“All right,” he said. “We’ll just ride on—till we run out of gas.”
With that, he broke the horse into a slow trot over the scorched, baked dunes. Leaving the spacecraft, Skipper’s grave, and the greatest mystery of his life behind him.
Temporarily, at least.
There was only one thing left in the universe, A.D. 3955 or not.
Find Taylor.
* * *
The search became a trek. A wearying, parching, searing exodus across a land which might have sprung whole from the pages of the Old Testament. Never had Brent known so much desert, so much sun, so much dry, sandy, barren nothingness. There was nothing to be seen of a horizon, for the mantle of blazing heat and, cloudless skies seemed to blend in waves of infernal, dancing heat which made vision valueless and pointless beyond more than five hundred yards. It was as if this strange planet lay like a skeleton bleaching beneath the ferocity of a never-extinguished sunlight. Night seemed an impossibility. It was difficult to assess anything. Neither place, Time nor direction. Brent could only let the horse plod along in a forward direction and hope for the best. The girl clinging to his dampened body was like some lovely homunculus growing out of his very back. Brent could barely see straight. His eyeballs ached, he had difficulty keeping his lids open. Great weights pressed down on his eyelids. And all about him, and the girl, beat down a heat so furnace-like and unrelenting that he felt as if the blood within his flesh was boiling. Time crawled, droned on. Not even the random furtive breeze which intermittently made its presence known by hissing across this blasted panorama of a Death Valley could relieve the depressing sensation of parboiled desolation and extinct living matter. Nothing could live in this inferno. Nothing. Brent was forcibly reminded of the many sites of atomic bomb testings on Earth where he had experienced this selfsame feeling of utter loss and obliteration. This vast, barren wasteland was exactly like that. He had not seen so much as an ant crawling across the ground. Not even the indestructible ant could have survived in this mass of deadness.
Not even Taylor…
He pushed the dismal conclusion from what was left of his thinking mind and pushed the poor horse on. Behind him, Nova made small, almost mewing sounds from time to time. Dimly, he wondered who she was, who she might be and where in God’s name she had come from. Surely she hadn’t grown to such lush womanhood, no matter how savagely formed, in a desert horrorland like this! It was inconceivable. Even a rudimentary knowledge of biology and ethnics told him that. Ecologically, the girl could never have bloomed in a Hades like this desert. Which had to mean that she came from somewhere else. Somewhere—where there was a normal sun, fresh air and green grass and…
Brent’s head toyed with mirages. With vistas of cool, rippling water and waving palm trees and fresh offshore winds. He caught hold of himself and steadied the horse on a plodding path over the wretched, fruitless terrain. Before them, many more endless stretches of rock and dune glistened cruelly in the sunlight.
The mirage moved from the boundaries of his mind and set itself down before him. Twinkling. Iridescent, like a pearl.
He blinked in the scorching sunlight.
His tongue licked greedily at his parched lips.
His pulses quickened.
He saw the greenness, the lushness, the beckoning beauty of fertility off in the distance. The good green earth!
A long, low-lying swatch of terrain, bordered with trees, mounted with tall grass of so brilliant and verdant a hue that it seemed to vie with the sunlight for sheer radiance. And luminosity.
His heart soared.
Behind him, Nova clawed at his back in confirmation of what his eyes had seen. Yes. This was where she had wanted to bring him. This was where Taylor might be. Or so he thought.
The horse now spurted forward, at a fast gallop, as if it too had been miraculously revivified by the change in the scenery ahead. Taking great strides, the beast plummeted forward, bouncing Brent and the girl indiscriminately. Brent didn’t care. He couldn’t quit the empty wasteland soon enough. He was leaving Hell behind.
