O-Zone

19

Two men who in the darkness were no more than hard hands and grunts smelling of glue had plucked Fisher out of the rotor and swung him to the ground in a net. The boy screamed once sharply and punched and pulled at the ropes. He had howled all the way to the camp, and was still howling. But no one heard him. He was still wearing his helmet and mask.

It was dawn at the mouth of the cave, in the dampness and dust and the sting of smoke.

The man called Mr. Blue watched him twisting in the net of ropes and said, "Let him out the bag, Rooky."

Once he was out of the net and disentangled, Fisher stopped howling — stopped everything. He had just lost his helmet and mask struggling in the bag. He cowered and tried to make himself small. He went absolutely rigid.

"Spiderman," someone said.

"He turned into a stick."

He heard them talking about him, but it was like a dream in which you know all the dangers, and know you are probably going to die, but are helpless to save yourself.

"You got a name?"

He stammered saying "Fisher."

"Fish," Mr. Blue said, and looked satisfied.

"Mighty goddamn far from the water, I'd say."

"Throw him back."

He was flat on the ground. Each time he opened his eyes he saw feet. Their sandals, the ragged straps, their toes, frightened him; and so did the stains on their faded pants. He saw ax heads and black dented pots and some of his own provisions from the rotor. Seeing these stolen things in their protective wrappings stacked in the dust reminded him that he had been stolen himself, and was captive and couldn't move. Now and then they touched him — pinched his suit to examine the metal-fiber material. He screamed, or tried to scream: it was a miserable whimper, so insignificant no one noticed it.

"It's strong lightweight stuff, but it's for cities and space. It can't take much abrasion. Even those boots won't last here. The gloves might be useful."

"The helmet's a beauty, but I can't get a buzz out of it."

"He's real pale. If he's sick with something I say dump him. He might make us all sick."

They were still talking.

But he was more terrified by their smell. To Fisher they were more like plants and animals than human beings. They had the ragged stinking look of wild things, they had wounds and bruises and chafed faces. They did not talk to him. They wore very little equipment, only old tools — a knife, a coil of rope, a sharpened screwdriver, a hatchet or ax. He could tell they seldom washed. He imagined them to be sick with dirt, probably wormy, or with fleas clinging to them, with nits in their hair. He thought of them as a type of poisonous weed, and he did not want them near him. He was afraid of their touch — their filthy hands and hairy arms, their damp rotten breath. Some were women, some were black.

"Wrap up this fish, somebody."

"No, don't bother. He's not going anywhere," Mr. Blue said. "And I hate his yelling. He'll just yell in the bag."

"We don't need him, Mr. B."

"Who knows? He's a fair specimen. We might be able to do something with him. Maybe use him for a swap."

Fisher was pleading, "Find Hooper. He'll give you anything you want. He's responsible for my safety—"

But they did not reply. They said nothing to him. It unnerved him, and he began to doubt that he was making any sound at all. Was he only imagining the words and his voice just an unintelligible mutter?

Their ignoring him was worse than if they had threatened him with their full attention. It made him motionless, it kept him rigid. It's driving me crazy, he thought. They'll let me die. He whimpered — it came out of his nose as a hum. He tried to speak — Who are you? — but his lips would not move. They were talking about food — the boxes they had lifted from the rotor; they wondered whether to eat them. They examined the thick wrappers and the seals on the bags: they could store them, they said, for a time when they might be even hungrier.

"Who are you?" Fisher whimpered, but now he was convinced that the question had not left his head. "Let me go!" It didn't matter what he said — they couldn't hear. "I hate you!"

They went on talking.

"You're aliens," he said.

This word roused one man. "You're the only alien here,

piggy."

Fisher screamed to himself: Herbert!

"And take him back to that rotor and swap him for Bligh," Mr. Blue was saying.

Yes, hurry, Fisher pleaded to himself, too fearful to speak again. The man had terrified him by calling him "piggy."

The woman Valda said, "Bligh and some equipment. Make a bargain. Maybe some money too. We'll never get another chance like this. He dropped in our lap!"

"He belongs to someone — probably an Owner, from the way he's dressed up. He's worth something."

"I say leave him and walk away. He's going to give us trouble. I can tell from his freaky face."

Freaky face! They were skinny and bug-eyed with hunger, and Fisher had the idea — in spite of what they said — that they were planning to kill him. This fear persisted in his mind with another related one: that they intended to eat him. It was the worst of his thoughts and he couldn't rid himself of it. He had heard stories about cannibals and had usually laughed at them — and he had mocked people who believed such things. But this was his punishment, for he had laughed at the stories of people living in places like O-Zone, too, and that was precisely what these aliens were doing. Their presence defied available data: why weren't they dead?

But Fisher was not impressed with their ratlike ability to survive here, against the odds. If they had a secret, it was a savage secret. They were rats, they would eat anything, they floated, they gnawed, they slept in lizard cracks in this rocky hill. There were no children here, and yet there were men and women: that meant something. Fisher also thought that they were sick and dying from the effect of living among low-level mutagens that had slowly soaked into their bones. They probably knew it, and in this desperate condition had turned into beasts — the sort of vermin that would do anything to survive.

They lived like beasts, he could see that. It was a temporary camp, but that was no excuse. They could have done better than these flimsy shelters propped against tree trunks, and that hole in the hill, and that firepit and foodbox. There were nests of grass and leaves where some of them were sleeping now, because they had been up all night, like rats and monkeys.

It seemed horrible to him that he knew all their names. He had lip-read Hooper's tapes and stored the conversations. He had classified each of these people according to age, sex, and body type; he knew their coloring and how fast they moved and what weapons they carried. Hooper had said that Hardy wanted all this data. Where was Hooper now? I'm responsible for your safety — that's what the porker had said!

"Eat this," Mr. Martlet was saying, showing him a handful of dry turds.

I don't eat stools, Fisher wanted to say.

Martlet (thirty, male, black, stocky) said, "It's meat. Go on."

How could crumbling black strips of stool be meat?

Covering his face, Fisher turned away. He refused a drink, he saw filth in it. He slapped a plate of wild plums from Valda's hands.

"Give him something from those tubes we took out of the rotor," Rooks said.

"No — save them. Their seals will keep them forever. It's better than money. Give him some of those pole greens," Mr. Blue said. "Or some of that cottontail stew."

"He won't eat anything," the woman Tinia said.

From his grass nest Echols said, wagging his beard, "He doesn't recognize any of it as food. We might have to analyze some of that sealed food to see what his diet's like. We don't know what he'll accept and eat."

"Choke him on this," Martlet said with a growl — what was he holding down there? — "Or else let's get rid of him."

Knowing their names made it a greater shock for Fisher to discover that these aliens with identities and ages and body classifications were such animals and stank so fiercely. It was a humiliation for him to consider that all the time he had spent with the computer, sorting and storing data, and scanning and enhancing the images, was for these savages. He had enjoyed the data, and he liked inventing ways of classifying these creatures, but up close he found them unbearable.

So his study was no help to him; it only showed how superficial his data was. All his hours of classifying and scanning had not revealed what he had learned minutes after being abducted: that these aliens were dirty, haggard, foul-mouthed, and ill-equipped. They lived like rats. They scratched. They stank. They were desperate, they were dangerous!

"Are you interested in getting out of here alive?" Mr. Blue said.

Fisher's pale pleading face was fixed on the man kneeling over him at the mouth of the shallow cave.

"Then write what I tell you."

Mr. Blue's words were harsh, but his tone was reasonable. It disconcerted Fisher, because the man's danger was like an echo. They were-peaceable-looking creatures, but on reflection not so peaceable: the aftershock was their ferocity. They were killers — he knew that now. It had not shown in the data, but as their captive Fisher could feel it and smell it.

Mr. Blue was holding a pen and a square of lined paper that had been torn from a pilot's logbook — both items snatched from the rotor.

Sitting up in silence, Fisher took the pen and smoothed the paper against his thigh. It was Hooper's pen — he called it his stylus. The porker was always scribbling with it when he should have been doing something useful, like making sure that no intruders could get into the rotor when it was parked. And why hadn't he found these aliens and blown them away?

"Write exactly what I say," Mr. Blue said. Then in a halting, dictating voice, "'I am being held by a large number of people'—correction—'well-armed people. If you follow instructions they will release me unharmed. There are certain conditions and demands'—you're not writing, Fish."

Fisher had been doodling nervously. This pen and paper were useless; anyway, he could scarcely write, and did not consider it anything but a pointless labor, since he had a voice-printer in the rotor, and even a pocket voice-printer. But the pocket printer had smashed as he had struggled in the net.

All these filthy-faced aliens were staring at him now.

He wrote, Bng hld bi Ig no amd ppl, and then the message appeared to become incoherent. Still stabbing at the paper, Fisher glanced up.

He thought at that moment the man was going to hit him— Mr. Blue had raised his hand.

The bearded man, Echols, snatched the paper.

"This is just a stupid scribble!"

Fisher had not been shouted at by any of these people until then, and when it happened he almost fainted. The sharp sound pierced him and gave him a pain in his heart. It rapped against his head, and when he saw the man's open mouth and his huge teeth and tongue his fear of being eaten came back. It was not a fear of death, but rather of teeth sinking into his flesh — of being eaten alive.

He could not speak, though an imploring voice within him was saying: Get me a printer or a frame and I'll key in anything you say and transmit it to my uncle! I'll do what you tell me! He knew he could not write well, nor use a pen with any skill. But he wanted to send the message and he was paralyzed by the fear that if he didn't they would tear off his arms and eat them — or simply start chewing his shoulders and biting his cheeks.

"He's saying something—"

Fisher himself did not know what he was saying. It was all a moaning in his ears.

"He wants a printer," Rooks said, as if translating.

Mr. Blue said, "He means some kind of cable rig. He thinks we have computers, frames, screens, phones, satellite links. He can't write."

Someone else was crumpling the paper. "This bullshit is no use to us."

"He's retarded — handicapped or something," Echols said. "Maybe he's got a motor problem. He seems a little dys-trophic, the way he moves, the way he was holding that pen — could hardly get his fingers around it."

"He acts like a cripple," Martlet said. "He'll cripple us."

There was a sudden chatter of opinion, everyone talking at once, but Mr. Blue made himself heard.

"Who wants him?" he said.

The question silenced them.

"Then we hand him back now, and no big negotiation. Come on, we're just wasting time."

"He's a drooly."

They pulled him up roughly and tried to trot him through the woods. But he resisted. He moved slowly. He was stiff and frightened. He had never run before in his life. His head felt small and fragile without the helmet. He could barely breathe.

''Can't run either!" Gumbie said. He was laughing at the way the boy stumbled.

Fisher knew why they were so rough and careless — because they would be rid of him soon and they had no regard for human life. He thought: Good, they don't want me. But he was also ashamed. He had tried to talk to them, he had tried to write a message to Hooper, he had tried to run. He had failed, and he had had to listen to someone say He's a drooly.

They carried him, four of them swinging him in a net, the way they had snatched him out of the rotor an hour ago.

The sun was higher — not above the trees yet but still striking brightly through the boughs — and the huge sky was one simple color that seemed to drown the eye. Fisher was watching it through the branches as he swung, his face upturned, hating these dusty woods and the men trotting beside him and gasping ump-ump-ump. He thought: Get me out of here.

Hooper would save him. Hooper was chief of ground operations, and Fisher was captain. He would demand that Hooper agree to the bargain, give them anything they wanted. And then when they saw Fisher ordering Hooper around, and Hooper saying Yes, sir, they would understand that Fisher was actually a very powerful person — not a drooly, not handicapped, not a cripple, but the captain and commander of a delicate mission to O-Zone.

And when he was safely aboard the rotor he would take the particle beam and destroy these monkeys.

Already, in his mind, he was burning them to dust. During this run to the sinkhole where they had put the rotor, this thought kept Fisher breathing. He would climb into the rotor and rise in it, and then just hover and pour fire on them and blow them all away. He saw them dancing in pain and then dying among the dead trees.

The swinging bag made him nauseous. There was something about nausea that always intensified his fear by weakening him still more.

"The hole's other side of that hollow."

"Just hand this pig back," someone was saying.

He did not recognize anything here. Hooper had landed in darkness, and it had been dark when they had manhandled him out of the rotor.

"It's gone."

"What did he do with Bligh?"

Fisher began yelling, "Where is he! Where's Hooper! Put out a Mayday call and raise him! Use my helmet phone!"

But no one responded, no one spoke to him. Perhaps they had not heard his voice? He knew he was hysterical. He was gagging on mucus. But was his voice merely a shrill noise in his head?

The men were discouraged that the hole was empty, and probably because they were so hungry they went suddenly limp from the effort of this run. They were saying, "He got Bligh" and "We're stuck with this fish," and cursing.

Fisher had begun to struggle again in the rope bag, trying to get free of it so that he could actually see into the sinkhole. They let him struggle and loosen the drawstring, they let him kick the bag until he realized that he could simply step out of it. It was as though they had just given him an intelligence test, but a simple one, to prove he was not a complete basket case.

Fisher pushed the ropes apart and ran to the edge of the wide hole. He saw four faint dents in the dust from the pads on the rotor's feet. The hole had an odd scoured look from the whirling rotor blades.

"You dong, you wang, you fucking tool!" he screamed. "You're responsible for my safety!"

He was on his knees.

The others did nothing but watch him in a vaguely irritated way. But he would stop his squawking soon-he would never be able to keep that up.

When the men came for him he said, "I'm still captain," and began to cry.

He could not walk. He had lost his voice. He could hardly see. The pains in his arms and stomach were a kind of gnawing, and a torment, telling him how it would feel when they held him — tearing his flesh, biting his toes — and ate him alive.

Back at the hidden camp he covered his face and became very still. His fear had distorted all his senses. His eyesight was poor and yet he heard everything as twice as loud. He had no sense of taste at all, but what he smelled was rotten, filling his nostrils with the furry stink of decay. His hands and fingers and all his hinges were numb, and yet the gnawing pains persisted in his body. He had never had such an awareness of his body, the frailty of it — its stupidity; of such a devastating sense that his intellect was useless. He could not seem to help himself from growing stupider.

The odor of food made him sick. They called it food! He could not eat. He could not distinguish between their feeding him and their torturing him. Wasn't it the same thing? They insisted that he eat, showing him a burned bone, and they kept up their punishing demand. But he refused. It was the odor, the sight of hanging meat — some dead animal that they wanted him to take into his twisted stomach.

"I saved that meat for him," Martlet said. "And he didn't eat it."

A black man offering him food! Probably flobbed on it!

"He's got to eat sooner or later."

