Worn, spent, bleeding, Taylor sagged along the edge of the dais.
“You bloody bastard,” he panted helplessly.
“Evil,” Dr. Zaius repeated, his voice rising. “And the destroyer himself must be destroyed!”
Oblivious of the dialogue on the dais, General Ursus had closed in on Brent lying in the darkened aisle. Brent stirred painfully, bringing his pistol up. Ursus bounded forward in a prodigious leap, his powerful legs landing him directly across Brent. He seized Brent’s gun hand, and bit with his great jaws into Brent’s forearm. The gun clattered to the floor. Ursus scooped it up, beaming. He motioned to the accompanying soldiers to kill Brent. His eyes swept to the platform where Dr. Zaius stood pointing a gun at the battered Taylor who had lifted himself to the high altar; Taylor was now only twenty feet from the Bomb. General Ursus knotted his fists.
“Fire!” he commanded Dr. Zaius. “Fire!”
But Dr. Zaius was indecisive. There was a look in Taylor’s eyes that he did not understand. That was beyond his range of science. Men do not look at you that way when they are not in deadly earnest.
Taylor limped to the prie-dieu. He reached it.
Ursus bounded forward, cleared the platform, raced toward Dr. Zaius. As the baffled apes hovering over the prone Brent hesitated, Brent’s dying gasp called out, echoing in the hollow reaches of the cathedral. “For Gad’s sake, it’s the Doomsday Bomb—the end of the world!”
Snarling, General Ursus snatched the weapon from the hands of Dr. Zaius. He aimed the gun at Taylor and fired. Taylor’s back was to him. An unmissable target. Ursus did not miss. The blast of automatic gunfire stitched across Taylor’s massive back, hammering him down to the floor before the prie-dieu. Amazingly, Taylor staggered erect, lurched forward and toppled over the prie-dieu, like a tired orator clutching his lectern. General Ursus growled in his chest. Dr. Zaius was rigid with growing dread. The great shining Bomb, with its passengers of great apes still in position on it like so many children, glowed more strongly than ever. A strange aura of something pervaded the stage.
The great stain of blood on Taylor’s back spread into a river of red. Through blood-curtained eyes, Taylor saw the cathedral spin all about him, whirling, coruscating, like a kaleidoscope. His senses fused and he died, slamming down over the bejeweled panel board.
He never saw the End.
The dead weight of his big body pressed down on the ruby button on the panel. The one that had never been touched before.
General Ursus stared at the Bomb. The glow evanesced over a period of seconds. General Ursus’ mouth opened and his fangs showed in a tremendous, terrified scream.
Dr. Zaius had no time to think about anything else. Not in this world or any other.
The ape militia scattered about the cathedral, three hundred in all, stupid, belligerent, unthinking, did not even think of running. Not that running would have helped.
The great cathedral was visible for only one second more.
Taylor’s dead body blackened to a silhouette, while above and behind him the Bomb whitened to an incandescence more blinding than the sun which Taylor would never see again.
And then die universal fire began…
…and all that was left was melting and burning.
And small, blackened wisps.
An electronic crackling sputtered in Outer Space.
15
ARMAGEDDON
Listen, if you have the ears to hear.
The Wind is speaking again.
“…the Universe, at present, contains billions upon billions of spiral galaxies. In one of them, one-third from the edge, is a medium-sized star…”
Only a small, blackened wisp. If you have the eyes to see it. Or the heart to care.
“…and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet…”
Blank, white, glaring.
“…is now dead.”
Silence.
There is nothing more. There is nothing left.
It is as it was in the Beginning.
Wasteland.
ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES
JERRY POURNELLE
Based on the screenplay by PAUL DEHN
TO: P. Schuyler Miller and L. Sprague de Camp
1
It was two o’clock in the afternoon with bright sunshine and cloudless skies over Omaha. A gentle wind flowed out of the northwest, and the temperature was seventy, nearly perfect weather. It would have been a marvelous day for a picnic.
