Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (13 page)

“How can we let you loose on the eve of a war, Mr. Brent?” the Negro suddenly asked, mildly almost.

Another twist in the labyrinth. Another turn. Brent said nothing.

“You know too many of our secrets,” the Negro reminded him.

He halted Brent, for the corridor or passageway had suddenly come to a dead end. A
cul-de-sac
terminating at a closed door that bore no lettering, no identification of any kind. The Negro prodded Brent as he touched a wall button. “Like your friend,” he muttered. The door, hinged, opened inward and Brent gaped.

It was a bare white cell, no larger than a storage closet. But within it stood a tall giant of a man. Bearded, bronzed, his great shaggy head oddly in keeping with his garments of loincloth and tatters. The Negro lolled in the doorway, grinning like an ebony idol. Brent staggered forward, his pulse racing, his heart trip-hammering. The bronzed captive in the room blinked back at the open door. At Brent. And then an enormous smile split the almost graven face into a thousand lines of joy and incredible delight.

“Brent!” the giant roared, coming forward.

“TAYLOR!”

Brent fell into his arms, pounding, clapping, babbling excitedly. Taylor clasped him in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet.

The reunion was euphoric.

At first
—

The Corridor of Busts echoed with the sound of the guard’s heels. Before him, Nova had been moving like a dead woman, her eyes listless and her muscles flaccid. But now, somehow, the shout of Brent’s voice echoing the only name she had ever understood came to her, like the call of a bugle. The effect was electrifying. With a wheeling speed more animal than human, she slipped out of the guard’s grasp, biting down on his bared hand like a tigress. The guard screamed and let go. Nova broke away from him, running like a gazelle toward the echoes of Brent’s cry. And the sound of the name,
Tay-lor!

Before the guard could rally in lumbering pursuit, his damaged hand already bleeding, the girl had sprinted down the corridor, turned into the passage leading to the catacomb complex and vanished from sight.

Nova ran like the wind.

The guard pounded along behind her.

Her bared feet made slapping noises along the passageway floor.

“How the hell did you get here?” Taylor demanded. They had both simmered down from the unbounded joy of meeting again and were now both of them well aware of the tall Negro still positioned in the doorway. Brent forced a smile. The white of the cell was a glare.

“I came by subway, naturally.”

“You’re two thousand years late,” Taylor replied through cracked lips. His heroic face, which would have looked so proper on a coin or medallion, had always pleased the younger man.

“Service never was much good,” Brent agreed.

“Is your commander with you?”

“He’s dead. Went blind—and blew a lung on reentry.”

Taylor sighed. “Then how . . .?”

“Nova found me.”

“
She’s
here?” Taylor started forward, his big shoulders flexing. “Where is she?”

“They separated us—thank God.”

“Why thank God?”

“They were trying to make me kill her
—
” Suddenly, he stared at Taylor. “Come to that, why haven’t they killed
you
?”

From the doorway, the Negro’s voice lilted pleasantly in reply.

“You know why, Mr. Brent. We’re a peaceful people. We don’t kill our enemies.” Taylor and Brent saw his beatific smile. “We get our enemies to kill each other.” The Negro paused, then directed his next remark to Taylor. “It takes two to make a quarrel. With whom could you quarrel, Mr. Taylor,
while you were alone?”

Brent shuddered, knowing what that could mean. Taylor didn’t. He advanced belligerently on the Negro, hands bunching.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he snarled, showing the erosion that imprisonment had worked on him and his will power.

“But I do,” Brent said. “Unfortunately.”

The Negro closed his eyes.

Brent braced himself, steeling his will against the mental assault he knew was underway. Taylor gawked at him, puzzled. The gawk widened as he saw Brent’s hands come up, fashion themselves into fists. Brent had assumed an aggressive, fighting position! He could see the perspiration breaking out on Brent’s face. But, incredibly—impossibly
—his own hands were coming up, knotting into fists,
and he felt his brain grow cold with hate and the desire to crush, hurt, maim.

Taylor confronted Brent.

Brent confronted Taylor.

The Negro, eyes still closed, remained in the doorway.

The glare of the cell was white, stark, ugly.

The smiles had drained from the two astronauts. Both faces began to twitch under the hammer blows of hypnosis.