Fisher was nauseous, but he was also very hungry. His hunger gave him a severe headache, and tired him; yet he could not sleep. He spent the rest of that long day and the first night shivering at the back of the cave in a mouse nest of dead grass, thinking: I am dead.

In the morning he saw a gray patch on the cave wall that was the size of the screen on Pap. He tried to calm himself by staring at it. He fastened his dim eyes to it and got some strength from this concentration. The sky, the sun, all the empty space — the smells, the noise — deranged him. He felt he could go mad in all this bad air. He had no helmet! His suit was torn! These people had no protection, but they were aliens, they were hardly human. They were probably mutants, or else sick, or crazy.

Fisher held his head lopsided and continued to stare with a crooked intensity at the lozenge of granite on the rock wall. It gave him strength, but still he whimpered as though he were grieving.

"He's more than wacko," Gumbie said.

He heard it and said nothing.

Mr. Blue said, "They're probably glad to get rid of him. They might have taken him out here to dump him, like they dumped all those others. Only he had connections, so instead of blasting him out of the rotor they set him down gently."

"And then that rotor just highballed out of here."

Hooper hadn't come back. He had abandoned the captain and aborted the mission. He had disobeyed orders!

The young woman called Kylie asked in a small voice, "Why did they take Bligh?"

"She might have gone willingly," Mr. Blue said. "She hasn't been right since those phantoms burned Murray and Blayne. And she freaked when we couldn't find the bodies."

Valda said, "What do we do if they come back for Fish?"

"No one's going to come back for him," Rooks said. "Would you go anywhere for him?" And he started to laugh.

That was the second day. In the evening they tried to feed Fisher again. He would not open his mouth. He ground his teeth. He would not drink. His gaze was fixed to the wall. He was solving problems. He was reporting Hooper for disobedience and making sure he never flew another mission ever again. Fisher's face was very dirty.

"Flatten him. I don't want him squatting there all night."

But when they dragged Fisher down he struggled — not against them, but their touching him triggered a fit, and he thrashed on the ground. Finally they got him into the bag. He squawked and tried to stretch. They stepped on him, jamming him down with their cheesy feet.

"As if we don't have enough worries!"

No food, no sleep — Fisher was dreadfully cold. And now his whole body hurt from their kicks. Strangely, the pain had driven out some of his fear. They dragged him near the fire but it only heated one side of his body: burned it — while the other side ached with cold.

"What do you say, Mr. B?"

He had been silent for a while, thinking. Then he said in a decisive way, "Okay, let's sell him."

20

The started their march at dawn. Fisher had hardly slept — the darkness made him think he was going to die. He had watched the moon swing and dissolve. Let's sell him, Mr. Blue had said. Fisher had the idea that if he was sold he was saved. That hope kept him marching.

They walked slowly through thin woods of cedar and short-leaf pine toward one of the round hills in a low range of them. Their circling and climbing took them the whole day. Fisher refused to eat anything except two wild plums which he peeled himself by picking flaps of skin away. He did not speak. Carefully, in fastidious steps, balancing himself in his torn boots and choosing his way, he walked in the middle of the file. He calmed himself by considering various methods of killing these people after he was safely rescued. He favored stunning them and then atomizing them, one by one, leaving the trees intact.

They camped under a limestone hill in the late afternoon. All that walking and they still weren't there? They did not build a fire. They muttered about hunters and searchers. They had carried all the stolen provisions but they did not open them. They ate meat strips and potato beans, and when the whole sky was black they lay in the leaves they had heaped.

For most of the night Fisher was awake, listening to their snores and gasps. He was now too weak to escape — they did not even trouble themselves to cram him into the rope bag or to tie him up. They left him squatting in his own pile of leaves. He imagined them thinking: How can this cripple get away? It demoralized him to know that they had not bothered to secure him while they slept. It was another sign of their contempt. He was too simple and stupid to save himself, they figured. He hated them, and pitied himself, and despised Hardy and Moura for the shortsighted fertility arrangement they had made. If they had been shrewder he would have been different — powerful, never afraid, taller, nothing missing.

He was impatient for the sun to come up. He wanted to move on. The prospect of change gave him confidence. At least the new people would not eat him. You didn't buy someone and eat him! He knew he would be handed back to Hardy and Moura for a ransom and then he would start proceedings against Hooper for dereliction of duty — a huge lawsuit — and bring him down. Sometime he would return here and burn them all.

His anger gave him life and restored his thirst.

"Who's that moving?"

It was the mutter of the little man Gumbie standing watch.

"That you, Fish?"

Fisher grunted "Yum," and Gumbie turned his back on him. That was how much they cared. And Gumbie was cracking something in his teeth. There was no greater show of indifference than a guard eating in front of a prisoner. Eating demonstrated a brainless absence of fear. Gumbie was eating like an ape. He was hunkered down, with his elbows out. He seemed to be crunching bones and blowing the broken pieces off his big lips.

"What are you eating?"

"Pine nut," Gumbie said, turned to the boy.

They were both pale blue in the moonlight.

"Crack one for you?"

Frog-eyes, they called this man — Froggy — because of the protruding hoods of his eyelids, and there was always a froggy frown on his big mouth. Fisher suspected from his unresponsive alertness — staring and never seeing anything— that he was dimwitted. He felt safe in the presence of this small man's inaction.

Fisher said, "I want a drink."

"There's a jug in the cooler."

"Not from the jug," Fisher said. "Get a sealed can."

"Mr. B said don't touch the provisions."

"I'm captain," Fisher said, steeling himself.

Gumbie went pah spitting nutshells.

"And if I die," Fisher said, "you won't be able to sell me."

Without a word, Gumbie rummaged in a bag and brought out a can. He handed it to Fisher, who sat down and fumbled with it. He had never opened a can without tongs or clean gloves. Finally he unsealed it, splashing some of it on his sleeves. He drank it so fast it went down his throat like liquid flapping through a pipe — the sound of a drain.

It was his first drink for two days. It cleared his head and strengthened him. He saw this as a victory, something to be enjoyed. He was alone in O-Zone with eight aliens! He was sorry there was no one he could tell — not to boast but simply to have on the record: an Owner, Type A, on his first mission actually living with hostile aliens. He thought: I'm not dead yet!

More than ever he wanted to be rescued, so that he could return and thunder down and kill all these people, especially this half-wit, Gumbie.

He said, "Where are we going?"

"Like Mr. B said, we're selling you, fella."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yump."

"Who's going to buy me?"

Gumbie was crunching a pine nut. He blew and swallowed, then paused, picking nutshells from his lips. He was thinking.

"Some Diggers in the town over there."

"Which Diggers, which town?" Fisher sensed that Gumbie was weakening. "I'll give you a swig if you tell me. It's glucose. It's real sweet."

A snort rattled out of Gumbie's hairy nostrils.

Gumbie then uttered an extraordinary sentence.

"The Bagoon family at the Mooseworks Pit in Varnado, near Summerville."

Fisher repeated the words to himself. They seemed to say everything, and yet they told him nothing.

"Now give me that swig," Gumbie said.

Gumbie's suckings and swallowings on the nozzle were too much for Fisher. They were monkey noises, they made the boy think of germs, and of viruses for which there were no known cures. He went and lay down on his leaves.

From the darkness there came a low accusing voice — the growl of Mr. Blue. "So you're not so stupid after all."

Fisher did not move, did not breathe. He kept very still, wondering who Mr. Blue was speaking to. "I'm talking to you, captain"

The next day they talked about him as if he were not there. Mr. Blue said the kid was tricky: it was best to ignore him.

"Don't touch him, don't talk to him, don't listen, don't give him anything. I don't want any relationships to develop."

They were sorting their equipment, distributing it in equal loads prior to moving on. They made a great effort to remove every trace of their having spent the night in this grove— scattered the leaves they had slept on, swept away their tracks, filled in the garbage pit. There had been no fire. It was especially important to make the place look innocent, Mr. Blue said, because they were leaving the stock of sealed provisions behind, buried in a hole.

"I want this to be a simple transaction," Mr. Blue said. "If they suspect the kid's a dip, they won't buy him."

"What are we going to tell them?" Martlet said.

"That they can have him. They can negotiate with the search parties and collect the ransom. They've got radios."

Valda said, "But he probably is a dip. He won't eat, and there's no one looking for him."

"That's his problem," Martlet said.

"His people just left without him."

"Don't tell the Bagoons," Mr. Blue said. "They'll see a good hostage. A little dippy and obstinate, but otherwise a normal eighteen-year-old, I guess."

"I'm fifteen and a half," Fisher said.

"I don't hear anything," Mr. Blue said.

"Fuck-wit."

Someone laughed.

"I'm a clinic-classified Type A, upper number. I've been a remote student since I was seven—"

"Nothing," Mr. Blue said evenly, and shouldered his pack.

"Fiber optics, particle physics, theoretical densities, the Bremstrahlung effect, wah-wah-wah—"

He had started a stammering quack in the confusion of his protest, because no one seemed to be listening; and the more he quacked, the more incoherent were his words. It was as if he had lapsed into another language.

"Mutagens! Thermal receivers. Fictile circuitry!"

"Let's move," Mr. Blue said. "We can be in Varnado by noon."

Their camp had hidden them at the foot of this range of hills, but when they climbed a low ridge and began descending again Fisher saw that it was the last range of hills. To the southeast was Firehills-Fisher knew the patterns of scarps and knobs and shut-ins; to the northwest, clearly visible on the edge of what looked like prairie, was the place they had been calling Varnado, and the surrounding township of Summerville.

"I know where we are," Fisher said, and blinked at the tumbled town.

"Not a thing," Mr. Blue said, with his hand to his ear.

"That city-stain."

They did not seem to know the term. Someone mumbled, "Varnado."

"I've been over there in a jet-rotor. I've even hovered there and shot close-ups. It's totally uninhabited. They've stopped putting it on maps, because it's still pretty hot. It doesn't have a name."

"Dip," someone said.

This sight, the land ahead, was Fisher's earliest memory of O-Zone. He had seen it first on the ground-screen when they had come for the New Year's party: the wheel-shaped city-stain of ruined and roofless houses, and tipped-over stacks, and the standing towers with bearded brickwork; the terraces and painted pools. From the rotor it had seemed a large figure flattened on the ground, like a pressed flower or a footprint. They had shot it and gotten a sound-bite, and then they had buzzed it and made for Firehills. That New Year's party Fisher now saw as their undoing— all of them had been wrecked by it, and he had come out the worst.

Today this city in the distance scared him. It was vast and irregular. There was no way out. Its farthest edge was rucked up like a rug into folds on the horizon. A light dust cloud swelled over it like a puffball. Beyond the broken suburbs in the foreground — streets bursting with grass and bushes, collapsed houses, faded cars resting on their axles — there were empty apartment buildings, and the stone towers and condos of the old town.

It all looked so different and dangerous: from the ground it was an aching sight of abandonment. They had just left the steep hill paths that gave Fisher vertigo, and now he was faced with this city-stain, where he felt he might sink and disappear — because "city-stain" was the wrong term. It was only a stain above an altitude of three clicks. He could see now that it was deep and shadowy, and was dusty with desertion. There was not a live thing anywhere in it. But his captors did not hesitate at the edge. They were still tramping. But where were they taking him?

It did not even occur to him to run. And the dark and the disorder of O-Zone frightened him so much they overwhelmed his other fear — of being eaten alive. What had remained of his willpower had almost stopped twitching in him. The thought that he was going to be sold to some new people no longer gave him heart. He could not find anything in the look of this ruined town to give him hope.

He saw a good walled-in house, but it was only a place in which to die. He thought of worse things. In one particular horror-vision he saw a gang of savages enacting a ritual sacrifice and roasting him over an altar fire. In another he was left to scream himself into suffocation in an airless room. He was tortured with biting insects. Or he was simply abandoned in this deadly place. He did not want to be let loose; he needed to be rescued by that porker who had demanded the title "chief of ground operations."

"I hate this place," Mr. Blue said. "I hate Diggers."

Fisher moaned to think that this savage alien was afraid and hated it here.

They were still scuffing through the outer town. They kept to the middle of the street, away from the dead or else grotesquely overgrown trees and hedges. The cracks in the street made it seem as if it were made entirely of puzzle pieces. The sun sifted through the puffball of dust,

"We'll drop this dip and then take off."

They were going to sell him and then leave him there!

"Maybe we should send Martlet ahead to let them know we're here," Tinia said.

"They already know," Mr. Blue said.

He said it in a kindly way. Tinia and Kylie, the two other women, stuck together and usually let Valda do their talking for them. Fisher now regarded these women with a sense of envy: they were going to be leaving this place today, and he was being sold — to stay.

Echols said, "They have sentries everywhere." He was wearing Fisher's broken helmet, with the faceplate up, and carrying a weapon he had stolen from the rotor — one of Murdick's particle beams. "They have radios, too. We've probably passed a half-dozen Bagoons in those empty houses. They'll send word ahead. They hate strangers in their quarter."

They talked as if O-Zone were full of people and places, with names and reputations. Not a Prohibited Area, but twenty counties still more or less ticking over. It was supposed to be empty!

"When will we see them?" Valda asked.

Fisher guessed that none of the three women had been here before, from their ignorant questions.

"When they want to become visible they'll stick their heads out."

The women looked up at the windows.

"Out of the ground," Echols said. "They don't live in those buildings. They live underneath them. Hey, they're all Diggers."

Overhearing this talk aggravated Fisher's fears, and after almost an hour of what he guessed were the Summerville suburbs they came to the granite buildings and the headless towers of Varnado. He was alarmed by the shadows and he felt sure he was being watched from these towers. A cone-shaped one had once been made of glass; every window was broken and what remained was a fragile structure of rusted frames. He had been fearful flying over it in a jet-rotor. He was now traipsing through it on foot! He wanted someone to know this! His fear was tinged with amazed pride at having achieved it.

"There's someone in that doorway," Martlet said, deliberately not looking.

The scrap of pride left Fisher then, and his terror returned. Terror was a sense of his being big and soft and very easy to kill.

Mr. Blue had started to say something, but the person in the doorway interrupted him.

"Stay where you are." It was a young grunting voice using an old loudspeaker that seemed to shred the words.

They saw it was a small ugly child with a thumblike nose and long dark nostrils and tiny eyes. It wore a long shirt and stood on bare feet, but whether it was a boy or girl they could not tell.

Echols said, "See, they put kids in all the dangerous jobs aboveground. They're expendable."

Vaida said, "What bastards!"

The force of her outrage distracted Fisher and made him see this woman as almost human. Until that moment he had not imagined any of them to have normal emotions. She cared about the child!

