O-Zone

25

It was their third search-and-scan mission — Hooper laughed to think that that was what Fizzy would have called this afternoon flight to and from New York — the picnic in Firehills, the low-altitude photography. Hooper felt he was flying blind, but he knew that Fizzy would easily have been able to locate the aliens. Hopper was lost without the boy: it seemed impossible to find Fizzy without Fizzy's help. Today was typical. Unless something specific showed up on the film — the band of aliens, a settlement, a hot spot, a glimpse of Fizzy, or any sign of life — it would be another failure. But it had been another lovely day with Bligh.

"We used to scream when we saw planes like this," Bligh was saying.

"I don't believe you," Hooper said. "Only wild men would do that. I mean, real burned-out Skells. Anyway, there are no other planes here. Overflying is forbidden."

"This year there were people," Bligh said.

New Year's: Hooper said nothing.

"They came down like thunder and lightning," the girl said. "But it's so quiet inside here!"

He loved her for not being afraid — he loved it that her wonderment and curiosity overcame her apprehension.

"What's this for?"

"It's a program scanner, a sort of analyzer. Fizzy's. I have no idea how to work it."

"And you said he's stupid!"

"Not stupid," Hooper said. "Just foolish."

The land streaking beneath Hooper's jet-rotor was wild and misleadingly green. He imagined that it was all contaminated, and felt like an outlaw and an adventurer. He saw an exciting similarity between Bligh the alien and O-Zone the Prohibited Area. It was a lovely lawless place with a terrible reputation; it was solitary and cut off, an island outside time; and it was her home. She was a child of all these dangers.

He wanted to believe that Bligh belonged to him now. She was everything that he lacked. He had been desperate to find her; he was desperate to keep her. "Love" was the word he gave his desperation.

In spite of his pleasure in her being with him on the flight, he was uneasy and superstitious traveling with her in O-Zone. He was superstitious most of all, because having found her here, he feared that he could also lose her here — something about just being in this place. And O-Zone still seemed very dangerous.

It was the only part of America that was genuinely empty — empty by law, feared by everyone, and heavily guarded. People dreamed about it and used it as a backdrop for their fantasies. Its very name was a word for wilderness and waste, and all its associations made it a complicated and ambiguous metaphor, as if it were not merely a closed-off area in the state of Missouri, but a remote place, with the features of another planet. It was not just a foreign land. It represented misjudgment and disaster — perhaps trickery, perhaps sabotage. Maybe Fizzy was right about the collapse of those caverns causing the radioactive leak. Yet no one had known until after the catastrophe that the Feds had hidden the waste there! Something unspeakable happened and then people said: There was something I meant to tell you. . O-Zone had been like that. One day it was just the Ozarks, and the next day it was an island revolving in outer space. It was lost beauty — spoiled, people said, ruined and poisoned. But now Hooper knew better, and somewhere down there so probably did Fizzy.

Bligh had been with him for over three weeks, and all that time he had methodically and conscientiously been kind to her. It had become almost instinctive to him in a tall fatherly way — his attention, his tenderness. He gathered that she had been unhappy with her people — those aliens. She said they had been driven out of their camp. What camp? He had not seen one, and neither had Fizzy. She said she had wanted to leave at about the time he had abducted her.

"You took me away," she said. "You stole me!"

Then she laughed, and he was so glad she had made it into a joke, because for him it was no joke. And he was still not sure of her. He had not touched her — didn't dare. He was amazed to think that after three weeks Hooper Allbright had still not made love to her. He wanted her to ask why. "Because I'm very serious about you," he wanted to reply. But the girl didn't ask.

Lovers are cannibals, he thought, and in his hungry, despairing way he wanted to devour her and have her at the same time. He wanted to inhabit her; he wanted her to live within him. But he hung back. He didn't want to frighten her; and he was also nervous. While he mocked his desire with the sad self-parody of cannibalism, there was in his mind the actual suspicion that aliens were animals. It was an irrational thought, he insisted, yet he did not want to rid himself of the notion, because he also found it very exciting.

Bligh enjoyed these trips — the search-and-scan missions, these outings. She recognized the features of the land — she told Hooper their names. The word O-Zone meant nothing to her; she called the area "our quarter" and explained that there were also people living in the other three quarters of "the Territory." What people? Hooper wondered. O-Zone was officially empty, and it was certainly a Prohibited Area. Bligh claimed it was full of people. They had camps — some had houses! They had water! They farmed and hunted! And what they didn't have they found in all the abandoned houses in the empty towns. Deserted and radioactive O-Zone was a sort of thriving state of industrious aliens!

"The first time I saw it I thought it was paradise," Hooper said. "But that's because I thought there were no people in it."

"That's selfish," Bligh said.

Hooper was surprised by how quickly and easily she said it; and she was right, of course.

She said, "Don't you like people?"

"I like to think there are places in the world where there are no people," Hooper said. "Empty places, that will never change. I thought O-Zone was one. I guess I was wrong."

"We didn't change it," Bligh said. "We lived close to the ground, and I thought it was a pretty easy life, until you took me away." She was now looking out of the side porthole of the rotor. "Now I know how hard it was. And we've been very hungry lately. The hunting was bad. We ate our dogs."

Hooper asked for more, but she had fallen silent. She often fell silent and shook her head when trying to talk about the past. She resisted, pretending there was nothing to say. She was not superstitious; she was doubtful, watchful, wary.

"Was it there?" he asked, because she seemed to be looking at something.

He took her silence to mean no.

He said, "Fizzy would know," and felt helpless.

This third trip was the last reentry allowed on the Access Pass. Remembering that, Hooper radioed Hardy.

"Homeward-bound, brother," he said when he found Hardy's frequency.

"Leave a message," Hardy's line automatically replied. "We will find you."

Hardy had specifically said: No detailed messages on this subject, unless in an agreed code — so Hooper said nothing, He was becoming discouraged, and what was so frustrating was the thought that if he hadn't lost the boy this would all be perfect. He hated the thought that Fizzy was both a swap and a sacrifice, and he knew that it would be very hard to snatch him back. He hoped he was alive. He counted on the boy's indestructible intelligence. And they had all that food — those weapons, the suit and helmet. And yet Hooper went on punishing himself with the thought that Fizzy was living among wolves.

Bligh was still looking away. Hooper said, "See anything?"

She had a way of wincing that made her seem both innocent and incompetent: that wince meant no, too.

She probably thought of him as a wolf. He knew she was not yet sure of him. How could she be sure in such a short time? So he was careful, he didn't want to frighten her: no shocks, no surprises, nothing heavy. Anyway, New York was strange enough for now. After all the trouble he had taken to find her, he did not want to lose her.

He wanted to say: Through you I can understand the world. Everything looks different and better.

"Why are you smiling?" she said.

"Because I've just realized I want to go on living."

She shook her head, indicating that she did not understand. Did a fifteen-year-old ever doubt that you went on living? She said, "I love these straggling ravines. Those are all pines." She was narrating over the ground-screen, fascinated by the images. "The roads are just black stripes. A few roofs. Now I see why you didn't think there were any people here."

She moved her small stubby finger on the screen, and frowned at it — a strand of hair coming loose from her helmet and brushing her cheek as she turned her head. He was especially touched by her slight flaws. Every imperfection in her roused his love.

She saw him watching her that way — his eyes pleading and possessive.

"You could have had anyone," she said. His steady gaze seemed to make her uncomfortable. "Why did you choose me?"

Hooper laughed to think that she meant she was unimportant. She still did not realize how difficult she had been. She had seemed just about unattainable. She was practically a child, she was an alien, she was living in the most forbidden of Prohibited Areas.

"I almost killed myself trying to find you," Hooper said "And of course that was one of the attractions," he added, anticipating her next question. "The difficulty of it all" — but he was smiling—"the risk." Then, remembering, he said, "I lost my nephew!"

"They'll look after him. They're not killers."

"He's a strange boy. You don't know him."

"You didn't know me," she said. "You still don't."

"When I saw you I wanted you," he said. "That was enough."

She became silent within her helmet and looked out of the side porthole to think.

"And you didn't know me," he said. "That's another reason I love you. I don't trust the word of anyone who knows me."

He wanted to add, Everyone lies to the rich, but it sounded like a whimper, and nothing was more disgusting to him than the rich portraying themselves as victims — and it was one of their most common complaints, saying they were weak, and rather burdened and powerless, and often claiming to be poor. Once, he had whimpered. No more.

"It was dark that morning," she was saying.

She believed that was the only time he had seen her. Hooper did not say that he had watched her on tape, or that he had murdered the two net-men who had cornered Murdick. He was thankful that she never mentioned those deaths. Her fearlessness was her best characteristic; and he loved her most at her most animal. Animals never mourned,

"You say you wanted me," she said, her voice breathy and incredulous. She did not know how strong she was. "But I had nothing. Nothing."

He said, "Yes!"

She winced slightly at his enthusiasm.

"I loved that most of all," he said.

"That word," she said.

"What's wrong with saying 'love'?"

She shrugged. "It's such a waste of words."

But her wide-awake way of saying that made him love her. "I thought I had everything," he said. "And then I realized I didn't have you."

She pushed the faceplate of her helmet up, as if to see him better. The clear sky brightened her eyes, and they pierced him.

"And that you didn't have me," he said, "Maybe I shouldn't tell you these things."

"Maybe," she said. "I'd feel a lot sexier if you weren't so serious!"

She laughed. He now knew that laugh. It was not companionable, and it was not intended as encouragement. It was more like a warning that he had gone too far.

She did not say anything more for a while — for minutes, which was many clicks at ground speed. They were nearing the perimeter. She looked at the ground-screen and said — it was the kind of whisper that is like a vagrant thought—"I thought I was going to die there."

Not there below: by the time she got the words out the rotor was far beyond it, homeward-bound at high speed. Bligh had no idea of air distances, but that ignorance was in Hooper's favor. She believed the short flight meant that they were still very close to the camp she called home. She did not know — how could she? — that New York was fifteen hundred clicks from O-Zone.

A Federal attack rotor escorted by two chase planes drew level with Hooper.

"Reduce speed and identify yourself."

It was only then that Hooper realized he had entered the Red Zone of the perimeter. Fizzy would have given him plenty of warning.

"Hooper Allbright and passenger, en route to New York."

"Identify passenger and give Access Code."

He first radioed the Access Code — their permission to use Red Zone and O-Zone airspace — and then he gave the name on Bligh's ID.

Moments later, the clearance came, and "That was your last reentry, Allbright. Your Access Pass is now invalid. You may proceed."

It was another reminder that he had failed to find Fizzy. How easily he forgot the boy when he was with Bligh, and he thought: What now?

"I wish I knew who this person was," Bligh said, holding the ID disc and glancing up. She had misunderstood Hooper's questioning look. "It's certainly not me."

"It doesn't matter," he said. How could he begin to tell her of the hunt in New York with Godseye and those miserable troopers, and how Murdick had burned that Owner? "But you need an ID."

"We know all about IDs," she said. Her harsh laughter said, Watch out. "If you don't have an ID in this country you're a zombie. That's another reason we didn't live in the States."

"O-Zone is the States."

"Then why do you call it O-Zone?"

He smiled because she had challenged him. It pleased him to see her in a defiant mood.

"Because it's an island," he said.

She was still studying the ground-screen.

"Where are we?" she asked after a while.

"Pennsylvania," he said. "I haven't been down there for years."

Bligh was still looking, but by the time Hooper had finished speaking they were over New York.

Out of her element, Bligh noticed everything. And she was illiterate. It was not a handicap: it made her especially alert and sharpened all her senses.

She was thrilled, as before on their return to New York, by the lights rising in the city — so much brighter than the low cooling sun settling into the depths of gray dust in the slip-stream aft of the jet-rotor. The slender glass-and-silver towers and turrets of the city glittered, and the lights on their steep galleries outshone the dying sun. The dark spaces at the margin of the narrow island only served to make the city seem greater, more imperial and unearthly. It was a city of light.

"It's like a beautiful castle — a gigantic one, with a moat around it," she said,

"How do you know about castles and moats?"

She laughed in her warning way, to put him in his place: How dare you accuse me of being ignorant of simple things? the laugh said. But it was only a laugh, a sound with the merest echo. A moment later it was gone for good.

Everyone Hooper had ever known believed that aliens were naive and that they hated and feared technology. And at the beginning — three weeks ago — he had been apprehensive about Bligh in the jet-rotor, Bligh in New York, Bligh in Coldharbor, Bligh carrying a dead girl's ID. He knew his apprehension was childish, but it was understandable. In his whole busy life Hooper had never known an alien — never been alone with one, never spoken to one. Bligh was human, and Hooper was deeply ashamed that he had ever doubted that in her or any other alien.

And the city was well-planned: Bligh was quick to appreciate it. Wasn't the technology of the city meant to allay anxiety? Surely that was the point of the castle and the moat— not the island's incomprehensible size, but its beauty? Technology was either aesthetically pleasing or else it was worthless and awful. Fizzy's preoccupations had shown him that technology was an art, not a science.

Hooper was glad that Bligh was not intimidated by New York, but after all, it was an easy place to live. Sleeping in the open and hunting in O-Zone took guts; but not this, not flying in a speeding rotor, and not the rich tower-life in the garrison at Coldharbor. If Bligh was silent it was not terror but bewilderment. It had not taken long for her to understand that Hooper was wealthy. She clearly knew what an Owner was, but Owner did not quite describe him.

Now as the rotor slowed down and turned, the twanging sound of the rotor blade reached them through the portholes, and the jets subsided. The slower this aircraft went, the noisier it was. But Hooper was circling around the island to impress her. The lights dazzled her and made her sigh.

Watching them — this pleased him — she seemed to become a very small girl. She was overcome by the sight, and did not speak but only uttered soft gasps of amazement. The towering city shone on the curvature of her faceplate.

"I think I love you even more now," Hooper said. "And—"

She had gone very quiet and was holding tight, as her thick helmet vibrated. They were hovering over the rotor pad at Coldharbor; they lowered and settled on the tower roof.

"And I like myself a little better," he said.

He cut the engines. Bligh lifted off her helmet and shook her hair into place — it was streaked light and dark and it jumped in thick hanks around her face.

"That's a strange thing to say." She had a way of staring at him that made him think he could never conceal anything from her.

He wanted to tell her that his desire, his sex instinct, was roused. He felt younger and more powerful. He wanted to say: Sex is magic.

He said, "I was getting very bored with myself. I'm much happier now — thanks to you. What's wrong?"

"I'm happy when you look after me" — but she said this in a solemn voice. "You're very kind. But when you talk about love, I get worried. I don't really know what you mean — it makes you seem unpredictable. And it makes me feel somehow unfair to you."

He was smiling — glad that they were able to talk, glad that they were alone and safely back at Coldharbor.

"Because I don't love you," she said — not apologizing but stating a fact.

"You don't have to," he said. And then he became solemn himself and said, "You're right. Let's not use that word."

"You haven't eaten much today," he said as they went down in the elevator.

She shrugged; she smiled. "I've never been so well-fed!"

"Please eat something."

"All right," she said softly. It was the small surrendering voice of a child.

He saw that she had agreed to eat, not out of hunger, but purely to please him, and that made him happy. Her willingness meant everything to him.

"And then I'll take you out. We'll buy something."

"You keep buying me things!"

"You can have anything you want."

"You'll make me greedy."

"I want you to be greedy," he said, because she had never shown the slightest sign of greed. "Promise me you will be," She laughed — her cautioning laugh: another warning.

26

In the unit at Coldharbor, Bligh went directly to the suite Hooper had given her. It was five rooms on the south-facing side of the tower, where she could look downtown, ninety blocks under the skylights. "I'll be right over," she said, using her helmet phones. She had been very quick to master the phones and the signaling devices, and Hooper could not help wondering whether Fizzy had adapted to the rigors of O-Zone. If he hadn't, he was probably already dead. This thought made Hooper feel fatalistic and made the whole matter of rescue somehow less urgent.

"Dinner," he said to himself, and put two sealed meals into the oven. That was another favor to her. She had been fascinated by the sealed meal trays. Hooper had stacks of them in the freezer, but was much prouder of the fact that as an Owner he had chests of fresh vegetables and fruit, milk and eggs, real meat, real fish.

"I don't eat meat fabric or textured protein," he had said at their first meal. "None of these pastes or formulas, except when I'm on a mission of some kind, and that's pretty rare. I mean, I don't run around rehydrating stuff to heat."

She stared at him: What was he shouting about?

"We actually peel potatoes around here," he said. "We chop our own spinach. Sometimes it has dirt on it! I've got asparagus in that refrigerated drawer."

"Good for you," she said.

But he did not want her to miss the point by mocking him. He said, "I've got a stack of firewood in the fuel room. For the fireplace."

Was she smiling at this?

He said, "It's probably the only firewood in New York. I've actually got a permit to burn it."

"What else would you do with it?" Bligh said,

"I've got real apples and oranges," Hooper said. "I've got onions! I've got greens!"

"Maybe that's why I feel so at home here," she said.

He thought: That's possible. He had always resisted the banalities and high tech of New York eating, and he was wealthy enough to afford real food, and a fireplace, and a private car.

And then Bligh smiled and said, "I've never heard anyone boast about onions before," and he realized that she had been sarcastic earlier.

"There's not much fresh food around," Hooper said. "There's not much water. We've got our own supply in Coldharbor — our own generator, too. Most New Yorkers eat meal trays."

And he explained how you rehydrated or thawed the meal tray. He showed her the tray, and the meal program, and the picture disc, and was about to say that city workers and pass-people from New Jersey and Brooklyn ate trays — and so did Federals, and guards, and probably some aliens too — when Bligh spoke up,

"That's what I want!"

