O-Zone

31

What had amazed Fisher was seeing Mr. Blue stand up and move away from the breakfast fire and in a voice of quiet power say, "Shall we go then?" And the man set out that instant for New York with the others behind him kicking the dust — never mind it being fifteen hundred clicks and their first time. It was a show of strength that matched the effort of a great machine — everyone had obeyed and followed the slender man to the edge of the cliff and down, walking in old-style shoes.

Fisher had obeyed, following in his new boots: he was impressed by the man who had made him do that. He wanted to say: I've never followed anyone before! A month ago they had put him in a bag and slung him from camp to camp and pushed him and dragged him — even threatened him. Now he was scuffing along with the rest of them. He was reminded of the day he had left Coldharbor alone and walked around New York. He had felt brave; it had been an unusual outing. But this was extraordinary. They actually expected to make it!

They took little except what they wore, the cast-off clothes they had found in O-Zone, a little food, including some of the sealed provisions, and some old weapons that doubled as tools — axes, choppers, knives, billhooks. They rolled their pots and cups into their blankets and twisted these rolls into backpacks.

"You're a problem, Fish."

"What kind, Mr. B?"

They were descending the cliff wall, Fisher in his helmet and torn suit, carrying his particle beam. His helmet contained him like a room.

"Your people are Owners. I mean, they're really powerful. Even I've heard of the Allbrights. If we stayed there they'd come and destroy us, for snatching you." He was talking quietly and choosing his steps with long loping strides.

The day was hot and bright and buzzing, what Fisher had come to see as a typical day in O-Zone. The sky was blue and high, not a cloud in it, no moisture, no wind. There was hardly any dew on the ground. There were scrub oaks and cedars here, and the flakes of sunlight beneath them were green and gold. At each clearing there was such stillness and such sky it was as though they were walking through a bubble.

"We'll find them before they find us."

"You had no right to take me."

"I suppose you think they had a right to steal Bligh."

He could have said, But she's an alien — and yet that didn't help. The word did not have quite the same meaning for Fisher now.

He said, "She wasn't legal."

"You ain't legal here, Fish," Gumbie said.

He was right — snuffling, frog-eyed DeWayne Gumbie was right. It was that sort of remark that made him qualify the word "alien," and they were aliens, no question about it. You only had to see them eating to know that.

Soon they were all perspiring and moving without speaking, Fisher at the rear, scowling, with his faceplate propped up, and the legs of his suit making a loud scraping as they rubbed together. He had begun to hate his noisy suit — it was a flying suit, totally wrong for the ground, and he swore at it — but he was afraid to take it off for any length of time.

He had never envied anyone before, and he told himself that he did not envy these aliens now. But he admired their guts and their dumb strength and their lack of ceremony. They didn't complain: that was very restful. You could probably teach these people enough math and physics to get them going. Their spelling and handwriting were better than Fisher's, but so what? Yet he liked the easy way they lived off the land — they simply stretched out and found something to eat, and left him the sealed provisions. They could smell water. He decided that they had to be very stupid to be so brave, and he somewhat despised them for their obedience. But how else was it possible to live here?

For Mr. Blue he felt not envy but regret that the alien had such inner strength. Although he was skinny and balding and had a bony face and was probably thirty, the man was very strong. Perhaps his strength came out of his silence and his narrow shadow. Fisher saw in Mr. Blue the qualities he knew he himself lacked. He needed that self-assurance, and there was something graceful about the man that made him feel ungainly.

"Never mind here in O-Zone," Fisher said, abruptly worried at what they were attempting and lapsing back into himself. "Never mind the low-level mutagens here. But what about the Red Zone Perimeter? There's a twenty-four-hour patrol! There's commandos! Checkpoints! Scanners! Spotter planes! Attack rotors!"

He hated his shrieking, but he wanted someone to reply, because he didn't have the answers himself. He struggled on the path, thinking: I'm on the ground! It wasn't even a real path — just the trampings of the feet up ahead.

"You'll figure something out," Echols said. "You're a smart kid."

Gumbie said, "And we'll give you some help, Fish."

They trusted him: they really believed he had the answers. He had overcome his fear of them, but this made him feel friendly toward them. They expected him to get them out of here. Was that possible? He realized the complication of having to save them in order to save himself. But walking to New York!

The name of the city made him think of his room, and Pap blinking at him; clean clothes, his bed, the bath, and a jelly sandwich and Guppy-Cola on a tray. He thought of his high cameras, and the view west that was always layered blue and purple over the dust-haze — the horizon that looked like sediment. He had been looking in this direction. He was now on the ground, part of the dust and residue he had always frowned at.

By noon they were trailing along the lower edge of the pan, where there was hickory shade. They kept to a steady pace until, near a rockslide, Mr. Blue led them to a pile of sprouting leaves and stalks that was tangled in a black patch of earth. It was a spring, rising out of the ground and seeping back.

"You smelled it," Fisher said, wondering how.

He picked some purplish leaves while the rest were drinking.

"What's the name of these?" he said. He had folded them, making a sandwich of them, and was about to stuff them into his mouth — he was certain he had eaten this cabbage before.

"We call that Sudden Death," Rooks said, and laughed as Fisher dropped the leaves and squawked.

But after that they showed him how to find potato beans and hawthorn buds and wild plums; and how to split roots and roast them and how to beat berries off the bushes. They tore up some weeds and said they were good for tea. They told him to crush the leaves and smell his fingers.

He put his fingers into the front of his mask and said, "Chewing gum. Toothpaste. Room freshener — the stuff you squirt in the bathroom. What is it?"

"Mint."

He did not hate them anymore. He pitied their foolishness and simplicity, and he wanted them to succeed, so that he would make it home. But they were aliens: savages didn't think ahead — illegals never made plans.

It was bright late afternoon when they stopped to make camp. They did not speak. Mr. Blue paused and they did the same, and when he began prowling they gathered grass for tufts to sit on, or looked for firewood, or sorted the food— wild food for them, provisions for Fisher.

They murmured as they went about their duties, not seeming to notice they were in a wasteland. It was wilderness! But they turned their backs on it and did their chores. Fisher wondered how long it would be before they died doing that.

"Do we have to sleep on the floor?"

"Not the floor, Fish. The ground. It's called the ground,"

"And, Fish," Valda said. "It's bad manners to talk while you're yawning."

He laughed at this alien talking about manners — she had once tried to stuff her oinkers into his mouth!

It turned cool after dark, but the fire was doused nonetheless, so it wouldn't be seen. There were no planes today, they said, but there had been some recently. They said: Your people must be searching for you, Fish.

Fisher was glad they didn't ask him why. He knew that none of the Allbrights liked him very much, and the Murdicks and the Eubanks and everyone actually disliked him. He thought: If you're indifferent to people they hate you. Now they wanted him back. He had been stolen by aliens— that was the reason. They didn't even know these aliens!

"You see something?" Fisher asked.

Valda was looking at the sky.

"Stars," she said. "Aren't they beautiful?"

"Arcturus in Bootes. The Galactic Equator. Hyades." He pointed. "And that thing that looks like Capella is a satellite. I've got an instrument in my emergency kit that will give me our position to five decimal places. Want the coordinates?" He was still looking at the starry sky. "Talking of pulsars, a few years ago I monitored energy emissions from pulsars in the Crab Nebula." Then, "Betelgeuse—"

He kept talking. At last he said, "Yeah, beautiful." And then they gave him a blanket and gathered themselves into a pig-pile under blankets to sleep.

Fisher crept away from them and lay in the darkness. It was always so noisy in the open air. Where were the solitude and silence people always talked about? The air crackled with the sound of beetles and locusts, and there was a continual rustle of insect wings.

Without asking whether it was all right they had placed their trust in him. You'll figure something out. He was grateful for their silent ways. What if they had asked him point-blank what his strategy would be? He would have had to admit that he didn't know how to get back to New York without a bird or a rotor; that he was afraid they would fail; that failure might mean dying. He had never walked anywhere. He might have said, "Let's stay right here in O-Zone and figure this thing out." But they had not asked.

It grew colder, and though they were sheltered by the sides of the pan, and there was no wind, Fisher shivered in his suit. The suit was in tatters — the elbows torn, tubes showing in the knees, the collar fastening gone. His helmet made his head hot, but when he took it off the cold penetrated to his skull.

From the pile of six aliens came the low rumble and flutterblast of snores. Fisher was wide-awake with discomfort, squatting in the dust and listening. He hesitated, and then he crawled forward and took his helmet off. An owl called out three clear hoots from a treetop. Fisher burrowed into the pig-pile between Mr. Blue and Valda, and sighed, and was soon asleep in that warm space.

This walk across O-Zone was not proving as bad as he had feared. Until now, he had kept himself apart from Mr. Blue, from everyone except Valda — that crazy spasm of hers; but she hadn't repeated it. Except for that, he had been alone, almost from the moment of his abduction.

Now solitude was not possible. The walking was hard, food and water were limited, and the nights were chilly. So he became one of them — walking in the column during the day, kneeling around the fire in the late afternoon, and part of the pig-pile at night. It vaguely disgusted him, but he had no choice. How else could he survive? He could not separate himself from them. Alone, he would die of exposure.

He came to see that these people survived because they had made themselves into an organism. It had been an accident, like the accumulation of a ball of fluff. They had been lucky in O-Zone; they had found everything they needed, they had lived by raiding the ghost towns, and they had stayed away from the areas of high radiation. The organism was a simple and fairly horrible thing: it was a blob, but it worked. It made headway through the wilderness, and when Fisher was part of it he felt anonymous.

They came to one of those towns — Talmadge, it was called, and on that same sign, Visit the Distillery and the Old Undershot Mill. But Rooks said he didn't see any Old Mill, and Gumbie said, "There's an ice-cream parlor." Talmadge had a town hall and a creek running through it — a trickle, but it had once been deep, from the look of the dam. The wrecked building on the dam must have been the mill. The town seemed full of bees, which gave it a hot, sleepy atmosphere. The lizards did not move from the sunlit shingles where they clung. The board fences had fallen.

"You're always talking about going to the bathroom, Fish," said Echols.

It was true: he used that expression whenever he unzipped his suit.

"Here's your chance," Echols said. He was pointing to a sign, Rest Rooms.

The main street was in good shape, but the gutters were weedy, and the trees had burst the sidewalks with their roots.

"I'd like to look in some of those houses," Fisher said.

"You wouldn't find much," Valda said. "We've looked ir lots of places like this. Even lived in some."

"We don't need anything here," Mr. Blue said.

They walked through the town without entering a building, without disturbing anything, and it seemed to Fisher as though the town was not dead but asleep, and they had not woken it.

Afterward, he had a vivid memory of the town — its still-white houses, and the sturdy bridge over the creek, and the shady streets. It was a decent place. It hadn't been vandalized. No evidence of aliens having raided it. The people from Talmadge had moved out their belongings, and locked their houses, and driven off. It was in a curve of the road, its lilacs were huge and untrimmed, the houses had porches. You probably wouldn't even need a breathing mask here. Fisher hadn't been afraid: Talmadge was a pretty little place — he congratulated himself on thinking that was so— and it was still in his memory, sunny and buzzing.

But he admitted that there were times when he was afraid, It was intelligent fear, he told himself. These aliens hadn't thought ahead — they solved problems when they encountered them: they did not anticipate them. Mr. Blue was fine, but he was only a twig they clung to. It was so far an organism without a brain.

"You do everything the hard way," Fisher said.

"That's the best way, the hard way," Mr. Blue said.

He actually believed that! Fisher said, "Sure, if you're a per-vert."

Mr. Blue said softly, "We are what we are because of our difficulties. We faced them together. If it had been easy we would have come apart. Difficulties showed us how to live here — doing things the hard way. That's why this trip is probably a good idea."

If you're weak you need to stick together, Fisher thought. But he had only noticed this after he had joined them. He told himself he wasn't weak; he felt safer among them. But what next?

They covered the distance, one hundred and twenty-two clicks, in five days.

On that fifth day, Mr. Blue said, "That's the States."

"What the heck?s this?" Fisher said, knowing the man could not say This is our quarter.

"This whole thing's the Territory."

"O-Zone, yeah," Fisher said. "And what's that again?"

"That's the United States."

"You are such an unbelievable tool," the boy said, feeling anxious and abusive.

They were at the edge of the last margin of woods, looking out across the long bald stretch of land that only Fisher called the Red Zone Perimeter.

"It's high security," he said. "It's deadly — there's commandos all over it."

Mr. Blue said, "Don't get upset, Fish. I always figured it was a good thing. It kept people out of the Territory, until recently."

The rest of them watched the flat land with interest, and Fisher gathered that Mr. Blue was probably the only one of them who had seen it before. And yet none of them seemed frightened — because they had no idea of the security here.

"Now what are you going to do?" Fisher asked.

Mr. Blue smiled at him and he wished he had not asked the question.

The man said, "Don't you want to go home, Fish?"

"This thing's lethal! There are aerial patrols with high-resolution cameras! They can shoot on sight!"

Fisher felt shabby and ill-prepared in his tattered suit and bruised helmet. He had not thought about Hooper for days, but he considered how his uncle had flown away without him, leaving him on the ground with these aliens, and all his bitterness and self-pity returned. That fuck-wit, that herbert, that willy. And he hadn't come back! In his anger was a measure of pride that he had done something that Hooper could never have managed: he had survived among these aliens, and more than that, he had walked across O-Zone. Hooper hadn't even been able to pilot his jet-rotor into the zone.

"The thing about those patrols," Echols was saying, "is they're just routine spotter flights. The high-resolution cameras mean that they're flying at tremendous altitudes. They've got so much technology they don't trust the naked eye."

"We're on the ground," Fisher cried.

"We're safer on the ground. If we were in a plane they'd take us out."

"If we walk across that perimeter we'll get burned. It's probably mined."

"No. It's a beam," Echols said. "Ask Mr, B" — and Mr. Blue nodded—"It's the kind of chemical laser you're alway boasting about. It's a red stripe running around the middle You've just got to think of a way of interrupting it."

Fisher glanced around. Their mouths were open, which gave them, he thought, the look of hungry monkeys.

"You can't interrupt it, you dong!" Fisher said, and they shut their mouths. "It's a coherent flow of beta flakes! About ten kilojoules of energy per square centimeter! You don't just stick your hand up and block it!" Fisher turned to Mr. Blue. "This total dick wants to get us all killed!"

"That's why I'm putting you in charge," Mr. Blue said.

A scarcely human sound came out of Fisher's mask: it was a mutter of pleasure, but there was a small squawk of vengeance in it.

"Yeah," Fisher said.

Someone sneezed — the dust was terrible here because of the defoliated perimeter. And not only no trees, it had also been bulldozed flat, the whole boundary.

"Shut up — I'm thinking," Fisher said, and continued thinking aloud, saying, "Because if you could block it you'd be in trouble. They'd pinpoint your interruption and get at you from an attack rotor. No, the best way is to slip under it, We don't know the wavelength — okay, that doesn't matter They're using about four megawatts. I've got six to ten in the short term. That chemical laser is practically on the ground— that's why this place has been leveled, to keep the beam low to prevent any infiltration. Funnily enough, they never thought of clandestine exfiltration."

"What's that?" Gumbie asked.

"What we're doing."

"We'll never slip under something that's lying on the ground, unless we dig under it."

"There's no time for digging," Fisher said. "We bend it instead. Boost it up a meter or so — give it an arch, using an alternative force field."

He saw that their mouths had dropped open again.

