Planet of the Apes Omnibus 4

by William Arrow

  “It wasn’t there at all. Either they can put the illusion right into, our minds, or create the illusion something like a mirage, something we actually see.”

  Jeff looked back over his shoulder as he lit a third torch, which flamed fitfully. “Any more, do you think?”

  Bill shook his head. “No telling. Also, no telling how powerful an illusion they can create, too.”

  “You mean anything might be an illusion?”

  “I don’t know, but we’d better double-check and double-think every obstacle for a while. Like, if we saw the tunnel completely blocked and thought it an illusion and sailed right into the real thing, we could get hurt pretty bad. Maybe even killed.”

  Jeff shook his head sadly. “What a world!”

  Now a great clatter rang out ahead, and in the flicker of the torch Bill and Jeff could see a huge black metal grid descend, sharpened spearpoints across its bottom. The grid blocked the tunnel from side to side, an apparently impenetrable barrier.

  “Real or not?” Jeff asked in a shout.

  “Not!” Bill said, and gave his handle an extra pump.

  The handcar shot through the metal grid as though it were not there and Jeff shot his companion a dazzling white-toothed grin.

  “Attaboy! But what made you think it was phoney?”

  “Too neat a blockade… and the old subway didn’t have barriers like that.”

  Moments later, the torchlight revealed another awesome sight ahead, and both men blinked with surprise and disgust. The tunnel, twenty feet high, was filled with a gigantic rat! It waited for them, its eyes gleaming greedily, its feral nose twitching. The astronauts could see every hair in its dirty whiskers, the gray matted fur, and the dirty yellow teeth—revealed gruesomely as the monstrous creature opened its jaws.

  “Hang on!” Bill shouted.

  “Mind if I close my eyes?” Jeff said, his voice shaking.

  The handcar plunged right into the mouth of the crouching rodent—and on through!

  The enormous rat disappeared even as they were passing through it—as if, once discovered, there was no reason for it to maintain the illusion.

  Bill let out a yell of triumph and Jeff grinned back over his shoulder at the empty tunnel.

  When Bill looked ahead again, he saw a faint gleam. “Look! Light!”

  It grew brighter, moment by moment, as if a cloud were lifting from the face of some sun.

  “Real or phoney?” Jeff asked.

  The two men studied the hazy glow as they pumped the handles, and Bill said cautiously, “Real…?”

  The two men stared at each other, then looked down at Judy. Bill gasped and dropped to his knees. The handcar lost momentum as he gathered her in his arms.

  Judy’s whole body was shimmering faintly.

  “Judy!” he said, “Judy! What’s going on?”

  Judy Franklin soon shimmered even more brightly, as if she were vibrating at some very high frequency.

  Bill groaned, looking at the now empty circle of his arms, feeling her weight diminish and disappear. “Judy! Don’t go! Judy!”

  But only Bill and Jeff occupied the handcar. It slowed and rattled to a stop.

  * * *

  The blue-robed men had swung a replacement unit into position, fastening it to the stub of the tall support, jury-rigging the wiring hastily. Other technicians were running a quick test, and the lights on the control panel for the miniature solar collector glowed green.

  One of the Underdwellers ran awkwardly over to the egg-shaped Chair of Power and called up to his leader. “Krador! It is repaired!”

  Krador did not respond, but the panels which had lit up when the Chair was activated now flickered and faded out. Another set of lights blinked into brightness, ran through the color spectrum, then pulsed into a steady beat as the computers synchronized.

  “Deactivate…” Krador murmured in a weak voice.

  The high-pitched whine died and Krador shoved up the dome from his head. He looked drawn and weary as he climbed out of the egg, and two assistants had to help him.

  The air nearby now suddenly shimmered, and Judy materialized before them. She, too, looked wan, and her eyes were unseeing and blank.

  Krador went to her, his first steps tentative and halting, but then energy seemed to flow back into his body. His eyes searched her face, then he spoke.

  “Never leave us, Oosa.”

  Judy’s lips moved but no sound came for a second or two; then she replied, “Never, Krador.” Her voice was distant and without emotion or inflection.

  Krador nodded contentedly.

