While Burke collected some of the insulation material and stuffed it under the waistband of his trousers, Virdon explained to the chimpanzee. “We burn this,” he said, indicating the insulation that Burke had noticed. “Then we collect the fumes and we’ve got sulphur dioxide. Blend that at the right temperature with water and oxygen, and you have sulphuric acid.”
“You two humans forget that I’m not exactly sure about why it’s such a wonderful thing to have sulphuric acid,” said Galen, as he, too, joined in ripping up pieces of the insulation.
Virdon answered while he worked. “First we melt down the copper we’ve got here. Then we can make a base conductor. With all of that, we’ll have a battery. I hope.”
They continued stripping off the gypsum-based insulation material. No one said anything further. The sun climbed in the sky, and beads of sweat dropped from their faces. The city was peculiarly quiet. Except for the gorilla patrol and the old human, the trio hadn’t seen a single living thing. But, of course, this was the forbidden zone . . .
When the sounds returned, they split the silence as completely as the explosion of a bomb. A captain of the ape guards and six of his soldiers had turned into the street from its opposite end, on their routine patrol. They had not spotted Virdon, Burke, or Galen yet, being still several hundred yards away.
The racket of the gorillas’ horses was startling to Galen. He stood upright suddenly, fearfully; he wondered that Virdon and Burke did not react the same way. Then he remembered that the humans were afflicted with poor hearing. Galen took a final look at the gorillas coming nearer, then he spoke. “Soldiers,” he said in a hissing whisper. The two astronauts looked up, suddenly alert.
As the Captain of the gorilla guard and his troops rode casually up the street, they affected an air of unhurried calm. But Galen could see that the Captain and his Sergeant beside him were carefully studying Virdon, Burke, and Galen.
“They’re not like the other humans in the city,” said the Captain. “They’re too well-fed. No one in the city looks as healthy as these. Perhaps they are escaped slaves. But they are with an ape . . .”
The Sergeant thought for a moment. “Could it be that they’re the outlaws General Urko has been searching for?”
“That thought appeals to me,” said the Captain. He said nothing more.
Virdon, Burke, and Galen stood where they were, frozen in position. There was no point in trying to run. Still, they attempted to give the impression of being innocently casual. They stared up the street at the approaching Captain and the gorillas. Virdon turned to lead the others in an apparently unhurried stroll which angled away from the gorillas, trying to put a little more distance between them. He spoke to his friends in short, hushed, authoritative tones.
“All right, listen up,” he said. “We don’t have much time. When I signal, we separate. Then run. We’ll meet back at the Institute. Anybody that doesn’t show up there in the next twenty-four hours, figure that he’s not coming.”
“Sure,” said Burke. “Then we’ll search for whoever—”
Virdon sighed. The pressures of being a leader sometimes overwhelmed him. He had to make his point, and make it quickly. Burke’s notions, although courageous and laudable, were foolish. “No!” said Virdon. “That’s an order. Don’t wait at the Institute. Get the projector going, locate the tapes. That has top priority. It’s much more important than any of us.”
Burke glanced over his shoulder. He was about to say something; Virdon could guess what his friend’s remark would be, and cut it off with a curt gesture. “This isn’t any time for sentiment,” he said. “Those gorillas aren’t worried about it. We can’t be, either, or we’ll be taking on a huge disadvantage. Now! Scramble!”
Virdon, Burke, and Galen suddenly turned and ran back for the cross street. When they reached the smaller road they separated. They dashed in three different directions. The Captain of the gorillas rose up in his stirrups to see what was happening. He waved at his troops, and they charged after him, splitting up, too, in order to capture the three fugitives.
Burke, a former football player at the University of Michigan, put his head down and ran. He concentrated on speed: stretching his stride and quickening it. He did not think about his pursuers. It was like running back a punt; you just put your head down and charged. Behind him, he heard two or three gorillas turn into the street along which he was running. Then he heard the sound of gunfire behind him. That was enough to make Burke stop his flat-out sprint in favor of some good old-fashioned broken-field running.
