"Oh, shut up, Fizzy," Moura said. "Everyone can hear you."

"If you don't know the risks, you're stupid," the boy yelled into the microphone. It was another squawk, and it made someone in another rotor laugh out loud. Fisher could not modulate his voice, and his mask only distorted it further. He clucked and growled and quacked in his adolescent way, and then there was more heep from the mike. And more people laughed, making him madder.

"The risks are infinitesimal," Hooper said. "This is a very old disaster."

Fisher started to say something, but Hardy signaled for him to be quiet. Hooper was still talking.

"I guess we'll have to move on and find a safe strip. And, Hardy. If there's any way of sedating your youthful passenger, I'd be mighty grateful. He sounds like a Fed."

"What's the point of sightseeing if we're making a video loop?" Fisher said. "It's a waste of time. It's for dimbos."

"Are we holding you up?" Hooper said. "Have you got a speaking engagement out here? You going to lecture the folks locally on the subject of antimatter? Or particles?"

"A lot you know about particles, you herbert."

"Or inert gases?" Hooper said, and shot his rotor up, and laughed, and added, "We're the only folks in O-Zone!"

"I hate words like 'infinitesimal,'" Fisher said. "I think Skells and Roaches probably use those words."

"I'm listening," Hooper said crisply, and he was still laughing.

"Everything can be measured," Fisher said. "Especially particles — particles have an inside and outside. They have interior dimensions, and weight and density. They have sur-faces, they have topography, they have personalities. Don't tell me about particles! And never mind quarks—"

"Doesn't this kid ever stop?" It was one of the Eubanks, back on the air.

"— I've tracked exodes! I described Antigons! I know all the numbers." He gasped and began again. "We've been flying in circles, slowing down, speeding up. If we had flown straight and let the camera move in circles, we could have calculated exact distances and speeds and fuel to a ten-digit milliliter. All this bullshucking is just creating useless variables. 'Infinitesimal' is crap! Everything has a number!"

"What's your number, then, Fizzy?"

Fisher laughed. It came suddenly, with the quack of his usual voice, but there was a choking behind it. His laughter was a horrible snorting noise. He showed his large disapproving teeth. He said, "You know my number, fuck-wit!"

Moura turned toward her son again. Throughout the flight he had seemed to be suspended by his straploops as he nagged and navigated, appearing to gnaw the mike in his mask. He held his face forward, against the curved window of his faceplate.

He was associated in her mind with masks: she saw his face behind most masks. They had been part of that clinic's ritual. She had worn one, the donor had worn one, and the masked face had hung just above her as he entered her. She had not known the donor's name, but she had approved his pedigree, and she had come to enjoy the sessions — one a month, over the period of two years. When they stopped, with her pregnancy, she had felt abandoned.

The donor's mask had been a soft, beaked thing, with live flicking eyes; and hers had been a human face — a lovely actress who had been popular at the time. After one session Moura had stopped wearing the short smock, after two she dispensed with the stirrups; before a year had passed she went to the clinic as if keeping an appointment with her lover.

It had been a medical fad that had passed through New York — contact with the donor, probably a reaction against the injections and the test tubes and the slivers of frozen sperm. In some contact clinics they wore body masks, like breastplates, and in others they were naked in total darkness. She often wondered whether she had done the right thing. She could have received a sliver or an implant. Now she never spoke about it — people would misunderstand. These days, contact clinics were regarded as little better than brothels.

She had not known the man, of course — that was forbidden. But sometimes — and very often these days — looking at Fisher, she felt that stranger become more familiar and saw not Fisher's face but the face of the man behind the mask. She saw him most clearly in her son as a hovering shadow, and shadows — for the features she gave them — were the most powerful presences of all.

Fisher was fifteen-plus, tall for his age, with a pretty face and some gray hairs. Even though he did not get regular exercise he was hard-fleshed and tight-muscled — probably from tension alone, the nervous way he sat at his console. He was angular; his arms were too long, his feet and hands too big. His palms were always damp. He used body powder but never combed his hair. He had Moura's good looks and like her he was tremulous and attractive, always glancing. The difference was he talked. Mother and son had the sort of pale faces that are brightened and made more beautiful by nervousness. They shared another characteristic: they never smiled.

Fisher yawned constantly, and she could not get him to cover his mouth. He had a phenomenal ability to sleep, yet his mind was tireless and his intelligence easily engaged. He fastened on a problem and would not let go until he had shaken a solution from it, and then he was bored and blank for moments — and deaf — until he snatched at something else to solve. Moura had expected most of these traits in him: she had seen his profile before he was born — before he was conceived.

He was an extraordinary boy. His memory was perfect. He could find his way in pitch dark, steering himself with his memory, or the memory of a picture. But it had been years since he had done so. He was now afraid of the dark. He said, "There's stuff in my nose," when it was only snot — and sometimes it dropped out and he shrieked. He howled at insects, sometimes saying loud simple words to them in his squawking voice.

All this, Moura told herself, was predictable. What she had not expected was his rudeness — his snarls, his corrections, his boasts, his bad manners. He had become worse as he had grown older, and he was harder now to control — impossible, really. He had no humor, no grace, only the rattle of incessant information. He did not converse, he argued and made noisy connections. Most of his questions were belittling or hostile: he seldom listened for answers. And now there was a wobbly quality to his fifteen-year-old's voice that was a bleat or a growl interrupted by a high metallic quack, and he lost his temper with a sound like tin trays dropping. At times four or five strange notes were struck in the same sentence, or in a single word — he knew some very long words. He was completely unselfconscious, and could become angry very quickly — new chords were struck and things snapped in his throat. Moura had not wanted perfection, but she did not want this either. He could be infuriating. He had the asceticism and willful self-indulgence of genius. He was a cold creature and when he was being obnoxious his good looks made him seem far crueler than if he had been homely. People called him "wonder boy."

He was still arguing with Hooper over the radio!

"I love these folds," Hooper was saying. "These little ridges and corrugations of the land—"

"Synclines," Fisher said. "Anticlines."

"Lay off," Hardy said.

"Look at that filthy crawling river.". That was another thing: his horror of dirt.

"It's stupid to put down here!"

He had gone rigid again, because Hooper was leading them in a great circle, around a collection of buildings — two sets of buildings in stone and metal, identical in every way, like gigantic furniture, resembling a pair of narrow matching chests, with balconies like pulled-out drawers.

"It's probably contaminated!"

Moura said nothing. She was afraid of giving away her real feelings — that she was pleased to see him challenged and defeated by Hooper's decision — obviously they were going to land. Now Fizzy would have to accept things. Who cared if he got angry and yelled? He deserved this: she liked the rare sight of uncertainty on his face.

At his age she had traveled across the world, to some of the wildest places. Today these places were off limits and served merely as names and metaphors for hopelessness or terror. "Africa," people said to scare each other; but she had been there, and not in a colony like Earthworks in Kenya, and not in a rotor either. She had seen Starkies and Skells — they had been more approachable then, less aggressive, rather glorying in their own strangeness, like clowns at a party. That was before IDs, before Owners were classified; and yet there had been risks. She had lived awhile in Europe — not always in a sealed city — and she had traveled to the various landing places in Asia. There were fewer Prohibited Areas then. But she had stayed in Red Zones, she had gone with Hardy on field trips, she had traveled in surface vehicles. And now O-Zone!

Yet this was fifteen-year-old Fizzy's first time out of New York City. She saw that it had made him edgy, and at times unbearable. She was glad. A little suffering might do him good. Everything had always been too easy for him. The really annoying part was that he was navigator — that reassured her, but it also infuriated her.

"It's a hell of a long way to go," he said.

Hardy said, "Too far from home?"

"New York is the center of everything! The rest of the world is Roaches!" He was swinging angrily again on his harness. "We're only going to sleep here. That's all you care about. 'Hook me up. Let's buzz out. Let's go into a coma.' You're worse than Skells!"

Moura smiled, because he was known to be so intelligent, and here he had just made this stupid remark. He slept a great deal, but he was too young and too impatient to appreciate the deep sleep known these days as a coma. It had been one of her first thoughts when Hardy had told her of the possible trip to O-Zone: A coma — sleeping in the wilderness — what dreams we'll have in the safety of that empty place!

They were still circling the buildings. The tallest were only twenty stories high, and their stone was soft and slightly pockmarked, terra-cotta-colored, with gilded seams from the afternoon sunlight, and russet-colored where there was shadow. They stood isolated on a low islandlike hill that was banked and terraced with stone oblongs and low walls. The land rose to a shallow flat-topped knob of wide pinky-gray steps that had resisted the bushes and prevented the spread of trees — dwarf hackberries and maples here. The pair of landings at the top of the step were each as long and broad as a football field, two flanking plazas providing a platform for the buildings. Now that they had made a complete circuit they saw that the buildings were like bookends on a broad shelf — no books — and the shelf surrounded by greenery.

Below the terraces and the plazas, and all around, were dense pine woods, with some black oaks towering, and little half-glimpses of abandoned structures, small and fragmented enough to seem like memories of what they had been. From this height — the travelers were circling just above the tops of the buildings — the old overgrown roads crisscrossed the woods like green seams.

"They look solid — no distress marks in the structures, no cracks visible, no subsidence, no evidence of fire or vandalism. The roofs are intact."

Hooper was speaking to all the other rotors.

"That's one good thing about radiation," he said. "Sure keeps the riffraff out."

"He thinks he can detect high-level mutagens by just looking," Fisher said. "What a porker."

"It's beautiful," Moura said. She saw in it everything that was lacking in New York and their own tower — silence, emptiness, natural light, wild trees.

"Looks like a great place for a party," Holly Murdick said. "We can have an old-fashioned New Year's!"

They were low enough now to look directly at the buildings without using the ground-screen. They had probably been regarded as towers when they were built, but they were not very old — not much older than O-Zone itself. They might have been finished just before O-Zone was declared a Prohibited Area. It was possible they had never been occupied. There were no signs of use, only of weather and neglect, and the effects of boisterous foliage. The brickwork was spotted with white lichens, and the empty blue-tiled swimming pool was cracked. The ornamental garden on the south terrace was overgrown in a strangely symmetrical way — the azaleas and junipers bursting from the edges, and lengths of red-leafed vines spilling into the pool. The thick untended trees had the contours of broccoli.

Sumacs and stinkweed had erupted through the main driveway, but Hooper followed it down to the main road— there was a structure he wanted to shoot, he said. It was a gatehouse, and beside it a large flat slab of stone with letters cut into it.

"It's got a name," he said.

The sign said "FIREHILLS", and beneath that, "Residents Only."

"Guess that means us," someone said.

2

They were not ordinary travelers; they were wealthy, they were city people, they were Owners. They had a passion for protection. There was no one here, there had been no one here for years, there could be no intruders, because O-Zone was prohibited and empty: it was on that basis that they had planned this New Year's trip. But their habit of security was so strong that they began laying out soft wires and alarms as soon as they hit the ground.

Hooper had spun his rotor down beside the stacked buildings on the hill — he saw that the plaza shelf would both hide them and give them a view of the surrounding countryside. Then the rest of them rifled in, and on the ground the rotors had the appearance of spiders — black bulgy bodies and pop-eyes and fangy jaws and slender bow legs.

"— lick this into shape," Hooper was saying as he paced on the terrace in full sunshine. "We'll be okay here" — but he went on fussing.

Even before the last rotor was unpacked Hooper had hoisted the power supply and set up the first eye. The seven remaining eyes were installed immediately after, and it was only then that the travelers felt safe.

Each eye was a multifaceted ball on a stalk, and any movement it detected caused a blink that tripped a signal and activated a beam. It set a tape going and made a sound-bite of everything it stunned. The soft wire was a separate system with its own lethal beam. These systems were powered by the energy cube on the roof — and it was put there not for the stronger rays of the sun or the absence of shadows, but because it was out of reach of any intruder. When the beams were fixed and the cameras positioned and all the circuits in working order, the travelers began to claim various rooms in Firehills for themselves.

They did not question the effort and expense involved in wiring the place. It did not matter that it took them longer to secure the area than it had for them to fly from New York. It was a ponderous instinct. They carried out the job efficiently, following a diagram provided by Fisher's computer — not only because Fizzy was the most intelligent of the travelers or because he had redesigned the security unit on their tower at Coldharbor, but because he was the most fearful of them and the one most likely to provide a complete profile of the weak spots in Firehills.

"Aren't you overdoing it a little, Fizz?" Hardy said as Fisher printed the design for a new circuit and prepared to bring it to Hooper.

"The system's specified on the pass," Fisher said in his quacking voice. "All overnight landings have to be secured!"

"But this is O-Zone."

"All the more reason!"

The rest of them worked in their masks, saying very little, taking orders from Hooper, who had not stopped talking.

"Let's give ourselves a big area," he said. "It'll take longer but it'll be worth it. We'll have some space to scratch in. And we can go for a hike afterward — on foot. You like hikes and outings, don't you, Fizzy?"

"Less than four hours of sunlight left," Fisher said. He was still agitated from the flight; the computer work had not soothed him. "Sunset is at seventeen-twenty-nine."

"Afraid of the dark?" Hooper said.

"Porker!" Fisher cried. "Herbert!"

The Murdicks and the Eubanks carried equipment, looking up from time to time to marvel at the place — at their good luck in having been granted permission to come here.

"Did you see the birds? Woodpeckers and mourning doves. And Willis says there's wild turkeys around. Isn't this something special?"

"Rinka saw some butterflies. We haven't seen butterflies in ages."

"Wouldn't you just love to pick some of those flowers? Only it's forbidden." This was Holly Murdick speaking. She made a face, "They could make you real sick. They could cripple you. You could grow a hump."

"Listen. Everything's got a different noise here — even the trees."

The whispers continued — the travelers were both nervous and grateful. One of the traits they shared was an alertness for the slightest sound, because a noise so often meant danger. It did not matter that they had been told that no other human beings existed here. Their suspicion and fear had given them an unsleeping habit of stealth. They were like certain timid animals in the watchful way they pricked up their ears and prepared their site; and even after it was wired and the whole of the exterior secured, they did not relax. Beneath their most easygoing expression was a twitch of attention. They listened as if with cats' whiskers, and in their soundest sleep was a monitoring throb that kept them awake to danger. They felt stupid rather than vulnerable, for they knew how dependent they were on their electronic equipment — their systems and devices were capable of spotting things they could never see.

This was proved only minutes after the circuit was complete. They heard a bleep and at the same time the snap of the light switch and a brief camera whine just beyond the area where the rotors were parked.

"Get down!" Hardy said.

They dropped to their knees, then forward onto their hands and elbows, turning their masks sideways to see.

"I knew this whole trip was a mistake," Barry Eubank said. "We didn't have to come all this way to get hurt."

