“You call this a map?” Zira asked with a huffy sniff.
“Since it’s the only map of the area ever made, yes, I do call it a map, dear. I made it as I traveled, exploring along the southern and western edges of the Forbidden Zone.”
“When was that?” Zira asked suspiciously.
“Years ago. Long before I met you.”
“You say it shows an area where we might be safe from the general?” Bill inquired, bending over the map and trying to orient it with what he knew of the Forbidden Zone.
“Yes. Here,” said Cornelius, pointing the dark-brown-furred finger of his left hand at a series of lines and curves sketched in near the map’s left side. “Here,” he said, using his other hand to point to some lines near Ape City, on the map’s right, “are the lake and mountains that lie between us and the valley and caves of the humanoids. You know that valley, I believe; it’s where you stayed for a time and where Mount Apemore has the carved faces of our great simian ancestors. West of that valley, beyond several parallel ranges of very high mountains, is the Forbidden Zone. On foot, it took me more than two weeks to get across them.
“The Zone—as you know if you’ve wandered around in it—is many, many miles wide. It begins as low hills and then desert. Then there’s a lake—where your spaceship crashed and sank, I judge. Then, beyond is more desert—much more desert!—most of it rocky and waterless. Finally, there are more lofty mountains again, on the western side of the Zone. I followed the hills south along the rim of the Zone and then across, till I reached the western side, and then went north some distance and crossed over the mountains again.
“On the other side I discovered a valley. A beautiful place, with high cliffs on three sides, and abundant water and game and fruits. It would take a major expedition for Urko to follow you there. And even if he did, his vehicles could not descend the cliffs.”
“It sounds perfect,” Bill exclaimed.
“Yes. Perfect for that honeymoon you never took me on, Cornelius,” Zira interrupted.
Her husband’s yellowish-brown face reddened.
But now Bill was shaking his head doubtfully. “But what about the one side of the valley that has no cliff, Cornelius?”
“Oh, that’s the north side.”
Jeff continued Bill’s thought. “But couldn’t Urko circle the Zone from the north—just as you did from the south—and come into the valley that way?”
“Well,” said the chimpanzee scientist, “you plan to set up defenses anyway. But you might be safe even without them. Here’s why. Almost a hundred years ago, Surgora the Bold, one of our greatest ape generals, attempted to cross the Zone with his forces. He got into the desert, yes, but his jeeps and tanks couldn’t climb the western mountains—and there were no passes. He kept on going north, through the hills and desert, looking for a pass. Finally, he came to the land where the white waters begin that never melt—and still the western range blocked him.”
“Cornelius, would Urko possibly try to reach the valley by your southern route and descend the cliffs on foot to reach us?” Bill asked.
“Well, yes, he might. He has a deep hatred for the humanoids. And, of course, he fears that you may teach them to speak as well as fight.”
“Would all his men—his troops, that is—go with him on such a difficult expedition?”
“The regular army troops probably wouldn’t. They’re a pretty conservative and religious bunch, especially the middle-grade officers. But Urko’s picked personal guard would definitely follow him—anywhere.”
“So the valley isn’t quite as safe as it might be,” Jeff said.
“Nevertheless what choice do we have?” Bill said. “Once again, anything is better than letting the humanoids just sit and wait to be wiped out at Urko’s leisure. May we borrow this map?” he asked, turning to Cornelius.
“Of course. I have no further need for it. My exploration days are past. Besides, I am too busy.”
“Okay. Then first, we have to get to the humanoids, and see if Nova can lead us to the spaceship.”
“First,” Jeff insisted, “we have to get out of Ape City! And, in case you hadn’t noticed, the streetlights are still on outside. And I believe I hear voices of people talking and laughing. Maybe the movies have just let out. Darn! And we missed seeing Zantar…”
“You could stay here in the lab, or in our home next door, till very late, and then leave town when no one is up and about,” Zira suggested.
“No, I think we’d best get moving,” Bill said. “Thank you, anyway. Since your lab building is on the edge of the city, we’ll go out the back way, through those trees I escaped among the last time. The quicker we reach the humanoids, the quicker we’ll be able to get them away to the valley and put of Urko’s reach.”
Bill solemnly folded up the map and tucked it into the pocket of his dirt-stained white leggings, carefully closing the zipper to make sure he didn’t lose it.
“Cornelius,” Zira suddenly burst out, “we must give them some furs—some of the humanoids’ furs that we’ve saved—to camouflage them.” She apologized to the two astronauts, “I would give you some extra simian clothing, but… well, your faces are so much prettier than ours and your hair is short. And we have no helmets here in the laboratory.”
“Certainly, my dear. What a good idea!” her husband said as he and she dashed into an adjoining room and pulled open a tall, wooden chest-of-drawers.
