Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (12 page)

“Has it occurred to you that tomorrow—they
won’t
be here?”

Cornelius looked at her.

Their eyes locked.

A patient, knowing smile curled Zira’s mouth.

Cornelius swallowed nervously.

It was pretty obvious what his adorable, firm-minded little wife meant. What she had always meant, since the very beginning of unrest.

Revolt!

Miles up the road, moving briskly in broad sunny daylight, the Grand Army was making good time. Ursus, Zaius, a bugler, the vanguard and vanguard commander, had rounded a corner on the outskirts of Ape City, to be confronted by a sight not to Ursus’ liking. Or Zaius’ for that matter. Being the only non-gorilla in the group, Zaius was keenly affected by the spectacle of a chimpanzee student demonstration.

Half a dozen earnest, outspoken young chimpanzees were squatting directly across the line of march, sitting in the roadway, blocking the advance of the Grand Army of Apes. Ursus growled menacingly in his deep chest. The two demonstrators in the center of the pathetically valiant little group were holding aloft a banner on which the paint-scrawled plea GIVE US PEACE was clearly visible and advisory. Ursus’ brow darkened. Zaius feared the worst.

“Halt,” Ursus commanded in an undertone to the bugler.

The primitive horn blared a tinny signal which was picked up and relayed by successive buglers all down the column of gorillas and guns. The column came to a full stop some twenty yards from the little knot of demonstrators barring the roadway.

Ursus, almost chidingly, smiled down at the chimpanzees.

“Get off the road, young people.”

The “young people” continued to sit, ignoring him and his army, obstinately and sincerely contemptuous of Ursus and all he might do in retaliation. Zaius’ eyes narrowed.

Ursus wheeled to the vanguard commander, braking his mount.

“Get them out of the way!” he bellowed.

The commander leered and drew a heavy pistol from his uniformed middle, but Zaius, quickly reaching across, took the ugly muzzle in both his paws.

“Wait,” he urged. He turned on General Ursus. Their eyes dueled again. “We don’t want martyrs, do we?”

General Ursus said to the commander, “And do it quietly.”

The demonstrators had gone limp in the roadway, the usual weapon of advocates of non-violence. The commander rapped out some orders and soon, and swiftly, gorilla hands had lifted the demonstrators, carrying them by the arms and legs and piling them into the cage-wagons at the army’s disposal, closing out the incident. The army was able to advance again. Wheels rolled over the abandoned peace signs. Ursus smiled smugly at Dr. Zaius. The good doctor stared pointedly ahead, his eyes on some unseen calamity on the horizon. In the future. With the inscrutability that General Ursus was never able to connect with the seething anger that boiled inside Dr. Zaius’ intellectual breast. Something his ape mentality would never have understood. Or
liked.

Dr. Zaius knew how to wait.

To bide his time.

Without giving up his ideals or his ethics to the code of Brute Force. To the ethos of Ape Logic and Ape Stupidity.
Gorilla,
that is.

General Ursus did not care.

So long as he had things his own way.

He would show the good doctor the efficacy of Power in due time.

All in due time.

Briskly, blindly, unknowingly, Ursus led his marching legions toward the horrors of the Forbidden Zone.

Where he thought the Fist would solve everything.

Where Dr. Zaius knew it would not.

In the great cathedral where the Bomb was lord and master of all it surveyed, a mass was in progress. The vaulted reaches of the dimly lit nave echoed with the chorus of voices raised in adoring harmony to the words of the hymn known as Psalm to Mendez II.

To Brent, forced to attend the weird ritual, the entire schema was a frightening mutation of the ancient Christian observance. All the singing and chanting seemed to have its origins in sacred songs of the twentieth century, now all cannibalized to match the coldness and cruel barrenness of this strange new cosmos into which he had blundered. He wondered how it all must sound to the mute Nova, at his side in the front pew, flanked by the fat man, Caspay, the beauteous Albina and the Negro, with four armed guards directly behind them.

At the high altar, now dark, Mendez stood facing a congregation of white-robed listeners. Brent was struck by the demeanor of the entire gathering. An inward spiritual serenity hovered about every face and figure. An outward gracefulness and gentility in mocking contrast with the
reason
for the radiance and exaltation of those faces and singing voices. The Bomb hung suspended above the altar, still invisible in the gloom of the ceiling.