"With a counterbeam. It's fiber optics, fuck-wit. The beam bends," He was speaking into their mouths. "This weapon can do it. We just program it to fire a continuous exode full of Antigens."

"I've never heard of those," Echols said.

"Of course you haven't."

"I was a physicist, you dipshit!"

"I only discovered Antigons last year, wang-face!"

And then Echols smiled, and conceded the argument to Fisher and said he wanted to know more. But Fisher said it would take too long to explain, and even then they would probably not understand.

"An exode full of Antigons," Gumbie said. "That's powerful medicine!"

Mr. Blue said, "Give him room."

Fisher had never believed that he would be having this conversation early on a summer afternoon in this wild place of hot dust and still air, on the perimeter of the famous wilderness. He had always regarded himself as a theoretical physicist, dealing in the symbols at the margin of the keyboard and describing hypothetical forces. He had regarded numbers as primitive and misleading, like primary colors; but now he knew what "primitive" meant.

It meant this — these people in this place, sitting in the dust needing to be saved. And not just these aliens. "Primitive" meant everything outside his room at Coldharbor. Compared to the life he had led and the work he had done, all this was the past, and in some cases the distant past. He was with a tribe of savages, but even the commandos and technicians who secured the Red Zone were primitive — just a step up from the aliens. Their goonish delusion was their settled belief that they had the perfect security beam. But it could be bent!

"What if we get chased?"

"We'll unbend the beam and drop it on their heads!" He felt giddy, and then he went breathless again. "But they might try to jump us before we get set up."

"Then well burn them to a crisp," Mr. Blue said.

"Yeah."

The particle beam which Fisher had reprogrammed was mounted on a stone pedestal and secured with wire. Fisher gave the orders, panting and screeching as time passed. By late afternoon he was making his final adjustments. He had grown crankier as he worked-and more abusive. He had begun by shouting "Out of my way!" and "I'm in charge!" and at the end he was crying "Aliens! Aliens!" Then he went silent.

"The light's going."

"What's on the other side?"

"This dip better know what he's doing."

Fisher wasn't listening. He moved as though he was deaf, in a ponderous and mechanical way, and then he said softly, "We'll have to leave this beam to self-destruct, you know." There was steam on the inside of his faceplate, dust on the outside — smears of effort. "Then we won't have a weapon."

"We'll steal one. We'll snatch as many as you want."

"Yeah," Fisher said, and he brightened. "Hey, I keep forgetting you aliens are good at that!"

He did not notice the silence then.

"We've got about eight minutes to get across, and then it's out of power, the weapon self-destructs and the laser straightens — the kink goes out of it. We have to be on the other side by then."

He moved his thumbs on the weapon that aimed across the perimeter.

"It's working," he said. "My seven megawatts are boosting that beam. Hear it?"

There was a small continuous sound, like a bee in a jar.

"This is crazy. I don't see anything," Valda said.

"Believe me, I've made a space through there."

"Lead the way, Fish."

Fisher locked his faceplate and set off, holding his head down. The others followed in single file, keeping themselves at the same angle, as if ducking a low ceiling.

They were halfway across the gravelly perimeter when a spotter gunship appeared overhead and began maneuvering back and forth. As the gunship bounced, a ground patrol emerged in a dust cloud from the O-Zone side of the perimeter. It was a half-track, with a rack of missiles on its roof, and it was painted in both Federal and Red Zone stripes. It swerved and rattled at great speed toward the point in the perimeter where Fisher and the others had entered.

It had been Fisher's intention to make them believe that a break had occurred in the beam — after all, seven people were running across the perimeter. The driver of the halftrack must have been fooled, because he raised his head above the hatch and steered forward, giving chase. Still speeding, he headed toward the ragged bent-over fugitives.

"Hurry up!" Fisher shrieked. He was sobbing with fear, and trapped in his helmet his voice deafened him for a while. He did not know that no one could hear him. "Clear the beam! It's going off! They're coming after us!"

His honking voice, crying Hot pursuit, rang inside his head.

But as he had promised, the beam wavered and went off. There was no question of that, and although they could not see it die or see the meltdown of its self-destruction, that puff of smoke, there was another piece of proof. At the moment the Red Zone beam dropped and reasserted itself against the perimeter, the half-track was passing through it, and the vehicle exploded with its commandos. Its four missiles were ineffectually launched into the air in a succession of gusts.

"No one's ever done that before," Fisher was saying.

He liked speaking with his helmet on and his faceplate propped up. He believed it gave a special and rather eerie quality to his voice.

"They've penetrated hyperspace, they're living in orbit, and there's a station on the moon. But no one's ever exfiltrated O-Zone!"

They were pig-piled under a bluff in a shallow cave of loose earth. Their instinct was to hide. On the way out they had crossed an old road and had seen some houses that may have been inhabited. Each of the houses had a sign on it saying For Sale. That was how you knew there had been a vast excursion of nuclear waste; half a state declared a Prohibited Area; America's first O-Zone; a monumental catastrophe: the bungalows just outside it had For Sale signs nailed to their walls. Fisher said wasn't that incredible!

The others were silent.

"They tried to nuke us. We destroyed those fuck-wits!"

Their breathing made the pile rise and fall. They had never even thought of breaking out before! This was as strange to them as O-Zone was to him. He had opened the door and let them out. And though he understood their fear, and had once shared it, he felt powerful here.

"Yeah. I like it on the ground."

Something happened to the sky the next day — it swelled, its dome grew and became cluttered with folding clouds, and even the horizon advanced to a greater distance and became as ambiguous as dust. But it was not the sky, it was the water beneath it, a slipping gray-green thing like another bald perimeter littered with branches and broken crates and odd bottles and logs, and the far bank trimmed so low that it seemed like more water. "This here's the Mighty Miss," Gumbie said.

Hearing it said like that, Fisher wanted to cry, he was so pleased.

"I know," he said, but he hadn't taken it to be water. He had never imagined a river could look like this — he had only seen it from the tapes, when they had highballed overhead. But it was so different on the ground. It had a smell, it had a sound.

They lashed two logs together and made a long narrow raft that carried them up on a back-current and then downstream to the far shore. The river was so muddy it seemed to have no depth at all — they worried about going aground, though they bobbed like all the other pieces of spring flotsam.

"This suit has a buoyancy feature," Fisher said, and nearer the Illinois side he jumped in, shouting, "Wet exit!"

He was submerged in the river to his chin, and his helmet was all that showed. It was as though he were walking on the bottom. The raft made the shore, but the boy still paddled in his slow upright way. He was enjoying being a speck in this waterworld. His helmet bobbed across the water like a bucket in a flood.

"Fish," someone said.

They had seen Winslow some way off — the buildings, then the route signs, and at last the for Sale signs. Winslow's watchtowers seemed particularly ominous, and the land was flat enough for the checkpoints to be visible as gates on the highway. So they left the road and detoured around the town. High fences drove them farther away. They crossed farmland, some of it neglected and some of it still in use. The strips of trees that had been left as windbreaks had widened into shaggier patches of woods.

"There's plenty of water here," Mr. Blue said.

In O-Zone they had traveled only during the day; now, on the outside they traveled only at night. They marched quietly in the darkness. This terrain was different — wetter and unfamiliar. Unlike O-Zone it had a human smell — air soured by smoke, a whiff of decay, a sharpness in the light breeze that caught on their faces.

Keeping away from the lights of the town, they strayed into a cluster of darkened buildings, and they crouched near them until long after sunup, when it became clear that the place had been abandoned.

They sheltered in the farmhouse that day. They were disgusted by its dry rot and flimsy construction — the sagging roof, the shaky floor. The windows were dirty and useless, the barns still stank of sweating animals — of death and dirt. Rusty refrigerator, rusty kitchen machines, a sink full of spiders and mouse droppings, and strewn on the floor of another room old books that smelled like corpses.

"Is the United States all like this?"

Echols said no; Rooks said yes.

Fisher said, "I don't know!"

They moved into the overgrown garden, among fat flowering bushes and fir trees that had grown into steeples. Here they slept, beneath the sounds of insects and birds, while Fisher rummaged. His success had given him strength.

He found the car first — sunk in the driveway, buried to its fenders. Then he saw the dish and the cable, and he felt at last that he was in the same country as his mother and Hardy and that dimbo Hooper. He still had his helmet. He was glad that, even when it had seemed heavy, and he might have managed better without it, he had not chucked it. An alien would have shit-canned it! But the helmet had become a home to him, and he had stuck himself into it, and inhabited it, and had felt less lonely. He had not used the phone functions since his abduction — what was the point? It had a range of less than a hundred clicks. But using this dish to create a satellite link would extend its range, and he could transmit by relay.

He wished the aliens had been awake to see him tinkering with the dish and taking a reading of the sun. He took a malicious pleasure in mystifying them — there was power in mystery! He wanted to tease them, too. "What do you think I'm doing now?" he wanted to say. He could see them making monkey mouths. He wanted to quiz them and prove they were ignorant. "I live here," he could tell them. "This is my home!"

But he did not wake them. They knew now how smart he was. And why hurt them when he had gone to so much trouble to save them? The coordinates in his reading shocked him. He was still so far from New York! He put his helmet on to calm himself, and then he made a test transmission. He could not raise anyone at Coldharbor.

Then Hardy's voice, a recorded message: The Allbrights are presently traveling in Africa and are unobtainable. Please store your name and number on the following—

They had gone on vacation. They had known he had been abducted in O-Zone by aliens, and had packed their bags and gone tootling off to Africa, to sun themselves at some crummy garrison resort! The careless, lazy, irresponsible fuck-wits! Not only had they done nothing to help, they were not even in position when he needed them.

He began squawking. "Have completed clandestine ex-filtration O-Zone. The coordinates of my present position are—"

He felt his strength return as he spoke, and he was powerful again, sitting under the trees among the wildly growing plants — the long-necked flowers and the shrubby garden— talking calmly on his satellite link to Coldharbor, using the dish in the yard and the booster in his helmet. He saw himself in the most dramatic way, like a man on a lonely mission to another planet.

When he had finished he stood up and faced Mr. Blue, who had been sneakily waiting for him to finish and perhaps incriminate himself.

"Who were you talking to?"

"Nobody."

That was not odd: he spent most days talking to himself, usually in two voices, young and old, a challenging one and a reasonable one, and when he went to the bathroom — as he put it — he talked the whole time, murmuring and reasoning with himself, though he was only dimly aware of it.

"I heard you, Fish."

"There was no one at the other end."

And why was this so? He had been away, kidnapped in a Prohibited Area for over two months. They knew he had been stolen — Hooper knew, and of course he had told them. They had not found him! They weren't home! The answering machine didn't even say where in Africa they were. They didn't care that he was being held captive by aliens!

Fisher was angry that he could not tell Mr. Blue how he had been abandoned by the Allbrights.

He said, "Why don't you let me go?"

Mr. Blue wore a smile of strain, his lips drawn down and his eyes hollow. His voice was a whisper in a monotone. Fisher knew the man was angry, but he felt stronger now — he had shown them he could work wonders.

"We'll leave you here, if you want," Mr. Blue said.

All at once it seemed a terrible place — dangerous, worse than O-Zone, probably full of crooked police.

Fisher said, "If I hadn't pushed that beam up you'd never have slipped out of O-Zone."

Mr. Blue said, "You'd have starved without us. You'd be dead by now. There's bears and bobcats in the Territory. You didn't even know that."

"Who stole me in the first place!"

But even Fisher saw the absurdity in arguing outdoors— yelling hoarsely under the sun that dazzled the whole sky.

"Your uncle snatched Bligh," Mr. Blue said. "And when we get her back we'll hand you over. Why else do you think we're going to New York?"

"We'll never get there," Fisher said, suddenly despairing and seeing this vast landscape of grass as an inescapable trap.

"Any other way is dangerous for us. We'd be ambushed. If we stay in control we'll make it. But if you contact your people you'll weaken our position, and then we'll all be in danger."

The phrase your people sounded so cold. It reminded him that he was a prisoner.

"You need my brains!" Fisher said.

"You need us, too," Mr. Blue said. In his quiet anger there was a kindliness, something reasonable and gentle. It was why they followed him.

A bird started squawking, and Fisher thought how stupid all animals sounded when they cried out.

"Remember we're in this together," Mr. Blue said, and he glanced back at the aliens slumbering under the trees. "Don't betray those people."

More birds came down like scraps of paper in the field.

"If you weaken us you'll be weak too," Mr. Blue said. "You can still die."

His parting words silenced Fisher. And now he was waking the others. They had planned to stay another day here, but Mr. Blue had probably not believed him when he said he was talking to himself — probably suspected the message, because he changed his plans. At nightfall they set off through the fields under a horn of moon.

Mr. Blue had alarmed him by reminding him how he depended on them. He wondered whether he should risk another message — or should he simply trudge with them until it was over?

He had also come to see this trekking as a pleasure. It had been very hard, but he had survived the hard part, and now his pride helped him on. They were not in O-Zone any longer. This was middle America under a huge sky — balmy late-spring days, thickened with heat. And when he wasn't worried he felt himself part of this band of people — and not an alien but their secret leader. You need my brains. Mr. B had not denied it!

They continued into the night, past the eastern side of Winslow. They heard a chugging, like a motorboat. Fisher said it was probably an old rotor. But the sound merged into a pair of yellow lights coming toward them on the ground, and they saw they were near a road.

Mr. Blue said, "It takes guts to drive out here."

"It looks pretty damn safe to me," Echols said.

"No, no," Mr. Blue said softly. He was smiling in the dark — Fisher could tell. The man knew something. "There's hijackers around."

"Where?" Fisher said.

Mr. Blue showed Fisher his moon-white face.

"Right here, boy."

He told them to pile straw and grass on the road, a bar of it, from one side to the other. He had wanted to use branches, but there were none around — no big trees. Fisher complained that they were so backward out here they cut down trees for fuel. The willies burned trees to keep themselves warm!

"That's the idea," Mr. Blue said.

When the next vehicle approached they lit the straw and fanned it with their shirts.

The truck did not stop, but it slowed down, and Mr. Blue, Rooks, and Echols leapt aboard, catching hold of the ropes on the load — no shouts, no orders, just grunts and the movements of three men who looked magnetized.

They were carried by the roaring truck into the darkness, leaving four people standing by the scattered fire.

"Now we're completely ballistic," Fisher said, and his voice broke. "Those fuck-wits left us! They're gone!"

He felt the night close over him like a rising tide.

Before he gathered his strength to cry out again, the ten-wheeler returned, Mr. Blue in the driver's seat.

"I'm navigator," Fisher said. "I'm riding up front."

32

"We still get married out here—'course we do — and we take our weddings kind of seriously in Guthrie," the old man said slowly. He paused to let this sink in, so that what he was about to say would sound like an outrage.

But he was too slow, and while he fuddled with his pipe a red-faced woman behind him said, "They were animals. The one wearing the helmet was the worst."

"He told us to call him Batfish," someone else said.

The old man resumed. "We had a preacher and a church full of people. The whole entire town was there. And there was food in the Grange Hall, three tables of it — a real spread."

They were in the Guthrie courthouse: Hardy often heard of such buildings, and had seen some, but he had never been inside one. It was wood-paneled and smelled of dented varnish and leather cushions. It had an American flag, the state flag, and three paintings in gold frames. The big lollipop-shaped fan was dead. Hardy wondered whether they held trials here, but he feared that if he asked they might take it as a rude question — a suggestion that they were ridiculously old-fashioned. But they probably did have trials here, and church services down the street, and Future Farmers meetings in the Grange Hall. They had weddings!

