Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (8 page)

The
drip, drip, drip
sounded very near now. Brent craned his neck higher.

A glittering stalactite, dangling from the vaulted roof of the subway cavern, looked as sharp as any sword. Brent shuddered, his eyes falling away. Until he saw another rust-eaten sign: NEW YORK IS A SUMMER FESTIVAL. And further on, another: KEEP YOUR SUBWAY CLEAN. Until, at floor level, he saw row upon row of menacing, cold stalagmites. Brent stared from the signs to the stalagmites, his courage dissolving. This wasn’t a subway, it was a cave—a hall of a mountain king where you’d expect to find trolls and witches and warlocks—! His senses reeled.

“God Almighty!” his voice crackled hollowly in the empty, dead tunnel. “This was my home! I lived and worked here once! What happened? Did we finally do it? Did we finally really do it?”

His voice rang off the barren lifeless walls. There was no answer for him. Just as there hadn’t been for Taylor.

“What does a man do when he comes home—and there is no home?” He shook his head in disbelief as his own question echoed foolishly in his own ears. Then quietly, trying to absorb this incredible unreality, he turned to Nova, who could only stare back at him in confusion, not knowing what he was thinking or feeling.

“It’s a damn nightmare!” Brent shouted at her, letting go. “A damn nightmare—a damn nightmare!”

Nova, seeing his misery, timidly touched his face.

The long subterranean labyrinth echoed and reechoed with his cries of frustration.

The temple was small and austere. It was exactly in the center of Ape City. There was no altar. Against a plain backdrop of stone stood the revered statue of the Lawgiver. The Great Ape was still holding his book for all Time itself. Below the idol stood an orangutan minister, clad in scarlet. Before him, listening to his invocation, knelt Dr. Zaius, General Ursus and the balance of the ape hierarchy. Like man who had come after them, the apes appealed sometimes to a Higher Divinity for success in projects about to be undertaken. Superstition, Religion and Faith was the theological end for all living creatures. Or so it would seem.

“O God,” the minister intoned unctuously, “we pray you, bless our Great Army and its Supreme Commander on the eve of a Holy War undertaken for Your sake . . .”

Zaius’ face was implacable. Ursus’ was smugly superior.

“. . . and grant,” the minister droned on, “in the name of Your Prophet, our great Lawgiver—” here he genuflected before the statue, his scarlet robes flashing, “that we, Your chosen servants, created and born in Your divine image, may aspire the more perfectly to that spiritual godliness and bodily beauty which You, in Your infinite mercy, have thought fit to deny to our brutal enemies.” The impressive words soared.

His bow deepened, his arms described a wide parabola of intense exhortation. The kneeling hierarchy
amened
in low voices.

“So be it,” General Ursus murmured mockingly, loud enough for Dr. Zaius to hear.

The statue of the Lawgiver smiled down on everybody.

Brent lay on the nightmarish subway platform, Nova curled up on a broken bench nearby like some immense kitten at sleep. Brent was waking up, after having fallen into a pitifully disturbed slumber alive with ghosts, demons and weird apparitions of his fancy. Blinking his eyes open, he almost groaned aloud at the eerie spectacle that was still before him, surrounding his reason; the mad vision of which he was still an integral part.

The subway station, incrusted with its silent armies of stalactites and stalagmites, continued its
drip, drip, drip.
A haunting, maddening refrain. Wearily, Brent stood up and stretched his stiff, aching limbs. Dazed, he staggered to the sleek wet wall and cupped his hands to catch some of the falling water which ran down steadily from the enormous stalactite overhead. He drank. The water was fresh and cold. It felt good against his parched, sun-baked mouth. He let it dribble down his chin.

He watched the sleeping Nova, his mind tumbling again with imponderables, impossibilities and wild suppositions. He really didn’t know what to think. It was all so—so—
incredible.

“Are
you,”
he asked the sleeping girl, “what
we
were before we learned to talk and made fools of ourselves? Did any good ever come of talking—round all those tables? Did apes make war when they were still dumb? Did men?”

Defeatedly, with of course no answer from the girl, he went over to a rocky vent in the station wall, through which some daylight feebly filtered, to look at the outside world from which he and Nova had escaped. He craned his neck to peer through.