Now, waiting for her, he switched on his monitor. She had been smiling when she left him. Was she still smiling? He watched her moving in her suite. He was heartened by the way she still smiled and sang to herself when she was alone. Hooper became very attentive in front of the monitor.

Being with Bligh meant that he had to isolate himself. He did not think it was wise at the moment to introduce her to Hardy or Moura — he believed that his enthusiasm for Bligh might seem as if he were indifferent to the missing Fizzy. Nor did he want to leave Bligh on her own. Yet it was a satisfaction to be with her. It made him feel useful and human, it allowed him a perspective on himself and his world.

And, after all, he was glad that she had not been impressed by his firewood. She had sense. She had not once mentioned drugs or money or weapons — the monotonous topics of all the other people he knew. Her presence in his unit gave the place life and color — the way dull rooms had been transformed for him by the presence of a singing bird in a cage, or cats magnificently slumbering on sofas. But he had long ago abandoned house pets.

She was singing now on the monitor screen — singing as she removed her clothes: not audible words, but a slowly lilting melody that was half in her head. She folded each garment as she took it off, and Hooper went on watching as she stood in her underpants. Liberated from her close-fitting flying suit., she stretched her arms and legs. She was fresh-faced and long-legged and smiling — the way he had first seen her.

She passed a mirror and then glanced back at it, perhaps wondering: Is this what he sees? The faces that people made in mirrors were never the faces they made in public. They seldom smiled. Bligh was not smiling now. She was looking enigmatic. They saved their secret expressions for mirrors.

Bligh went into the bathroom and took her pants off, as Hooper switched monitors, following her to the shower. She ran it so that only a dribble came out, and she washed as someone who had experienced a scarcity of water — sponging herself thoroughly but not wasting any.

She called out, "Almost ready!" — speaking to the closed door and unaware that a camera had followed her here.

And then with an urgent expression on her face, Bligh straddled the width of the tub and, still standing, and holding her slim legs apart, she arched her back and smiled. She took her vulva in both hands, parting it where it was reddest, as though she were holding two halves of an exotic mushroom. Where it was ripest its lips were softly squashed like the thin leaves on the underside of a mushroom cap. Lifting herself with her fingers, she let fly, pissing with a scorching splashing sound into the glugging tub.

Hooper turned up the volume until the sound she made was a loud crackling. He had never known another woman to piss like that, shooting it in an arc as she stood with her legs apart. She was a girl of fifteen: did that explain it? Hooper was fascinated, staring, holding his breath, hanging in front of the monitor and suffocating.

He told himself that he needed to know all her secrets. Then he sighed and came alive, and peered at her resuming her shower, and drying herself, and dressing for dinner, first her underwear, and then sheathing her slender body into another tight suit.

In that same moment Hooper felt accused by small squinting eyes and murmuring voices. He was forced to justify himself, almost to say it out loud. This is not spying, he thought. This is my only chance. 1 could lose her tomorrow and this would be all I'd have. And he swore to himself: I won't betray her.

"It's true," he said as they were eating.

Bligh looked up from her meal tray. Hooper had spoken out of a trance, surprising her after a long silence. He had been thinking again about what he had seen on the monitor.

"I don't know much about you," he said.

She looked uncertain. She had stopped eating. Then she recovered.

"Can I tell you something?" she said. "I've never loved anyone — I don't even like the word. I always thought it was something that would happen to me later, when I was older."

"You're so young," he said.

"I don't feel young," she said. "And I don't think of you as old. But I feel that you've loved other women. That you've used that word lots of times before. Lovers go on finding other people to love."

"I was married," Hooper said, feeling oddly as if this little girl had put him on the spot. "She was like me. I didn't love her. I pitied her. Because she was like me."

"Was she an Owner, too?"

"Everyone's an Owner," he said.

She laughed at him with a suddenness and a sharpness that reproached him. He knew he deserved it, and to cover his embarrassment — what made it worse was that she was not in the least offended — he said, "It was a few years ago. It was a sort of romance." He was trying to explain, but he was also trying to improve the moment and disperse the echo of her laughter. "Haven't you ever had the feeling, after someone has played music or sung a song beautifully, that you're in love with them?"

She still faced him. She said, "In that case, I would be in love with the song." Picking up her fork, she added, "But as I said, I don't know anything about love."

Hooper watched her closely. He felt insecure when she said something very logical or very wise. Then he realized how little power he actually had, because it hinted at strengths in her that he had not anticipated.

He said, "Eat up and we'll go," and she obeyed him.

On the way out, Hooper radioed Hardy, using the helmet phones.

When Hardy came on the line and heard Hooper's voice, he said, "Don't say anything more, don't explain anything— say nothing." Hardy sounded as though he were repeating something he had carefully rehearsed, "Talk to me tomorrow on my private line, and in the usual way."

He meant in code. He hung up as abruptly as he had answered.

Bligh said, "I like these helmets!"

She had already learned the trick of using a line and phones rather than hollering out of the pushed-up faceplate, and only her boots gave her trouble — she was a trifle unsteady in them.

"Masks are very stylish these days," Hooper said.

"But they're tough, too. They're safe. And the phones really work!"

She took nothing for granted. It was this lively appreciative quality that Hooper valued most in her. When she saw a button, she said, "What does it do?" and faced with a machine or a strange object, she said, "How does it work?" Hooper explained, and she liked the explanations as much as he enjoyed detaining her with them. Teaching her made him feel useful, and it renewed his interest in the city. It also reminded him of all the skills it took to live here.

She was at times so impressed with these details of life in New York City that he suspected that she did not understand them. And then he felt safer, knowing she needed him.

She was astonished by the lights at night — the skylights especially, and the blips and flashes of air traffic, small private planes and rotors, in their clockwise progress around the city; the streaks of their high-level landings and vertical take-offs. Hooper knew from the monitor that the light sometimes kept her awake (Bligh slept naked, with the blanket over her head). But the light also reassured her. Whenever she saw darkness she said, "What's in there?"

She was eager to know more: Hooper had not imagined that New York was so interesting. Bligh's curiosity made the city special. Hooper, seeing it with her eyes, realized that it was fantastic — the heights of the residential towers, the indoor parks and glassed-in gardens, the quack of rotors and the hiss of expresses aboveground — trams and rail cars; the complex rules of entry, the roadblocks, the security checks, and the surrounding darkness.

"I live over there, don't I?" she said, tossing her head at the wall of black beyond the west side. She still believed that O-Zone, her quarter of it, lay across the river, just beyond New Jersey.

Leaving Coldharbor that night, Hooper took Bligh past the checkpoint, so that she could see Jennix and his wall of monitors. He showed her that they did not simply record what was happening in the towers and grounds, but also monitored different parts of the city.

"That's Upper West, that's Lower East, there's the bridges," Captain Jennix said helpfully. "There was an incident at a tunnel entrance earlier on — Lower West. Might have been Skells. And we were getting reports of an alien alert right next door, at the Lansdown Tower. I think they nailed someone. There was an all-clear. Going out?"

"We were thinking about it," Hooper said crossly.

"Taking your car?"

Hooper faced the man and said, "I hate questions!"

But Jennix was not put off. He said, "It's just that with these incidents tonight, and the way the world's going, I thought you might be interested in some literature."

"Not today," Hooper said.

"The young lady might be interested," Jennix said, turning his smile on Bligh. Jennix wore a long-visored cap and earphones, and a high-powered particle beam was strapped to his waist. He approached Hooper and said, "Time is running out, you know. A fellow like you, with your net worth, could have a swell place on a station. You could do yourself proud — be totally self-sufficient. You could upgrade yourself at any time. You could be in orbit, Mr. Allbright."

Hooper said, "It's so kind of you to think about my future," and started away, taking Bligh by the arm.

But Jennix left his station with a leaflet in his hand.

"You don't have to accept this planet," he said. "Millions are rejecting it for a better life in space. The day is coming when you'll need it."

The leaflet said, Reserve Your Space.

"And we're looking for recruits for White Girls," Jennix said, glancing again at Bligh. But he had strayed too far from his station. As Hooper walked on, Jennix said, "If you weren't hurrying away she'd listen to me. I can tell she's interested. She'd sign up for the program."

On the plaza outside Coldharbor, Bligh asked who Jennix was, and what had he been saying?

"He's a Rocketman, a Pilgrim. He lives in a workers' development in Queens with his wife and reads science-fiction novels. He's got an entry pass to New York and a work permit. He brings his lunch in a paper bag. All his savings go to the Pilgrims. It's a space cult — Survivors, Starlings, they have different names. The Federal government actually encourages them. They've made a sort of scientific religion out of the space program — they're rocket people."

"They actually ride in rockets?"

"So they claim. Along with the scientists, the Astronauts, the politicians, freeloaders, and millionaires, you'll find a Pilgrim or two on most missions. They're pathetic — it's just a publicity stunt. I think it's a trick to get their money."

They walked for nearly a block before Bligh spoke again, but she did so in a marveling tone. "I'd love to go up in a rocket. I've only heard about them," she said. "I was so cut off in our quarter. The world is such a wonderful place!"

"This isn't the world," Hooper said.

They had reached the rail-car station. A red Circle Line car hissed to a stop, and many of the passengers were wearing helmets and suits — some with masks in the high style that had recently become popular, with faces and phones and breathing options. Above the station were rotors and skylights, and all the towers were lit. A canyon of light led downtown. The city was best at night, Hooper thought. It was certainly safest: the security patrols were at their strongest at night, and the checkpoints and scanners were all in operation. And it was at night, surrounded by darkness, that the city seemed complete — an entire world, castle and moat.

Bligh said, "What else is there?"

She seemed overwhelmed by it and Hooper guessed that she had already begun to trust in it.

"Dark and desperate places," Hooper said.

But she was smiling.

"Not very far from here," he said.

She was still smiling; she believed she knew those places.

"And all over the States."

"I'd like to see!"

She looked so eager because she didn't know.

"And Asia, South America," he said. "Africa — God, Africa."

"I wouldn't be afraid."

Her upturned face was bright in her faceplate. Hooper held her. She was trembling, and he thought how small she was, how thin, for someone so strong.

"Take me there," she said.

"First you have to see New York."

She had said, "I want to go as far as I can possibly go in this city," and Hooper took her by taxi to South Ferry.

He said, "We could have come here in my own car."

"This is probably quicker." Her gaze was intent upon some men in masks strolling on the promenade.

She had not understood him. He said, "No. I actually have a car at Coldharbor. I keep it on the ramp. I hardly ever use it. It's a new one."

Bligh said, "This is fine" — missing the point.

Hooper paid the driver, and they got out and headed down the steps to the promenade. Hooper said, "I mean I have a real car — that I drive myself."

"We found cars in our quarter, in those ghost towns," Bligh said. "I used to sit behind the wheel when I was small, going brm-brm. Mr. B drove one. But it was no good, and there was nowhere to go. You should see those roads! We heard that some people out there lived in them — too lazy to put up houses."

Hooper said, ''Listen, do you know how few private cars there are in this city?"

But saying it, he realized that it was a pointless boast: it really didn't matter.

Bligh said, "Why is this called South Ferry?"

"There used to be a boat here that went across to Staten Island. The ferry was much bigger than those patrol boats. I don't think you'd want to go there now… or there,"

His sweeping gesture took in Staten Island, New Jersey, and the Brooklyn shore. They were like the dark edges of distant countries, all shadows and tiny lights, as if they were slowly drifting away. Gunships and rotors patrolled the bay as if engaged in battle maneuvers in a silent war.

"Are they really dangerous?"

"Not really," Hooper said. "Just bleak and boring. And unhealthy. They're full of housing blocks and workers' towers — too many people. Only about half the people have entry passes to come over here."

"Have you been there?" She was pointing at Brooklyn.

"Sure. And not just flown over it — I've driven through it.

The road's pretty well fortified. You don't see much. That's probably a good thing. It stinks. It's full of the worst kind of aliens."

He remembered too late, but the word had not offended her. It was simply that she had not understood it.

"Just slang," he said. "The polite word is 'illegals.'"

They walked a little more, keeping New Jersey in sight— Bligh said she found it reassuring to see it and to know that her quarter was in that direction. Hooper was impressed by her stamina: after a full day, the flight to O-Zone and this ramble around New York, she was still on her feet and eager to know more. It was after midnight!

Hooper radioed for a taxi, but passing through midtown on their way to Coldharbor, Bligh recognized the Greenhouse— it had been the first place Hooper had taken her — and she asked if they could stop for some chocolate.

"There's one," Bligh said, inside the place.

It was a naked woman in a mask. She wore thick chains around her waist and thinner ones around each ankle. She was with a man in a flying suit and a helmet and high boots. They made an odd couple — the nude woman, the overdressed man.

Bligh was fascinated by them and saw two more — an older woman, rather heavy, looking terribly untidy Hooper thought — even disheveled — although she was stark naked; and a naked man in a helmet and boots. As the man passed them, Hooper noticed that he was wearing a green penis sheath.

"A year ago you wouldn't have seen any naked people in here," Hooper said. "It's recently become the fashion— something to do with wearing masks, I think. You can get away with anything in a mask."

It gave the place a carnival atmosphere — a feeling of anonymous hilarity; and it was not only the masks and the nakedness but the other fashions that had the look of costumes, the backless dresses, the women who wore nothing but aprons, the security men who wore protective gear and looked like troopers and Martians and Rocketmen of long standing.

Hooper was surprised that Bligh liked the Greenhouse. For Hopper, it was just another frenzied shopping mall in competition with his mail-order business, but for Bligh it was a carnival crowd and tropical warmth, the scent of flowers, the overhanging trees, and stores crammed full of merchandise. She even enjoyed the ritual at checkpoints — the scanners, the sight of armed guards and Federals. She squealed on the moving sidewalks and on escalators, and she seemed fascinated by the electronic equipment — videoscreens and monitors and flashing lights on the towers beyond the glass roof.

He bought her some chocolate, and when she lingered near a store selling masks, he urged her to choose one. She chose a pretty face, and Hooper bought it for her. He told her how much lovelier her own face was, but he was grateful to her for wanting it. He said, "What else?"

"Are those real?" she asked, and walked to the side, among some trees, crushing a leaf in one hand, then a flower in the other. She sniffed her fingers and laughed. "They are!"

But a guard had seen her.

Hooper moved close behind him. "Owner," he said, and showed both their IDs.

"Keep away from the plantings," the guard said through the grille on his mask. His amplified voice was menacing, but Hooper's ID cut him short.

After that they took another taxi back to Coldharbor. It was a sealed taxi with an air system, so Hooper took off his breathing mask. Seeing him, Bligh did the same, and sighed and sat back. Her face was gleaming with pleasure.

"It's like a dream," she said. She looked very secure, very safe, and happy.

Hooper almost kissed her. He touched her once again, and put his face near hers. But he held back. She was smiling, as if daring him and watching him weaken. He considered the flesh of her lips.

His bleeper went. He could have ignored it or killed it, but he welcomed it now. It was Murdick, on his private line.

"Lost anything recently?" Murdick said.

When Hooper began to reply, Murdick went on, "Anything stolen, anything ripped off or broken? Because—"

"Willis, I'm heading home."

"Because we caught Skelly at the Lansdown with his hands full," Murdick said. "We've got exclusive possession. We're not turning him over. We thought you might want to ask him a few questions."

"I don't have any questions."

Murdick said, "We're going to squeeze him."

"Squeeze him without me."

"What's that?" Bligh asked as Hooper switched off.

He shook his head, and thought: I almost kissed her! He was relieved he hadn't — yet he had come so close. He had vowed to be very careful, not only to avoid frightening her but also to avoid infecting himself. He had not rid himself of the notion that as an alien Bligh might be a carrier of disease. It was his intention to have her undergo blood tests, and not to touch her until then.

But it had been a miserable interruption. It must have been the alert that Jennix had mentioned. Murdick and his trooper friends had caught a thief red-handed — a Skell or someone without an ID: a person without a legal existence. There was always a quarrel when a thief was caught — did he belong to the local security unit, or to the city police, or to the Federals? Usually it depended on what he had stolen. But this was obviously a private matter. Godseye had captured a thief. Anyone who had recently been robbed could join in the interrogation. They would kill him eventually, but it was a slow death.

It was too dark in the taxi for Bligh to see the troubled look on Hooper's face — and anyway, she was more intent on looking out of the window.

"I like this," she said, and took an energetic breath through her teeth.

"There's more," Hooper said. His voice had become very solemn. "There's much more."

He was thinking of black places and city-stains and ruined towns and some of his own depots that had been burned to the ground. But then he got a clear image of Fizzy. It was a pathetic picture and, in sympathy, he had made it old-fashioned in his mind. Fizzy, poor boy, was a lamb on a rocky hillside far away, bleating and trying to keep upright on wobbly legs; and he was surrounded by high winds and wolves.

27

In the morning, Hardy found another message from Hooper gleaming at him from his monitor and he knew he could not put it off any longer. He phoned his brother and felt at once that Hooper was in a businesslike and just-returned state of mind.

"Please don't ask me to go up in the rotor again," Hooper said. It had been for secrecy, Hardy said. They had gone up at midnight about a week before, and hovered, talking of Fizzy. It was then — certain that they were not overheard— that they had worked out the code.

"In that case, be brief," Hardy said.

"Still no luck with the package. Not even a sighting."

"These things take time," Hardy said. "When you've got some hard news, plug me in."

Trying to be circumspect, he sounded calm — even indifferent to the abduction. He was concerned, he knew that Fizzy was valuable — might even be crucial to the project in O-Zone — but he could not risk anyone getting wind of the disappearance. If Fizzy were reported missing, Federal Rescue would make inquiries, and Hardy would be forced to disclose the reason for the mission. Then the whole plan for the thermal mountain would be known, and the other oil companies would start a free-for-all in O-Zone.