Vainly resisting, Brent gasped, “I am fighting an order! I . . . am . . . fighting . . . a FRIEND!”

With that, he lashed out with a terrible left to the jutting promontory of Taylor’s chin.

The fight was vicious, savage.

Both men, friends, in the grip of a power willing them not merely to hurt, but to murder each other—with no lethal holds barred and no dirty killer’s tricks left untried—collided in the center of the room. Taylor gouged at Brent’s eyes. Brent swung a violent foot into Taylor’s groin. The sound of the encounter was prodigious. They locked in the death grip of brutal close combat. Kicking, gouging, biting, clawing, tearing at each other like two wild animals. Grunts, groans and curses filled the cell. The Negro, eyes screwed tightly shut, stood unmoving in the doorway. His face might have been carved out of marble.

Taylor caught Brent in a powerful viselike hold, swung him like a rag doll and then battered him with his head, butting like a ram. Brent kicked out with his legs. He caught Taylor in the pit of the stomach. Taylor let go and Brent broke loose. For a long second both men were free of each other, circling warily, waiting for the next opening. Their faces were bloody masks, their teeth exposed in brutal animal snarls. They were all but spitting at one another. The savage code of the jungle. Survival of the fittest, the law of fang and claw. They were slavering, gasping and grunting. Two mockeries of intelligent life.

The Negro, eyes still shut, dug into his white robes and produced two weapons. Two shining short knives with hafts of ebony. These he threw unseeing into the center of the room. The knives clattered onto the floor. As if they had been thrown a bone, Taylor and Brent instantly swept up the weapons. Now the fight assumed a deadlier overtone. An aura of the slaughter house hung about the cell, a charnel atmosphere which had eons and eras of brutality, prehistoric violence and unthinking savagery as its questionable guide.

Brent and Taylor went at each other still more viciously.

There was the sharp, ringing strike of metal against metal, the fierce muted thunder of men breathing like animals, gulping oxygen with bestial rapidity. Snarling, snapping, biting, digging at one another as if the universe depended on this one single encounter to give anything of life meaning, sense.

The Negro stood through it all, back against the door, holding it open, silently waiting for the outcome that had to be the death of one or both men. The stunning waves of traumatic hypnosis held Brent and Taylor in a dazzling, relentless hold which would not loosen until the Negro opened his eyes.

The barren little cell permitted no escape. No headway. No room in which to maneuver to advantage. Like the suicidal duels of ancient times, both combatants were committed to a battle from which neither could possibly emerge unscathed or unmarked. Blood would tell.

It was falling now, spurting from cuts and slices and minor wounds which only served to make Brent and Taylor go at each other all the stronger with their lunging, stabbing thrusts. The Negro maintained his position.

And the outcome drew nearer.

Inevitable, like something preordained.

The fight was now at its sharpest pitch.

There was about it that ferocity that lent it an animal quality. Except that it was easier to kill with a knife than to rend and tear a man to bloody fragments.

Brent moved like a ferret, hacking out at the bigger man.

He made a score. Blood spurted from Taylor’s side as the knife bit in and pulled out again.

Taylor roared from deep in his chest, bounded forward, and Brent found himself face to face with finality. Now the death dance began, with the two of them reeling around the narrow white cell, knives going for each other’s bared throats; then hand to hand, each holding onto the enemy knife aimed now at his own heart.

And then there was an interruption.

Nova materialized in the door behind the Negro.

She saw Taylor, saw the fight. The shock and the joy combined in one mammoth surge of emotion that needed some outlet, some vent through which to escape. Some avenue along which to meet the world.

The miracle occurred.

Nova’s neck muscles arched, her lips parted and she spoke.

The name.

The magic word.

“
Tay-lor
. . .”

The word was tinny, faint, a faraway sound but as crystal-clear in quality as the first word spoken by a schooled deaf child. As can happen with a mute who is not necessarily deaf, the girl had managed the very first word of her life.

And Taylor heard her.

And Brent heard her.

And, fatally for him, the Negro also heard her. He made the mistake of
opening his eyes.

Brent sobbed, the magical change sweeping over his brain.

“His eyes are open.”