The child had given Fisher a fright. This little creature intimidated him more than a full-sized adult would have done. He found most small children subhuman, apelike, and dangerously unpredictable. Even ones in Coldharbor upset him. "Children" was a horror-word,

The child's grunting came again. "Use the phone!"

Mr. Blue slung down his pack and left the group. He went through the doorway, where the child still stood watching, but he was not gone more than a minute.

"It's just me and the Fish," he said when he returned. "The rest of you wait here."

Fisher said, "I changed my mind."

They looked at him.

Fisher said, "I've decided I don't want to be sold."

"Dippy," someone said.

"Don't say that!" Fisher cried out. "Don't leave me here."

But the others had stopped listening to him. More faces emerged from behind pillars and window frames — they were children of remarkable similarity, with round, sunburned faces, rather doglike and snub-nosed, and squinting and frowning at the strangers like bad-tempered old men.

Fisher had become very afraid. The aliens hadn't answered him. He had told them his decision. They didn't care! And now, at the moment of being separated from the group that had abducted him, he stopped seeing them as savages and stopped believing they would eat him. Valda had convinced him by saying disgustedly What bastards! He began to fear the unknown Diggers who lived like moles in this ghost town of Varnado.

They entered the building, just the two of them, Mr. Blue leading, and descended the fire stairs — three flights to an old concourse, with lamplit tunnels leading from it. It had once been an underground shopping center — the troughs still stood, holding dead ornamental trees. The store signs were intact above shop fronts: shoes, salads, sandwiches, jewelry, books, bedding, drugs, flowers, chocolates, ice cream, auto accessories, clothes. It was so odd in this buried mausoleum to see the empty shops and the dirty signs: Casey's, Hi-Rite, Soop's, Van Allen, Heather, Speed-King, Grover's Drugs, Hax, Mackie's — there was even a cavernous Allbright's, one of the old retail outlets.

This large underground area had the smell of humans. The light was poor — there was no electricity. That was very scary. There were oil lamps and reflectors and ceiling wells where shafts of dusty sunlight came from street level. And there was a stink of burning fat or grease — probably the lamp fuel— and a smell like dead cats.

Mr. Blue said, "Let me do the talking."

Fear had silenced Fisher. They were following another ugly child.

Mr. Blue turned. Was he smiling? He said, "I was just getting used to you."

The quack that came out of Fisher's nose was pitiful — even he was startled by it. Mr. Blue's features softened when he heard the harsh despairing sound.

"They call this the Mooseworks," Mr. Blue said, in a chatty way.

It pained Fisher to hear this man be friendly now, as he was about to sell him. Perhaps that was why he was being friendly, because Fisher no longer mattered, and the man was relieved at the thought of getting rid of him and making some money. What good was money here?

"To distinguish it from the Buffaloworks. That's another network of Diggers."

They were met at the far end of the concourse by a man with a flashlight. He held it and twirled it in a self-important way, as if it were his badge of authority. And because he kept it shining on Fisher for most of the time, Fisher had only the dimmest sense of the man's appearance — merely an impression of clumsy fatness, and whiskers, and greasy overalls. The man breathed loudly through his nose. This was an alien! He made Mr. Blue seem rather tame and gentle.

"What have you brought me, Mr. B?"

From behind the light Fisher heard the disgusting scrape of the man's fingers scratching his scalp.

"I've got a valuable hostage."

"He doesn't look very healthy." The fingers reached beyond the light and pinched Fisher's arm. "Where did you get him?"

"Out of a rotor, in a gully in our quarter. Hunters, probably. New Yorkers — the rotor was registered. They're looking for him, but we've avoided them. We can't deal with ransom. We don't have any resources. We had to leave our camp two months ago because of a raid. We lost two people. We're on the move. This kid's just in the way,"

"What makes you think we can handle him?"

"You can make radio contact," Mr. Blue said. "There's some big bucks to be made out of this kid. See his suit?"

"You only took this creep? You didn't take food or weapons?"

"Nope."

"That's got to be a lie," the man said, flashing his light into Mr. Blue's face and giving Fisher a glimpse of the man's own head: he had the flat broad frowning face of those children, and was dirtier, and had hair to his shoulders, and tiny eyes— hardly a face with so much hair.

"I wouldn't trust their food," Mr. Blue said. "They put poison in it. And they never leave weapons behind."

"Yet they left this kid," the man said, and made Fisher wince with the flashlight. "I don't blame them! He's a bone, he looks sick, he's probably carrying something infectious. Unless he's hoopy. What's his name?"

As the man asked, he reached out, and thinking he was going to be pinched again, Fisher recoiled with a squawk, crying Wah! He had also gotten another glimpse in the shifting light of the man's face, his bad skin, his cracked lips and matted hair. He received a strong gust of the man's stink.

"His name's Fish," Mr. Blue said. "We haven't got a machine to read his ID. It's coded. I'm telling you, if he's not an Owner he belongs to Owners. They pay big bucks."

"He's a dip," the man said, and scratched his head. It was like a rake dragged through sand.

Fisher had reacted to the man in a monkey movement, and he was still whimpering. But he had already processed what he had seen so far. This large filthy family of Diggers had been undetected because they lived underground, at the lowest level of this abandoned town. There was no way a scanner could reach them, and any shooting missed them too: Fisher's own shooting had missed them. Wrong again!

"I've got enough dips," the man said. "We'll take him off your hands, but we're not buying him unless we get some food and weapons."

"We need food too," Mr. Blue said. "That's why I'm here. We're hungry. We can't feed hostages."

"You mean this dip is all you've got?"

"He's worth money. When they come looking for him—"

The two men argued. Fisher had long ceased to feel that he would be saved here. He doubted that he would even survive in this awful place. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness: he could see enough of these littered shops and tunnels to fear them. It was bad enough on the ground — but belowground it was ratholes, with suffocating smells.

Mr. Blue was saying, "These hunters and prospectors have money. They're going to want this kid back."

"There are no hunters here," the man said. "They call it O-Zone. I think they dumped this kid. I think you found him in a bush. I think you're lying."

"I'm not."

"You're lying about the weapons, too. One of your men up there has a helmet and some kind of laser gun-new stuff. My kids saw it. Don't bullshit me!"

"Broken," Mr. Blue said. "Try them if you like. You can have them with the kid if you pay. But I swear they're cracked."

"This kid's cracked — he's a dip." Again the light was on Fisher, dazzling his eyes. "Look at those teeth, look at those big lips. Why are his hands red? He's got pimples and sores. Don't lie to me — someone dumped him. They'll never be back. Look, he's crying!"

Tears were brimming in Fisher's eyes. He had started to crouch in despair. His breathing was sudden with sobs, and he looked stricken. He had no hope at all now.

"I like that — look!" the man said. He was peering closer at Fisher, he seemed amused by the child's weeping.

Mr. Blue said, "Leave him alone."

"I'll take him," the man said. "I want him!"

Mr. Blue had knelt near Fisher, and so had the man. Fisher snatched at Mr. Blue's hand and held it tightly, pressing it to his face. Long labored groans came out of Fisher's mouth. Fisher glanced up and he was shocked by the look of pity on Mr. Blue's face. Or was it pity? It was an expression of sympathy and disgust, and perhaps anger, too.

Fisher was unable to make one word. His fear had reduced his speech to animal sounds. He was drizzling and honking snot. The sounds frightened him and his fear made those same sounds worse.

Mr. Blue stood in front of Fisher as the big man reached out with his dark hand.

"Hoo! Let me have him!"

"Leave it," Mr. Blue said. "I changed my mind."

"I think you're a dip.'*

"I think so too," Mr. Blue said. "I guess we're going."

"Stick around. We can have some fun with this creeper!"

"Ill have to discuss it with my people," Mr. Blue said, hoisting Fisher, jerking his arm.

And they left — Mr. Blue hurrying the stumbling boy along the concourse. In his panic, Fisher had become wordless. He grunted, he shambled, he tripped on the stairs.

On the second landing, Mr, Blue fussed and hesitated, changing again, reproaching himself. He said, "Why didn't I leave you there!"

But he stopped when he saw Fisher stammering, trying to speak, and his eyes became kindlier watching the boy's struggle.

"It's. . it's not a laser gun," Fisher said at last. "It's a particle beam. I can fix it for you. I can fix the signal in the helmet. I can get the radio working. I can get anything you want. Please don't leave me here!"

Mr. Blue had become very calm, and Fisher saw in his calmness the kindest face. He did not see a savage anymore: he saw a rescuer.

Mr. Blue said, "I occasionally have the feeling you might be human."

Outside, he did not reply to any of the questions from the group — and they were heckling him. He did not slow his pace. He pulled on his pack and, still walking, he said, "Let's get out of here while it's still light. Diggers are dangerous in the dark, and I don't like Varnado."

"Why didn't you sell him?" Martlet said. He had been nagging the whole time. "Why didn't you swap him?"

"They didn't want him," Mr. Blue said, and kept his face forward.

The lie gladdened Fisher and made him march harder. People had always told lies against him, but when had anyone ever lied on his behalf? And it was an alien!

21

Mr. Blue was a young balding man whom most of them called Mr. B. Though he was strong and had the upright and stiff-backed posture of a man in Federal Security — and that in itself amazed Fisher, because Mr. B was an alien— and always carried his own pack, and was always at the front of the file, and a wonderful walker, he was mostly made of bones. He was so skinny his knees showed as big bulges; he had sharp elbows and shoulders; and Fisher could see the clear angles of his skull beneath his thin flesh — even the way his jawbone was hinged just under his ear.

At times his thinness gave him a kindly aspect, and at other times it made him seem suspicious and dangerous. His thin face and long fingers always made him appear cautious, as if he was willing to take his time, and didn't mind being slow. Fisher looked at him and expected him to say "No" or else nothing at all. He often said nothing. He had a habit of suddenly falling silent — breaking off in the middle of a sentence, tilting his head slightly, and listening. When he listened like that everyone else went quiet. His silences gave him authority.

It happened that very afternoon, as they marched away from Vartiado on the track they had followed in. Fisher was talking — he was so relieved to be alive and with these people that his fears were suspended, and he was gabbling.

"I'll tell you why the satellites have missed those Diggers so far" — though no one had asked the question—"and why they still figure O-Zone is empty. If the Diggers aren't using any energy except a little oil and a little solar, and they're staying belowground or undercover in watchtowers, there's no way they can be detected. You could get a satellite fix on them if you knew how to program it. I could program a satellite to find something five millimeters long. I've got enough information now to get a wire on those Diggers, and burn them out, too, if you want to—"

"Shut up, fish-face," Martlet said,

"Mr. B's listening," Gumbie said.

Fisher was flustered. He did not know the words for any apology, and had never placated anyone before, and so he became very nervous. He could not remember what he had been saying, or even that he had been monologuing.

They all held their breath for a full minute.

Then Mr. Blue signaled that it was all right — just a plopping noise made by a branch.

"He hears things that we don't," Echols said. "That's why he's in charge and you're not."

"I heard it," Fisher said brightly.

They glanced at him: all those cold faces.

"It was random," Fisher said. "Percussive. Organic. No threat quotient. Yeah, it could have been a branch."

"Dip," someone said, but Fisher was still talking.

"If we had the right box I could print those sounds and analyze them. We could store sounds, make a memory bank for every gleep, program a listener alarm. We could have bands with pitches represented, so that every sound was categorized, and then—"

He sensed a rising antagonism toward him, a growing intensity of rejection. It was like a certain quality in the air— like a smell vibrating against him. And it seemed to awaken a receptive sense in him that he had never used.

"Then we could go on talking," Fisher said.

"We don't have a box, we don't have a frame," Mr. Blue said. "We've got nets and jackknives, that's all."

"I can fix the particle beam or the helmet if—"

But Mr. Blue was still talking. That was another habit of the man, the way he would go on in the same even voice, overriding any interruption-which was why his anger seemed so terrible. His shouting was rare, so it was like madness,

"We were raided last January," he said quietly.

"New Year's day," said Rooks.

They kept track of the months and days? January? New Year's? Fisher was on the verge of saying, It wasn't me — it was Hooper!

"We lost two good men," Mr. Blue went on. "We had to leave our camp — we've been on the move ever since. That's why, when we hear a noise, we listen."

"The particle beam has a heat sensor. That's better than a human eye. And the radio scanner in the helmet can pick up anyone shadowing us, on any frequency. I mean, you don't have to stop walking and stick your ears out just because a branch falls down somewhere, or a bird poops in its nest!"

They had started to walk again. Fisher sensed that no one was listening to him, and stopped talking.

"I'm hungry," he said after a while.

Martlet said, "Now he wants to eat!"

There was not enough daylight left for them to get back to their previous night's camp, where they had buried their provisions. But they were eager to be as far away from Varnado as they could. They climbed to the ridge on the first range of hills and stayed there. It was too dangerous to make the descent on the narrow track in the dark. They ate pine nuts and hawthorn buds they had gathered on the way up, and they promised themselves a better meal tomorrow. It was a cool night, and there was drifting dust, but Fisher was comfortable enough in his insulated suit, in a nest of pine needles and leaves. The others slept together, huddled in a heap under some woven blankets.

In a groggy voice Fisher spoke to the darkness: "People in New York think O-Zone is peaceful."

He still marveled that he was alive — after his abduction, after the dirt, the bad food and no sleep, and the marching, after the frightening encounter in Varnado: those children, that Bagoon man, the Diggers. I am alive, he thought.

He had begun to relax, and as his panic left he discovered that he was very tired. He had loosened his grip on wakefulness and was already plunging fast into streaming fathoms of sleep. He was wakened from this slumber by a reply — one of the men.

"Ozark, not O-Zone."

"The Outer Zone," Fisher said, slipping under again.

He woke, shivering, and heard the crackle of a fire. It was daylight. He had noticed that they only made fires during the day, and often no fires at all. They lived lightly in a skimming way on the land, with no signs of their having passed through.

This morning they were all on their feet, standing in a circle, warming themselves. They were laughing — talking about thick soup and hot tea and fresh bread — what they would do to get some.

They were handsome in their headcloths, their scarves wound around their faces against the dust and the chill. And their shawls and their cloaks gave them the look of Arabs or Gypsies. They had the right clothes for this hot-cool place and its dryness. Fisher no longer noticed that they were wearing faded rags; they seemed camouflaged and well-equipped. "We could strain some water through Gumbie's socks."

"Would that give us soup or tea?"

"Oh, man," Gumbie said, and looked at his feet. Fisher stood up and staggered. He pushed at his hair and yawned and limped over to them. He chucked a large stick on their fire, scattering sparks and killing the flames for a moment. Warming his hands, he bumped the others and stumbled, stepping on someone's toes. Then, to be companionable — though no one had said anything — he laughed abruptly. He opened his mouth very wide and honked Ha! Ha! Ha!