"Be quiet, Dad," his wife whispered, embarrassed by the man's whimpering. "It's probably nothing."

"I've got irons," Willis Murdick said. "I'll burn down the first thing that moves."

"Don't burn me, Murdick — I'm moving," Hooper said, and hurried toward the activated eye. He kept his head down and his weapon forward.

Fisher lay against the stone surface of the plaza shelf. He was squinting and speechless with fear.

Hooper then trotted heavily back, grinning through his faceplate. He tonged a dead thing out of a bag and spread it on the stone surface. It lay like soft gray fruit with bad flesh and dark bruises. Moura's hands were over her faceplate and she had gone off the air.

"You know she hates rats," Hardy said. "Why are you such a fool, Hoop?"

"Squirrel," Hooper said. "And not any old squirrel."

Fisher raised his mask and angled it so that he could see. It was not large—"Eighteen centimeters," he said — and it had been burned on the beam: the singe mark was printed on its spine. It was still whole. It was skinny and strangely deformed. It had a stumpy tail, and its brain lay outside its skull, encased in a sac of membrane.

"It's a mutant," Fisher said.

"Ain't that good news?" Hooper said, and squeezed the thing with his tongs, making its eyes bulge.

"He means," Fisher said, "we won't find any people here. Not even Roaches or Trolls. They wouldn't have lived through the heavy doses of rads."

"Or their brains might have burst out of their heads," Holly Murdick said.

"They couldn't survive with undeveloped crania," Fisher said. "So that's a stupid thing to say."

"It's a joke, sweetie," Holly said quietly, and kissed her faceplate at him.

"I don't think jokes are funny." Fisher stared at her with cold eyes, then pushed the squirrel into Hooper's bag and sealed it. He said, "I'm keeping this specimen, to study."

There was only one job remaining before they could move in: the sealing of their rooms. Hooper had chosen the units from the lower floors of the second Firehills tower, and each group was responsible for sealing and decontaminating its own unit. It was not a matter of radioactivity — they had measured that before even cracking the canopies of their rotors and they had made sure that the level was safe. "Low-level mutagens," Fisher said, and traipsed up and down with a scanner, poking the others in the leg.

But there was dust everywhere and there was always the possibility of danger from whatever new viruses or strains of bacteria had emerged here. This was the reason they kept their masks and suits on, and wore gloves and boots. The units had to be made safe before they could be used as living quarters; before the cushions could be brought in and inflated or any of the provisions unpacked; or any of the hardware set up — the monitors, the phones, the lights, the insulated pods they called sleep capsules.

Hardy was filling the cracks in one of his rooms. His apparatus was bulky — a sort of plump fire extinguisher which he carried in a backpack. He was working the nozzle over a deep crack when he looked up and saw Hooper enter.

"I was just thinking," Hooper said dreamily, showing the gap in his teeth.

Hardy switched off his machine and shifted its weight so that he could stand straight and face his brother. "You look like you're enjoying yourself," he said.

"Why does that surprise you?"

"You have a rather frightening habit of saying, 'I've tried everything.' You're hard to impress." "This is different," Hooper said, and began pacing. "Wouldn't Dad have loved this condo? It's not that old, but this is the old world."

Hardy said, "There are probably thousands of them in O-Zone, all empty."

"It's real brick, you know. This stone wasn't poured. There's even wood in some of the rooms. I mean, actual lumber — not this superior sawdust we get in New York. The Murdicks don't like it! They're putting up a bubble outside. Nice and new. You know Willis. And he claims he's got some special food for us."

Hooper was walking around the room — stepping over Fisher as he did so — and rapping on the walls and windows, testing their strength in an admiring way.

"When I dream about buildings, I dream about things like this — old empty towers in a green wilderness. A big sky and no wires."

But Hardy was puzzled by his brother's sour tone of voice. "Why do you sound so resentful?"

"Because of the trouble it took us to get here, and it isn't even far," Hooper said. "And we've only got a forty-eight-hour pass, and then it's back to Coldharbor. That's not fair."

"I'll never get another permit if we break the rules."

Hooper glanced at Fisher, who was injecting the squirrel through the transparent bag, and then showing his teeth at the dead thing as if he had been contradicted.

"Besides," Hardy said, "it's probably not even safe here."

"That's good news. Mutagens, right, Fizz? That'll keep this place in shape."

He started to leave, then paused and returned.

"It's amazing what happens to a place if you leave it alone," Hooper said. "It just goes its own way. It stays alive. It grows. It gets better!" He smiled and looked wildly around and said, "There must be people like that. Do you suppose there are? That were left alone? Innocent friendly little forest people? I'd like to see one with her face pressed against the window, I'd be grateful for her, she'd be grateful for me— that's love, Fizzy."

"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."

"You'd need a torch. It's armored fiber."

"Skells have torches. Most aliens have torches!"

"There's no aliens here," Hardy said. "There's no one here but us."

The others had begun to listen, and after Hardy spoke, a silence fell. They were unused to such silences: this one was riotous with insects and birds and the papery swish of leaves.

"So who's for a hike?" Hooper said.

And the silence continued. It was a vigilant pause, as the travelers looked outward from what they had begun to call their camp — beyond the security apparatus, the cameras, the soft wires and beams and the eyes on stalks and the masses of positioned lights. They looked out at the shaggy yellow-green woods that surrounded them. The road was overgrown, there was no path, a building just below the terrace was split; there were insect mutters and the chirps of birds — and mewing doves, and the soft chattering rap of a woodpecker. Overhead, a turkey vulture circled slowly like a severed kite. They were all thinking: Where are we?

"We'll just walk a few clicks," Hooper said, taunting gently. "Who's for some fresh air?"

They murmured at the absurdity of it; they were all wearing masks and breathing Assisted Air.

Hardy said, "We should make the most of the daylight. Establish some kind of satellite link. Keep in touch. Get Fizzy's mainframe working. It gets dark here."

"Really dark," Barry said.

"Imagine that," Rinka said, and still in her flat anxious voice, "That's going to be different."

The thought of darkness brought to them a foretaste of blindness, an intimation of terror. It was never dark in their tower at Coldharbor, and they were used to the skylights of New York and some streets, lit from below. It was the simplest fact of life: light was safety and darkness danger.

"We won't be able to see a thing," Holly said, anticipating the night. "I'm not going."

Willis Murdick said, "I've got some lights in my bubble we could bring. You don't even have to carry them — they fit over your helmet."

Moura said, "We don't have any kind of map."

"This is a hike," Hooper said. "It's not an expedition. Just a stroll down the street."

"I don't stroll down the street in New York," Holly said. "Why should I do it here?"

"Anyway," Fisher said, "there's no street here."

"Through the trees," Hooper said.

"There's no path," Barry said.

"We'll make one," Hooper said, but it sounded like a hollow promise. He saw there was no enthusiasm for the walk— indeed, he sensed a degree of fear among them. They were new here, and not yet accustomed to the light and sound of the empty place; he knew the dusk and the darkness would be much worse for them.

"I've got just the thing," Willis said, and brought out a long flat object from a tube. "Ever seen one? A chain-sword? For bushwhacking?"

He also had a thick helmet and mask, he said, and thigh boots, and a new suit of armored fiber. "What's the point of coming to a place like this if you haven't got the hardware?" He salivated and swallowed noisily as he described each new thing. They were the best, he said — based on the most advanced research, made with new substances, developed in outer space, and tested on the moon and in orbital stations. He kept swallowing, as if he were tasting something unusual and splendid. He said his chain-sword had an extension that gave it a meter-long blade.

"There's your blade," he said, shooting it to its full length. "And there's your cutting edge. Oh, sure, your whole edge is heated and high-speed."

He was chomping with satisfaction inside his mask.

"What's that fixture?" Hooper said, tapping a ring and collar at the front of Murdick's faceplate. "Is that going to be useful on our hike?"

"It's a suckhole," Murdick said.

"Your husband is such a total tool!" Fisher said to Holly.

"It's for the food I brought," Murdick said. "You're all going to need suckholes. But don't worry. I've got suckholes and adapters for everyone. You just snap 'em on your faceplate."

"What about our hike?" Hooper said.

The eight travelers in their suits and masks tried to look important and preoccupied, but they were silent, they had no answer: they shifted uneasily on the terrace, avoiding each other's gazes, and glancing out at the woods. The light seemed to be draining out of the trees, leaving a blackening glow in the thickness of ragged boughs.

"What if we trip and fall down?" Barry Eubank said. "I know we're alone here, but that's not it. You could rip a suit you could crack a mask. You could get hurt pretty bad out there."

The others had turned to see what Hooper's reaction would be. Hooper said nothing. The sun dazzled against his faceplate. So the travelers looked out again, past the security apparatus; and again their odd movements and glances seemed dominated by the thought of danger.

Slowly Holly said, "That could be awful in the dark."

"We can't pick the flowers, we can't drink the water, we can't eat the fruit or cut any branches," Moura said. "And you want to hike it, Hooper?"

"It seems to be getting dark already," Rinka said.

It was only a lumpy pillow of cloud passing across the sun, but it left a chill on them with its brief shadow of darkness.

"Let's have this damned party and then get out of here," Barry said.

They were timid, Hooper saw, and even he had become unsure. They still stood together in their expensive masks and suits, facing the ragged trees and looking for openings or the malevolent eyes of animals. They saw nothing but the irregular wall of woods, so dense there could only be more of the same behind it. They split up again, pretending to be busy, but after a while most of them had returned to the edge of the terrace and paced along the perimeter wire — using their security beam as the margin of their promenade.

They looked outward at O-Zone as if looking offshore. They studied the indecipherable shakings of the trees. Moura spoke suddenly, as if saying out loud what everyone had been thinking. It really was like looking at the sea, she said — the rough waves and changing colors. "We've got no idea at all about what's underneath it!"

"Don't be stupid," Fisher said. "Murdick's got sensors and pods with thermal imaging!"

"What does that mean, Fizzy?"

"It means you can see anything in those bushes," the boy said. "The porker doesn't even know what thermal imaging is!"

But Moura was staring at him.

"Are you going, then?"

Fisher said nothing. There was only the swish and scrape of his trouser legs rubbing as he walked across the terrace. And then from inside Firehills came a reply — a loud quack of anger.

Night came down and everyone said wasn't it a good thing they hadn't gone with Hooper on his hike?

Moura Allbright and Rinka Eubank stayed outside at the edge of their lighted island and stared into the dark. The night had a blackness of unusual depth. It seemed bottomless and mocking, and they were alarmed by the rising tide of night noise — the scratch of insects, the smash of leafy boughs, and was that the wind? And above all this murk and babble was the starlight — a whole sky of sandgrains. It had been so long since either of the women had seen this — they lived under a starless sky in New York.

"Aren't they pretty?" Rinka said.

Moura agreed. But there was no comfort in stars. Their cold light was deadened by distance. She thought how stars only made her feel more isolated and made this darkness thicker.

Rinka said, "Do you remember the accident?"

"The incident?" Moura said. "Not really."

"All that reassuring talk scared the hell out of me," Rinka said. "And then the rumors of sabotage? The evacuation that went wrong? The casualties that were supposedly smuggled out and buried in mass graves? The panic, the blame—"

"My marriage was awful then," Moura said. "All I remember was that."

"They were putting nuclear waste in caves! Just stuffing it in and hoping for the best! No one knew!"

"Lots of people knew," Moura said. "I thought the whole country was destroyed. And then I realized it was just a corner of Missouri, and they were putting a fence around it and giving it a new name. I had other things on my mind."

She turned to face the darkness, to ease her memory, to say more. But the past was a darkened forest like this; she remembered and was discouraged. What did the world matter if you were lonely and sad? Cylinders of nuclear waste coming apart and bursting through the mouths of caves and seeping into creeks and rivers — that did not seem such a catastrophe. It was a local matter. You decided not to go there — as if anyone wanted to! They chose those caves because no one really cared. But even if it had been different and much worse — the world splitting into fragments — you didn't think of the world, you thought of yourself and your own life and grew lonelier and sadder, because there was no one else.

Rinka saw that she had stumbled into a private area of Moura's life. It was so odd to find someone who didn't have an opinion about O-Zone and how it had got that way!

"You always think a place like this is going to be exciting until you get here, and then it's usually either boring or dangerous. This is both! How is that possible?"

Moura was listening to her with a fixed expression — these were the times when she was glad to be wearing a mask; you just made encouraging noises into your mike and let people go on talking. But Rinka was asking another question.

"Did you?" she was saying. "Did you really want to come here?"

"No," Moura said.

She was thinking of the nightfall. She had watched it and worried. It was as if they had been swallowed by an animal and were inside, in the darkness of the beast.

"Who's that?" Moura said, seeing a big shadow move away from the building.

"It's Fizzy."

He looked so strange — she wanted to say so. But how could she say anything about Fizzy without making it a comment on herself? She went inside with Rinka, to avoid having to talk to her son.

Fisher too felt lost in the darkness. This night made him feel weak and naked. He complained, saying he was hungry — the complaint easing his fear somewhat; but still he was afraid, and he limped, dragging one boot — it was timidity, he was not hurt. He shouted, much too loudly, "I whacked my heel!" He stayed under the lights, and meant to attach himself to anyone who came near.

He saw Hooper and struggled over to him, and then he saw the others, just around the corner of the building, at the perimeter beam, standing like people in a foundering ship, searching the dark ocean for a light or a glimpse of a narrow beach.

Fisher wanted a friend now — Hooper or anyone, even Murdick, whom he disliked: even Murdick would do. He was drowning here in this darkness. He wanted reassurance, he attempted conversation. But he was clumsy. He did not know how to begin.

He gasped at Hooper and began in the worst way, saying, "Why don't you have a woman?"

Hooper thought of Fisher as a supermoron, for his brains and his bad manners. But he knew the reason for the boy's awkwardness now, in this place: he was afraid, he needed human company, he had intended a friendly question.

Hooper said, "You can help me find one."

The boy blinked. He had not expected that. He tried again, bumping against Hooper and kicking his uncle in the shins.

"What's your problem?"

He was still trying to be friendly!

"I lack inexperience," Hooper said, and laughed at the boy's bafflement. "I don't want anything!"

There was a sudden screech of fabric as Fisher turned, working his arms against his noisy suit, and pulled his too-heavy boot aside.

"Fizzy, that's a big problem!"

And Hooper was thinking that there was something so pathetic in the boy's being overdressed — all those clothes were so sad. Just then there was a flash — another creature caught and killed on the beam.

"It's a mutant," Fisher said. "Yellow stripes. . and what a smell! It's actually getting into my air!"

"It's a skunk/' Hooper said. Fizzy had never seen one. Never smelled one. And he called out, "Another party guest!"