Galen ran up another street, without Burke’s experience and natural speed. But he did have a better idea of the motivations and techniques of the gorilla guards. Instead of trying to outrun them, he ducked into a crumbling, deteriorated building, just seconds before the Sergeant and several gorillas hurried into the street. The gorillas ran up the street, past the building that shielded Galen.
Virdon, too, was running up another street, hopefully one that would lead him away from the center of conflict. He trusted his instincts, because he had no knowledge to rely on. He was halfway up the street when he tangled his feet in a mass of cable. Virdon fell, taking a rough tumble on the ground.
He grimaced in pain; the cable had held his foot stationary while he twisted in his fall. He tried to stand, but his right ankle wouldn’t bear his weight.
“Well,” thought Virdon ironically, “that’s it. I’ve had it. It’s funny the way they never have chapters on being hopelessly captured in the instruction manuals. Three of us landed here in this crazy world. Me and Burke, well, we’ve managed so far. But old Jonesy never even got to see what happened. I wonder if the instruction book would have approved of the way he died. I’d like to have the guy who wrote that book here, right now, with his ankle twisted up like mine. I want to know how to get out of this.”
The answer, of course, was obvious; if there were a chapter on it in the instruction book, Virdon would know just what to do. He desperately wanted to have the man or woman who wrote that manual here, in the astronaut’s place. Then Virdon could watch from a safe, distant place. Virdon wouldn’t mind even taking notes.
But there was no one else to help. It was only Virdon and the sharp, crippling pain in his leg as he tried to escape. He gave up running; his right leg was just so much dead weight. He would have to drag it behind if he could hope to make any kind of progress. He slowly limped across the street and out of sight down a narrow alley.
Just as Virdon entered the alley, two gorillas hurried into the main street, their shaggy heads moving from left to right, eliminating the potential hiding places in doorways and entrance halls. They moved methodically down the street, working in the cold, practical manner devised by General Urko for all of his subordinate teams.
The gorillas urged their horses slowly forward up the street, maneuvering slowly among the piles of rubble, searching for any signs of movement, of life. There were none. The empty windows had been gaping holes in the buildings since before the memory of anyone born into this planet of the apes. Nothing moved there, either. Slowly, the two mounted gorilla guards approached the place where Virdon had fallen. One of the gorillas continued to ride on past the spot. His eyes were directed to the roofs of the buildings, those that had not collapsed in upon themselves. The rooflines presented excellent protection for human snipers; of course, the humans’ weapons were inferior to the apes’ rifles and hand guns. But the chunks of rock, concrete, and brick that the humans threw was in much greater supply.
The second guard noticed something. His eyes caught the glinting of sunlight on pieces of copper which Virdon had been carrying and dropped when he fell. This metallic sparkle was not part of the natural scene. The gorilla stopped his horse and bent lower for a better view.
“Did you see something?” asked his fellow gorilla.
The first gorilla signalled for the other ape to be quiet. He drew his pistol carefully and slid noiselessly to the ground. He knelt by the pieces of coppe
r; yes, it was obvious that someone had broken these bits. For what purpose? The slow-witted ape could not understand. But the evidence was enough for him. He stood up, very much on the alert. Before he said anything to his companion, he scanned the immediate area. He saw nothing suspicious.
Virdon, at the same time, grimaced with the great, throbbing pain in his ankle, and tried to hurry up the alley toward a safe place of concealment. He had been in greater pain, in worse situations, and his sharp, well-trained mind had always gotten him safely through. Now, though, there wasn’t much for his superior wits to work with. He dragged himself further into the shadows of the alley.
In the same dark, littered inlet among the buildings, a small, thin street boy hid from the patrol of gorillas. The boy was about twelve or thirteen years old. His clothing was even more coarse and filthy than the clothes of the fugitives; the boy was a resident of the city, dependent on the city for the necessities of life. He hid himself now behind a pile of rubble through which he had been rummaging for food. He peered out from his hiding place and stared silently at Virdon.