  * * *

  Bill and Jeff climbed down from the handcar and walked cautiously toward the pool of light. They peered upward, their eyes blinded by sunlight drifting through a deteriorated roof, clogged with debris and dirt.

  “It’s a way out,” Bill said.

  “Or a way in,” Jeff muttered, looking back down the dark tunnel.

  “This must lead to the surface.”

  Bill jumped up on some fallen concrete and leaped across to an embankment of rubble.

  “We can’t leave Judy,” Jeff said, frowning.

  Bill looked down at his friend. “You’re right, but where do we look? Well, maybe if we went back to the—”

  A sudden explosion cascaded dirt and stinging particles of rock over both men, who ducked quickly into the debris. Looking back down the tunnel, they saw four Underdwellers running toward them. One stood still and from his eyes shot out another blast of light, which exploded against the rocks behind which Bill and Jeff huddled.

  Bill spotted three more blue-clad Underdwellers running out of the darkness; they stopped and stood very still. Three more explosions, in quick succession, showered down still more dirt, and Bill shouted to Jeff.

  “Let’s get out of here!”

  “What about Judy?”

  Bill was scrabbling up the slope. “There’s no choice, Jeff,” he panted, overturning rubble in his climb. “Not for now!” A sixth explosion threw Bill on his side; he rose shaken but unhurt. “But we’ll be back!” he yelled to Jeff.

  The black astronaut picked up a stone the size of a baseball and hurtled it at the approaching figures. One dodged and it hit another, causing him to stop and clutch at his stomach. Bill threw a stone as Jeff ran up the slope. The two men tossed what rocks they could lift, and hit several of the blue-clad figures. A seventh blast suddenly knocked Jeff off his feet, but he got up quickly to follow Bill.

  “Come on! We’ll roll rocks on them!” Bill shouted.

  Another flash of light exploded near Jeff as he climbed, knocking him down again. He lay dazed this time, and a blue-clad figure ran from where he had taken shelter to pause below the opening; he stood dead still and a humming rose.

  As fast as possible, Bill seized a heavy piece of bent steel in his hands and threw it with deadly accuracy. It struck the figure just as his eyes fired. The pencil-thin beams flashed upward, striking the already cracked and ruined edge of the tunnel, and a shower of rocks and dirt came down, burying the man.

  Bill cried out to Jeff, “Come on!”

  He got no answer, so he grabbed two large rocks and heaved them into the tunnel. They bounced and ricocheted off the tunnel walls, and diverted the Underdwellers with a clatter of falling dirt and rubble.

  “Jeff!”

  Again he heard a humming, and two beams of light flashed, angling, through the dust, exploding below and to one side of him. An ominous crack now sounded, then a scraping, ripping sound. Suddenly a whole section of the subway roof fell in.

  A great puff of dust exploded upward, choking Bill as he clambered down over the concrete to the outside of the collapsed tunnel.

  “Jeff! Where are you?”

  Hearing a groan, Bill felt his way through the dust, coughing and spitting. Jeff groaned again and suddenly the black man was under Bill’s feet. He scooped him up, spilling off several pounds of dirt that covered Jeff’s body.

  “Come on, let’s put
on some speed, if you can!”

  Jeff sighed. “I’m… I’m all right…”

  Bill helped him stand, then took his arm as they climbed over the rubble. The dust was clearing and, looking back, they could see that where the blue-robed Underdwellers had stood far below was a mound of fresh earth.

  * * *

  Cornelius put down the book he was reading and shambled over to Zira, putting a comforting arm around her frail body. “Don’t worry, dear. As my grandmother Steffa used to say, ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn.’” He patted his wife’s back. “Don’t worry about Blue-Eyes, Zira. We helped him to escape, didn’t we? And I think, wherever he is, there will be others to help him.”

  Zira patted her husband’s hand on her arm and smiled bravely up at him. “Dear Cornelius, you are always such a comfort.” Then her face clouded. “Cornelius, could it be that our concern for the humanoid goes beyond our behavioral studies needs and our liking for him? Do we perhaps see in him some possible help for our sim—?”