Sluter was seated at the judge's high bench, Meesle and Murdick on either side, all of them in their Godseye uniforms, with the Snake-Eaters insignia; high-tech helmets with the faceplates down; and they spoke through the amplifiers in the grillwork of the throatpiece — it made a piercing sound.

Their flying suits were black, with blacked-out masks, and their antenna-coils shining silver. They had put on this battle gear when the alarm came from the station at Guthrie.

Nothing had ever seemed so incongruous to Hardy as the sight of these three vigilantes — they were wearing gloves, too! — in the wood-paneled courtroom. The Guthrie people said they would agree to testify only if they could remain anonymous — no names, no IDs, no numbers. And no cameras or recording devices in the courtroom. They were anonymous — anonymity made them talkative. Hardy had already heard an hour of this.

"After the church service, some of us went next door to make sure everything was ready. And that's when we saw them. Must have been ten of them."

"They looked like wolves, with food in their hands and food all over their faces," a woman said. To justify her interruption she glanced around, showing an insulted expression, as though she had been wronged. "They just stood in the hall — didn't even run."

"They were all in old shoes, except for him."

Sluter said, "Why didn't you burn them down right there, knowing they were aliens?"

"They were armed," a young man complained. "They had our weapons! We weren't allowed to take our irons into the church for the wedding. We left them here with the food, assuming they'd be safe. That's the last time we make that mistake. They were the ugliest goddamn people I've ever seen."

"'Don't move," they said—"

Witnesses were leaping to their feet all over the courtroom.

"'Don't do nothing. If you follow us, you burn.' The one with the helmet, he was the worst one. 'We'll nuke you. We'll lay the land open and drop you into the crack.' Stuffing sandwiches into his face mask the whole time."

"They would have killed someone, if we hadn't agreed."

Now Hardy spoke up for the first time. He was sitting under the American flag, on the steps of the aisle. He had taken his helmet off. He had become worried by the anger of the townspeople, and especially by the effect it was having on the Snake-Eaters.

"They didn't kill that truck driver," Hardy said. "They just threw him out of his cab."

"They hijacked the vehicle," Meesle said, leaning over to look at Hardy. "That's grounds for hot pursuit. The shoot-on-sight rule applies."

"No one was hurt here in Guthrie," Hardy said.

"They terrorized us," the old man said. "Anyone who doesn't call that a crime is as bad as they are."

Hardy knew he was losing. For the past two days the Godseye troopers had talked of nothing but killing the aliens. "Or else we don't have the right to call ourselves Snake-Eaters." It had been bad enough receiving explicit encouragement from the commandos at the Red Zone Perimeter; but the discovery of Hooper and that girl at the farm outside Winslow had maddened them much more.

"This mission is classified," Sluter had said to Hooper. "I could have killed you and your pup!"

Hooper had been shaken by the surprise visit from Godseye; and he had appealed to Hardy: "Let me help you look for the kid."

"We're looking for outlaws," Sluter said. "They outsmarted you — you lost the kid. You gave that kid away!"

"Please don't follow us," Hardy said, for what good had Hooper been so far? He had lied, he had stalled, he had been ineffectual, he seemed to care only for this young girl. "We can handle it. We'll find him."

And so Hooper Allbright had been left behind, but that conversation between him and the Snake-Eaters had seemed to whip up their blood. They were furious when they left him, and Hardy feared that in their anger they might kill Fizzy too. Now, in Guthrie, they seemed to make no distinction between Fizzy and the aliens — it was as though Fizzy had become an outlaw himself. And then he began to wonder whether the boy was still among them.

"Wasn't there a young boy there?" he asked in the Guthrie courtroom.

"They were all old and dirty," a man said.

"The one in the suit and helmet?"

"Old and dirty."

"I've never seen clothes like that," the red-faced woman said in a disgusted way. "Even Roaches and Trolls, the pictures I've seen of them, don't look that bad. We never had the real thing here, I guess we've been lucky — Guthrie's a quiet place. It's terrible to think there's creatures like that around."

"We'll find them," Meesle said. "We know what to do with them."

Hardy said, "I think they might have ditched Fizzy."

"He's with them. 'Batfish.' The one in the helmet. Snatching food. The worst one. That's got to be him."

"He's fifteen years old!"

"He seems to be able to look after himself," Meesle said.

Hardy hoped that was so — hoped Fizzy was alive and not in a ditch, where the aliens had thrown him after taking his suit and helmet. Hardy hated this talk of pursuit and pouncing, and though he was sorry he had started them on this chase, he was glad he was still with them: he still believed he might be able to restrain them. But Fizzy might not even be alive, and if he were, Hardy wondered whether he would be able to rescue the boy from their onslaught.

"I want to take down the testimony of everyone in this town who saw these aliens," Sluter said from the judge's bench. "I don't care about your names and addresses. But I need a complete list of missing articles and a description of the creatures."

Hardy listened very carefully to the statements. And he was impressed by the gentle, outdoor faces of the townspeople— their bewilderment-seemed like kindliness. They were surprised and insulted that Guthrie had been invaded. They said they knew such things happened near Chicago and St. Louis, and all over the east — and no one was safe in Florida. But Guthrie was poor, remote, and self-sufficient. It was full of woodburners and simple-lifers. They had two gas stations. They made bread here, they raised chickens, they went to school, they got married. No one ever moved here and in the past few years they had hardly bothered to operate the checkpoints except when they received a raid alert, which was not even twice a year.

And that was why they had been so scared when they saw those aliens chewing their food and taking their weapons in the Grange Hall. This was the nightmare they had always been warned about by the Federal marshals. They saw how easily they had been invaded and now they would have to go back to the old time-wasting ID system, and all the checks: scanners, roadblocks, watchtowers, and aerial patrols.

"We can't afford that," they said.

"Want to know the price you pay for not securing yourselves?" Sluter asked them. And then he told them the price, in the Godseye formula: aliens, blacks, prostitutes, polygamists. .

The aliens had come straight up the interstate, I-92, and had turned off at Exit 29, the main road into Guthrie. They had driven their ten-wheeler down Main Street without anyone stopping them. No one had even noticed that aliens had come to town!

They had abandoned the truck on Curtis Street, behind the bowling alley, and as it was a Saturday afternoon (this witness pronounced the word Sarradee) — and a wedding day— all the stores were closed and no one was in the center of town. That was a big mistake. The aliens had broken in Warwick's and taken six pairs of trousers, a box of assorted sweatshirts, five blankets, and some haversacks. They must have stashed them, because they were not wearing any of those clothes when they were next seen.

"Only six pairs of trousers," Hardy said, so that they would remember.

But Sluter urged the witness to continue. "Where were they seen?"

This was at Arthur's Rod and Gun on the Service Road entrance. A woman passing on her way to the wedding had seen some people fiddling with the steel shutters. She had thought it was kids. There hadn't been aliens here for years— high-school kids sometimes caused trouble, but aliens were the last creatures she would have expected, though one alien had apparently worked in the box factory for years without anyone knowing.

"You mentioned kids," Hardy said. "So there might have been a young boy among them?"

"Nope," the woman said, and Hardy hated her certainty. She said she had thought they were kids, but later she realized they were adults behaving like kids, as aliens did.

A man stood up and said he was Arthur, the owner of the shop, and that he could confirm that there had been damage to the lock on the steel shutters. Nothing had been stolen from him.

But Fizzy would have been able to burst a lock, Hardy thought, and again began to doubt that the boy had been among the aliens the woman had seen.

"It doesn't look too good for your kid," Meesle said, rubbing it in with a sort of cruel commiseration. "They might have chewed him up and spit out the pieces."

Hardy looked fiercely into the black faceplate: there was no face visible.

"But they're not going to chew us up," Meesle went on, defying Hardy.

It was now three in the afternoon. When the Godseye gunship landed just before noon it seemed that the only sighting had been at the Grange Hall — the aliens plundering the reception, stuffing their mouths with food, and warning the wedding guests to keep away. There was one story.

Murdick had said, "Let's go after the bastards!"

But Sluter said no. "Everyone's story is the same," he said. "That proves they're lying."

So he had held the hearing in the courthouse; and more sightings were remembered. You don't forget a thing like that, one man said, contradicting himself. The aliens had been seen behind the town hall, near Jack's Tractors and the Redemption Center and the firehouse; at the baseball field, near the War Memorial and on the way to the high school. Some people had seen two or three, others swore there were a dozen, and one man had seen twenty, marching four abreast like a color guard. They were bearded, they were black, they were dark, they were ragged, they were doglike; you couldn't see their eyes.

One man denied these various descriptions. "They blended in perfectly," he said. "They could have been citizens of Guthrie — let me finish! — on their way to the wedding. That's why I wasn't suspicious."

A woman said that she had seen some men, stark naked, at her bedroom windows. They had climbed up to the windows and stood with their feet against the sills, pressing their bodies against the glass and darkening the room. While she was speaking, the woman became short of breath and began to sob, and then she broke down completely, uttering a little threadlike wail that resembled a distant cry in a tunnel,

"This unfortunate woman is not responsible for what she is saying," another witness said.

Sluter said, "She's clinical."

"She was evacuated from O-Zone," the witness said.

"Some of those people settled here in Guthrie. Most of them died."

A tally was made of everything the aliens had stolen. It was a very long list, and it included food, weapons, clothes, and electronic equipment.

"And you say they left town on foot with all this stuff?" Hardy asked.

When they were challenged, several more of the townspeople contradicted what they had said, or withdrew their testimony.

"Why don't you just go after them, and leave us alone?" a man said, exasperated by the questioning.

"We want to know the size of the problem," Sluter said. "We need some more numbers."

Hardy guessed that, faced with these different versions of the alien invasion, the Snake-Eaters were becoming nervous and perhaps afraid — and he knew this was worse, because it would make them uncontrollable. He had long ago decided that it was ignorant cowardice that had turned them into killers. They were afraid of the aliens, and hated them, and because Fizzy was with them he seemed like just another fugitive.

Slipping out of the courthouse by a side door, Hardy stepped into the glace of afternoon sunlight. The air tasted of hot painted shingles and the sweet-sour tang of fresh grass clippings. He passed a telephone cubicle and dialed Moura in New York. His call was shunted to the answering machine.

"I'm standing on the main street of a town called Guthrie. We haven't found Fizzy yet, though there's apparently a band of aliens roaming around. They were here this morning. But I don't know whether he's among them. Call me on the Godseye number if you get another message from him."

He wanted to say more, and imagining the tape spools turning in the machine, he was reminded of his hesitation. He glanced up and down the street.

"They have fire hydrants and streetlights."

There were trees planted by the roadside, and neither the ftrehouse nor the police station was fenced in.

"Guthrie is indescribable, Moura."

Some children passed him and then turned and stared at him.

"They think we're aliens here."

After he hung up he looked more closely at the town. It wasn't indescribable — he hated the word anyway, as a result of Fizzy mocking it: Nothing is indescribable! But the town was not like any be had seen for years. He realized he had traveled too much in poor countries, his work had taken him too far afield, he had neglected the heart of America. They were still walking around in overalls here, digging potatoes, burning wood, driving cars. Guthrie resembled Winslow in its small size and its lack of security. In its way it seemed a fine old town, even if here and there it was a bit battered.

A great fear had come and gone, taking some people with it and leaving a few landmarks, like the watchtowers and the checkpoints. That was about fifteen years ago — the terrible alien scare that occurred at the same time as O-Zone was declared a Prohibited Area, the two events in Hardy's lifetime that had changed the country most. But that was the past: Guthrie was asleep again. It wasn't worth plundering, it wasn't touched by the world, and it had simply continued to exist without much crime or much technology. It was a town that stayed home — and that was so rare in the world. The townspeople were largely unguarded and respectable. Today was one of their terrible days: they were reminded of their old fear.

But they would brighten up. Many of them were old folks, who would have been shocked to see New Yorkers in masks, or painted, or stark naked in jewels, or wearing nothing but aprons. Even these Godseye helmets and faceplates seemed to startle them, and the gunship parked on the lawn in front of the town hall was still attracting attention hours after it had landed. No one seemed to mind that its presence had snarled traffic and that the Godseye troopers were a greater source of interest than the aliens had been.

The people in Guthrie seemed decent — and they were not very angry. They carried weapons, of course, but that was an old habit and a hard one to break.

A woman who had seen Hardy at the courthouse stopped him on the sidewalk and invited him to her house.

"Want a piece of pie?"

The sentence was so strange to him he found himself saying no and translating it to himself; and then he laughed at its beauty.

The afternoon sun shone on Guthrie without heating it much this fading day in late spring. A light flutter ran through the leaves in the trees above Hardy's head, and a ripple in the ivy on the brick wall of the library made it seem like a curtain swelling in the breeze. He heard the taunt of children's voices several streets away. He had the strong sense that the town was alive. It was not only the children and the lawns and the people gathered on the sidewalks chattering about the aliens and the troopers — but the very houses looked alive. There was something handmade and human about their chimneys and windows, their fences and gardens. You could smell cooking here. No rotors in the sky — he hated the thought of that racket in New York.

He was outdoors at last. It was not the New York sense of safety he had, that came from being imprisoned on the island-city; it was a looser, easier feeling of well-being — and it helped to be away from the troopers and their obsessions. He was glad in Guthrie that such places existed, where you could breathe without a mask.

He hoped that Fizzy had come here and had time to experience the same feeling.

All this while he had been walking along side streets, to test his impressions. Then he heard a harmless commotion, and following the sound to a sloping road, he came to a brick-and-glass building. Just behind it, enclosed by a high fence, a group of people on a set of bleachers cheered a baseball game. He had thought the whole town had turned up at the courthouse to describe the invasion of aliens, but here were fifty people who hardly seemed to care.

He took off his helmet and boots, unzipped his flying suit and stepped out of it. He made his equipment into a bundle, which he tucked under his arm, and in his street clothes he entered the ballpark.

He had never been interested in baseball, but this previous lack of interest made him especially attentive now. A man stepped to the plate and after several swings hit the ball into the outfield. Hardy was inspired to clap with the spectators. This happened again — another hit. Hardy stood up with the rest of the people. Then a young man hit the ball over the far fence and Hardy heard himself yelling with pleasure.

It seemed to him that these people in Guthrie knew a secret that he was still learning. He wondered how many other towns there were like this in America. Few of the people were Owners, probably, but that did not seem to matter here. Most of them were visibly hard-up, yet had their lives changed? It was not that the town was poor or bankrupt and that there was no one in the watchtowers; but rather that it went on surviving in a dignified and tidy way. They still cut the grass, and weeded the flowers, and put up the flag: that didn't cost anything. Guthrie was like a memory — not his own, but a recollection of stories he had been told. It tormented him to know that after seeing the white frame house surrounded by the green lawn and the clipped hedge, he would have to go away.

That was what "indescribable" meant: what he had not told Moura. The simple truth had not struck him then. He wanted to call her back and say This is the past.

And that was why the town had most likely suffered a greater violation from Godseye than from those aliens. He thought: They don't want us here, they don't need us here. The aliens had swept through, reminding them of the old world. But Godseye was still there, hovering and murmuring, like the intimation of a new kind of terror — frightening everyone with its masks, and demanding information, and filling the citizens with dread.

"Evidently one of them got into the high school," Murdick said. "We've got a witness."

Murdick had seen Hardy on the porch of the courthouse, leaning against a column, and while Hardy waited he went inside and found the witness, a boy of nine. He had a bristly head and a broken front tooth and he wore a T-shirt lettered Obee's Apple Farm. He seemed particularly afraid of Murdick, who was still in his Godseye battle gear — black flying suit, black helmet and opaque mask; and he was gesturing with his explosive baton.