The blond man continued to crawl up the alley for another dozen feet or so, looking around wildly for some place to hide. He came to a doorway at last and darted toward it.
The door would not open; a quick examination of the hinges told Virdon that the door would open outward, and it was blocked by a low mound of rubble. He fell to the ground, scrabbling at the shards and pieces of concrete, trying to scrape enough away to allow him to force the door open.
The rubble protected Virdon from observation from the mouth of the alley; this fact only partially made up for the labor that he undertook. If he could open the door, he would be even better protected. As he scooped more and more of the debris aside, Virdon made an astonishing discovery: he was digging into a kind of nest, a hollow area that had been built and was now occupied by a young woman. Virdon felt a huge wave of pity and sadness overwhelm him. What had these people been reduced to? Living in piles of garbage and trash? Scrounging the offal and refuse for their daily meals? And now he, Virdon, an intruder, was casually destroying their only vestiges of civilization, of community life, of humanity.
The young woman stared at Virdon mutely. Her expression was not one of fear; she had outgrown that emotion many years before. Her face showed a great weariness, a life-long hunger—for food, for warmth, for human compassion, perhaps for the knowledge that as a human being she counted for something. She was not an unattractive woman by Virdon’s standards, ideals which had died with his world but lived in his mind. She was in her late twenties, already an old person in this harsh world. Her hair was long and blonde, and her eyes were large, blue, and staring straight into Virdon’s. He stopped his frantic burrowing for a moment and stared back at her. He did not know what to say, what to do.
The woman cowered deeper into the doorway. She had a bag with the few pitiful belongings she had gathered in her lifetime. Virdon slid down the rattling broken bits of concrete and brick. He got to his feet, but stayed bent over to prevent his being seen by the gorillas who were searching for him. His bad ankle still hobbled him. He spoke to the woman in hushed, urgent tones.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. He wondered what effect his words could have on her; don’t be afraid. He felt the foolishness of the sentiment even as he spoke it. This woman had spent a lifetime afraid. She had every reason to be afraid, even before this strange blond man appeared, bringing with him a hostile search party of gorilla guards. “I’m not going to hurt you,” said Virdon, trying to reassure her that, at least for the moment, at least as far as her physical well-being was concerned, she was in no danger. Whether or not she believed him, that was a matter Virdon had too little experience to predict.
While the astronaut sought to comfort the woman’s anxiety, the boy was creeping behind them, moving closer toward the mouth of the alley, climbing up the back of a mound of rubble. From that vantage point, the boy could see what was happening in the main street, and he could look back to watch Virdon’s speech with the blonde woman.
Virdon’s apology had done nothing to ease the woman’s terror. “Please,” she said, her voice dull and empty of emotion—even her fear, so constant a factor in her life, failed to color her speech—“you have to leave.”
The astronaut struggled to squeeze into the tight space between the shallow cover the woman had dug for herself and the doorway. His ankle still gave him trouble. “I can’t leave,” he said. “Those gorillas are looking for me.”
“And you will bring them here,” said the woman. “I have lived here all of my life, and I haven’t found a place of safety. The only safety is in not making the apes angry. Then they leave me alone. If they found you here with me, they would think that I was trying to help you escape. You know what they would do with me then.”
“Yes,” said Virdon softly, painfully. The woman was not begging or pleading with him. She was simply reciting the facts of the matter. That she could so coldly accept things as they were made the horror even more intense for Virdon. While he stared at her lovely though dirt-streaked face, his ankle gave way. He fell, and the woman instinctively reached out to hold his arm, to catch him. Again, Virdon looked into her eyes. He could not tell if there was anything there beyond instinct, impulsive reactions, thoughtless actions based on need and want.
