Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (4 page)

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
.

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 cage—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.

Ursus knew that in his own scheme of things it could be no other way.

Nova led the confused Brent through the thick underbrush bordering Ape City. In her dimly lit mind she had realized that perhaps Zira and Cornelius could provide the new man with the answers she was incapable of giving. She had seen that Brent was the same stamp of man as Taylor. There was the clean, bold look of the eyes, the firm carriage of the body, the walk of giants. Even if Brent was confused and obviously dazed, to Nova he represented a species several thousand cuts above the half-savage, brutal race she had grown and lived among. Anything was better than that. Anything was better than the rule of apes.