Jeff and Bill crept between the towering pieces of strange equipment to the closed door through which the lines of robed figures had disappeared. Bill saw a button next to the door and pushed it. Both men leaped to the side as the door whisked open. They stared beyond with some apprehension.
A rough-cut rock corridor, dimly red-lit, lay before them. It turned at about thirty yards ahead but its end was unseen. The two men from Earth’s past entered, and Bill started to push the close button he saw on the inside.
“Don’t do that!” Jeff whispered quickly. “We might want to come back through here fast!”
Bill nodded his agreement and they walked quietly along the corridor to the bend and looked beyond.
“More hallways!” Jeff said.
There was nothing to do but continue.
“Soon they heard a faint chanting and took the branching corridor that seemed to lead toward it. After a hundred yards or so, Bill and Jeff heard a growing chant coming from another direction, and they jumped back some distance to a bend in the corridor.
As they heard the chant grow louder, they saw another line of blue-robed figures march past.
“Oosa… Oosa… Oosa…”
After the column had filed by, the two astronauts edged out, stealthily and followed it. Within a short distance they saw the figures turn into a doorway from which they heard an even louder chanting.
“OOSA… OOSA… OOSA…”
Creeping to the wide doorway, they cautiously put their heads around the edge. The room beyond was a cathedral-like cavern cut from the living rock. Pillars surrounded the room, heightening the church effect. The roof was a series of vaulted arches cut and smoothed in the rock.
Scores of blue-robed figures stood in rows, and at the end farthest away from the entrance was a raised platform. On it Bill and Jeff could see two figures. One was robed in dark blue and the other, a larger figure, wore a more distinctive robe than did the others who stood in the “church” chanting.
Gesturing to Jeff, Bill slipped into the room, creeping quickly to the shelter of a pillar, where he bent over in a crouch. Jeff joined him in seconds, and they gaped at the proceedings.
The chant continued, then the smaller finely clad figure raised its arms high. The chanting immediately increased in tempo.
“Oosa… Oosa… Oosa… Oosa, Oosa, Oosa!”
Jeff clutched at Bill’s arm in surprise as they heard the whine of a hidden engine and the rumble of gearing. A shining column appeared, coming up through the base of the altar on which the two figures stood. Light reflected off the gleaming shaft, splashing into Bill’s and Jeff’s eyes. When it had risen to its full height and stopped, they could see that it was a hollow column of clear plastic, and held within it a living tree.
The plastic-protected tree was thick, crowding the altar space, and judging by the now-frenetic chant of the robed figures it was obviously their object of worship.
“Oosa, Oosa, Oosa! Oosa, Oosa, Oosa!”
The smaller figure turned, for a moment, toward the massed worshipers and the two hidden astronauts caught a glimpse of blond hair and the curve of a feminine cheek.
“Oosa! Oosa! Oosa!”
The girl, whose arms were raised, extended them suddenly, rigidly, palms toward the assembled, worshipers.
“OOSA! OOSA! OOSA!”
Jeff gasped, and Bill started, as they caught a better look at the elegantly robed girl.
“It’s Judy!” Bill gasped.
Without thinking, the two stepped out from their shelter behind the pillar.
Bill called out loudly, his voice cutting through the chanting voices. “Judy! Judy! It’s us!”
Jeff shouted, “Judy! Here!”
At this, the chanting broke, stumbling to a verbal halt as the robed figures turned toward the disturbance.
Judy still stood with raised arms, her face vacant. As the chant faded, her arms fell slowly as she stood, without expression, looking toward the end of the room.
Bill and Jeff slipped between the robed figures, pushing a few of them not too gently aside, and quickly made their way to the base of the altar. Light from the plastic-enclosed tree shone on their faces as Bill spoke up loudly.
“Hey, Judy! It’s us—Bill and Jeff!”
No response came from Judy, who continued to Stare blankly.
“She’s hypnotized or something!” Bill said angrily, turning toward the tall figure also standing on the altar platform. “Hey, you! What’s going on here?”