The project had to be kept secret, because O-Zone was still a Prohibited Area. No one else knew that it was now safe, that it might be profitable, and that it could be leased and reactivated. Hardy intended to apply for the permits as soon as Fizzy provided the survey data — Fizzy was perfect for that. He had already done a profile and a field study. With a thermal mountain, a new weather pattern — with plenty of water — it would be a tremendous piece of real estate. What had been a disaster area was now the last great chance in America.

"Anything else?" Hardy asked. He hated this inconclusive conversation and wanted to hang up.

"My ticket's expired," Hooper said, sticking to the agreed words.

"I'll try to get you a new one."

"It's been over three weeks without a signal!"

Hardy said, "The package is well-wrapped."

"The package might be coming apart by now," Hooper said. "Its ass might be hanging out. Holes in its boots. A dent in its head."

"I'm getting static," Hardy said. It was the code signal to change the subject. Hardy was nervous about Hooper's obvious language — anyone would know!

"It was a pretty flaky package—"

"Hooper!"

"And it sort of vanished furiously off the screen," Hooper said. "I wish we had some strategy."

"We need more data on the real estate," Hardy said.

"I've got some elevations," Hooper said, ignoring the code. "Some scattered temperatures and wind speeds. But I can't work the program alone. You know who I need."

"I'm getting more static," Hardy said. Why was Hooper going on in this agitated way? "But thanks for news of developments."

"There are no developments," Hooper said, breathing hard.

A message came up on Hardy's monitor. Weathermaker, it said. Hardy said to his brother, "I have to go to a meeting."

But Hooper held on. "What does Moura think?"

"Moura doesn't know. She is a little preoccupied at the moment."

"She's bound to ask," Hooper said, and Hardy guessed that what his brother was really asking was to be excused for this and given an alibi, as if he'd guiltily lost the boy.

But Fizzy was not lost, Hardy felt. Fizzy was stronger than any of them — that was one of his problems. Moura was the one who needed help.

"I think she needs a vacation," Hardy said. "The Murdicks are still looking for people to go to Africa with them."

"Africa." Hooper said the word in a wondering and appreciative way. "What would Moura say to that?"

"Who knows? You ask her how she is and she bursts into tears."

"I have an idea," Hooper said with gusto.

But the words alarmed Hardy. "More static," he said, and this time he hung up.

He had told Hooper he had a meeting, but it was more like a summons; and what was even more surprising was that it was with an unnamed member of the Asfalt board. The key name Control said everything, though: it was one of the budget people.

That too was surprising. Hardy was confident that he had unlimited time and money to gather the data he needed for his thermal mountain in O-Zone. Fizzy, unexpectedly, had become essential to the data search. Who would have thought this difficult child would have a practical use? But he had proven himself, and he had opened up new areas of study: he asked the right questions.

Hooper had felt Hardy was being cold toward the boy— Hardy sensed the criticism in his voice, and he knew his brother was impatient. But he missed Fizzy much more than he had suggested. It was not sentiment, or even stepfather's duty. It was a much greater urgency — it was business. Hardy missed Fizzy deeply, because — apparently — only Fizzy was equipped to find the necessary project data in O-Zone.

"It's awful," Hooper had said in the rotor during their conference. "Fizzy is the only person who could find Fizzy."

"Then he's not lost," Hardy said.

"Where is he?" Hooper said.

"He knows where he is," Hardy said, "We're the ones who are lost."

Now they knew that Fizzy had mastered all the moves. They had doubted him, because he had never left his room. But he had proven to be the best navigator — he had guided them to Firehills; he had the most versatile grasp of the equipment; he could locate aliens, he could complete the survey and program it, put it in code, and enable Hardy to present his project to the board. But the boy had been missing for almost three weeks. Until he turned up, Hardy's job was impossible, and O-Zone remained a distant and featureless island. That was Hardy's lament.

But he was sure that Fizzy would show himself, and when he did he would be more useful than ever, having spent time on the ground. He would have examined the surface of O-Zone, and being Fizzy, he would have kept a log of what he saw — not only temperatures and elevations, but the pattern of variation and the whole geomorphology of the area. He didn't need a wire. He would remember everything: his memory was perfect.

In Hardy's view it was not a tragedy that Fizzy had disappeared. In a crucial sense it could be the answer to the project. The boy would undoubtedly return with the data, and the longer he stayed away, the more he would collect about this unknown area. Hooper had said that the boy might have been abducted; but what proof was there of that?

Once more Fizzy was there, driving the computer synthesizer and squawking. Hooper had taken a walk and returned to find the boy gone — so he had said. No message. Some provisions missing. A weapon gone. Fizzy in his survival suit, waddling away, squawk-squawk. The likeliest explanation was that Fizzy had deliberately dropped to the ground, as he had that January day in New York; and for the same reason — to test his nerve. He had lived in his Coldharbor room for fifteen years! Hardy was certain the boy would be brave. He was equipment-conscious. He had food. He had a weapon. And he had a radio.

"No aliens," Hooper had said. "Fizzy's the only alien in O-Zone."

"Then he's all right," Hardy said.

If I had thought he were in any danger, Hardy explained carefully to himself, I definitely would tell Moura.

Hardy could see the boy fleeing the jet-rotor and hurrying away, daring himself as he went; he saw him sniffing and blinking — making camp, peering out of his helmet, collecting data. He was a strange boy, practically unknowable, a sort of human O-Zone; but with his sixteenth birthday coming up, not really a boy any longer. He may have dropped to the ground for any number of motives. The aspects of his character that made him indispensable also made him unfathomable. He was highly intelligent, he was selfish, he was scientific, he was unpredictable, he was a brat, he was immature, he was perhaps even crazy: he had reasons.

And Hardy felt he had stronger proof that the boy would return. He cynically believed that Fizzy would be back, not because he needed him but because he didn't like the boy. Of course he'd be back — squawk-squawk; and that horrible yawn, and that honking laugh. And Hardy did need him— very badly.

Weathermaker — the message had appeared on the monitor of Hardy's office computer in the middle of his phone call with Hooper — be on the roof prepared to fly at 1430 hours. It was signed simply Control.

He was being summoned to attend a rotor conference. It had been just such a confidential meeting that had given him the idea for his briefings with Hooper, in his own gyrating rotor: their first discussion about Fizzy's disappearance. Hooper had hated this way of conferring. The tight holding pattern and the turbulence upset his stomach, he complained. It was a noisy and distracting way of having a meeting. Hardy said that the beauty of it was that no one at all could monitor them, and the Fizzy problem had to be kept secret.

Looking down into the Hudson River, Hooper had groaned, "I get the feeling that at any moment I'm going to give the wrong answer and be ejected sideways out of the hatch."

"It's not like you to worry about things like that."

Then Hooper had said with real feeling, "I've got a lot to live for, brother."

Now it was Hardy's turn; but he was not discouraged— indeed, he was glad for a chance to discuss his project in confidence. He had not been able to say anything to Hooper, and that was maddening. He was proud of his idea, and he imagined the results being celebrated: Hardy Allbright, weathermaker, reclaiming this portion of America for Asfalt! And not only opening it to settlement and industry but giving it a new weather pattern — giving it more clouds and rain— and creating a garden where there had been luminous radioactivity, and city-stains, and the footprints of roads and broken houses, and caverns glowing with contamination. He would be bringing O-Zone to life.

Not long ago, in a kind of despair, the Feds had spoken of making O-Zone a dumping ground for unclassified pass-abusers, crazies, and petty criminals!

Hardy appeared on the roof early, impatient to talk. Just at two-thirty the rotor settled — it was a four-seater, one window, no markings; and Hardy saw that it was pilotless— command-controlled — someone was working it from below. The rotor blades stuttered but did not stop. Hardy fought the buffeting draft and climbed in.

There was only one person inside. He was strapped to a seat, he wore gloves and a mask (coated faceplate, monkey-mouthed breathing apparatus) and a green Asfalt suit with white piping. What flesh Hardy could see was sallow — perhaps elderly — and Hardy was annoyed that in his small breathing mask and headphones he himself was so easily identifiable.

"I don't know you," Hardy said.

"Good. I don't know you either."

They were now off the roof, the city beneath them — the spires and turrets, the guarded parapets of garrisons and heliports, the black streets, the castellated heights and smoky distances. It was a warm hazy afternoon.

"We are waiting for your numbers," Control shouted.

Yes, there was definitely a little old man inside all that equipment: the voice became breathy when he tried to shout.

"I'm waiting for data," Hardy said, and thought: I am waiting for Fizzy.

"It's been almost three months!"

"I understood there was no time limit in this scheme," Hardy said. "And the budget has been approved for the project. I've got funding."

"We are a commercial enterprise," Control said.

Nothing was more insulting than being forced to listen in silence to the obvious, Hardy thought. There was something so aggressive about a deliberate show of stupidity.

"We have to make long-term plans—"

Hardy wanted to pinch the old man's breathing tube.

"We need to know whether your site is definite and viable."

Hardy began to screech: "It could be the largest thermal—"

But the man's plodding voice had not stopped: "And we need to know how many barrels to commit to this project."

So that was it. They had a glut of oil, they couldn't store it and didn't want to dump it. They needed an early answer.

Hardy had given them a probable figure — an enormous one — and now he could not confirm it.

"This is a weather project," Hardy said. "It's not just an oil-burner."

"We are in the oil business—"

Again, that tone: the obvious — to insult him.

"— and we wonder whether you're taking this seriously enough."

There was another implication here. Hardy, because he was wealthy — the famous Allbright fortune — was sometimes thought to be a dilettante, passing the time at Asfalt and attaching himself to prestigious schemes. He knew what they said about him — he was an Allbright, didn't need a job, playing at being a scientist, and he was also a very large stockholder in Asfalt. But that stock didn't give him a right to waste company time. The family money was always held against him; he was suspected of being unserious. And it was felt, he knew, that he was prepared to take absurd chances— a rich man's risks.

That was why they had sent this faceless man to interrogate him. Hardy was on the verge of losing his temper. But it was no use. If you lost your temper in a rotor, the aircraft simply went on spinning noisily until your anger was wrung out of you,

Hardy said, "I'm dealing with a Prohibited Area, I need time. Don't worry — it'll pay off,"

"We need a backup or you'll lose your funding."

They must really be stuck with an ocean of oil, Hardy thought. They weren't interested in the weathermaking prospects; they just wanted a project, any project, that would allow them to dump the oil — and the best way was to turn it into hot-top asphalt for a thermal mountain.

"Your Project O-Zone might fail."

It seemed so odd to hear the man saying these forbidden words, but of course no one could overhear him in a chattering pilot less rotor high over New York.

"If Project O-Zone isn't viable, we'll need another project just as big."

Hardy hated this man — hiding behind rotor noise and a coated mask and his company code name: "Control." He was a budget man, an oil-dumper. Finding wind, pouring a mountain, building clouds and steering them, making rain, reclaiming land, filling reservoirs, growing food — none of this mattered to him. He thought only in terms of disposing of as many barrels of oil as possible.

"I'll be thinking of one," Hardy said coldly.

"Think fast — we're making our descent."

The man adjusted his mask and Hardy saw that his face was without any expression at all, and that seemed to him a merciless form of gloating.

He could not help thinking of Fizzy — what the boy would say to this man. "Porker!" he'd cry. "Dong-face! Dimbo! Fuck-wit!"

"I'd go with China or India," Hardy said, loathing the silly hiding mask.

"Too much bureaucracy. We have to be in charge, for the maximum benefit. That's why we liked O-Zone. It would have been all ours."

"You keep saying 'we,'" Hardy said. "Is there someone in that suit with you?"

"A backup, Weathermaker," the man said. "A big one, and no strings."

"Africa," Hardy said, because he wanted the man to ask why.

Because my wife needs a vacation, he would reply: she cries easily these days. Because our friend Willis Murdick has been trying to organize a party there. Because I need time for my son to make his way out of the wilderness of O-Zone, and for the boy to find me.

But the man didn't ask.

"Okay, Africa. But go soon, and cover yourself. We have competitors, you know."

"Fine," Hardy said. "My wife needs a vacation."

Moura thought: I have nothing else to do but this, and yet I can't do it. She was still looking for the man, Fizzy's father. The problem was in the nature of the search itself. Men would not help a woman look for another man. They just stood in the way and obstructed her and said, "Why look further — what's wrong with me?"

It proved to her that men who foolishly believed that women were all the same, also believed that men were all the same. Hardy would have known what to do, but he was the only person she could not go to. He would be blunt: Do you want to find this man for Fizzy's sake, or your own?

"I want to prove that I'm not alone," would have been her answer.

Then Hardy would probably shout, "That's just sentimental!"

If you know someone well, she thought, you don't hold conversations — you each have your own monologues. She seldom had intimate talks with Hardy — she did not need to. She always knew what his side of the conversation would be.

But searching for the man in a luckless way made her feel weak and silly and exposed. She had now known the donor's name for a month, and his ID number, and his most recent address. She had gone back to the clinic with Holly, who still used it — still called it a clinic, still used the jargon. She was making progress in broad areas, she said, expanding the range of her responses, and developing new and subtle patterns of sensitivity.

It was sex. It was probably nonstop. It was probably movies, too. They were urging Holly to fantasize, giving her an appetite for something bizarre, and charging her more. The roasted look on Holly's face said it all: it was rosier and greedier in an eager way — now she knew everything. Her face was flesh; there was no thought on it, but there was a sleepy look of pleasure — her eyes were restless. She usually looked very hot. She is cooking in sex, Moura thought. She is going to catch fire.

Holly said that she had not realized how much she had been missing.

"Now I know why men are so demanding," she said. "I never knew that I could have whatever I wanted."

She was happy now; she never listened anymore. She said she felt braver and bolder; and she made Moura promise to go to Africa with her.

Moura said yes, because Moura was her only friend; and Holly was the best reminder possible of what Moura had been. Once, sixteen years ago, Moura had gone to the clinic with that same ardor.

Dr. Sanford had demanded a high price for the information about the donor, and he had insisted on a number of conditions. The most severe condition was that Moura could do no more than establish the man's whereabouts — what he had become, his position and designation. She was not allowed to tell him who she was, nor even speak to him; and resuming contact was out of the question.

She promised, because she would have promised anything; and she paid, because she would have paid any price.

"You keep in touch with these men," she said.

"Donors," Sanford said. "They're not all men. We update their files regularly for ten years."

Moura hated the way doctors combined coyness and pedantry: the doctor always taking charge, either saying nothing or putting you down. And this doctor was also a pimp.

He said, "There is a one-in-a-million chance that the donor will die of an undetected disease that had been incubating for many years — hiding in the central nervous system, let's say. Or the donor might go mad. In such cases we would warn the recipient."

Moura was not thinking of Sanford's warning about disease or madness. She was pondering the word "recipient."

"After ten years we put the file in limbo," Sanford said, and it was then that he had torn the printout on its perforations and given her the strip showing the name and number.

Again she said, "Don't worry. I promise to follow the rules."

"It is not necessary for you to promise," he said.

But he was not being kind. He reminded Moura of what she had seen in his monitoring room, and that he had in his archives over forty hours of raw tape in which she was shown — as he put it — trying to conceive. He spoke of the excellent quality of the tape, the detailed close-ups, the color and sound quality. She realized that in this boasting way he was threatening blackmail.

He said, "I am very sure you'll do the right thing. You won't misuse this information."

"Boyd," she said, reading the name from the printed strip.

"We always called him 'Boy,'" Sanford said.

Moura had never seen his face, but "Boy" was a name she could easily connect to his slim body. Sanford dismissed her, saying that names were notoriously unreliable but that numbers never changed. She had Boy's fourteen-digit number, and although he was not in the phone book or any of the current reference guides, she found him in an out-of-date ID directory, listed with his parents, who were Owners. Their address was a tower in Upper East, twenty-eight blocks north of Coldharbor.

That was the first day it struck her that Fizzy was perfect for this world. With that ID number and the various scraps of information he would have sat in his room scanning lists for more details of this man. He would have hacked into the data banks and compiled a complete dossier; he would have found what he wanted.

But that was the last resort — sending Fizzy to find his father. Yet, when all she could do was pick up the telephone and try to call the place, she resented Fizzy's skill. She was glad he was not around: just the sight of him would have aggravated her resentment.

There was no answer. She took a taxi to the address — a granite apartment house called Cliffden, one of the older buildings still standing in an area that had been recently redeveloped. The tower was on its own, not in a garrison. The windows on the lower floors were barred and the front door was caged — but beautifully, in silvered steel. It was not heavily guarded — nothing around here was — but Moura was aware of police patrols as soon as the taxi drove off: a checkpoint, a barrier, a roadblock-her ID was examined three times before she found the building, and one of the security men had asked her, "Purpose of journey?"

"I'm seeing an old friend."

She was always startled by her truthful replies to other people's questions.

The doorman at Cliffden was middle-aged and had the torpid and humorless smite of a Pilgrim — so many guards were Rocketmen: you couldn't rattle them. Moura tried to hide her nervousness. Each stage of her search made her think that she had gone too far, that she was pressing her luck.

In a pressuring way, the doorman said, "Maybe there's something I can do for you," and let his sentence hang. He saw her as any woman looking for any man.

He smiled at her shyness; her timidity made him friendly. Yes, he remembered the family, the Boyds. Yup, and the son — big strapping fellow. Nice people, but they'd had setbacks. Moved out of the city. They were in Long Island— Jamaica. He had the forwarding address.

"Must be the Estate," he said. "The rest of it is real jungle."

