As the caravan started up the grade ahead, Jeff gained some distance on Bill. They went down the other side of the hill and through a winding road in a forest of oaks. Bill didn’t see the frightened humanoids pick up the two rifles and bags of ammunition and throw them into the bushes.
The trucks sped on.
* * *
Jeff’s truck ground its way up the mountain road in low gear. Nova, who had originally been almost petrified at being put into the great growling metal beast, had adjusted and was cuddled against the passenger-side door, asleep. The long hours cooped up in the truck had put most of the humanoids to sleep, and Jeff’s own eyes were glazed with fatigue as he kept them locked on the narrow road ahead.
In the second truck Bill, too, was nodding with weariness. His truck labored slowly up the twisting, turning mountain road, his hands cramped from long hours of gripping the wheel. As he turned to go up yet another switchback, Bill glanced back down toward the base of the steep mountain.
“Dammit!” he said, the surprise killing his sleepiness.
A caravan of Gorilla Army trucks was just starting up the mountain road, followed by three light tanks.
Bill quickly squinted ahead again and saw that he and Jeff were almost to the top of the long, steep grade. Then he looked down again, trying to gauge the speed of the enemy trucks and count their number.
“They probably can go no faster than we can,” he muttered to himself. “But there are a lot of them. If they get within rifle range…” His mouth set in a firm line and he kept his foot firmly pressed on the accelerator. Don’t let anything go wrong, he thought grimly.
When he reached the top, Bill honked his horn once as a signal to Jeff to stop. He jumped out and ran over to the edge of the road, gesturing for Jeff to join him.
The black astronaut whistled when he saw what was coming. “Oh, boy! Company!”
Bill turned and looked at the trucks for a moment, then said, “Let’s get them out. All of them!” He started running toward the trucks as Jeff called after him.
“What are you going to do?”
“Use the trucks to block the road!”
Jeff, too, started running back. “We’ll need to block it as low down the road as possible, to give them more mountain to climb!”
Bill nodded, dropping the back gate of his truck. “Everyone out!” he shouted.
He gestured for them to leave the truck and once again had trouble getting them to obey. But at last both trucks were emptied and the humanoids stood in a large, frightened cluster as Jeff drove his truck over to the edge of the mountain road. Bill guided him with hand signals, then stopped him.
“Leave the engine running,” he said. “It may catch on fire that way.”
Both men now ran to the rear of the vehicle and started pushing. But the truck was too heavy, even in neutral.
“I’ll start it off, then jump,” Jeff said.
Bill grabbed him as he started forward. “No! You might get hurt.”
He ran back toward the humanoids and began urging them toward the truck. They went reluctantly, until they saw what the Earthmen had in mind. In moments, the truck rolled over the edge and started its dangerous plunge down the mountain.
The big vehicle careened downward, crashing into the road on the switchback below and killing much of its momentum. But it nevertheless bounced across the dusty mountain road and started down the steep slope once again. Farther down, it hit the next switchback, toppling itself again and landing on its side. Fortunately it still had enough momentum to roll across the narrow road and fall off the edge again. After two rolls, it exploded with a whoom, scattering bits and parts in every direction, but kept bouncing and sliding for several more switchbacks until it collapsed finally with a roar across the road about halfway down the mountain.
Jeff let out a cheer and Bill grinned as he turned to drive the second truck to the edge of the hill. Jeff guided him to the very brink, where the dirt began to crumble under the big knobbed tires; then Bill leaped out. He was no sooner clear of the vehicle than the humanoids started to push.
“Let’s try for distance!” Bill yelled.
The truck tipped and started rolling, gaining speed. It was falling at a different angle from the first truck, the terrain helped it to gain even more speed. A tire blew as it crashed along the third switchback, causing it to veer. But it kept going, since it had too much weight and momentum to stop easily.
It now passed through the patch of grassfire caused by the first truck’s explosion, then skirted the edges of the much larger fire where the first truck’s wreckage burned. Bill shouted with glee when he saw that the second truck had a chance of getting all the way down the mountain and hitting the Gorilla Army column.