The figure stepped forward and Bill saw the frowning features of a man glaring at him. Undaunted, he started up the altar steps toward Judy.
“Judy, it’s me, Bill. Everything’s all right, and—”
Bill whirled toward the tall figure at the sound of a sudden humming. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jeff start up the few steps toward the man opposite Judy. The humming increased in pitch and a pencil-thin beam of light shot out from either of the figure’s eyes, spreading slightly and splashing over Jeff.
“Uh—!” The muscular black man stopped in his tracks, and crumpled, falling limply to the steps, unconscious.
Bill jumped at the still-glaring figure. “What are you—!”
The pencil-thin beams flashed at Bill, the blinding light causing sudden darkness, sudden silence. Bill had no awareness of his body falling heavily to the altar platform. Blackness closed in and he felt no sensations at all.
* * *
The first sensation was pressure.
Something was across his chest, making it hard to breathe.
Bill groaned, and the sound surprised him. His eyes blinked open, then closed, then blinked open again, staring at the rough-cut rock. His whole body felt stiff and sore, and his head ached terribly. A wire seemed to be wound around his head, incredibly tight, agonizingly hot. He put a hand to his head and felt only tousled hair.
Bill looked down, and saw immediately that the weight on his chest was Jeff’s leg. He shoved the leg away and Jeff groaned.
“Ohh…” The groan seemed to release action in both men, and now Jeff opened his eyes. “Judy!”
Jeff half rose, stared around frantically, but there was no one there. He then noticed Bill for the first time. The white astronaut was looking at him curiously.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Jeff answered, “except that the top of my head is missing.” He put an unsteady hand to his skull and felt it gingerly. “Man, what did that priest hit us with?”
The memory of what had happened came back to Bill and he sat up.
“Ohh…!” he said as the room blurred. “Take it easy getting up,” he cautioned Jeff. “My brain just turned to mush.”
Bill got to his knees and stayed there, his eyes pained and his body sore: He looked around the small room as his companion slowly and painfully got to his feet.
The room was a strange combination of rough-cut rock—hewed somehow out of the foundations of Manhattan—and of gleaming metal and plastic panels. At one end of the room, several steps led up to a raised platform, where a comfortable chair sat, flanked by a small table upon which sat a glass and a decanter. Some books filled a shelf below the tabletop. There was one door, the only door to or from the room, beyond the chair.
On the lower level of the room, where Jeff and Bill had been laid, stood a large cabinet of beautiful plastic, decorated with whorls and organic shapes formed when the plastic had been cast.
“Well, are you going to say it, or am I?” Jeff asked.
“Say what?”
“What everyone is supposed to say when they come back to consciousness in a strange room. ‘Where am I?’
“Okay, I’ll play straight man,” Bill agreed. “Where am I?”
“Same place I am,” Jeff muttered.
“Comedy dumbness we don’t need.”
“There was more dumbness in that remark than comedy,” Jeff replied.
He helped Bill to his feet and they started exploring the room.
The first
thing they investigated was the door. Although there was a set of buttons next to the metal door, these did not—or would not—operate.
Bill picked up several of the books sitting in the table rack and read the titles aloud. “Huckleberry Finn, Main Street…”
“Good old American novels,” Jeff said, testing the plastic and metal panels set in the walls.
“Also something in Italian and something in German. None of these books looks read. I wonder what they are—”
The door abruptly clicked, and both astronauts looked alert.
When it opened, in walked the tall man in the rich robe. He looked at the two, looked at the books Bill held, and his eyes grew hard as he said, “Please put those down. They are quite valuable.”
Bill put the books on the table and turned to look at their “host.”
“I am Krador, leader of the Underdwellers,” he said.
Jeff and Bill looked at each other and raised their eyebrows.
“Underdwellers?” Bill asked. “Who are the ‘Under-dwellers’?”
Krador’s eyes were hard and shrewd and took in every detail of the men before he spoke. Bill moved down a few steps toward Jeff. The handsomely robed man’s voice was awesome, and something of the recitation of a church litany could be heard in his words.