Hooper looked around the terrace, hoping that someone else had heard and would find it funny. But the rest of the travelers were inside — it had gone dark. The heavy black sky had slipped down against the orange bar of sunset and narrowed it to a red line and squeezed it into the far-off hills. Then he was alone with the boy, each of them pretending he was not frightened.

3

Even with the lights on it seemed dark to them in

the second-floor unit that Hooper had sealed for the party. Perhaps it was too big for their lamp fixtures — it was a pair of long rooms with a balcony (one of those galleries shaped like pulled-out drawers). A hundred bright bristly insects sucked and fluttered at the windows.

Hooper was attracted to the large windows. He glided over like a fish in a glass tank and put his mask against it.

"Look," he said, because his brother had followed him. "People rave about visiting orbital stations and leasing time in space vehicles. This is much better."

"The weather's hurt this place."

"You can do something about that," Hooper said. "You're the landscaper."

Hardy hated Hooper joking about his job at Asfalt, especially as he had made it rain in a dozen countries. And it was a potential contract at Asfalt that allowed him this Access Pass to O-Zone. But this was a party; he didn't want to spoil the mood by contradicting his brother — anyway, Hooper would accuse him of being oversensitive.

"I don't think I see the same things as you, Hoop."

The dark helped, Hooper thought. He saw great soft hills and hidden places, and he imagined being among them, possessing them and burying himself there. It was not the hard lighted place that New York had become. This was a murmuring darkness. It gave him hope until he remembered he would be alone here.

"I could be happy here," Hooper said somewhat defiantly.

"You used to say that you could be happy in space."

"You have to return from space."

Hardy said nothing more. His brother was so impulsive— saying something one day with utter conviction, and regretting it the next, feeling condemned by it, and hating all his moods as soon as they left him. He yelled in fury when he remembered his contradictions, and he was bitterly hurt when he was reminded of them. It was in the end so embarrassing to be that fickle. What did he really want?

It was as if at these black windows they were flying blind through space. They were falling but could not tell how fast. It excited and frightened them — it was total eclipse. And the paradox was the noise. They had naively expected the darkness to be silent. The insects and the surfy noise of trees woke old memories in them — longings and fears and the hopes of early childhood. Hooper thought of the happiness he had always wanted, and Hardy the happiness he had never believed in — he knew that Hooper had not really grown up, or at least had not stopped hoping, which meant the same thing. How was it that Hooper, so much more battered, could still be so hopeful?

"I'd like to buy this place," Hooper said at last.

"This condo — Firehills?"

"No" — and Hooper's teeth flashed at the suckhole Mur-dick had fitted to his mask. He seemed to be addressing the black territory that lay behind the balcony. "I want to buy O-Zone."

"You're one of the few people I know who could probably raise the cash," Hardy said. "But it's not for sale. It's all Federal property now, and I think the Feds have other plans."

"I'll buy the Feds," Hooper said.

Was he laughing? He was certainly happier and more animated than Hardy had seen him for a long time. He had been whistling ever since they had landed here.

"I already own some Feds!" Hooper said. "Threw some money at them."

While they had been talking the guests had arrived and taken seats with their backs to the glaring lights. The travelers were used to brighter, safer-seeming rooms — this was a temporary shelter, a camping trip! — and so they glanced sharply whenever a shadow jumped on the wall.

This play of broken silhouettes and crow patterns distracted them and made them nervous and talkative. It reminded the Eubanks of a landing they had once made in Africa, when the lights had failed in the Earthworks colony on the coast. And the Murdicks said they had passed a night like this in a town in California, years ago — they'd never forget it. "I thought we were goners."

"It reminds me of being small," Moura said. "This is how I felt when I was about five. I was always looking at the walls of my room and thinking: What's going to happen next?"

"I wish you hadn't said that," Rinka said.

"It doesn't remind me of anything," Hooper said. "That's what I like about it."

Holly said the lights were awful but at least the sputter of the quartz core drowned some of the nighttime cackle—"All them birds," she said, meaning the insects.

Each person had brought a cushion, and most of them had changed into a different suit — they were one-piece flight suits, which were so closely fitted the air-conditioning tubes stuck out like veins along the legs and arms. No part of the body was exposed: they wore gloves and soft boots and masks — each mask had been adapted for eating with one of Murdick's suckholes.

"I'm running the whole commissary," he had explained. The Murdicks had matching helmet-masks, and Holly's large faceplate showed that she was wearing makeup — stripes on her cheeks and around her eyes and the fashionable stripes that continued over her ears and hair. Moura wore a custom-made mask that had been modeled on her pretty face — she thought the suckhole (why had Murdick been so insistent on them?) rather spoiled the effect. Hardy's mask had been issued to him by Asfalt; it had a company bleeper and was equipped with signaling and dust-sensitive devices. Fisher wore a video mask, and he was engaged in watching some-

thing on it, which was why he had not said a word. Most of the radio apparatus was in the dome of Hooper's helmet; but all the masks had radios — the party guests communicated by radio on an open circuit that allowed them to hear what everyone was saying, much as if they were sitting in a room and not wearing masks.

They kept their masks on. It was not because of the radiation level — the counter in this sealed unit was registering less than fifty rems — but rather so that they could see and hear better. Their breathing was improved, their Assisted Air was better than whatever stuff was trapped in this room; and if the roof fell in — Murdick said that it had happened before in places like this — they stood a good chance of surviving it.

"I'd love to get these clothes off," Holly said. She squirmed in her suit and wagged her helmet. "Next time let's choose somewhere safe. Then we could walk around naked."

"Barry saw a naked woman shopping in New York the other day," Rinka said. "It's supposed to be very fashionable."

"She was obviously an Owner," Barry said.

"Sure," Hooper said. "You could tell by her tail."

"By her mask," Barry said. "And she wasn't really naked. She was sort of painted. Body makeup, that kind of thing. The idea is to look like a Starkie."

"That could be dangerous — that's what I tell Holly," Willis Murdick said. "Someone might take her for a Starkie. She could get burned."

Holly was insulted, but kept her temper and said sourly, "As if anyone would take me for a Starkie."

"Some of them are pretty nice-looking," Hooper said.

"I know Willis hunts them," Holly said. "And I can understand why people burn them. But if you find them 'pretty nice-looking' I think you're sick and perverted."

Hooper's big mocking face came up against his faceplate— his white stumpy teeth with the wide space between the two front ones, and the bat ears trembling on his helmet.

"Sex with a different person is different sex," he said. "It stimulates a different part of your brain and gives you slightly different desires. You make discoveries. When I say 'you' I mean me."

"But an alien?" Willis Murdick said. "You're risking diseases!"

"Don't believe that propaganda. They blame everything on aliens. Hey, some of them are pretty nice-looking! Better than flesh-pups. I've had flesh-pups!"

Holly had started to smile. "What do you do with a flesh-pup?"

"You butter her and fuck her. Or him. With a flesh-pup you can hardly tell the difference." He turned from Holly and looked around the room. "You're all shocked, because I just reminded you that you're like me. It's like the song — I'm saying what you're thinking! You women are thinking: Let's get disgusting. . let's have a splash party. And—"

Barry Eubank and Willis were whinnying inside their masks, as Hooper caught them with the flash of his faceplate.

"— and you men are thinking: I like the way your tits jiggle — let me stuff them into my mouth. If only I could tip you onto your back and receive the gift of your young body!"

"When the conversation takes this sort of turn," Moura said, "I always figure it must be time to eat."

The travelers had arranged their cushions in a circle; in the center was a low wooden table that the Eubanks had found in their unit. Murdick said that a table — especially this one— was not required for the dinner; but it was a solid old-fashioned oak table, and everyone else said that it added to the old-time atmosphere of the New Year's party. They were alone, in a place that was prohibited and remote, and the thick lovely tabletop with its dents and dark scratches seemed somehow appropriate.

Willis Murdick had broken the seal on a crate stenciled "Provisions," and unzipped the inner bag, where there were tubes lying in small bundles. The tubes were narrow, the size of soft air bottles. He had passed them around and urged the others to eat.

"Your wife doesn't like my food," he was saying now to Hardy.

Before Hardy could reply, Moura said, "I like it. I just wish I didn't have to squirt it into my mask in order to eat it."

"You don't squirt it, you squeeze it — pressure means everything with space food. And use your suckhole — didn't I give you one?"

"This food was designed for the space program," Hooper said. "Years of research went into this meal. That tube of protein cream you're holding probably cost a million bucks to develop — and you just strangle it and sneer at it."

Moura could not tell whether Hooper was joking — often, at his most obsessed, when he harangued them, the effect was comic. But she said nothing. He was dangerous when he was angry — not physically dangerous, but abusive and growly. Just a moment ago Holly, who had obviously been thrilled by his talk of sex, whispered, "Hooper, sometimes I like your insane notions," and his face had darkened and he had made a dog noise at her.

And he could sound self-mocking when he was being serious.

"I'd like to take something of this away with me," he had said.

"This toothpasty food?"

"No," he roared. "O-Zone!"

Murdick was sorting out more tubes — of pulverized fruit, of nonalcoholic wine, of noodle gluten. "This one's called 'Celebration Seafood,'" and he read the contents on the label and showed how to fit the nozzle over the suckhole.

"Hollandaise whitefish! Shrimp paste! Crab strings!" Hooper said, passing the tubes around. "Here's some oyster pellets and textured lobster — just squeeze this little bottle and pretend you've got your face in a lobster claw. Here's some rice fiber, here's some meat fabric."

"Baby food," Hardy said. "I'd rather be fed intravenously than eat this goop."

"Fizzy hasn't eaten anything," Moura said.

"Fizzy's watching a video in his mask."

"If I can't have a jelly sandwich I'm not eating!" Fisher said — but he had not moved, he was still watching something on his video mask, his voice had come out of his ears.

"Wonder boy needs a swift kick," Barry Eubank said, and looked straight at Moura, as if defying her to respond.

Moura was not ashamed of herself for keeping silent. She felt a certain exhilaration when she heard the boy criticized; it was so much worse when he was praised. Praise angered him, in any case, and criticism merely made him laugh — that terrible braying that upset her more than tears.

"This is a memorable meal," Murdick said. He compressed his lips in gratitude and peered through his faceplate, looking delighted in a pious way. "We've got our vitamins, we've got our bulk, our fiber, and our taste. The product is easy to digest and no problem with contamination. This product is not going to repeat on us. And no impurities."

More out of loyalty than conviction, Holly said, "I agree. We ought to eat like this back in New York — we'd be a whole lot happier and we'd live longer."

"I think I could be happy without forcing this parrot shit down my gullet," Hooper said.

"It's a great product — I know the wholesaler," Murdick was saying. "A friend of mine" — and he brought a tube of crab strings to his mask, screwed the nozzle into his suckhole with a half-turn, then squeezed and swallowed—"good friend of mine, would be mighty pleased to be eating this. That man has been in space for years, rehydrating his food."

Murdick saw that he was being stared at.

"When I heard we were getting permission to come to O-Zone I said, 'We're not having any rehydration! This is going to be deep-space conditions! Forget New Year's — this is a real mission!'"

"Try the meat butter, Barry," Holly said, passing a tube to him.

"'Fortified,'" Hooper said, reading a label, and feeling the words themselves were satire enough. "'Spinach sauce in a matrix of emulsified yeast portions.'" When no one responded, he said softly, "Mother of Christ. This food is a nightmare."

"And it's all got weaving in it," Murdick was saying. "It's great for the guts. Aren't you having a good time?"

They said they were — even Hooper said so, and Moura agreed. It seemed petty to spoil Murdick's surprise treat. This party was very unusual, they knew. They were the first travelers to come here since the sealing and naming of O-Zone — and so they felt like explorers and pretended to be roughing it in the harshly lighted room of this empty building. The food was silly, but it did not alter their mood, which was one of celebration and discovery. They felt brave, being here. It was as if they had come to a distant and inhospitable planet — they would not have felt stranger or more exuberant in space. Talking about it was one thing, and the food. . well, the food was cranky; but the meal was the important thing, all of them seated and eating it together in this place, all the travelers enacting this old ritual.

Moura tried to put this into words. But she could see that it was unnecessary to say it — they shared the feeling, they were moved.

"Say something, Fizzy."

Hooper tried to get the boy's attention.

Fisher did not reply. He had been sitting cross-legged, but he had tipped himself onto his back, and he lay there with his knees up and nodding inside his mask and muttering barely audible sounds — the murmurs that crept out of the ears of his mask.

"He's still watching his loop," Moura said. She tapped on his mask, but he did not respond.

Barry said, "I used to watch porno with those things. I just locked myself in my helmet and drooled. Drove my parents crazy!"

"It's probably theoretical physics," Hardy said. "With Fizzy it usually is."

"Bremstrahlung!" Fisher's sudden quack — that odd word — startled them.

"I think he's telling us something."

"Give him air, brother," Hooper said. "I think your son's fading on us."

The quack came again. "Electromagnetic radiation!" the boy said. "Decelerating subatomic particles in an electrical field of an atomic nucleus. Lining up the equation!" He un-clamped his video mask, but left his faceplate in place.

They stared at his pink puzzled face — he was still damp from concentration.

"Go shit in your suit," he said to no one in particular.

They ignored this. He was freaky. He was only fifteen! Why should they let him worry them? He was so strange he screamed at insects, and he had mistaken a very ordinary skunk for a mutant — so Hooper had wheezily whispered to them.

Fizzy's abuse was no more than a childish nuisance. Murdick told him to grow up, "Wonder boy," Barry said. Hooper smiled and said, "Supermoron." And they went on congratulating themselves at their success in having made camp in this prohibited place. We're actually in O-Zone, they kept saying.

"Who got you here?" Fisher said. "Who's navigator?"

Now they were submerged in darkness — they could see it packed against the windows, like fathoms of dangerous water, a wild ocean in which they lay buried. The night outside was still noisy, and their lights seemed crude to them. But they felt bold — they were pioneers.

"This is paradise," Hooper said.

That was just about right, Moura thought, because paradise was difficult — not a settled area, but something wild and empty. Beautiful, yes, but paradise was also a place where you had to figure things out for yourself, and where you might also fail.

"This friend of yours," Barry said to Willis. "You say he's been in space for years?"

"Right. But I agree with Hooper. I wouldn't trade this for anything."

"There are more risks here," Fisher said. He had not put his video mask back on. He sat holding it and regarding them contemptuously through his faceplate. "Those space stations are controlled environments, and there's no Roaches on the moon. But a place like O-Zone hasn't been properly studied — or if it has, that data's all classified. There's no documentation that I could find — only a few weather reports and some soil samples. I think it's full of freaks and mutations. Listen, we found one! And there's probably seepage. Half of O-Zone is underground anyway — caves and burrows, and those Federal caverns where they stored that nuclear garbage. How do we know there isn't more of that slush leaking into these collapsed roads that look like riverbeds? There's no maps! You'd get nowhere in a ground vehicle! This is more dangerous than space!"

