“No trace at all?” the general snapped.
“No, sir. It was as if they had never been here at all. Like some kind of vision, sir. There’s just desert now.”
“What about the humanoid? Any humanoid!”
“Nothing, sir,” the scout leader replied. “There’s just nothing at all.”
Urko growled angrily and ordered the column ahead. He came to the area beyond which the mountains had blocked them and halted the column. Urko and Mulla both stood up and scoured the area with their glasses.
It was as though no one had ever been there. Untouched sand, without the sign of sandal, boot, or foot.
“He’s disappeared, sir,” the captain said in a hollow voice.
Urko’s eyes roved to the rocky hills. “I don’t see him up there, either.” He spat out a curse that made the jeep driver wince, then fell back into his seat with a savage growl. “By all the claws of Kerchak!” He waved at the driver. “Go on! Go to the caverns of the humanoids!”
The powerful jeep leaped ahead on the untouched sands of the desert-valley floor. Captain Mulla waved at the following vehicles wavering in the shimmering heat. The column jerked forward again, following the dust cloud of their general.
* * *
Bill grasped Jeff in the dark. “Is that a light, or are my eyes playing tricks?”
Below them shone a faint red light, almost concealed by the steps and pipe railing. And they could now hear some kind of slithering sound, made perhaps by a piece of machinery. Earlier, all sounds had been masked by the ponderous whine, clicks, and rumbling of the massive dish column and the double set of overhead doors.
“No, there is something down there,” Jeff answered. “Come on.”
“Take it easy, Jeff,” Bill cautioned. “These stairs could end in open space and we would never know it in this darkness.”
They made their way down past several more switchbacks of the zigzagging stairway until they stood on another platform that seemed to be the end of the steps—or the beginning. A red light overhead dimly illuminated the edges of a square hole in the platform floor. Coming up from the hole and onto a roller overhead, then down the other side, was an endless conveyer belt. Traveler drums kept the two sides of the belt apart and teeth slipping into slots in the belt helped support it. Small handholds and foot platforms alternated down the length of the belt, which disappeared into the darkness below.
“It looks like one of those things in a parking garage,” Bill said, “but it’s efficient.” He glanced at Jeff in the dim red light. “Are you game?”
Their voices echoed in the deep concrete pit and Bill saw Jeff shrug. “It’s a long way down,” he said looking into the hole.
“We might as well start…” Bill stepped onto the moving belt and grasped a handhold.
Jeff waited until Bill had disappeared into the hole before he stepped on and sank into the square opening.
Dim red lights were set at intervals, and the astronauts could see that the smooth concrete of the pit above had now given way to rough-hewn rock.
“You okay?” Jeff called down to Bill.
“Yeah… but I think we’re not too far from the bottom. I can see a floor down there.”
In a few moments Jeff, too, could see the floor. The two men braced themselves to jump off the descending belt.
Bill stepped off easily and called out to Jeff, “It’s easy. Just step off.”
Jeff jumped to the floor and the endless belt disappeared into a hole, reappearing on its upward track on the reverse side.
The two astronauts looked around, trying to orient themselves. In the red light they could see the base of the enormous metal column that rose into the darkness of the huge cavern above them. From the column’s base radiated a number of pipes, each as thick as a man’s torso, which disappeared into massive machinery. There were also shadowed control panels and hulking shapes of metal and opaque plastic, whose purpose neither Jeff nor Bill understood.
“What an energy system!” Jeff said, his voice reverberating in the stone chasm.
The vertical, rough-cut rock, tunnel through which they had just descended ended in this rock-bottomed room on the floor of the huge concrete cavern.
Bill looked up at the shadowed structure critically. “I don’t think the apes could have engineered anything like this. Their level of technology seems rather static—rather primitive—when compared to this!”
Jeff nodded, his face puzzled. “But if the apes didn’t build this monster, then who did?”
They stood staring, wordless, for a time. Both the lack of real light and, the few clues defeated them. Finally they turned to look more closely around them, at the rough-cut room-like area they were in.
Bill pointed at a black spot that seemed circular at the rear of the room. “What’s that?” The two men approached it cautiously. “It’s some kind of metal pipe—or tunnel,” Bill guessed.
Jeff stepped into the darkness, feeling his way by touching the curving walls. “I can feel a slight breeze,” he said.
“Maybe it’s how they air-condition this place,” Bill said.
He, too, now stepped into the pipe-tunnel, which was quite high enough for them to walk erect. Their voices and movements echoed hollowly as they felt their way along for a few feet. “Can’t see a light,” Jeff said.
“Well, why don’t we take a look anyway. We can always come back here. But there may be something at the other end.”
“Anything’s better than waiting for those gorillas to find out where—and how—we disappeared,” Jeff growled. “Come on, you first, explorer.”
The two astronauts cautiously felt their way along the tunnel. Within a few feet, they lost all help from the faint red light behind them, and were progressing slowly and in utter darkness.
“Oops! A bend here,” Bill cautioned, feeling his way.
“Is the breeze freshening?” Jeff asked.