The others looked at him slowly, with polite horror. They were startled and suspicious, and their silence silenced the boy's honks,

"Where do you brush your teeth around here?" Fisher did not see their apprehension or their mockery. "Where do you squirt?"

They laughed at this, and he was glad. He was so happy to have woken up among them. One of his nightmares last night concerned torture in Varnado. It was a stone or a stick pressing into his back, but his nightmare made it into a knife blade. And the odd burr of insects in the night had given him a glimpse of the filthy Bagoon, that Digger scratching his scalp.

But now he was drinking air in the clear morning light by the fire — you needed permission for fires in New York, and this kind was forbidden! Anyway, you'd never find the wood! This wasn't civilized but it wasn't too bad. He now saw Diggers as dangerous cannibals, and decided that he was safe. Mr. Blue was decent, for an alien. Fisher liked the way these people had risen early and made their fire. He had somehow thought that they would be snuffling under their blankets all day, and biting each other, or else waiting for it to rain. He couldn't imagine what you did if you didn't have a room.

They were outdoors all the time! But he was reassured by their human laughter, even if he didn't understand their jokes.

He wanted to please them. He had never tried to please anyone before in his life. He believed that his laughing very hard and very loud was one way; that asking dumb questions was another; and that being useful — repairing the signal and the beam — would make them grateful to him. It would surely please them to know that he was very powerful; but he regretted that they were not intelligent enough to understand his particle theory — Of Subsequence. He longed to impress them, but they did not have any math, so it was perhaps impossible — unless he was able to turn his learning into a trick. He kept laughing in odd stuttering shouts — he honked, he hee-hawed like a jackass.

He said, "Do you aliens notice the cold? You probably think I'm a herbert but if it's a couple of degrees down I can't move!"

They stared at him, scarcely believing.

He said, "I was just joking about brushing your teeth, by the way. Mine are sealed. But you've got to do something or else you'd get wicked bad breath."

They said nothing to him, and yet still stared.

He said, "I used to think you people were cannibals. Hey, you must have heard the stories!"

He spoke to Rooks.

"That you kept Owners for their meat!"

Rooks was a wheezy-faced black with blown-out cheeks and a flat head and a deeply pitted nose. He had made himself a thick collar with his scarf. His color frightened Fisher, even though Hooper had said there were legal blacks all over New York. Fisher had never spoken to one, and he could not imagine that this man understood English. He had not seemed to hear; he had not blinked.

But now he took his mouth out of his scarf and spoke back to Fisher.

"If I was a cannibal," Rooks said, "I certainly wouldn't eat you. I'd only eat you if I was a vegetarian."

Broop-broop, someone was laughing.

And so Fisher laughed — gave his sudden honk — and it was such a surprise to everyone that they laughed with him.

"Those Diggers!" he cried between honks. "I was scared! I thought I was going to brick myself!"

Mr. Blue interrupted him and said they had a long day ahead of them. He said, "And we could take those provisions home. We should go back to the valley."

"Which one?" Fisher asked. "This zone is full of down-thrown massifs and cave tectonics!"

"Happy Valley," Gumbie said.

"Sounds like a funny kind of depression," Fisher said. "Hey, get it?" He became very grave and added, "I don't blame you. I hate jokes mysetf. You always get them from porkers. 'What's four feet high and has three ears?' That kind of wonk. I don't even listen to it."

They boiled water and drank it,

"White tea," Valda said.

Fisher had some and complimented them. "It's pretty sensible to boil it, you know. You guys aren't doing too bad."

Then they kicked the fire into a hole and scattered the piles of leaves and dragged branches over their tracks. They walked along the ridge and down the hill to the place where they had buried their provisions.

"This isn't the place," Fisher said. "It was farther down the slope!"

No one said he was wrong. Mr. Blue moved a rock and dug out some soil and lifted a box of provisions.

"We could bury a bug or a sensor, and then afterward we'd know just where to dig," Fisher said.

"We could bury you, sonny," Martlet said. "And then you'd know."

Mr. Blue had knifed open the box. He said, "We'll split open one of these protein packs and rehydrate some of those vegetables. But that's just to get us started. We're going to spend the next few days finding our own food — as much as we can,"

"Like animals," Fisher said, showing his teeth and grinning, trying to please them. It was not a smile; it was merely a way of twisting his mouth.

They were watching him.

"Just food-gathering! Using the whole day to grab food, and storing it up, and just thinking about eating! That's what wild animals do! Ha!"

Their silence overtook him and smothered the echo of his laugh.

In a challenging voice Martlet said, "What are you planning to do, Fish?"

"Fix the hardware!" Fisher said. "When you come back from your nut-gathering you're going to hear a radio going zip-de-zip. You might even have a particle beam. You've never had one of those before. You're going to like that!"

"Dippy-dip," Rooks said.

Mr. Blue broke open a tube of textured protein.

"It's made for the space program," Fisher said. "They've got all different flavors. The nozzle's for fitting on a suckhole, but you can eat it without a suckhole: I'm the only one here with a helmet, right!"

"It looks like shit," Tinia said; and the other woman, Kylie, said, "Sure does."

"It tastes like shit, too," Martlet said.

Fisher said, "You guys eat dead animals!"

Their stare was like a disapproving noise.

"Hey, I eat meat now and then," Fisher said. "Really!"

They were all chewing fragments of the protein mixture now, and this chewing was more intimidating to Fisher than their stares.

"Fart-food," Echols said.

Fisher said, "It goes good with glucose."

"No glucose, no sealed drinks," Mr. Blue said. "We can dig for water. Then we set off and collect some grub."

They filled a soup pot with some freeze-dried vegetable flakes from the sealed provisions, and boiled them in water, and let the flakes swell — the contents were thick and sludgy, they soaked up so much water. And the people ate them using wooden implements out of their packs. Mr. Blue ate sitting on the ground. His back was perfectly straight, like a classical musician in a chair — a man with a violin, except he had a wooden spoon and wet vegetable flakes. He ate without a sound, listening hard, as he scooped each flake neatly and raised it to his mouth.

When they were done, Mr. Blue gave them tasks. Most were to gather food, or else process it; one was to keep watch on the ridge. Fisher, Echols, and Valda were to stay in the camp.

"I don't need help from them," Fisher said. "They're ignorant about this stuff. It's very sophisticated circuitry — just slugs and chips. It doesn't have moving parts, you know!"

"How old are you, Fish — fifteen, right?"

"Sixteen in a couple of months. Hey, listen, a theoretical physicist is washed up at twenty-five or so, and a mathematician even earlier. Your brain turns to mush. Einstein did all his serious thinking in his twenties. So did Ravensdale, the particle man — he did this big thing on densities and speeds. I was working on the interrupted mode — beam-bending. You don't understand any of this stuff, do you? What I mean is, I'm old!"

"Sure," Mr. Blue said. "And that's why I want you to keep an eye on these people, Fish."

"I'll be captain," the boy said.

He fretted about finding the right place to work, but when he found a flat rock, he worried about dust getting into the works of the helmet. He whimpered about the light being bad and about not having the right tools. He had only the emergency kit from the lining of his suit. He seemed very young and very nervous, and he snapped at Echols and Valda, "These are caveman conditions! This is year zero! And you don't know the first thing about this category of helmet. You probably think it's some kind of hat!"

But when at last he opened the helmet and set to work on it he became calmer and conversational.

"This helmet's a Velmar Victor. It's got about a hundred functions, and that's just in the communication mode," he said. "You don't have the slightest idea." He removed the dome with his bony fingers. "This is where your energy cells are housed. This is how we test them—"

In a patient but doubtful way, Valda and Echols sat watching the boy. They were each knitting, moving two short spikes through some coarse yam. It was one of the habits of these people, Fisher had noticed, their routine of knitting whenever they were at rest. They made narrow lengths of woven ribbon that matched the patterns in their clothes. Every scarf they wore was sewn together from such woven strips. Their spikes clicked as they watched Fisher.

"I hate my head," Fisher said suddenly, looking up and making a face. "The shape of it, the way it bulges in the back." His gaze met Valda's, "I know what you're thinking. Too bad about his ears. They're way too big."

Valda said, "I hadn't noticed."

"Then there is something really wrong with your eyesight," the boy said. "Plus, my left ear is smaller and a fraction lower than the right. God, I hate being asymmetrical." Now his head was down, his nose against the helmet. "The cells are fully charged, from your wearing it, Mr. Echols. Though you had it on wrong. Probably thought it was a hat, right?"

Echols said, "How long are those cells good for?"

"Stymax — no upper limit!" Fisher said, poking inside the mask. "And my sinuses, too — they fill up. I get wicked sneezing fits and my nose drips. And I've got flat feet, practically no arches at all. If I took these boots off and walked through this dust — which I would never do, because there's probably hookworm here, but let's say I did — you'd see duck prints. I'm not kidding. Webbed feet."

He was still tinkering.

"This is such a beautiful thing. Look at the circuitry, all those chips. This was developed for high-risk areas. It's shockproof and sensitive. Look at the technology, the.bands, the slugs, the sniffer. This baby doesn't sneeze!" He handed Echols the dome. "Hold that — don't drop it."

"I'll try not to," Echols said.

"If you do," Fisher said, "you're wasting about two million bucks' worth of research technology."

"We'll try to remember that, won't we, Valda?"

"If my parents weren't such porkers I'd have a head like this" — he was gripping the temples of the helmet. "I wouldn't have these stupid ears. These duck feet. These spastic reflexes. My sinuses wouldn't be fouled up. It's their fault."

He glanced over and saw them staring, and for a moment their stares held him.

"My mother decides to go to a clinic. She gets a printout. The clinic's a meat market, staffed by wonks and weirdos. She doesn't run a check on the printout, so obviously there are negative factors. She just looks at a few items instead of the whole data profile. Then she goes for about two years. This is a contact clinic, I'm not kidding. She's up there playing Mrs. Sandwich and Hide-the-Sausage, and all the rest of it. She figures there's a problem. Two years — she's still wondering! She could have gone on to frozen angels, but no, she's got Mr. Sausage and his magic knob doing the job. Finally, she's positive, barf-barf, and she gets scanned and plunged, and here I am. And you're wondering why I'm so pissed off?"

He had returned to the helmet.

"That red bulge is the signal," he said. "See if we can get it talking to us."

His tongue was clamped between his teeth, and he looked like a small boy struggling with a toy. He twisted a cartridge and pressed his thumb on a bulb. A sound came out of its perforations like fingers snapping. "This is what I'm good at. What are you porkers good at?*'

"We know how to evaporate," Echols said.

"What does that mean?"

"We can evaporate. That's how we've survived. That's what we're good at."

"Half the time I don't even know what you're talking about," Fisher said. "Hey, hear that clicking? That's the synapse heating the inducer. These things are beautiful."

Valda leaned over to see.

"And I could mention my knob. It probably doesn't even work."

"What's a knob?" Valda asked.

"Hear that? She wants to know what a knob is!" Fisher said to Echols.

"Why don't you tell her?" Echols said.

"A knob is something you don't have," Fisher said. And when Valda looked up he honked at her. "Know what I mean?" And he nudged Echols and honked again. "A dingle-dangle. A winkle. A sausage. A worm. Know what I mean?"

"Yes," she said, "but are you sure it doesn't work?"

"You're getting a buzz," Echols said, for a heep-heep, like an alarm, was sounding from the helmet.

"I know," Fisher said. "Don't touch it. Give me the dome, but don't drop it, dong-face!"

"Is that buzz the radio?"

"Can't you tell the difference between the radio and the scan signal? It's two totally separate functions and sounds!"

Valda said, "You can tell us all about it."

"Sure," Fisher said. "But would you understand it, is the question. You don't have enough math. Hey, do you have any math? You certainly don't have enough high-tech. Have you done sequences?"

Valda said, "I didn't even know what a knob was."

"Ha!" Fisher was honking again. "I've been a remote student since I was eight!" And he put on the mask. "Listen, this dong is humming!" And he jammed the faceplate down. "I'm getting signals! Want a news update? Want some weather?"

"How about a commuter-traffic report?" Echols said.

* * *

When the others returned with their bags of food, Fisher gave them all a demonstration of the helmet, fastening on satellite signals and relaying radio news.

He said, "It's got lots of functions, but it doesn't have much range."

"We want the weapon," Martlet said. "We don't need a radio."

"Weapons!" Fisher said. "I know all about your weapons. You go around scaring people. You fling mutants at them!"

"Diggers do that," Gumbie said.

Fisher experienced a retrospective fear, for that meant back at Firehills that Diggers had been lurking near the wire, those Bagoons, and had chucked a dead squirrel at them, so that they would think Cancer! and Mutants! and go home.

Echols startled Fisher out of his reverie by saying, "The helmet's probably got a scan that will help trace the fault in the particle beam." And he smiled at Fisher. "It's got to be a break in the transducer."

Fisher said, "Know what? You're pretty smart for an alien."

It was later that day that Fisher realized there were conflicts within the group. It made him uneasy to hear them arguing, and Mr. Blue did nothing to stop them. The leader simply sat on the ground, hardly listening, while three people pulled one way and four people pulled the other. Then night fell, and they were speaking in the dark, the woman called Kylie leading one side, and Martlet leading the other. Kylie, Gumbie, and Tinia were for heading west, to the next range of hills; and Martlet, Echols, Valda, and Rooks wanted to cross the nearer ridge and make for the valley, to see whether the camp they had abandoned was still intact. This camp was news to Fisher: he had not seen signs of any camp on the tape they had shot, either at New Year's or more recently. If he had seen a camp none of this would have happened. He would have said, "Nuke it," and that would have been that.

Why didn't Mr. Blue intervene? The skinny man was silent, which disturbed Fisher, because the boy did not have enough data to take sides — and he wanted more data — and furthermore, the fact that there were sides to take made him feel insecure.

It was this way for part of the night. And then at dawn, around the fire, they started again-this way, that way. They probably didn't even consider data, they probably were just hungry and hostile — some kind of psychotic depression before they started biting each other!

He put on the helmet and locked the faceplate in order to isolate himself from the yakking. But what was that noise?

"I'm getting a buzz," he said.

No one heard. He pushed up the faceplate.

"Someone's using a radio around here," he said.

It was then that Mr. Blue spoke. It was one word, which he hissed: "Diggers."

22

"I lost them," Fisher kept saying — talking to himself inside his helmet. He had been left alone in the temporary camp, but even if someone had remained the boy would not have been audible, because his mask was on and his faceplate was down. The others had gone out for more food. Fisher fretted over the beam but did not fix it. He was still saying "I lost them" inside his helmet when the group returned with stashes of food.