"Tell the Pilgrims that," Barry said.

"If you set one of those amateur astronauts down here, he'd think he'd made it into the program," Fisher said. "He'd think he was on a hot planet."

"I am so sick of those people and their rocket talk," Holly said.

Moura said, "The security guard in our tower is a Pilgrim. Only he calls himself a Starling. Captain Jennix. He's very secretive."

"He's a complete porker," Fisher said. "He reads those stupid science-fiction books that all of them read. He believes them! You can see him throbbing!"

"Have you actually talked to him?" Rinka asked.

"Yes," Moura said. "I think he confided in me because he wanted to get some information from Hardy. I wanted to laugh! How can they actually believe they'll be able to settle on the moon — or is it Mars?"

"It's platforms in geostationary orbit," Fisher said. "The porkers."

"They're welcome to all of them," Hooper said. "And the Roaches can have New York, and the Trolls have my permission to infest California, and the Starkies can squat wherever they want. O-Zone is for me."

Barry said, "I know what you mean. I've felt less secure in New York. That night we had that power failure on the bridges. That was worse than this."

"Is this bad?" Holly said.

"I mean, it was dark," Barry said.

Hardy said, "I remember when I used to like the dark."

"Hearing you say that gives me the creeps," Rinka said.

"Relax! Willis has a chain-sword!" Hooper said. "He can slash his way to freedom!"

Sensing that he was being mocked, Murdick said, "I've got some irons, too. And I know how to use them."

His defiant tone brought a silence to the room, and the others sat there, among the jumbled tubes of food, with a buzzing in their earpieces. That was the terrible thing about the talking masks, Moura thought: everyone could hear you swallowing and gulping and pretending not to be frightened.

"For example, that power failure on the bridges," Murdick said. "I didn't care. I was in a rotor — I'm not saying who it belonged to. We burned over a hundred Roaches that night. They were hanging on the bridges. I could show you a tape of it, if you don't believe me."

Fisher said, "Moura wouldn't let me go out that night."

Murdick grinned at him and said, "I wasn't scared. I had irons. And the whole bottom of my rotor was plated with titanium. I might as well tell you — it was a gunship."

"These horror stories are making me hungry," Hooper said. "I wish we had some real food. Next time let's bring pizzas."

No one was listening to him; no one responded. The attention was on Murdick, who seemed both aggressive and anxious, all his talk of aliens and killing. Why were such stories always told by isolated people huddled in a shadowy room?

"If for some reason we couldn't get our rotors off the ground…" Barry was saying. Then he stopped and looked at the window. He could not see anything beyond the black glass. "I suppose we'd be in pretty rough shape here."

Hardy said, "There's Red Zone Rescue at the perimeter."

"They'd have to find us first."

Murdick said, "What's to prevent us from getting our rotors off the ground?"

"Holes in them," Rinka said. "Some friends of ours took a trip in that bad zone in California outside L.A. — Landslip, where they had the quake. They didn't know there were aliens around, some kind of Troll territory, and the aliens were all having a war or something. They had three rotors— real expensive ones — and every single machine was damaged. Holes punched in them. Seems the Trolls had got hold of some shit-guns. Luckily, these friends of ours were very well-armed, but if they hadn't been, and if they hadn't burned about twenty of those Trolls, they would have been in serious trouble."

Murdick said, "When people stop coming to places like this it'll be the end. This isn't far — it's a mental distance. You're just worrying about the dangers. And there was that stupid campaign a few years ago to completely deactivate O-Zone. Declare it a wilderness area, the cowards said. But what's the point in staying home in a sealed city and turning the rest of the planet over to the animals? Eventually you'll have animals scratching on your front door."

"So you want to activate O-Zone?" Rinka said. Before Murdick could speak, Hooper said, "No, leave it alone. It's probably the only empty place on earth. The last chance!"

"You're just saying that because you can't buy it," Hardy said.

"Tell us your plans for O-Zone," Hooper said, and smiled as Hardy fell silent.

Holly was objecting at the other side of the table. "I wouldn't live in a place like this," she said. "A woman in my tower said she knew someone who got deformed after living on a margin of a waste dump. It was in Europe somewhere. She grew a hump."

When she finished speaking, Fisher began jeering. His noisy pleasureless laugh was a nagging noise in everyone's earpiece.

"What is wrong with this kid?" Holly said. Fisher's ear-scraping mockery stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The boy turned his big mask on Holly and said, "What you just said isn't true. And if a thing isn't true, it's stupid."

Holly tried to dispute this, but Hooper interrupted her, saying, "As usual there is a sort of crude integrity in what our supermoron says. There are too many superstitions about places like O-Zone."

"There's too many laws," Murdick said. "We had to wait years for permission to fly here, even though we've got the right protective gear and all the food. I think we're hampered by regulations."

"I think we should be grateful for what we have," Hardy said. "We're lucky to have safe cities and secure corridors. Who has the money to activate zones like this? They're pretty, but they're uneconomic and probably unsafe. There's contamination — everything would have to be sealed, and food and water would have to be flown in. Water!"

"They shoot water to the moon," Hooper said. "And your company got us under the wire, so they must have some interest in an uneconomic wasteland like this."

Hardy did not reply to Hooper, and yet he kept talking. "Think of the security problems," he said. "It's impossible to travel on the ground, and there are no maps. The high-risk areas haven't been pinpointed. Look at us — we hardly dare leave the building!"

"We don't know what's out there," Holly said.

"There's nothing out there!" Hooper said.

Hardy said, "They've tried to activate places like this before. They've had an easier time on the moon than in some contaminated zones on earth."

"Because imaginary dangers are much worse than real ones," Moura said.

"And there's no Skells on the moon."

Hooper said, "There's no Skells here! We're alone—"

There was a little whimper from Rinka — she was laughing. She said, "This has got to be the strangest New Year's Eve party ever held."

They felt this was true, and that it made them singular, but it left them feeling self-conscious, too. They went silent, still sitting among the blazing lights and the shadows, with their backs to the windows. Yes, it was an accomplishment being here — something they had dreamed of. And yet they knew how timid they were in this huddle, and that they were afraid of the dark windows.

"I remember when this was Missouri."

"Who said that? This bullshuck is boring," Fisher said, "How about showing the tape?"

"We're having a conversation," Murdick said.

"We've got two hours of raw tape!"

Murdick said, "I'll bet you don't remember when this was Missouri."

Fisher crept over to Murdick and put his mask against Murdick's so that the faceplates touched. He said, "Who is that man in there?"

Unzipping a side pocket on his trouser leg, Hooper took out a cylindrical cartridge. "Here it is," he said. "The trip from Coldharbor. I'll play it at three hundred clicks an hour and you tell me when to speed and when to zoom."

Hardy handed over his own video cartridge and then hung the screen on the wall and held it steady while Hooper inserted both video cartridges into the base of the frame. It was a simple self-contained viewing apparatus that was operated by the control pistol that Hooper was fumbling out of a bag.

"Who wants to work the controls?"

"Let me do it," Fisher said.

"The kid'll jam it," Murdick said. "Give it to Hardy."

"Yah, I'll jam it — I'll jam it down your throat so far you'll be showing movies out of your bum," Fisher said, and again he pushed his faceplate against Murdick's.

"You'd better be careful, kid," Murdick said. "Don't make me crazy. I'll hand you your head. I've got irons."

"If I was as stupid as you I'd have irons too."

"You might be smart, but you've got the manners of a Roach."

"You look like a Roach."

"Beautiful irons," Murdick said, trembling as he spoke, and cracking his faceplate against Fizzy's.

"You fuck-wit."

"I've got stunners, I've got beams, I've got flechettes, I've got burp guns and shit-guns." Murdick's faceplate was clouded with steam and spittle.

"Look," Fisher said, "he's flobbing on his faceplate."

"I don't have to kill," Murdick said in a choked voice. "I can blind, I can deafen, I can sicken, I can burn — I can make you stupid!"

But Fisher had turned away from him, and facing the others, he cried, "Why isn't anyone sticking up for me!"

4

They were silenced by the tape. It began behindthem, with Hardy pointing the control pistol at the screen. The light isolated and seemed to quieten Willis Murdick — he appeared ashamed of what he had said: he looked limp and regretful in his expensive suit and mask. And Fisher seemed a little solitary and pathetic; after his squawk, no one had said a word. Then everyone was watching the screen, and video reflections streaked their faceplates and throatpieces. "There's Coldharbor," Holly said. "There's our block." New York — its deep walls, its battlements and shining towers — filled the screen and rolled past, like a cluster of castles; and the island's edge followed, the silver shimmer of the river full of daylight, and then New Jersey, and the sweep of empty streets — a Black town, a Troll town, a lightless city of aliens of some kind sinking into its own stain. Occasionally there was a flash — a dull orange smudged by smoky air. So many fires, of all kinds — random fires in the open, burning buildings, black ruins sending up trails of soot, cooking fires in settlements. For those poor people, someone said, fire was their only flamboyance.

The video was shown at a speed slower than their rapid trip, so they saw now what they had missed on their rotor's ground-screens. They saw simple features — the accumulation of snow and the icy lakes in the north; the pretty configuration of hills; the high fences and sentry posts around most farmers' fields. The pleasure of watching this videotape lay in their ability to slow it, or — using the faint grid on the screen — enlarge any part of it, any square, and bring it sharply into focus.

They asked Hardy to crank it up so they could examine the houses, and crank it again to see the people inside the windows, and their faces, their eyes, whatever they were holding in their hands. There were more plated or armored vehicles out here — and more jalopies, too. Hardy cranked them forward, and enlarged the pedestrians and the little dramas being played out beneath them as the trip progressed. They saw a human corpse on a roadside, and many dead dogs, and a house that had just caught fire, and wrecked vehicles.

They saw several mobs rippling down side streets, looking like marbles in a chute. The faces were expanded so that their expressions were readable, and their clothes, and their weapons.

"They're enjoying themselves," Hooper said.

Most of the people below were unfamiliar to them — they never saw them in New York: workers and low-grade Federals, and all the other tribal types who were known collectively as aliens. It was doubtful whether anyone down there had a valid ID, and there were certainly no Owners on the ground.

"There's a mob — that shadow in the corner."

"A Swarm—"

Murdick said that Swarm-crime was common out here: the mob surrounding and surging into a store or a house, or overwhelming a person, and then hurrying on, quarreling over its loot.

"Zoom them, Hardy. Look, they're Roaches."

"What's that in their—"

"Guns, bones — they're looters," Barry said.

"It's firewood," Hardy said, and moved even closer.

Moura said, "They're just poor people. Leave them alone, Hardy."

But he paused and gave them all a glimpse of the gaunt dusty faces and the torn clothes.

Fisher watched with his fingers on his faceplate and in his eyes a clear black light of pure horror.

There were few patches of dense population after that. Mottled woods crowded below, and then there was no one and nothing except hiding trees.

"I've hunted here," Murdick said. "It's good country."

"Good roads?" Hooper asked.

"Never went on the ground. We hunted from rotors."

In some towns there was no smoke, no lights. Perhaps they had been shut down? Or were they pretending, as some towns did, that there was no life in them, no valuables, no property at all — playing possum because of all the roaming thieves. But plowed fields showed farther on, private gardens, and towns with perimeter fences and fortress walls, and towns with main streets and white churches and ice rinks that looked as though they had never changed.

"That must be Pittsburgh," Hooper said. "See the rivers? See the walls?"

Murdick asked for the tape to be slowed in order for the others to see how there were no trees around the city. It was stark on its cliffs, as smooth and simple as a blister, with a margin of grassland around it.

"No hiding places," Murdick said. "They've got a terrific safety record here."

The tape quickened and the view tipped, the horizon rolling down below speeding clouds. They were like laundry that has twitched and blown in the sky since the beginning of time; the clouds were enormous — stretched thin and threadbare with all the beating, and now no more than gauze turning into vapor. Then it was all blue and the ground no longer visible.

"Turning south," Hardy said. "So we avoided all that traffic in the northeast corridor."

"I think it was smart going this roundabout way."

Fisher said, "It completely bent my calculations."

Holly was saying, "I know people who won't fly to Washington anymore, there's so much traffic."

They were quieted by the sight of grassland and fields and smudges of woods, and for the next fifteen minutes they watched the land pass by in an unbroken ribbon. Few vehicles were visible on the roads, and the tape was rolling too fast for them easily to identify the people. When a surface vehicle was spotted, someone shouted "Zoom!" and Hardy aimed his pistol and fired at that part of the grid; and then the vehicle rushed hugely into focus.

"There he goes, old Willy Shucker, in his four-wheel-drive toilet," Hooper said as the elderly driver of the plated car swelled on the screen. "Oh, he's been living out here for years — just him and his carcinoma."

Hearing the rotors droning, the old man looked back, in the wrong direction, not realizing they were overhead,

"No — over here!" Rinka said. "Look!"

The old man struggled with his steering wheel and his vehicle slewed left and then right.

"He's a Rocketman — a real Pilgrim. Look at those wild eyes. His ass is on the ground but his mind's in Mars. He's got his money in space vehicles, paying dues at the local space-cadet clubhouse. He definitely has room on some future launch — look at him, he's dying to leave. He's practically in orbit already. No low-level stuff, but the real whatsit—"

"Geosynchronous," Fisher said.

"You heard the boy."

"Leave him alone," Murdick said, and when Fisher looked up rattling his mask at him Murdick added, "Not you — that old guy, that Astronaut. Lay off him. Those people aren't hurting anybody. I think they're good for the program. It's the other bums I can't stand."

"What bums?"

"Aliens, blacks, prostitutes, polygamists, professional beggars, stowaways, lepers, and psychopaths." Murdick had not taken a breath. He gasped through his suckhole, then said, "Burn them down."

Moura said, "It all looks pretty normal to me," and everyone turned back to the screen.

"Foodplots," Fisher said.

Was that what they were, all these patchy right angles? Moura thought: Then I'm right. And the ground vehicles— the little beads and blobs — seemed to slip along the roadways unimpeded. A portion of the town was clearly shriveled or cut off, but other districts had a look of health — roofs and movement and the occasional flash of glass or metal. Heavy smoke was always a bad sign from below, but there was not much smoke here. Moura asked for a few close-ups and was rewarded by the sight of a dusty convoy trucking vegetables. But when she asked what could be more reassuring than a great hopper of cabbages — or were they beets? — Murdick stood up and began gabbling.

"Don't you believe it," he said. "There's danger there — it all looks different on the ground!"