Moura set out the following day in a taxi. At first the driver had refused to take her, and then he began asking insinuating questions—"for the checkpoints," he said, "for the bridge" — but before they reached the bridge Moura lost her nerve and demanded to be taken home.

"Why won't men ever help you look for another man?" she asked Holly that night.

But Holly liked men these days — the clinic, she said, had made her rational. She only wanted to talk about the trip to Africa, and she reminded Moura that she had agreed to go.

At last she said, "Fizzy would help you."

"But he's not a man," Moura said. "He's nothing, really. And anyway he's not here."

Hardy had kept asking her what was wrong.

She cried because she could not tell him. He might have thought she had a lover who was making her miserable. If so, he would have been right, in a way. A sense of defeat intensified her feelings of loss, and she could not distinguish between despair and passion.

She tried again, driving toward the Jamaica Estate in her own car. It was a mistake, a terrible trip, she was frightened the whole time. She kept thinking: I should have flown, I should have taken Holly, I should never have risked this. The delays at the checkpoints were bad, but then she'd had to leave the sealed boulevard, Jamaicaway, and was subjected to a recorded warning at the barrier. It was not the Estate after all, and not even a garrison. Was it possible he lived in a house? It was still patchy all over Queens — garrisons surrounded by isolated ghettos — Asiatic, Spanish, and black, legals and aliens mingled. The high walls of Jamaicaway hid this dangerous mess, and the bridges protected New York itself — only legal and registered workers in these outlying places had entry passes to the city.

Her fear of the neighborhood was increased when a group of leather-clad boys thumped the doors and kissed the windows of her car as she slowed down. The smears of their lips stayed on the glass. Then she saw someone being screamed at — another gang of leather boys howling at a cornered Asian, probably Korean. Screaming had become a popular method of assault out here; she had never seen it in New York. Some of the gangs claimed they could paralyze their victims with screams — so she had heard.

She found the address, but though it was a listed building and had a number in the directory, Moura was too frightened to get out of her car. Owners' license plates meant very little out here, it seemed. The building was squat and gaunt and gray. She remained parked in front, and waited, trying to call the building on her car phone. Then a man emerged from the front door. He was armed and wore a mask and phones, but whether he was a criminal or a security guard she could not tell. She was glad the car was reinforced — Fizzy had designed it, though he had seldom ridden in it. He had always said: What if we're hijacked?

The man motioned for her to open her window. She refused and instead set her phones on scan and spoke to him with her helmet on.

When Moura told him who she was looking for, the man offered himself. What was wrong with these men? She had ceased to be angry and insulted by this, but was still frightened, still impelled to keep her hand on the panic button beside her seat.

"He's in his mid-thirties," she said, trying to be businesslike. "I have an urgent message for him."

"Too bad it's urgent, because it's going to take time to find him."

He was smiling, seeing the eagerness she could not conceal; and he was pleased, because his bad news gave him power over her.

"He's gone. He's been picked up. This was a year or so ago."

"Picked up by whom — police? Federals?"

"Could have been any of them. They might have been private. I wouldn't like to say."

She said, "Was he registered when he was picked up?"

Still smiling at her weak questions — an Owner here, asking him these thingsl — the man said, "Only the Feds know that, but they won't tell you."

She saw that he was reaching down to try the door handle.

"Stick around — we can talk about it," he said.

"Keep away from my car or I'll call the police." The car was securely locked, but even so her hand was on the button that would summon a strike-force rotor from New York.

"I'm a policeman!" The man laughed, and threw open his jacket, showing her his badge.

His laughter was still crackling in her headphones as she shot down the street and, two checkpoints later, she was back on the Jamaicaway. She drove on frightened and bewildered, wondering how an intelligent young man, the son of two Owners, with an excellent pedigree, could have been picked up — and what for?

But she thought: Fizzy will know how to find him. He would be able to break into a data bank and find the name, if he were still registered. He would find the right file. And if "picked up" meant arrested, or if he had become an outlaw, or was wanted, or had lost his pass for some reason, Fizzy would still be able to trace him. Fizzy had once said in his humorless and truthful way that he could open any line anywhere and find anyone. No one could keep a secret from him, he said.

Let him find Boy, she thought. She would not tell him that the man was his father, but if he found out, so what?

Moura always felt stronger when she was away from Hardy. Her conception of marriage was that it always weakened one of the partners and strengthened the other. Hardy was secretive and slow, yet he dominated her. She believed he drew his strength from her.

Tonight he said, "You're looking a little better." She had felt fine until he made that undermining remark. But if she protested now, he would say she was being hysterical, and she would probably become hysterical because of his saying that, and he would weaken her in that way.

"I need Fizzy's number," she said, vowing not to be sidetracked. "I've got to talk to him."

That silenced Hardy, for a reason she could not understand. He seemed to be thinking hard. But she trusted him to tell her the truth. He was too literal-minded ever to lie convincingly.

"I don't have his number," Hardy said.

"You told me he was in O-Zone with Hooper."

"Yes, that's what I said — a month ago, when you asked." Hardy, she saw, had been studying a map illuminated on a videoscreen — a very empty map, she thought: perhaps O-Zone.

Turning back to the map, Hardy said, "He's still there, in O-Zone, but he's off the air. However, Hooper's back."

Moura said, "It's Fizzy I need."

"So do I!" Hardy said. "But he'll be in touch."

"He can't be totally unobtainable," Moura said. "You can get him on a satellite relay."

"No, he's using a helmet phone. He's out of range. But if Fizzy wants to be found, he'll be found."

After Hardy said this he realized that it was indisputable: they could not find him; the boy had to find them — and it would be easy for him, when he chose to look.

"Is he all right?"

"Yes," Hardy said, and hearing himself say it convinced him that he believed it. "I know he is."

Moura remained silent. She was trying to imagine Fizzy's face, but the face remained behind one of Fizzy's very complicated masks, one with swollen eyes. In a mask like that he had tramped back and forth in his room saying, "This is Mission Westwind, the commander speaking—"

Hardy said, "Isn't it odd, both of us stuck here, needing Fizzy's help? Fizzy, of all people!"

"Fizzy's my son," Moura said. "I have to talk to him."

"You can't — not just now," Hardy said, and was glad to have a truthful excuse for the delay — time for the boy to show himself. "Have you forgotten? We're going to Africa" — he was gesturing to the map on the screen: so that's what it was. He said, "It was your idea!"

28

"Fizzy used to call this stretch the most dangerous part of any trip," Hooper said, turning to Bligh.

They were one click out of New York, Hooper driving his own car, and Hardy and Moura in the back seat. They had just left the tunnel checkpoint and were in the brightly lit expressway trough, on the way to the security checkpoint in the barrier that surrounded the airport, forty clicks into Long Island.

But this was more than a rackety speedway — it was like a continuation of the tunnel: high walls along the side, and a canopy of wire mesh overhead. Bligh leaned back to look at it through the sunroof.

"'Enemy territory,' he used to say," Hooper was speeding, not because he thought it was dangerous, but because he hated the look of it — another shabby fortification.

Moura thought: I was here alone, four days ago. But she felt it was no achievement: she had been very frightened, and she hadn't found what she wanted. Fizzy was right!

"Full of aliens," Hardy said. "I don't see the point of going to the airport by car, frankly. If we'd gone with Murdick in his bug we'd be there by now,"

"Bligh's never seen the outskirts," Hooper said, and in his doting, overattentive way he repeated that she was new to New York and was seeing this for the first time. He seemed to be taking pride in offering her this experience.

He was in love — Hardy knew that; and even Moura had said, "I didn't think people like that existed anymore. It's probably her age — she can't be more than sixteen." Yet Bligh was not girlish at all: she was straightforward and strong and very curious about things. For the tenth time, she was saying, "What's that?" And she had an odd effect on Hooper. He seemed different — innocent and kind, unembarrassed and submissive, anxious to please. Hooper Allbright! It was love, certainly — they could see that — but there was more to it: he was that fussing fidgety creature, simpering and stern, the fatherly lover.

A gap in the expressway wall had been mended with a hundred meters of steel mesh. A ruined building flashed past, a black chimney, a stack of flattened cars, and the sight of several orange fires. In the greasy smoke, twenty or more people stood with their arms high and their fingers hooked on the wire and their faces against the mesh. They were motionless, and yet the swirling smoke seemed to give them a sideways movement. Then the expressway wall resumed. It had been like a glimpse through a window to a terrifying interior.

"That was nothing," Hooper said, because it had frightened him and everyone else badly. His smile was not a smile, but rather an expression of the same fear.

At another break in the wall beside the road there was a much larger group, high up on the mesh — hanging and sprawled like smashed insects. Some of them looked both desperate and threatening, as if they were trying to break through, and yet they too were motionless, watching the stream of cars, holding on. Behind them, under a blue and bulky chemical cloud, was a brick township, and it too was smoldering and scribbled on with angry patches of paint. There was writing everywhere, and all of it looked fearsome, all of it like warnings, and fires, and more smoke, and glinting faces in ragged hats and masks, and trash packed against the mesh of the fence.

"Is that Africa?" Bligh asked.

She was alarmed by the laughter — it was sudden and very sharp and full of wordless worry.

"Owners, Owners, Owners!" the porter cried, preceding them with a handcart of their luggage.

The Murdicks were waiting at the departure checkpoint— Holly in goggles and a semitransparent one-piece, Willis in a flying suit and helmet. He was cross, he said: they had made him hand over his weapons and he wouldn't see them until he arrived. "Some stupid new rule," he said. And Willis was the first to say, "If only Fizzy were here—"

The boy was missed at the luggage check: he would have known which bags to bring aboard and which to send to the cargo hold. He was missed on board when the captain made his rounds: Fizzy would have known which questions to ask regarding flight times and traffic and wind speeds. He was missed in the compartment: there was a built-in computer but no one in the party was sure which flight data should be fed into it.

"If Fizzy had come we could have leased a bird and gone in on our own," Murdick said. "I've always wanted to go transatlantic in my own big bird. Fizzy'd be navigator. He'd drive the computer."

They were seated in a private compartment that they had approached through tunnels and gangways and down the narrow corridors of the plane.

Bligh said, "Are we on the plane yet?"

The others laughed, but it was appreciative laughter this time, not the hysteria of the expressway.

"Bligh's used to smaller units," Hooper said. He loved her wonderment and her capacity for surprise. And she was wise enough in her innocence not to be a danger to him.

"Not only are we on board, but we're about to take off," Hardy said.

"I love your hair, sweetie," Holly said, and leaned forward, tightening her suit against her body. She was damp and very white, like meat wrapped in cellophane. "I want to know how you get it that way."

You live fifteen years in O-Zone, Hooper thought, seeing Bligh smile at Holly. Her hair was chopped short and sun-streaked, and her eyes were pale gray in her tanned face. She was young and rangy, she had small breasts and stubby fingers and smooth fleshy lips. She wore one of Hooper's suits— she said she preferred it to buying a new one, and it was attractively loose on her. Today she was looking even lovelier, Hooper thought — her face softened by the weeks in New York, the food and good living.

"Over a thousand people in the belly section alone," Murdick said, praising the plane. "And there's three more levels. It can be pretty crappy in those central areas," he said. He was smiling, because he was relieved that he did not have to endure it. "All those slobs. But you'll be real comfortable in here. We've got all the facilities,"

After takeoff, a steward pushed a hot table in and served the dinner. There was an argument over whether the meat was real or woven, whether the potatoes were powdered or just-peeled, was it spinach or processed seaweed, and what flavor were those fiber chips supposed to have?

"It smells right, but it don't chew right," Holly said.

"It tastes right if you cook it right," Murdick said.

"Fizzy would know," Moura said. "He's always so funny about his food. Jelly sandwiches and Guppy-Cola."

She had begun to miss him, and missing him, had begun to pity both him and herself. Now that he was gone she felt she knew him better; he did not seem so much a stranger. She chewed the food without tasting it, in a quiet and forlorn way.

"I feel lost without the little monster!" Hardy said, reading his wife's expression.

Hooper held his breath and waited for more, and dreaded it, because his explanation was so thin. But nothing more was said. There were nods and glances that said, yes, they too felt lost without the little monster. But no one said: Where is the beast?

They were all subdued in the plane. It was late and dark. But also none of them now wore a mask. They had become used to traveling in masks, and wearing helmets, and they were shy without them.

They finished eating to the low roar of the slipstream against the windows of the enormous plane. Bligh flicked a screen up and saw it was black outside. Hardy said, "We're at twenty clicks. That mean anything to you?" Then they wheeled the table with the remains of their meal into the corridor and extended their chairs into recliners. Hooper yawned and said, "We've only got about three hours more."

Bligh was the first to wake. She put her eye against the window screen and through the crack saw the sweep of the bay and the irregular crusty reef. Then she worked the shade up, and the rest of them woke, dazzled by Africa. The sun burned in a cloudless sky, and beneath was water — green and blue — and a mottled seabed of sand and coral was visible. The plane banked and turned: now they crossed a gleaming green strip of savanna. They flew on and got glimpses of a light brown desert crisscrossed with the dry veins of stony riverbeds, and tumbling hills and great dark cracks in the ground; and turned again over pale patches of dying trees, and blue boulders, and wide orange cones of earth — mountains shaped like anthills; and were flying low over the blue-green sea again.

"The coast," Hooper said. "That's where we're staying."

"I'm going hunting up north," Murdick said. "There's an awful lot of action there. Real wicked trouble" — but he was smiling. "You can shoot poachers on sight." He became solemn and certain. "No questions asked."

After the landing, the loud brake-blasts, and the tow to the terminal, they transferred to a waiting bug, an eight-seater that Murdick had chartered and was piloting.

The copilot was African — the first one they had seen. In his lapel was a gold rocket-pin.

"He's a Pilgrim," Holly said. "Imagine!"

"They're all Pilgrims," Hardy said. "It figures. There's nothing for them here."

Murdick said, "You got a name, fella?"

"Navigator Jimroy," the African said.

Holly put her mask on and faced the African. She said, pointing, and speaking in a little girl's voice, "Mr. Jimroy, are you going up in a big rocket to a space station or a lunar base?"

The African said nothing. He had a gentle apologetic smile — it was the enameled smile of the Pilgrim — and he kept his eyes on the ground-screen.

"With Fizzy along we could have done without this fucking Astronaut," Murdick said. "Anyway, where is he?"

But the question was lost in the noise of the rotor whirling them to the ground.

They had seen from the air that the green ribbon of coast was thick with hotels. Theirs was Earthworks Lodge, at the edge of the sea and under the rattling coconut palms. It was arranged in a number of connecting villages — a dozen or more. Each village was a cluster of thatched-roof huts. They only seemed primitive from the outside: they were air-conditioned and had four rooms apiece and were set in gardens among fountains and flowers. The grass was a moist carpet of green and the entire lawn was continually watered by a system of sprinklers that cast forth a glassy mist, like a hologram that contained a number of dim rainbows. In the sky, big slow birds circled without moving their wings.

The other guests hardly seemed to notice the visitors from New York. Most of the guests were naked, and many of these were painted. They slept under the trees; they lay on lounge chairs, wearing video masks; they walked slowly through the heat, the sun gleaming on their oiled nakedness.

"You're in here," Hooper said to Bligh, inside their hut, and he showed her to her bedroom.

He could not make out her expression. Did she want more than this? Was she disappointed, or was she relieved by the way they always slept separately?

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll keep an eye on you."

It always stopped him, the thought that she was an alien. He was afraid, but his fear excited him, too. It made him hover intensely near her. It kept him from touching her; it made her fascinating to him. For now, he was content to watch. But his was not a glance now and then: it was a burning scrutiny. He wanted to know everything about her— to see everything — which was why, even here, he had requested a one-way mirror on the wall that divided his room from hers.

All the rest of that day they rested. The sun was terrific, beating through the branches, spangling the sea, and covering the land in a powerful silencing light. Holly went naked; Moura was bare-breasted but wore a sarong; Bligh wrapped herself in a loose gown which gave glimpses of her naked body when she walked and which Hooper found more thrilling than the waxen nudity that Holly flaunted. The men wore sarongs — Murdick had fastened his with an ammunition belt on which he hung a pistol.

All the guests were burned dark brown by the sun. These naked wandering people sauntered in the shade, many wearing pistols, and nearly all wore floppy hats and sandals. Some of them were painted with fantastic designs — flames and feathers and loops — like garish snakes coiled around their arms and legs. Their faces were painted with masks — their hungry bloodshot eyes peering through the greasy designs. Leaves were painted on them, and shattered circles, and fragments of the alphabet, and tiger stripes, and fire. One woman was a zebra, another wore giraffe blotches. Some of them were caked in white, others were totally black.

They wore jeweled belts and nothing else; they wore necklaces of bone and ivory. Some wore plaited hair, some wore plumes, one girl wore a devilish tail, another small girl was tattooed; all of them were naked. Except in the middle of the day, when the sun was unbearable, these people emerged and paraded in the grounds and gardens of the hotel compound, promenaded among the various clusters of huts in the villages, and walked along the white beach. There were guests in canoes and on surfboards and in sailboats. Some of them bravely played gasping games of tennis. But most of them simply prowled, or slumbered in the shade, amid the urgent screeching of birds.

Holly immediately adopted the painted style: she went naked, with red spirals and streaks on her body, and her hair dyed yellow, and a thin mask stretched around her eyes. Willis wore an African mask he had bought at the shop in Earthworks Lodge. It was made of a whole turtle shell, cut beautifully and fringed with feathers; and it was fitted with electronic detectors, a radio, an air-filter snout, and phones.

"I've always wanted one of these," he said in a quavering ducklike voice that came out of his snout. "You can see the workmanship. These aren't available anywhere else,"

Murdick practiced shooting with the other guests. They fired at coconuts that were lobbed over the water — blasting them with their beams. The weapons were silent, but the coconuts split apart and exploded with a loud cracking.

