Текст книги "Beneath The Planet Of The Apes "

Автор книги: Michael Avallone

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11.

“TAY-LOR!”

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.

“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 . . .

Angrily, impatiently, the guard moved down the corridor past the closed doors of the Inquisition Room.

Nothing stirred.

Not even the kneeling figure of Mendez behind him, beyond the turn of the passageway.

12.

DR. ZAIUS

The Grand Army of the Apes had achieved the frontier zone of the designated area. Now, as the hot sun beat down in a cobalt-blue sky, General Ursus initiated the opening steps of the invasion. Beyond the burning rim of the horizon, the skyline of buried New York steepled eerily. Silhouetted and somber. From his horse, with Zaius at his side, Ursus’ medals shone in the sunlight. He raised a glittering sword.

His army moved. Quickly, in full military pomp and precision. Orders were shouted, marching feet thundered, equipment rolled into position. Squadrons formed. Gorilla infantry, about fifty apes to each group, with a commissioned officer and a noncommissioned officer leading every command, flanked into attacking formation. The gun carriages wheeled up, clanking noisily. Bayonets gleamed from rifle tips. The assembled apes were ready to attack. To fight. To obey the Ursus dictim of Invade, Invade, Invade! Dr. Zaius looked on almost sorrowfully at the spectacle of force of arms triumphing over sober reflection and discourse with the enemy. Ursus, eyes shaded against the sun, peering toward New York in the distance, summoned a bugler to his side. His gimlet eyes were twin pools of ecstasy. His black gorilla face was exalted. The morning heat set a shimmering haze over the scene. It was a lovely day for the Invasion.

“Sound the advance,” Ursus commanded the bugler in the sudden total hush that preceded the strike of lightning forces from the kingdom of Ape Gty.

The horn brayed, a pealing blast of sound wafting over the formation. The army, in extended order, advanced. Uphill. Toward the visible reaches of the Forbidden Zone. Ursus’ mount pranced in the vanguard. Zaius trotted along behind him.

The hill was steep, sloping upward at a hazardous angle. The ape army swarmed upward, a vast body of moving gorillas, horses and ordnance. With skilled coordination of all units and a minimum of stumbling blocks, the advance platoons of Ursus’ forces gained the crest of the mountain which overlooked the buried grandeur of New York.

Ursus reached the pinnacle first. Then Zaius, then the troops directly behind them. Ursus lifted a paw to signal a halt. The army came to a stop. Waiting legions, motionless in the sun.

Zaius’ breath caught in his chest. Ursus groaned mightily.

The spectacle before them defied belief.

Where before there had been nothing but limitless expanses of arid desert in the vast sun-bleached acreage leading to buried New York, there was now nothing but horror.

Row upon row of naked gorillas, hanging from inverted crosses staked to the ground, glowed wickedly in the sunlight. A mass crucifixion, awesome in all its implications, to match the Roman massacre of Christians along the Appian Way in another equally terrible time. Zaius’ scholarly blood ran cold. Ursus’ face darkened. Fire and smoke, both sourceless and spread out like a blaze encompassing the world, had also appeared, seemingly from nowhere. And still the mutilated gorillas hung crucified from their upside-down crosses.

The ape army, particularly the infantry, closest to the sight, aghast and quivering in horror at the devastation below them, began to panic. A great tumult of shouting and anguished cries went up. Ursus, livid with rage, found himself being berated by Dr. Zaius.

“Ursus, I warned you! Look what we are faced with! I told you we should wait!”

“Whoever did this,” Ursus growled, “will pay heavily.”

The groans of the crucified gorillas were clamorous, rising from the bloody desert plain like a universal wail of misery, sorrow and agony. Dr. Zaius shuddered, reining in his horse.

“If you have any pity, order your soldiers to shoot our people.”

“I cannot order what the Lawgiver has forbidden. Ape shall not kill Ape,” Ursus snarled, wheeling his mount to shout an order to one of his nearest commanders. “Prepare to attack!”

“Attack what and whom?” Zaius demanded softly, his orangutan face constricted in lines of bewilderment and compassion.

The ape army suddenly rallied.

Gorillas, horses and guns moved up over the ridge, pounding over the crest, swarming down the other side. Ursus led the way. The infantry rushed forward, racing across the desert to the grim spectacle of their slaughtered comrades. Shouts and gunfire filled the air. Gorillas yelled and screamed, summoning up a banzai-like courage to grope with the situation. Or cope. The hot sun blazed down, as if trying to pierce the gathering smoke and fire filling the landscape. The infantry rushed. Ursus spurred his mount. Zaius galloped alongside.