“They don’t know which way to jump!” Jeff exclaimed.
The heavy truck lurched and weaved, going left, then right—but always down—and the terrified troops in the gorilla trucks were staring up at the hurtling missile.
Two soldiers jumped from the last truck and started running down the road past some follow-up tanks. But the attempted escapees were stopped by their own sergeant, who rose up and put a bullet into the back of each deserter.
Several more soldiers had jumped to the ground, but now clung to the metal sides of the troop carriers with frozen fingers, their eyes glued to the bouncing juggernaut approaching them.
At the last minute, the descending truck veered from its track, which ended at a troop carrier, bounced high off a rock, and headed toward a lead tank.
For some reason the tank fired—probably it was a terrified gunner. The shell struck the slope harmlessly, but the truck angled off the mountainside, flying through the air, and struck the tank squarely in the side.
The truck exploded in an orange fireball, and both tank and truck tumbled over the edge of the road, a welded mass of metal. In a few moments, the sliding, tumbling tank exploded with a great roar as its ammunition was touched off. Flaming parts of its wreckage rained about the Gorilla Army trucks and troop carriers below it, injuring several soldiers, and killing the officer who had fired at the deserters.
Bill and Jeff let out wild rebel yells and slapped each other on the back. Then they each hugged Nova. But the rest of the humanoids cringed with fear: they had never seen anything like it, and they knew they had taken part in what had happened.
“Come on!” Bill said. “Let’s get out of here while they are still disorganized.”
Near the bottom of the hill, General Urko looked along at his injured vehicles, his face again contorted by a livid rage. “Those beasts! Look what they’ve done! Captain Mulla!”
The aide-de-camp ran back to Urko’s command jeep and saluted.
“Put those fires out! Leave the wounded! Get this column moving!”
Within minutes the trucks, troop carriers, and tanks were moving, and Urko was gritting his sharp teeth in frustration. He could see that the humanoid’s first truck had blocked the road and left them no room to get around.
As they approached the still-burning truck, halfway up the mountain, he bellowed again for Captain Mulla. “Push that wreck out of the way!”
“Sir, it’s still burning. We might set a truck afire!”
“Then get a tank up here! If they weren’t so damnable slow, they should be in the front of the column anyway!”
“Sir, the road is too narrow to pass the tank around our own—”
“Captain Mulla! I gave you a command! Obey it!”
“Yes, sir!”
The gorilla officer turned away, hiding his own rage. They give orders, impossible orders, and it’s up to us to make ’em work, he thought angrily. He gave an order to a grim-faced tank driver to pull out and inch along the steep side of the road in order to push the burning truck off the side of the mountain. We’ll never catch them at this rate, Mulla thought gloomily, and it will somehow be my fault!
“This might take hours,” Dr. Zaius said to the furious general, who was by now pacing the road.
>
Urko gave the orangutan a bitter look but did not deign to reply.
Zaius sighed. “Apes also serve who only stand and wait…”
Urko stopped his pacing and looked at Zaius with loathing. “Civilians!” he snorted.
* * *
Jeff walked out of the cave rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. It was a beautiful morning, but sleeping on bare rock had made the young astronaut stiff. He walked over to a boulder as big as a house and climbed it to look around.
As far as he could see was only the empty countryside. We gave them the slip, he thought, and just in time, too.
Hearing a noise, Jeff turned and saw Nova exit the cave mouth with several other humanoids. Bill came out too, and headed toward the rock lookout quickly. Jeff watched as the humanoids started gathering food for the day and felt the grumble in his own stomach.
Bill climbed to the top of the rock and stood next to his fellow astronaut. They looked out over the valley before them.
“Going to be hot,” he said, nodding at the morning sun low on the horizon.
Jeff agreed and the two men squatted down.
“If there was only some way we could help these people defend themselves against the apes,” Bill said. “They’re nothing but sitting ducks this way.”