Major General Raymond Hamilton, USAF, knew this because the weather over each of his Strategic Air Command bases was displayed on the command status board above his desk in the hole. Otherwise, Omaha’s weather wouldn’t interest him for another six hours. It would be night before he went off duty and home to his wife and two boys and the red brick house originally built for the U.S. Cavalry before the turn of the century. Now the cavalry wasn’t needed to stand guard over Omaha. Instead, the old fort was Offutt Air Force Base, home of SAC, and SAC stood guard over the world.
General Hamilton’s desk was three stories underground. It rested on a glassed-in balcony overlooking the main SAC command post, and two floors further down, directly below and in front of Hamilton’s balcony, were the Air Force personnel who could put him in communication with any SAC base. They could also launch enough nuclear firepower to destroy half the world.
Among the telephones on Hamilton’s desk were two in color. The gold phone would instantly reach Executive One—the president. Next to it was the red phone that could launch the force.
Ray Hamilton wasn’t thinking about the red phone at two in the afternoon. The president’s summit conferences had been successful, and although Ray, like all SAC generals, believed the Russians were planning something and had to be watched at all times, he didn’t believe the “Big One” was coming just yet. If SAC stayed alert, it might never come. Ray was relaxed in his easy chair, leafing through a murder mystery. He grimaced as he realized he’d read it before and faced the afternoon with nothing to do.
General Hamilton was bored. If he worried about anything, it was about his son’s bicycle. That was the third ten-speed stolen from his family in less than two years, and it irritated him to think that SAC could guard the free world, but SAC’s Air Police couldn’t catch a bicycle thief. The boy had to ride a mile to high school and would heed a new bike, and that would cost money Ray Hamilton didn’t have at the moment.
A phone rang. A black one. Hamilton picked it up. “SAC Duty Commander.”
“SAC, this is Air Defense. We have a bandit re-entry coming in over the South Pole. I say again we have a bandit on re-entry course over the South Pole. Probable place of impact, vicinity of San Diego, California. Estimated time, plus 26 minutes.”
Hamilton tensed. “NORAD, this is SAC. Are you sure you have a bandit?”
“Affirmative, SAC. We have no previous plot. Bandit has no previous orbital flight. Launch point unknown. This is a big one. Estimated excess of 35,000 pounds.”
“My God!” Ray Hamilton looked across at the enormous screens on the opposite, wall. His staff had already projected a map of the Western Hemisphere and the predicted path of the intruder. The red dotted line led from the bandit’s position over Chile up to a large circle just north of San Diego. Hamilton scowled. The Soviets had tested a 100 megaton bomb, and a vehicle that size could carry one. That thing would take out most of Southern California, including Oceanside. Hamilton’s status board showed Executive One in residence at the Western White House.
Suddenly he felt very calm. His voice was unemotional as he spoke into the black phone. “NORAD, this is SAC. Thank you. Send any additional update information. SAC out.” He laid the black phone down and hesitated a second. Then he lifted the red one.
A siren blared through the hole. Red lights flashed. That phone was no joke. Hamilton’s throat was dry as he spoke in the unemotional voice of command. “All units, this is SAC. EWO, EWO. Emergency War Orders. This is no drill. Yellow
alert. All units, Yellow alert. March Air Base, generate your aircraft wings. I say again, March Air Force Base only, generate the force. SAC out.” He nodded, and the duty officers below him began feeding the authentication codes that would confirm his orders.
Across the country men responded. Pilots tumbled from their ready-room bunks and raced across runways to their ships. Within minutes the B-52’s and B-58’s were cocked and ready, engines idling, as their pilots waited for the orders that would launch them toward the north. Each carried maps to half a dozen targets around the world. They would learn which to head for once they were airborne.
In forty holes across the northern United States, USAF officers took keys from around their necks and inserted them into gray consoles. They did not, as yet, turn the keys. Above them, sergeants locked steel doors three feet thick into place; the missile commanders were sealed in and would be until the alert was over. Around the missile farms the Minuteman missiles came alert, gyros hummed, computers took in last-second data.