  She put her hand to her mouth. She and Cornelius stared, blinking, at each other. Her idea was a disturbing one and had many implications that might be dangerous for the two of them.

  * * *

  Bill and Jeff stood near the filled-in hole by which they had escaped the subway tunnel. All around them was the desolate desert, iron-hard, heated to an intolerable degree.

  “New York… is under… all this?” Jeff asked, his voice still choked from the dust.

  “Where’s the Atlantic Ocean, then?” Bill said, peering eastward.

  They remained silent for a long time, examining the desert around them.

  “It’s been a long time, of course,” Jeff whispered. “A very long time,” he sighed.

  “Whatever happened to the world we knew must have been cataclysmic! Maybe it raised this whole area, or… maybe the, oceans are gone now, or…” He could think of no more outrageous and fantastic ideas. “We’ll have to get back to Nova and the other humanoids, to help them,” he said to Jeff. “And eventually we have to rescue Judy…”

  “Well, Judy is safe for now, I suppose—as safe-as she can be under the circumstances. Meanwhile, I hope we can get back to the humanoids’ caves.”

  Jeff now pointed west, where a dust cloud in the distance appeared to be heading toward them. He and Bill dashed behind some boulders and watched as the Gorilla Army column of trucks and tanks became identifiable.

  * * *

  General Urko picked up his radio as his command jeep bumped along across the desert. “Urko to all commands! The escaped humanoid and the Underdwellers must be exterminated! Shoot on sight!”

  Bill and Jeff watched the approaching dust cloud and wondered what they were going to do next.

  Whatever it is, Bill thought, it won’t be like anything we knew back in our time. Nothing has been so far!

  ESCAPE FROM TERROR LAGOON

  Adapted by William Arrow

  Based on the teleplays:

  “Tunnel of Fear” by Larry Spiegel

  “Lagoon of Peril” by J. C. Strong

  “Terror on Ice Mountain” by Bruce Shelly

  Based on characters from Planet of the Apes

  Bill Hudson had, in his years of training and service as a NASA astronaut, learned the techniques of willing his body to sleep whenever he wished, whenever he needed to sleep. But now he found those techniques useless to him. His head felt as though it had been caved in, and a constantly returning cramp was tearing at the muscles of his left leg, making it throb and ache with a pain that reverberated through his entire body.

  The muggy night pressed down on him like some living blanket, sucking what little energy he had left from his system, bathing his body in rank-smelling sweat. The feel of dark wetness in the air and in the sodden soil reminded Bill of the tropics back in the time of his own Earth. Mosquitoes and other biting night creatures paused briefly for a drink of his blood, and many seemed to return for seconds. Furthermore, the velvet-black night was alive with the sound of birds and insects and life forms Bill had no name for.

  Bill felt helpless and hopeless, lost in a world he could no longer comprehend.

  “What time is it?” his partner, Jeff, asked suddenly, the white gleam of his teeth pinpointing the location of his dark face in the surrounding blackness, five feet in front of the tree Bill was leaning against.

  “Almost two,” Bill grunted after pulling his arm up close to his eyes and flashing the red digital numbers to life with a light finger pressure on the actuating switch of his watch.

  Bill’s arm dropped to his side again, as if the weight of it was just too much for his muscles. He just sat there sweating, occasionally swatting uselessly at the swarming bugs that seemed to be taking an almost intelligent delight in torturing him with their stings and bites and buzzing about his ears, keeping him from the sleep he needed so badly.

  Since escaping the tunnels and caves of the Underdwellers early that morning, Bill and Jeff had been pushing hard across country. Across the desert and finally into some unexpected brush country they had gone, occasionally together, sometimes as much as fifty yards apart. No markers had told them where they were, or even where they were going. There were no paths, no fences. Just a hot, steel-blue sky and the land that lay in flat planes or rolling waves, reaching from the desert badlands behind them to the almost jungle-like forest they had reached now.

  Back behind them, in those caves they had been forced to fight their way out of, back with their captured fellow Astronaut Judy Franklin, was proof that, despite their far traveling in the Venturer, despite the alienness of their surroundings, and despite the fact that they were trapped on a world where ape-like beings ruled and men were dumb beasts, they were on Earth!