And then twilight: the first darkness drifted down like dust and thickened on the ground and deepened until it was over their heads. With it came a rising vibration that was both sound and movement on the cliffs above their camp.

Mr. B said, "There's someone stirring around us. It could be Owners looking for Fish, or it could be Diggers. Let's move higher up the ridge."

"I'm getting that buzz again," Fisher said, and wondered whether it was Hooper. But how could Hooper mount even the simplest search-and-rescue mission without his help? Fisher's gloating was checked by a feeling of abandonment.

The helmet was an acorn shape on his head, and the mask's distortion squeezed his face small in the faceplate. His suit was already frayed, and the padding torn and tufted. His bulgy boots were scuffed.

"They're using a bleep," he said. "There are two packs of them bleeping each other."

His voice had not left his helmet.

"It's a routine signal, but they're not far off. I could estimate it."

He saw the others muttering. He could not hear them. He did not know they were not listening to him. In fact, he felt they were following his words closely.

"There it goes again. Seems to be a five-second interval."

Mr. Blue was saying, "The Diggers won't buy him if they can steal him."

"They never came into our quarter before," Martlet said,

"If they're Diggers," Echols said in a doubting way.

"They're Diggers," Martlet insisted. "Owners would wait for daylight — and they don't have to sneak with their equipment. They could throw gas over us. They could zap us like they did Murray and Blayne. No, what Mr. B hears is night people. Let's give them what they want."

Martlet had not looked at Fisher as he had spoken, but now he looked directly at the boy.

Gumbie said, "He'll run off."

"Not if we tie him up," Martlet said.

"He'll undo the knots."

"Possibly three packs, two overlapping," Fisher said.

He was giving information. No one heard him. His head, miniaturized by the faceplate, was like a furious walnut.

"Splice his ankles. Hang him by his feet."

"They'll find him and leave us alone."

"Hook him on a branch," Rooks said, and the lisp of his tongue bunching against his front teeth made it sound slushy and sadistic, and gave him a fishmouth.

Still concentrating hard, Fisher said, "I'll try to give you an update in a couple of minutes."

"They can have him," someone said.

Mr. Blue trampled the small fire that Valda had started, and said, "Shut up," very softly in the darkness he had just produced.

The silence and stillness that followed made Fisher conspicuous.

"I can confirm three packs," he said, and stood up and pushed his faceplate into a visor position. "I'm still getting bleeps."

"He's getting bleeps," Martlet said.

It was the first time Fisher's voice had been heard, and they were all listening now. Eight faces had turned upon the boy and by the light of a yellow blade of moon they looked pale and expressionless. The moon was still low in the night sky, tangled in the branches of the hillside trees.

Fisher plucked off his helmet. He was threatened less by the white faces than by the darkness behind them.

"Whaup?" he asked, in a nagging nasal way.

The darkness returned his yap to him.

He began to speak again, but the silence overwhelmed him with the sense of savages and savagery, and he was reminded again of how different he was. He sensed — really, it was like a strong smell from them — that they wanted to leave him behind. Their faces said: Ditch him. The darkness had suffocating depths.

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

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

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

Echols said, "Switch off, Fish."

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

"And they're getting yours."

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

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

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

"I wasn't emitting a signal."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's it," Echols said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Echols said, "I can hear them buzzing."

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

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

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

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

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

"Then we'll have to hand you over," Mr. Blue said.

"And they'll eat you alive," Martlet said.

Fisher said, "It shouldn't be too hard to fix,"

"You can fix it," Gumbie said. "You've got the creative juices."

"I hate that expression, 'creative juices.'"

"Get them flowing."

"Flowing!" Fisher said. "That's worse. That's disgusting."

Toward dawn they plodded more slowly, picking their steps, until, just at sunup, when the red edge of the horizon blazed at them and bulged from behind the blue plain, they seemed to grow tired, as if the light was making them stagger. They lay down in pairs, except for Fisher, who covered his head and muttered until he was asleep. They were woken hours later by the sizzling insects and bright heat of midday.

Echols handed Fisher the long tube of the particle beam.

"Better be careful with that thing," Fisher said. "It's not a spear, you know. It's not an ax. It's not some kind of net."

Echols was smiling. Their yellow smiles were worse than anything, Fisher thought. It was an animal sneer — a hairy alien face showing its bony fangs.

And Fisher squawked when the savage said, "It's probably a fault in the transducer."

"I hate know-it-alls," Fisher said. "Especially ignorant alien know-it-alls," and snatched the beam from him. "Anyway, the fault might not be there, because the transducer in this unit is a coil, not a clip, and it's self-regulating. This delivers a dozen kilojoules per square centimeter. Get it, dong-face?"

Echols had not lost his smile. He said, "What are those marks on your hands?"

They were circles drawn in green ink on Fisher's skin, and there was a small red swelling in the center of each one. Fisher pushed up his sleeve — more circled swellings covered his arm.

"That's what happens when you get rips in your gloves," Fisher said. "They're bites, of course. Haven't you ever seen bug bites?"

"I mean those green loops."

"I circled the bites with a marker."

Echols nodded, saying nothing more, and so Fisher chattered to fill the silence.

"That way I know just where to scratch when they itch. That way I get the right spot. Otherwise—"

Was Echols, that fuck-wit, smiling again? Fisher suspected that he was, but the alien said in a horribly solemn voice, "That's a very sensible measure. Oh, yes. Circle your bites so you know just where to scratch. Oh, yes."

"I think they're under us," Mr. Blue said. He spoke suddenly, as if revealing an inspiration. "I think they know we're here. They're waiting for nightfall."

"We'll blast them with the beam," Fisher said. "As soon as I've fixed it,"

"He still hasn't fixed it!"

"If you're so smart, you fix it!" Fisher said. "Anyway, I thought you said that Diggers don't go out in the daytime."

"They don't have to. They have special scopes. They can detect warm bodies—"

"Thermal imaging," Fisher said impatiently.

"Right. And I think they're sitting under us."

"How do you know that?" Fisher asked.

"I can feel it."

Fisher laughed his jeering hee-hawing laugh.

"When you don't have high tech you tend to listen a little more sharply," Mr. B said.

Although it was only midafternoon, Fisher imagined that it was growing dark. He too sensed the Diggers stirring now. He was still testing the circuits in the beam's transducer. As he worked he mumbled, "Dingle-dangle, peeny-winkle," speaking to the weapon. "Open up, Where's your clasp? Wonky-works!"

Echols saw him and said, "You're using a high-energy scan. They have ways of detecting that emission and tracing it."

"Your nose has a magnetic field, porky, so don't tell me I'm doing anything risky, because they can hear you blowing it."

"I think they're monitoring you heating those circuits."

"Let them listen. Let them find us. At least we'll have something to burn them with."

"You look a little worried, kid," Echols said. "Are you afraid it doesn't work?"

"How do I know if it works?" Fisher said. "If I test it the Diggers will certainly hear."

"That's interesting," Echols said. "We can't test it until we see them." He spoke to the others, who had taken up positions on the ridge. From this vantage point they could see the hollows on both sides, and there was no movement.

Fisher had dug himself in between two boulders and was listening to the others murmuring, "Nothing. . nothing." Except for this, they remained silent. Fisher knew that they feared the onset of nightfall, when the Diggers might emerge from their hiding places.

Martlet put his head between Fisher's boulders and breathed and stared.

"Why don't we run?" Fisher said.

"We live here," Martlet said. "This is our quarter."

"Then why is everyone so scared?"

"It's you," the man whispered. "Why don't you creep down there and hand yourself over?" Martlet moved, and the purple firelight of sunset flashed across him and lit his lumpy face. "You're just trouble for us."

Then it was dark and Fisher was fully awake, thinking: What if it's not Diggers — what if it's Hooper, or a search party? He still did not believe that Hooper or anyone else was capable of tracking through O-Zone — not without Fizzy himself as navigator. They would be flying blind. And yet what disturbed him in the aliens gave him a little hope for his rescue. The aliens showed flashes of intelligence, and if they were capable of understanding the basic structure of particle beam — certainly Echols seemed to — then might not some Owner be capable of making sense of O-Zone and perhaps finding him? It was possible that searchers might have located his signal, and that within a very short time they would be springing him — and flinging shit and misery down on the aliens. But it was also possible that the Diggers were lurking in the darkness, and that was why he did not budge. Who was out there?

Every sound upset him, the dry crackle of leaves, the purr of grass blades sieving the wind, and the way this same freshening wind wrapped itself round the rocks with a sigh. Among the rat-tat of insects he felt a peculiar nakedness. It was not irrational fear — these aliens, these savages, were afraid, and they were wild men, and strong, too.

He had rebuilt the weapon and in doing so had practically reinvented it. But having heated every circuit in the beam, he had risked being detected by the Diggers, or whoever was out there. It had been a necessary risk. And so he had done everything except fire the thing. The aliens thought he was a fool. He wanted to tell them that the last test might be a matter of life or death.

He longed for the time to pass. He searched the black sky for signs of dawn; he put his eye against his watch. Time seemed to stand still. He had always been afraid of the dark.

Sleep had helped him through it before, but now sleep seemed a different kind of death.

The indignity of his fear shamed him and made him feel like an animal. It was not self-contempt — it was not his fault that he had been stolen by these savages! But it made him feel stupid. He was like a turtle torn out of his shell to bleed here. It brought a raw ferocity to his feelings. He wanted to destroy first the Diggers, then these people, for his humiliation.

He thought: I'm dying because I don't belong here! .

Had he gone to sleep just then? He must have, briefly, because he heard Mr. Blue's voice in his dreams and when he woke up the dream was still draining away like daylight leaking from a room and then the cracks themselves vanishing as the last door closed for the night — something about New York without electricity, the whole place turned into dark hills and valleys, for wasn't O-Zone New York without lights? The dream was gone but there was still the voice, and black night gave it the crispness of command.

"Put on your helmet, Fish."

It was Mr. Blue, one of his quiet orders. The boy obeyed.

"I don't hear anything," he said. "They're not signaling."

Mr. Blue sighed and said, "I can sense them there. . and there" — perhaps he was motioning. Fisher could not see the man's hands in the dark.

Fisher said, "Who?" and regretted it as soon as he spoke.

"Night crawlers."

The words gave him a sight of fat-faced beasts sliding toward him on smears of body slime. He knew exactly what he wanted: a hook to reach him and get him out of here and swing him to safety, and a jet-rotor with blasters and howlers, to strafe and plummet and hover.

He was looking up, searching the sky for the rescue party, when the attack came. Nothing happened, and then everything happened.

His first feeling was that they had come to save him. He wanted to see Hooper, but instead it was a pack of Diggers. It was such a nightmare of assault that he could not grasp the whole of it. He was pushed back into his dream again, and struggling to wake up from the fright of those hairy faces and the tumult and the thudding of their feet and their yells. It was so much worse in the dark, that motion and sound, and only the smallest glimpse of the attackers.

They had sneaked up behind the northern side of the ridge and overwhelmed the sleepers while the sentries' backs were turned — looking down as the Diggers dropped onto them from a higher ledge. Who would have expected them to scale the far side of that sheer cliff? Fisher watched from between his pair of boulders as Mr. Blue and Echols threw themselves at the Diggers and flung their nets high, trying to snare them. It was confusion: they were hardly visible, a jumble of bodies and ropes. And then there were gasping cries.

"Where is he?"

"Grab him!"

But who was shouting and who did they want? Soon no answer was necessary, because there were no more cries. There were grunts. There were terrible noises — the sickening chop of bone hit by a rock or a club, the odd pulping noise of ax blades on flesh, and startled gasps of either the attackers or their victims. That was the pity of it — there were no demons in the darkness, they were all blundering animals, fighting an animal fight, using their claws and fists to bruise each other's flesh.

"Lift the nets!"

But apparently the nets were no good — it was too dark, the attackers too agile.

"Don't shoot — take him alive," a grunting man said— surely a Digger?

"Push them back," Mr. Blue said. "Get them at the edge."

This had all taken moments — ten seconds, no more. It was all fury. The fighting in the darkness was still strangely dreamlike and primitive, like people struggling against drowning in a dark sea. Fisher stuck his weapon out of the boulders, and then was shoved to the ground.

"Stay down," someone hissed at him, and swung him aside. That was Echols — that whisper, that smell.

Fisher thought he was lost, then realized he was safely back between his boulders.

"Take the beam," he said, and held it out until it was snatched from his hand.

It was a simple weapon, the thickness of a baton, the length of a cane, a funnel on its muzzle, its works in a small box. But as soon as he had surrendered it Fisher became hysterical and began screaming.

"Nuke them! Nuke them! Nuke them!"

There was a flash — not the beam itself but the man it hit as he died in a flare of light. It struck and spread, and in that fire he saw a man melt so fast he could not tell whether it was a Digger or not. The particle beam itself was noiseless, innocent-seeming even; yet its victim hissed and crackled in a lumpy corpse of blackening fat.

In the light of the burning man were upraised arms, and twenty startled faces. The beam had frightened everyone, because no one knew for sure who had fired it and who had died. That puzzlement produced an odd chastened pause, and a greater darkness, and then an explosion of leaping light, the meteorite of a Digger's tracer misfiring in a soundless streak over their heads.

Fisher had put on his helmet and gloves and buried himself in the boulders' crack. Looking out, he could see in the bright silence of another tracer Echols holding the particle beam, and the Diggers backing up, and several bodies twisted on the ground.

He did not recognize any of the Diggers, He guessed from their irons that they were troopers or warriors of some kind, but their clumsy irons were no match for the particle beam. One Digger was burned in the act of raising his flare to aim, and another went up like a torch exploding into flame. Both burning Diggers became simpler silhouettes of themselves, smoldering black and falling. And soon the attack collapsed. The next moment Fisher heard the fading sounds of the Diggers scrambling away and jumping from the ridge. They leapt into the darkness and disappeared.

"They got Martlet," someone said.

"Give me a light," someone else said. "I think they got Tinia, too."

"Broke open her head."

In the ensuing silence, Fisher realized that he had not been harmed, and hyperventilating, he began gasping, "We nuked them with my beam!"

"If it hadn't been for you we wouldn't have needed the beam."

He could have killed Gumbie for saying that, and yet he knew he had been responsible. The Diggers had come for him, and three had been burned and the rest driven away. But was he really to blame?

"It's your fault," he said, and then screamed, "You stole me!"

Seeing their faces near him, angry, and with the gleam of the fighting still on them, he became alarmed.