"Except Willis never goes on the ground," Holly said.

"That's the reason why!" Murdick said.

It was greener as they traveled farther south, and the lakes, like metal dishes and brimming potholes, were more numerous and blacker by contrast. The grassland ended, the farms became more rumpled and hummocky, and were bordered by snaky riverbanks and the dark shag of pine woods. The towns were tufted in these distances — more good roofs and buildings high enough to cast shadows.

"Sometimes, out here, you get thirty or forty aliens going up to a house and just walking in. What use are dogs or alarms against forty reeking aliens? They just chew their way in and devour the place, and then move on. And on some of these roads—"

Murdick went closer to the screen and found a long straight road.

"— you get your major hijackings. Oh, it's no more than a roadblock — it might be a tree or a tipped-over car or a stack of burning tires. But as soon as that vehicle stops, they're all over it, sinking in their claws and wetting their teeth."

He was pointing to a particular truck, a long double-bodied model.

"Your alien," he said. "Your career criminal."

Hooper said, "I've lost shipments that way. But these days we air-freight most merchandise."

The camera drew back again and gave them a wide angle; but Moura was still looking at the truck, a tiny pair of hyphens in all that browny-green wrinkled land. This truck was heading down an unbroken road, about six lanes, and other vehicles strung out on it too. What Murdick said, and Hooper appeared to confirm, made no sense: Moura could not see where the road started or where it ended, and the only indication that things might be strange down there was the fact that each vehicle, and the truck especially, was followed by a trail of dust. So it was unnaturally dry on the ground, but that wasn't crime, that was just bad weather. She thought: He's trying to frighten us.

But reminding them of the dangers was also a way of reminding them that they had overcome them. At a slower speed and in ground-focus — looking at farmers' faces and at barnyards and at washing hanging on the line — their journey seemed to them remarkable. For long stretches they looked with unselfconscious admiration at what they felt they had accomplished. It was as if by flying over in their speeding rotors and photographing every detail of the terrain, they had taken possession of it, and understood it; and more — that now it had no surprises for them.

"Couldn't this be turned into graphics and color-coded and used for navigation on the ground?"

"Of course," Fisher said, to Hooper, who had asked, "but why would anyone want to take this trip twice?"

Now, emptier, the land seemed enormous. Minutes passed, and only a handful of settlements appeared, and they lay on the landscape like scabs. Murdick said that they were lawless places — most of them, anyway — and that no one was to be fooled by the look of the roads or the condition of the buildings. They were inhabited by the worst aliens — Trolls and Skells that had been dumped or driven there. Many of them had been thrown out of planes and somehow survived, all bashed up, and found others and started breeding a very nasty kind of alien.

"And we've seen Starkies here."

Where he waved his gloved hand was a river of oxbows, and a sloping valley that was hemmed and tightly folded and gathered, like an old-fashioned skirt — all these odd features were watercourses. Murdick's glove hesitated over a great patch of woods the shape of a bird's shadow and splashed with blue. It was beautiful.

"Probably bandit country," someone said.

The towns here seemed lifeless. Hooper wondered if they were bust, for in the same vicinity were compounds of fenced-in families and their fields, or so it seemed to him. He said out loud they were probably fugitives, and the others said, Oh, sure, and were glad to see the land below streaking past.

Some hills had been cleared and on their summits were the domes of observatories and some goggling telescopes and big white dishes — look at all that crockery, Fisher said; and Murdick said: Skelly — that was the proof that aliens had technology.

"There — that sort of irregular star-shaped stain — that's a fortified town."

"Where are we?"

"That sort of cleft-chin shape in the river is the bottom of Illinois."

"And there's the murky Mississippi," Hooper said, and asked for the tape to be speeded up. In the blur and monotony of trees another color swept fleetingly past, but was less a stripe than a moment of shadow, a sort of beat like an eye-blink, a visual blip, much like the river a few seconds before.

"The margin of the Red Zone," Fisher said.

There was silence — no one had seen it, and there was a certain hesitation in their earpieces, the pressure that builds just before something is loudly denied. But no one denied it. The pressure continued as anxiety and mumbling silence.

More woods followed, with torn patches where there were lakes. They were shrunken lakes, ringed with deep shores: O-Zone was famous for having become dry, and this was one of its driest months. There were stains of settlements, some buildings precariously standing, but no other signs of habitation. Although some of these towns were spattered with colored bungalows, you looked closer and saw they were abandoned and scorched. The power lines hung from discolored pylons; the roads were empty; the bridges were down. The woods piled up and became denser and thickly ribbed with overgrown ranges of low hills, the assertion of a rough plateau, with ridges and hollows dividing rugged bluffs.

"O-Zone," Fisher said.

The boy's eyes twitched at the hurrying tape.

"This is the part I like," Hooper said. "Those narrow canyons, the gorges, the velvety folds of land. Please don't call them anticlines."

"Shut-ins is what they call them here," Fisher said.

"How do you stand him?" someone said.

But the tape was still speeding them on through O-Zone.

Among the forested knobs were shadows where nothing else could be seen, and these spaces were pressed deeply into the land, as if old blood had soaked into the ground and still showed. These shadows looked solid and were blindly black, like a depthless lacquer that was a shape without features or details. Where the curves were gentler and had soft bulges and human curves and contours, the crescent shadows lay alongside them, fitting perfectly. In the muscular cushions of green there were scars, but there were no openings among the trees — only the steep lips of old clearings and the tracings of forgotten roads, with the new woods folded over them.

"Caves," Hardy said. "It's all caverns underneath those ridges. This is where it all started."

He slowed the tape and pointed out the creeks and rivers, which flowed from underground rivers in the caves, and what everyone had taken to be springs actually bubbled from caves, and after the incident—"the excursion," Fisher called it — the water had come up hot. The area was dammed and closed and renamed — Outer Zone seemed appropriate for something that was no longer Missouri. Satellite pictures showed it glowing green.

With the tape crawling on, they saw more city-stains and the eruption of trees in what had been plowed fields, and fat green pads where there had been lawns and parks. And among the fallen settlements the slashmarks of ruined highways.

"Wasn't it a great trip?"

"I've got to have a copy of this tape," Barry said. He turned to Rinka. "Show it to the Etnoyers. They'll scream!"

"I want a print of this too," Murdick said.

Hardy aimed the control pistol at the screen and brought the ground even closer, separating the colors and showing the bristling treetops and the areas of water — with the sun slanting on them they were like bottomless holes. The greater the enlargement, and the more detail they saw, the wilder it looked.

"Those shadows are sinkholes," Fisher said. "Collapsed caverns. Some people think they could have squashed the containers of waste."

"I think it was the Russians."

"It was aliens," Murdick said. "There's documentary proof."

"Anyway, we're here."

"It's not desolate," Hooper said hopefully, and finished the thought in his head: it was only empty.

In this long slow panning shot the land gleamed with radiant darkness, the lines of forest making long troughs of shadow. A moment later the land was flat and fragmented, with patterns of deserted settlements and dead towns like the sprawling symmetry of lifeless flowers and sun-faded colors on the surface design of an old trampled carpet.

An hour had passed. Now their New Year's party seemed more like a mission into the unknown, the sort of expedition that people made into deep space. They were glad to have this unusual tape to show their friends, so they could boast about having been to this wilderness. After letting the people marvel at it they could spring the surprise: This is American O-Zone!

"It's scary," Moura said. "We're so far away."

Barry said, "I can't believe we took that trip."

"It's lovely," Hooper said. He was smiling sadly, deaf to the other comments. He liked the way it went on rising and deepening; he liked the shadowy belts of foliage and the creases at the edges of the fine furrows below, and on the surface the suggestion of caves below.

The camera's eye swept into it and onward, probing it without disturbing it.

"Heads up… Look!"

It was Fisner, sitting forward — but the tape was still rolling.

"Rewind!" he said, and set their heads ringing.

His young untuned voice had no note of authority in it. Moura always thought of it as the sort of carping voice she wanted to disobey — the sort of voice that made you want to do the opposite of what it demanded.

"Didn't you see them?"

He was excited and sounded insolent. Now he was standing. He snatched the control pistol from Hardy, and while the others complained, he shattered the picture on the screen into splinters. All this had taken seconds, yet the panic had begun.

"Fizzy, what are you doing? You'll break that thing!"

He ran the film clumsily back and forth, using his thumbs, then said, "That cluster of pale specks. See them?"

Weren't they tiny withered blossoms, or perhaps dead patches on the ground?

He screwed them closer, holding the pistol at the screen. He was squawking with pleasure, and then complaining. "Fuck-wits! We didn't get a sound bite!"

They had heard the aircraft — they were running, half-hidden, he said.

"I don't see anything."

"Neither do I," Hooper said. "Where are these people?"

"I don't even think of them as people," Holly said.

Fisher was crying, "Aliens!"

Someone — was it Barry? — whispered, "But you said we were alone."

They froze. The lights sputtered. Time did not matter, because they felt trapped. They looked up at their black windows in fear, expecting to see half-human creatures come shouldering their way out of the woods.

5

What made it worse for them was that only the boy had seen them — and they were dependent on him; they needed him and they disliked him.

"What did we just see?" Rinka asked.

"Aliens," he said, with a clam in his mouth.

No one asked whether those people were dangerous. Everyone was dangerous.

It was as if they had just confronted the symptoms of a fatal cancer — not goblins or demons, but the plain bony face of certain death: pickety teeth, a splintered nose hole, and the unwavering gaze of empty eye sockets.

Just as the travelers had begun to take hold of a shaky sense of well-being, the fragile feeling vanished. They felt unsafe and were desperate to do something. It was now late, almost midnight. They had planned to watch another tape and then pop enough pellets to give them a long sleep — there wasn't time for a coma. They had felt more than safe — they had felt privileged and powerful. Now this.

"I couldn't see anything," Hardy said, and looked around. He was watched by masks but there seemed to be no faces behind them.

Why had they all gone so quiet? Why was Fizzy the only one moving in the room, fussing with the cartridge?

Throughout a long fearful stammer of silence Fisher replayed that particular strip of the tape three more times, and they studied it in order to find reasons to calm themselves. It upset them that nothing was clear and that this boy was squawking and hitting the screen with his glove and saying, "Right there!"

Everything they heard from Fisher frightened them, because it seemed they were in his hands. Afterward there was nervous talk and more hesitation. They did not at first ask the obvious. They did not want to terrify themselves with questions to which they had no answers.

They were tentative but kept talking, in the belief that their fear wouldn't show. Yet it made their fear apparent.

"There probably weren't enough for a swarm," Barry said. "But they sure must have been doing something criminal."

Fisher said, "You can't prove that."

"I think I saw them," Holly said. "They looked real ugly. Did you see their dirty rags? They're like germs, these people."

Fisher said, "They weren't wearing rags."

All these remarks were addressed to Hardy. Hardy was somehow responsible for this. Hardy had got the Access Pass from his company, and he had hinted that he had plans for this place. Also, Hardy was sitting among them, looking ineffectual. And everyone remembered Hardy's remark. Some of the others were whispering it. Hardy had said there was no one here.

His weakness showed in his wet eyes.

"I couldn't see anyone," he said.

Moura said, "I wonder what they were doing?"

"I don't care," Hooper said. "But why were they doing it here in O-Zone?"

He was the only truly angry one and because of the force of his feeling he seemed the least afraid. His anger preoccupied him. He was nervous — not frightened, but agitated and spiritless. He looked undermined.

"They have no right to be here," he said. "This is ours!"

Fisher was staring, his mask twitching at the absurdity of that. Hooper glanced up and nodded and swallowed the rest of his protest.

"They were running," Fisher said. "They heard our rotors. They were trying to hide."

"Could have been poachers," Murdick said. "Like those Skells that poach dogs and cats in New York. I know a lady lost her collie dog that way. I didn't tell her they torture them to death and eat them — but it's true. Torture softens up their flesh, sort of tenderizes it, see."

"Apparently they're always on the move," Hardy said. "That's why they're always looking for food."

He was receiving the glances again, for saying that. Did that mean he accepted what Fizzy had said? He seemed to be acknowledging that fact.

Hooper began saying something more about the aliens' habits, and the rest looked up at the screen. Although it was empty and not even lighted, it seemed now like a window— the creatures had been seen there. That was part of the unreality of it all: they had flown over them, making plans and congratulating themselves on their boldness, and they had not seen them until now — and even so, they had had to be told by wonder boy that the aliens were there. The travelers felt foolish and exposed. The aliens had been there the whole time!

"Maybe the kid's wrong!" Hooper said.

Barry Eubank replied to this by saying, "Rinka and I are going home first thing in the morning."

He was holding his breath, as if he expected to be challenged and was going to say much more. But no one asked him to justify himself.

Hooper said in a disgusted voice, "Who else is bolting?"

No one spoke up. Moura suspected that it was not their determination to stay that kept them quiet but rather that they were ashamed to say out loud that they wanted to go. In their small timid hush was their anger at being asked the question that way.

"We should get some data on them," Hardy said. "What's wrong, Willis?"

There was steam on Murdick's faceplate.

"Nothing's wrong," Murdick said, and his tone said everything — it was a perfect lie-detector phrase. Murdick spoke quickly and tried to shrug. He looked lost in his bright suit and oversized mask. He was panting as he added, "But don't you think we should have gotten some data on them before we came all this way?"

"This is O-Zone — it's empty," Barry said. His shrill sarcasm betrayed all his terror. He was perspiring inside his mask; and he was pacing — keeping away from the windows. "There's no one here!"

"And those are just the ones we happened to see," Rinka said, speaking for everyone, accepting everything that Fisher had said. She was whispering and staying near Barry — their common fear had made them a married couple once again; their terror was a kind of agreement and bond. "There could be lots more," she said, "right out there in the dark."

Hooper said, "Hardy's right — we should get some data on them."

"Who wants data? I don't care who they are," Rinka said. "If I had irons I'd kill every one of them."

Murdick said, "I've got the irons."

But no one asked him more. He was pathetic about his new equipment and when he mentioned his weapons he seemed frightened rather than strong.

Hardy's hands lay in his lap, his palms turned up, his thumbs out — they were more telling than a facial expression, and they signified futility. He said, "The only thing is…"

He did not finish the sentence — did not have to. The same worry was in everyone else's mind: Where were these aliens?

"We'll never find where they are," Hooper said. "We weren't flying straight. And if they were running when Fizzy saw them, they're probably still running. The calculation is impossible."

"That's just" — Fisher was squawking and stuttering—"just exactly the kind of stupid thing those aliens would say. 'Impossible' is another idiot word! If you start talking like them you'll never find them. Look at all the data we have—"

They hated his voice. It was bad enough having to overhear his talk, but it was so much worse being lectured by him. Yet they listened, because there was nothing else they could do, and because he was explaining what he planned to do with his computer. But his voice was so harshly unpleasant it made his plans sound desperate and unpromising.