“Hardly a breeze, but the air is moving,” Bill said.
The two men searched carefully with their feet, hoping they would not stumble into a vertical open shaft in the dark. After what seemed like an interminable time, Bill felt the edges of the tunnel-side end.
“I can’t see a thing,” he said, “but there’s no more tunnel.”
Jeff extended a foot in another direction and tapped it on stone. “Rock here,” he said. “And I can feel rock on the sides. Let’s go this way.”
Jeff now leading the way, the two men felt along walls of roughly cut stone until they once again found the smooth metal edges of the huge circular pipe.
“Did we come full around?” Bill wondered. “It doesn’t feel as if we came that far.”
‘The air is still moving toward us,” Jeff said. “Let’s take a chance.”
Bill laughed a short, wry laugh. “Isn’t that what we’ve done every minute since we arrived on this godforsaken planet?”
Jeff nodded in the darkness, then realized Bill couldn’t see him. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said.
The two men stepped into the round tunnel and continued their travels in the darkness. After some time, Bill peered into the blackness ahead.
“Is that light, or am I seeing things?”
“It’s faint,” his companion agreed, “but you’re right.”
The light grew brighter as they moved along the echoing passage; then, after a turn of the great pipe, they could see a glowing disk ahead. They now moved faster, eager to be out of the dark, claustrophobic confines of the tunnel, and reached the end of the large tube quickly—so quickly, that their eyes, after long confinement, were blinded by the light.
Squinting into the glare, their impressions were too chaotic to voice immediately.
Bill was unwilling, at first, to comment on what he thought he saw. But Jeff uttered the one word that had occurred to them both. “Incredible!”
As their eyes adjusted, they began to pick out details of the complex sight before them. Tiny slivers of light filtered down through cracks far overhe
ad to illuminate great mounds of rubble: the ruins of a once-great city!
The pipe through which they had just traveled was broken as it entered the vast cavern in which the ruins lay. They saw evidence of a street before them, with broken sections of smooth concrete. To the right, the old street bent sharply, blocked by the wreckage of a building. They noticed, too, the silt and the water-worn smoothness of a storm-water passage down the street; it disappeared into crevices in the rubble to their left.
Great cracked structures leaned and canted in different directions, and although neither astronaut could see very far into the dimly lit cavern they had the impression of the ruins of a fine city.
“It’s not so bright here, now that our eyes have adjusted,” Jeff muttered.
“But we can see that this is the ruins of an ancient civilization!” Bill said in awe.
“It must be thousands of years old,” Jeff agreed. “Let’s get a closer look.”
They climbed down from the broken pipe, holding on to chunks of concrete with broken, rusted fingers of reinforcing steel thrusting from them, to get down to the mutilated avenue. The buildings seemed even bigger from this lower angle, and in the back of Bill’s mind there was something familiar about what he was looking at.
Jeff stepped across a gaping crack in the street and walked up some wide, broken, stone steps. He peered into the shadows of a leaning wall where shattered pillars had collapsed.
“Hey, there’s something back there! Looks like a sign, or inscription…”
He started into the shadows and Bill jumped the street crack and trotted up the steps behind him.
The grit under their feet snapped and grated, loud in the utter silence of the vast cavern. The two astronauts, one white, one black, searched the darkness of the slanting wall with their eyes.
“Wait a minute,” Bill said softly. “That’s English!”
He climbed over a column, fallen and partly crumbled long ago, and moved closer. Jeff followed, and they peered up at the leaning fragment of what had once been a building’s facade. Some of the letters carved in the stone were chipped and weathered beyond recognition, and one large triangular piece was missing entirely, but both the young men could make out the four words.
Jeff’s voice was husky, echoing in the stone mausoleum, as he whispered what he was reading. “New… York… Public… Library…”
The two men stared at the words, then looked wonderingly at each other, scarcely daring to believe what they were thinking. Around them now, details which moments before had had little meaning suddenly sprang into focus. The edge of the street was not a step, but a curb, scratched and broken. The fallen capital from the pillar was not some ancient design carved by an alien or an ancestor of the great apes, but the battered Corinthian top of a column fluted in the style of ancient Rome and once, popular throughout Western civilization. The rectangular opening in a tilted wall was a window, long void of glass or casement.
“Jeff,” Bill whispered in a voice that was awed by the shock of what they had discovered, “this is Earth. Our own Earth!” He turned to the dark-skinned astronaut. “This… these ruins are New York City! We have come centuries… thousands of years… but into our own future!” He grabbed at Jeff’s arm, holding it tightly. “This ancient civilization… It’s ours!”
The two men stared around in confusion and apprehension, their minds befuddled by the enormity of their discovery.
Jeff gulped, cleared his throat noisily. “Maybe there is some… other explanation,” he said hoarsely. “An… alternate universe… some incredible coincidence… something… something the apes tricked up to fool us or capture us.”
Bill did not even reply. He knew his companion was merely searching wildly for a “logical” explanation. Jeff fell silent and they both sat down, staring from the broken paving up to the fractures in the cavern ceiling far over their head that admitted some light.