The greener, richer country magnified in size, looming large, larger, largest. Until it seemed to fill the whole new world. It was a fresh universe set down in the seeming middle of Nothingness. Brent rejoiced in his heart. He could tell the girl felt much better, too, by the manner in which her arms tightened around him as they drew even closer. He was unable to distinguish between fear and joy. Now, there were trees. A forest of them. Green and abiding. And thick copses of shrubbery. Hedges, measured landscaping. Like terraced gardens. The evident hand of a civilization of people. A land of green-thumbers who knew how to make things grow! Brent gave the horse its head but navigated it toward a trail cut directly into the heart of the pleasantly leafy outskirts of this oasis of beauty in a barren planet. There was hope yet…
The horse slowed, avoided overhanging boughs encroaching on the path and gingerly worked a passage among the verdant environs. Brent gave it free rein, but when Nova suddenly pulled at his uniform, he turned in bewilderment. She was indicating that they should both dismount and look first to see what they were getting into. It seemed a sensible idea. Brent slid off the horse and assisted the girl to the soft earth. Now, faintly, he could hear a mammoth roar. Like a distant thunder of waves beating against a shoreline. Puzzled, he allowed Nova to lead him where the bush was thickest. Here she tethered the horse so the animal could not run away. Then she joined the new white man and motioned for him to peer through the foliage in the direction of the strange cataract of sound. To Brent, unless the infernal heat he had suffered most of the day was making him hear things, the strange murmur of noise was like that of a large and vociferous crowd of people. At a stadium, say, or a political rally; like a convention.
Together, Brent and Nova crawled through the green shrubbery, found a vantage point and parted some overhead branches. Brent was the first to look. To goggle.
As he stared down toward the source of the waterfall of sound, his eyes bugged out, his mouth fell open and the scientific mind inside his skull did a pirouette of insanity.
“My God—” he blurted. “A city of apes—!”
It was true.
He was seeing what Taylor had seen way back at the beginning.
Seeing what Taylor had refused to believe until he had felt the first sting of a gorilla’s whip and the first guttural commands of his ape jailers. Until he had lost all his comrades-in-space.
Seeing and daring not to believe, for it would mean that he was truly mad and had lost his mind when the spacecraft had come down in the desert in a crash landing.
He saw the complex of Ape City. The stone warrens, the dome-shaped houses, the granite walks and paths, the immense gorilla-house aspect of the kingdom which had sprung into being after Man had lost his way in the hierarchy of power. Below him he saw the circular stone arena in the heart of the city. Unbelievably, hundreds of apes were thronged there, standing together like any mass of humans who have come to hear someone speak. He could see squads of gorillas, uniformed like some kind of military personnel, brutally herding half-naked humans into wagon cages. The air was filled with the sounds of barked commands, cries of fright and pain. And something else Brent couldn’t quite fathom. Not in his frenzy of fear and bewilderment.
“What are they doing to those people down there?” he almost begged the question of Nova. Behind him, crouching and remembering all too well, the girl did not answer. She couldn’t.
At the arena’s main gate, a picket-like arched entranceway, Brent could now see a small gathering of chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, armed with banners, walking around in circles, gesturing defiantly toward the center of the arena. The banners read: FREE THE HUMANS! UNITE IN PEACE! Nobody of the gorilla stamp was paying any attention to the dissenting chimpanzees. Brent shook himself, blinking. He was seeing things. He had to be—uniformed gorillas, chimps in civvies…
“This is a nightmare,” he said huskily, mutely, his tongue thick in his mouth. His
frantic eyes searched the arena dumbly.
He could feel Nova’s hands trembling on his back. Nova, who still remembered the ordeal of Ape City. Brent was stupefied.
Nova was only—afraid.
4
URSUS
Down below on the perimeter of the stone arena, too far away for him to have spotted Brent and Nova in the concealment of thicket above, stood General Ursus. General Ursus had eyes only for the crowd. His audience. He stood on a dais, surrounded by the populace of Ape City, all eager to hear what he had to say—to offer. General Ursus was a very large, very imposing gorilla whose military costume of braid, epaulettes and medals merely enhanced the ferocity and brute strength of his appearance. Behind him on the dais, Nova would have recognized the elderly Dr. Zaius, the stern but kindly orangutan who had at least attempted to understand the freedom that Taylor had wanted and needed. Other members of the ape hierarchy filled the chairs ringed around the platform. But for the moment, the center of all eyes and ears was the mighty General Ursus.