"You saved me," he said.

That night gave Fisher the soundest sleep he had had since being abducted. It was more than the satisfaction that he had an efficient weapon. It was the sense that, faced with the chance of getting rid of him, they had fought for him and protected him. Martlet had hated him, but Martlet was dead. That was another cause for relief. He had been afraid of the black man, his mockery, his cruelty. He thought: That alien wanted me to die.

He woke up and wanted to thank them. He did not know the words for his feelings of gratitude. He felt the desire to speak this foreign language, but he was tongue-tied — simply making mewing noises.

Hearing him, someone struck open a light, and the glare obliterated every face. But the blaze remained like an unanswered question.

Fisher said, "I'm glad you saved me."

He spoke into the blinding light. He tried again.

"I'm glad I'm alive."

It was the nearest he had ever come to saying thank you.

Mr. Blue's voice became audible behind the light.

"We don't care about you. We fought for our own sake. This is our own land."

In Fisher's mind this statement was proof that, no matter how they seemed in their actions, underneath it all they were savages.

They buried Martlet and Tinia the following day. Most of the others had spent half the night digging — the savages used axes for that, too. There were no coffins, no shrouds, no coverings. The corpses were stripped and the clothes and weapons — and the few possessions — of the dead people were distributed equally by Mr. B among the remaining members of the group. Fisher watched without sharing.

In New York he had seen cremations and funerals on television — the death of old grandfather Allbright had been a spectacular ritual of pompous mourning, one of Fisher's earliest memories. He still laughed when he remembered Hardy's and Hooper's superstitious stage-managing of the occasion. They had hired buglers and black rotors and they had spent millions to ensure that the ashes could not be stolen from the vault.

This burial at dawn on the hillside in the alien quarter of O-Zone was almost perfunctory. But this was more like it: naked corpses, no worshiping, no tears. All life was gone from the bodies, all hope: no promises, no blessings, nothing false was said. It was not a celebration of any kind but rather a ceremony of concealment, but a plain one, like a form of planting.

"This isn't bad," Fisher said, watching with cold eyes. "No prayers anyway." He suspected that prayers would have frightened him — especially the sight of aliens praying.

"We don't believe in second chances," Echois said.

The graves were like postholes — deep and narrow. That was why they had taken so long to dig. Fisher watched with interest as the bodies were slung in headfirst and lowered by their feet, until their foot soles showed about thirty centimeters below ground level.

"A few months ago there were eleven of us," Mr. Blue said.

"Where are the others?" Fisher asked. But he knew: Hooper had burned two and snatched one, and the Diggers had done the rest.

"Dead," Gumbie said. "Gone."

Fisher was staring at the yellow-gray feet in the holes.

"These bodies are empty," Mr. Blue said. "There is nothing left inside. Our friends are gone."

He chucked some dirt in with a mattock.

"They're nowhere," he said.

Then the rest of them piled in dirt and rocks, and they filled the holes and sealed them. They hurriedly shoveled until the holes were indistinguishable from the surrounding land. There was nothing to mark the graves, nothing left behind. Mr. Blue led the small group away as soon as it was done, and only Fisher looked back. He believed that this burial made more sense than a tombstone ceremony and was much better than the voodoo ritual that accompanied old Grampy Allbright to his ridiculous mausoleum.

Fisher liked this, the way the dead went back to the earth and broke down. Clean degradation; no sentiment. And he liked the way these people had fought. These feelings gave him his first stirring of hope and made him proud of surviving among these animals.

"Except," he said, continuing his thought aloud, "as a result of your probable contamination from exposure to radiation in O-Zone, and the gene mutation in your somatic cells—"

The six remaining aliens had turned from the rubble on the graves to stare at Fisher, who was quacking at them.

"— as a result of that, you've got a very short life span."

They all looked black with the rising sun right behind them.

"What makes you think you've got a long one, Fish?"

23

Nothing more was said about those dead aliens. Fisher wondered why, and asked, but there was no reply. He was stared at and the stares said: Who are you? They did not talk about the past: what was dead was gone forever. They had few memories. They had no ancestors, nor any ghosts.

They had decided to dig up the sealed provisions and take them back to their original camp at the center of their quarter in O-Zone. Fisher did not tell them that he had been near it at New Year's with Hooper and Murdick. He pretended to be interested in the place — they called it variously "The Valley" and "The Frying Pan," because it was an enormous circular depression. But the area was not noted for its caves, and he had not been able to find any huts there; so where did they live?

He asked.

"You'll see. Fish."

"What are we going to do there?"

"We'll decide when we get there," Mr. Blue said.

A squawk shot out of Fisher's helmet.

"Until you came along, we never thought much about the future," Echols said. "Never had to."

"Now it's the only fucking thing," Rooks said.

Someone grunted, "Shut up."

Fisher knew he was different from the rest of them. It was more than a suspicion or a feeling; it was a visible fact. His intelligence, he knew, made him a member of a superior race — but he had long felt that he was superior to Hardy and Hooper and Moura, and they knew it too. He had proven himself to these aliens by repairing the helmet and the particle beam. Now they had a radio and a weapon, though they hardly seemed to care. Their uncaring attitude to his technological genius was further evidence that they were savages, Fisher felt.

He still wore his padded suit with the baggy pants and boots. His long red hands and bitten fingers protruded from his.sleeves — his skin was still circled where he had insect bites. He usually wore the helmet, and often with the faceplate down, so that he seemed bizarre and doll-like in that wilderness.

They asked him to take the helmet off, and when he refused, they wanted to know why.

"The faceplate's optical — I lost my contacts. Hey, I need it to see. You want me to be blind! You're afraid of me!"

It was a lie, all that squawking — the first deliberate lie he had told them. But he did not blame himself. He was still very frightened and often when he reviewed his situation he was in fear of his life.

Savages were unreasonable and unpredictable. Aliens had no legal existence, no legitimacy. He felt that they were parodies of his own life, for they gambled and halved their chances every time they mated; and though Moura could have made a better match at the clinic, she had taken no chances.

But living in O-Zone had improved them, for although they were certainly aliens and savages, they were also tough sunburned people — strong and very silent and watchful. They could move very fast through the trees and hills of this place. They wore knitted hats and knitted clothes — they were always knitting, even the men, when they were at rest. They also wore surprising clothes, like bomber jackets and bush hats.and old-style slacks and sneakers, and Mr. Blue wore a brilliant silk scarf.

But he did not have to ask where they had gotten them. O-Zone had been a Prohibited Area for over fifteen years: its inhabitants had been evacuated but they had left a great deal behind — in their houses and shops and hotel rooms. Even Firehills had been full of abandoned belongings, and though it had disgusted Fisher, Hooper had taken pleasure in looking this stuff over, and opening drawers looking for treasures. It was all secondhand junk, Fisher felt, and probably contaminated; but for an alien the whole of O-Zone was a treasure house.

He knew that being aliens, they were predatory. How else could they have survived here so long? His suit and helmet protected him from them. He hated hearing them and being reminded that he was their prisoner, and that they were somehow stuck with him. Until you came along we never thought much about the future — that crap.

He wanted to tell them that he had always thought about the future — how it was contained in the present, and was familiar and visitable; how it was always a version of the remote past; and how it could be discovered and accurately projected a thousand years hence. But he spoke a different language. This mode of life in O-Zone was worse even than the prison of the present or the usable past. This was the chaos of prehistory, the aliens like the first beings sniffing the world.

But he also thought: I am farther away from people like Moura and Hooper, than people like Moura and Hooper are from aliens like these. And there were times when these aliens were just as exasperating and stupid, in just the same way, as many New Yorkers he knew.

Yet in New York he had seldom been self-conscious. But here in O-Zone, the way they isolated him forced him to think about himself and his effect on other people. It had an unexpected result.

He said, "When I was a baby, my parents bored me."

And Valda laughed. She had been walking behind him. She laughed out loud.

Fisher was not used to laughter. He was startled and in an obscure way thrilled by it.

He said, "I hate to hear people laugh. Or talk. Or eat. Especially eat."

Valda laughed again. In spite of himself, he was flattered: he felt it gave him strength. He turned and saw that she had thrown her head back. She was a young woman with heavy breasts, and the gesture lifted them and gave them life. He watched them, liking the weight of them, the way they moved as she laughed. There was something careless and wild — and perhaps brave — in the way she leaned back and laughed. He could see the root of her tongue, and her small discolored teeth. Now they excited him, and her body smell teased his nose like new paint. The sound of her laughter seemed to say that she was not afraid of anything at all. He wanted more of it,

"And sometimes," he said, "people have underbite, or a wacky jaw, or teeth missing, and then it's horrible to see them eat — the wobbling way they masticate their food. By 'masticate' I mean 'chew.'"

"We speak English," Rooks said.

But Valda said, "Your teeth are so white, Fish."

Of course he was different, but it was a novelty to him that it was noticed and remarked upon. People in New York took him for granted — all the "supermoron" business that they thought he never heard. Valda was properly paying him a compliment.

"They're sealed," he said, chomping and showing her his bite. For a moment it looked like a smile, but when he stopped you knew it could never have been. He said, "Epoxy. I get them recoated every couple of years."

"That's pretty interesting," Valda said.

But it seemed wrong to him to be producing envy or awe in this alien, and he pitied her for her simplicity and the way she was carrying a heavy pack of provisions.

"But I've got bruxism," he said.

Valda was silent. Rooks turned and stared at him.

"I know you speak English," Fisher said.

"— the fuck's that?" Rooks was saying.

"I grind my teeth," Fisher said. "Especially when I'm asleep."

This was the second day of their march to the camp they called home, carrying the crates and packs of the sealed provisions they had stolen from the jet-rotor. Going to the Frying Pan, they said; wait till you see the Frying Pan. But Fisher had seen it. It was where they had burned the two net-men to save Murdick that misty New Year's, when it had all begun.

There was no path, they stayed away from paths, but they kept in a file. They were climbing again, rising to the low hills at the distant edge of the depression.

"I hope you know where you're going."

"This is our quarter, Fish."

It was true: they seemed to know it — they had names for every city and town. At the top of one hill Mr. Blue pointed and said that over there was Sutton Bluff, and down there Alton and Shannon and Saint Clair, and farther along was Dexter.

For the moments he was saying these names O-Zone did not seem a wilderness or a Prohibited Area, but rather just another state in the Fifty-two, with prettily named counties and picturesque towns. But Fisher looked across the treetops and saw nothing to justify those names. And a town was not a town if all that was left of it was a contaminated stain.

"I suppose it's all right for you here, but I'd rather live in a room in New York with a secure seal on it."

Valda laughed just behind him again, and she laughed harder when he tried to explain the work he had been doing on particles — describing the Squark, the Wabble Effect, the Antigens, his own Theory of Subsequence.

"I've coded a whole suite of variables for that theory, and by the time I'm twenty and my brain turns to mush it'll be a new law of physics."

Valda was still laughing.

He said, "That's not supposed to be funny. I've been looking at the sideways movement of particles. And Antigons are destructive particles that emit—"

He was unexpectedly encouraged by the fact that she was laughing harder than ever. He liked the sound of it; he wanted more.

He said, "When I was small I used to say 'pisghetti.'"

Valda fell silent.

"I named my computer Pap. Everyone wondered why!"

She began to stare at him.

"And 'jellyshiff,'" he said. "For 'jellyfish.'"

Valda had begun to frown at him uneasily.

"And 'dobba' for 'poops.' It's a corruption of 'job.' You know, like sitting on the hopper and doing a job." Now he was frowning back at her. "I see. You don't have hoppers, do you?"

She did not reply.

"I was a horrible baby," he said. "Actually, I was a Type A, but they thought I was a spazz."

He waited for Rooks to turn, and then he explained.

"A wonk. A dimbo. A wimble."

Valda made a new noise — it was a soft sudden croak, like a baby's burp.

"And then when I was about three I started problems," he said, and quickly added, "Solving them."

Was she listening?

"I managed Pap with two fingers. Bash-bash — boop-boop-boop. When I was five I was hacking. They sent me to school, but what was the point?"

He expected Valda to be impressed. She did not say anything.

"We were living in another garrison then. They didn't call them garrisons, though. Just condos and co-ops. This one was Wedgemere. Very English."

"Wedgemere!" She was laughing again. "Very English!"

"It gobbled," Fisher said. He did not smile, yet he was pleased. "Full of fossils — really old people and foreigners. I mean, I know they had IDs, but they probably bought them. Half the people who worked there were illegals, though— I'm sure of it. That was one of the reasons we moved. We started getting thefts. Then they had a strike force. It was ridiculous. That's one thing I like about you guys — you might be illegal but at least no one's old."

Echols was listening. He said, "This is no place for them."

"And no children — that's great. I can't stand kids." Then he asked, "But how come there aren't any here?"

They did not answer. What did the silence mean? Perhaps that the old folks had died — and the children too, if they had managed to be born somehow. And there was that fifteen-year-old that Hooper apparently snatched, the porker. Aliens were abducted, or else they died here, and it was as if they had never lived. They were plowed under and returned to the earth and forgotten, like the clothes and weapons that were shared among the others.

Fisher said, "How could you live here so long and not invent anything useful? All this walking. All this shitty food. You don't have protective clothing. It's just foraging — hand-to-mouth. What's the point of it, or does it have a point?"

"It keeps us moving," Mr. Blue said. "And it helps us evaporate when we have to."

What was that supposed to mean?

"And no cash."

"What do we need that for?"

"You need weapons. That takes cash."

"So it's your fault we need money. And you don't have any."

"Hey, listen, you stole me!" Fisher said. "You took me away from my uncle!"

They said nothing more. It was noon on this new hill, and they prepared to make camp.

"Other people's lives fill me with depression," Fisher said. "Especially yours."

Another night.

He had thought he did not belong: he did not sleep well, he was still afraid of the dark, he hated their food and their fires. And then he remembered how well he had managed at Fire-hills with Hooper only — what? — ten days ago? They had established a command post, a terminal, a data base, and a communication center. They had enough food for two months. They had been completely secure, with a soft-wire network of alarms. They hadn't cowered behind a rock listening for the hoarse gasps of Diggers! And none of these wonky stances with skinny Mr. B whispering I can feel them. . I can sense them. What porkers!

I was commander of Mission Westwind, Fisher thought. This is my food, my radio, my weapon. These people have not stolen me — I have rescued them.

They were still trekking to the place they called the Frying Pan. Fisher wore his helmet and carried the beam.

"That is one hell of a lethal beam," Echols said.

Marching along, people said whatever came into their heads, and often someone would take up a point made two days before. Echols mentioned the beam as if they had been talking about it; but in fact this was the first time he had raised the subject.