"It was over there," Murdick said, pointing the weapon in the direction of the school. "In the basement or something. Speak up, sonny."

"The cafeteria," the boy said, clearing his throat.

Hardy said, "Can you describe him?"

"Kind of old. Kind of strange."

"So it couldn't have been your kid," Murdick said.

"We'll be right back, Willis," Hardy said, and walked over to the school with the boy. He easily gained entrance. He remarked that nothing seemed to be locked around here. He had simply strolled into the ballpark and now they were in the school. The boy did not seem to understand, which Hardy took as a sign that he did not find it remarkable. It really was the past.

"He came out of that door," the boy said.

The cafeteria smelled of bread crusts and stale milk and fried food and ammonia.

"Where did he go?"

"He saw me in here, eating my lunch. It was just before the game. The rest of the players left. But all I do is help with the Scoreboard, so I had some extra time."

"Did he say anything to you?"

"He made a funny noise. Then he picked up my sandwiches and smelled them."

The boy straightened his shoulders — he was afraid, remembering, and his fear stiffened his posture.

"He took one of the sandwiches. He ate the whole thing. I didn't care, as long as he didn't hurt me. He kept making these noises."

The boy took a deep breath, but did not exhale.

"It was my jelly sandwich. Then he called me Herbert. I was afraid to tell him my real name's Glenn. I didn't even know he was an alien. I thought he might have been one of the welders from the garage. Was he going to kill me, mister?"

"No," Hardy said, and was greatly relieved. "But what's in that room?"

"Computers?" Nervousness had turned his answer into a question.

At the farmhouse near Winslow, Hooper had first regretted that he was being forced to stay behind — and he hated the humiliation of being threatened. But then he realized that the Godseye troopers were lost and that Hardy was merely a passenger, so what did it matter if he spent the night there with Bligh? They slept in the rotor and when the sunrise warmed the windows they woke and made love, and slept some more.

"Such long grass," she said later, and left the rotor and ran into it.

Hooper, seeing her disappear ahead of him, felt he was in danger of losing her — the feeling was very distinct after they made love.

"I'll never be able to please you," Hooper said.

"I'm pleased here," she said.

She was very bright. She had the ability of the young to bounce back. Her memory seldom seemed to trouble her. She laughed easily, and became passionate quickly, and when it passed she was talking about the watchtowers and were there rats in that house?

Hooper had made love to her in an urgent and subduing way and yet afterward felt like a victim of it. She made an attempt to reassure him; but she did not understand. It was another paradox of her being fifteen that she was practically unconscious of her body, and yet he could hardly take his eyes off her. She was always half-smiling and saying, What are you looking at? She didn't know!

He wanted her to desire something that only he could provide. He needed her to tell him what she wanted. And his motive was not only to make her happy, but to make himself happy that way. But she was happy with nothing, so he was left out.

"I hated those men," she said. She was so young her teeth still seemed a bit oversize and her neck very thin. Her breasts were small, yet they were still growing! "I think they're dangerous. Not your brother, but the others."

"My brother's afraid — and he's given up on me."

And Hardy had not heard the worst of it. Sluter had hissed at Hooper, "If you follow us we'll shoot you down."

And they had flown the Godseye gunship into the darkness, their rotor blades whanging the low branches.

But, after all, staying behind had given Hooper and Bligh the advantage. On their return from the walk they had heard a signal from the rotor. The receiver was taking a directed message from a town three hundred clicks east of here— Guthrie. It was Fizzy, driving a transmitter in the high-school computer room — he had started calling himself "commander" again — and aiming at the dish in this ruined garden.

He had probably just walked into the room and walked out, for Hooper's message was returned to him with the code comment: Not receiving.

"At least we know where to find him," Hooper said.

Flying east with Bligh, Hooper had heard the general alarm — the Guthrie transmission: alien alert. He realized then that he was too late to find the boy. The aliens had fled and taken Fizzy with them, and the Godseye gunship — he could hear Sluter roaring on the alien-alert frequency — was on its way to Guthrie. So Hooper had done nothing more than circle the town.

"It looks like a nice place," he said. "They're wearing skirts. God, I love the word 'skirts.' Want one?"

Bligh laughed and put her knees together, and they had flown on, scanning the ground for the fugitives.

33

Fisher's memory was perfect. He had told Mr. Blue that, yes, unfortunately, he was afraid of the dark — Moura's fault for mashing the lights off once when he was three — but it didn't matter if he went blind, because he could remember clearly everything he had ever seen. What was the point in seeing it over and over again with his eyes when it was printed perfectly on his brain? Experience and memory made eyesight irrelevant, and Fisher had always been bored by repetition. He had never believed that the world outside his room mattered much.

He felt so foolish now. He wasn't afraid of the dark anymore — why had he blurted it out to this alien? And there was the other error — a great deal worse.

Months ago in Firehills, at the New Year's party, he had run the tape of the trip out. The party guests had watched it and they had congratulated themselves on having taken such a dangerous trip to O-Zone. And then Fisher had analyzed it. In his analysis, ruined towns and mobs and beaten people had appeared in the long desolate panning shot from New York to O-Zone. It had all looked like a route through the worst part of America, and shaken-down places like Guthrie and Winslow and Loogootee and Seymour (they had just left Seymour today) had seemed dreadful: hot dangerous horror towns in the dusty midwest.

No — leave it out! He had been wrong. But how could he have been so wrong? Anyway, he knew it now: he was on the ground. The camera had lied, overdramatized the action, darkened the shadows, exaggerated the poverty and ruin.

And the scanner had overreacted. I was frightened, he explained to himself, so it seemed dangerous. But where was the danger here? It was not only bearable, it could be downright pleasant. Those savage-looking towns were a pushover — practically harmless. The patched streets and stained roofs and empty watchtowers of these so-called outposts had misled him. They were simple little places! They had drugstores and bus stations and supermarkets and high schools. The stoplights worked. No one wore helmets, very few wore masks.

Fisher had said beforehand, "You're going to see some dongs and dimbos running around naked, pretending they're Starkies. Guys in horror-masks. Women in aprons, with their bums sticking out and their oinkers joggling. It's the fashion."

He had been thinking of New York. It was all he knew. But in Guthrie the people wore dungarees and overalls and sweaty hats, and some women wore skirts. The children ate ice cream. The wedding was well-attended. White dresses. Flowers, Church bells rang.

"Just because people are poor it doesn't mean they're dangerous," Fisher said soon after they arrived, when he knew he had been wrong. "It doesn't necessarily mean they're dim-bos, either."

"What a wise child you are," Echols said.

"I wouldn't mind staying here awhile," Gumbie said. "Think my name's in their computer?"

"They'll kill us," Mr. Blue said.

"Not me, they won't," Fisher said. "I'm legal. I've got an ID. I'll say I'm Fisher Allbright, and they'll keel over!"

But then they had behaved like outlaws, taking the weapons arid plundering the wedding reception and, as they moved through town, snatching what they needed. Fisher had felt brave and dangerous, and when the terrified woman in the Grange Hall had asked him who he was he had lifted his faceplate and yawned at her and said, "Batfish!"

They had lingered in Guthrie and put themselves into greater and greater danger, until at last they heard the approaching rotor and fled. After scattering, they evaporated, and regrouped in the dark. They seized a van from a pair of lovers, who were too surprised to do anything but surrender the keys when they saw the seven faces pressed against their windows.

"Aliens! Swarm crime!" Fisher cried, liking the game. And then he added, "Front-seat window for me! I'm navigator!"

They piled in and drove slowly all night on Route 50, stopping often — whenever they suspected they were being followed, and usually delaying themselves further by eating the food they had brought from Guthrie. They had sneaked into those other towns — Loogootee and Seymour: crawled down their streets in the van and read the signs, looked in the store windows. Shoe stores, banks, car dealers. Riteway Drugs. Alder's Griptite Tools. Ralph-O-Tronics, Pinsker's Pet Shop.

Fisher said, "It's the past."

"Looks like the future," Valda said.

"No," Fisher said. "The future's familiar. This is a mystery."

"Not to me."

Toward dawn they were rolling past damp fields, and way at the back of those fields the sun appeared in three wide layers of light in a dusty green sky. Caution — Low-Fly ing Aircraft, a sign said. Nearer the airfield, outside Marengo (another old-new town), they ditched the van and burrowed under the perimeter fence, using the tools they'd brought from O-Zone.

"These clunkers actually work," Fisher said, stabbing the sandy dirt with a shovel.

They positioned themselves in the bushes at the end of the runway, where the planes landed and turned before taxiing to the small terminal. "Looks like a shoebox! Traffic controller probably yells out the window!"

But no one was listening to Fisher. They were crouched in the morning heat, the fudgy-looking runway giving off a stink of oil.

"They'll just fly away when they see us waving guns at them," Rooks said.

"We'll command them to let us board," Fisher said, fussing with the radio in his helmet. "If they don't, we'll nuke them."

Just then a fat flapping plane submerged them in its roaring noise.

"Think you can yell loud enough, Fish?"

But Fisher's head was down. He had found the right frequency and was monitoring the approach of another aircraft.

They hid until a ten-seater radioed its landing and touched down, and when it swerved toward them on the runway Fisher broke into the transmission and ordered the pilot to hold. The plane paused, and rocked. The control tower demanded to know who had overridden the instructions. Then seven people surrounded the plane, holding their weapons up.

"Swarm crime!" Fisher said, laughing because it was so easy.

The rest happened quickly: the steps were dropped and the passengers hurried onto the runway, and the seven armed people boarded.

"Aliens!" the pilot was hissing into his microphone as Fisher entered the cockpit and took the seat next to him. He pointed his weapon at the pilot's throat.

"I'm not an alien, you fucking herbert! Look at me!"

He was honking into his helmet.

"Your security here is terrible," Fisher said. "You people don't know the first thing about crime control. Haven't you heard of perimeter beams? You've got these stupid wacky fences that even a shit-wit could get through, if he wanted. I had a shovel — I dug my way in! You herberts deserve to get hijacked."

The pilot meanwhile was trying to answer him.

"Up!" Fisher said, outshouting the pilot. "Get us up! I'm driving the computer! I'm navigating!"

When they were in the air he turned and saw lowered heads. The hesitant plops of their puking disgusted him.

"Haven't you guys ever been in a plane before?" Then he remembered, and laughed in his strange groaning way, and tried to share the joke with the stone-faced pilot. "Hey, it's their first time up!"

The pilot's expression softened to pleading.

"Aliens!" Fisher said, intending to explain.

It was a short flight, less than an hour, but for nearly the whole of that time Fisher ridiculed the plane's instruments.

"These were obsolete twenty years ago! It's all needles! It's got bells and whistles!"

The pilot said they were low on fuel. Fisher saw it was true, and mocked him for not carrying a spare tank. Then he demanded to be taken down.

"Going down by hand! What a toilet! This is like driving an old car. You're actually using your feet, you willy!"

There was no airport nearby. They came down on a back road in Ohio, rolling past a sign that said "Bixby 4 km."

"Take anything you want — but please—" But the pilot said no more; he was too ashamed to say Don't hurt me.

"We don't collect antiques," Fisher said.

The others laughed, and over the next two days, hiking across fields by night, and sleeping by day, they repeated the sentence; and Fisher was proud of having pleased them — but what was the joke? All this time he was directing them, taking his bearings from the stars and monitoring police broadcasts. Roadblocks were common here on the interstates, but by following Fisher's directions they kept on back roads.

On several occasions, hearing low-flying aircraft or ground vehicles approach, they evaporated. Each time it happened quickly, without a word, and yet the method varied. The first time, they scattered and sank into the fields; the second time, they gathered, pressing themselves together, and moved in a mass and evaporated that way.

Fisher was impressed by these escapes — he called them monkey maneuvers. But he was prouder of the listening devices in his helmet, and his skill with radio navigation, and his reckonings by the stars.

"Think Bligh could do this?"

He meant: What good was she? He had always resented being swapped for an alien.

"Bligh wouldn't have to do that," Rooks said. "If Bligh was with us, we wouldn't be here."

"You'd be lost without me!"

Mr. Blue said, "If we didn't have you, we wouldn't need you. I told you, you're the problem."

"I'm the solution!"

But he was enjoying himself now. Being on the ground had corrected many of his misconceptions. He did not feel like a prisoner any longer.

"Next stop is Pittsburgh." He laughed, twisting his face into a frown, and the noise came out of his helmet. "It's a sealed city!"

"I'm going to miss that laugh of yours," Echols said.

Fisher explained that unlike Guthrie or Loogootee or Seymour or Marengo — those sleepy towns in the cornfields — Pittsburgh was very secure. It had rivers and bridges; all the access roads had checkpoints. Like New York, its physical features had helped make it secure. It was a natural fortress.

"You can't get in without an ID," Fisher said. "Without IDs you don't have a legal existence. They don't have any qualms about killing you, because you guys are already dead. But not me! I just flash my disc and they start saluting."

"Where are we?"

"Near Somethingopolis."

"We're skipping Pittsburgh," Mr. Blue said.

In their detour around the city that night they were slowed by fences, and rushing one in the darkness, Valda stepped on a rusty spike, injuring her foot. It was a deep cut, exposing the bone in one of her toes — raw meat and tattered skin.

"That's what you get for laughing at my boots," Fisher said. "You're not in O-Zone now, you know."

A new person had emerged in him over the past week or so — ever since crossing the Red Zone Perimeter. It had first seemed like a mood, and then a phantom, and now it had asserted itself and possessed him. It was older, bossy, mocking, confident: the "Batfish" from Guthrie, the copilot from Marengo. His voice was taunting and loud, his elbows stuck out, his helmet clattered on his head when he walked. I live here, he seemed to say. I know better. But he had also mastered many of the aliens' own skills. He could find food, he could sleep on the ground, he could evaporate when they did. He was stronger than the younger Fisher, but he was just as intelligent, and Fisher thought: When my brain turns to mush and I can't do any advanced math, I'll still be strong.

"If you don't get an antitetanus shot within forty-eight hours, you're risking lockjaw."

Valda worried and limped, keeping one shoulder high, and Fisher was so intrigued by her silent suffering he knocked his head against a low branch.

"Didn't hurt!" he cried, and it hadn't — he wanted them to think he was being brave. But he had cracked his radio, and thereafter its hum made it almost unintelligible.

"It hammered my accumulator!" he complained. He had been listening to Owners' and police broadcasts. Now, he said, he'd have to make a trip into Pittsburgh to find another accumulator.

"This is the best helmet you can get," he said. "It's better than most human heads!"

"Wait up," Mr. Blue said. He was looking at the lighted sky, a pile of yellow clouds: it was all they could see of Pittsburgh.

Fisher said, "We can't travel without a radio. And Valda's going to get muscle rigidity and tonic spasms. Lockjaw's a misnomer that some dimbo gave it. It's tetanus. The neuro-toxic component's called tetanospasmin. It's one of the deadliest poisons known to man." Fisher grew excited as he spoke. "No one else can go with me! They'll get arrested! They'll get nuked!"

Echols was saying to Mr. Blue, "Is this a good idea?"

But Fisher gloated. "If Valda doesn't get a jab she'll be foaming at the mouth! And you'll need my radio to keep away from Feds and security people. I'm giving you raw data."

"He might not come back," Echols said. "What'll we do then?"

