Текст книги "Beneath The Planet Of The Apes "

Автор книги: Michael Avallone

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3.

BRENT

He clambered through the open escape hatch, carrying the vital medical equipment and oxygen apparatus. The crumpled steel sides of the small reconnaissance spacecraft had never seemed so vulnerable to him. Now, set down in a crash landing on some unknown, perhaps alien planet, it was twice as toylike and futile. Being lost in space was one thing, but this was the penultimate in Nowhere. Never had he seen so much limitless desert waste, so much unending distance between things. He felt like a small boy wandering amidst the vast trackless expanses of Time itself. There was no telling where Life began—or ended.

The skipper was still lying where he had left him. Head propped on a mound of sand, his rugged body spent and looking for all the world like a battered rag doll. The impact of the crash had banged the skipper up plenty. There was no immediate telling the extent of the personal damage.

As he bent over the skipper, the equipment clattered metallically. The skipper stirred, eyes open, face haggard in the fierce blaze of an unseen sun.

“Who’s that?” The question was a feeble attempt at authority.

“Me again, Skipper.”

He passed his hand twice over his superior’s eyes. He saw that they did not flicker at all.

“Brent?”

“Sir?”

Skipper was breathing with great difficulty now. Brent busied himself quickly. First he gave Skipper a pill, then an efficient injection by hypodermic in the left arm, and then settled down to a rhythmic, powerful chest massage with his bare hands. Skipper almost smiled at that but the look in the dulled brown eyes was remote, distant, as though fixed on some faraway place that only he could see. The emblem swatches of the United States flag sewn into the left sleeve of the tunics both men wore, shone like blood in the tropical blaze of daylight. Brent resisted the mental image.

“Did you contact Earth?” Skipper rasped, his voice getting weaker with each breath he drew.

“Tried to, sir. Not a crackle.”

“Isn’t the set operational?”

Brent frowned. “I don’t know, sir. I ran a cross-check of the Operations Manual. As suggested, I took an Earth-Time reading just before re-entry.”

“Well?”

“Three—nine—five—five.” Brent spaced the numbers very very slowly, as if he still couldn’t believe them himself.

“Hours?” Skipper stirred again, almost trying to rise. Brent steadied him with a firm restraining hand. “There are only twenty-four . . .”

“Not hours,” Brent said. “Years.”

Skipper breathed hoarsely. The unseeing eyes seemed to freeze.

“Three thousand—nine hundred—and fifty-five?”

“A.D.” Brent agreed, drily.

“Almighty God.”

In the brief silence, both men might have been listening to the hissing, scorching wind sweeping over the baking landscape.

“We were following Taylor’s trajectory,” Brent continued, trying to hang onto his calm. “So whatever happened to us, must have happened to Taylor—” he continued to massage his superior’s chest.

“What about us? Where are we?”

Skipper sounded like a desperate blind man, trying to see what he never might again.

“In my opinion, sir, we’ve come through a Hasslein Curve, a bend in Time.”

Skipper groaned feebly, falling back in greater pain than before. The damning facts had only augmented his poor condition. Brent tried to rally him, knowing how hopeless that was on the face of it. His superior, by all the signs, was a dying man.

“Look,” Brent spoke rapidly. “I don’t know what planet we’re on. I know it’s fantastic but the fact is, we’re both of us here, wherever that is. Breathing. Conscious. There’s oxygen on this planet—and water. You’ll be okay, Skipper. We’ll run a navigational estimate . . .”

The unseeing man at his side stared mightily up into the alien sky. His face was bleached, almost lifeless.

“God, if I could only see the sun!”

“You can feel it on your hand, Skipper,” Brent said very quietly. But his brain wasn’t quiet at all. It was rioting.

“Yes—but which sun?”

“I don’t know. Our computer is shot. We’re lucky to be alive.”

“Lucky—?” Skipper echoed with sudden fury and strength. “No! If it’s A.D. 3955—oh, God! My wife—” His breathing was obviously becoming more difficult. “My two daughters. Dead. Their sons. Daughters. Dead. Everyone I ever knew. Everyone!”

“Yes, sir,” Brent agreed, more quiet than ever. “But I’m trying not to believe it.” He was too, with every fibre and atom of his being and reasoning power. “It’s quiet here, sir. God, it’s quiet.”

It was. There was no sound, no movement, save for the almost furtive whisper of that phantom wind hurrying over the limitless expanses of sandy soil. This unknown planet was a wasteland.

Skipper suddenly pressed both deadening hands against his own chest and choked violently, desperately.

“Oxygen—” he gasped. “More . . .”

Brent leaped to obey, his heart hammering, his pulses pounding. Not even all of the intense, highly technological education instilled in him by the Space Program had ever prepared him for this. Sudden Death is forever a blow, a shock to the nervous system, no matter where, when or how it strikes.