He caught his breath, almost jumping back in terror.

About ten yards beyond the vent, he could see a veritable squad of gorilla guards, helmeted, armed, scouring the rocky maze, still obviously searching for him and the girl. He could make out the muttered concert of their ape voices. They didn’t sound very happy about something . . .

“I guess we lost them,” one of the fiercest-looking gorillas was growling to the others. “The sergeant says, keep looking. We’ve been here all night. The sergeant says we’d better not come back unless we’ve found them. Keep looking!”

Brent retreated from the vent, not wanting to see or hear any more. It was still unnerving seeing and hearing animals act like men. The same inflections, the same gestures . . .

He returned to Nova, bent over her, and gently roused her from sleep. She stirred fitfully, her long, curved body tensing.

“Nova, wake up!” he begged.

Instantly she opened her eyes and swung erect. He could see the rapid rise and fall of her semibared breasts within the ragged confines of her burlap-like garments. Her eyes searched his face. He forced a smile.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” he suggested. She nodded, her lips moistening nervously. He took her hand and swung her to her feet. He held onto her hand as he led her carefully down the long, dim, glistening subway platform with its mocking signs and depressing interior that spoke so eloquently of what had happened here many centuries before.

Suddenly he was aware of a faint humming sound.

Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
. . .

He reacted. The girl did too.

He hadn’t been quite sure he hadn’t been hearing things but the awareness on Nova’s face was unmistakable.

“That hum. You hear it too!” He exulted, not knowing why. “We’re going to follow it . . .”

They did.

All along the platform, using the labyrinth of decayed track and seemingly endless tunnel as a guide. The hum grew gradually louder, with variations of volume and power so subtle that its tone didn’t increase abruptly. It merely increased, amplified as it were, to become a steady focus of attention. Excited, Brent clung to the girl, bringing her along behind him. The rhythmic hum and purr of the sound drew him on like a magnet. The tunnel seemed to lengthen, widen, and soon there was no more sign of the platform, the stalactites and stalagmites. None of the rotting, eroded fissures and cracks. The mouth of the cave ahead had rounded out, smoothened. Brent felt as if the way now led upward, that they would eventually surface somewhere in broad daylight in the outer world. But it was only illusion. The underground humming throbbed eerily, built symphonically, and now there was even a faint suggestion of a pleasant wind at their backs, wafting them onward, as if they were two vagrant feathers. It was totally unreal. With his ears filled with the vibrant hum of the unidentifiable noise, with all his senses riveted to an unknown force, Brent walked steadily forward, conscious only of movement and sound.

A long, slightly uphill passage loomed ahead of them.

Glimmering there, somewhere, was a high sliver of very dim light. Indirect light. The hum and the wind had both increased in velocity. They seemed to be hurled forward. Upward. The sliver of light was widening and even as they plummeted toward it, Brent could make out a rock-lined egress of some kind. The exit was just broad enough to accommodate both of them. Brent’s hair floated like a thatch on his head. Nova’s long tresses blew like pennants in the breeze. The hum had increased to dynamo intensity. It seemed to fill what was left of this world. The world of the desolate subway station had disappeared entirely.

Before them lay a high-vaulted, natural rock tunnel. With sleek, scaled, impossibly sheer sides. The light source proved to be another vent, set in the rock barrier across the uphill road’s dead end ten feet above the ground. Into it seemed to blow—or was it
sucked,
Brent thought wildly—the wind. From this issued the light. Too white to be the sky’s and yet . . .

“Whoever—or whatever—is guiding us to this place—” Brent muttered to the girl, “they breathe air, anyway.”

They drifted closer to the vent. Two black silhouettes starkly outlined against the bright, white light. The hum, like ten dynamos now, pulsated deafeningly.

Brent and Nova swept closer to the opening, to the weird vent with the weirder light.

He could see it was an octagonal frame, wrought in a white metal of some kind. He stared up at it speculatively, watching the wind rush through the opening. Grimly he got hold of himself. He began to climb toward the vent, putting his hand on the lowest bar of the metallic octagon to do so. Then a frightening thing happened. The electrical hum stopped, as quickly as if he had pushed a contact button. The sudden silence was terrifying.