They had started talking to each other about him, as if he was deaf and didn't matter. Aliens!

"We'll put cowshit on the wound," Mr. Blue said. "Cowshit's great for tetanus."

"You horrible dim fucking willy," Fisher said — his wonderment gave a lilting tone to his abuse—"that's the sickest thing I've ever heard in my life."

"And yet it's true."

They were seated on the ground in the early-morning darkness with their backs against a grassy bank, preparing themselves for the dangers that daylight always presented. The aliens were silent, like small children or animals under a heavy falling sky of terrible blackness. They had never looked stranger or more savage.

When Fisher looked again they were gone: evaporated.

"Cowshit!"

He had thought of saying good-bye, or thanking them, because he had no intention of going back to them. It wasn't stealth that prevented him, and not the idea that they might conclude that he was running off, and seize him — no, he just didn't feel strongly enough about them to bother shifting his faceplate so they could hear him.

They had terrorized him, they had pushed him, they had forced him to walk and tried to wear him out, and then when they had needed him they had turned to him blankly and said, "Help." He had steered them out of trouble. And they had stolen him from Hooper's rotor! What was there to thank them for? He wondered whether they were really convinced of his intelligence. Possibly Mr. Blue and Echols realized that he had some power, but the others weren't bright enough to understand his special qualities. It took brains to appreciate brains.

That was why he had said, "I don't know what I'm going to do without you folks."

Because sarcasm was always best when it was used on people who didn't understand it.

Then he said sharply, "Don't even think of following me. If they catch you near that city, you'll get burned."

He could have disguised his feelings and said, "I won't be long." Instead he turned his back on them. He wanted them to suspect that he might not return; he wanted to put them in suspense. They deserved to worry for all the worry they had caused him. Would they, as aliens, be conscious of the fact that he had not said good-bye or thank you?

The full force of it had probably hit them now that he was gone and the darkness was piled on them. They knew that they were lost.

He found a main road.

"We've got a security check up ahead," the bus driver said in a cautioning voice, looking Fisher up and down as he boarded.

They had big wheezing rubber-wheeled buses here!

"I figured," Fisher said. "It'd be pretty pointless to seal the city if they didn't have tight security."

"They sometimes do spot scans," the driver said. "I'm telling you for your own good." He spoke in a voice of gentle warning. A stunner was strapped to his leg. He spoke from inside the driving capsule. "They can be very thorough."

"Good!" Fisher said. It was a torn-off squawk, as he pushed to the back of the bus, where he found a seat. It was the first bus ride of his life: But after what I have been through, why should I worry about taking a bus?

The stares of the other passengers annoyed him so much he clapped his faceplate down and raised his antennae. The passengers watched the slender probes grow out of the top of his helmet. Fisher folded his arms across his muddied suit. He had mended the rips on his knees and his sleeves with sticky tape from Guthrie. He had used adhesive tiller on the gouges in his boots. His pale fingers showed through his split gloves.

He knew the bus passengers were interested in him — a bit too interested. They were commuters, probably not even Owners, just pass-holders and permit-people. They never went anywhere.

"Just back from a mission," he said.

The amplifier turned his voice into a series of wavering quacks and solemn chuckles. The defective accumulator had robbed his voice of authority.

"Cla-heep-ssified," he said, cursing the helmet and vowing to have it fixed.

At the security check — a gate, just before the bridge — a man in uniform boarded and looked down the crowded aisle. He examined the driver's ID, but did no more than that — no scan, no check of passengers' IDs, no photographs, no further questions.

"What a clam," Fisher said, as the big bus started across the bridge in the morning sunlight. "There could be a diseased alien riding on this vehicle! How do they know there isn't a weirdo illegal Roach on board just sitting here getting lockjaw and about to take a spasm?"

He enjoyed being watched like this: they were listening— you could tell.

"Maybe he's fungoid. Maybe he's got an iron. Maybe he's disguised as an Owner, wearing a lot of expensive gear, only underneath he's a stink-heep-ing wreck. Maybe he's got a forged ID. And he's going to be let loose in downtown Pittsburgh! What a great security check!"

Long before the bus pulled into the terminal, the passengers had begun drawing away from him and gathering at the doors. Fisher hated them for their rudeness. And they thought aliens were bad!

He attracted the same attention on the street. Was it this wonky helmet? It must have been — no one wore them here, no one wore masks. Yet he was happy. He liked these rising streets, and the bridges on three sides of the city, which bulked on the hilltop like a citadel, high above the empty steel mills.

Why had the bus been waved through the checkpoint? Mr. Blue could have come with him. Any alien could penetrate this city!

"Excuse me, sir."

He heard that as the faintest whisper, and kept walking, until he was seized by the arms. His helmet was twisted off his head. He yawned at the two state security men — black uniforms, black helmets, funnel guns, stunners, shiny boots.

"It's about time," Fisher said, biting his yawn — tearing the sound with his teeth.

"Would you mind showing us your ID, sir?"

He had startled the men, he could tell. He yawned in then-faces again, and handed over his ID. "Take a good look at the reference and the code number," he said. And he stood there gloating while the security men scanned him and phoned his ID through to the computer.

"You've got fabulous security here."

He snorted at them, seeing their bewildered reaction to his sarcasm. He wanted to go on ridiculing them with compliments, but they were not listening; they were looking closely at the taped patches on his suit.

"I'm afraid I can't tell you why this suit's in such tough shape," he said. "I've been on a mission."

The security men told him he could go: he was very pleased and felt powerful. This was more like it! Mr. Blue would have failed that security check. The alien would have been stuffed into a gunship and taken to a White Room for questioning. Plug him in.

"Correction!" Fisher said out loud. He had actually passed the security check! The computer had not caught his ID, even though he had been kidnapped in March. He was a hostage who had escaped and returned home to discover that he hadn't been missed. It was stupid, disgraceful, and inefficient. What if he had lost his memory and was stumbling around Pittsburgh this morning blinded with aphasia and loss of identity? The security goons would have let him go!

He found a telephone on a post and then saw it was outside a stand-up restaurant.

"Hardly worth using a credit card for that," the cashier said. She was black, her name badge was lettered Herma, and she was armed with a stunner. She frowned at the two jelly doughnuts and the vanilla milkshake on Fisher's tray.

"No cash," the boy said. "Too many weirdos around.

There are probably aliens right outside this city, sticking their noses through the fence and trying to break in."

"I don't know anything about it," the woman said quietly.

Fisher pushed the doughnuts into his mouth and took the milkshake to the telephone.

"Who is that?" Moura said, catching her breath.

"Batfish!"

"Fizzy, is that you? What's wrong — where are you?"

He had started to gag. "Milkshake," he said. "Can't get the stupid straw into my suckhole."

"Are you in New York?" Moura's voice was urgent.

"The herberts didn't even find me in the computer," Fisher said in his old snarling way. He hadn't spoken like this since the last time he spoke to Moura. He disliked becoming a child: it was the effect his mother's voice had on him. "Hey, that's what I call security! What if I'd blacked out?"

"Is Hardy with you?"

"I haven't seen the stiff," and then his anger overcame him. But there was pleasure in his anger, and strength, because he felt safe here. "Listen, did you report me missing?"

"Hooper didn't tell us you were missing until two weeks ago—"

"That willy!"

"Fizz, are you all right? Is someone listening to this? Because if they are, we'll pay them whatever they want."

She went on talking, sounding very worried. It calmed Fisher. His mother's nervousness gave him strength.

"Thanks!" he said. "You didn't report me missing!"

"Just tell me where you are — what's that noise?"

He was slurping the milkshake again through the suckhole in his helmet.

"On a mission," he said, and hung up.

He was still walking — it was so lovely on the sunny heights of this city. And he was less mocking about the security situation here, knowing that it had not been a computer error or a goofball or a police blip. They hadn't identified him, because he hadn't been reported missing. But why not? If Hooper hadn't told them, what had the fuck-wit been doing all this time?

He passed another telephone and punched Hooper's number and got his uncle's answering machine.

"You lost me and you didn't even say so! There's something seriously wrong with you, mister. You were responsible for my safety on that mission. I am very disappointed in you. This is Commander, Mission Westwind—"

He swung the phone from his ear, then thought again.

"Furthermore, you still haven't found me!"

He felt very happy after this. For once, he was not imploring these adults for help. He didn't need them. He had arrived here on his own — he had led the aliens here. He was not their prisoner but their leader. That knowledge, and the sunshine, and the sugary breakfast, gave him the lift he needed. It seemed official, it was confirmed. He thought: I'm a man.

It was a feeling of quiet power — something he had seen in Mr. Blue. It was not a show of strength: it was confidence. He had been tested. The test might have broken him — yet it had strengthened him. We are what we are because of our difficulties, he thought.

He needed a new flying suit and boots, but he decided not to buy them. He had begun to take pride in his ragged taped-up outfit. He liked the look. It showed what he had endured, and it was a kind of armor. He enjoyed being an Owner disguised as a trooper: a combination of cunning and technology, like an animal with indestructible circuits, an electronic wolf.

And of course people would know and be afraid. They would stare at him and say: He's been on a mission. Must have been some mission!

He frightened them, he knew, with his piercing look of having done something very dangerous. The man in Ray-Tech who sold him the accumulator seemed as fascinated by the scars on his helmet as by its many functions.

"A piece of equipment like this can be very important when you're in a Prohibited Area and you have to locate your ship," Fisher said. "And the place is crawling with aliens."

The salesman just stared, taking very small breaths, his tongue quivering behind his teeth.

"It can be the difference between life and death," the boy said. "Suppose you've been kidnapped, and there's contamination, and you have to locate the rest of your team?"

"You in the Pilgrims?" the man finally said.

"Shit-wit!" Fisher honked at him, suddenly angry. "Space is nothing — the moon and these orbital stations are for tourists and fanatics. Any dimbo can go up in a space vehicle. Just remember not to puke. They're not heroes, they're not explorers! Fucking Christopher Columbus had a much harder time than any Astronaut — the dimbo didn't even know this continent existed, and you can see these space stations on a clear night. What's so hard about walking on the moon? Hey, I'm talking about the earth. Nothing is stranger than being on the ground!"

He loved saying that. He believed it, too. And he could tell the salesman was impressed.

But he was maddened again trying to buy the antitetanus serum — three drugstores said no. And, angered, he remembered his other grievances, the stupidity of Moura and Hooper, the incompetent secrecy of Hardy. And he felt more kindly toward the aliens, because they had helped make him tough; but he still had not decided whether to go back to them. For the moment, he was satisfied being alone.

The drugstores were so foolishly stocked! He wondered whether they were like this in New York. Toilet paper, pens, candy, radios, hair spray, tobacco, rubber hoses, electric fans, approved explosives, magazines and books, gardening equipment, potted plants, bicycles, wristwatches, children's toys.

"We've been carrying these items for years," the pharmacist said. "Where have you been?"

And he refused to sell Fisher the serum.

"I'm on a mission," the boy said. He was wearing his helmet, his faceplate was up. "It's classified. I need this serum for one of my people."

In his white smock, the pharmacist looked less like a medical man than a mental patient, and when he apologized it seemed like a crude form of gloating.

"I'm afraid I'll have to report you," Fisher said, and tugged at the cuffs of his greasy gloves. "You're highly unprofessional, and you're a complete and utter tool."

Was that man smiling into his hand?

Because he had been turned down, he was determined to procure the serum. It did not matter whether he needed it for Valda. He simply wanted it. All this time he was tramping. He followed a sign saying "University" to another rising road. He saw some boys, students probably, loitering near a building, and he butted his helmet at them.

"Where's the hospital?"

What were these dimbos looking at?

"Over there," one boy said, making a face at him.

Fisher walked through the entrance, pushed a door — no security — pushed another, found a corridor, and scuffed to the end of it. The legs of his suit still rubbed with a loud scratching sound. He pushed his faceplate up in order to read the small print on a sign, something about visiting hours, but hated the smell of the place. He kept walking — his boots going Goom! Goom! on the tile floor, and his legs going Haust! when they rubbed. Another sign, another door, a new smell: was that food or disease? This corridor was lined with doors.

He stopped, too furious to go farther, and rattled a doorknob. He pushed the stinking thing open. He squawked when he saw the woman in the chair — her white thighs.

She was young and she was just rising from the chair, her skirt rucked up — she hadn't expected anyone. Her face swelled with surprise, and then all the air went out of her cheeks.

"Who are you?"

Fisher was making noises inside his helmet,

"I can't understand a word you're saying," She seemed at once both frightened of him and eager to calm him, and so her voice was false and ineffectual.

"Antitetanus," Fisher was saying. He told the woman it was an emergency. What was wrong with these drugstores? He needed the serum for one of his people. He spoke of his mission, mentioning its secrecy. He spoke in his squeezed squawky voice through the trapdoor of his amplifier.

The woman smiled sternly in fear and urged him to sit down in her chair.

"They sell bicycles and candy bars and sex magazines," he said. "And they won't sell me the serum! But if I wanted a radio or some spermicide, oh sure! Want to see my ID? I'm an Owner."

But the woman had gone to the door.

She was frightened and preachy. She said, "Any injury involving a rusty nail must be taken very seriously, no matter who you are."

"And they said they were going to put cowshit on it!"

Fisher was pleased with himself when the woman left. She understood the urgent nature of the mission. He felt safe in disclosing it to her. He no longer feared the aliens, and since leaving O-Zone he had stopped seeing himself as their prisoner.

He now regretted that panicky message he had sent from the dish near Winslow, particularly Very high exposure risk— send assistance immediately. He was ashamed of the fear he had felt among the aliens, and even more ashamed of the fears he had felt in his room in Coldharbor. He had felt weak and his weakness had shown him demons. It was all a memory of childhood.

"I don't need help from anyone," he said when the woman returned.

She held out a small pouch which contained a hypodermic syringe and a bottle of serum. Fisher snatched it am squeezed it in his dirty glove, and the woman looked frightened again.

"Don't be afraid," she said — her voice had gone hollow, "We get a lot of you people in here."

Fisher was having difficulty turning the doorknob — he couldn't grasp it in his oversize gloves, and the splits in the fingers loosened his grip.

"Wonky door doesn't even work!"

In the voice that seemed to come echoing out of her forehead with fear, the woman said, "Follow the exit signs and go straight out. But please be more careful in the future."

"It wasn't me! This complete tool stepped on the nail. I didn't tell her to! She probably wasn't even wearing any shoes!"

"I mean, telling people you're an Owner and your father's an Owner."

"I don't have a father!"

But the woman was still cautioning him in her fearful way.

"I knew as soon as you stepped in here that something was wrong. See, an Owner wouldn't have barged in like that. I could have set off my alarm — I'm glad I didn't, though. And an Owner would have said please and thank you. An Owner would have been wearing a clean suit — and that helmet is not convincing at all. These are all very simple things. But you should remember them. I'm not asking you who you are, or where you came from, or where you're going. It's none of my business to question anyone's legality—"

She had come quite near to him. She held her hand out in a peacemaking gesture.

"You porker!" Fisher said, and shoved the door aside. "You porker!"

Now he had what he wanted; but he wondered what to do with it. Yet he felt strong again, walking freely through the sealed city. And that porker had taken him for an alien! Each time he passed a public telephone he thought of Moura and Hooper and how they had let him down. They were too incompetent to find him. They hadn't even reported him missing. But their indifference had given him strength.

He thought of calling them and saying; You are such total fuck-wits everything has to be proven to you!

He laughed at this — his laughter was mirthless and energetic, like someone trying to blow out a small fire. But the effort of it gave him confidence.