The atmosphere at Earthworks was African, and still wild, in spite of the clusters of other nearby hotels. A heavy odor of salt and seaweed saturated the air, and farther in, near the huts, the smell was of flowers and cut grass and the rankness of damp animals. The sunlight was of shattering intensity. The heat came and went. With all of this was the oddly jubilant sound of birds and insects.

In this isolated and drowsy place there was also activity— waiters carrying food and trays of drinks, gardeners on their knees, men raking the beach or, at sundown, musicians in the twilight playing drums and flutes and twanging harps. All of them were black — perspiring heavily. They were obedient, beaten-looking people. They seldom spoke. They were civilized and solemn in the most old-fashioned way, in thick cloth suits and neckties. They did not seem to notice or to care that the guests were naked, and what Hardy had said about Navigator Jimroy seemed to be true: nearly all of them were Pilgrims — they wore the rocket-pin and read the books and had the short haircut and military manners. They used the lingo.

"Are you a member of the program?" one African asked Murdick.

"No, thank you!" Murdick said.

Bligh was fascinated by the Africans — by their silence and good manners. But more than anything else she was fascinated by the food — vast amounts of it appeared every day on the buffet table on the lawn of their village. Even the New Yorkers, and the other Owners from America, and the various Europeans — Germans mostly — were excited by the food. The sight of so much of it got them shouting and reaching — snatching food from the tables and from each other's plates.

These high spirits caused horseplay and the result was usually a food-fight. The guests' nudity contributed to the riotousness of the event. Tureens of soup were emptied and fruit thrown back and forth, and the naked hollering guests kept it up until the table was bare. There was no check on them — no one stopped them. Afterward, the waiters vied with the marabou storks and the crows for the fragments.

There was a food-fight after lunch on their second day— they always seemed to happen after lunch, when the tables were still piled high and the guests no longer hungry. Hooper steered Bligh away when he realized what was about to happen. But he was a moment too late — before he could get her past the hedge she looked back and saw them flinging food and swiping at each other.

Tears welled in Bligh's eyes and she watched sadly as the buffet table was brought down. It had held a roasted pig and a long filleted fish, vegetables steamed in palm leaves, wooden bowls of salad, pots of stew and spitted chickens and cold platters of peeled fruit.

"Real food," Hooper said angrily, wanting Bligh to know that he too was disgusted. Bligh did not hear him. Hooper had seen food-fights before, but seeing them now with Bligh they seemed much worse — and he was grateful to her for inspiring in him a sense of outrage.

"That's murder," she said. "Those people are worse than animals."

Then it was forgotten. They spent these hot days in idleness, strolling on the beach or else sleeping in a hammock. They slept and ate and lay in the sun.

"Why are so many people wearing weapons?" Bligh asked.

That was the other worrying thing about the food-fight— most of those rowdy people had been well-armed.

"There used to be trouble here," Hooper said. "Everyone had weapons — the local people legalized them for visiting Owners. Then they just became fashionable, like the masks."

"Do they shoot them?"

"They kill poachers," he said.

"What's that?"

"Someone who is very hungry," he said, and surprised himself with the truth of it. He was seeing more and more with her eyes. That was what he meant by liking himself better.

Moura was at the pool with the Murdicks, wondering where Hardy had gone. It was supposed to be a vacation, and yet Hardy was rising early and catching planes, and returning exhausted at nightfall as if he'd done a day's work. And where did Hooper hide with that young girl? The Murdicks stuck with Moura, eating and napping and talking about the other guests. They gave the other guests names: Sweaty Betty, the Moonman, the Teapot, Knockers, and the Monkey. There was another breathless man who sat sloppily in a wicker chair watching Holly with his perspiring face.

"I've got him throbbing again," Holly said.

She called him the Haystack, because of his hair.

Moura was occupied by her own thoughts. She lay on a rock by the pool, like a lizard, her eyes half-closed. Occasionally she slid into the water with a narrow splash, to cool herself.

"Apparently Fidge is still in O-Zone," she said just before she dropped into the pool one afternoon.

When she surfaced, Murdick was gaping at her.

Murdick was equipment-conscious, even here. He wore a wide-brimmed safari hat, and a khaki flying jacket, and goggles and a wrist radio. His concession to Earthworks was his sarong, but he had a short-barreled rifle on his lap. Beside him, Holly was naked — she wore nothing but paint. Her breasts and nipples were outlined like popping eyes, and a nose was painted on her belly, and her groin rouged and marked and made into a mouth: her torso turned into a large leering face.

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you kidding?" Murdick said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were sunbirds, weavers, fisheagles, falcons, and owls; there were vultures and hawks. They flocked to Earthworks, staying near the coast, where food was still available.

For a while longer they flew over an area so bare that it hardly looked like land at all, but rather like the remains of a place that had blown away. And then ahead was the city. It lay beneath a range of hills that rose to a set of knucklelike peaks. The capital had a look of prosperity — white buildings, granite towers, brick chimneys and walls, the city piled up in the dust. But that look was misleading, for closer it was like any of the places they had seen in O-Zone, and for a moment Bligh seemed to think she was back in her quarter. This was a city of broken windows and ruined streets and overturned cars and burned-out parks.

There were Africans on the roads below, many more people than there were vehicles. The Africans possessed the city: they were everywhere, crowding the buildings, filling the roads; but they hardly moved. They were standing and sitting and lying down. They had built their own shelters on the sidewalks, and against fences and trees.

Hooper did not dare land the rotor, but he went close enough for Bligh to see how the city had been turned into an enormous camp, with shacks and cooking fires lining the main road, and shantytowns stacked against the old abandoned towers — the banks and office buildings and ruined hotels.

"That could have happened in the States," Hooper said. "But they got smart and sealed the cities."

Bligh said, "I never lived in a city," and looked down at the mobs in the streets.

"They'd eat you alive," he said.

He went lower and lingered over the upturned faces, the reaching arms, the whirling woodsmoke. The rotor's noise drowned the voices.

"Where are we going?"

From her tone he knew he had succeeded in frightening her. He wanted to say: This is the world, too. But he also wanted her to know that she was safe with him. He wanted her to love him for taking her here, and for being able to fly this machine, and for getting her out of here. He swooped between two narrow buildings and scattered the people on the street, and then he rose in a cyclone of dust that he had created, lifting the rotor free of the city.

She said, "I want to learn how to do that."

It surprised him. He had not counted on her wanting to fly a rotor herself. He almost said: But you're an alien!

He said, "I'll show you how, someday."

Talking about the future made him feel hopeful. He wanted to prolong this pleasure. He began to make more promises, but he saw that his eagerness was silencing her, and so he stopped.

They were over the plains again, flying above the blowing dust. "Imagine lions and elephants and rhinos," he said, looking down. But he could not picture it; he could not imagine animals living in the dust of this empty plain.

They passed over the dry riverbeds and the red crumbling hills. Nearer the coast, Hooper showed her the system of perimeters and roadblocks that prevented anyone from entering the coastal strip; and the way the airport was fortified, and the harbor blocked. They flew on, over the shoreline of settlements and hotels, and beyond the reef, where there were patrol boats.

If Bligh was impressed she did not say so. Hooper was not sure whether she was afraid. He had expected her to feel both thrilled and insecure — it was the reaction of most people to Africa, living like islanders on the small patches of luxury that were reserved for visitors. She had been alarmed by the sight of all those Africans living wild in the capital— the sight of them had startled her.

But none of this bothered her half so much as the other guests at Earthworks — naked, painted, wearing masks; their laughter; their late-night parties, and their cruising in the compound; looking for pickups; the food-fights. Their weapons worried her. And the way they fired them — shooting at the coconuts that were flung out over the surface of the sea. Africa did not frighten her, nor did the Africans, who seemed merely pathetic or docile workers — and it seemed everyone called them aliens. Yet the Earthworks Lodge and its guests made her silent and watchful.

She kept her wits about her. She saw and heard things that he missed. She was stronger than any of the others. She did not swim or sun herself — she couldn't swim; she waded by the shore; she regarded sunbathing as absurd and unhealthy. She ate — slowly, gratefully — listening the whole time.

It had been dark when they arrived back at Earthworks, and they had seen Murdick's rotor being washed by an African.

"Too dark to look for shells," Hooper said.

Bhigh had collected a bag of them. He had bought her a gold bracelet, a mask, a bowl of polished onyx, the swordlike horns of a now-extinct buck, a set of sharks' teeth — African treasures. She had not said so, but Hooper knew she preferred the shells she found on the beach.

They sat on the veranda of their hut that evening, listening to the splash of the sea, the waves breaking softly on the sand with a gasping sound.

He said, "Are you happy?"

"I never ask myself that," she said. "But I am!"

The path was lighted with the torches that were stuck into the grass beside it. He had turned off the veranda lights; he wanted to be with her in the darkness.

After a while she said, "What's the sound — that little buzz? I always hear it at night."

It was the camera. He used an infrared one here. He had believed it was inaudible — anyway, it was supposed to be. But she was so alert, so sensitive to movement and sound.

He said, "Must be a bug."

"Sometimes I think you're afraid of me," she said.

He wondered whether it was true.

"Because you keep giving me things," she said, and before he could question that, she added, "But you never touch me."

"Would you like me to?"

"I'd like to please you."

He thought ahead to the video: to seeing her and hearing her say that, and playing it back, to hear her repeat it.

"Tell me what you want," she said. "I'll do anything you want."

He tried to see her face in the darkness. He was glad he was shooting this. He liked her seriousness, her confidence in saying this — her believing that she was able to do anything he asked. He liked the stillness of the shadows on her face, her odd straight hair that was so fine it picked up the firelight from the torches down on the path.

"I want you to go on saying that," he said.

Hooper wondered if their long day together had produced that peculiar intimacy. If so, he looked forward to longer days with her.

He wanted to show her he trusted her, by divulging his most secret thought and saying, I am one of the rarest, luckiest people in the world. I have had everything I have ever wanted.

It was a vain boast that he had always been too superstitious ever to say aloud, yet he was on the verge of blurting it out now — then she would know everything about his wealth, his luck, his vanity. He wanted to record her reaction to it: he was still shooting. What would she say?

"Look at me," he said.

But before he could begin, he saw Hardy, and Moura on the path, making their way between the flickering torches. Hooper could not think straight. In his reverie with Bligh, that intimacy that was a suggestion that they were very similar — not that they belonged to each other or were possessive in that way, but wanted the same things, the same simple happiness — time had faltered. Only when he saw his brother and Moura on the path did he remember that they were in Africa.

Moura was nearly naked, and the way she walked in her nakedness revealed an anxiety that her clothes would have concealed.

Hardy was behind her, but he spoke first — and sharply: "You told me there were no more aliens there!" Hooper thought: Africa?

"It's Fizzy," Moura said. "I'm so worried about him."

Hooper stood up. He wanted to speak, yet he could not summon any deception. The long day and the heat and Bligh saying I'll do anything you want had made Hooper passionate and truthful. It struck him just a moment too late what they were talking about: the kidnapping about which they knew nothing. He forgot the boy easily, and the crime, because it was such a serious matter.

But he was also startled by their abrupt concern. They were talking about Murdick, telling Hooper things he knew. Leaping with aliens! Hardy said angrily. And Moura was crying — but when had she ever cared so deeply about her son? They had come striding out of the darkness and the bat-screeches demanding the truth as Hooper stood up and tried to begin.

"They won't hurt him," Bligh said, and sat up straight. "They'll keep him safe."

Then Hooper remembered everything.

Hardy and Moura were silenced. They seemed bewildered by Bligh as by a bright light that had just clicked on — by her sudden intelligence and what seemed like inspiration in this unexpected protest of assurance.

But it was a puzzled silence and full of piercing questions: How do you know that? Who are you? Where are you from? How old are you? Who the hell—

To distract them, Hooper said, "Yeah, it's full of aliens— illegals. We were getting data on them."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Hardy said. It was much more than a question — it was an accusation and a protest. He felt like a fool with his O-Zpne project now, imagining that the zone was empty, imagining that he could reactivate it. It was full of aliens — even this little girl knew that!

"They stole him," Hooper said, talking fast. "They wanted him — probably wanted some technology or food. They were stalking us. I blinked my eyes and they took him away."

Hooper kept talking. He was relieved to be telling them the truth. He smiled and he realized how he hated these needless secrets. And as he talked he had a proud giddy fear, a kind of vertigo from the heights of his determined honesty, that he would go on chattering and say too much — that he would be so possessed by the truth that he would tell them everything. But they saved him from that by shouting at him and rushing away.

29

They left Africa for New York so abruptly they had to carry their argument onto the plane. Hardy was still thrashing. Hooper listened and tried to calm his brother— but how? Murdick winced, marveling at the fury he had produced in Hardy by telling him there were aliens in O-Zone. Murdick was proud of possessing the news — it was like knowing there was life in outer space. There was no letup in Hardy's anger and he filled the compartment with the repetitious abuse of his questions. When! Why! Where!

"Take him out of here!" Holly finally said, snatching the door open. "Delete him!"

But Hardy was still talking as the two men helped him into the gangway.

"Why did you lie to me?" Hardy said. "Why didn't you tell me he'd been kidnapped?"

Hardy then turned on Murdick, saying, "And you swore to me that you'd burned them all down!"

Murdick had not stopped smiling.

"They breed like flies," he said. The drama of the moment made him stupid with self-importance. "Hey, we were lucky we weren't taken hostage. They swap hostages, they enslave them, they sell them. People are snatched in California and end up in Japan. Remember when they found that Jewish kid in Australia? It's a business! Ever since the value went out of money, aliens have been making fortunes from kidnapping. I've seen the studies. Hey, this could cost you plenty."

Hooper said, "I honestly don't think he's been kidnapped."

"Know what I'd like to see?" Murdick said. "I'd like to see some Owners, some troopers, sweep in there and kidnap a few aliens. What do you think, Hoop?"

"We have no proof it's a kidnap," Hooper said.

"'Stolen'—that's what you said!" Hardy had taken hold of Hooper's flying suit, and looked violent.

But Hooper was gentle with his brother, and at least Hardy was not listening to Murdick. How could he tell them that Fizzy had almost certainly been grabbed in revenge for his taking Bligh? If he said that, he would lose her — they'd hand her back. He did not want to be separated from her. It was bad enough standing here in the gangway while Bligh sat in the compartment, frightened into silence by Hardy's outburst.

"I think he might have gone willingly," Hooper said.

"Fizzy wouldn't have done that," Hardy said. "He's afraid of strangers and he's a physical coward. He never left the house alone — and you think he'd walk unprotected into a Prohibited Area!"

"He was armed," Hooper said. He still believed what Bligh had told him, about Fizzy being safe with those people. "He had his suit and helmet. He was wearing boots. He had food and water."

"They would have swiped his irons first thing," Murdick said. "That'll make it tough for anyone who goes after him."

"They kidnapped him and they're holding him," Hardy said. "Why didn't you tell me there were aliens in that fucking cacotopia!"

Hooper said, "Have you gotten a call? Any ransom demand — anything that sounded like contact?"

"No," Hardy said. "That's why I didn't suspect you of lying. It's been a month! Who are these Roaches!"

"I don't want to be gross, but sometimes they eat their prisoners," Murdick said. "I've seen documentation. They shrink them. They stuff them. They sew them up and hammer them into boxes."

"Shut up," Hooper said.

His sudden shout stiffened them, and in silence they reentered the compartment. Holly was wearing a video mask; Moura and Bligh sat side by side, not speaking — but how similar they looked, Hooper thought, like mother and daughter, the alien and the Owner.

The huge multilevel plane flew westward into the unchanging light. The travelers did not eat — you had to be calm to sit and eat. Instead, they paced; they used the phone link to collect the messages from Coldharbor. There was no word of Fizzy — nothing from him or his captors.

Hooper saw that the news was not merely upsetting to them — it was frightening. An unexplained disappearance was much worse than a certain death. They worried about Fizzy, but they also felt insecure themselves now — as if they too might be snatched at any moment.

Near the end of the five-hour flight from Africa, Hooper saw this fearful self-pity on their faces and said, "You used to hate him — all of you. Isn't that right?"

No one replied until Hooper's stare hardened. In his stare the question was repeated, demanding an answer.

"I need him," Hardy said, and thought of his project — how crucial Fizzy was to it. I need him to make it rain in O-Zone.

Hooper challenged his brother with a smile. Then he relented and said, "I'll help look for him. I'm sure he can be found."

"You've had your chance, Hoop," Hardy said, dismissing the offer. It was as if he had been waiting for Hooper to extend a helping hand, so that he could slap it away. Hardy had regained his vindictive spirit now that Hooper was being conciliatory; it was the way their old brotherly games always went. "You didn't find him before — you didn't even tell us he'd been snatched. I don't trust you."

"We'll get up a mission," Hooper said. "We'll plot one of Fizzy's own grid programs and search every square."

He seemed hopeful. His explanation made it sound possible, even somewhat simple, as if they were looking for the boy in a section of New York and not in the wilderness and ruined towns in the thousands of square clicks of O-Zone, which was itself a byword for everything unknown and unfathomable and empty and strange.

O-Zone was associated in the American mind with such strange imagery — nothing was more frightening than the land that was never visited; and saying the word was less like mentioning a part of the United States than a distant island or another planet. And because it was never visited, people believed it to be much bigger than it actually was. They thought about it all the time. It was an area of darkness in most people's consciousness, and Fizzy was lost in it.

"Fizzy's the only person who could write that kind of program," Murdick said.