Fisher did not reply. He told himself that he was very suspicious of this man's math. He had done some of the work, but not all of it.

"You got it working beautifully, Fish,"

"It might still have phases of bust and spinout," Fisher said, brushing aside the praise. He would not let himself be complimented by these people. What did they know about fiber optics? But he was proud of the weapon — he knew it was a deadly beam, and it was better than they deserved. It had saved their lives.

That was when it struck him that they had no business here. They didn't belong in O-Zone. They really were aliens. They were bewildered, they had not adapted. They had no reliable water supply, their food was disgusting, they slept on the ground, they had a doggy smell, they wore clothes they pilfered out of the musty rooms in the ghost towns of O-Zone, they had secret ceremonies — like that burial.

They screamed at planes.

That was the oddest thing of all, though Fisher had not noticed it at first. How could he? There had only been a few planes — low-flying, radar-avoiders, very loud, possibly search planes looking for him. These aircraft made so much noise streaking past that Fisher had not heard the screaming. The second time they had kept it up until a moment after the plane passed by — the plane was gone, but in the time lapse just after the roar of jets there was a cut-off scream. It was like hearing an echo but missing the original sound that caused it.

But he had seen the aliens, the whites of their rolled-up eyes, their fingers tensed, their mouths wide open — howling at the sky. Even Echols, even Mr. B. The next second it was over and because the jet engines had drowned it all he could not ask why: it was gone, nothing had happened. It was like the dead aliens. When something was gone, so was the memory of it. And, strangely, they did not raise their voices, apart from that.

It pleased him to have proof that they did not belong here. They were truly aliens. Of course he was their prisoner— they were like members of another species. He was one of a small number of special people — now he knew just how special; and he could rely on Valda's laughter — he had always felt that laughter was a kind of submission. But this was not enough, and it hardly calmed him, because he also knew that they could kill him — just punch him down in the most brutish way. Or they could do it with more style, since he was now sharing his weapon with them. Behind all of this was a question to which he did not want to know the answer: What plans did they have for him?

They were not cannibals, but he was still afraid. He suspected that they had diseases and that they were outlaws. He learned a little of them; but they could be so vague.

"How long have you been here?" he asked Rooks.

"Since that explosives thing they tried to hang on me," Rooks said. "Making explosives. That was years ago, but they don't forget."

"Is Rooks your ID name?"

"No. My ID name — before I lost it — was Kenway."

Fisher said, "It's funny. I can't imagine someone named Kenway wanted by the police."

Then Rooks gave him that Who are you? look.

Gumbie said, "They claimed I was raping women. It wasn't rape. They wanted to and I was willing. There was absolutely no use of force. Is sex a crime? Hey, they were thanking me! But afterward they changed their minds and I was the one who suffered. That's what happens if you're willing."

"What about Gumbie — is that the name on your ID?"

Kylie said, "Don't ask me any of these questions."

Gumbie was still replying. "Truth is, I never had an ID. Where I came from, they never checked, and we just lost interest in them. I always figured I was a pretty good American until that rape thing came up. But that made me want to leave the country. I lost all respect for the Feds then."

"What you're saying is that you were wanted by the police," Fisher said. "And you're saying that O-Zone isn't America."

Mr. Blue said, "Give it a rest, Fish."

"I was just asking him about his name."

"Gumbie's my family name."

"What's your first name?"

"DeWayne."

Echols said, "Me, I abused my position."

It was a new day but he still did not know them much better, and the raw data he had only confused him more. But it was clear from what they said that the country was in a greater mess than he had ever imagined sitting in his room in Coldharbor.

It also struck him that they were telling him these things, and would probably tell him anything, because he didn't matter: he would be dead soon. That gloomy hunch made him less inquisitive.

One more day.

"Tonight you can sleep with me," Valda said.

She had dropped behind to speak to him — just a whisper. They had started their march, they would eat something farther on. They didn't have mealtimes, they only had hunger, and they did not always obey it.

Valda was smiling at him, still whispering, "If you want."

"Do you mean sleep?" he said.

She murmured something and glanced ahead of her, where the others were tramping. Some carried crates on slings, and others used two-man fitters — poles that had been hanked together and lashed like stretchers for the big boxes.

"Because I might not be tired," Fisher said.

Valda laughed again and walked on, and the next time she saw him — it was a rest stop — she said, "That's good!"

Fisher was pleased. He liked her face and her heavy breasts and her smooth hips. He wondered what she looked like naked, but he also worried that she might be strange— diseased and hairy. He was faintly repelled by the thought that she was an alien. And there was her age: Valda he had calculated to be at least twenty!

He liked to watch her body move when she was marching or preparing food, but he reminded himself to be careful: these people were notoriously unhealthy. Aliens carried viruses for which there were no known cures. Some of these viruses had actually been developed by the Feds as weapons, and had been dumped in Prohibited Areas. There might have been some truth in the rumors that these viruses had been tried out on aliens. He wished that he had hacked into more Federal data, but he had never believed it to be of any practical use; he had never imagined leaving Coldharbor, much less being on the ground in O-Zone.

Fisher grew sad at the thought that Valda was perhaps his only friend. The rest of them were skinny and silent. They ate without any pleasure and they had little interest in him. He sat apart from them, trying to eat. He managed to swallow some, but he had plenty left — what they called pole greens and the dried-out muscles of a dead animal.

Gumbie knelt next to him. "If you're not going to eat that, Fish—"

"I was planning to throw it away."

"We don't throw anything away." Gumbie gathered the scraps into his outstretched fingers. "This is for me. Yep. Yump."

Fisher said, "You eat anything."

"It's not hunger," Echols said, because Gumbie's mouth was full. "Whatever you leave behind is evidence that you passed through. We don't leave traces — no food, no footprints. That's why Rooks marches at the rear, dragging a bough to sweep away our tracks."

Fisher had seen the man doing so, but he had imagined it had something to do with the porker pretending to have a tail. Maybe they weren't completely stupid. But in the time they had been in O-Zone the technology outside had developed and left them behind with fifteen-year-old fantasies. For example, everything that Echols knew was out-of-date.

"I hate your food," Fisher said.

"When you're hungry enough you'll eat it," Mr. Blue said.

"That's a sick idea," Fisher said.

Gumbie, still chewing on the scraps he had cadged, said, "What kind of stuff do you want, Fish?"

"Jelly sandwiches," the boy said. "Guppy-Cola. Burgers. Chili. Fries. Ice cream. All kinds of tuna fish. I like that fortified one-meal drink they call 'Marvel Milk'—though it's not milk." He became lonely thinking about it. He said, "Fudge. Chocolate. Spaghetti. Grapefruit segments. Those white things known as 'fish cheeks.' Glasses of juice with condensation on the sides. I'm not supposed to eat dairy products, but I do. Honey, bananas, Sammy Syrup, and those fiber crackers they call Poker Chips." He looked up and groaned. "Chocolate-chip cookies."

They were staring at him and he suspected they hated him, but in telling them what he privately craved he had made himself too sorrowful to care what they thought.

"At least drink your tea," Kylie said.

"Boiled bark!"

"It's good to have a bellyful of warm water inside you," Kylie said, and Fisher thought: She has never tasted Marvel Milk, or Sammy Syrup, or Guppy-Cola.

Later that day they found a shelter in a rockslide. Mr. Blue put down his pack and told them where to make a fire and prepare the sleeping places.

"We don't see the same things," Fisher said.

They ignored him. He had sensed that his listing the food he wanted had created a greater gulf between himself and them. It was as if he had blurted out a belief in a strange god, He wished he had not told them — not because it(made them suspicious but because it had made him homesick; and it had also reminded him again that he was a prisoner. The sense that he had been victimized made him antagonistic.

"You point to a pile of rocks and say, "This is camp.'"

He had slid his faceplate up. His face was squeezed between the cheekpieces of his helmet.

"You rake some leaves into a pile and say, "This is a bed.'"

He didn't care whether they were listening or not.

"You grab a bunch of weeds and say, 'This is our salad for tonight.'"

Valda was smiling at him, but for the moment he saw her too as an enemy.

"Hey, dimbos, I know the difference!"

That night — Fisher suspected they were taking revenge— Gumbie showed him a thick brush of green weeds. Gumbie was eager to talk, and he had the bright eyes and the wide grin of an explainer.

"There's eighty-seven million kinds of weeds," he said, shaking the bouquet. "If they have milky juice you don't touch them. If they have regular juice you rub some on your skin and wait eight hours. If there's no rash after that, you chew a little piece and spit it out. Wait eight hours more. If there's no stomach problem you chew another little piece, and swallow the juice and spit out the piece. Wait eight hours—"

"That's twenty-four hours," Fisher said. "No food, just flobbing."

"If your stomach's still okay, you chew the weed good, and eat.it. If it don't make you sick after that, you can eat a whole handful of it. Yump."

"That's how we discovered stinkweed salad," Rooks said.

Savages, Fisher thought, with fear and pity, and he sealed himself into his helmet so as not to hear them tearing the leaves in their teeth. But he also thought of what Gumbie had said: Why didn't I know that?

He clicked his faceplate up.

"You've got no right to steal my provisions," he said. But the thought of that pilfered food was displaced by a woeful thought, and he sobbed, "You've got no right to steal me!"

"One of your people stole Bligh," Mr. B said.

"I don't know why he bothered," Fisher said, and felt himself trembling. "Because you're savages."

"No more than you," Echols said. "Probably a lot less."

They were still sitting on the ground.

Fisher said, "You scream at planes!"

"You yell at insects," Echols said.

It was true, but so what? He howled at ants and flies when they came near him, and when he saw an insect on his suit he yelled "Cootie!"

"They're vectors in disease," he said. "Especially flies and lice. They're just like you aliens!"

But he was upset; he wanted them to plead with him and to promise to take him home. He was surprised that his screeching had not cowed them. He wandered away to where he planned to sleep and switched on his helmet light and saw Valda lying down and smiling at him. She raised her leg at him, offering him her boot.

"Get this thing off my dog," she said.

It was certainly safe to do that, away from her body cavities. Fisher worked it loose, liking the warmth of her bare leg and the heat of her foot.

"Have you changed your mind?" she said.

He was sniffing in mild alarm: he had forgotten to put on his gloves when he removed her boot.

"About sleeping with me?"

"I'm all right," he said, and his helmet rattled when he shook it. "My suit has coils in it, and I've still got a power pack. I'll be warm enough."

She made that noise again that was like a baby's burp. He could not determine whether it was another laugh. She seemed strange but at least she was on his side.

Never mind sleep with you, I'd like to squeeze your oinkers! That was what he wanted to say. He was afraid of disease— he looked at her and he imagined fungus in her crevices. And if she was twenty she must have plenty of both — funguses and crevices. But still his eyes ached with desire when he saw the pressure of her breasts against her shirt, and her delicious nipples like toggles.

He inflated his suit and warmed its coils, and he slept on his back like a toy bear on the ground, sighing slightly and fogging his faceplate, his arms clasped over his belly and his legs apart.

The next morning he remembered the raw tape clearly as they marched through the rising meadows and tree clumps to the last hill. He could have led them from here: he had studied the profile enough just before his mission with Hooper and Murdick. The repetition of that trip annoyed him. Why come back? He saw all repetition as useless and ignorant routine. Being back here was like failure.

But where was their camp? He had never found one. He had never located any huts, and if it was a cave, where was it? He only saw the valley — the great flat depression between two ranges of hills.

"The Frying Pan," Echols said.

"That's the center of our quarter," Valda said.

Mr. Blue did not descend the slope to the camp, but instead walked in a halting way — glancing, peering, moving on — like a man shuffling in a museum, possessed by concentration. He did not bend his knees. He nodded at the wide circular valley.

"It's a pan," Mr. Blue said. "It's all ours. No one else has been here for over fifteen years."

"Except me," Fisher said.

Mr. Blue turned to him, stiff-legged, and lifted his face in a question.

"I mean now," Fisher said.

But he had meant before, with Hooper and Murdick— another lie. He had this place in twenty-color overlay, all the elevations, even an infrared version. He had found the paths they had thought were hidden; the sinkhole where they had landed and secured the rotor. The Frying Pan, Rooks said.

"It's got a bottom and sides," the man said. "It's got a handle."

"Incredible geological qualities," Echols said.

"You mean geomorphic features," Fisher said.

They were still at the edge, Mr. Blue still gesturing at it.

"Remember when we used to call it Happy Valley, and mean it?" Mr. Blue said. "Because we thought we were safe here?" He had glanced back at Fisher. "And you wonder why we scream at planes."

"Because, geologically" — Fisher was quacking loudly— "this depression is a down-thrown massif of the eastern O-Zone platform."

"I like them cracks and ridges," Gumbie said. "Yump."

"Delimited on each side by conspicuous fault lines," Fisher said.

"We figure it's been here a long time, looking like this," Mr. Blue said. "That radiation leak certainly didn't affect it."

"At the end of the Tertiary, this platform was composed of an extensive uplifted massif, flanked by down-warping areas on both the north and south sides. During the Quaternary, these down-warping areas were folded and uplifted by neotectonic movements of the limestone plates. That produced caverns elsewhere in O-Zone and the depression here."

"I guess that's why we call it the Frying Pan," Rooks said. "Why are you laughing, Valda?"

She could not answer. She had started while Fisher was speaking, and she was still laughing. It was like frantic hiccuping.

"That was before the radioactive excursion," Fisher said. "Before the human intervention."

"When they fucked it," Rooks said.

No one commented on that. They picked up the boxes and crates and started downward, skidding on loose stones. The sun was up and they were perspiring, on their last push,

Gumbie dropped behind, where Fisher was stepping carefully down the steep sides of the valley.

"Boy, you're real area-dite," Gumbie said in an admiring voice.

24

"No — not over there," Mr. Blue was saying. "It's right here."

But even with the man pointing, Fisher could not see a thing, and it was only after they began climbing again that Fisher saw the slash in the hillside, under a great hanging cliff. It was a stone vault in the mouth of the rockface, this cave they called home.

So he had been completely wrong — he understood that when they had assembled at the cave. He had not expected huts — he had not found any on the raw tape. From the way they had been living and camping on this march he had come to believe that they were tramps: huddling under bushes at night, and then in the morning burying their fire and scattering their leaves, and marching on to find a new bush and scavenge for some food. It was a grubby, prowling animal existence, based on hunger and fatigue. But now he saw that that was not it at all: they had a home, they had possessions, they had beds, they had comforts.