The aliens were huddled under the evening sky. Thoroughly stupid people needed to be shown everything. He had shown the aliens he was strong by leaving them and penetrating this city on his own. There was a way he could show them he was even stronger: by returning. And they needed his medicine, they needed his helmet, they needed him.

"Excuse me, sir," the security guard said at the bus station as Fisher was boarding. "Step over here — we'll have to run your ID through the filter."

"Where the heck have you guys been!"

The guards did not laugh. The station was thronged with homeward-bound commuters. The guards stuck to the routine of their random check: filtering the disc, doing the numbers.

"You're a long way from home, Mr. Allbright."

"I've been traveling," he said. He decided not to arouse their curiosity with the word "mission." They were staring at his dented helmet and his patches of sticky tape. He said, "Wear and tear. Ha!"

"Notice any illegals in your travels?"

"Aliens — you mean real aliens?" he said, and swallowed and waited for their full attention.

"Any kind."

"No," he said.

Saying that, he transformed the people who were hiding and waiting for him. He made them better, he made them worthy of him; he appreciated them. And they needed him! He felt gladder — he had rescued them again. Now he was returning to them as a friend. Saying no to those cops proved it.

34

They were much angrier now — Sluter and Meesle especially; Murdick was nibbling in fury. And they flew the gunship recklessly, battering the turbulent air. They had received an all-points alert from Marengo — the airport had not been specified — and when they landed in the town center they were surrounded by armed men. One of the men said, "We don't care who you are or what you want — just get out of here, right now, and take that bug off the lawn."

Then a warning shot went twangling past the Godseye gunship.

"They think we're aliens!" Sluter cried as he spun the rotor into the air.

It was another bad day. The tension brought on by their frustrated pursuit worried Hardy. They had started out looking for Fizzy, talking of rescue; but now they talked about little except the criminality of aliens. Hardy was reluctant to give them any more information, and he didn't blame the vigilantes in Marengo for sending them away. He did not trust them anymore.

He radioed Moura from the gunship — the troopers would not allow him to use any telephones on the ground.

Seeing them adjusting the phones on their helmets, he said, "Don't eavesdrop."

Sluter said, "If we want to listen, we will. We've got her number, she's got ours. We don't need you, remember. But you need us. Why don't you jigs understand that?"

They heard everything of the conversation — that Moura had been phoned by Fizzy, that he seemed either very calm or very crazy, that she had traced the call to a public phone in Pittsburgh. "He said he was on some sort of mission."

"He could be wacko," Meesle said, without the slightest pretense of discretion. Hardy had just switched off.

He hated them, but without them what hope had he of finding Fizzy and freeing him from the aliens? Godseye was his punishment for the secrecy he had imposed on himself. Even Hooper had been excluded. Yet Godseye seemed a little too eager now.

Hardy said, "What are you going to do?"

"Find them!"

"I only want you to find Fizzy."

"If we can tell him apart."

"I don't care about the others. I'm not pressing charges."

They snickered at his innocence and headed for Pittsburgh. It was still only the middle of the afternoon, and there was plenty of daylight left.

Hardy was surprised, as he had been at the Red Zone Perimeter and elsewhere, by how easily these men picked up information. Over Pittsburgh, they radioed State Security and then the city police. As soon as they gave their code and identified themselves as Godseye troopers they were told everything. Hardy was appalled to think that an organization so vicious and bad-tempered had such good relations with legitimate police.

"Typical aliens," Sluter said. "They've left tracks all over the place. Three sightings in the city, a suspicious incident in the hospital, and detentions at two security checks. That proves it. Your alien sticks out like a real wolfman."

"What alien?" Hardy said. "He was describing Fizzy!"

Murdick said, "Maybe it's not him. Maybe it's an alien dressed in his clothes. Maybe they decided to eat him, and used his ID."

The furious smile on Hardy's face was intended to intimidate Murdick.

"'Eat' is just a figure of speech," Murdick said, backing away.

"Why don't you say what you mean, Willis?"

"Okay, maybe they killed him."

Meesle said, "Some of these kids that are kidnapped get twisted around. They begin to identify with their captors. Listen, we've got documentation — romances, marriages, slave relationships, puppet phenomena. Or they turn into animals. The average person can't take too much captivity."

"Fizzy isn't average," Hardy said.

"That's what we mean," Sluter said — and Hardy saw that Meesle and Sluter had doubled up on him. "It could be worse in his case."

They had hoisted their gunship over Pittsburgh. They collected the information about the sightings, and received a soundprint that was very blurred: it looked like a rotting Martian, or a collapsed Astronaut in secondhand space gear — the person's head deep inside the shadowy helmet.

Was that Fizzy after his ordeal?

"That's your career criminal," Meesle said. "That's your omnifelon. That's your animal. We're talking woof-woof here."

He stuck the smudged picture over the control console.

"Where are we going?" Hardy said, feeling the gunship gather speed as Sluter clutched at the controls.

"This is the bus route they mentioned."

The stripy road patterns moved across the ground-screen.

"A young, very dirty boy, wearing a helmet with a smeared faceplate." Meesle was quoting the security report and, Hardy felt, taking too much pleasure in it. "Extensive damage to new-model suit. Scarring on helmet. Boots plugged with filler. A loud voice. A noticeable laugh."

Murdick said, "Guess they didn't eat him."

At this high altitude, visibility through the windows and portholes was so poor they had to rely on the ground-screen and the infrared sensors and heat-seekers.

"There's no security out here. They could be anywhere. And we're going to run out of road in a minute." No sooner had he finished speaking than Meesle pushed up his mask and lowered his face to the screen. "Hold it. I've got a cluster."

"Count them."

"Seven. Isolated. Way off the road. Probably jigs, probably jabbering — they're always jabbering to themselves, never listening."

"We're going down."

"Be careful," Hardy said. "Fizzy's a very excitable kid."

"I'm getting a little tired of you," Sluter said, accelerating the dive, and his anger showed in the tilt of the gunship.

"Wait till you see this kid," Murdick said.

Meesle said, "If they put up any resistance, burn them all down."

"A shower of flechettes!"

"No. You'll be putting Fizzy in danger."

"Get him out of here," Sluter said. "That's an order, Willis."

"Sorry, Allbright," Murdick said, and took hold of Hardy's arm. But Hardy immediately yanked himself out of the flimsy grasp and shoved Murdick aside. And when Meesle came toward him, Hardy dodged, let the fat man stumble, and went for Sluter. He intended only to jostle him — to arrest their nosedive — but Hardy realized too late that he had shoved Sluter very hard against the console of controls, causing the gunship to stall.

A sputtering and a hesitant chug of the rotor blades preceded a violent tilt of the ship, and it went lopsided, falling flat, with Sluter gasping obscenities and snatching at the console.

And then the engine started, the rotor began chopping, and the ship swung sideways in a pendulum arc. At its highest point it shuddered, spilling Hardy and the others onto the rubber deck. Then the gunship lifted itself farther with a roar, and it buzzed in flight.

"They're gone!" Meesle said, clawing at the ground-screen. "We lost them!"

Sluter said nothing. He steadied the ship and slowed the rotor, and using thrusters he brought them to where they could see individual leaves beating under them in the tree-tops.

Murdick said, "Are we going on the ground for them?"

He was always frightened by the prospect of ground searches, and had been terrified even in the harmless farming town of Guthrie. Hardy had long ago decided that all their fears of the ground — they were seldom on it: they made a fetish of flying — had given them dangerous fantasies.

"No. Your friend is."

Hardy had been bruised by the struggle, and by the stall and roll of the gunship. He had hit his elbow and thigh. His mask had been pushed hard against his face. He guessed his nose was leaking — he could taste the drab syrup of blood in the corners of his mouth.

With a springy stop they were on the ground and rocking gently, the rotor still spinning. The sun had just left the sky, and Hardy sensed darkness and a chill rising from the damp earth.

"We don't need you anymore," Sluter said. "Get out. We should have dumped you long ago."

Murdick and Meesle eagerly tipped Hardy through the hatch onto the ground.

They had seen the toppling gunship and heard its roaring straight overhead, and without thinking, Fisher clapped his hands over the earpieces of his helmet and began screaming at the noisy ship falling from the sky onto their heads.

He was rigid — stiffened by the unearthly noise and the sight of the black gunship plunging toward him. His throat ached as he tried to scream it away.

"Move!" Mr. Blue said, and hurried Fisher down the embankment.

The boy felt himself rising and being carried in the same toppling, lopsided way as the gunship was falling. And when he stopped screaming there was only a distant hum in the sky. He sensed that he had silenced the thing: he had repelled it.

"I did it," he said in an exhausted voice. The screams had taken all his strength. How had he gotten under this bridge?

Echols said, "Think we should dig in here?"

He was talking to Mr. Blue, who shook his head.

Rooks said, "That ship came straight down — I think someone jumped out."

"They're after us," Fisher said in a hoarse voice.

In the pause his words produced, the sky darkened and the great gusts of smokelike cloud that had been building up in the east began to crowd the whole sky with night.

"Let's stop a vehicle," Gumbie said.

"They won't stop for us," Fisher said, then showed his teeth and said, "I just said 'us' again." But it did not seem odd anymore. Returning to them, he had proved he was not their hostage.

"If we burn off a wheel it'll stop."

"How will we drive the wonky vehicle on three wheels?"

"Everyone carries spares, Batfish."

"Yeah."

They ambushed a small pickup truck just beyond the bridge, blowing out one of its tires with a silent rifle and an exploding shell. The burst tire caused the vehicle to swerve and stop, and they swarmed over it, hooting and showing their weapons, and terrifying the driver.

"He's an Astronaut," Fisher said, seeing the man's cap and insignia and finding it ridiculous on his faded farmer's clothes. "Hey, this dong's going into orbit!" He poked his old iron into the man's face and said, "Okay, Rocketman, change the tire!"

The man limped and set up his jack.

"He's probably in spinal shock," Fisher said.

After the man had finished, Gumbie said, "Can we drop you anywhere, mister?"

The man said no, and winced as they drove away.

"How did you know he was an Astronaut?" Valda said.

"I live here!" Fisher said, and liked hearing the confidence in his voice, for he had always thought that he lived in a room in Coldharbor. "I know these people!" But he was sorry he had frightened the man in order to prove it.

"What's this?" Gumbie said, and showed Fisher a plump copy of a paperback book, The Tropes of Planet Alpha.

"His bible," Fisher said, and threw it out of the window. "Nuke it?"

They drove on narrow back roads, heading east, until Fisher tuned into the frequency of a live roadblock near the settlement of Greensburg. It was shit-wits, he said, carrying out spot checks. He picked up the drone of their scanners and some of their talk.

"We'll walk it," Mr. Blue said, after they had abandoned the truck and eaten the Astronaut's sandwiches. "Let's go."

Fisher liked hearing this even more than before, in O-Zone, because now he shared the impulse. The simple statement of determination showed confidence and strength — like hatching and flying out of the shell — airborne as soon as the egg cracked open. Let's go. And look how far they had gone!

"Security's terrible out here," Fisher said. "It's really bad."

"That's what worries me," Echols said.

"Hey, stop worrying — it's lousy. Just dongs at roadblocks. They check vehicles, but if you walk through the woods no one bothers you. What kind of security is that?"

They were cutting across a field, but slowly, because there was no light. The moon and stars were hidden by the dense cloud. And Valda was limping, dragging her injured foot. The darkness made Fisher imagine he was in a forest, with masses of black boughs above his head.

"As if all aliens travel in vehicles — the dongs!"

They kept walking, and from the swallowed sound of their footsteps they sensed they were near another embankment.

"No one's safe here, except us!"

"Keep it down, Fish," Mr. Blue said, but he was laughing softly.

"I mean, that kind of security wouldn't make me feel safe if I lived here," Fisher said, and he felt even sorrier for the Astronaut in the pickup truck. No wonder they planned trips to the moon and read those stupid books and believed all that trash. "Hey, I'd get a dog!"

They sat on the embankment, listening to Fisher; then they slid down.

"I smell tadpoles," Gumbie said,

"And where's the security here?" Fisher said. "There's nothing in position. We just traveled halfway across America and no one killed us. And look at this — pathetic! An unguarded signal box! That doesn't inspire my confidence at all. Hey, you're better off being an alien!"

"It's a road," Rooks was saying.

"This tool thinks it's a road!"

Then they saw the dim light of the distant train.

Hooper had been certain of the spot. Fizzy's brief message had given him Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh security had briefed him on the various sightings. "Missing person," Hooper had said, and he had found the people on the ground very helpful.

Following the bus route, he had picked up an emergency bleep which, strangely, had fallen silent moments after it had begun..

Bligh said, "What's wrong?"

"I think that distress call could have been the Godseye rotor. I know they're in front of us, and they've got a faster ship."

He could tell that Bligh was worried — she had been frightened at Winslow when Godseye surprised them, and was glad to leave Guthrie before they showed up. She seemed to recognize the troopers as her natural enemy. They represented everything that she feared and hated in New York; and yet the rest of the time she was happy, feeling freer in the jet-rotor than she had in Coldharbor or the city.

Hooper loved her watchfulness, and the fact that she took nothing for granted. At Coldharbor she was able to sleep for long periods, and there was a sensuality in her slumber— sleep heated her skin and made her damp — as if all her dreams were sexual. But here in the jet-rotor, Hooper's Flea, she was wakeful and always alert, and she vitalized Hooper with her energy.

But he was careful with her. He knew he had a rich man's presumption, and that his possessiveness spooked her. Whenever he reached out for her she drew away. She was like a cat: when he ignored her she crept into his lap, as if reassured by his inattention. This search for Fizzy had had the same effect: it was a distraction that brought them closer.

Each night in the parked jet-rotor they made love in a fierce way, losing themselves in it, and simulating rapturous murder — not only his old impaling, but all the interruptions of it, as she rode his face like a saddle and galloped him into ecstasy as he gasped between her thighs; but it was she who was winded and made the sounds of suffocation. And when she took him into her mouth and drank, it was he who howled as if he were dying. They lay head to toe, licking the dew from each other's bodies, and giving themselves life.

"What do you want?"

"You know what I want,"

It was dark magic, and it worked. It confounded them, then helped them understand in a way that words would have failed to do. Sex took away their loneliness, then gave it back; and so desire returned.

Yet Hooper had noticed that at times his passion for her alarmed her. I want to eat you — and for a moment fear flickered on her face, as if he meant just that and would devour her with cannibal teeth. She laughed when he told her that she had the dark fishy taste of smoked salmon. He wanted more.

The sky was blue, but night was falling and the ground had gone gray.

"If that distress call was Godseye," Hooper said, "I don't understand why they went off the air."

Bligh was silent — the name Godseye reminded her of the story Hooper had told her of the hunt in New York. But he had not intended to frighten her. He had been trying to tell her that he loved her: he wasn't like the others, he was saying, and now he had stopped thinking of her as an alien.

"I wish we could see something," he said as the clouds buffeted around them. "I was sure we were following that ship. Now we've lost them. No more landmarks."

"It's getting dark," Bligh said.

He had said: Only Fizzy knows how to fly one of these things in the dark.

"Are we going home tonight?"

Hooper stared at her.

"You said 'home.'"

The pinprick on the ground-screen was at just the point where the other ship had signaled, but now it was too dark to tell what the pinprick was. It seemed hotter than a human being, and not hot enough to be the burning wreck of a crashed gunship.