"I'm pretty sure I can locate their position to within three clicks," Fisher was saying.

"I don't want to know their position," Moura said.

"I do," Murdick said, but without conviction. "Then I could show them my irons."

They all felt foolish in their masks and with all this clumsy equipment. And the litter of tubes from that ridiculous meal! And the complicated alarm and the sealed units in this Firehills condo, and the talk: "Our bubble-dome is a totally dust-free environment." But nothing they had brought with them on this trip could prevent them from being afraid now.

They decided not to move — not to go to their units or to sleep or stray outside — until Fisher did what he said he could and established the approximate position of the aliens. But they doubted that the boy could really help. What if the creatures were just outside in the darkness — squatting there and gurgling and waiting with the rockets everyone said they had? There was no more terrifying image than a hairy filthy alien — an Arab, an African, an illegal Hispanic — poised in the darkness clutching a heat-seeking missile; it was an ape with a deadly weapon.

Even if the aliens were not outside the condo — if they were east of that last large city-stain that had no name — how many clicks was that, and was it possible for these marauders to get here on foot before dawn? The travelers did not think their fears were unreasonable: most aliens moved on foot, and they often traveled at night, since none of them had passes. "I'm standing watch," Murdick said. "We should post someone on the roof to guard the aircraft. I'm not saying go on the ground, but someone's got to watch it." He rocked on the heavy treads of his boots and said, "They're not getting near my bubble! I've wired it! They'll blow themselves up! Raw meat!"

But it was a haphazard vigil — it was a glancing at windows and a peeping over balconies. They were too apprehensive to be efficient. They felt naked and isolated on this lighted hill — it was too late to douse the lights — and they felt peculiarly threatened by the darkness. They prowled inside Firehills, discovering cracks and old furniture and tattered curtains. Using remote control, they set the alarms on their rotors. But who would rescue them when the rotors were snatched and flown away? They imagined the alarms screeching and the lights flashing as the thieves took off into the night.

They climbed to the roof of Firehills and looked blindly down upon the great blackness that surrounded them. The humiliation was that in this darkness they were both blind and naked. They wanted to save themselves. It maddened them to think they had no remedy except this squawking boy. Murdick startled everyone with his weapons and his threats. Just the sound of him was a worry. He clanked his irons and muttered his confused plans. He was a small man, and because of his obsession with complex equipment and uniforms he always looked overdressed and somewhat top-heavy. He said he had the best irons, and they asked him what kind exactly. He told them rockets and gas-guns.

"We might be shooting into the dark. With these you don't have to aim. And we're wearing masks, so there's no problem."

"I thought gas-guns were against the law," Hardy said.

"They're against the law where there's a law," Murdick said. "But this is O-Zone."

"You frighten me," Hardy said.

"There's a shoot-on-sight rule that applies in places like this," Murdick said. "They might be right down there, steaming and stinking under those bushes."

"Why are you so eager?" Hardy said.

The man did not reply. But it was not the eagerness in Murdick's attitude that worried Hardy. It was the man's stupid fear and wild talk — all those horrible promises. It committed him to action and made him capable of anything. When Hardy left him, Murdick went looking for Hooper.

In the glaring light of the party unit, Fisher wired his computer terminal to the video screen where they had reviewed their trip. The aliens' malevolence still seemed printed there in small smudges, and the travelers had only to glance at the screen for their fears to intensify.

All except Fisher, who was calmed by his data-search. He set his keyboard on the big oak table and began to issue orders in his quacking voice. He had no authority, and he was very clumsy — his arms too long, his feet and hands much too big — yet everyone obeyed him. He had the Eubanks dragging cables for him. They believed that any activity, even this menial work for Fizzy, would soothe their nerves. At the very least it would help them kill time until dawn, when they planned to flee this dangerous place.

Hooper ran up and down stairs, first trying to avoid Murdick, who was raving and stamping, and then trying to keep away from the others, who were watching Fisher seated at his terminal, tapping tock-tock with "infuriating pauses, and snorting at the screen.

Hooper was gabbling. Finally he said, "What are you doing, sonny?"

Someone mumbled wonder boy: the name had never fitted him better. He was in his element. His youth and intelligence, and most of all his conceit — his importance! he alone could dispel the confusion! — plus the weight of his own drowsy fear, made him tyrannical.

He was now in sole charge. He had demanded that each pilot hand over his audio-log and flight program. Both the Murdicks and the Eubanks had recorded domestic squabbling on the tape, and they hated giving this unpleasant boy access to their privacy. What would he do with them? Yet their recorded outbursts only annoyed Fisher. He wasn't curious about the shouts and accusations; they were an interruption of his work. He frowned and muttered when something abusive was aired.

"What did you say?"

Fisher did not look up at the questioner. "I said I find foul language very relaxing."

He screened the incomplete charts of O-Zone and ran the tape of the flight back and forth, timing it and scanning it for speed and direction.

"How long do you think it will take?" Murdick asked.

"What are you doing now?"

"Do you really think there's aliens here?"

Fisher let the questions accumulate. He was absorbed in building a system; it was too early for answers. Fisher's relationship with computers and machines was physical — you could see it in the way he moved his lips. And there was an intimacy in the delicate touch of his hands stroking the keys. He used his fingertips on them, and when he was lost in concentration he had a way of salivating. He spoke in a slow satisfied drawl, with juice in his mouth.

"I'm feeding it raw data."

And he lightly scratched the keys, as if tricking his fingers into an arpeggio, and consoling the machine that way. Then he gave the whole mainframe a benevolent smile, as if this thing were animate and regarding him with hunger and gratitude.

Hardy found his brother at the window shortly after that. They did not speak immediately. Each glanced at the other's reflection in the glass and saw a distortion of his own face. There was a family resemblance — the faceplate showed enough of the broad nose and heavy jaw, the bright close-set eyes. Each man was just over six feet tall, and physically strong. They believed themselves to be the healthiest in the party.

As brothers they were not made uneasy by long silences. Each knew that the other was only pretending to be looking out of the window, but was in fact comparing the reflected faces. They were fascinated by the possibility that as brothers they might be interchangeable.

At last Hooper said, "I never expected the Eubanks to let us down. They're supposed to be so sophisticated and well-traveled. What a pair of shitters."

"I don't blame them for wanting to leave," Hardy said. "We should all leave."

"You mean run away before our pass expires?"

"If there are aliens here we can get data on them without hunting them down. What's wrong?"

"Nothing." But Hooper winced as he said it, because there was so much to explain, and Hardy's mind seemed made up.

"Murdick wants to burn them," Hardy said.

Hooper merely stared in acknowledgment. Only minutes ago, Murdick had come to him with a plan for mounting guns and beacons on the upper floors of these buildings, Firehills, and luring the aliens out of the woods with food or loud music (he believed the creatures were nearby and breathing hard), and gassing them.

"You know me," Hooper said. "I've never burned anyone in my life. I don't use my iron in New York. As for my warehouses and depots — when they're looted I just file an insurance claim and fix the hole in the fence."

"You sound so passive."

"That's the sound of money," Hooper said. "Money makes some people helpless. No one listens when I complain, because I'm Hooper Allbright of Allbright Cable Sales. A man of my net worth has no excuses."

Hardy was embarrassed hearing Hooper talk about his wealth — especially wealth making him feel weak. He resented it, and felt Hooper was merely indulging himself and overplaying the role of victim. But Hardy felt victimized himself and he decided that it was the time and place that had produced the feeling — it was O-Zone, it was this empty building standing in the darkness; it was the conclusion that everyone had reached: they were trapped here.

Hooper took a shallow breath — it was as if he were sipping at a thought.

He said, "I don't want to burn down those aliens, whoever they are."

"Why are you so gloomy all of a sudden?"

Because we might have to burn them down, Hooper.thought.

The beauty of a mask was that it gave you whatever expression you wanted, and you could hide behind that face. As long as Hooper didn't talk, his brother would never know what was on his mind.

The thought of killing those people deadened him and made him feel half-human. He tried to rationalize it. When they're burned they're gone. It was merciful, in a way— better burning someone than injuring him and leaving him struggling for the rest of his life against that damage, and suffering yourself with his lasting reproach. No, that was just hunters' logic.

Hardy filled him with buoyant light by saying, "Maybe there's no one here."

Hooper was still concealing himself in his mask, wondering what to say.

Then he did not have to reply.

"I found them!" It was Fizzy, yelling from what he had begun to call "the Operations Unit."

There were eleven of them, he said, big and small, in a large circular depression near wooded hills they had taped, eighty-two clicks east-northeast of Firehills.

"It's a valley?"

"It's a down-thrown massif," Fisher said.

The aliens had no vehicles, he said. Even if they were in perfect health it would take them three days to walk to Firehills. Amazingly they had no village; there were no huts on the tape, no active dwellings.

"These bastards just keep moving," Murdick said.

"They have no discernible pastoral features," Fisher said in his slow juicy way. He had the maddening habit of making intelligent comments in moronic, slurring speech.

"This kid belongs in a rubber room."

"Who said that?" Fisher cried. And trembling at the computer terminal he went on, "If you say those things about me I'll leave you here. I'll unplug this system! You'll be stuck! You'll die! Those aliens will get you!"

When his honking stopped, the room went very quiet.

"I want a drink," Fisher said into the submissive silence.

"Get him some water," Hardy said.

"I want a bottle of Guppy-Cola."

The bottle was quickly brought, and as Fisher refused to leave his terminal Murdick was obliged to kneel and fit the nozzle of the Guppy-Cola bottle to Fisher's suckhole.

And then, a great deal calmer, Fisher described how he had made projections of travel time, and located obstacles, and roughed out a strip map of the land that lay between Firehills and the aliens. He had plotted the irregular flight path of the afternoon. He calculated the exact quantities of fuel consumed, and all the other critical measurements— elevations, altitudes, temperatures, wind speeds. From his scan of the tape he sketched a profile of the aliens: they were clothed, most wore shoes of some kind. Three profiles were still pending, and of the rest five were men and three women. They had dogs. Several of the men were capable of running very fast.

"They're blacks?" Holly said, and frowned in disgust.

"No," Fisher said.

"That could be worse," Murdick said. "That could mean they have technology."

Two might be black, Fisher said, but that didn't mean anything. They were all carrying what seemed to be simple weapons, and as none had food packs or other bundles he had assumed they either lived nearby or else camped there.

"What were they doing?"

"Chasing some big birds," Fisher said. "Wild turkeys, I think."

"Them turkeys must be sick," Willis said.

"Not as sick as them aliens," his wife replied.

Hooper said to Fisher, "You actually saw the birds?"

"Yes, and that's not all. I saw some deer, and a small bear and a bobcat, and some other stuff — rabbits and raccoons, I guess."

"Mutants," Barry said.

"I couldn't tell."

"Let's get out of here," Rinka said. "It's all animals."

"I wish we knew something about those aliens," Hardy said. "They must be illegals of some kind."

"You didn't even know they were here!" Barry said, and bore down on him, and backed Hardy to the window.

Seeing his hesitation — he was trying to think of a way of reassuring them — the Eubanks and the Murdicks turned on him. It was very late, their eyes looked boiled in their faceplates, they began shouting. Was this some kind of joke? A whole day had been spent in traveling here and making camp, and just as they begin to relax they find out they're surrounded by Skells! Hey, they could have had all the Skells they wanted in New Jersey!

They went on yelling, competing with each other, their voices gonging in everyone's earphones. It wasn't bad enough that they had come without maps, it wasn't risky enough to be here on their own — no, they had to be here in a flimsy haunted condo with aliens in the bushes. And it was dark! These animals had technology — they could rush Firehills at any moment and slip through the alarm beam and kill them all!

"Leave him alone, you porkers!" Fisher said. But Barry ignored the boy, and went for Hardy again. "You work for one of the biggest research agencies in the country," he said, squaring his faceplate against Hardy's, "and they send you here with false information."

"Not false information," Fisher said. "No information! That's different. We're generating data—"

"Those aliens might have penetrated O-Zone just this morning," Hardy said.

"They live here," Holly said. "And we paid money to come here, and we're not even safe!"

"If they live here, then we've made a very big discovery," Hardy said, forcing himself to whisper to these shrieking people. "This is officially a degraded area and it apparently supports a small human population."

"It might not be small," Fisher said.

"It's definitely not human," Rinka said. It was all going to be so different, Moura thought: a pleasant flight, and then a foray over the new territory — towns and city-stains that hadn't been seen from the ground for fifteen years; and then camp, a meal, and the tape of the trip in this undisturbed place. And hadn't someone mentioned the possibility of a long recreational slumber in the sleep capsules? Afterward, when the party was over, a triumphal return to New York, and a celebration in Coldharbor Towers. But no — instead, it had become uncertain and possibly dangerous. Two of the couples were panicky. The Eubanks were furious and the Murdicks vengeful. Willis was talking about gassing and burning the aliens. Hooper looked defeated — he wore an expression of helplessness and woe, which he could not conceal behind his mask; he looked as if he had been jilted. Hardy was still trying to fend off the others and deal with their loud cheated-sounding accusations.

Moura's face was set in a frown of resignation. She had never believed in the trip, she had not wanted to take it in the first place. What she had begged for was to be away from Fisher — perhaps Africa, just for a few days. She suspected that Hardy had arranged this O-Zone party for business reasons — perhaps he needed cover. All her fears were confirmed; in fact, this was all much worse than she had feared. But she did not say what she felt. Hearing the others complaining loudly helped her a little and eased her frustration.

Only Fizzy was happy, and pleasure made his mouth grim. Because only he had seen the aliens, he had become essential to them. He knew where the aliens were, he had analyzed them, he had all the information. He alone was calm. He had called out a few abusive names and then gone back to his computer, where he now sat, his head slightly inclined, his fingers stroking the keys. He was playing something, and swallowing in an affectionate way, and still speaking fondly and juicily of feeding it raw data.

"I'm getting a little more color," he said. "Quit the noise."

Murdick was stamping, he was impatient. He wore a glittery silver suit of armored fiber. He was a small skinny man and in his oversize helmet-mask he looked absurd and over-prepared. His anger was unconvincing, and, like his antenna spikes and his two-inch bootsoles, seemed like just another aspect of his absurdity. He was overdoing it, because he was afraid.

He had stopped talking about burning the aliens. He said that he and Holly certainly weren't going to bolt, but they wanted to do something before the aliens were on top of them. Rinka was probably right in thinking that there might be many more of them out there: it was a frightening thought. All those eyes!

"Someone should take a little trip," Hooper said. "Before we do anything rash we need another sighting. Something more tangible. A shoot — some more tape."

