Planet of the Apes Omnibus 4

by William Arrow

  Without looking at Zaius, she said, “I hope Blue-Eyes can be returned to us safely.” She turned back toward Zaius to add, “He was so intelligent, you know. A real find!”

  Zaius stared at her for a long moment, his face unreadable to the chimpanzee scientist. Then he said stiffly, “Then I trust he will have a chance, to be proven innocent of the charge that he possesses language.”

  Zira compressed her lips, and Zaius, attempting to read her expression, studied her openly.

  “If he can speak, he must die,” the orangutan leader said softly. “It is written…”

  Zira put out a hand toward the. council Elder. “But, Doctor Zaius…”

  The simian leader held up his hand in protest. “Children, children… your studies are so important to you that you sometimes lose perspective. I must, on the other hand, be concerned about practical matters. And sometimes your studies—as valuable and revealing as they are—are in conflict with the overall good of the whole simian culture.”

  Zira shot a glance at Cornelius and saw in his face a warning to keep silent for once. Still, she was on the verge of speaking, when a knock came at the still open outer door.

  A messenger ape stood in the doorway, then crossed to the inner lab, his face respectful and his manner urgent.

  “Yes?” Dr. Zaius asked him.

  “Doctor Zaius, sir, another report from General Urko.”

  He held out a slip of paper and the orangutan motioned to him to hand it over. Zaius read it, then looked at Zira and Cornelius.

  “The humanoid has disappeared… Urko thinks he is in the hands of the Underdwellers. Something about artificial mountains getting in the way…” Zaius shook his head and started toward the door. “I must see about this,” he said, strangely disturbed.

  As the messenger closed the door behind them, Cornelius came over to his wife and put an arm around her. She looked thoughtfully after the departing apes, her head tilted sidewise in thought. Cornelius, recognizing the signs, said nothing and waited.

  “Cornelius,” Zira said thoughtfully, “I’ve been thinking… Why is Doctor Zaius so worried about Blue-Eyes possessing language?” Cornelius looked sharply at her as she added, “What is he afraid of?”

  Cornelius sighed. “I don’t know, Zira.” He bit at his lip, then continued, “But I’m wondering, now, if we did the right thing in helping Blue-Eyes to escape…”

  Zira nodded, her eyes distant. “Yes, perhaps we could have protected him here.”

  “And perhaps not,” Cornelius said. “Blue-Eyes was very impetuous. There was no telling what he might have done. It could have been disastrous… both for him and for us.” He shook his shaggy head. “No, Zira. He has a better chance out there, among his own kind.”

  * * *

  Bill and Jeff walked among the fallen debris of Times Square, staring at the ruins with sick hearts. There was not much they could say.

  Suddenly, a shower of dust fell from a dangerously tilted wall and Jeff cried out to his partner.

  “Bill! Look out! It’s going to fall!”

  The two men started running as the wall began to crumble behind them. The stones fell with a great, reverberating crash, sending up a cloud of choking dust that filled the deserted square. Several objects had been jarred loose from surrounding buildings and fallen to the Uttered plaza with crunches and thuds.

  “Down there!”Bill said, pointing into the now partly revealed subway entrance. “We can—”

  The sound of a second falling load of debris drowned out Bill as the two Earthmen stumbled through the billowing dust down into the subway. It was almost choked with litter and rubble, but they climbed quickly over these obstacles and into the dubious shelter of the tunnel.

  The light was dim, but became slightly better as the dust settled. There were cracks in the ceiling that emitted a very dim light, but most of the tunnel was in darkness. The floor was covered with silt, evidently washed down by rain coming through the cracked dome over the city, or from some distant broken water main in the past. The platform directional posters—UPTOWN and DOWNTOWN— had long ago rotted away without a trace, and the tiles along the tunnel wall were cracked and missing.

  Standing almost in front of them was a subway train, its middle cars buckled and derailed by the sudden halt and the debris fallen against the lead cars. Bill and Jeff looked through the dirty glass windows of the first car and saw what appeared to be several skeletons, tangled together.