He flew closer and saw that it was a small fire — the sort of dinner fire that aliens might build to cook an evening meal: roast a dog, or soften potatoes, or stew the vegetables they were so fond of. Yet he could not pick up the heat of any humans. Perhaps they were sitting too close to the fire to be located?

He spun the rotor down with all his lights blazing and saw a figure separate itself from the fire. It was a person in a helmet, but with its arms up — welcoming, surrendering.

"It might be Fizzy," Hooper said, and hoped it was, so that he could bring him back to Coldharbor and vindicate himself for having lost him.

The boy wonder was capable of anything — even this, turning up beside a fire in a rural buffer zone in Pennsylvania.

"People always look so small on the ground," Bligh said. "So helpless and alone. I never knew that."

She's thinking of herself, Hooper thought. Flying with him had shown her the true size of things. She realized how precarious her life had been before they had met. She felt a sort of retrospective fear and was puzzled by the illogicality of her luck.

"And they always look desperate at night."

But even though she was reflecting in this way she still managed to work the spotlight expertly as they descended.

"It's my brother," Hooper said.

35

It was raining — a soft rat-tat that became a sizzling on the roof of the boxcar, and oddly quickened each time the train slowed down.

Through a crack in the door of the car they saw a spattery blaze of lights flash past. Fisher, speaking from within his helmet, told them about the people out here — commuters, simple-lifers, fanners, Astronauts.

"Some of them work in Philadelphia, Some of them want to go into orbit, though the program only takes one in two hundred thousand," the boy said. "Some of them don't even have telephones."

Explaining to them what they could not see strengthened his influence on them. He conveyed to them the sense of strange lives pulsing in the dark — it was the way he had told them about the stars, giving them names and shapes. He said there were people awake all night under those lights as the train slid past. He told them what he heard on his radio earphones, as he monitored local broadcasts: more mysteries.

"I've got a police patrol — a standoff with some aliens," he said. "I've got a roadblock incident — someone just flunked a security check. Dong! A suspected tax defaulter! And what's this? An unfortunate motorist, as this willy calls himself, is broadcasting from his broken-down car. It's a distress call. He thinks he's being watched by Roaches. What a dick! What if those Roaches have a radio? He thinks they're sort of subnormal peckerheads who've never heard of radios!"

The others listened attentively.

"Good thing we're in here," Fisher said. "There are a lot of patrols in this area. The private ones are the worst. I mean, who are they answerable to?"

Light from the door crack cut across their faces, and the boy saw their eyes flash at him.

"Don't be scared," he said.

"You're the one with gray hairs," Valda said.

The boxcar smelled of dusty vegetables. Foraging in the corners, they found onions, the remainder of a shipment— enough for three apiece. They peeled them, and chewed them, and wept.

"No one's going to want to kiss us," Fisher said.

He was still monitoring the passing transmissions.

"Altoona," he said at one point, and at another, "Harrisburg."

Place names meant nothing to these people, he could tell. They fell asleep, they stayed that way, and finally, banging across the trestles of an iron bridge, they were shaken by the clatter, and woke. The outside lights were dimmed by the oncoming dawn. Soon after, they looked out and saw horses, with smooth gleaming skin drawn tight over their muscles and their heads up at the approach of the train.

"Naked horses," Fisher said, and seeing a man on horseback, went on, "Some of the people here ride them. That's how they go to work." Yet he did not quite believe it, nor did he believe those men in black made a virtue of it.

The lock hasp swung and clanged at the boxcar door as the aliens gaped. Seeing their helpless curiosity, Fisher felt refreshed and strengthened.

"Bet you weren't expecting this, Elroy!"

Mr. Blue smiled.

"What are you thinking?"

"It's a long way back."

"There's a lot more ahead!"

"More of this?" Echols said.

Fisher snorted, because he didn't know and didn't want to admit it. But he knew that they saw the future outside and were alarmed by it. He saw the past and was consoled.

"You've been here before?"

"Oh, sure," Fisher said, exulting, because he meant the past. "But, hey, I always feel at home in my helmet."

He sensed that he had bewildered them by saying that. Good! Bewilderment would make them rely on him.

"I used to be afraid of places like this when I was a kid." He thought: I was a kid until I was kidnapped.

Valda was holding his free hand in her hot fingers. He was glad she hadn't given up on him. He had always regretted having said to her: Shall I stick my finger into your bum?

He said, "Know what? I've discovered I like weather. I never liked it before. You don't have to change it — you can change yourself. It can make you happy, too. It's better than music."

The morning was drizzly and still warm, and the foliage seemed swollen and sodden, like rags thickened by moisture. The trees were heavier in the mingled steam and smoke; the drooping branches hung almost to the ground. There was a blackness in the green that summer rain always brings to trees and grass — so the day seems gloomy. The pale sifting mist streaked past the door of the boxcar, and the warmth only made them more conscious of the humidity. The freight train moved along the tracks on screeching wheels.

"Philadelphia," Fisher said. As always his helmet distorted his voice and made him sound like a talking animal. "But this train's going straight through, so there won't be a scan. It's got checkpoint clearance."

He had just heard that phrase on his radio. He was monitoring the engine now.

"What happens in New York?" Echols said.

"We won't get that far. The city's sealed. Or do you have an ID and a work permit?"

"I didn't want to be here," Gumbie said.

"Then why did you come!"

He saw in their momentary puzzlement that they had forgotten why they had come, and when they remembered they blinked — did they regret it?

"Maybe your friend Bligh can take you back!"

He was hearty: this seemed to frighten them. He wanted to frighten them further. Fear made them so attentive! They had never listened to him this way before. He liked that. He knew it was not friendship, but there was something touching and equalizing in their dependency. It was not that Valda was holding his hand; he was holding hers too. He needed those people and he was glad they didn't know it.

"One of the biggest checkpoints in the world is near here," he said. "It's a high-tech filter. It can detect anything — drugs, weapons, diseases. Everyone is scanned — every vehicle, everything. Hey, don't even think of squeezing through!"

They were never more frightened than when they saw some people outside in flying suits and helmets and thick-soled boots. At first, Fisher did not understand their fear— the folks outside were lolloping in a park, faceplates down, probably children. Then it struck Fisher that they were dressed as he was, except in cleaner suits, and so he did not seem absurd anymore, but rather in his element. It was then that they realized that they were the aliens — strange, naked, and weak; and hunted.

"They call it the Wall, but it's not a wall," Fisher said. He was still talking about the checkpoint from New Jersey into New York. "And don't think we can sneak under it like we did in the Red Zone Perimeter. You want to drown?"

Talking in this way he had made them curious, but when they looked out of the moving train all they saw were huge rusty drums and girders, and flaring chimneys behind high fences, and tumbled stacks of broken bricks on the burned earth. Where it was not burned the ground looked soaked in black oil. This low scorched place, without a tree, without a person — and where was the checkpoint? — seemed to contradict everything Fisher had said about the high security and technology. For that reason, it was much more worrying,

"There's the river, too — they've got gunboats and missiles! They use them! And there's aerial patrols on twenty-four-hour watch, with high-resolution cameras. You'll hear them — aerial patrols make the most noise."

But it was quiet now, except for the rumble of the train. It looked as though a civilization had burned to the ground— not a great civilization, but a flimsy flammable one, with nothing under it but shallow cellars into which it had tumbled. And its embers lay in the streets — sprinkled with broken glass and looking greasy in the light rain. The civilization had been temporary but its ruins were permanent.

"You can't fly in, walk in, sail in, or drive in, unless you've got papers — an ID, a work permit, an entry pass or proof of residence. You need two stickers for a car. They detain people by the thousands every day, and if you look like a tool or a dimbo they'll jail you on suspicion. They're not supposed to, but they do."

"We never had anything like this in Chicago," Echols said.

"That where you're from?"

Echols said, "A long time ago," and left it at that.

Once Echols had said, I abused my position, and Fisher had hated him and imagined something very crooked. But now he felt sorry for the bearded, beaver-faced man, and the others, too, huddled in the boxcar. They had lain in the darkness ever since Pittsburgh, and even Mr. Blue seemed nervous. They had glanced through the crack in the door, but they no longer hung there gaping. It was as though they did not want to see too much, as though this was more reality than they could take. O-Zone aliens in New Jersey! He could tell they were shocked: they had not expected this. He wanted to say, You O-Zonians haven't seen anything!

"What are we going to do when we get there?" Valda said.

"We're not going to get there."

"She means to the Wall," Mr. Blue said.

"I'll call my mother."

In a whimpering voice Rooks said, "He'll call his mother!"

Echols said, "You could call her now."

Rooks the toughie, and Echols the scientist, spazzing out at the sight of New Jersey!

"I don't have the range yet," Fisher said. It was a lie but it made them listen. When had they listened like this to him before? Yet, telling them not to worry and showing them this terrible place, he felt tender toward them.

Passing a settlement of old half-collapsed towers with lank gray laundry hanging straight down from clotheslines, they saw children playing among smashed cars in a sealed-off street. There were the inevitable fires: junk fires, children's fires, cooking fires, and smoldering dumps. The earth burned here — nothing in particular, just the oily ground. The drizzle made the fires smokier, and in their disfigurement was a look of utter futility. They had no fury. Their pallid flames and their gas were just another aspect of the ruin. And among all those fires a burning building — fifteen stories in flames — did not seem unusual. This one burned in silence. No fire engines, no hoses or alarms, no shouts: just a black tower going up.

"This is all Roaches. As soon as it gets dark they swarm outside," Fisher said. "There's a law against fires, but no one enforces it — too dangerous."

They did not talk much — the smell choked them. It was a dark brown stink of burned rubber and heavy gas, human waste, ditch water, and oil; it was scorched cloth and the reek of food being boiled in dented pots — bad meat and slop, that seemed the more disgusting when Fisher told them that someone out there intended to eat it.

"Retch-retch," he said, and clicking his faceplate into position, "Too bad you guys don't have masks."

They wrapped cloths around their faces and squatted like bandaged patients. They said nothing, and he admired them for their toughness. And he was grateful: they had made him tough. The very idea of this place used to paralyze him; so he did not blame them — they were aliens, after all, but not Roaches or Skells. And it was a terrible place.

"You get used to it," he said, exulting.

Once, long ago on that New Year's trip, someone had said that aliens had technology — it was Starkies with rockets. And Fisher had denied it — how could they? Naked people with matted hair and dirty feet and yellow teeth — who didn't even build houses! It was impossible to imagine them with missiles, or irons of any kind. They were fairly dangerous with their fires and their knives, but they had no technology — nor had Diggers, nor Skells, nor Trolls, nor Roaches, nor any aliens. If they had, they might have lived interesting lives; but, no, they survived by hiding. Mr. Blue and his people knew how to evaporate, but who except Hooper had ever bothered them in O-Zone?

Yet what this boxcar trip — and really, the journey from O-Zone — had shown Fisher was that aliens were tough. They were not the shaggy pathetic creatures they were always depicted as being — accident-prone and diseased. They were strong; they had to be strong to survive; and if they had technology they would have been superb. It was weapons that made Owners seem strong. Without them, they were naked. They weren't tough, they had no cunning, their senses were deficient. But an alien with technology hardly seemed like an alien at all.

Fisher said, "Don't be afraid. I'll take care of you," and saw himself in the boxcar as unique. He had the wealth of an Owner and the strength of an alien.

They were watching the smoke rise.

He said, "A little technology has taken us halfway across the country. You would never have made it without me."

And they were still relying on him, in a place he had always feared. Looking across at it from Coldharbor or from Hooper's rotor, he had sensed a tightening in his throat, and he felt he would suffocate if he had to go on looking at it. He became a stupid animal and blamed Moura for choosing such an inadequate pedigree. My ears, my teeth, he thought. And he had been reminded of the size of the world, and how New York was surrounded by misery and danger.

"I like it on the ground!" he said.

Though it was awful here, and no one had succeeded in getting rid of these peripheral zones of gutted buildings. The attempts to burn them down had only made them more dangerous and uglier, and deepened the wasteland, and thickened the soupy air, like something out of the Jurassic Age — black rocks and big greasy birds. But he had conquered his fear and so he felt a wild affection for the place and a tenderness for these strangers who were still afraid.

"Bet you're glad you came!"

He had never imagined this: his standing in the boxcar, rattling through the smoke, frowning at the alienation out the door, and giving these O-Zonians encouragement. They had stolen him! They had not brought him here — he had brought them. And what had begun as his dependency had turned into his leadership. He wasn't leaning on them anymore, he was propping them up. He marveled at the change, and then thought: I am Fisher Allbright!

"I used to sit at Pap — remember I told you that's my computer? — and I was all hunched over. My membranes used to get all dried out because I never left the room. A flake of snot would drop out of my nose and hit the keys and I'd screech at it. My uncle saw me do it once. I didn't even care."

They were anxious and so they did not simply laugh but let go and screeched themselves hoarse, as if mimicking his terror.

"They thought I was a willy!"

They laughed again, the boxcar echoed with their shouts, and Fisher thought: They're mine. Their laughter proved that. But it also proved something else: they were good people.

He said, "If I ever took a spasm and decided to stay with you people, it wouldn't be because you're simple and primitive and wonderful, but because you're smart, and you learn fast, and you can use technology. And you know how to evaporate."

The laughter made them very quiet after that, and in the silence of the boxcar they heard voices outside — the cruel-sounding whoops of wild children.

Gumbie whispered, "Get me out of here."

The door crack widened as the train lurched, and a chevron of daylight passed across the faces of the aliens. They were pale, exhausted from their cross-country push. Heaped there in the boxcar they looked brave and defeated.

"We'll have to get out of this freight car pretty soon. They scan these things at the checkpoint and then seal them. If they find us we'll get cooked."

He wanted them to react. No one spoke.

"You'll get cooked."

He wasn't needling them, he was warning them. But they were waiting for him to say more.

"There's no communications here — there's nothing. But I've got my helmet and I'm within range. I'll radio my mother pretty soon."

Rooks said in his whimpering voice, "He'll radio his mother!"

"How will she find Bligh?" Valda said.

"She'll call my uncle," Fisher said. "Hooper Allbright— remember?"

Kylie startled everyone by saying the jingle, "Allbright's for all bright things."

"Shut up," Rooks said.

They were quiet again, thinking: Then what?

"We'll get out of here," Echols said.

He was already thinking that far ahead. They hadn't arrived and he wanted to leave!

"Wherever we are," Gumbie said in a tone that meant nowhere.

Fisher said, "Don't you worry," and liked the way it made them purr.

"— the hell's that?" Valda asked suddenly, jerking herself around and then slowly backing away from the half-open door.

It was a tall shimmering vision, like a whole mirage, sky-high. Beyond the black earth and twisted wire and the fires and the junked cars of the foreground, which was both smoldering and wet — soot and steam mingled — was a towering island of bright metal and stone, across the water. Although it was about noon, the lights were on — windows and skylights; and the thin pale rain made it glitter in half a rainbow.

It rose, wreathed and sparkling in the haze like a city of crystal.

"New York," Fisher said, and he pushed up his scratched faceplate to see it better.

He had left it. He had been a child then, and had thought that New York was the center of everything. The rest of the country was primitive and insignificant, and the world was dark and dangerous. He smiled at the memory of his stupidity. It was not the world but New York that was dangerous. He was headed for that trap — these people intended to deliver him back into his old delusion. He would be shut up in it and kept ignorant. He would be a child in that room with Pap, and afraid again.

They were all staring at the city through the open door.

Fisher was behind them, zipping his suit, tightening his gloves, adjusting his helmet.