  Bill, after his capture by gorilla soldiers, had been caged and taken to Ape City, capital of this odd civilization. There, he had discovered that three types of simians made up the new society: orangutans, golden-furred and slow-moving philosophers and lawmakers who, in their apricot-colored robes, ruled over the green-clad chimpanzees—intelligent and chattery ape scientists, businessmen, media men, etc.—and over the gorillas, big, black-furred, and burly leather-clad soldiers of the Ape Nation. Bill’s two ape friends, Zira and Cornelius, two scientists who studied the planet’s speechless, unintelligent humanoid cavedwellers had freed Bill from their laboratory when the government and army discovered that he had the fearful talent of speech! Even Dr. Zaius, the kindly old leader of the Council of Elders, would have destroyed blue-eyed Bill, since any single humanoid’s ability to speak might lead to all humanoids learning to do so; this, Zaius feared would mean the beginning of the end for ape civilization…

  Bill had rejoined his friend Jeff—and Nova, the beautiful raven-haired cavegirl who had befriended them and who had some limited ability to make sounds.

  “Why didn’t other Underdwellers chase us?” Jeff suddenly asked out of the darkness.

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Underdwellers. They’ve got Judy, and they obviously wanted us pretty badly. And that cave-in we started wouldn’t have stopped them for long. So why didn’t some of them come after us? They could have caught us without much trouble, the shape we’re in.”

  Bill was silent for a long moment. Then, apparently changing the subject without answering Jeff’s question, he asked, “How long do you think it’s been? How far in the future did you say we are?”

  “Judging from the ruins back there in the caves, and the time distortion shown on the earth clock in the Venturer,” Jeff said slowly, “we’ve got to be at least two thousand years from home. The accident that knocked out all our power systems toward the end of the flight had to be the result of Dr. Stanton’s theory of time thrust. Nothing else makes any sense.”

  “Two thousand years…” Bill mused. “It doesn’t seem like a very long time for evolution to have made all these changes we’ve seen.”

  “You mean the apes?” Jeff asked.

  “The apes—and the Under
dwellers. But that’s why the blue-robes didn’t come after us. If they’ve spent a couple thousand years, say sixty generations, down there in those caves, their eyes probably can’t take direct sunlight anymore. Remember how dim those caverns were? That’s probably normal lighting for them now and they just can’t take anymore.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff said, “that might answer my question, but it doesn’t answers yours.”

  “I didn’t know I’d asked one.”

  “Evolution. You’re right. Two thousand years—even three thousand—just isn’t long enough for the kind of changes we’ve seen here. There’s got to be some other explanation.”

  “There is,” Bill said wearily. “War—probably. Somewhere in the past there had to be a war, and a big one. A war with atomic weapons.”

  “Radiation?” Jeff asked, the surprise plain in his voice. “Radiation-caused mutations?”

  “It has to be that. Nothing else makes any sense. Unless we’re not really on Earth. Our Earth.”

  “We’re, on our Earth, all right,” Jeff said. “But I thought that radiation-produced mutations very seldom bred true. Most of them are oddities, either going back to the normal parent type in the next generation—or proving to be sterile, so they couldn’t give birth to similar mutations.”

  “Right. But what it looks like happened here is that wholesale mutations took place, the normals died out, and those oddities with pro-survival characteristics did breed true. That must have been what happened here—although there may have been other factors at work that we can’t even guess at.”

  “That’s the problem,” Jeff said, bitterness creeping into his voice. “We’re doing too much guessing. We’ve got to get some facts.”

  “First, we’ve got to get some sleep,” Bill answered with a smile Jeff couldn’t see. “First thing tomorrow morning, we’ll check around the area to see if there are any ‘facts’ lying around loose for you.”

  “I can’t sleep,” Jeff said, ignoring the teasing tone in Bill’s voice. “I keep thinking about Judy back there with the Underdwellers.”

  “Thinking about her and worrying about her isn’t going to help. We’ll get her out! But first, we’ve got to get some help. If we can get to Cornelius and Zira without being picked up, they can help us to get back to the land of the humanoids again—we can’t locate the trail from here. Then, with Nova and her people to help—”