"Sorry, Hoop," Hardy said — and all his bitterness toward his brother was in the word sorry: it could be the cruelest word, for nothing was more insulting than an insincere apology. "You'd need an Access Pass to get back into O-Zone. I won't get one for you. But you'll make out all right" — and he glanced at Bligh—"you've got your young flesh-pup."

Hooper checked himself in his reply. He had been on the point of shouting at Hardy. But there was always a problem in arguing with his brother. Because they were brothers, Hooper knew that at some stage they would have to settle the quarrel and make up. They knew each other too well to use words casually — anything spoken in the heat of argument was likely to be intended. Angry words sounded just as truthful as calm ones, and they cut much deeper. They were never forgotten. The brothers had always talked too much; and thai was always an error, it always made things worse. Still, fleshpup hurt.

"Fizzy doesn't concern you," Hardy said. It was another cut — as if Hardy was provoking Hooper to hit back, in order to justify himself and put Hooper in the wrong. "Forget it."

Hooper hated that from his brother; and it was more than a rebuff and worse than a rejection — it was a deliberate slap. But even Moura had joined him in it — even she wanted Fizzy back. "He's my son!" she said sadly. Even she was sulking.

"All at once the supermoron's very popular," Murdick said — and kept talking, because he did not understand how insulting his words were. "Still, the kid's got to be rescued."

In New York, they did not say good-bye — it wasn't necessary; it was a bit too polite, it was certainly too late. Anyway, the argument over Fizzy had done that. It seemed to Hooper that arguments were always either a hopeless beckoning or else a terrible kind of farewell.

That left Hooper isolated. At any other time he would have clung to Hardy and swallowed his pride and made an effort to repair the friendship. He believed that a break between his brother and himself explained the hatred in the world: it made the world look wasted and desperate. He did not want to be forced to admit the truth of this — but if a family was divided, what hope was there for any people?

Fizzy was the rallying point: they had to love him in order to love each other.

In the past, Hardy's anger or any friction between the brothers caused Hooper to grieve — and he knew that he had caused Hardy to grieve in the past. But tonight in Coldharbor Hooper did nothing. He thought: Find him if you can. Go buzzing and yomping through O-Zone in your humping rotor—

What they would discover was what Hooper had known for much longer: that Fizzy was not the pathetic squawking su-permoron they had always made him out to be — tripping over himself and afraid to leave his room. No, Fizzy had begun to grow, and he might find his manhood in that thorny place. He had all the skills it took to live there. Perhaps that was what really frightened them — the suspicion that Fizzy was strong. They needed him.

They said they were worried; but O-Zone was fenced in. The boy was not on the loose — he was trapped. He would not be found until he wanted to be found. Hooper had convinced himself that the boy had already overcome his sense of strangeness and had probably conquered his irrational fear of aliens. The odd experience was liberating him — releasing him from his lonely terror. Or am I thinking of myself! he thought. Hooper was isolated, but he was not anxious. For once he was not alone.

"Your brother's so angry," Bligh said. "I shouldn't have said anything. You told me never to—"

"I'm glad you spoke up," Hooper said.

He wasn't glad at all, but he was ashamed of having to hide Bligh on a false ID. And because he was hiding her from his brother she was dearer to him. That phrase flesh-pup still rankled: it was another insult he'd have to endure. Now, cut off from his few friends and his family, he needed Bligh more than ever.

This isolation contained a smothering darkness that generated heat and power — the airless-attic intensity that made things explode into flames. It was the first time that Hooper had felt alone with Bligh. The responsibility for Fizzy had been taken away from him. That offered him a greater isolation. This hot solitary feeling, being alone with Bligh, excited him and made him grateful. It also filled him with desire.

He observed her, and his secrecy made him passionate. It was keyhole adoration: he knelt and watched her with one eye.

It was late in the evening of their return from Africa. The last leg had been a rotor flight to Hooper's car, and then the drive through the layers of night smoke in Long Island to Coldharbor in New York. They were exhausted. Bligh had gone to her suite — to wash, she'd said, but she had lain on her bed and had not moved.

Having lived wild — and also, Hooper suspected, because she could not read or write — Bligh had developed the capacity to be very still for long periods. She was a light sleeper she woke at the slightest sound; she heard everything — but she could spend the entire day motionless, only her eyelids flicking, like a bird on a branch, just sniffing and blinking That was her daytime dozing. At night her sleep was a form of sensuality, and she lay and turned slowly, as if falling from a tremendous height and learning to fly.

Hooper watched her until very late, until his eyes burned Then he too went to sleep. But still he saw her, bright naked, making solemn truthful faces at him — her mirror.

The next day at breakfast — real food for Hooper, a meal tray for Bligh — Hooper said, "I'm going to be very busy for the next week or so."

"Tell me when you want me."

He loved hearing her say that, but he took just as much pleasure in spending the rest of the day watching her on his monitor. She undressed, she folded her clothes, she stretched, she scratched herself as she gazed downtown — and he focused on her fingertips relieving the itch. How thoughtful she looked when she scratched herself. She washed, taking more care than before, using more water. She wiggled her toes, she picked her teeth, she took her buttocks in both hands and warmed them. She tried on the clothes that Hooper had put in the room — nothing exotic; in fact, the opposite. They were the sort of clothes worn long ago by his first girlfriend, when they were both fifteen; but "girlfriend' had not meant much then. White silk panties, and tight shorts, and a frilly halter that left her midriff bare. Bunny, she was called. She was bad-tempered and a tease. She had an insolent way of walking that excited him — like that: Bligh was prowling the room. She found a soft spot and folded herself compactly like a cat, and dozed and blinked.

If I were in that room, or beside her, Hooper thought, as if replying to an accusing voice, I wouldn't be able to see her. I would hardly know her.

He needed this distance to see her clearly, and yet it had all started so simply — with his determination to know, when she had left him and gone into her suite weeks ago, whether she had kept her happy expression. He had wanted to know whether she was still smiling, hadn't he? Or had this monitoring grown out of his earlier habit of watching her on the first tape they'd shot in O-Zone, the morning of those murders?

During the days that followed, he went on watching her twitch and glide like a fish in a glass tank. He wished it could have been literally so — her swimming alone in the pool; but she couldn't swim. Yet her sleeping was a form of swimming: she rolled over and came up for air, and surfaced and sipped; and then she seemed to sink slowly and doze on the bottom. Often, when she was at rest, Hooper shot her face, the clasp of her nostrils gripping air when she breathed, the flutter of her eyelids and the hiding eyes beneath, the way she dampened her lips with her tongue, or slept with her fingers against her cheek. He shortened the focus so that he could see the veins in her neck, and the way the sun struck through her ears.

When she was active — striding to the windows, or hurrying to the bathroom — he remembered how he had first seen her like this, on the original tape, shining on the screen in Fizzy's room after they had unlocked that film cartridge; how, seeing her running in the dry woods of O-Zone, among the thin trees, he had decided to hunt her and capture her and bring her back.

He could not explain his helpless urge to watch her. Calling it voyeurism merely turned it into a decadent passion. And that was inaccurate, because it was not fulfillment but rather the most intense form of waiting. Watching her prolonged his ecstasy, and gave him the element he valued most in sensuality, which was suspense. Photography was foreplay, and it sometimes seemed to him the gentlest sexuality imaginable. It was also, with Bligh, a longing in him for a simpler world — the one she had inhabited: the past. The activity took hold of him and thrilled him. He was discovering another man inside himself, and this creature, a kind of timid twin, surprised him as he emerged: not a beast, but a patient kindly soul, who was bewitched by a little girl. And he thought: I'm the one who is trapped — not she.

There was also something pathetic in this watching and filming — he knew that, too. You filmed the thing you could not have. You had it this way — just the narrow image of her flashing like a fire on the screen: her body always looked so hot to him. Then it all went black, and he was alone. He had other moments of supreme confidence, when he felt they would never be parted, and when he saw them both much older in New York or elsewhere, still in love. He counted it as a measure of his love that no other person entered that imagining: he and Bligh were alone, needing only each other. Their love was not a way of making other friends, or trying out other lives. He had hope.

But just as often he felt panic — the idea that he was filming Bligh so that he would have something of her to hold on to long after she was gone: this image. He knew that if he had had no doubts he would have taken things as they came and allowed himself the rest of his life to love her. But he watched her, he filmed her, he kept his distance, he burned; and he suspected that he was running out of time.

He had once thought that it would all be simple, because she was an alien. Now he knew that nothing would ever be simple, because she was an alien.

His fortune, his future, all his time, and all his hopes were concentrated on his success with this young girl. For her he had risked a jail sentence, and following her he had trespassed in a Prohibited Area. He had left Fizzy behind in the wilderness for her. Taking her away, he had abandoned the boy.

In the morning he worked at his console, doing Allbright business — messages to his employees around the country, directives and memos to the managers. And still he watched her: rising, bathing, dressing, eating, undressing, squatting, roosting, dozing. He knew all her secrets, and at times she seemed fascinated by her own body, the way she sniffed and peered. It seemed as though she had begun to enjoy the complacencies of captivity.

He said, "I want to feed you," and gave her lunch. Her breasts moved when she chewed. In the afternoon they used the whirlpool bath, or the hothouse, or the sleep chamber.

He made films of this; he watched them after she went to her suite to sleep, and then he watched her sleeping.

A rigid schedule was important, because these days they did not go out. It was easy in the tower to lose track of time and turn day into night. Fizzy had lapsed into that lonely pattern of reversal many times before — it was the hazard of living indoors, a sort of sleepwalking, nighthawk life. But Hooper had always been careful, and he was careful now. A week after their return from Africa they were still keeping to regular hours, rising at dawn and dividing the day into four parts.

And still he went on monitoring her. He made copies and often watched them again the same day, and he stored the copies. He was glad she did not ask to go out. His watching had given him lately a powerful sense of possession. He did not want anyone else to see her — not now.

She slept naked, tumbling weightlessly in bed. She woke up quickly, at first light, and always seemed startled by her surroundings. Then she smiled, cursing softly in wonderment at the smoky dawn — and talked to herself, "Get smart, girlie," or something similar. She did stretching exercises very slowly, one limb at a time, and she growled in a way that always reminded Hooper of Fizzy's harsh catlike yawns.

Hooper had his favorite moments of watching her, but the best of the day was when she woke and winced at the light and remembered that she was in this pleasant tower. He hoped she was thinking of him at that moment, as she smiled and seemed to breathe Alive!

Her suite was full of mirrors, so that Hooper missed nothing. But neither did she miss anything of herself. She was obviously not used to mirrors, at least not ones this size. She found herself funny — teased herself and made faces. Sometimes her reflection seemed to arouse her sexually — she was less mature than her reflection — and that fleeting narcissism in her aroused Hooper more than he had ever known.

To start the morning she paced naked to the window and flung the blinds open and stretched some more — and more dance steps, pawing the floor and flexing her shoulders and scratching herself. She drank water thirstily in a neat licking way and then padded to the bathroom and stood in the tub and made a wishbone of her legs — arched her back and pushed and pissed hard into the drain. She washed in the tub after that, a shower, and then brushed her hair and dressed. By the time they met for breakfast she was a subdued and slightly different person from the swimmer who had surfaced on the bed.

That was what kept Hooper watching her this way: he loved the panting energy of the prowling youngster in the room, and he felt he knew her better than the shy and rather quiet and womanish girl who joined him for meals.

"I hardly see you," she said, biting an apple. "I don't know what I'm doing here!"

He felt he was taking a great risk saying. "Go if you want—"

"You're very kind to me," she said in a puzzled way.

His guilt stung him, and he hated his secrets. He wanted to tell her everything. That we are most ourselves when we are alone. That we are at our most natural when we are hidden, and that this is all a rehearsal. That for the pleasure of suspense he had been watching her closely on the monitor. That he loved her.

But just the word "love" frightened her — or else she raised her face at him and tried to repel the word with a laugh.

"I think you're rich," she said.

"Real apples. Real meat. Real vegetables. Potatoes with real dirt on them! Real firewood. Leather boots," he said. All his boasts had become jokes. "My own car!"

Yet she saw he was serious.

She said, "I never see anyone else at the swimming pool."

"I own that swimming pool," he said. "Here you can have anything you want."

"I can't swim," she said.

"I'll teach you," he said.

But another question forming in her eyes remained unasked.

She was still somewhat timid and obedient with him, and after the meal she quietly returned to her suite. She kicked off her slippers and became the prowling little girl again, and he became the hidden watcher.

He had only guessed from a few glimpses about her reaction to mirrors, but he soon realized that he had been right. Today, not long after she left him, she caught sight of herself in a full-length mirror, and lingered and teased herself. Then she went into a corner and lay on her side, facing the wall, with her legs drawn-up and slowly scissoring. Her hands were clasped between her thighs, and she began chafing herself and uttering low sorrowing moans. Then she struggled with herself, and became frantic, as if she were being stabbed to death — each knife blow was distinct until they were too quick to see. And she died, too, but came alive some minutes later, looking shattered.

Hooper recorded this. He recorded her washing that afternoon, be recorded her trying on dresses, he recorded her painting her face. When she phoned him from her suite to ask whether he wanted to join her in the whirlpool bath he recorded in close-up the changing expression on her face. In the week after their return from Africa he had recorded a hundred hours of her on tape, and for about half that time he had been watching, directing the camera, changing angles.

He sensed that time was running out. They would find Fizzy — or more likely, Fizzy would find them — and Bligh's people would bargain for her back. But watching her, he had learned so much about her it was as though he had entered her life — known her for years. What husband knew as much about his wife as be did of Bligh? And it was an advantage that she was very young, because it seemed to Hooper characteristic of the young that their inner states were reflected in all their surfaces. He was seeing her naked, and while with some people nakedness was a special form of concealment, Bligh's nakedness said everything. She did not know he was watching.

It was always said that aliens were infectious — they were unhealthy, they were carriers of disease. It was the reason that they had no legal existence, that the cities had been sealed against them. It was not simply that they were regarded as career criminals, but that they were a danger to public health. Hooper had watched Bligh for symptoms of disease — sores, leaks, rashes, spasms. So far, he had seen nothing but her prowling and her dozing and her eager appetite: she lived like a cat, padding and stretching in her rooms. Yet even if she weren't carrying anything, she represented risks. But that was no discouragement to Hooper. He felt a kind of lust in being a lawbreaker; but he was justified, he felt, for if she were dangerous he was the only person who would suffer.

The possibility of danger-from the Feds, from Security, from Bligh herself — excited him and kept him watching her. He loved the hard muscles that moved under her curves, the colorless gaze of her large pale eyes, and her sunburned hair. Her buttocks were small and solid from her running, her legs slender, and her lips full on her wide mouth. She was lovely and so young; but her attraction was not only physical. Hooper loved her tomboy's daring, her curiosity, her darting glances, the way she paced at the windows. She had learned to use the binoculars and she remained fascinated by the city.

Without knowing it, she stirred his interest and took away all his loneliness. He had not even known he was lonely. She had shown him that, and he was anxious not to lose her, because he wanted to know more. Bligh was making him a better man. In spite of all the dangers associated with her being an alien, he felt very happy with her. And thinking about her, he dared to think about the future that had always seemed so familiar, and for that reason, so deceptive.

The image he always returned to was a simple one. It was not her youth, nor her nakedness, nor the fury of her eating, nor making love to herself, nor revealing herself to a mirror, nor energetically pissing. It was rather the sight of her standing at a large daylit window in a silk robe, with dawn showing through it and darkening the silhouette of her body, her small breasts and her boy's hips and bright hair, and looking like a princess in a castle tower.

Then he was burdened by the very beauty of it, and oppressed by everything he knew of her and all the hours he had spent watching her. He understood her well, and needed her, but without her realizing it she had become his secret life. He hated his sneaking and his excuses of work.

"What is it?" she asked. She had seen the strain on his face. They were in the whirlpool bath, bobbing in the warm currents, but at opposite sides of the tub. I can see you better from here, he had said, and meant it. She said, "Tell me."

He decided to approach the truth.

"I want you to let me watch you when you're alone," he said.

"How could you possibly do that?"

He explained how he would set up cameras and monitors and mirrors, and how they would work. He told her how he planned to watch her. He hoped she would not laugh.

"Is that all you want?" she asked in a wondering way. "To look at me like that?"

As soon as she said it in that certain way his desire for it died. He had never wanted her to know she was being watched. The pleasure lay in the secrecy. But her permission took all the blame away, and all the eroticism of watching her, and in that moment he wanted more.

Later, after their meal, when they lay on the cushions by the window — the yellow brightness of the early-evening skylights shining in on them from above the city — he touched her face. She was burning — he almost drew his hand away, he was so startled by the heat. But she was quicker, and snatched his hand, and took some of his fingers into her mouth. She moved nearer to him and rolled his fingers on her tongue until it seemed a bulb of heat traveled up his arm and burst, wanning his whole body.

Hooper pulled the blinds, needing darkness, and tumbling into that darkness they struggled slowly with each other. It was as though they were inventing by trial and error an ancient ceremony, testing each separate move until it became part of the magic. It was a ritual he did not understand, but it changed him, and it could not be undone.

He woke, believing he had killed her by splitting her in half — he had a frenzied memory of lifting her by her ankles, one in each hand, and opening her wide to impale her and then devour her. But she had groaned with pleasure, and when he stopped she squawked for him to continue, and then she uttered little grunts until he was done. Now he was bumping against the ceiling, reawakened. He was horrified. He said, "You're wonderful."

The praise provoked her. She moved against him and dived deep, and then it seemed as though they were trying to drown each other, but were too buoyant to sink. The air was as thick as liquid around their bodies, and they held on as if performing a furious baptism in which two submerged lovers were purified to become one whole rising organism, flesh against flesh. Passion allowed this special creature to exist.