At March Air Force Base, Riverside, California, a wing of B-52’s rolled down the runway and took off, the last airborne less than fifteen minutes from the time Ray Hamilton gave his orders. Each ship carried four twenty megaton bombs in its belly, and two more in stand-off missiles hung under the wings. The ships left faint vapor trails in the California sky as they flew northward toward their rendezvous with the tankers. Navigators handed up course data to the pilots, then looked back at their charts. On each chart was a dark black line. When the planes reached that line, they would turn back—unless they had received orders from the president to go on in. The pilots flew grimly, silent, waiting, some praying, hoping for cancellation orders…
* * *
General Ray Hamilton lifted the black phone again. “NORAD, do we have any additional bandits?”
“Negative, SAC. It’s a single object on a ballistic re-entry, automatic sequencing. Not under command so far as we can tell. Pretty big to be a bomb. Too open. I think it’s experimental.”
“So do I.” Hamilton waited. He could call the president, but there’d be no point. If that was a bomb set to detonate at optimum altitude over Oceanside it would take out the president, March AFB, San Diego Navy Yards, Miramar, Long Beach, and a lot of Los Angeles. There would be no way to get the president out in time. And if it blew, there’d be no question about a hostile move against the United States.
It probably wasn’t. It was too big and too open. Probably the force would be recalled, and SAC would have had another drill. They had them every week anyway.
“All right, NORAD,” Hamilton ordered. “Give me what you get as it comes in. Have you got an intercept launched yet?”
“Affirmative, SAC.”
“Patch me in.”
“Roger, SAC.”
There was a lot of static and several squeals; then Hamilton could hear the pilot of the interceptor flying above the probable area of the bandit’s impact. Ray glanced at his status board. The March AFB wing of 52’s was on its way and put of the danger area. At other bases the ships waited still. His SAC force was poised like a cocked crossbow, and the red phone could launch the greatest concentration of firepower in the history of the world.
Not without permission from Executive One, of course. Ray waited; in a few minutes, he’d know. There would be no point in launching, or Executive One wouldn’t care. SAC would own its own planes and missiles again, and SAC would take a terrible vengeance for the president.
“NORAD, this is Red Baron Leader. I have visual on the bandit,” came the interceptor pilot’s voice, cold and unemotional.
“Roger, Red Baron Leader. Describe.”
“Bandit is lifting body spacecraft with NASA markings. Spacecraft is descending with air speed approximately mach 2.6 slowing rapidly. Spacecraft appears oriented properly for splashdown with low g-stress.”
“Red Baron Leader, say again ID of spacecraft.”
“Spacecraft appears to be United States NASA lifting-buddy ship. I can see the NASA insignia. I say again, spacecraft has US NASA markings. It’s going to splash. It looks to be under control.”
“Red Baron Leader, follow that spacecraft down to splash and stand by to direct Navy recovery team to your location. MIRAMAR, this is NORAD. We have an unscheduled NASA spacecraft splashing in your air defense area. Can you get a recovery team out there pronto, interrogative?”
“Roger NORAD, this is Miramar. Helicopter recovery team will be on the way in five minutes. We will notify Fleet to send out a recovery ship.”
“SAC, this is NORAD. Get all that?”
“Roger, NORAD.” Hamilton shook his head slowly, then watched his status boards. The timers clicked off to zero; bandit was down. He heard the chatter of Red Baron Leader. The spacecraft had made a perfect landing and was afloat. Hamilton waited another minute, then lifted the red phone.
Again the sirens wailed. “All units, this is SAC. Cancel EWO. I say again, cancel Emergency War Orders. Return to alert status. March wing, return to base. SAC out.” He laid the red phone down and breathed deeply.
An unscheduled spacecraft screaming in for splashdown off San Diego from re-entry over the South Pole. Somebody in NASA was going to get his hide roasted for this. Hamilton hoped he’d be around to see it. In fact, he’d like to do the roasting. The incident had scared him, he would admit now that it was over.
In all his years in the Air Force, he’d been through plenty of alerts, but this was the first real one he’d commanded. Ray Hamilton said a short prayer that it would be the last. There wouldn’t be many survivors of a nuclear war.