But this place also worried Fisher. It was a high limestone cave, very deep and full of chambers, but from the outside it was hardly a shadow. Even when he had stared directly at it he had not seen it. It was invisible to any search plane: Fisher himself had not seen it with any of the scanners or scopes. He had seen — it was pure luck — aliens scurrying on the video. And no wonder they scurried. In that New Year's party were the first aircraft they had seen for fifteen years. And no wonder, afterward, they had started screaming.

Not even satellites had picked up the presence of these aliens. That was how ingenious their living arrangement was. And that was why Fisher became very silent when he was led through it and shown its various entrances and its hidden corners.

We're bluff-dwellers, they said. These castaways had solved their problem of how to survive in O-Zone. But what was a solid and secure home for them was a prison for him. He had not detected it, so how could anyone else — like Hooper or Hardy or a search party or a strike force?

He thought: They'll never find me.

"I know they're looking for me!" he said, quacking in a kind of protest. But it was empty defiance: he had no proof. In fact, the reverse seemed much more likely — that he had no chance at all, for more than a week had passed since his abduction and there was no sign of rescue. But still he quacked at them. "They'll find me!"

"That's not necessarily a good thing," Mr. Blue said.

"Why not?"

"Because they'll have to find us first."

They were standing on the open platform at the cave mouth, Mr. Blue and Fisher, while the others had dispersed into the cool shadows of the interior chambers. Water ran in a continuous blabbing somewhere deep in the cavern, and this platform that gave onto the valley smelled of fire and burned corn. It was like living on a shelf in the wilderness.

"Troglodytes," Fisher said.

And yet, in this setting, these people appeared to be almost human. They were not sleeping under bushes anymore; they had food; they had rugs and chairs and tables and lanterns — most likely stolen from the abandoned houses of a nearby town, where they got their clothes. The whole of their quarter of O-Zone was available to them, every house, every hotel, every condominium. Everyone in America spoke of the ghost towns of O-Zone, and these aliens were its ghosts.

"Put him to work," Mr. Blue said.

Fisher said, "You don't mean me."

But Mr. Blue had spoken to Rooks, and Rooks was smiling.

"Get that helmet off so you can hear me better."

With another quack of protest, Fisher yanked the helmet from his head.

"Now get that suit off."

"No," Fisher said. "I won't."

"Do it now," Rooks said, insisting with the kind of whisper Mr. Blue used.

"I was sealed into this suit!"

Rooks had a knife. "I'll cut you out of that suit and you'll never get back in, because there'll be nothing to get back into."

After he unfastened the clasps and the zips, Fisher peeled the suit down and stepped out of it. Standing in the liner, long Johns, and a T-shirt, but still wearing his boots, Fisher felt more naked than he ever had among these aliens. Once he had felt distinctly like a turtle torn out of its shell — it seemed to sum up his situation. But that had been fanciful then, a random image to describe his sense of nakedness. Now it precisely described him, for he stood wearing only the thin liner, and there was his shell, folded in a pile with his beaky helmet on top.

He felt weak, but he was bigger than Rooks, with a big boy's thick legs and wide shoulders. And he was tall, roughly the height of Mr. Blue, who was the tallest of the aliens. Yet he had never felt that he was at any physical advantage, and out of his suit and helmet he felt terribly reduced. His great fear now was that he might burst into tears if anyone threatened him, and to calm himself he fantasized again about how he planned to destroy these people, first deafening them with howlers, and then blinding them with lightning bolts, and then burning them down, one by one.

Rooks said, "We've got some boxes down there — food boxes mostly. But other boxes, too, because when we left here we left in a hurry — never got time to hoist those boxes."

"What are we going to do with them?"

"When I said 'we' I meant you," Rooks said. "You're hoisting them, Fish. Get them up here. All of them."

"That'll take me a week!" Fisher said, and he feared that he might not be able to do it at all.

"We've got a week," Rooks said. "We've got time. Now go to it."

Fisher was on the point of asking what the others were doing to help, but before he spoke up he saw them. They seemed very busy, and some of them were engaged in harder tasks than his. Gumbie was carrying huge dirty boulders, and Valda was digging, and even Mr. Blue was hacking away at something.

All that day, Fisher labored with the boxes that lay against the hillside. His job was to raise them fifty meters up to the shelf at the entrance to the cave. The first day he fumbled with them — carrying one, dragging another, pushing a third. He bruised his hands and knees, and quietly — in frustration and rage — he wept to himself in the shadow of the hill. He was too tired to eat that night, but he noticed that they had broken open a crate of sealed provisions, and the next morning he found some packets of cookies and some Guppy-Cola.

He felt weaker the second day, but he had devised a system for raising the boxes. Using a long crank from an old meat grinder, and a ratchet from a truck jack, and a sequence of pulleys, Fisher made a hand-operated lifting machine that he predicted would allow the person lifting the weight to rest, as the ratchet prevented the ropes from slipping.

The question was, where to hang it? There was no tripod, no beam heavy enough or long enough to make into a crane, and the only logical alternative was a hook over the cave entrance.

"Don't you think we tried a block and tackle like that before?" Echols said. "You must think we're pretty stupid to have lived here this long without trying a gizmo like yours."

"Where is it, then, shit-wit?"

"Didn't work, and yours won't either."

"Yes, it will. All I have to do is find a place to hang it."

"Find me a point to put my lever, and I will move the world," Echols said. "There is no point. That's why ours didn't work. My advice to you is start heaving them boxes,"

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

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

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

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

"You've tried it, eh?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Bullshuck," Fisher said.

"He never heard of it," Gumbie said.

"It doesn't exist."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The question is what to do with him."

Him only meant one person here.

"Make him take a hike," Rooks said.

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

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

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

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

And if it was true that this alien had been taken by Hooper, then it proved that he had sacrificed Fisher for a monkey-woman. He had hurried away with her and left him to the mercy of these aliens. I'll burn him, too, Fisher thought, but of course if Hooper had gotten what he wanted, then he might never be back. He swapped me for that monkey.

"You'll get her back," Fisher said with his usual bravado, but his quack took all the menace out of it. "My uncle's got a jet-rotor that's so fast it's practically invisible. He'll come whistling in and burn you all down."

"Tip him over," someone said.

"Leave him alone," Valda said — more and more he noticed that Valda defended him, probably more because she disliked them than liked him; but he was grateful nonetheless. "Bligh might not even want to come back. She certainly wasn't very happy when she was here."

"She was a kid," Echols said.

Fisher was reminded that this monkey-woman wasn't a woman — she was a fifteen-year-old, probably diseased little creature with no ID that his rich uncle just whisked off, the disgusting porker.

"This discussion is closed for the moment," Mr. Blue said.

Fisher found himself giving thanks that nothing was going to change. Whenever he felt safe, as he did here and as he had at certain places on the march, he wanted everything to freeze: no change, no alteration, nothing. Let everything continue just as it was. Packing, burying their fire, hoisting their packs, all the activities of setting out filled him with apprehension. And it was only in the course of the day, in the evidence that nothing bad was happening to him, that he became convinced that this move was sensible. But two weeks in this cave on the bluff had calmed him. He wanted things to change, he wanted to be found — rescued — and for the aliens to be burned. But not right now — not while he was feeling safe. He had come to depend on these aliens, and he knew their moods, and so far they hadn't killed him. He did not really believe they would, and he felt that any change implied risk.

The food was a great help. Eating familiar provisions from the stock he had selected and packed gave him a feeling of well-being. Perhaps the aliens were trying to make him complacent by feeding him this way. But he did not think they were that devious. Much of his confidence arose from his suspicion that the aliens were very stupid and gullible. In a sense, Mr. Blue's spiriting him away from the Diggers was proof of that. Mr. B was sentimental. Fisher was glad of it— he knew he would have been eaten alive by those apes — but he also believed that it gave him power over Mr. Blue.

He had none of their superstitions. They had no idea of change, none of time. Their whole effort was toward survival. And so they had not separated themselves from the land — they saw themselves as part of O-Zone, which would have amused any New Yorker: O-Zone was a contaminated wilderness. And they seemed to see themselves as existing in a place that was not attached to America.

Fisher said, "You aliens are out of this world."

They had heard him say "aliens" so often they had stopped objecting to it.

"This is the world," Echols said.

"Bullshuck."

"The rest of it doesn't count, because it doesn't matter to us."

"You pretend this is some kind of island," Fisher said.

Valda said, "I like that. It's true."

"We don't have to pretend," Mr. Blue said. "We live in our quarter. We have everything we want. And all the perimeters are dangerous. It is an island."

Fisher said, "I'd like to leave it, somehow. Not today or tomorrow. But pretty soon."

He meant he wanted to be scooped up by a battling gunship and to wake up in his room in Coldharbor.

Rooks said, "Why are you listening to this dip? He's nothing, he's nobody!"

Still, they fed him — they fed him like a cat. And he congratulated himself that he had lasted with them. He had been out of Coldharbor alone once in his life; had wandered in New York one day. And the rest of the time had either been in his room or else shepherded by Hardy and Moura ("Look at the lights, Fizzy"), But for weeks he had lived in O-Zone, and not simply survived but had brought technology to this wilderness — it really was an island — and had repaired his helmet and his beam. He knew the aliens did not like him, but he felt sure they respected him. He was their prisoner, but he had not broken down. He did not think that any of them except Mr. B had seen him cry, and he drew strength from that, even though he was aware that he had wept several times. Often he had felt stupid here, as if O-Zone was not the world.

Mr. Blue had protected him from the Diggers, Echols had enough math to know he was a brilliant boy, Gumbie had not really regained his confidence after the business about the so-called centrifugal force; though Gumbie was too stupid to be consistent. Rooks hated him, but Rooks was only one alien. Kylie hardly existed, and after the death of Tinia she had seemed greatly diminished — just a small-faced woman who worked without speaking.

And there was Valda. Whenever he had felt particularly stupid she had propped him up. He was grateful to her. He knew that the other aliens thought he was infantile and selfish, but what did they know of the world? O-Zone was the one place on earth where even a Type A would have difficulty, and where an alien had the advantage. What they took to be his brilliance was actually a considerable handicap, but only Valda seemed to understand this paradox.

Valda entered his chamber early one morning in the third week. It was that hour when his fear of the dark subsided into the impatience and uncertainty he felt in daylight, though both paralyzed him with a numbing sense of imprisonment. There was either no light at his window or else too much — he was blinded by darkness or its opposite. This was the brief in-between phase, and he was startled to see Valda standing over him.

She knelt next to his low bed, where he lay in his inflated suit, his helmet and boots on. He felt very small beneath her, like an infant, and very passive — he was intimidated by her eagerness. She quickly unbuttoned her shirt, and then parted it and held her breasts to him, one in each of her hands, offering them to him.

Fisher looked at the soft crushed nipples and despised himself for liking these imperfect things.

"Don't be afraid," she said. She was smiling at him, her face shining with excitement.

He had not known how tender any breasts could be unti! she touched them and they were plumped in her hands. Their fragility kept him away, and yet he wanted them. The morning light at the window whitened her skin and showed its tiny veins crazing its tissue, and its dusting of pale hairs, its moles scattered like flakes, and the soft contours of breasts lying like full pouches of milk against her fingers and thumbs.

Facing her, Fisher felt as if he were made of wood and wet clay, sort of stuck together. And though something was struggling within him it felt like an ineffectual rattle — less like a sign of life than a reminder that he was dying. He groaned and a patch of steam clouded his faceplate. He lifted off his helmet, not sure what was expected of him.

"Shall I stick my finger into your bum?" he asked.

"Why would you want to do that?"

"To get you hot," he said, and looked for a reaction on her face.

Valda thought a moment, and smiled at him pityingly and then said, "Let me tell you what I like."

Now the eagerness was in his eyes, too, and still her hands gently lifted her breasts.

"Touch them, suck them, lick them," she said. "Take them."

He thought: They're all she has — they are everything.

She said, "Baby," as his hands went to them; and there was a clap and a roar — a jet-rotor, he knew at once. Fisher sat up but it was too late to run out.

In those seconds she had let go of her breasts and begun to scream. There was no sound of her voice above the racket of the rotor, but he was frightened by her convulsive movement, her open mouth, her teeth, the whites of her rolled-up eyes. A split second afterward the echo of her scream rang on the walls of his chamber, and he heard the distant growl of the jet-rotor.

It broke the spell — shattered the magic with noise. Valda stood up awkwardly. She seemed embarrassed. She buttoned her shirt and knotted it and without looking at him — she had already begun to leave — she said, "You look so funny in that suit."

"Aw, jings," Fisher said, and felt flustered, as if he had stumbled reaching for something he badly wanted — not only had he fallen but he had ended up with nothing. And now he could not remember what he had wanted; and Valda was gone.

"They're searching for him," Mr. Blue said later that day. They were eating again, but the old stuff — pole greens and stringy meat and bean cakes.

Mr. Blue still talked as though Fisher were deaf or stupid, a dim alien who had washed up on the shores of O-Zone,

"They'll kill us if they find him here."

"And how are we going to swap him for Bligh?" Gumbie asked.

"If we find his people before they find us, we might be able to make a deal."

"He's a dip — he isn't worth the trouble," Rooks said. "Sell him to the Diggers. Give him away. Tie him to a tree and just walk off?"

They usually spoke softly, but Fisher heard everything, because even a normal voice made the vault chambers stutter with echoes. These aliens seemed threatened by echoes, but no whisper was too weak not to reach these walls and be flung back. Fisher stayed away from the echoey darkness at the back of the cavern, and he avoided the blinding glare of daylight at the front. He kept to the edge of the shelf, between the darkness and the light, tuning the transmitter in his helmet and playing with his phones, listening for another rotor. He imagined it swooping, and taking him up and away, and blasting them. But more days passed and there was nothing.

A decision came quite suddenly.

Fisher had been staring at Mr. Blue's skinny face. He thought: I don't know this alien at all. He said, "What's your other name?"

"Elroy," the man said softly. "Elroy Blue." And then he responded to the suggestion and said, "What's your other one?"

"Allbright."

It made an echo, three bounces, and someone was listening inside. That person said, "Like the department stores. That rich family from New York."

"That's my family," Fisher said. "But they closed the stores. They've moved into cable sales — it's all mail order. What are you looking at? They're all Herberts. My uncle's a porker. My father's a dong. He's not even my rea! father!"

He was surprised by their interest and wanted to mock it; these aliens were perhaps even dumber than they looked. They were impressed by the Allbrights! Fisher disliked the Allbrights and every aspect of the business. But the aliens were murmuring and seemed to see possibilities in the name. They kept repeating it, as if trying it out and listening to the sound of the echoes. And now they seemed to know what to do.

"Take him back," Echols said.

"New York," someone said. "That's the States."

"We can walk to the States."