A random roam through the killing zone encountered not even a stray eccentric.

The night they bombed Northridge was warm, quiet and calm.

For all the news attention it got, and the alarm it generated among the fearful and impressionable, the malathion spraying of the northwestern San Fernando Valley went virtually unnoticed.

No mobs formed to hurl curses at the imperial aircraft, whup-whupping overhead and dribbling little specks of corn syrup. A random roam through the killing zone encountered not even a stray eccentric--the village idiot of Mission Hills, perhaps--shaking his fist or humming the opening bars of Ride of the Valkyries.

As the sun went down and the heat of an oven-hot day loosened its grip, residents appeared from air-conditioned houses, cars and offices to run errands, shop, stop by restaurants or jog.

The scene looked remarkably like what people in the rest of the nation imagine Southern California life to be like, a stereotypical vision that reality matches only a few weeks of the year. The setting sun cast a ruddy glow on the skinny palms. The natives went about their business in extreme casual wear, just short of nudity, shorts and T-shirts, flip-flop sandals or running shoes.

The insecticide spraying was on some minds, with widely varied reactions.

“I think it’s beautiful,” said Gene Pinto, a retired aircraft construction worker heading into Mrs. Gooch’s Market on Reseda Boulevard. “They have to do it, have to get rid of them flies.”

“We’ve got the car all covered, and it doesn’t bother us,” said Art Medrano, an aerospace contract administrator out for a quick-paced evening walk with his wife, Susan. “It’s good they’re going to stop them before they get worse.”

“Well, I’m not pleased about it all,” said Ginger Russell-Stahley, who sells television advertising time. “I’m concerned about my two dogs. And nobody asked me if I cared. There was no warning, they’re just going to go ahead and do it.”

At the Firing Line pistol range just south of Parthenia, Jim Hebert of Northridge sat with a group in the lobby, listening to the desultory bang-bang-bang from a few shooters inside.

“They say it’s harmless, but they said the same thing about Agent Orange, and now some of us are rotting from the inside,” said Hebert, who said he spent “just shy of three years” in Vietnam and has a claim filed against the government because of poisons he said remain in his blood.

“They don’t spray the rich people, do they?” asked Ernest Raft of Northridge.

“They aren’t spraying Woodland Hills and Porter Ranch, are they?” he inquired, probably without intending to echo the East Los Angeles protesters against the Medfly spraying years ago, who demanded to know why they didn’t spray in rich neighborhoods like . . . oh, say . . . Northridge.

If Woodland Hills gets hit eventually, perhaps some Porsche Populist can point out that Newport Beach was spared.

In most neighborhoods, few cars were covered. There were exceptions. In the 9500 block of Rhea Avenue, virtually every auto was sealed up tight. One gleamed in bright silvery reflective plastic, converting it into the kind of inexplicable sculpture that appeals to municipal art bureaucrats.

At Van Nuys Airport, an oasis of darkness in the grid of street lights, a pool of glaring blue-white light from a bank of TV cameras surrounded two helicopters, stuck away deep into the Air National Guard base. The copters, leased by the state from the San Joaquin Helicopter Co., sat on the ground, rotors whirling swiftly. The air blasted TV reporters with loose dirt and jerked their lacquered hairdos this way and that, as if they were being tormented by invisible sprites.

“This is a dirty job,” remarked Gera Curry, a short woman in a purple pantsuit who speaks for the state Department of Food and Agriculture. She meant the prop-blast, not the insecticide spraying. The mixture the helicopters carried was more than 80% corn syrup--bait for the flies--she kept pointing out to reporters. It is the corn syrup that is bad for auto paint, she said, not the poison.

The helicopters took off at 10:04 p.m., four minutes behind schedule. The trailing copter flew close behind the leader, staggered just slightly to one side, giving them a military formation appearance.

They flew at about 400 feet, low enough to have seen faces aboard if it were daylight. In the darkness, little was visible but the flashing red light beneath the aircraft.

Whup-whup-whup they flew along the western edge of the zone, north and south along Wilbur Avenue, over strips that gradually moved to the east, like plowmen following furrows in the sky.

Drivers in the light traffic beneath them did not notice. The sound of their own cars and radios masked the aircraft noise.

The moon was full. The streets were almost deserted.

A few teen-agers hung about a pizza stand.

“No man, I don’t care. It’s my boss’s truck.”

A woman sat with a can of beer on the wall outside an apartment house on Sherman Way.

“I don’t mind. I’m sure we breathe worse . . . than this every day anyway. You don’t go until it’s your time to go, and then you’re gonna go anyway.”