And then . . .

A colossal effigy of the Lawgiver, the Great Ape reading a book, materialized in view, his stone feet among the scorching flames, his head seeming to touch the sky. The apes in the oncoming infantry group braked to a halt. Utter consternation and dread took over where before nothing but fear had ruled. These emotions—and a great joy!

“The Lawgiver!” a gorilla soldier squealed in delight. He dropped his rifle and kneeled. The soldier beside him, humbled by the vision of ape greatness, cried out, “He will avenge our crucified brothers!”

“Vengeance!” shouted the next soldier.

And the cry was taken up by the rest of the ape infantry. A mighty chorus of adulation, happiness and sheer exaltation echoed over the scene. Baffled by what he saw, General Ursus roared at all of his commanders, “Hold your positions!”

The gigantic figure of the Lawgiver now seemed to show the many holes and perforations in his great body, From these openings, red blood flowed in a scarlet spiderweb of color. Pumping, welling, spurting terribly. Ursus, in fear and horror, had to cling to his mount for support, his eyes two black marbles of disbelief. The Lawgiver, the Almighty, the Great One, the Nonpareil, the Master of all Apes, was bleeding to death before his very eyes!

“He bleeds!” General Ursus boomed. “The Lawgiver bleeds!”

An atavistic growl thundered from his chest; a trumpeting blast of animal sound that must have echoed in the days when his ancestors swung from trees and loped along the ground for their food. As for the ape infantry, it was completely demoralized by the spectacle. They threw down their rifles, pointing and gibbering with dismay at the Thing In The Sky. Simian cries of alarm and dismay rose in a blended medley of vocal terror that sounded exactly like the monkey house in a twentieth-century zoo. Above the blasted, cursed desert, the effigy of the Lawgiver, flung there by the hypnotic powers of the leaders of the Forbidden Zone, continued to bleed to death.

Only Dr. Zaius was able to retain his wits, to keep his head. The fufillment of all his hopes for a compromise of the minds hung on the action he was now steeling himself to take. Turning, he faced the paralyzed, screaming infantry of gorillas and raised his cultured voice to an unfamiliar authoritative shout.

“The spirit of the Lawgiver lives! We are still God’s chosen! And this is a vision and it is a lie!”

Before they could digest his words, he charged. Alone. On horseback. Out toward the bleeding image of the Lawgiver. The astounded gorillas quietened, stunned by the sight of the old scientist, the Minister of Science, galloping out toward his inevitable doom.

Dr. Zaius rode into the Vision.

Rode out between the row upon row of crucified apes. Past the inverted crosses, through the veritable forest of slaughter—toward the Effigy of the Lawgiver. His horse shied and whinnied but Zaius kept a tight rein. Soon the clattering hooves had led him up to the vision. The smoke and the flame. The scorching fingers of the blaze eating away at the very feet of the Lawgiver.

Behind him, General Ursus and the Grand Army of the Apes looked on in mounting wonder.

Zaius’ horse reared, kicking at the smoke and the flame.

The Vision.

And slowly, inexorably, the Vision toppled, falling down, hitting the sandy earth. It exploded with great violence, creating a huge sheet of flame and roaring black smoke.

The entire tableau vanished in an instant.

And then—suddenly—the smoke was gone. The flame was gone. So was the image of the Lawgiver. And the forest of crucified apes. There was nothing on the vast, empty, rocky and sandy landscape but the figures of Dr. Zaius and his horse. Everything had faded away, leaving only what was really true and the reality that was really there.

General Ursus, staggered, and insanely jealous of Zaius for doing what he should have done, could only gaze on the scene with utter wonder and regret for a marvelous opportunity lost. One that he would never have again.

Dr. Zaius had passed through the Vision, triumphed over it. In the name of his science. He turned and waved to the Army of Ursus. There was nothing interposed between him and his people on the slope of the hill. The stage of desert and landscape was desolate.

General Ursus reformed his army.

He coldly acknowledged the signals of his revitalized commanders and troops. Dr. Zaius remained where he was, waiting for the Grand Army to rejoin him. Ursus’ color was malignant. He was furious. It was Zaius, and not he, whose gallant action had turned the tide of battle. Mottled, Ursus summoned the bugler again.

“Sound the advance,” he said dully.