“When the great fires destroyed the Earth centuries ago, we sought the safety of the underground.” Bill’s puzzled eyes met Jeff’s. “Lo, our ancestors were forced deep down into the darkness.” His eyes now melted from a glaring fanaticism to a sadness that touched both Bill and Jeff. “We have never returned to the blessed green world above.”
“It’s not all that green,” Bill said.
“But what have you done to Judy?” Jeff demanded, stepping forward.
Krador’s face returned to its former harshness. He raised an arm to halt Jeff. “Our sacred writing told us that she would someday return to fulfill the prophecy.” A faint smile crossed his face, then disappeared. “We observed you, also, when you brought Oosa back to us.”
“Oosa?” Jeff puzzled.
“That chant!” Bill exclaimed.
Krador walked down the steps and over to the large beautiful plastic-paneled cabinet. He opened a hidden lock and swung the doors wide. Within sat an ancient statue: a ceramic, sculptured bust, chipped and cracked, but quite obviously a portrait in clay of Judy Franklin.
Bill’s breath caught and he stepped closer. He could barely read the inscription cut into the base of the bust. It read: lost. And below: usa.
“They—NASA?—must have made this bust of Judy when she didn’t return.” He looked at Jeff with sick eyes. “We’re trapped by our own past!”
Jeff’s eyebrows shot upward. “That chant! They called her Oosa.” He pointed at the base of the ceramic bust, where USA was carved. “Here’s where they got that.”
The black astronaut turned to Bill with sudden excitement. “We must talk with her!”
He turned toward the door, and at once a humming proceeded from the direction of Krador’s eyes.
Bill jumped as two pencil-thin beams of light flashed by him, landing explosively on the floor in front of Jeff. Jeff halted his sudden lunge for the door, startled. Both astronauts looked at Krador, not knowing what to expect.
The robed and hooded Underdweller smiled—a thin, haughty smile that told the astronauts from the Earth’s past that he, Krador, would determine what was to happen and what wasn’t.
“Of course you shall speak with Oosa;” he told them smoothly.
Then he picked up an inconspicuous block of black plastic from the table—an object that Bill and Jeff had supposed was a sample of art—and pressed one blank side of it. The door whisked open and Judy stood just beyond.
“Judy!” Jeff said, stepping forward.
Bill threw a glance at Krador and then, reassured, joined Jeff in taking Judy’s arm and bringing her into the room. “Judy? Judy, are you all right?”
The two astronauts exchanged puzzled and frustrated looks when their former flight companion did not respond to their pleas. Jeff stepped in front of her, taking her upper arms tightly in his hands, squeezing hard, hoping that a little mild pain might cut through whatever it was that was blanking her out.
“Judy… It’s me—Jeff! Don’t you remember?”
He looked over his shoulder at Krador, who was watching with heavy-lidded eyes. As Bill tried, next, to get a response from Judy, Jeff slipped a hand into his pocket and extracted Judy’s ring. He took up her hand, his body blocking any view of what he was doing from Krador. Slipping the ring onto her finger, he pressed her hand tightly.
“Judy? Judy?” Bill was saying.
He was jostled aside by Jeff who half turned Judy away from Krador, letting her hood hide any expression she might have had. But there was nothing, and the black man dropped his hands from her shoulders wearily.
“Whatever it is that’s wrong with her,” he said morosely, “it doesn’t look as if either of us possesses the magic formula.” He looked at Krador, whose face was impassive, and grimaced.
“Zumor! Yathor!” Krador called out in a sharp voice.
Two blue-robed men appeared, burly specimens with grim faces who had been standing just outside the door.
Krador indicated Jeff and Bill with a wave of his hand. “Take these two to Cell Four.”
Neither of the astronauts resisted. Seeing Judy in her nearly catatonic state had made them sad, though a mood of anger and resentment was contained under their sadness. They followed the guards through a maze of rock-cut tunnels, as well as along a few cut through earth and shored with metal salvaged from the ruins above, with old marble columns, and with bricks.