At last Bill said, “No… it’s our New York… our civilization. Somehow we—we—came through time.”
“Something to do with the ship…?”
Bill shrugged. “We may never know. But, come on, let’s look some more. Maybe we’ll find something that will…” His voice trailed off, since he had no other suggestions.
The two of them walked down the broken steps and took the turning of the street, climbing over tumbled masonry and shattered walls. They saw a stone statue of a lion, beheaded and battered almost beyond recognition, then the discolored and cruelly crushed remnants of a bronze equestrian statue. Jeff pointed out the rusted hollow column of a fire hydrant and a fairly well-preserved brownstone front. Bill gestured toward the crumbling facade of another half-familiar building.
“Only stone and reinforced concrete seems to have survived. Hardly any wood. But it has been a long, long time…”
“What could have happened?” Jeff wondered aloud.
Bill did not answer. They came into an open, space between great crumbling mounds of buildings. Passage was blocked to the left, which Bill’s instinct said was south, by the sheer mountainous mass of loose brick and glass and broken shards of concrete. Ahead of them was a broken-edged rectangular hole in the ground. A metal pole, almost completely rusted through, and bent at a crazy angle, hung precariously over the square-cut pit. There was a sign on it, weathered almost into indecipherability.
“Forty-Second Street shuttle subway,” Bill said.
Jeff glanced at the sign, his face puzzled. “How do you know? I can’t read it—it’s only smudges.”
“Because we’re at Times Square. I couldn’t read it either, not if I didn’t know where we were.” He pointed north, into the darkness of the cavern. “Central Park is far up that way.”
“It must be a jungle,” Jeff breathed.
Bill now gazed far up at the roof overhead, which he could not even clearly see. “Not enough light coming through to grow anything. We haven’t seen a spot of green.”
Jeff, too, threw back his head to stare. “Some kind of artificial roof,” he said. “Something they must have domed the city with after we left—maybe geodesic.”
“They were talking about it in our time,” Bill remembered. “What a fantastic engineering feat! They must have air-conditioned the whole city!”
“But the desert outside—!” Jeff’s voice choked off in realization of the immensity of the changes that had taken place. “Good Lord, what happened?”
The white astronaut sat down on a mostly melted fallen statue with the words george m. cohan still readable at its base. He put his head in his hands and only after a long moment did he speak.
“We’re back on Earth, Jeff. Something… somehow… in our own future must have gone wrong—terribly wrong. Somehow, thousands of years, after we left Earth, the apes took over the planet.”
His dark-skinned companion sat down next to him. They were silent for a long time.
Then Jeff asked, “Did the apes cause all this, somehow? Or did we—our descendants—do something that destroyed all we’d built?” He struck the metal seat and jumped up. His voice echoed in the ruins of the greatest city of the world.
“What in name of all that’s holy happened?”
* * *
General Urko had briefly halted his column and was standing on a sun-baked hilltop, surveying the desolate land ahead.
His aide-de-camp stood nearby, a map spread over the hood of the command jeep. He glanced over, his shoulder at the figure of the gorilla general, seeing in his face the fury and frustration he knew the commander was holding within himself. He saw the general’s lips move and inquired, “What was that you said, pardon, sir?”
“I said we will soon be rid of these humanoids—and none too soon!”
Captain Mulla, as tough and as calloused as he was to the horrors of war, shivered as he heard the chill, deathlike tones of his commanding officer.
* * *
Zira slowly poured the clear liquid from a test tube into a beaker, carefully measuring the amount.
The chimpanzee scientist stopped speaking and his head snapped up as he heard a noise outside. His eyes darted to his wife, who had frozen, her hands still holding the laboratory apparatus and her eyes frightened.
Cornelius scrambled to his feet, putting aside the manual, and scampered over to Zira. He put his arm around her and felt her trembling body.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “don’t worry. As my grandfather Julian used to say, ‘We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.’” He patted her arm as they heard a knock at the outer laboratory door.
Zira twitched her nose reassuringly at her husband and gave him a brave smile. She watched him go out toward the door with nervous anxiety, but when she saw that it was Dr. Zaius she put on the carefully neutral face of the innocent and uninvolved. Or what she imagined the innocent and uninvolved looked like.
“Good evening, Doctor Zaius,” Cornelius said.
“Good evening, good evening! Ah, my children, I see you are hard at work.”
Zaius came over to the laboratory bench and peered at the apparatus as both Zira and Cornelius bade him welcome.
“I have good news from General Urko,” he said, peering nearsightedly at the glass vials and test-tubes filled with various liquids. “A little exploratory chemistry, dear Zira?” he asked, his head turning sidewise toward her.
“Yes, doctor, but what is the—the good news?” Zira felt her heart must be pounding so hard that Zaius would ask what the sound was.
The Elder drew himself up arid flicked his eyes from Zira to Cornelius and back. His fingers combed his long golden beard thoughtfully and a half-smile of amusement tugged at his mouth.
“He has located the humanoid you call Blue-Eyes.”
Zira gasped slightly, then covered her expression of woe by turning away to set down her beaker.
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