Mendez was chanting sonorously, his purple robes dazzling as his arms and his voice rose in unison:

“The heavens declare the glory of the Bomb. And the firmament showeth his handiwork.”

To a man, woman and child, the congregation answered him. A full-throated, deep, reverent response. The gloomy cathedral echoed with the words:

“His sound is gone out unto all lands. And His light unto the ends of the world”

Now the hidden choir joined with Mendez in an invocation that soared up to the nave. The sound was spectral, ghostly:

“He descended from the outermost part of heaven. And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. There is neither speech nor language. But His voice is heard among them.”

The congregation responded:

“Praise him. My strength and my redeemer.”

Mendez knelt at the
prie-dieu;
his white-gloved hand pressed a button on the bejeweled panel. The floodlight control was released and dramatically, illuminatingly, the Great Bomb, with its inscribed fins, filled the eye. ALPHA and OMEGA glowed like constellations in a sky of gun-metal silver.

Mendez and the choir sung aloud:

“Glory be to the Bomb and to the Holy Fallout—As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; world without end. Amen.”

“Amen,”
the congregation spoke as one.

Brent had a bad taste in his mouth. His ears ached with the awful, ridiculous, puling blasphemy of it all. Behind him, the four guards, their faces radiant and inspired, were singing with brilliant sincerity. The fat man, Caspay, Albina and the Negro were showing nothing of the revulsion that beat through Brent’s brain like a prairie fire. Only he and Nova, of all the souls in that damned cathedral, were remote and out of place and out of time. Their rags may have been covered at last with decent robes, but nothing had changed. Brent was still frightened and repulsed by all that he saw and heard.

The multitude of
Amens
fell away to a whisper. And still the Bomb gleamed down from its religious base. The main lights of the cathedral had all dimmed, leaving only the Bomb spotlit above the altar where no eye could miss it. Brent pulled his eyes away; the dread in his stomach was as tangible as a cancer in its most advanced stage.

Somewhere, the unseen organist struck a note.

From the
prie-dieu,
the kneeling Mendez’s voice rose once more:

“Almighty and everlasting Bomb, who came down among us to make Heaven under Earth, lighten our darkness. O instrument of God—Grant us Thy peace.”

The organ bleated a series of low, muted chords. All of them climactic, beseeching, uplifting, followed by a final hosannah.

Mendez stood up, back to the congregation, his purple robes a blazing field of color. He raised adoring arms to the Bomb suspended above him. His voice reached up, as if to touch it. To caress it with syllables, words.

The choir’s multiple voice rose in song:

“Almighty Bomb—who destroyed Devils—to create Angels! Behold His glory!”

Mendez chimed in with the choir:

“Behold the truth that abides in us, His handicraft!”

The choir stilled and Mendez’s chant rose on a single note of prayer and supplication:

“Reveal that truth unto that Maker!”

And now, incredibly, exaltedly, Albina, the fat man, Caspay and the Negro and all the leaders of this ghastly mass stood up as a body and chanted in a synchronized blend of many voices:
“I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God!”

Brent blinked.

As if he had been struck between the eyes.

Nova shrank against him, mewing like a terrified kitten.

The topmost totem of unreality in this world of unrealities had been reached. Once more the universe had reeled and the mind boggled at what the eyes saw
—
had to believe
—had
to accept as
Truth.

All about them, the leaders were unveiling. Albina, the Negro, Caspay, the fat man—everyone. Unmasking, as it were. Pulling and tugging at their heads and faces—taking off rubberized, plasticized masks which had concealed their inmost selves, their
true
appearance. Now Brent and the girl could see in all its blasphemous, unmatchable horror the true depths that their nightmare had bought for them when it set them down in this terrible city of lost souls.

Under each mask, each face now revealed to the awful light of the cathedral was a mockery of nature. A countenance repeated endlessly like some hideous joke at a costume party. A face devoid of all hair, all skin, all color and warmth. Centuries of postnuclear mutation had evolved all these faces into skinless horrors. Repulsively red and blue and pink, exposing all the ganglia of facial veins, arteries, tendons and muscles. As stripped and visible as any anatomical specimens in a medical class. The leaders, including the mighty Mendez, were totally horrible, totally and unbelievably hideous.