They were back with the astronauts in an instant.
“These outfits will help us pass the roadblocks that seem to surround your city just now,” Bill said, quickly donning the smelly animal fur, along with Jeff.
“They must still be searching for Blue-Eyes—even close to Ape City,” Zira explained, and Bill blushed slightly.
Jeff and Bill stood at the back window once again.
“Good luck!” Cornelius said simply, holding out his hand for both astronauts to shake.
Both smiled but neither said anything. Then Bill reached out spontaneously, and gathered Zira into his arms, hugging her as he would have hugged his mother, and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead.
Jeff, and then Bill, climbed quickly out of the window and in seconds they were completely out of sight in the woods behind the laboratory. Cornelius, his hand in his wife’s, couldn’t help notice the glint of a tear in Zira’s eyes.
* * *
They were just beyond the northern edge of Ape City.
“Everything seems quiet out here,” Jeff hissed, peering through the leaves of the brush that screened him from the road.
“Yeah. Let’s get going again.” Bill got to his feet and pushed through the stiff, short branches.
A mile farther on, they came on the broad river that supplied water to Ape City. For a moment Bill was tempted to halt, to hide and rest in the thick bushes that bordered the river, but just at that moment they heard the sound of engines. Military truck engines, he thought, headed our way. The trucks were chugging along the dusty, one-lane road running parallel to the river.
Hurrying now, trying to stay ahead of their pursuers, Bill and Jeff stuck to the road but tried to cover as much distance as possible in as short a time as possible. On one side of them was the river, and on the other a low block wall made of sun-dried brick with occasional fallen-in gaps showing a lack of maintenance. The wall separated the road from an orchard of gone-to-seed apple trees which were being slowly choked to death by weeds.
They’ve had no new humanoid crews recently to reinforce the “Animal Labor Detail,” Bill remembered.
Long minutes passed with only the sound of their heavy breathing to break the night’s stillness as they trotted along the road. Then, close behind them, came the harsh sound of gears being changed, clashing together as the driver geared down to round a bend—the corner they had come around only minutes before.
“Quick!” Jeff gasped. “Over the wall! Get down flat against it until they’re past!”
Bill planted his hands flat on the top layer of bricks an
d vaulted across, only seconds behind Jeff. A moment later, a jeep came rolling up the road in a cloud of dust, followed by a series of trucks filled with soldiers dressed in the distinctive uniforms of General Urko’s prize guard.
As soon as the last truck groaned past, rocking on the uneven roadbed, Bill and Jeff were on their feet, running through the orchard towards the low hills half a mile away to the west. Minutes later, they were scrambling from bush to bush, stunted tree to stunted tree, up a hillside. Then, again, they heard the sound of trucks, this time laboring even more as they moved off the road into the open fields, coming up the slight grade toward them.
Jeff dived under a low, thick bush, and Bill flattened quickly behind a group of small boulders, peering out from between two of them to see if the trucks were on their trail, or just searching the area at random. Both astronauts held their breath as the vehicles came pushing through the brush below them, then passed on, back toward Ape City.
* * *
A few hours later, Jeff stopped at the crest of a ridge and looked back toward the yellow streetlights of Ape City twinkling at them through a light layer of smog that hung in a blanket over the city.
“We’d best not waste any time,” Bill said. “Let’s see if we can get way out in front of those patrols—and stay in front of them.”
With one final look back toward the only real friends they had on the planet, aside from some of the humanoids, Bill headed down the reverse slope of the hill, away from the city, Jeff walking quietly beside him.
By dawn they were almost exhausted, but the hunger they both were beginning to feel was bothering them as much as the exhaustion. All around were scrub trees, but none of the berry bushes they had snacked off of coming into Ape City from the Forbidden Zone the night before. Shortly after dawn they slid down a steep incline, into a dry gully that showed signs of being a runoff for flash floods. There, with a thunder of wings, a covey of quail flushed—flying only some fifty feet before landing in a clear area of the gulley. No longer hunted by man, and having no reason to fear the vegetarian apes, the birds had lost their fear of most creatures.
Jeff stooped and quietly scooped up a handful of small, smooth rocks. Winding up like a baseball pitcher, he let one of the rocks fly, and a bird fell over without fuss. The rest, having heard no suspicious loud noise, continued bobbing and clucking, awaiting another rock. In a short quarter of an hour, Jeff had killed a dozen of the plump birds; then he stopped, only because he and Bill would not be able to eat more before the birds spoiled.
Half a mile beyond the gulley, they began to climb the mountains separating the land of the apes from the cave area of the humanoids. Up and up they went, into a rocky waste where nothing moved except the branches of thin, dead-looking trees blowing in the icy wind that whistled over the passes. It was almost noon before Jeff dropped to his haunches on a small ledge, Bill right behind him.