Within the next torrid hour, he was burying Skipper. Shoveling sand over a rough grave just beyond the dune where the spacecraft had crashed to earth. A melancholy assignment, endured with aching muscles and ragged nerve ends, with tears poised on the lids of each eye. Brent was a young, athletic, handsome astronaut; clear-eyed, level-headed, with the look of eagles in his eyes. But Skipper’s dying reduced him to a terribly lonely and frightened young scientist.

He felt like a small boy lost in a maze.

It was only when he had patted the last shovel of loose sand over Skipper’s grave that the man in him returned. The one who had wanted to explore outer space and learn the secrets of the skies.

For it was then that he heard the first sound of life on this planet since the spacecraft had come down; the initial indication that other forms of animal life existed on this unknown, blazing chunk of terra firma beyond the stars.

He heard the clopping sounds of the horse’s hooves long before he saw the beast and the savage-looking female riding it.

Nova, forlorn and aimlessly wandering since the strange disappearance of Taylor, had blundered across the path of the wrecked reconnaissance spacecraft. Another lost child.

Brent watched her from the concealment of the sand dune overshadowing Skipper’s grave. He didn’t make a move until it looked as if Nova would continue on her way. The horse was balky, frightened.

Then he sprang erect, looming before her path, waving his arms, calling out “Hi!” like a maniac, blocking the way.

Nova stared down at him, her gaze torn between him and the shining wreckage of the spacecraft. Brent came closer, cautiously, quietly now, not wanting to frighten her off.

“Who are you?”

Nova did not answer.

“Can you understand me?”

Nova continued to stare, eyes uncomprehending. Brent came still closer. As bewildered as he was, he decided he had never seen a more beautiful, primeval-looking female in all his life. She might have stepped out of one of those old Tarzan movies of the twentieth century.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said easily, smiling to make it more palatable. “Just tell me where I am.”

Still she did not answer.

“My name is Brent.” He reached out to touch the horse’s nose in a gesture of friendliness. “Brent—!” With the same fervor which had characterized Taylor’s attempts, Brent mimed his own name, pointing to himself with grand gestures. Nova gazed down at him, unblinking. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking, what her attitude might be. Brent felt defeat rise in his chest but he shook it off.

“I’m not going to hurt you—I just want to know where I am. Where are you from? Where are your people? How do I get to them? Which way? Can you talk?” He paused, watching her closely. He had his answer in her mute, unspoken demeanor. “You can’t talk.”

Bitterly, he shook the rage out of his brain. The defeat.

Then his eye caught sight of the identification tag looped about her dusky throat where its bright disc caught the rays of the fierce sunlight.

“You have a name—?” She didn’t flinch as he reached up to turn the tag toward his own eyes so that he could read it. In that single instant, Brent felt all the miracle of rebirth. And a hope for Tomorrow. The name TAYLOR, clearly imprinted on the disc, set off rockets in his heart, soul and mind. “TAYLOR! Is he alive? Is he hurt?”

Now, for the very first time, Nova came to life. Her eyes lit up, showing emotional response. She nodded excitedly. Once, twice, three times. Her whole body seemed to take on new vitality. The horse shifted its weight with her movements. Brent, now more desperate than ever to make himself understood, literally seized on all the play-acting ability at his command. He was using sign language, gestures, vocal emphasis to get through to this strange young woman, who had wandered from nowhere to find him.

“Look . . . is there anyone . . . any other . . . someone who can talk . . .?”

Nova smiled at that, dismounting from the horse.

Brent took heart.

“You—” he pointed to her, “take me—to Taylor”

Her smile widened. A dazzling, marvelous smile that rivaled the sun overhead. She relooped the ID tag about her throat. Without asking her permission, Brent quickly mounted the horse directly behind her back. She started at that, staring at him, uttering a tiny cry of dismay. Brent grinned, urged the horse forward and motioned her to mount behind him. With a glad cry, she did so, huddling against his shoulders. Brent looked at her, just once more.

Their eyes met. Held.

“Taylor,” he said. “Now.”

The dazzling smile once more washed over him.

“Where?” he asked.

She held onto him, even more closely than before. He could see that her gaze was focused intently toward the right. Whatever direction of the compass that might be.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll just ride on—till we run out of gas.”

With that, he broke the horse into a slow trot over the scorched, baked dunes. Leaving the spacecraft, Skipper’s grave, and the greatest mystery of his life behind him.

Temporarily, at least.

There was only one thing left in the universe, A.D. 3955 or not.

Find Taylor.