Brent and the girl stood stock-still, stunned by the new quiet, the strange calm. Nova began to retreat, panicking.

“No,” Brent caught her. “It’s too late.” He drew her back again. “We’ve got to go on.”

But she pulled her hand free of his, shocked by the unknown. Rendered horrified by things she couldn’t understand. Brent tried to appeal to her, ignoring that she couldn’t follow his words.

“There’s a high intelligence at work in this place. Good or bad. That sound we heard is either a warning, or some kind of directional device. I don’t know which. But it doesn’t matter. The truth is
—they know we’re here!”

She didn’t understand a word of it, of course, but his tone was so positive and reassuring that she almost smiled. But she continued to retreat, backing away slowly.

“All right,” Brent said. “I’ll go up first.”

And Brent continued his climb, while Nova watched anxiously. He hauled himself high enough up to grip the octagonal frame. He swung himself in, lost from view for a full second. Nova whimpered aloud. But his head reappeared, silhouetted against the vent. He beckoned. “Don’t be afraid. It’s empty. Come on.”

She reached up to him, climbing. He caught her hand and lifted her. He was very strong. Within seconds, he had swept her up from the strange world of the white tunnel, into the vent, and then they were both suddenly
—
standing in yet another maze of unreality. On the white floor of a white-walled, down-sloping tunnel, also octagonal in contour. The released air was funneling out of this down toward another white dot of far-off illumination. Another light of some kind. Brent did not hesitate. Pulling Nova, he led her toward the next outlet. The last exit to . . .

Where?

They emerged from the tunnel.

The glaring world of a new daylight invaded their aching eyes.

A cold, unreal sunlight.

And Brent stared.

And Nova shuddered against him. Helpless and afraid again.

For Brent, the universe had once more turned over.

His intellect dissolved into a thousand more little pieces.

They were on the outskirts of a city.

City.

If he could have imagined a place that a conceivable nuclear war in the year, say, 1990 might have devastated and then become a refuge of survivors trying to evade fallout, this would be that place. How else to account for the parts of a 2000-year-old original structure that now greeted his eyes? His and the girl’s.

He saw twentieth-century brick, stone and concrete, corroded sewer signs, showing through the basic foundations of a metropolis of predominantly white architecture, and the interior decor of a twenty-second-century catacomb complex scooped out of ancient foundations. Narrow streets, more like white corridors, twisted and turned between buildings with windowless walls. There was an unearthly emptiness and nakedness, a lack of ornamentation and color. It was as if a world of impersonal stone greeted them.

“Are we in a city?” Brent whispered. “Or a cemetery?”

Nova stared at him, taking her eyes away from the dead metropolis. She still couldn’t understand his words but she had become very sensitive to his moods and emotions. Fear had made them companions.

Wordlessly she slipped her hand into his.

Brent couldn’t take his eyes away from the dead city.

It was a stone monster out of his wildest nightmares.

At the Research Complex in Ape City, the scarlet-clad minister had lingered to listen to a heated discussion between Minister of Science Dr. Zaius and General of the Armies Ursus. Though the minister was also an orangutan, it was very clear where his sentiments lay. Zaius felt as though he was boxed in by enemies.

“Supposing they turn out to be our superiors?” Zaius was reinforcing his point.

General Ursus unrolled a map, his expression pugnacious.

“Their territory is no larger than ours. We shall not be outnumbered.”

“I was not referring to their numbers,” Zaius said patiently. “My supposition concerned their intelligence.”

Ursus stared at him, his gimlet eyes cold.

“Then your supposition was blasphemous, Dr. Zaius.”

The minister nodded grandly, solemnly agreeing.

“The Lawgiver has written in the Sacred Scrolls that God created Apes in His own image to be Masters of the Earth. We are His Chosen,” he reminded Dr. Zaius.

Ursus glowered at the doctor.

“Do you doubt that?” Ursus snapped.

“What I doubt,” Zaius said softly, deftly parrying, “is your interpretation of God’s intention. Has He ordained that we should make war?”

Ursus rose, pointing with the partly unrolled map.

“Has He ordained that we should die of starvation?”

The minister chimed in again. “Has He ordained that we should make peace with the Human race?”