The woman waved Virdon back. The man pressed himself into the shallow cover of the doorway. The woman curled herself into the depression in the rubble. The Sergeant of the gorilla guards and his men, dismounted, ran through the alleyway. When they reached the mouth of the narrow passage, they had not spotted anything. Virdon let his breath out in a quiet sigh. The woman near him signalled that they were not safe yet. Neither human moved.
The boy, in plain view on the mound of rubble, turned to face the guards. “Sergeant,” he said boldly.
The gorillas grabbed the boy roughly and pulled him down from his spy position. “A human boy,” said one of the gorillas. “A filthy human boy, a stinking animal.”
“If you let us have food, if you let us have decent homes, we wouldn’t stink,” said the boy. “If you let us have water.”
“No one is holding you here against your will,” said the ape sergeant. “You could journey to one of the farming communities and grow food for yourself and your ape masters. You could travel to Central City itself and become whatever the Supreme Council decided you were fit for.”
“To travel, I have to have food,” said the boy. “I couldn’t live three days on the road. I don’t have food, water, or even identification. If I left this forbidden zone, I would end up in an ape prison.”
The Sergeant laughed, a harsh, raucous sound in the stillness of the ruined city. “Then you would be fed,” he said at last.
“Until I was executed,” said the boy, with a wisdom that came from experience beyond his few years.
“Of course,” said the Sergeant. “There is that to consider. But you still have a free choice.”
“I could tell you something you’d like to know,” said the boy.
“Your name,” said the Sergeant. “I will conduct the interrogation.”
“I am called Kraik,” said the boy. “But you won’t ask the right questions. I have something you’d really be interested in.”
“Yes?” said the Sergeant.
Kraik hesitated for a moment, looking back toward the doorway where Virdon still hid, unable to hear the gorillas and the boy. “It’s worth a lot,” said Kraik.
“Your idea of what is worth a lot, and mine, are quite different,” said the Sergeant. “Also, your idea of ‘a lot’ and mine, aren’t the same, either.”
“Well,” said Kraik, smiling confidently, “let’s start trading. This part is fun.”
“This part will be short,” said the Sergeant, suddenly angry for letting this human boy speak to him on equal terms. “This part will not be fun. And if you do not have anything very interesting, this part will be fatal. For you.”
&nbs
p; “Isn’t it always?” said Kraik with a shrug. One of the gorilla guards slapped the young boy hard, across the face, for speaking with such disrespect to a sergeant of General Urko’s guards.
“How much is what you have to tell me worth?” asked the Sergeant, his teeth clenched in hatred.
Kraik shrugged. He did not seem to have noticed the blow from the gorilla guard, nor the atmosphere of potential danger that the interview had suddenly taken. “Two days’ food,” he said simply.
The Sergeant turned away, frowning. He would not be treated in so impudent a manner by any human. This young human could die before the Sergeant would give him two days’ food, for any reason.
“One day, then?” came the response from Kraik, whose voice, for the first time, showed the hope and longing he had hidden in his expression.
The Sergeant turned back to face the boy.
“What’s happening out there?” asked Virdon, pressed against the door, only slightly protected by the small entryway.
“Nothing that I didn’t expect,” said the woman, her voice flat and emotionless.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Virdon. Before the woman could reply, the man could hear the heavy steps of the gorillas running back up the alley toward them. “Did the boy—” He never finished the question. The gorillas saw the blond man and grabbed him, dragging him through the rubble. Virdon tried to fight them off; any single gorilla was more than a match for the astronaut. The gorillas had the strength of three men, and here was a sergeant and a squad of subordinates. It did not take them long to overwhelm Virdon.
A few moments later, the squad dragged Virdon and the woman to the mouth of the alley. “It’s over,” said the woman.
“I’m sorry,” said Virdon, horrified at what he had brought on her.
“I’ll be all right,” said the woman. “These guards know me. They know that I can’t possibly be of any danger to them. But you’re a stranger. And that’s the worst thing in the world to be.”
Planet of the Apes 03 - Journey into Terror Page 3