The search became a trek. A wearying, parching, searing exodus across a land which might have sprung whole from the pages of the Old Testament. Never had Brent known so much desert, so much sun, so much dry, sandy, barren nothingness. There was nothing to be seen of a horizon, for the mantle of blazing heat and cloudless skies seemed to blend in waves of infernal, dancing heat which made vision valueless and pointless beyond more than five hundred yards. It was as if this strange planet lay like a skeleton bleaching beneath the ferocity of a never-extinguished sunlight. Night seemed an impossibility. It was difficult to assess anything. Neither place, Time nor direction. Brent could only let the horse plod along in a forward direction and hope for the best. The girl clinging to his dampened body was like some lovely homunculus growing out of his very back. Brent could barely see straight. His eyeballs ached, he had difficulty keeping his lids open. Great weights pressed down on his eyelids. And all about him, and the girl, beat down a heat so furnace-like and unrelenting that he felt as if the blood within his flesh was boiling. Time crawled, droned on. Not even the random furtive breeze which intermittently made its presence known by hissing across this blasted panorama of a Death Valley could relieve the depressing sensation of parboiled desolation and extinct living matter. Nothing could live in this inferno. Nothing. Brent was forcibly reminded of the many sites of atomic bomb testings on Earth where he had experienced this selfsame feeling of utter loss and obliteration. This vast, barren wasteland was exactly like that. He had not seen so much as an ant crawling across the ground. Not even the indestructible ant could have survived in this mass of deadness.

Not even Taylor . . .

He pushed the dismal conclusion from what was left of his thinking mind and pushed the poor horse on. Behind him, Nova made small, almost mewing sounds from time to time. Dimly, he wondered who she was, who she might be and where in God’s name she had come from. Surely she hadn’t grown to such lush womanhood, no matter how savagely formed, in a desert horrorland like this! It was inconceivable. Even a rudimentary knowledge of biology and ethnics told him that. Ecologically, the girl could never have bloomed in a Hades like this desert. Which had to mean that she came from somewhere else. Somewhere—where there was a normal sun, fresh air and green grass and . . .

Brent’s head toyed with mirages. With vistas of cool, rippling water and waving palm trees and fresh offshore winds. He caught hold of himself and steadied the horse on a plodding path over the wretched, fruitless terrain. Before them, many more endless stretches of rock and dune glistened cruelly in the sunlight.

The mirage moved from the boundaries of his mind and set itself down before him. Twinkling. Iridescent, like a pearl.

He blinked in the scorching sunlight.

His tongue licked greedily at his parched lips.

His pulses quickened.

He saw the greenness, the lushness, the beckoning beauty of fertility off in the distance. The good green earth!

A long, low-lying swatch of terrain, bordered with trees, mounted with tall grass of so brilliant and verdant a hue that it seemed to vie with the sunlight for sheer radiance. And luminosity.

His heart soared.

Behind him, Nova clawed at his back in confirmation of what his eyes had seen. Yes. This was where she had wanted to bring him. This was where Taylor might be. Or so he thought.

The horse now spurted forward, at a fast gallop, as if it too had been miraculously revivified by the change in the scenery ahead. Taking great strides, the beast plummeted forward, bouncing Brent and the girl indiscriminately. Brent didn’t care. He couldn’t quit the empty wasteland soon enough. He was leaving Hell behind.

The greener, richer country magnified in size, looming large, larger, largest. Until it seemed to fill the whole new world. It was a fresh universe set down in the seeming middle of Nothingness. Brent rejoiced in his heart. He could tell the girl felt much better, too, by the manner in which her arms tightened around him as they drew even closer. He was unable to distinguish between fear and joy. Now, there were trees. A forest of them. Green and abiding. And thick copses of shrubbery. Hedges, measured landscaping. Like terraced gardens. The evident hand of a civilization of people. A land of green-thumbers who knew how to make things grow! Brent gave the horse its head but navigated it toward a trail cut directly into the heart of the pleasantly leafy outskirts of this oasis of beauty in a barren planet. There was hope yet . . .

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.

4.

URSUS

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.

The habitations were as she had remembered them. Domelike huts and houses scaled on different levels of the ground, terracing down like so many beehives. She spotted Zira’s home almost immediately. Brent tethered the horse once again in the leafy undergrowth and they proceeded on foot when she pointed out the way. Between the houses and huts, the brush was dense and almost impenetrable. But it made concealment easier. Brent stumbled along behind her, his mind still reeling from the spectacle of the arena. Behind them, the hoarse ovation for Ursus’ speech still lingered in the air. Nova suddenly halted as Brent came down too heavily on a twig beneath his heel. The noise cracked out clearly in the stillness of the brush. Nova pulled Brent to the soft earth.

A uniformed patrolman, his gorilla face savage beneath a visored cap, paused for a routine check. Through the density of foliage, Brent saw that they were only yards away from the guard. He held his breath, oddly terrified and bewildered. An ape in uniform walking around like any security policeman! With a weapon, too.