Ursus the Powerful.
Ursus the Great One.
Even as he now spoke, holding out his long arms, his full-chested voice sweeping over the throngs, the great white statue of the Lawgiver behind him seemed to wrinkle in a smile of simian approval. Ursus was a man of the people.
“Greetings, members of the Citizens’ Council,” Ursus boomed. “I am a simple soldier—” Deafening applause and a wildly cheering multitude greeted this pronouncement. From the cover of the shrubbery above, Brent almost broke down in total astonishment. His eyes glittered insanely in his bronzed face. “God, this is not real. It can’t be—!” Nova, terrified, pulled him back to cover.
“As a soldier,” Ursus resumed, placidly, in control of his audience, “I see things simply—” His listeners had stilled, ready to absorb the rest of what he had to say.
Brent was talking to himself now, in a shattered whisper.
“I see an ape. He talks…! I know what happened… Re-entry: twenty thousand miles an hour. A force of 15G. It made Skipper blind, and muddled my brains. So everything here is delusion—” he turned to Nova almost helplessly. “Even you—which is too bad…”
Nova, somehow understanding the horror of what had come to him, quickly placed her hand over his mouth.
The next words of Ursus came up to them, sonorous and clear. Like shining rocks aimed at what was left of Brent’s sanity.
“What I saw, when I became your Army Commander, broke my heart. I saw our country imprisoned on one side by the sea, and by north and south and west—by naked desert. And inside our country, we found ourselves infected by those enormous parasites which we call Humans. By parasites who devoured the fruits that we had planted in a land rightly ours; who fattened on the fertility of fields that we had made green with wheat; who polluted the pure and precious water of our lakes and rivers with their animal excrement; and who continued to breed in our very midst like maggots in a once healthy body. What should we do? How should we act? I know what every soldier knows: the only thing that counts in the end is Power! Naked, merciless Force!” A low growl of applause filtered up from the crowd but no one was anxious to break the flow of Ursus’ rhetoric.
“Today, the bestial Human herds have at last been systematically flushed from their feeding grounds! No single Human Being has escaped our net. They are dead. Or if not dead, they are in our cages condemned to die.”
The thick murmur flittering among his listeners began to swell into a low rumble, building to a full roar. Ursus smiled all too benignly. His deep-set eyes were as cold and cruel as leeches.
“I do not say that all Humans are evil,” he declared, “simply because their skin is hairless. But our Lawgiver tells us that never will they have the Ape’s divine faculty for distinguishing between Evil and Good. Their eyes are animal, their smell the smell of the dead flesh they eat. Had they been allowed to live and breed among us unchecked, they would have overwhelmed us. And the concept of Ape Power would have become meaningless; and our high and splendid culture would have wasted away and our civilization would have been ravaged and destroyed.”
Now there was no holding the audience of apes, gorillas and camp followers. The stone arena thundered with noise. Ursus beamed down on a sea of simian faces. He raised his arms in gratitude and acknowledgment. From the hillside, Brent had listened with mounting horror and cold fury. Flat on their stomachs, he and the girl had worked themselves further away from the hideous tableau. Nova was shuddering as if she had palsy. Brent tried to steady her by holding her wrist firmly.
“I’ve got to get out,” he told himself, trying to remain clearheaded. “And the only way out—is to take to the sky. I don’t know how or what with—all I know is I can’t stay here. If this place has a name, it’s the Planet Nightmare…”
Backtracking furiously, slithering along the green earth like snakes, Brent and the shaking girl disappeared into the foliage.
Ursus had almost reached the end of his peroration. “…and those lucky enough to remain alive will have the privilege of being—used—” Here he half turned to bow slightly toward Dr. Zaius whose powerful face had remained inscrutable throughout the highly inflammatory speech, “by our revered Minister of Science, Dr. Zaius.”
This last statement was uttered in a flat, unemphatic tone, but nevertheless a small but spirited outbreak of minority clapping sounded from the crowd below the dais, filling the arena. Dr. Zaius still did not smile, but Ursus frowned, flinging a furious glance toward an outer section of his audience.