Brent and Nova held onto each other, shuddering.

Mendez exhorted:

“Reveal that truth unto that Maker!”

The choir and the congregation sung back their song of homage:

“I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God!”

The congregation now unveiled. The rubbery masks made slithering, uncanny sounds in the stillness of the dark cathedral.

The parody of Life and Nature gleamed from a hundred bodies. Brent dared not look too long. His brain was splitting apart again.

And then all the voices raised around him and the girl as the hidden organ swelled into a final exaltation to the devotees of the Bomb Everlasting. Proud and happy voices rose in a tremendous paean of glory:
“All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small .
. .”

Caspay smiled in a brotherly fashion at the Negro and then favored Brent with an extension of that smile. But Brent could not in all conscience smile back at that hideous travesty of a human face. He averted his eyes, holding onto Nova’s shaking hand.

“All things wise and wonderful,”
the congregation sang with deep, fervent voices.

The hooded purple head of Mendez turned up to the Bomb again, the spotlit Bomb which looked down on everything. “The good Bomb made us all,” the congregation chanted. Some three hundred mutant singers blended into an
intermezzo
between stanzas of the song:

“He gave us eyes to see with, and lips that we might tell How great the Bomb Almighty, who has made all things well. Amen.”

During this last
Amen,
Brent saw Albina jerk her weird face at him. The great beauty was a thing of the past. Brent read her message without hearing any words. Unspoken words.

“We can’t,” he said. “We aren’t wearing masks.”

She scowled. But Mendez was speaking the Benediction now:

“May the blessing of the Bomb Almighty and the fellowship of the Holy Fallout descend on us all, this night, and for evermore.”

Once again he pressed a button on the bejeweled panel board. The emerald one. Even as the congregation’s
Amen
died away to a whisper, the spotlight slowly dimmed. The Bomb disappeared into darkness. Fins and all. It was as if it didn’t even exist. Had never existed.

Brent kept, his arms around Nova. Poor, mute Nova. A waif for all time.

About them, the horrible mutants they had known as the fat man, Caspay, Albina and the Negro, leered hideously. Colors rippled, eddied.

The cathedral throbbed with horror. And the great Unknown.

And Mendez’s chants hung in the dim nave, swirling about the high, vaulted reaches of the cathedral. Echoes of Hell and the Pit on all sides. Brent hung onto the little courage left in him.

He had to.

Or there would be no way out.

None at all.

Whatever God’s Hell and Damnation was, this had to be it.

For the first time in his life, he had been able to pinpoint the spot. Give it a location.

The Forbidden Zone was Hades, Incorporated.

And this great cathedral was its Limbo.

The Corridor of Busts, gleaming with its stone gallery honoring the Mendez Dynasty, glimmered like a museum in Brent’s eyes. He had been disrobed following the incredible scene in the cathedral so that now he was once more in his familiar rags. Caspay and the Negro were escorting him to some unknown destination. Or fate. Mercifully they had replaced their masks so that their marble faces of beauty were once again intact. Brent wasn’t sure he could have borne gazing too long into those skinless, horrendous travesties of the human face. Caspay was smiling, as usual; knowing the man as he now did, Brent knew it meant nothing very good.

“I trust our simple ceremony convinced you of our peaceable intentions,” Caspay murmured in his bland way.

“I found it informative,” Brent said guardedly.

“Then your cooperation has had its reward.”

“Its
only
reward?” Brent turned away from his contemplative study of the busts along the corridor. “When may I hope to be set free?”

Caspay’s mouth was still smiling, but not his eyes.

“You may
hope
whenever you please, Mr. Brent. Have pleasant dreams.” With that, he waved his hand and continued along the corridor, his green robes rustling.

“I doubt it,” Brent answered drily, watching him until he diasppeared. The Negro now placed an unwelcome hand on Brent’s elbow and guided him to a passage turning left off the corridor’s far side. Here, low ceilings and closely distanced walls suggested a catacomb complex. The area was as labyrinthine as a grotto but white-walled and sourcelessly white-lighted. There was no telling where the illumination came from. Brent squinted against the glare.