Fisher kicked the table leg and squawked with a suddenness that silenced the room. Everything they needed to know was on the tube! There was no point in leaving this room! There was nothing more they could find out from the air. Everything that was possible to shoot on a flying trip tomorrow, Fisher could tell them right now.

Hooper was shaking his head. Fizzy, when he was pedantic, was unbearable, and he could not be stopped. But the boy saw pain on Hooper's face and spoke quietly to him.

"I found you a woman," he said, and tapped a line on the screen: Subject G. Female. "She's about fifteen, and boy can she run."

"This all sounds imaginary," Moura said.

"I'd like to see them," Hooper said.

"If they exist," Rinka said. She turned her faceplate at Hooper. She was very attractive and so there was something particularly ugly and repellent in her face when she showed disgust. "And you want to go near them?"

Hardy said, "It could be risky to go on a shoot. You'd be taping them on the ground. And it's a violation of the Access Pass."

Barry let his cold eyes rest on Hardy. He said, "You swore there was no one in O-Zone but us."

"That's what he said." Willis Murdick peered into Hardy's faceplate. "There's no one else here."

"And he keeps talking about 'them.'"

"Officially there are no aliens in O-Zone," Hardy said.

Murdick said, "Then officially we wouldn't be taping anyone. I say we go on a shoot."

So the party ended. The Eubanks said they were too frightened to sleep. The Murdicks hid themselves in their bubble. Hooper said he would stand first watch, and he took up a position on the roof of Firehills with a gas-gun that Willis had forced upon him. Hardy and Moura locked themselves into their unit, and Fisher moved his sleep capsule into "The Operations Unit" — he had taped the new name to the door and given himself the title Director. He would sleep there, he said, in case of something additional to add to the data base — another projection or detail.

It was two o'clock in the morning, and in their fear and anger and confusion the travelers had not noticed that the new year had begun.

6

Hooper was impatient on the roof of Firehills, standing watch under the dim flakes of starlight — their shining seemed to keep him in darkness. He was murmuring, trying to remember. When Murdick had given him the gas-gun and another lethal-looking black pipe, the little man had said, "Burn all prostitutes, beggars, lepers, wackos. ."But wasn't there a lot more?

Being alone here made Hooper jumpy. This was serious— this was urgent. He considered whether they should leave as soon as it was light, then decided that it was a necessity to look for the aliens; considered whether it should be a large shoot, then decided on a small scouting party — and decided that he should be leader; considered the time and decided soon, then today — at dawn, or when they could get ready; and finally decided to go after the little bastards right now.

That decision gave him patience. He stopped kicking. He waited another hour and woke Murdick. He knew that Murdick was an irritable man, but he was necessary: he had the best equipment and the most versatile rotor.

Murdick was ready. He too had decided a scouting party would be a good idea. He only needed encouragement, someone to share his nervous anger, someone to take charge.

He said, "Who else?"

Hooper told him.

"I don't want that brat along!"

"He knows the way," Hooper said. "We won't find the aliens without him. He's already got them programmed."

Murdick said, "Let's just take the program. I've got a mainframe on board. We don't need him."

But Hooper knew how to convince Murdick.

He said, "We won't have a chance without him."

Murdick sulked — not by saying anything but by stumbling obstinately and bumping the walls as they proceeded to the Operations Room, Then he spoke. "That kid better behave himself."

Fisher refused to accompany them. His pleasure lay in solving problems at his computer, and he sat with one knee jumping — flinging his leg up and down. He was still working at the terminal with long stabbing fingers and making faces at the screen — he said he had decided not to sleep after all. He was surrounded by empty Guppy-Cola bottles. He had discovered more about the group; he had coded the individuals according to speed and size; analyzed their old-fashioned weapons — nets and noise-makers and snares. But where were their shelters?

Hooper said, "I know how you can find out."

"Not if it means going there and landing," Fisher said. He had not looked at Hooper. He was still twisting his face at the screen, where the calculations glowed. "I don't want to be on the ground with them."

"Don't you want more data?"

Fisher said, "I can find out what they have for breakfast using algebra."

"But you don't know where they live."

"Hooper, some of them look crazy. There's four big ones."

Even Fisher's science and precise data were sometimes overwhelmed by his instinctive fear. He hated this in himself, but he could not rid his mind of these visions of beasts — their smells, their wet hair and wild eyes. Mathematics didn't help.

Hooper said, "But you know all about their weapons."

Fisher could not speak. There was something so stupid about admitting you were afraid.

Hooper said, "We need you, Fizz. We can't find them without you."

"Murdick, you porker, turn your radio off," Fisher said, and he waited while the furious little man moved a switch at the side of his helmet. "I don't want him listening."

"He can't hear anything now."

Fisher said, "Did you tell him that you can't find those aliens without me?"

"I sure did — and he screamed his head off."

Fisher turned back to the screen. He said, "If I go, I'm in command of the whole flight. I give all orders. I can abort the mission at any time. Otherwise, forget it."

"Yes, sir," Hooper said — glad of his mask, glad the boy was turned away from him. "This mission is all yours. You're captain."

"And what are you?"

"You can just call me uncle."

"Aliens, blacks, prostitutes, potygamists, professional beggars, stowaways, lepers, and psychopaths," Murdick said as the huge rotor jumped and hovered.

Hooper said, "I was trying to remember."

"Accelerate," Fisher said.

As he moved the throttle, Murdick said, "All of them. All aliens. All illegals. Burn them all down."

Murdick's violent talk fascinated Hooper. It was a complex belief in hostility that made his aggression seem as systematic as a religion. But the same talk only bored Fisher with its lack of logic. Its arguments were dangerous and messy, and it was based purely on power-seeking. And it was arbitrary, too. He had asked, "What does 'black' mean?" and Murdick had raged at him.

Now Fisher said, "Are you watching the direction? Correct it one-half degree east."

Fisher sat in the rear seat of Murdick's Wellington, as captain — he had insisted on that. His forearms rested on the computer terminal and he watched the tube and the ground-screen. He had demanded to be navigator as well, but the program was written and there were as yet only trivial decisions to make. Those he dealt with in his nervous pedantic way and always in a voice of complaint.

Without telling anyone of their departure time, they had hurried away from Firehills, making their vertical takeoff in the dark, the Welly rising before anyone could react. The idea was to locate the aliens, to hover and land in darkness, and at dawn go on a shoot — observe and tape them.

"Just like we did in Africa," Murdick said. "Holly and me, at that Earthworks place on the coast."

"Watching aliens?"

"Buffaloes."

Hooper snorted.

"We had to catch them in the early morning," Murdick said. "Antelopes, zebras — everything. Sometimes you'd see a croc making a kill. But it can be dangerous."

"The crocs?"

"Blacks," Murdick said. "Jigs." He became thoughtful. "Some of the worst aliens on the planet. People hunt them. I could tell you stories, except this kid is here, which is kind of frustrating."

Fisher said, "The point about these O-Zone aliens is that they probably live here. And we're visiting. So 'alien' is a funny word for them."

"I don't call them aliens. They're Skells, they're Shitters, they're Roaches," Murdick said. "And that's not funny. These savages might have hit the coast last Monday from the islands — Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti. Or in an unmarked plane from Canada. A lot of them come in by plane — it's the new racket. From India! From Brazil! They're smuggled in like dope. They land in fields and then scatter. Hey, wouldn't you try to come here if you were a jig? This is America! They burned some just outside New York last month that came from the middle of Africa — by plane. They were barefoot!"

"These aliens are wearing boots,"

"They could very easily have sneaked into the U.S. a few days ago."

"If that's the kind of shit-data you need, there's no point in going."

"I want to smell them," Murdick said.

"Then stay on course and do what I say. Deck of clouds ahead."

Fisher maddened Murdick by staring at the screen when he spoke to him.

"Because I've smelled lots of others," Murdick said. "Know why?"

He had begun to shout against the wail of the slipstream and the clicking of the rotor, and he didn't wait for a reply.

"Because I'm in Godseye," he said. "I can say that now we're on this mission. Yeah, Godseye."

"I figured that," Hooper said. But he wondered whether Murdick was just boasting, as he had about his bubble shelter and his tubes of food and his chain-sword for bushwhacking. Those boasts had meant nothing.

Fisher said, "What does that mean, Godseye?"

"I guess it means you don't know everything, wonder boy."

"If you want to get on the ground with your ass intact, don't talk to me like that."

Hooper had been expecting this friction. Two of the biggest fatheads in the party! In order to divert them he said lightly, "How are we going to land in the dark, Fizzy?"

It didn't work. Fisher began to complain. "It won't be easy, because this well-equipped Welly doesn't have infrared sensors on its landing gear."

"I've got high-definition thermal imaging!" Murdick said, almost choking. "I've got beams! I've got—"

"Never mind," Fisher said. "I know a place."

He guided them over the sinkhole he had found on the chart he had made. He spoke sharply, then grunted. His manner was severe and, from a boy of fifteen, nearly unbearable to the two men on board. He could navigate, but he could not pilot the rotor, nor could he operate any of the controls. He knew the commands, and that was an even greater irritant, because he always gave them with his head down, in a cross, contemptuous slur, speaking through his lips like an imbecile.

"When I give the signal, hover," he said. He was holding his watch dial against his faceplate in order to see it.

Murdick said, "If anything happens to this ship—"

"Shut up and hover!" The command rattled their earpieces.

"We're steady," Hooper said.

"Start the descent and don't deviate!"

There was always a nag of insolence in his orders.

"Drop it!" he said, just as Murdick recovered and began to complain. "There's an old sinkhole here. And cut the engine as soon as we're down."

They plunged slowly, spinning and tipping slightly, landing like a helicopter, but using jet-thrusters. Then they touched, the thrusters beating against the ground, and Fisher was squawking for them to cut down the noise and kill the lights so that they would be hidden. They had dropped into this hole in the woods. Darkness lay against the portholes and seemed heavy on the hatches.

Hooper screwed open the hatch and switched on his external sound. A gusty breeze barged through the high leafy boughs they could not see.

"They're going to find us," Murdick said.

"Not if we find them first," Hooper said. "Grab that energy cube, Fizz."

"The captain doesn't carry gear."

"You're not captain on the ground — I am. Now pick it up."

They dropped lightly to the ground and set off in the dark. They were afraid to go very far from their aircraft, and yet the hickory woods rose all around them — they needed high ground to see the aliens. Fisher had plotted the route: the landing in the sinkhole in order to hide the rotor; the circular way out; the climb to a vantage point just above the meadow and field where he had seen the aliens on the tape.

Murdick kept stumbling and grunting. He heaved himself at bushes and caught his toes against small boulders and tripped. He blamed it on bad directions, he muttered about the darkness, he damned his new boots. Earlier he had boasted about the boots, their thermostat feature, their built-in pedometers. "They're state-of-the-art," he had said. "Godseye got a special consignment." But they made him clumsy on the narrow track. His grunts and squelchy curses made him sound in the others' earphones as though he were slowly falling down a long flight of stairs, and bumping on each step.

He said, "It's the wrong terrain!"

"You mean the wrong boots," Fisher said, behind him.

Hooper listened to them squabbling. Fizzy was just as boastful and equipment-conscious as Murdick, but his confidence exasperated the older man, who, aiming to compete, deceived himself and became lost in exaggeration. It was not the boy's wild-sounding talk that disturbed Murdick but rather the fact that he was always right.

"At least they're safe," Murdick was saying. "My feet are completely sealed."

"You're so worried about radiation you can't even walk straight!"

Fisher talked back without letup; he had never outgrown the childish habit of reacting to everything, and he often teased until it became torture. He made no allowances for a person's simplicity or weakness. When he heard a yelp of pain he went on squeezing, and so he could seem cruel in an apelike way.

Murdick was having difficulty concentrating. He gulped as he stumbled, and swallowed his replies.

Up ahead, Hooper told them to take care. Monitoring each other, in their masks and helmets, they were almost deaf to outside noises unless they deliberately amplified them. Hooper listened to the commotion of their footsteps crashing through the thickness of leaves and dead sticks and briars. They had no light, there was not much moon. The risks excited in Hooper a sense of nakedness and a wilder sense of freedom. This was like launching himself off a cliff and trying to fly. He was very sorry his only witnesses were the boaster and the brat.

Murdick was saying in worried tones, "Well have to find our way back on this awful path to get to my Welly."

"You might not make it back," Fisher said. He got courage from Murdick's fear, and taunted him. "If you don't reach the ship in time, we'll have to leave you behind. That's the rule."

"This isn't space travel," Murdick said in a pleading voice.

"It's much greasier, it's more dangerous. You'll reach chokepoint and jeopardize the whole mission if you make us wait."

Breathless from kicking his big boots through the low dense bushes, Murdick gasped, "You can't leave me! It's my ship!"

"Shut up, both of you," Hooper said. He turned and they saw his towering body outlined against the star-grains in the fuzzy night sky. "I'll switch you off and lose you."

He then hurried forward and shortly after said, "Here we are."

It was lighter on the thinly wooded knob, but they could not risk the open — not even the dusty glow of pale moonbeams. They found a grove of bushes tike a large leafy basket on the upper side of the knob and crouched there, inside, kneeling and balancing themselves with their elbows. It was just before five, in the predawn dampness.

"Your yawning drives me crazy," Murdick said.

Fisher had been growling and gargling into his mask. He did not stop. He had discovered one more way of enraging Murdick.

"I hate the dark," Murdick said. He was genuinely afraid, and his bad nerves made him pathetically truthful, even shameless.

Hooper said nothing. He was sighting out of the grove with the double-barreled object Murdick had called his burp gun when he had given it to him.

"You've got irons," Fisher said to Murdick. His own fear was returning and making him shiver in this stillness. "What are you so nervous about?"

"We could be sitting in poison." Murdick sensed that he had torn his suit on briars on the way up. He imagined the thorns like rusty spikes tipped with radiation and that the slightest scratch meant death.

"This isn't an iron," Hooper said. "It's a camera. Right, Willis?"

"That piece is regulation Godseye," Murdick said. "It's got thermal imaging."

"You didn't answer the question," Fisher said. "Didn't you hear me when I told you I'm a theoretical physicist? That looks like a particle beam to me, shit-wit."

In the darkness, Murdick breathed hard and blinked at the dial of his watch, and still in the darkness, crouching and grunting, he said, "I don't have a college education, because I don't need one. Listen, at least I'm not a freak. I didn't come out of a test tube."

"He thinks people come out of test tubes! Murdick, you are such a tool."

"Listen, I'm doing all right for myself. I've been around. I don't have to read about things in books. I've seen them, I've shot them, I've brought them back. I've stuffed them."

"Stuff this, porky."