He might have guessed. Zaius’ advocates seemed to be the chimpanzee section of the crowd. The usual, typical kindly intellectuals who still used such expressions as the “milk of human kindness.” What rot! Damn Zaius and all his intellectual weaklings! Ursus gestured peremptorily and a military policeman advanced on the section, brandishing his club. The clapping subsided. Except for one very energetic female chimpanzee who kept on clapping. Her companion, a male chimp, plucked at her sleeve nervously.
“Zira!” Cornelius whispered savagely. “Stop! You’re in danger.”
“So is the future of science with that rabble-rouser fomenting a senseless military adventure,” his wife snorted angrily.
On the left flank of the crowd, in the concealment of the hillside, Nova had halted Brent. Pointing down toward the chimpanzee section, she gesticulated wildly toward Zira and Cornelius. Brent did not understand until Nova touched the ID disc around her throat and pointed back toward the arena. She had recognized Zira and Cornelius; two of the gentlest souls in this Ape City, who had helped her and Taylor effect their escape. The intelligent chimpanzees who in their long jackets and skirts and trousers had been like saints in a universe gone mad.
Ursus was winding up his oration.
“We will never lose our sense of purpose. We will never degenerate. We will never become weak and hairless—” Growls filtered up from his audience once more. “Because we know how to purify our own people—with Blood!”
His gimlet eyes swept over the dais, finding Dr. Zaius. Their glances locked. The conflict between the two of them hung like unexploded dynamite in the charged atmosphere.
“The Forbidden City,” Ursus intoned heavily, “has been closed for centuries. And rightly so. But we now have evidence that that vast, barren area is now inhabited. By whom or by what, we do not know. But if they live—and live they do—then they must eat. We must replenish the land that was ravaged by the Humans with new, productive feeding grounds. And these we can obtain in the once Forbidden Zone. So now it is our holy duty to enter it, put the mark of our feet and wheels and guns and flags upon it! To expand the boundaries of our ineluctable power!”
A mammoth a-a-a-ahhhhh! erupted from the crowd.
“To kill our enemies—” Ursus thundered, shaggy arms outflung, “known and unknown—like so many lice!”
A growl, a gathering crescendo of fury and might, swelled up from anthropoid throats. Ursus brought his arms down in a mighty
sweep of finality, his voice climaxing the speech with one last fierce exhortation of brute force.
“And to invade—invade—INVADE, INVADE!”
The ranked gorillas, standing before the platform, blistered the air with applause. Hoarse shouts of exaltation rumbled wildly from the throng. With waves of acclaim cascading upon him, Ursus took a seat once more, his gorilla smile as wide as humility allowed. Dr. Zaius did not smile.
Seated and silent amid the uproar, the chimpanzee section of the audience sat in stunned despair. One Ursus, feeding flames to trigger-happy civilians, could fan a blaze that could wreck Ape City. Gorilla policemen, quick to put down troublemakers among the intellectuals, were circulating rapidly, wielding truncheons. And bayonets. The chimps who had refused to stand to honor Ursus and his speech were bullied into upright positions. All but Zira, who remained seated, her chimp muzzle screwed into an expression of defiance. Cornelius, standing to avoid a fight, was exceedingly perturbed by her foolhardiness.
“Zira!”
She wouldn’t budge. Cornelius whispered to her in a fierce undertone.
“Zira, as your husband, I beg you to stand up.”
“Only for my principles,” she said clearly and coolly.
“All right,” Cornelius smiled, in spite of himself. “For your principles then. And mine. Only stand!”
Zira dutifully got to her feet, a split second before a glowering gorilla policeman could reach her to force her to do so.
From the center of the arena, Ursus smiled a triumphant smile. No matter what the brainy fools might think—force was the only answer for all problems. Power. The Big Fist. Ineluctable Power!
Even his most vocal opposition, the chimpanzee claque, were all on their feet now, paying homage to what he had said. His words. His platform. His promises.
Dr. Zaius would learn that someday, the scientific idiot!
Or he too would have to feel a leather truncheon crashing down on his orangutan skull.
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