His heart was thumping in his ears. And then he woke again, but this time he was cold and solitary.

"I didn't think you were interested in that," she said, and drew him to her, warming him.

He did not speak. He was afraid again.

"I thought you might have some kind of infection," she said.

He was relieved to hear her say something he had himself feared. But he was still afraid.

"No," he said. "Do you?"

"I'm clean — cross my heart."

He knew it was the truth, and he caressed her, touching her between the legs, wetting his fingers. It was as though he had put his hand on an open wound.

"You taste like smoked salmon," he whispered.

She smiled. She said, "I wish I knew who you were."

It amazed him to hear her say this, because he felt he knew her so well — every habit, every mumble and mood, every fleck on her body, her teeth, her toes.

"You'll have to stay with me to find out," he said, "because I want you for a friend."

He put up the blinds to see her face better. She seemed thinner, and rather small, but he had the sense that she was indestructible. He lay gently next to her, and the skylights gave them both a second skin. He became perfectly calm. He had not known such peace since early childhood.

He thought: I'm home.

His happiness with Bligh gave him a glimpse of Fizzy in O-Zone. In his vision the boy had grown older and had overcome his fears. He was stronger and more sensible, living among people much like Bligh — just as patient and watchful, just as gentle. The boy was happy at last.

Two days later (though it could easily have been more — after that night they abandoned their routine, and their exhausting nights turned the days inside-out; Hooper had stopped watching Bligh on the monitor, stopped recording her, and they went back and forth freely between her suite and his apartment, and bathed together, and shared one bed, and praised themselves — it could have been a week later) there was a message from Moura. She had arranged for it to appear as a priority printout, because he had gone off the air, he had closed his phone.

I must speak to you, the message said.

Hooper did not want her to visit him here. He took a different view of his apartment now that he shared it with Bligh, and he wanted to keep this second life, this real life, secret. He phoned her, and as soon as she identified herself he said, "I'll be right over."

On the way it struck him that she might have bad news of Fizzy. We've just found his body. Why hadn't he thought of that before? Willis Murdick found teethmarks on the corpse. No, not that. We want you to be completely truthful and tell us everything you know about those aliens. How could he begin to tell the strange story? He vowed to be cold and to let her do the talking. He was glad that the quarrel with Hardy was a thing of the past: it all seemed pointless nagging now. He wanted to see Hardy again and say, No hard feelings!

"Where's Hardy?" he said, stepping into the empty apartment.

"On a mission," Moura said very quickly, dismissing his question. "Will you help me?"

He was happy. He promised to do what she wanted — he felt he could do anything now — though what he longed for was very simple, to return to Bligh and take her downtown and urge her to choose something for him to buy.

"Let me talk," Moura said. She was edgy and trembling and her breathing was shallow. "If you're looking for someone who's lost, is there a central registry where they keep the names of people who pass through checkpoints? I'm not talking specifically about Owners. I mean anyone — can you locate them or pin them down to a particular area?"

"The Federal Census keeps track of everyone who passes through the Federal checkpoints. There's some sort of Health and Safety Department that stores the figures," Hooper said. "Some people slip under the wire, but not many."

"What if the person deregistered?"

"He'd still be in the computer," Hooper said. "Every time he's scanned his file's reactivated. We can't have unidentified people running wild in this country. Remember all those Mexicans during that border war?"

He saw the absurdity of it. Bligh had a false ID! There were probably millions of people like her — aliens living like Owners, and no one noticing.

"Where do I begin looking?" Moura said.

"This is the age of the ID," Hooper said. "In theory we know the identity of every single person in the United States. Everyone's got a number."

"What if he's an alien?"

"In theory, aliens don't exist — except for aliens wanted for crimes. But when they're caught, they stop existing." Hooper was disturbed by a sudden tension in her face. He said, "You don't have to worry. Fizzy's tough — he'll turn up."

"I'm not looking for Fizzy," Moura said.

Hooper laughed, feeling relieved.

"I'm looking for his father."

"I didn't think that was possible with frozen angels."

She made a face at the euphemism.

"Fizzy wasn't a test-tube baby," she said. "I went to a contact clinic. It was a man — a young man. I want to find him."

Hooper felt very close to her then and recognized the desperation in her voice: a panic of love.

"He shouldn't be hard to find. He had to have been an Owner or else fully registered, and even if he's cut himself loose, he can be chased. I'll help you." And then he felt it was safe to ask the question he bad been pondering since he received her message. "What about Fizzy?"

"Hardy heard from him a few days ago."

"From O-Zone?" Hooper could not understand how the boy had managed it.

"No, but it wasn't far from there," Moura said.

"So you must know the coordinates," Hooper said.

Moura made a face and then said, "Hardy's gone looking for him."

"Alone?"

"With Murdick."

"In the Godseye gunship," Hooper said, seeing the big dark thing with the death's-head on its nose and its Snake-Eaters insignia, streaking across the treetops, with its searchlights bleaching everything under it; and its urgent murmuring crew.

"I suppose so," she said. "What's wrong?"

Hooper saw the deadly thing against a clear sky at sundown, and the aliens below, with Fizzy.

"Give me the coordinates," Hooper said. "What did Fizzy's message say?"

"Hardy said he doesn't want you to interfere," Moura said. "He doesn't need your help — I do!"

Hooper said, "If you want me to help you find that donor, give me all the information you have on Fizzy. That's how we begin — we find him first. Then we find his father."

Moura began to cry, and it seemed odd to him that she knew so little about how terrible the situation had become and yet could still shed tears. She knew nothing of the aliens in O-Zone, nothing about Bligh, nothing much about the two abductions, and very little of the terror of Godseye. And she was not crying because her son was gone — she was crying for her lost love.

He saw the gunship again and the troopers peering out. It was a big wobbling wasp-shaped rotor, looking for someone to sting.

30

From where he stood, Hardy could see thin high veils of cloud ghosting in the blue sky of southern Indiana, and all around him the watery mirages and double images of the flat green fields — another hot day, another fuel depot. He had never known a rotor to use so much fuel. Even the depot engineer had remarked on it.

"Your ship's armor-plated!"

"We're security."

"What's it got — titanium shields? You carrying bulk weight? I guess it guzzles fuel!"

"That's all classified," Sluter said. Although he was outside the rotor, and just a cornfield nearby, he was wearing his mask.

"We don't have any trouble here," the engineer said. "Half the time the roadblocks are wide open — no guards or nothing."

The fuel was humming in the hose-pipe as they spoke.

"No roadblocks is just plain stupid," Meesle said through his propped-up faceplate. He had the thick upholstered look of an Astronaut. "You're going to pay the price for that. The price is aliens, robbery, rape, drugs, bad money, and disease."

"This ain't Florida or Texas," the engineer said. "This ain't Landslip."

He was smiling. He seemed friendly and unsuspicious in an old-fashioned way. And although this fuel depot was fortified, and most of it buried in the hillside, it seemed very peaceful: it was like the past. The engineer had planted geraniums in the dry soil, in flowerbeds around the rotor pad, and morning glories had leapt up the spiked fence.

Hardy had come to like these refueling stops and was glad the gunship was such a guzzler. He looked forward to seeing the star shape of the depot from the air, the glint of sun on the rotating radar dish, and then being on the ground — the easy conversation with the engineer, and a chance to hoist his helmet for ten minutes or to use a proper toilet — the Godseye troopers insisted that on-ground toilets were security risks; they used the inflatable shit-eater on the gunship.

The very desolation of these midwest depots was a relief after the confinement of the gunship. The big bug had seemed roomy and luxurious a week ago, but now Hardy regarded it as poky and rather noisy. He had been airsick on three occasions — clear-air turbulence. He found Sluter bossy and Murdick stupid and he had taken a particular dislike to Meesle, who had insisted on showing him videos.

"This one's kind of cute," Meesle always said of the cruelest ones, and of the most violent he said, "This one has an important message but it's in an easy-to-digest form."

Then Meesle usually smiled.

"It's full of geechees getting burned down."

He screened Intruder, Alienation, Time Travel, Godseye-Worldwide, and Reclaiming the States. Hardy watched them. How else to pass the time? But he hated them, and he hated Meesle for always sitting directly behind him, with his face against his neck.

Asians, Africans, Hispanics: they were shown committing dreadful crimes, and their faces were intercut with images of rats and roaches. Then they were chased and rounded up and killed in peculiarly horrible ways, often very slowly, in close-up.

"Omnifelons," Meesle said. "Lepers. Skells. Coke-whores."

Hardy sat stony-faced, with his helmet on and his faceplate locked into position, and his collar up, and even his gloves on. He went on watching because he wanted to go on hating these so-called troopers.

"You're as bad as your brother," they said.

At night, after scanning an area, they put the gunship down in darkness and kept a beam on for protection. They slept on board. Hardy was the first to begin wearing his mask every day and night, and he stopped taking his boots off. He used a breathing apparatus and assisted air.

"Worried about omnifelons?" Sluter said. "Meesle telling you about violent predators? That why you've got your armor on?"

"No, it's your feet," Hardy said. "And all the garbage we're carrying. This bug stinks."

Within a few days they were all wearing masks and air cylinders. But the Godseye troopers denied that they were doing it because of the smell in the gunship. It was preparation against aliens, they said. How did they know this kid Fizzy was alone? He might have fifty aliens guarding him. Some of them had technology! They might have rockets or land mines! They were desperate little geechees!

"This kid we're looking for," Murdick said one night. "He won't thank us. He won't like us. And we'll hate him,"

The others looked to Hardy to refute this. But Hardy did not reply. He was ashamed of himself for having lived in New York his whole life and not known how vicious these people were. He had always assumed that Godseye was just another of the many security strike forces. But no—

"He's going to say, 'Make me captain or else I won't fly," Murdick had tried to imitate Fizzy's quacking voice, but he had overdone the wah-wah. It was a mistake. Now no one believed him.

"I don't understand how he got out of O-Zone," Sluter said. His incomprehension had made him grumpy. "You can't do that!"

"Not to mention the Red Zone Perimeter," Meesle said. "You can't get through the beam."

"He got through the beam," Hardy said. "He got out of O-Zone."

"You can't," Sluter said,

"He can," Hardy said. "Fizzy's area is particle physics."

The three men turned their masks on him. He could not see their faces, but he knew they were frowning at him.

"And fiber optics,"

He felt pompous just saying the words — even the simplest. description of Fizzy's research sounded boastful, and Hardy sensed the hostility coming at him through the painted faceplates. He had some sympathy for Fizzy then: the poor kid had to put up with this crap from everyone.

Sluter said, "Lots of people in this country know about particle physics and fiber optics. But there's no record of them having busted through a Red Zone. And no one has ever entered or left O-Zone without written permission."

That objection made Hardy proud of Fizzy: it was like a testimony to the boy's uniqueness.

"He's a smart boy," Hardy said. His assertive tone said Smarter than you.

"Years of research went into securing those zones," Sluter said, and pushed past Hardy on the way to the cockpit.

"He's barking mad," Murdick said. "Hates the idea of someone breaking through a zone."

"So do I," Hardy said. "Except this is my own kid."

"We always considered those places safe," Meesle said.

"No one ever considered them safe!" Hardy said.

"By safe I mean dangerous," Meesle said. He had unlocked his faceplate so that Sluter wouldn't hear him arguing on the phones. He was whispering under his uplifted mask. "Dangerous for aliens. When we had to dispose of them."

Hardy said, "So you're the ones who populated O-Zone with all those stinking aliens."

"It was before we switched to ocean drops. We booted them out of cargo planes. But we didn't always give them parachutes. Anyway, even if they survived the fall and managed to live with the radioactivity, they couldn't get out of the zone. If they didn't get cancer, they'd get nosebleeds. They'd start staggering. And they'd never get out of the zone. That's what I mean by safe — I mean very dangerous."

"Fizzy got out," Hardy said.

"Maybe."

"He was on the outside when he sent the message!"

"Then why wasn't he in Winslow like he said?"

The message was: Have completed clandestine exfiltration O-Zone. The coordinates of my present position are 89°.58.027 and 37°.91.284, an unfortified farm near Winslow. Health okay except for feet. Very high exposure risk. Assistance required immediately, but do not alert Red Zone Rescue. Await instructions.

It was unsigned but unmistakably Fizzy. A number of details interested Hardy. There was the astonishing news that the boy had escaped from O-Zone and broken through the Red Zone Perimeter — no one had ever managed that on the ground. There was except for feet, a very Fizzy touch. And there was the baffling Await instructions: this statement seemed more ambiguous as Hardy repeated it. Did it mean that Fizzy awaited instructions, or was it an order for Hardy to await instructions?

But unambiguous was Fizzy's order not to alert Red Zone Rescue, which would have been the normal procedure. It was the reason for their existing, to patrol the perimeter, and if Hardy had reported Fizzy's present position the boy would have been picked up within hours and spirited back to New York. But Hardy had a better reason than Fizzy's forbidding it. Alerting Red Zone Rescue to Fizzy's so-called clandestine exfiltration (no one was better at playing the trooper-hero than an irritating brat with no experience!) might also make the O-Zone project impossible. It would certainly endanger its secrecy.

So Hardy had accepted Murdick's offer of the Godseye gunship and crew, and now he was stuck with them. They had agreed to the mission in the hope of catching a band of aliens.

"We'll burn some cars. Shoot some dogs."

Hardy had expected that.

"Nuke some aliens," Meesle said.

"Wait a minute," Hardy said.

"Neutralize them," Murdick said. "Snatch the kid back."

But now, over a week later, they had found nothing — no one. It had made them bad-tempered and uneasy, and they were often frightened by the open spaces and the stands of trees. They imagined Diggers tunneling underground — thousands of them underneath the gunship as they flew low over southern Illinois. They saw what looked like bulges and breathing holes on the surface. They hovered and pumped gas inside and plugged the holes. They did not see Diggers. That scared them. It meant that the Diggers had outsmarted them: the beasts were clever.

They had flown toward Winslow on that first day worrying out loud. Hardy had imagined that they would be volatile and aggressive — their huge clacking gunship, with armor plate and mocking insignia; their arsenal of weapons; their helmets and wild-looking masks. Well, that was how they looked— like those space warriors that Pilgrims and Rocketmen fantasized about — but underneath it all they were worrying. Was the boy alone? Was he armed? Was he sane? Was he alive — or had he been killed and was the whole mission about to be lured into a trap? Was anything known about these aliens? Did they have technology — any irons, any firepower?

Murdick had made matters worse by hinting that the boy might be unreliable, and not just ungrateful, but hostile.

The Godseye troopers were strangers here. They were New Yorkers, and like all the Godseye people they were part-timers, volunteer vigilantes. "I've got a couple of drug companies," Meesle had said, and Hardy knew that Murdick manufactured elevator equipment. This was a part of America they flew over at an altitude of forty thousand clicks. It was farmland, open fields, simple wooden houses, silos, and straight roads — some of it looked deserted, but most of it was in fairly good shape. Surprisingly, there were few checkpoints. Who lived here? Very few of the settlements looked fortified. It was fenced-in farming, but the land was poor or else underused. Perhaps it was too near O-Zone?

"Ground vehicle," Murdick said.

It was an old blue pickup truck, with six people sitting in the back and dust flying. The passengers were men and women, and the Godseye scanner did not find any weapons in the vehicle. But the troopers were not reassured. Those people in the truck were strangers; all strangers were dangerous.

"I'd like to nuke that vehicle," Meesle said. "Just take it out. I'd feel better."

But he did not shoot. They watched the vehicle head into Winslow.

"I don't like the looks of this," they kept saying, worrying themselves into a mood of aggression.

Winslow was a wide place in the road surrounded by watchtowers. There were farms and fenced-in fields nearby. Wind pumps had been stabbed into the landscape: they looked as simple and pointless as children's toys, their blades turning high above the still fields. Must be oil, Murdick said. Hardy did not bother to correct him — giving information to a stupid person only made the person stupider and more annoying. They were pumping water, of course. This region had been drying out for years, but Hardy did not want to give them rain. He craved an empty place — one that would not be taken away from him after his rain began to fall.

"This area could be crawling with geechees," Murdick said. "There are whole towns out here that have been taken over by Trolls."

That was the talk: Hardy had heard it — everyone knew it. But it was city talk. There was very little hard evidence to suggest that anything had changed out here. In fact, just before he had left New York Hardy had watched a television program about how Easter was celebrated somewhere out here — Easter had just passed. But why tell the Godseye troopers that he had seen people, like those down below probably, eating ham, wearing new clothes and fancy bats, and going to church?

"Another ground vehicle," Meesle said,

"With a woman behind the wheel." Hardy had enlarged the image. She wore sunglasses and gloves. She steered around the holes in the road.

"Don't shoot yet," Meesle said. He rested his handgun on the dome of his belly.

"What do you mean yet?"

"I mean I don't like the looks of this."

They were flying high over the main street of Winslow, and what surprised them, when they enhanced the image on the ground-screen, was that none of the buildings was taller than five stories, and many stood alone, and some were unfenced. Their roofs were tarpaper and shingles and tin sheets — old stuff, with square patches showing. The watchtowers were empty.

"Look. Iron fire escapes. Haven't seen those for years, "

"No security," Meesle said. "Must have a hell of a crime rate. Just kick your way into most of those buildings. Go through the roof."

"Maybe they don't need security," Hardy said. "Maybe it's peaceful."

Meesle found this very funny, and when his belly shook, so did his handgun, where it rested.

"Going closer," Sluter called from the cockpit.

He flew slowly and without banking, in order to keep the armor-plated underside of the gunship facing down. That was their protection. They dipped near a checkpoint at the edge of town, but there was no one near it — the gate was open, vehicles came and went. Meesle said he didn't like the look of that. There were stores on the main street, selling hardware and clothes and food and electrical equipment and farm implements. One of the largest buildings in town was a brick structure which bore the sign "Farmers' Market."