2
The gold telephone rang, and the president hesitated a moment before answering. There were several of those gold phones throughout the U.S., and they didn’t all mean war, but he was scared every time it rang. He wondered what other presidents had thought when they heard it, and if they ever got used to it. Certainly he hadn’t, and he’d been in office over a year now. The phone rang again, and he lifted it.
“Yes.”
“Mister President, this is General Brody.” The president nodded. Brody was White House Chief of Staff. He wouldn’t be calling with a war message. “Sir, we’ve got a small problem out your way. One of NASA’s manned space capsules came in over the Pole and splashed just offshore from you, and SAC went to Yellow Alert.”
“What’s their status now?” he asked quickly.
“Back to normal alert status, Mister President.”
“A NASA spacecraft—I don’t recall that we’ve launched any manned capsules recently, General.”
“I don’t either, Mister President. Nor does NASA. But there’s sure as hell one up there—well, down now. Anyway, the Navy’s helicopter boys think this could be one of the ships lost a year ago. Colonel Taylor’s, for instance.”
“Eh?” The president pulled his lower lip. It was a famous gesture and he’d used it so often that it was genuine enough now, even if he had been advised to adopt it by his managers back when he was still in Congress. “What are the chances of its really being one of our ships? With the crew alive?”
“None, Mister President. That ship maneuvered into the water. It came in on automatic, but there was a pilot working the controls just before it splashed. Colonel Taylor’s been missing over a year. There weren’t enough supplies to keep the crew alive that long. No, sir, it can’t be our people coming back.”
“I see.” The President pulled his lip again. “Have you thought of this possibility, General—that the Russians retrieved one of our missing spacecraft and have now manned it with their own cosmonauts. Could there be Russians aboard that ship?”
The line hummed a moment as General Brody listened to a background voice the President couldn’t quite hear. Then his Chief of Staff came back on. “Sir, there could be anybody aboard that thing. The Navy’s bringing the capsule onto their recovery ship right now. Have you any instructions?”
“Yes. If there’s anyone alive on that thing, welcome them to the Unit
ed States. Or to Earth, if they’re—uh, there’s always that possibility, isn’t there? That they’re little green men? Have Admiral Jardin use his judgment, General. Meanwhile, you get those NASA scientists to go over that ship with whatever’s the scientific equivalent of a fine-toothed comb. When they know anything, tell me. And General, I want full security on this operation.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You do understand me, don’t you, General? This is not for the networks.”
“Yes, sir.” General Brody cradled the phone and swore. He couldn’t blame the president. There’d been a lot of leaks to the press. The heavy sarcasm was probably deserved. Still, there were a lot of people who were easier to work for.
He lifted another telephone and dialed; then, as it was ringing, shouted, “Sergeant, where’s that TV monitor?”
“Coming up, General.” Three uniformed men rolled a color TV set into General Brody’s office. They fussed with the dials, and a picture formed. The camera was atop the island on the aircraft carrier, looking down onto the flight deck. Brody could just see waves over the side of the ship—a calm sea.
A crane lifted the space capsule out of the water and over the deck. There was no mistaking the NASA markings on the sides and the vertical stabilizer. Ugly ship, Brody thought. No wings. Just the body of the craft, bent, so that it would provide lift at high speeds. Pilots told him it had all the glide characteristics of a rock, but they were all willing to fly in it. With the cutbacks in the space program, there were five astronauts for every mission anyway.
The capsule was lowered to the deck with a thump. Sailors clustered around it Brody’s phone rang and he answered absently.
“Admiral Jardin, sir,” the voice on the phone said.
“Put him on.” Brody continued to watch the spacecraft on the TV set. No one wanted to open it. Two Navy surgeons stood outside the hatch, watching, saying nothing. Admiral Jardin, with a phone, stood with them. Brody spoke into his phone. “You going to open that thing, Admiral? I’ve got a TV monitor here, I’m watching. The president says you’re to use your own judgment, but keep the reporters away.”
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