He turned to Mr. Blue, who had not spoken for hours— and his last words hadn't been much use. Silence always seemed to make him skinnier and more intense. He looked tough but unprepared.

"What I want to know is," Fisher said softly — and he loved the power in his whisper—"who's in charge of this mission now?"

36

Fisher, yelling into the bubble on his head, was the first to jump from the boxcar; and the others followed close behind. They took cover in a burned-out building away from the tracks. When they were inside, breathing hard from the effort, Echols remarked on how lucky they were that they had not been spotted by a security patrol.

"There are no patrols on the ground here," Fisher said. "It's all aliens."

They stared at him: they knew what the word meant now.

"I mean, real aliens," he said. "Dangerous ones. Skells. Roaches. Trolls."

They looked around as if expecting to see fangy faces with yellow eyes and spiky hair.

"Hey, the security patrols are dangerous too," he said.

He felt he was now between two worlds — the drooling aliens, the sky-diving Owners. He could think evenly in this in-between space — it was everything that he had seen since O-Zone, and it had seemed fabulous, like an undiscovered valley that had lain undisturbed and unchanged; like O-Zone itself. But he had explored the unknown and felt safe there, and already he longed to return to it.

"Take your time," Mr. Blue said.

Fisher had started to radio Moura. Until then, he had been monitoring the engine of the freight train, the aerial patrols, the transmissions from the towns they had passed.

"Got anything?"

He was fully in charge now. He held up his ragged glove to silence them. He. was on the air. Then he heard Moura's voice, talking fast, like someone who has been waiting a long time to speak.

"I'm in the scab — New Jersey," he said, answering one of her many questions. "Let me give you my position. Ready for my coordinates?"

He paused before relaying the information. He liked seeing the patient trusting expressions of the aliens. They did not realize how tough they were. He clicked his faceplate up.

"She's calling Hardy now. He's out looking for us. A real yo-yo at search-and-scan. All technology — no muscle. We could have found him if we'd wanted. These people are such fuck-wits!"

"That's your father," Echols said, cautioning him.

"I don't have a father!" And he thought: That's part of my strength.

"There's no food here," Gumbie said. He was looking out of the cracked window. "That's why these people are crazy."

"They'll bring us food. Well put it in the bargain!"

Mr. Blue said, "We'll need more than food. What about a truck or something?"

"He wants a vehicle," Fisher said, and made the request sound foolish as he repeated it to the others. "Hey, you won't get far in a vehicle."

Mr. Blue looked uncertain. He sniffed — the smell of this building, its crumbled plaster and burned Moors, its lingering smoke-stink of shit, hung over them and made them itch. But their discomfort here added to Fisher's authority.

"You guys have to be prepared. Not a vehicle-a jet-rotor. Money. A program. I've got a great program — it would get you back there, no hands. You've got guts, but you need a little more technology. Hey, this is the world!"

"And Bligh. We want her," Mr. Blue said.

At her name they looked up at the city. It still gleamed through the mist, and the tops of its towers protruded into clear air and shone, silver and crystal, among the buzzing rotors.

The aliens were impressed by it — dazzled even — and Fisher was disappointed in them and wanted to tell them that this revealed the depth of their ignorance. The city seemed as magnificent to them as a castle, and even looked like one. But it was arid and haunted and sealed, hard to enter and after a time impossible to leave. They did not know that— but, really, how could he hold it against them? He had not known it until recently, and it was they who had shown him the true size of the world. Fisher said, "We'll get everything we want."

They had taken up positions around the blackened building — it seemed more dangerous inside than out, and Fisher knew that if they wanted — if they had to — they could evaporate outside and wait that way: into the mud, behind the decayed houses, into the smoky air. But not yet. Their mission was so far uncompleted. One thing he had noticed, though. They had stopped using the phrase "hand you over."

There were aliens nearby — they could hear their whoops, their dogs, their tin-bashing. There was violence in their very mutters. Their stinking fires were suffocating. And because they could be heard and smelled, but not seen, they seemed turbulent and a greater threat. The rain came down and dribbled into the street and blackened further the poisonous-looking mud.

Fisher said he was trying to get a fix on the rotors. The dark hornets droned, and rose and fell, and some of them settled on the distant buildings. But most of the ones that landed did so on the rotor pads that were moored on the river.

"Not real rotor pads," Fisher explained. "They're just converted barges and lighters. Half of them aren't even safe. And after you put down you need to take a launch into the city."

Again he was describing something they could not see, so they listened very carefully.

"We've got our own pad on the roof of our tower."

"Wedgemere," Valda said, and smiled.

"No, Coldharbor Towers."

It was not a boast anymore. Saying it, he realized how paltry it was. It was a garrison in the Nineties, but so what? For him it had been no more than a safe room where he had spent his childhood with Pap. The journey from O-Zone had helped him discover the pleasure of space. That was his message to Captain Jennix; There's plenty of space on the ground!

The rotors flying very high over there made an odd overlapping sound, like a woolly roar. They nosed in and out of the clouds, and the roar suggested that there were many more up there than could be seen.

The clouds parted in places. They were discolored and ragged, and where they had separated were wisps, and in between a clutch of nose-heavy rotors, one with a curling scorpionlike tail, and another with twin rotors, and the shuttle sausage, and a black gunship with indistinguishable markings.

"I think I have contact."

The gunship detached itself from the passing swarm and dropped lower.

"That might be them."

It circled and came lower still, and then held its altitude and moved in a squarer way, tracing four corners in the air above them.

"They're doing short takes for their computer," Fisher said. "Just checking us out with scans, trying to get a soundbite. Hey, they're probably terrified."

He looked around and saw the others squinting over the cloth masks they had wrapped around their faces, against the smoke and the monotonous stinks,

"It's a big bug," Fisher said, and spoke into his mouthpiece: "Commander to Hardy Allbright. We are the mission from O-Zone. Do you read me? Over."

The rain obscured the gunship, and at times it was lost in a tuft of cloud. Fisher repeated his call. The gunship did not reply, yet seemed to drop lower.

"Give your position!"

The command thundered out of the crackle on his earphones. Fisher looked around him. The others had not heard it.

"This is the commander speaking — mission from O-Zone," Fisher said. "I gave explicit instructions for you to keep your distance. My people don't want—"

"We're talking to you, wolfman!"

"If that's not Hardy I'm not giving my position. Verify at once, or else that's negative, fuck-wit. Over."

Mr. Blue was next to him. He said, "What's wrong?"

Fisher did not want to say that he felt very vulnerable under the rolling gunship. But it was still high, and they were scattered beneath it.

"They could be security," Fisher said. "Maybe they haven't pinpointed us yet. I didn't give them our position."

There was an overtaking sound of human voices that made his skin prickle: some of the others had started to scream at the sight of the descending gunship. It disturbed him and made him want to scream himself.

"I'm going off the air. We've got to lose them."

The gunship was settling lower and turning toward them, whipping the rain.

"Get down!" Fisher said, and he stood up, holding one of the old long-barreled weapons they had brought from Guthrie. He hoped to fire into the throat of the jets and perhaps gag it. Now it had come close enough for its insignia to be clearly visible. He saw the skull and crossbones, the sunburst, the motto.

"Godseye!"

There was a mass of twisted snakes painted on the tail, and weapons protruding from under the black canopy, and howlers mounted on the midsection.

The gunship was shuddering, moving back and forth, beating the rain and spinning it in silver bursts from the rotor blades. The windows were blacked out. Fisher was trying to signal again. Hooper had told him of the Godseye hunt he had gone on, and how stupid and heavily armed the troopers were; how they burned aliens.

He could not warn the others. The howlers had started, deafening them, and the sound made them go small and look very compact. The howling was interspersed with blasts of simulated artillery, the terrible noise intended to paralyze them. But Fisher still wore his helmet, and when he switched it off and sealed it he heard nothing more than a distant whine and an odd popping.

Yet there was too much interference for him to go back on the air and tell them who he was. You're making a mistake, he wanted to say — and he kept thinking of the hideous irony in his having gotten so near to New York, and being burned here, in sight of Coldharbor, mistaken for an alien.

Mr. Blue lay on his side, and Echols near him, and Valda and the others crouched with small pinched faces under the ear-shattering noise. The howl alone seemed lethal, rendering muscles incapable of movement, and smothering the will in its rising pressure. But in his helmet Fisher was more indignant than frightened. He was outraged. How dare they! He had come too far and fought too hard to be wiped out by the dumb sadists in a death squad.

The rifle banged his faceplate as he tried to aim. He fired anyway, but made no impact — what good was this old iron? Yet their sensors must have picked up the slug, because the gunship immediately tilted in a lumbering way and presented the titanium plates of its armored hull.

And still howling, the gunship released a rocket. The slender thing flamed out of a side tube and tore off a corner of the building above them, spilling bricks on them. This was followed by a burst of flechettes.

Fisher was swearing, but before he could fire again he saw the shadow of another rotor diving through the upper air. A missile twisted out of its nose and flashed into the gunship. In that same instant the gunship exploded. It blew sideways and dropped, burning fast. There was no thud — after the howling and the blasts there was only a loose sunflower of flame, coming apart as it fell. Then the great black gunship was simplified to a shower of sparks and bright petals, and fluttered noiselessly to the ground.

Bligh had begun to cry as soon as she had seen the aliens cowering near the building: they were magnified on the ground-screen. Even after the gunship disintegrated and vanished, they had not lifted their heads. She wept at the sight of them in that black ruin among the burned-out houses and the ditches and tracks. Steam rose around them, and bright pellets of rain flecked the smoke. Not even Mr. Blue was standing. She wondered whether they were dead.

Hooper had been shushing her, trying to calm her, for the entire trip, as he had radioed Moura and monitored Godseye. He had been tense for the past half-hour, knowing that Godseye had copied the message from Moura, and fearing that he might be too late. Burn them all down he had heard echoing from the gunship, and he'd flung himself at the missile release.

"Don't cry," he said.

She had sometimes become tearful when they made love. I'm happy, she said, blinking her smeared eyes and licking the tears from her lips. She said nothing now, she only sobbed.

He guessed that it was her shock at seeing the aliens in that terrible place, flattened on the ground, and Fizzy standing over them.

"He looks okay," Hardy said. "He's alive."

Hardy's words meant nothing, and he knew it. The boy was beyond description. It was as though a defiant and slightly taller stranger had slipped into his flying suit and was shaking his iron at the heap of steaming ashes. Yet his faceplate was open; they recognized the boots, the gloves, the helmet; and though the suit was tighter on his body, they could see it was Fizzy. But that raised another question: Who was Fizzy?

"They want to see Bligh!"

It didn't sound like Fizzy. The quack had gone out of his voice. There was a growl in it now, his delivery was slower, with a rumble behind it. His voice had broken: it had dropped from his nose to his throat.

"Is Bligh in there with you?"

Bligh heard him and pushed her face to the window. She looked out, trying to smile and keep her balance in the tipping rotor.

"They wonder if she's all right!"

Bligh heard this over the rotor's loudspeaker and waved. Hooper flew lower, so that they could see.

"Don't come any closer," Fisher said. "You'll spook them."

"Give us instructions for picking you up," Hardy said into his mike.

Fisher stepped back. Who were these people? This was no rescue. He had saved himself.

"They might have warped his judgment," Hardy was saying.

Fisher said, "We want to know who sent that Godseye gunship here."

Hardy said, "Who's 'we'?"

"I'm putting this thing down, Fizz," Hooper said. "Get clear of that building."

"They don't want me to. They don't trust you — especially now, after those howlers and that rocket. They want to make a deal."

Bligh was still crying softly at the sight of them crouching in the mud; and circling in the rotor, she could see the city behind them. It seemed to her now as though that was where the world began.

"What do they want?" Hooper called out.

Fisher did not have to consult Mr. Blue, or any of the others. He knew the terms, he had known them ever since they set out.

"Hand Bligh over," he said. "And some hardware — a rotor, some weapons, some food, and cash. And get me a jelly sandwich."

Hearing this, Hooper brought the rotor to within a meter of the ground. He threw the side hatch open, so that Bligh could be seen. She hung on to the safety clamp and strap-loops, and stayed in the gaping hatchway. She lifted off her helmet and shook out her hair. She was not crying any longer, and yet she looked frightened as she glanced at Mr. Blue and Echols, who were kneeling in the mud in front of the others, as though they had been tossed there. They blinked back at her through the warm drizzle.

Bligh turned toward Hooper, as if imploring him for a verdict.

"It's your life," Hooper said, trying to find the right words, but expressing it better with a gesture — opening his hand and lifting it, as if releasing a bird. "You're free."

She smiled and held on. He had gambled on that. His decision to let her go — to leave the choice to her — was the proof of his love. In freeing her, he allowed her the decision. He now knew her well enough to realize that it was the only basis on which she would stay. She was so young, and he did not want her as his prisoner.

She had not moved; and it seemed certain from the way she was braced, with her legs apart, that she was not going to. The shadows had cleared from her face. She clung to the hatchway, but not in triumph. Her thin flying suit was blown against her body by the draft from the rotors — it was so tight its pressure outlined her nipples and her navel. Her expression showed relief, but her pale eyes showed sorrow and helplessness and eager hope: all the emotions of love — but it was part of her victory that she had never used that word.

"Look at him," Hardy said.

He had not taken his eyes from Fizzy. He was still trying to discern the nature of this beast. There was no doubt that the boy had become a man — he was bigger, hairier, and his voice had a growly authority. He wore his suit and his helmet. Their battered condition made him look wild. But he was calm, and there was something in that terrible patience that made him seem stronger and more dangerous. He was like one of those creatures that Hardy had heard of but never seen, aliens with technology, like the naked cast-out people who had rockets, and the Trolls who had gas, and the Roaches beams, and the Diggers who inhabited whole underground cities, in fabulous caverns — they were mythical almost, but Hardy believed he was looking at the real thing now.

They were asking for surrender, Fisher knew that. But he wanted more than New York — more than to be kept in a room, even one with Pap and his data base. He wanted to lay claim to his own life. So far, he had only had glimpses of what it might be like. He remembered it as triumphing on the ground — walking through O-Zone, blasting through the Red Zone Perimeter, entering the town of Guthrie.

"Batfish," he murmured, and saw himself opening another door and stepping through. "You porker."

He was smiling. He had not been rescued. He had made his own way back to New York. He had saved those aliens. He had saved himself. He could do it again.

Beyond the black scab of this place, and the twittering rotor, the city mounted higher. The air was still gray here, but over there the sky had cleared. Rocket-shaped towers, and some like swords, struck through the parted clouds. Was that Coldharbor — was that the room where he had been a child?

He thought: What a world — and corrected himself. There were a million worlds; they contained all the past and all the future. Time was a matter of choice, if you were free. Every age was simultaneous upon the earth.

He wanted to choose. Mr. B had once said beautifully, "Shall we go?" The man had not needed to ask — that was why it mattered what he said. And Fisher, who had never believed in permission, and had seldom uttered a question, now had to ask one.

"Can I come with you?"

Their consent gave him power.

The uncertain weather and the way he stood in the rotor had masked Hardy by giving him a yellow mottled face, and he went very still and stupid, as if emptied of hope.

Hooper had never expected Fizzy to turn aside. He had agreed to all the terms, and had just begun to say, "You don't have to go all the way back."

But before he had got five words out — and as he was speaking, which made it the worst interruption — the people shimmered into the drizzly heat. It made him feel temporary and unsteady, and he held on to Bligh, as the sun pierced the mist on this perimeter and broke through to reveal the people gone. They were all aliens again in the transfiguring light.