  Bill walked to the end of the train, looking in at the mangled skeletons of surprised commuters. Beyond the last car stretched the subway rails—de-electrified now—unbroken into the dark spaces beyond. At the end of the broken and tilting subway platform, beyond the last death car, sat a rusted handcar. Bill was examining it as Jeff came up to him.

  “It’s rusted,” Bill said, “but I think this handcar might work.” He looked up and around. “If we only had some oil…”

  Jeff pointed at a rectangle in the end wall of the platform. “Isn’t that a maintenance locker?”

  He pushed aside the rotting remains of the once-locked doors. Bill heard the clatter of cans and metal, then a whoop of joy from Jeff.

  “Hey, a five-gallon can of oil!”

  Bill heard the squeak of a lid being pried open, then Jeff’s exclamation.

  “Looks like a couple of gallons left!”

  Carefully, Jeff carried the container of oil over to the. handcar. Its rusted bottom was already starting to fall apart, leaking oil rapidly.

  “Hold it over the machinery!” Bill said.

  Oil dripped onto the rusting arms and wheels of the simple mechanism railroad-type handcar and Bill began to work the handles.

  “We’re lucky this is a real oldie,” he said, “and not one of the electric kind. It’s a simple push-pull lever mechanism—Watch it!”

  The can now gave way with a splash and drenched the machinery in sludge.

  Quickly, Bill wiped at the machine, forcing the reluctant parts to move and admit the oil. In only a few moments, he had managed to make the protesting machine move.

  He grinned at Jeff. “Now we can go places!”

  Jeff looked surprised. “Where? This whole town is in ruins. The city is dead!”

  “The subway goes all over. Even if there are blockages, we might be able to go around by alternate routes or different lines.”

  “But why? What’s to see if it’s dead?”

  “Let’s go uptown to the Museum of Natural History or the New York Historical Society. They might have a history of what happened, if somebody survived for a time. Or tools; weapons! The library was in ruins and probably the paper all burnt or rotted away, but a museum might have something we can use!”

  “You’re right,” Jeff said, looking off into the blackness of the subway tunnel. “But we’re going to need light. Torches, maybe. I’ll rustle up something and some way to set them afire.”

  “And I’ll get this old monster working.”

  Jeff started back up the platform, then hesitated. “Listen, the tracks…”

  Bill shrugged. “High-quality steel. Rusty, but probably passable, since we don’t weigh the same as a whole train.”

  “Unless the bottom of the tunnel has rotted away… Unless our vibrations bring down more muck on our heads… Unless there are big holes of ‘walls’ in the dark… Unless…”

  Bill grinned at him. “We won’t be going very fast. Hell, we probably won’t be able to go very fast. We’ll see any holes or drop-offs. Probably.”

  “Probably,” Jeff sighed.

  A half-hour later, the black astronaut had manufactured some torches out of lengths of rusted metal pipe and tubing, and had used lengths of copper wiring ripped from conduits to wrap up bundles of combustible debris he had gathered. He took his armloads to the handcar and found that Bill was moving it now back and forth down, a length of track. The parts were stiff, but moving without too much effort.

  Bill smiled pleasantly. “First-class transportation: no
crowding, no mugging at night, no advertising to disfigure the cars interiors… just perfect!”

  Jeff dumped the torches and debris bundles across the end of the handcar. “Only one thing: how are we going to light these things?”

  “Hmm,” Bill pondered. “It’s likely that no can of gasoline would have survived the… explosion…” His eyes fell on the final subway car and its ghostly inhabitants, and an idea—fuzzy at first—came to him. He rose. “C’mon, Jeff. Let’s see if anyone has one of those Ever-Seal butane lighters they were making when we left Earth!”

  One by one, the skeletons were lifted, turned, and examined. The dust of their clothes lay on the coach floor; little fabric remained. But underneath one woman’s—man’s?—hand the two astronauts found what they were seeking.

  “Luck is with us!” Jeff exclaimed as he picked up the aluminum lighter. He opened the cap and ignited it.