"After O-Zone was declared a Prohibited Area, these nearby places just got sick," Murdick said, "The people are vegetables and simple-lifers. Scratching a living and saying prayers. Hell of a lot of Rocketmen in those towns." He smacked his lips and said, "It's all fucking terminal down there."

"Probably not an Owner or a taxpayer among them," Meesle said. "Probably all geechees, like Willis says."

"Why don't we go down and find out," Hardy said.

"I wouldn't go down there without a lot of firepower," Meesle said.

"We don't have to," Sluter called out. "The kid's coordinates are west of here."

Sluter had marked the spot on the ground-screen, but instead of flying directly to it he made a dogleg around a settlement on the outskirts of Winslow as a precaution.

"Missiles have come blasting out of pretty places like that!" Sluter said. He had shouted, Hardy thought, to cover his nervousness.

Some of these places looked idyllic to Hardy, with the sunshine on them and the roofs brown with rust and the pumps spinning and the wet ditches cut into the fields. It seemed amazing that these people had found a way to survive on the ground here, and in the twilight such places took on an almost nightmarish appearance. They were unknown, unseen; only talked about. They seemed to represent the confusion that Hardy always felt when he was away from New York: everywhere else was the past and paradoxical, the simple life that looked romantic one minute and savage the next.

"I'm not going down until we scan those buildings for lurkers," Sluter said. "And then we wait until dark."

"Just don't shoot," Hardy said. "I want that kid back alive."

Hovering over the cluster of dry wooden buildings, they were low enough to be drawing dust off the ground in their updraft.

From the cockpit Sluter called out that he was reading the scanner. He then said, "I'm not getting diddly."

No people — that frightened them. It made them imagine filthy creatures in underground burrows; dug in and swallowing and waiting. Sluter landed the gunship a hundred meters from the farm and kept the scanner on it. They expected to see heads rising from the ground — hairy faces, crazy eyes. But there was nothing. The scanner did not register either movement or sound. Yet each of the troopers said he heard human noises and could see shadows and licks of light— antlers of flames striking through the darkness.

Dawn came and showed them nothing more. There was no furniture in the main house, though there were some torn curtains in the empty rooms. The ceilings had fallen, and the floors were littered: animals had come and gone. Some power lines still stood, and there was a dish in the yard.

"Probably got raided by Starkies or Trolls," Meesle said.

"Those people we saw in town looked pretty legal to me," Hardy said. "Just hard-pressed, as far as I could see."

Meesle paid no attention to Hardy. He was still looking at the empty farmhouse. "Probably snuck in and burned the people and butchered the animals."

"Maybe the people just picked up and went away," Hardy said. "Maybe they went into Winslow."

He could see that these buildings were a skeleton of the past: frail and hollow and dried-out, without any flesh, too far from town. But its death and distance made it a safe place to hide in.

Murdick said, "No sign of the kid."

"But this has got to be the place," Hardy said. "He could have bounced his message off that dish in the yard,"

They considered this, and Hardy knew that they hated the possibility of the boy being able to manage that. They stood in the farmyard in their helmets and flying suits — looking, as always, like Astronauts. There was no sound now-not the wind, nor the creak of the timbers, nor the complaint of joists; the wooden buildings had stopped going ouch-ouch. It was so still it seemed eerie and unnatural, as if some killer— Meesle said — were holding his breath and hiding, and someone else lay dead nearby. It was that quiet.

"I don't like the looks of this," Murdick said.

"We should maybe search for a body," Meesle said.

"Sometimes they eat them," Murdick said.

They searched, they dug, they scanned, they used thermal imaging and metal detectors. But there was no body. The only bones they found were those of a cow, yellow and soft with age. There was radiation still in them.

"Oh, sure, they took casualties," Meesle said. "O-Zone's just across the river."

"Let's get off the ground!" Sluter called out. "I hate it here!"

* * *

That failure their first day had made them impatient — and suspicious and sulky. They were not methodical or calculating men, Hardy decided — more reasons for him to miss Fizzy. Only since the boy had been absent had Hardy really begun to appreciate his uniqueness. And how often had he and Moura muttered about Fizzy being handicapped! But these Godseye vigilantes — these so-called troopers — were the opposite of Fizzy. They were frustrated, hurried and rather clumsy; they were quick to assign blame; and this fearful restlessness — their cowardice — had made them into killers.

Hardy was sorry he had asked Godseye to help him find the boy; and now there was no going back. They were always telling stories of how they had joined the squad!

"I'm in Chicago on business," Meesle said. "This was years ago. They used to hijack cars and trucks in Chicago. You'd slow down on an exit ramp and they'd be on top of you. Anyway, I'm driving down a ramp and I see three Roaches squeezing through a fence. I gave them time to get near the road and then I pulled off and ran them over — bump, bump, bump. A week later I got the call. Someone had seen me and reported me. Do I want to join Godseye?"

"Mine was the same kind of impulse thing," Murdick said. "I had just bought a really neat iron and was taking a walk in Upper West, where we used to have a condo. I saw a Skell— incredibly old and ugly. I knew he was going to mug me, even though he was about a block away. I could feel it. And after he mugged me they'd put him away or burn him or whatever — but what good would that do me? I'd have scars for life! Maybe brain damage! Might lose an eye! So I lined him up and gave him a bead and stiffed him before he could lay a hand on me. He had money — he was a snatcher, no question of it. You've got to get the jump on them. Burn them before they commit crimes, because what good is it afterward? That's how I got the call. They liked my attitude."

"Memory lane," Hardy said, and turned his back on them to show that he had heard enough.

"You're as bad as your brother," Meesle said.

"I've burned so much trash I can't remember the first time," Sluter said.

They were still flying east of Winslow on the main line, looking for the boy — or was it a kidnap gang, or half an army?

"Some of these aliens are so hungry," Murdick said. He spoke in fear and admiration.

The Godseye troopers were well-armed and yet they were reluctant to touch down, except at night to sleep. Hardy felt that they might have preferred flying blind in the darkness to risking the ground. It was almost as if they were afraid because they knew what fury they could unleash — afraid of their own firepower. They said they wanted to save time. They zigzagged and filmed; they radioed down to checkpoints, giving Fizzy's ID number.

They mocked the small towns, and yet they lingered over them, taking pictures. The places looked hard-up, with old cars and bad roads and acres of patched solar panels. Yet apparently they still worked. They had schools and stores and police, and most had checkpoints. They all flew the Stars and Stripes.

None of the people out here wore helmets and not many wore suits. It was rare to see a mask, and even then it was a nosebag, nothing fancy. Some of them had radios clamped to their heads. Their clothes were flapping and faded, the women wore trousers or skirts, and even though they might not be Owners they certainly were not aliens. They were working people and in some places there were fifty or more in a field, all together, hoeing weeds.

When Murdick said, "This reminds me of Africa," Hardy thought Bullshit, but he knew what Murdick meant. It was the contrast with New York — not nakedness and starvation, but another time zone. He was talking about the past.

"More irons," Meesle said again and again, in a kind of nagging notation. But it was true. Nearly all the adults out here, east of Winslow, wore weapons — real irons, pistols mostly, and the troopers were fascinated by them. These old irons were slow and inaccurate, they said, but it was touching and romantic nevertheless to see men and women carrying weapons in leather holsters strapped to their waists.

"Weapons with moving parts!" Sluter said, mocking and marveling.

"You couldn't carry them in New York," Murdick said.

"Why would you want to?"

"Allbright's probably one of these people that thinks the city's safe," Meesle said.

Hardy looked the fat man up and down, and sighed, audibly flunking him. This bug was too small for an argument, but Meesle got the message: Look at yourself.

"No city is safe," Meesle said, angered by Hardy's wordless scrutiny.

It is only a matter of time before he kills someone, Hardy thought. Of the three — Flatty had not been able to join the mission — Meesle was the most impatient to use his weapons, and it seemed as though his only motive was his impatience.

The days were full of silences, and the racket of the gunship was like another kind of smothering silence. They spent hours looking for fuel depots — like wanderers in a desert looking for oases. And because all the depots were fortified and some actually enclosed in garrisons, they lingered in these places, spending a whole morning or afternoon enjoying that safety at ground level. Then they ventured into what they thought of as the unknown: the pattern of towns in the midwest. They stayed away from the cities, believing that was what Fizzy would have done. Anyway, most of these cities were so hard to enter or leave. Cincinnati, for example: they were kept holding over the river for almost an hour.

"Checking credentials!" Sluter complained, and when the control tower asked for more information the others cried, "Snake-Eaters!" and "This mission is classified!" They flew off without entering the city.

Thereafter they kept to the small towns and the in-between stretches of farmland. When they took the trouble to look closely, they were impressed by the way some of the people in these towns lived so close to the ground — eating real food, drinking their own water, running factories and ingeniously irrigating their land. Many of them did not even bother to erect fences. From the air, their gardens looked like multicolored rugs. There was large-scale fanning, too — fields of winter wheat and newly sprouted corn.

Occasionally, from the air, they saw a white farmhouse and a barn and a paddock and a silo and a chicken coop and an old truck parked in front. And they knew there was a family in the house that had not been changed by either time or events. The family was at the table, eating supper in their overalls, their heads bowed toward the mashed potatoes and gravy and broccoli and the gleaming chicken — probably praying, and probably not even thinking of it as real food, but just food.

Yet some of those same families might be buying space in a rocket and paying a subscription to the Pilgrims and talking about leasing units and stations and orbits. They might be saying, "Let's sell up and get off the planet" — the poor deluded fools. Hardy felt they would be better off in Maine or Idaho. But they all worried; even those people praying over their mashed potatoes feared Diggers and Starkies and Roaches and all the aliens that sneaked into the States from the world, or were thrown out of the cities; and they braced themselves against the swarms that hit here and cleaned them out.

That was a fleeting thought over Indiana, but the rest of the time it seemed to Hardy that nothing had changed at all.

Toward the end of the week, Sluter said, "How do we know the kid got out of the Red Zone? We don't have any corroboration. That message doesn't prove anything — he could have sent it from O-Zone or anywhere, if he's such a brain. I think we're wasting our time. We should go to the Red Zone Perimeter and make inquiries."

"Fizzy specifically said not to alert Red Zone Rescue," Hardy said. "We should try Missouri State Security or the local police."

"The security people in the Red Zone will know if someone broke through," Sluter said. "We don't have to mention names."

"Do you have a right to go there?"

"Godseye! Snake-Eaters!"

They could seem clumsy and unsure of themselves, and rather dangerous because of that; but it was when they were arrogant and flashing their weapons that Hardy remembered just now dangerous they were, and that Godseye — in spite of all its pretensions about justice and brotherhood — was a death squad.

They lumbered around for most of the day in the gunship, looking for a fuel depot. By the time they found one and set off for the Red Zone it was growing dark. They put down and secured themselves for the night, and they grumbled: they were running low on air, food, and water, and so the next day they made that their excuse to stop where they did.

"You can keep Winslow and Booneville and Cincinnati," Sluter said, gloating at the ground-screen. "Just give me garrisons like this. The command post of the Red Zone Perimeter!"

"It used to be called Winterton," Meesle said, "Before the shit-storm."

It was a Federal flight garrison at the edge of the defoliated ribbon of land that ran around O-Zone. Hardy thought of it as a glorified sentry post, but the Godseye troopers were clearly impressed with the technology and the fortresslike aspect of the garrison that gave it a forbidding appearance. It was a control center and its purpose was to prevent anyone from crossing the red line and entering O-Zone. That anyone might want to leave O-Zone was unthinkable, since officially no one lived in O-Zone — too dangerous. That's what Hardy had thought until very recently. Now he knew that Fizzy had been kidnapped there by aliens who had probably been dumped into O-Zone by one of the Godseye squads.

"You're responsible for Fizzy's abduction," said Hardy. "Your people put those aliens in O-Zone."

"What was this kid doing in a Prohibited Area?" Meesle said, and laughter rang in his helmet as Hardy turned away.

They were making their final approach to the garrison.

"Just don't mention Fizzy by name," Hardy said.

It was always said that Godseye, and organizations like it — paramilitary groups, security patrols, task forces — were partly funded by the Federal government. That was what Hardy had heard. This landing was like proof of it: the control tower immediately granted permission for the gunship to land, and when they were on the ground they were given access to the provision warehouse. Two Red Zone commandos went aboard the gunship on the pretext of examining the flight recorder and logbook, but they hardly seemed to care about that. Their real interest was in the Godseye weapons and search system.

"You sure are ready for action!" one commando said, looking at the Godseye troopers.

The troopers wore helmets and masks and their sturdiest suits. They had tough ground boots over the liners they tramped around in on board. They wore their weapons, and communicated through headsets.

"Lovely boots, too!"

Hardy wondered whether any of the Godseye crew would give the real reason for wearing battle gear: the smell on board the gunship.

"We're on a mission," Sluter said.

Murdick described the features of his suit and the holding and traction capabilities of his boots, and then he took out his weapons and showed them off. The commandos were so eager to see the particle beam in action they escorted their visitors to the garrison firing range to try it out. Even on a low charge it melted the steel target frame and turned a bag of sand into a pillow of solid glass.

"It shoots around corners," Murdick said eagerly.

"I wish we'd had this a week ago," one of the commandos said. "Hey, why do you private task forces have the best weapons!"

"What would you have done with that weapon a week ago?" Meesle asked.

"We had an incident."

Hardy said, "You mean someone penetrated the perimeter?"

"Suspected violation."

Sluter said, "Aliens?"

"Absolutely. But they had high tech." The commando was still holding Murdick's weapon. "This would have taken care of them."

Hardy said, "Was anyone killed?"

"That's classified."

"Have you issued a description of the violators?"

"You don't know what an alien looks like?"

"How can we help?" Sluter asked.

"Look for aliens," the commando said. "And shoot on sight."

It was remarkable how just that short conversation with the commandos at the Red Zone had bucked up the Godseye troopers. Hardy noticed a new resolve in the men and a determination and a sense of mission that had not existed even at the beginning. They started to call themselves by their nickname "Snake-Eaters" and they resumed their mutters of "I don't like the look of this."

But this new spirit in the mission worried Hardy. He saw them firing at anything that moved, shooting on sight, as the chummy vengeful commando had suggested. He feared that Godseye was a greater risk to Fizzy than the aliens, but how was it possible to neutralize them?

"I have an idea," Hardy said, after they were back in the air. "We head for Winslow. That's our best hope. We've got the exact coordinates."

"The kid wasn't there when we looked," Meesle said.

"We should stay there and await further orders," Hardy said, believing that they were likely to do less damage on the ground.

"Orders!" Sluter said. "From a kid!"

"Wait till you see this kid," Murdick said.

They all laughed, except Hardy. He had become convinced of Fizzy's versatility, and he was now ashamed of the many times in the past when he had complained about the boy. Fizzy was special — there was no doubt of that; and Hardy wanted him back.

"We'll look at Winslow," Sluter said. "It's not far."

But he took the gunship to a high altitude so that they could drop quickly into the farm complex without being seen or heard.

"There's lights," someone muttered. "There's a rotor down there!"

They were examining the ground-screen, the blip on the scanner — there was definitely a hot spot near those buildings.

Murdick said, "Where would he have picked up a rotor?"

"That wouldn't be too difficult for Fizzy," Hardy said. His mind was still on the boy's excellence.

"Except he can't fly."

Meesle was crowding the ground-screen and saying, "They're in the house. I'd like to drop a wipeout on them."

They cut the engines and drifted down silently, landing three clicks from the farm. Too far, Murdick said: they'd have to walk in the darkness, wearing their heavy battle gear — helmets, masks, armored suits, ribbed-sole boots, and two weapons apiece.

"This is ridiculous," Murdick said.

Their labored breathing came over the headphones, and soon they did not have the wind to complain. Hardy saw them in the starlight, and sometimes trudging against the sky. They were like big swollen dolls, with thick soft bodies and bulbous heads. They groaned and stumbled, cursing each other, blaming Fizzy, becoming grumpier. They were walking across the margin of a cornfield, past the papery flutter of the leaves. Hardy hoped they would not be seen by any of the local people — these leathery-faced farmers in dungarees would surely mistake them for the vanguard of an invasion from space, and they might be quicker with their old irons than Godseye with their beams.

Hardy was apprehensive, but all the more eager to rescue the boy, because of the gratitude he now felt: Fizzy had led him here, by a circuitous route, to the edge of the past. It was as if he had reached the shore of an island.

"I don't like the looks of this," Murdick said.

It was always the most worrying remark: the nervous client meant trouble. Hardy was afraid that Murdick was on the point of firing his weapon.

Meesle said, "Set up the scanner."

They did so, and found no wires or alarms. The rotor was parked on the far side of the barn — they took its profile, but could not read any of its markings.

They crept closer, moving clumsily in their suits and bumping each other, and swearing.

"Two of them," Sluter grunted, his faceplate against the scanner.

Hardy had crawled ahead, his hope making him bold. He had discovered his need for Fizzy and he knew he would defend him — he would certainly not hesitate to shoot anyone if it meant saving the boy.

"I'm almost on top of them," he said. The harsh breathing of the three Godseye troopers filled his headphones. He knew they were fearful: they had let him go forward. The death squad!

He halted and dropped to his knees.

"Hold your fire," he said. He seemed to be speaking to himself as much as to the others. He forced his weapon down. He had seen enough.

Yet it was the strangest sight. Standing framed in the old wooden windows of this farmhouse — just behind the cobwebs and the cracked panes of dirty glass — were two travelers in silver flying suits, with their helmets off; Hooper and that girl.