The cell was carved out of solid rock, at the end of a short passage, but it didn’t look like a cell. It had no bars, no windows; it was, in fact, nothing but a bare rock cube with two spartan bunks and a bucket for waste.
Krador had followed them silently, but now he spoke. Standing outside the open doorway he said, “You will remain in this cell until you have proven your loyalty.”
“How do we do that?” Bill asked, some of his anger surfacing.
But the Underdweller leader had turned his back and was disappearing down the corridor.
“Hey!” yelled Jeff, but Krador was gone.
The two guards gave them a disinterested look and then they, too, walked away.
Bill looked around at Jeff. “What is this, the honor system? No bars, no nothing! Come on, let’s get out of here!”
He had started forward when Jeff stopped him.
“No, wait!” The black looked around, found a small stone that had crumbled away from the rough rock walls. Picking it up, he tossed it toward the center of the doorway.
The stone arced through the air until it came between the sides of the doorway. Then there was a sudden flash, and both Jeff and Bill were stung by flying bits of the exploded rock. Wiping their faces, they gaped at the door.
“A force field!” Jeff exclaimed.
“We’ll never get through that!” Bill said.
The two friends looked at each other hopelessly.
* * *
Krador re-entered the room where the bust of Judy sat in the opened cabinet. The original model stood unmoving upon the platform, her face blank.
The Underdweller leader stepped past her and closed the doors of the cabinet. Then he turned back toward her and studied her face for a few minutes before speaking.
“Your friends would take you away, Oosa…”
Judy stood unmoving, staring through empty eyes. She barely breathed and only the gentle rise and fall of her breast and an occasional eye-blink indicated she was alive.
Krador walked up onto the platform next to her. “They do not understand the importance of the fulfilled prophecy.” He paced around her, his hands behind his back, and spoke as if thinking aloud. “Your arrival gives us hope, Oosa, and we were woefully short of that.” All at once, he stopped in front of her. “Someday you, Oosa,
will help us return to the green world up above!”
Judy’s lips moved, but no sound came for several seconds. Then her voice sounded, wooden and dead. “Your thought is true, O Krador.”
“And on that day,” he said, his voice rising, “we will recover our world from the hands of the apes!”
* * *
“I’ve been thinking about the terrain above here,” Bill said, looking over to where Jeff sat on the opposite bunk, “and about those mountains that jumped up to hide that solar dish.”
“What about them?”
Bill swung his feet to the floor and jerked his thumb toward the surface of the planet. “I’m not so certain those were real mountains we saw.”
Jeff raised his eyebrows. “They sure looked real.”
“Yes, but raising whole mountains? I admit they have a hell of a lot of power here, but… Well, let’s say that’s a possibility. But a real problem is the fact that Judy showed up here, after apparently falling into a fissure created by an earthquake.”
“Apparently? We saw her!”
“We saw what we saw. We also saw flames shoot out of nowhere.”
“But our survival pack! It was burned up!”
Bill nodded. “Yeah, it seemed to be.” He shook his head. “It’s pretty confusing, Jeff—what is real and what isn’t. I think the moving mountains, the lightning that came out of a clear sky, the earthquake, everything… are all defenses for this place.”
“Granted.”
“And maybe not real.”
Jeff’s eyebrows went up even higher.
“I don’t know how,” Bill said, “or even all the why, but I bet these things I’ve mentioned are—at least in part—illusions.”
“Those rocks that almost fell on us weren’t illusions. The rays that Krador can flash didn’t seem like any illusion. I went out fast—just zonk!”
“I know,” Bill continued, “but something is really strange here…”
“It’s a strange place,” Jeff agreed, and Bill nodded. “Maybe that Buck Rogers door is illusion, too,” Jeff said.
Bill grinned weakly. “No, not that. Unfortunately.”
* * *
Cornelius woke in the middle of the night and found that Zira was not beside him. He raised his head and saw her standing by the window of their modest bedroom, staring out into the night.
Planet of the Apes Omnibus 4 Page 15