  “Ready to go?” Bill chuckled eagerly as they returned to the handcar and lighted the first torch.

  Jeff let the torch droop in his hand. “Seems to me you’re pretty cheery, considering what we’ve found out about where we are.”

  “And… when we are,” Bill added. He looked seriously at Jeff. “But do you want me to cry? That won’t do any good. We have to accept it. We aren’t going back, ole buddy. We’re here, at least a couple of thousand years in our own future, along with intelligent apes and gigantic solar mirrors and humans like us who’ve become some kind of ‘animals.’ We are just going to have to make the best of it!”

  Jeff nodded soberly. “They are practically animals, aren’t they? Dumb animals. We’re the only real humans—you and me and Judy, wherever she is. It’s our duty to set things right!”

  Bill looked worried. “I don’t know if we could ever turn things completely around. But we might be able to get the humanoids—excuse me, the humans—back on some kind of equal basis with the apes. Then we can start figuring out what happened way back then!”

  Jeff chewed at his lip. “Right on, Astronaut Hudson.”

  A sudden clang made both men crouch.

  They exchanged amazed glances, then moved as silently as they could to hide behind one of the final subway cars.

  A second sound came from the same direction—the far end of the tunnel, beyond the first car—and Bill and Jeff waited with considerable apprehension. Soon they heard the crunch of sand and dirt underfoot, and the whisper of cloth.

  Cautiously, they both peeked around the edge of the rusting car and saw two hooded and robed figures emerge from the darkness.

  Jeff started, and Bill grabbed at him, shaking his head. They watched as the figures came into the slightly brighter light near the exposed subway entrance, then strode onto the passenger platform. Bill and Jeff peered out dangerously to examine the two figures. Each was robed in pale blue; but the face of each was hidden by hoods.

  The astronauts watched curiously as the figures walked up to an apparently blank wall, no more and no less ruined and discolored than any other section of the subway tunnels. One of the blue-robed beings reached high into the dimness with a forefinger extended—and there was a faint click.

  A section of the broken-tiled wall snapped aside a hand’s width, then slid open with a faint rumble and the high-pitched whine of a distant, muffled motor. From beyond the door came a faint red glimmering, and the two robed figures moved inside and were lost to sight. In a few seconds, the door hummed closed, snapping into position. It appeared as seamless and whole as before.

  Jeff stared at Bill, both men speechless in surprise.

  Jeff blinked. “Humans?”

  Bill looked worried. “Maybe some form of humans…” They both looked back at the hidden door. “If apes evolved into what we’ve found here, humans devolved in some way… Well, someone built that solar collector back there, and maintains it beautifully. And these people just now looked more human in size than apes, and couldn’t be humanoids like Nova, scared of their shadow half the time—” Bill stopped abruptly. “It’s very confusing,” he said. “We need more information.”

  “Well, let’s go get some, partner,” Jeff said, abandoning the handcar and climbing up onto the subway platform.

  Bill followed him and they approached the wall where the two figures had stood. Bill peered up into the shadows.

  “See that tile there, the dark one? I’ll bet that’s it. You’d never notice it unless you knew what to look for.”

  “Well,” Jeff said, “whatever they were, they went through here.”

  “So will we!” With determination, Bill reached up to the dark tile in the wall, glanced at Jeff, who nodded, then pressed it.

  The section of wall before them snapped open almost silently, then slid aside. Bill and Jeff could see only a short distance into the roughly hewn rock room beyond, for it was only dimly lit by red lights.

  “Let’s go,” Bill suggested, and stepped through.

  Jeff followed him, and moments later the door slid closed, snapping back into place. The two astronauts looked back and saw the metal braces that held the hidden door, and the overhead track upon which it moved. They memorized its position, then moved toward the other end of the red-lit room. A wide metal door was set into the rock, but had no lock, and the astronauts opened it carefully.

  Their eyebrows lifted in surprise at what they saw beyond.

  They stood looking across a huge underground hall from near the top. A catwalk, one of many, extended from a platform inside the door all the way across the cavern, supported from the roof by steel rods. Below, on the level floor of the vast artificial cave, sat huge machines.