Taylor staggered back, equally freed of the mental lock. Brent jumped forward, knife upraised, and plunged the point of the blade into the Negro’s heart. The white-robed figure threshed against the door, then lurched forward into the cell. Brent watched, panting. The knife protruded from the reddening folds of the white robe. The Negro plucked at it ineffectually, his hands pawing feebly. Away from the door, his weight free of it, the barrier swung shut with a slam. There was no handle on the inner side of the cell. Brent was too late to catch the door before it closed. There was the click of an automatic lock.

Eyes glazed, the Negro blurted, “Unto God . . . I reveal . . .” His bloodstained hands tore at the rubberized mask of his features, “my Inmost S-s-s-se . . .”

He fell flat on his face before he could complete the gesture. Taylor, bathed in sweat, crouched over his prostrate body, his eyes almost insane. Brent suddenly retched; a ratchety cough of pain. Taylor went to him, seeing the widening stain of blood from a place in Brent’s shoulder where his own knife had drawn blood. Nova had come forward to assist him, both of them trying to stanch the flow of red from Brent’s wound. It was an awesome slice across the deltoid. Taylor quickly cut strips from the dead Negro’s white robe to fashion a crude but serviceable bandage. Brent winced painfully. Taylor worked fast, conscious of Nova hovering at his side. The girl was smiling despite everything.

“You talked,” Taylor said simply, kissing her gently. “And we’re alive.”

She looked up at him, pleased at his evident pleasure. Then he kissed her again. A prolonged kiss. Brent smiled, but in the sudden silence he could hear a soft but steady rush of sound. Like—
air!
Coming from—Brent’s eyes searched the room rapidly—there was a six-inch impenetrably grilled vent in the wall behind Taylor, just above his head. Taylor broke from the kiss.

“It’s no use,” he told Brent, quick to the direction of his gaze. “I’ve tried. We’re near a main air-conditioning vent.”

“It’s cold,” Brent said.

Taylor eyed the inert body of the Negro with distaste.

“Just as well.” His nose wrinkled. “We may have to wait, and I’m allergic to the stink of death. Now, talk some more, Brent. And make it quick.”

Brent fingered his bandage, fighting the pain.

“They have an atom bomb.”

Taylor’s eyes narrowed. “Operational?”

“Yes. And they intend to use it.”

“What type is it?”

“That’s just it—I don’t know. It belongs to a series I’ve never seen before. Maybe because I don’t have top clearance as yet.” This last was almost rueful.

“I do,” Taylor said grimly.

“Or did,” Brent tried a small joke. Gallows humor. “Two thousand years ago.”

Taylor wasn’t listening.

“Did you see a series number?”

“Yes—on one of the fins. Except there were no numbers. Just two Greek letters.
Alpha, omega”

Taylor’s face tightened into a mask of inner pain. “May God help us,” he said in a low voice.

Brent started. “What is it? What does it mean?”

“Doomsday Bomb,” Taylor said. “Cobalt casing. The last we ever made. Only one. One was enough. The idea was to threaten the enemy by the very fact that it existed. A bomb so powerful it could destroy—not just a city—not just a nation—no, not just every living cell on earth, every insect, every blade of grass—but set nuclear fire to the wind, to the air itself. Scorch the whole planet into a cinder! Like the end of a burnt match. The ultimate bomb—” His voice trailed off into a whisper.

Nova, always responsive to his moods, huddled closer to him.

Brent had forgotten all about the throbbing discomfort of his damaged shoulder.

The baffled guard who had allowed Nova to elude him was still searching for her. Without any success. He had not entered the catacomb complex but had returned to the Corridor of Busts to make a fresh start on his hunt. He was startled to see someone in the renowned corridor. Somebody wise and all-powerful.

Mendez in his purple robes was kneeling before the stoic bust of MENDEZ I. He was silent and immobile. As if his entire being was as one with his legendary ancestor.

Mendez seemed to commune with the inanimate bust.

The guard withdrew very carefully, anxious not to make a whisper of sound. He stole up the long corridor like a wraith.

The posture of the leader disturbed the guard.

Was something wrong that Mendez had to take this time to pray on the eve of a great conflict?

But the guard removed the thought from his already worried mind. There was still the girl to find . . .