Jeff sighed and agreed again. “You’re right. They have no weapons, no technology really, and seem too… too…”
“Dumb?”
Jeff nodded. “I’m not sure if that’s the word. Frightened, maybe. Trained. Traumatized. Something like that. They don’t seem capable of protecting themselves, much less attacking the simians. But you know more about them than I do. Tell me what happened since the gorillas first captured you.”
Bill quickly outlined what he had discovered and what he suspected. “So, the chimpanzee scientists—Zira and Cornelius—found me… well, let’s say ‘unusual.’ But they look upon me as some kind of mutant—a sport, a freak. I told them I was from Earth and how I got here, but they didn’t seem to believe me. Oh, they pretended to, but I don’t think they really do. However, while their interest may just be in preserving me for study, they did seem to have some humanitarian ideas that were at variance with the commonly accepted beliefs.”
“Ape-itarian ideals?” Jeff suggested.
Bill nodded glumly. “It’s all so turned around, so twisted! It’s grotesque!” He made marks in the dust atop the huge rock. “When they had me… in a cage like an animal… I was in shock.”
“I would have been, too,” Jeff said softly.
“It was as if I was a lower form of life: a dog, a head of cattle, something really low on the evolutionary scale. Yet I looked human, just as Nova and the others look human. So human-looking—or, maybe I’d better say ‘humanoid-looking’—that they never thought for a second I was anything else. Until Zira saw my blue eyes… And then, when I started to speak, of course.”
Bill stared out over the valley with pained eyes. “It was a humiliating and frightening experience. And not one I want to repeat.” He spoke in low, powerful tones. “We are men, Jeff. Human beings. Homo sapiens. People. We are not animals to be kept as pets or slaughtered in stupid war games or used as unwilling laboratory guinea pigs!”
“Neither are they,” Jeff said, gesturing down at the humanoids, who were busily searching for berries and carrying water.
“It looks as if it’s up to us to lead them out of this mess,” Bill said quietly but with great determination. “The first thing we should do, I believe, is find them a safer place to live.”
“Where?” Jeff asked. “We don’t know where anything is. And no one can tell us,” he chuckled.
“I don’t know…” Bill pondered. “But tomorrow let’s start exploring some of the terrain around here.” He looked to the north. “Up that way, maybe. Let’s see what’s out there.”
Jeff nodded. “They should be safe here for a little while, if we leave them. But maybe we should erect some kind of defense for them, something they could defend or which would slow down the apes, if they attacked.”
Looking back down at the cave mouth, Bill and Jeff discussed various ways that might help.
“Remember those thornbushes we passed by, a little way back? They could transplant them here, make a kind of fence with them, and either make maze entrances that would by easy to defend, or some kind of gates that could be closed completely,” Jeff suggested.
“That would be all right for troops on foot,” Bill said, “but what about the tanks? They’d roll right over the thornbushes. What is needed is something solid as a rock and—” Bill stopped, his eyes scanning the ground below them. “Look, Jeff,” he said to his companion. “Look at those boulders. They are roughly in a semicircle around the entrance. And those boulders there and over there. They could be rolled into the spaces between and fitted together. Properly placed, they would make a pretty good defense perimeter. It would look fairly natural and deceptive, yet be good enough to give the humanoids a chance to defend it if the apes realized what it was.”
“Or if they couldn’t defend it,” Jeff added, “it would slow down the apes and give the humanoids a chance to get away… But how would we move the rocks and—” Bill raised a brawny arm. “Oh, sure, muscle power and a quick invention called the lever. But how are we going to fit the rocks together to make any kind of tight defense? We’d need some pretty advanced tools for that, and those people,” he said, waving his hand down at the humanoids, “are fresh out of advanced anything.”
“We aren’t,” Bill said, his face lighting up.
“What did you think of?”
“Our laser drill. We were to use if for cutting into rock to get deep-core samplings, remember?”