  Bill and Jeff crept silently out onto the platform to peer down. The gigantic room was lit by lights, luckily below the level upon which Bill and Jeff stood, which hung from the maze of catwalks and overhead rails at every level that crisscrossed the space. On the opposite wall, at a lower level, were banks of what looked like controls. An elevator ran down past them, with openings at every level, starting at the top, where the two astronauts lurked. Below, on the floor, were more controls.

  “It’s huge!” Jeff said, awed. “It’s as big as the Vertical Assembly Building at the Cape!”

  Bill leaned over the railing, pointing. “Look down there!”

  Hooded figures glided along the catwalks below and walked along the floor, dwarfed by their monstrous machinery. A humming filled the air from the giant generators, and the transformers seemed to be carrying enormous charges of electricity.

  “They look as if they’re floating,” Jeff remarked, “because their robes are so long we can’t see their feet.”

  Bill gave his friend a quick smile. “If they have feet. They might be robots with wheels.”

  “Yeah? Then why put on robes?”

  Bill shrugged his shoulders and they both continued to scrutinize what they saw below. Jeff pointed out a dish reflector, something like the huge one they had seen far above, in the desert.

  “It’s a power plant of some kind, all right. They must get their power from that big solar device we saw aboveground,” Bill suggested.

  “Whoever they are—or whatever they are—they must be highly intelligent to have created all this.” Jeff grinned at Bill. “Maybe things aren’t so bad after all.”

  “Intelligent, yes… but are they friendly? After all, they have sure gone to a lot of trouble to keep all this secret. They might not care for nosey visitors, not even a couple of well-meaning astronauts from the past.” Bill looked at Jeff and added, “They might even blame us, somehow, for what happened…

  “Do you think that—”

  A bell sounded somewhere far below, cutting through the hum of generators and the other noises of machinery. Bill and Jeff heard a chant of what seemed to be human voices coming from the bottom of the vast hall. They moved farther out onto the catwalk and crouched behind a support girder to scrutinize the area below.

  The chant grew louder, so that the two on the catwalk could make out the words—or word—eve
n if not its meaning.

  “Oosa… Oosa… Oosa…”

  “What’s that…?” Jeff asked, frowning and gesturing with his head.

  The robed figures below were leaving the vast control room by the way of an exit on the ground floor. One by one, they drifted over to the door and disappeared, chanting, until there was no more song and no more blue-robed figures.

  Bill and Jeff now rose and searched the area below, moving along the catwalk and inspecting the floor and catwalks carefully.

  “They’ve all gone,” Bill said softly. “Let’s get a closer look.”

  The two astronauts crossed the cavern and pushed a button to call up the elevator from the ground floor. “Might as well ride in style,” Jeff said.

  In a few minutes, the caged elevator rose to their level and they entered. Bill pressed the bottom button and the cage started its smooth descent. He and Jeff could soon see more of the vast room: it extended into two undercut caverns to the side, also filled with oversized machinery of unknown function.

  Passing the upper control center with its illuminated dials and blinking lights, they came to a stop at the cavern floor and stepped out.

  They were awed by the size of the machinery around them. As they came around a turbine as big as a house, Bill pointed to something near the base of the miniature of the solar energy collector. It was an egg-shaped object; various conduits led from it to the thick base upon which it rested. As they walked closer, they could see that it was a kind of chair, with a padded seat and back and armrests within the concavity of the gleaming metal egg.

  “The whole thing,” Jeff said, waving his arm at the complex around them, “seems to be leading right here to this—this module.”

  Bill looked closer and saw an adjustable head dome inside. “It’s like a—a throne—or an electric chair—or…” He seemed stumped for further answers.

  Jeff pointed down at the thick strands of cables leading away from the module, encased in the clear plastic conduits. “These look like output cables.”

  Bill shook his head, perplexed. “Let’s follow those blue robes, Jeff. We aren’t going to figure out what this thing does unless someone explains it to us.”