Once more the braying notes of the horn filtered out over the baked panorama of landscape. In the visible distance the steeples and tombstone tops of New York lay illuminated in the sun. The tips of the Empire State, the Chrysler Building—and the face of Miss Liberty poking from the earth like a milestone—stood like markers along the route. General Ursus dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks and raced out to join Dr. Zaius where he still waited. A solitary figure on the desert plain.

Damn the good doctor!

There would be no living with the orangutan now . . .

The Grand Army of the Apes moved out toward the city on the horizon.

In the Inquisition Room, Mendez and his surviving inquisitors, seated on their curved chairs, had their eyes focused on the opposite wall level with their heads. Caspay, the fat man and Mendez, projecting purple, green and red, were throwing mental images to keep themselves abreast of the military situation. Albina’s blue was negative.

Which was critical now.

They saw General Ursus and Dr. Zaius, at the head of the Grand Army of the Apes, defeat the specter of the desert, move into the city and press onward. Zaius’ face appeared on the wall. Dismounted from his horse, he was pointing to the ground, calling Ursus’ attention to a six-foot-square octagonal vent just beyond his horse’s hooves. The same octagonal vent which had guided Brent and Nova into the very heart of the metropolis.

“There are ways down,” Zaius was shouting.

The perfect color on the wall dissolved as Mendez and Caspay and the fat man rose from their chairs. Mendez’s smooth face was calm but his eyes moved strangely. Flakes of gold in a mysterious wind of inner turmoil.

Caspay addressed the fat man.

“You know the range of their city?”

The red-clad fat man nodded.

“Set it in the mechanism and wait for me.”

The fat man left the Inquisition Room.

Caspay smiled at the beautiful Albina.

“I want a public thought projection at adult and infant level. ‘Clear the streets. Stay indoors.’ ”

Albina nodded too. Then she also rustled out of the room.

“What will you do, Holiness?” Caspay asked Mendez.

Mendez’s marble face was fixed with confident placidity.

“Everything necessary,” he murmured.

Caspay smiled his benevolent puckish smile and fondled his green robes.

All would be well, no matter how well organized and powerful the ape army might be.

There was still the Almighty Bomb!

And Mendez, whose brilliance outshone even the sun.

The last of the ape infantrymen had clambered down into the six main vents. Nothing remained on the surface of the Forbidden Zone but endless scores of tethered horses, waiting patiently for the eventual return of their riders. Four young gorilla sentries guarded the mounts as the main force pushed on.

An aura of excitement prevailed.

General Ursus and Dr. Zaius led the way along the narrow, glaringly white passageway. The cool air, the almost antiseptic texture of the corridor fascinated Zaius but Ursus could now smell blood. His gorilla face was beaming with expectancy. The unexpected rise of Zaius to hero status no longer disturbed him. There would be fresh battles, new conquests, and soon! He could almost feel the proximity of combat, the matching of arms with this rabble who had to live underground like worms and play tricks with gorilla minds. Well, he would show them. Show Zaius too. Show everybody—the unimpeachable wisdom of Invade, Invade, Invade!

Everything was going so smoothly now.

Once out of this damnable corridor, they would come face to face with the half savages who had dared to mock gorilla might and abuse gorilla people.

Yes, he would show them.

Show everybody.

The ineluctable power of Force.

There was just no other way to run a country. A people. A civilization. Foolish man had learned that, hadn’t he, to his sorrow. Trying to rule a world with the milk of kindness.

Damn chimpanzee philosophy.

Weak-kneed, thin-skinned. Hopelessly . . .

Grunting happily, his eyes shining, General Ursus moved down the long shining corridor at the head of his troops.

Dr. Zaius tagged along, just behind him.

Zaius was still unhappy.

He did not like the signs all around them of a vastly superior race of beings.

A race of intellects.

For which no gorilla could ever be a match.

Beyond the maze of octagonal corridors, in the cold glare of the metropolis above, nothing moved on the streets of the Forbidden Zone. There was a curious, almost frightening emptiness to the streets. No little knots of playing children, no passers-by, no single solitary streetwalkers. Nobody.

Only the wind fanning eerily over the half-buried building tops, the windowless structures which resembled so many headstones and tombstones jutting from the depths of the faraway mountains.

Only the mammoth silhouette of the great cathedral poking into the slate-gray skies.

The cathedral that housed the Bomb.

The Almighty Bomb.

Dedicated to the Holy Fallout.

And ultimate Oblivion.