Each time they spoke, Hooper had to readjust the sight and take a new reading.

"A lot of people," Murdick said — his voice had gone hoarse and threatening now—"people with a technical and scientific background, aren't worth anything in a crisis. In fact, most of them are wacko. But me — I've got money. I've always had money. That's all a sensible person needs."

"Hooper's net worth is ten digits! Why are you such a tool?"

By saying nothing, Hooper made them self-conscious and shamed them into silence.

Before they were fully aware of it the air around them was fogged and then washed with dawn. The sky lifted, and from a low roof turned into something light and limitless, and it intimidated them with its clarity.

Below them was the meadow they had seen on the tape, but it was messier, with muddy hoofed-over patches and protruding clumps of grass. The woods beyond looked pathless and showed fallen oaks, with redbuds and dogwoods growing beneath. Though it had an appearance of danger and disorder, scaring Murdick and Fisher tike an ugly mask, Hooper still felt thrilled by its wildness, the way it seemed young and untouched.

But as it grew light they all felt punier, and soon as spooked as they had felt at Firehills, Their equipment was no good to them here, the woods made them feel like savages, the landscape reduced them, and anxiety made them simple-minded. Then they were in full light of day, three lost souls sighting across the grass.

"The aliens I saw were over there," Fisher said, pointing beyond the meadow. "There's a narrow hollow—"

"I'm not getting caught in those woods," Murdick said. "I'd never have a clear shot."

"What kind of film did you load?"

Murdick didn't turn. "Very fast," he said.

They debated moving closer to the hollow — if there was a hollow. Hooper said they should try to get a sound bite— their wires were sensitive enough to pick up even distant voices.

Fisher said, "What's the range of your mike?" and reached. "That doesn't look like a mike."

"Keep your hands off," Murdick said, and snatched the thing away.

Holding a small trumpet-shaped object, Hooper crept out of the basket of trees and aimed the bell-mouth at the far end of the meadow. He moved it again, then shook his head.

"It picks up every breeze and every bird," he said. "All I can hear clearly are bobwhites. We'll have to shift."

Murdick said, "Never" — he would not move on any account, and he sat surrounded by the telescopes and cameras and the two energy cubes they had brought from the rotor. His small face was pinched in his mask, and he made himself even smaller, putting his knees together and holding his gloves against his earphones like a frightened child. The fact that his gloves were broad and pawlike made him seem even more childish.

"So what good is all your hardware now?"

Fisher's voice was mocking. It made him almost serene to see the terrified little man.

"It's the wrong terrain," Murdick said, and he moaned because the young boy was standing over him.

"He means the wrong planet."

Hooper said, "I wish I knew what we were looking for."

"It's stupid to look for aliens right away-they're too dumb and slow," Fisher said. "We should look for animals. I mean, real ones. I saw deer and foxes on the tape. Animals would give off better signals — we'd pick them up more easily — and animals would distract the aliens. Then, instead of us trailing the aliens, they wouid be trailing the animals— chasing food, see — and we could hang back and tape the whole show."

Hooper turned completely around, so that his faceplate was level with Fisher's, and he was smiling through it at the frowning boy. It was a good plan, he said. But Murdick looked rueful and stubborn; it was such a good plan it gave him no excuses.

Hooper saidt "Yeah. Let's pinpoint some animals. You coming, Willis?"

"He wants to sit on his hardware."

But hearing that, Murdick struggled to his feet.

They broke cover, laden with hardware, sloping forward and keeping their heads down. Hooper whispered for them to watch for smoke or any movement. They crept to the top edge of the meadow and walked just inside the woods, in the crackle of dead curled leaves.

"That's deadly soup," Murdick said as they passed a bowl-shaped mudhole. "It's all cancer here. We shouldn't have come."

They moved irregularly in single file, Murdick and Fisher jostling for second place behind Hooper. For Fisher it was dreamlike, and his feet hardly seemed to strike the ground; Murdick's gabbling fear made him giddy and gave him an illusion of courage.

"Their brains might be growing out of their heads," Murdick said. They reached a corner of the field. Hooper said, "If you see anyone, freeze. If he sees you, hold your ground. Don't run, whatever you do, or you'll get eaten."

When they moved off again, Hooper thought of the injustice of having to sneak around here. This was O-Zone! Empty, poisoned, prohibited O-Zone! They deserved to have the freedom of the place — it belonged to them! Its perimeter and commando guards and all its security were paid for with Federal taxes. Aliens didn't pay taxes — they had no legal existence. Hooper felt a mingled annoyance and respect; he was a hunter whose quarry had so far eluded him, and still moving blindly, he sensed in a sort of prickling psychic way that the creatures he hunted were watching him the whole time.

Murdick was studying Hooper's eyes. Hooper looked back, his reverie broken, and saw that Murdick too seemed to be watched by aliens.

"I don't like this," Murdick said.

"And you're in Godseye, Willis?"

"We hunt in packs, we don't take crazy risks, we have air cover." Murdick was being candid — he had been terrified into telling the truth. "We've got bigger irons, we've got real firepower, we stay off the ground."

Fisher was listening to both men and staring at the sleeved pipes they held across their knees.

"Hey, are those irons or cameras?"

Murdick's eyes were red and squinting. Hooper looked away and said, "I see something."

Putting his pipe to his eye, Murdick said, "It's a dog."

"It's a deer," Hooper said, also spying with his pipe. "A white-tailed doe. Look how skinny she is. There she goes."

The animal had a muddy belly and muddy shins and it kicked its hind legs as it ducked into the woods.

At that moment the men emerged — no helmets, no masks. Their bare faces gave them a look of power. They were carrying something coiled. They made no sound at all. When they paused they were like dogwoods, and when they moved they turned back into men.

"Are they mutants?"

The deer was slightly lame and favoring one leg. It was moving and listening, very alert, but it had not sensed anything yet. It was shambling and browsing, leading the aliens on — two of them but it seemed like three, the way they moved, appearing and disappearing. They were gone. Had they ever been there?

Pausing near some wrecked trees, the deer lowered its head to the grass and in the same movement raised it — swung its body round, twitched its ears and tail.

"It saw us," Fisher said.

Hooper said, "Not us," and lifted his black pipe.

The deer was looking away from them, its ears alert and stiff, its hooves planted firmly in the turf. It held its rump high, in anticipation. Then a shudder in its haunches ran a shiver through its stringy leg muscles, and it rocked backward and bounded lopsidedly through the trees, the way it had come.

A man had sprung up behind it, and then the other reappeared, and both gave chase. They were small and ordinary, and their plainness was the most astonishing thing about them. They were real, they were more frightening than monsters. They wore thick vests and heavily patched trousers, and their hair was braided and tied back. They looked like woodsmen — bearded and green — and they were very fast. Aliens. They were gone now.

"It's two of the males — B and D," Fisher said.

"You recognize them!" Hooper stopped shooting with the thick black pipe.

Murdick said, "They were carrying ropes."

"Nets," Fisher said. "They keep them coiled. They can't throw them in there — they'd snag on the trees. They're probably driving that deer into a hole."

It was a hurried conversation. They started after them and saw more aliens gathering ahead and joining the running men — another man, a youth — girl or boy, they could not tell. They went after the slowly dancing deer.

Shadowing them were the three unearthly figures in suits and masks and domed helmets.

"Let's stay together," Murdick said in a terror-struck groan.

The aliens were yelling. It was not fierce — it was a wild kind of laughter interspersed with chatter. More aliens had appeared and vanished: they were uncountable, and were the more alarming for that. They were nimble and fast, and when they spoke they did not seem out of breath.

There was a power in the aliens' confidence, Hooper thought, and it was clear from the way they moved in the woods that they lived here. They neither stumbled nor hesitated as Hooper loped after them, trying to steady his camera. Fisher kept up with him, but it was not bravery; he was afraid to be left behind.

The deer was running back to the meadow, now trying to elude the two men who had confused it by separating themselves from a pair of hackberry trees. As they ran they loosened their lines and shook out the folds in their nets.

It was all magnified in Hooper's viewfinder. He was outraged that these aliens were chasing and poaching this animal — they had probably crippled the doe in a trap. They had no right to be here! His anger gave him speed, but he did not burst out of the woods. He stayed hidden at the edge of the meadow, still filming, as the aliens expertly netted and caught the deer, and then tripped it and pinned it to the grass.

That was the answer. Not burning them, as Murdick kept threatening, but chasing them and catching them in a bag, then emptying that bag somewhere far away. Killing was wrong, and killing was also very stupid — there were too many, it would never succeed, and just the attempt would turn you into a monster. But rounding them up might work— it was what they did themselves. Trap them in their own nets and then take them away.

"They don't look like mutants to me," Fisher said.

"They don't look like taxpayers either."

Hooper was still filming them — the scene, rather than the people. He longed to take this tape back and study it; to let Fizzy analyze it.

The aliens had turned their hunt into a lark. They yelped as the grunting deer was subdued, and when its legs were tied its grunts became rattling cries and snorts. It went on thrashing.

Fisher was breathing hard. "That individual is female. She's coded G."

She was muttering and pointing to the edge of the meadow.

"Murdick," Hooper said.

He had tripped and rolled over, and then climbed upright and was now balancing on his wobbly boots. He was examining his suit for punctures. He picked at the fabric, and when he was satisfied that there were no holes, he looked up and saw that he was being watched by four aliens. He smiled at them in terror.

"Don't bolt," Hooper said into his helmet mike.

There was no signal from Murdick.

"Can you hear me, Willis? Don't raise your hand, don't turn. Just copy. Do you read me?"

Fisher said, "He must have pinched a wire when he fell. The great equipment freak! He's going to choke!"

In his suit and helmet and mask and buskinlike boots, Murdick looked like an astronaut prepared for free-flight— just swimming in space — which was why he looked so strange standing still in those dry slanting woods, up to his knees in ferns, and with yellow jackets buzzing around his helmet,

He was clearly terrified — his arm froze as he motioned to raise it. He held his double-barreled pipe in his gloves, but he did nothing with it. Hooper's was still whirring softly, as he taped this confrontation.

The aliens had become smaller, had silently shrunk into concealment in the brush until their heads and shoulders were indistinguishable from the smooth stones. But Murdick turned away with wooden movements ("Don't!" Hooper shouted, hurting his own ears with his loudness), and tried to drag his legs through the undergrowth. Then the stones became human heads, the aliens materialized again, and rose up. Glancing back, Murdick ran, and one of the net-men started after him, swinging his coil.

Murdick was slow; he pitched against the trees, stamping and sort of free-wheeling, and his helmet swiveled heavily left and right — he had no peripheral vision. He moved into the meadow like a prehistoric animal, lowering his head to look around, and stumbling on his big flapping feet. He had dropped that double barrel and was fleeing in a slow staggering way across the grass. His panic gave him a crazy uncoordinated gait and his boots lurched as if struggling against magnetism.

"They're going to get him!" Fisher said. In his voice was neither pleasure nor fear; it was pure animal excitement — a kind of sudden ignorance. "Chokepoint!"

Hooper did not lower his video camera. He braced himself and slipped his fingers into the grooves Murdick had shown him. He snapped off the safety catch. The net-man was in his eyepiece, poised and steadying himself to fling the net over Murdick — he was arched as dramatically as a spider. Hooper moved him to the center of the cross hairs and squeezed.

The sound of a soft thump reached Hooper as the man exploded into meat and in the same instant flew apart like liquid.

The camera still ticked in the first barrel. There was no one: what had just happened?

Before the other aliens could check their running toward Murdick — the man they had followed had simply vanished— Hooper fired again. There was no bang. The loudest sound was the plop of the plunger, as the second man exploded— swelling, becoming huge, just before he vanished. This one bloodied the other two with the mist of his red pulp.

Murdick turned to face those remaining aliens — the man, the wide-eyed girl. They were screaming, their shirts were blackened, their faces were streaked with blood. They were appalled, and yet they looked like demons, and when they ran they were still howling. Murdick had hesitated, and then he blundered in the opposite direction, toward the hill where they had left the rotor.

Fisher said, "Did you tape that too?" but he was frightened by the wild look on Hooper's face and he did not wait for a reply.

They stopped by the basketlike grove of trees and bushes to pick up their remaining equipment and then hurried down the slope to the sinkhole. Murdick was already in the cockpit and heaving the hatch cover.

"Move over," Fisher said. "I'm captain."

Hooper said, "Were you trying to run out on us, Willis?"

Murdick's eyes popped in his faceplate. He was speaking, but he couldn't be heard — his mike was broken, he was off the air.

Just before they took off, Fisher peered into the faceplate and saw that Murdick was weeping with pink eyes. He pointed to himself and mouthed "captain," and to Murdick and mouthed "fuck-wit."

In the air, Fisher said, "I knew you'd bring irons!" He was more frightened now that it was over. "You used a particle beam on them!"

Hooper said, "Is that what that thing is?"

"You're turning out a dozen kilojoules per square centimeter and you don't even know it!"

"It's a good thing I did," Hooper said. "They were going to eat Willis."

Murdick sulked and fought for breath and let the others fly his plane. He was humiliated and broken, and he looked especially absurd in his expensive flying suit and helmet-his small face in the wide faceplate, his gloves making his hands look like fat mitts. He looked like a child wearing a party costume.

"No one believed me," Fisher said. "They were there! You saw them!"

Murdick winced at this. Every mention of the aliens made him glance sideways wearily. His mouth was slack with self-disgust and his eyes were bleak with pain. Disgrace showed on him like a skin disease. "And now they're all dead," Hooper said. "There's nine more of them!" Fisher said. Murdick's face showed pain once more. "Do you want the world to know that?" Hooper said. "Wouldn't you like to know something that no one else knows, captain?"

Fisher said, "I know a lot of things that no one else knows!"

He was glorying in the speed of the rotor, the way it plowed clouds apart, the slow tumbling of the earth beneath them — all this in brilliant sunlight.

He said, "I once thought I was heliophobic — no crap!"

"Please, Fizzy, pay attention," Hooper said, and braced himself against Murdick in order to look closely at the boy. Murdick was slumped in his bucket seat; Hooper used him as a cushion. Hooper said very carefully, "If we keep them secret, they'll belong to us."

The boy's eyes were cold and almost colorless, but his lids softened them as he became thoughtful; and his lips moved, not in speech, but tightening against his teeth. He was thinking about the aliens. If we keep them secret, they'll belong to us.

Hooper saw that the face in the mask was as strange as the mask itself. He knew the reason: it was the closest the boy had ever come to smiling.

But at Firehills it was Murdick who was first out of the rotor — Murdick, because Hooper was at the controls and Fisher was navigating: Murdick had had nothing to do.

His cry was triumphant but he wore a mad grin of humiliation. "We burned them all down!"