“Oh, I remember that it would work,” Jeff said, “but I also remember that it went down to the bottom of the lake with our late and very lamented spaceship! A lot of good that will do us!”
Bill looked earnestly at his dark-skinned companion. “Sure, I remember, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to retrieve it!”
Jeff ran his tongue over his teeth, his face serious. “No…” he said slowly, “no, it doesn’t. If we could get into the airlock and close it behind us, we’d be all right.”
“First we have to locate it,” Bill said. “And that will be no easy task.”
“First we locate breakfast,” Jeff said with a grin, rising to his feet. “I think it is hanging on some bushes over there somewhere.”
“Well, come on, then,” Bill laughed. “Every man for himself!”
* * *
General Urko stood by his command vehicle, his fieldglasses scanning the empty landscape from the mountaintop he had finally gained. He dropped the glasses into the jeep with a snarl.
“They might have gotten away this time,” he said, his rage unabated, “but I’ll get the beasts and make them pay, no matter what it takes!”
The fury in his voice made Dr. Zaius shiver with a strange kind of fear. He knew he needed Urko and the Gorilla Army to hunt down the escaped animals, but for the first time he nevertheless felt a certain sympathy for the humanoids. They deserved a quick, clean, possibly even painless death—an extermination, not the sort of horror that Urko was addicted to. Not even a humanoid should suffer that way!
* * *
The barren desert was quiet, baking in the hot sun. Even the lizards kept in their holes and in the shade of rocks to avoid heating their blood to deathpoint. No wind blew and the column of dust in the distance hung hazily in the air, thin and chalky, marking the approach of the Gorilla Army column.
A snake stirred as it felt the vibrations through the ground, and raised its head, its tongue going out and in quickly. Disturbed from its reptile dreams, it writhed deeper into its hole, its unblinking eyes watchful.
The nearing dust column soon dipped below some rocks, then started rising toward the hills. The lizards could hear the rumble of trucks and weapons carriers, and made sudden swift movements, ducking into crevices in the sun-baked rock and cli
nging to their sides with uncanny ability, torsos rising and falling with their breathing.
A command jeep suddenly roared up out of a gully and came to a halt. The passengers waited impatiently as the following dust cloud caught up to them, enveloping them in its choking fog. The column, too, had stopped behind the jeep and lay stretched out over the desert road, its vehicles chalky with heavy dust.
Gorillas sat in open trucks, huddling into their helmets and trying to endure the long, rough ride. They now stared blankly out at the desert, blinking the heavy beige dust from their eyes, but making no attempt to brush the coating from their thick black fur or their leather uniforms. Soldiers in armored vehicles did not dare touch the metal sides of these carriers in the desert, if they could help it. Not even thick gorilla skin was immune to the heat that the metal soaked up.
Behind them the desert floor, stirred into gritty mush by the passage of the column, settled back onto vehicle and bush alike.
The driver of an armored troop carrier grumbled to his co-driver, “Damn those humanoids anyway! What are we doing out here today? Who the hell would want to be out here, ya answer me that?”
The co-driver shrugged, his eyes red despite the goggles they all wore. “Stupid beasts, I guess. You know how dumb those animals are, Nutark. They’re likely to do anything.”
“How does the general know they’re out here anyway?” The driver looked gloomily at the desolation through the driving slit. “How could anyone live out here in the Forbidden Zone, for crying out loud?”
The co-driver shrugged again. “Officers know stuff we don’t, I guess.”
Nutark grunted, as if not convinced. “Well, I know enough not to be out here, but I’m out here ’cause Captain Mulla says I gotta be out here.” He yanked a canteen from its clip and moodily took off the cap. He took a swallow, and made a face. “Awful stuff is near boiling!”
“Yeah, it’s hot,” the co-driver agreed.
In the command jeep, the map was spread across. General Urko’s lap.
Captain Mulla pointed to a section of the map with a thick finger. “The caverns must be in this sector, general.”
Planet of the Apes Omnibus 4 Page 11