“I think we can hole-up here for a while,” he said. “They’ll be looking for us along the main road, not up here. And they won’t be able to see a fixe from below.”
Those last words brought a smile to Bill’s lips and he quickly set about gathering dry twigs and small branches while Jeff plucked and cleaned the birds. A small, icy stream tinkled down the face of the mountain a few feet away, and Jeff carefully washed the quail. The two astronauts were barely able to control their impatience as the little birds roasted on spits of dry wood.
Finally the small, succulent quail were ready. Bill and Jeff picked the bones clean, until, an hour later, they were filled and refreshed and ready to move out again. They were still bone-tired, but not so weary that they had forgotten their goal—the mission they were on to save the humanoids, and themselves, from the wrath of General Urko.
Over the next three days, they stuck to the high slopes of the mountains, desolate country where the granite rocks sparkled gray in the sun and where the trees seemed to match the rocks’ grayness. What little soil there was proved sandy and stony, and Jeff was not surprised that they found little growing up there to help sustain them. The long days were spent sliding and slipping across the sharp rocks, climbing always upward, so that the road became a ribbon far below them. The longer nights were spent huddled together for warmth over small fires, fighting to keep from being frozen and hoping to get rest enough to spend another day fighting the mountains.
Then, early on the sixth day after their escape from Ape City, Bill and Jeff crested a granite peak and there, below them, still miles away, but clear in the crystal air, was the warm, tree-filled valley, and line of caves that was the home of the humanoids.
Nova’s home.
* * *
A very ambitious, cocky, and overly proud chimpanzee, Julius hadn’t become the top news-ape for the Simian Broadcasting Company by ignoring stories when they came his way. But that’s just what he’d done when he first ran across the rumors about a blue-eyed humanoid that could talk. Ignored the rumors—because he was asked to ignore them by several very high officials in the government, including one member of the Supreme Council. And now he was cursing himself over and over for being such a fool.
Not that he had helped to cover up the story of Blue-Eyes out of any sense of patriotism. He had really, been-skeptical of the story from the start; but now, he heard again and again as he hurried down the crowded street towards the Ape Senate Building, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”
A newschimp was standing on the corner with a bundle of papers under his arm, yelling in a squeaky voice, “Unidentified Flying Object lands in Forbidden Zone!” The boy went on. “Extra! Extra! Flying saucers invade Planet of the Apes!”
Julius slowed his steps for a moment, just long enough to scan the headline across the top of a second pile of papers laying at the newschimp’s feet. INTELLIGENT MEN INVADE THE PLANET OF THE APES?? the headline screamed in three-inch-high letters.
Shaking his head, and with his shiny black lips clamped tight together in anger, Julius hurried on. But at every corner was another reminder of the story—another news vendor. Even a radio blared at Julius from a storefront as he hurried down the crowded sidewalk, pushing his ways through knots of excited apes.
“…Latest reports from our ape in the Senate Building,” the voice of Julius’s chief newscaster rival said, “indicate that intelligent humanoids were on board the Unidentified Flying Object spotted in the Forbidden Zone. Such speculations seem right out of an episode of television’s ‘Spokka the Space-Ape.’ But it has been learned that the Supreme Council has called the Senate into an emergency session, giving a certain degree of credibility to the fantastic stories which have been circulating all morning. Stay tuned to this network for further bulletins.”
“You silly humanoid-brain!” Julius mumbled to himself. “I doubt if there’s an ape in town who doesn’t already know the Senate is in emergency session.”
An elderly gorilla looked sharply at Julius, as if asking who he was talking to, and the conceited news-ape’s feet, which had slowed as he listened to the radio report, speeded up again just as a commercial for Golden Flea-Be-Gone began to squawk over the speaker.
Minutes later, Julius was fighting his way through the crowd in front of the Ape Senate Building. It was a crowd to be made up primarily of chimpanzees and gorillas of the higher types in evidence, although Julius spotted two orangutans who had probably wandered over from Embassy Row to see what was going on.
Up in front of the crowd, on the lower steps of the Senate, a short orangutan with long and shaggy hair, and wearing beads, was waving his arms, leading the crowd in a chant.
“Truth, NOW! Truth, NOW! Truth, NOW!” they repeated over and over, more and more apes joining in until it became much more than just a chant—it was a thunder of sound breaking against the front of the columned marble building.
Julius pushed through the packed crowd, trying to suppress his disgust at having to come in physical contact with other chimpanzees and—especially—gorillas! Then he ducked around the side of the
wide marble steps to the small door that had been set aside for the coming and going of the news-apes assigned to the political beat.
Just inside the door a glowering gorilla in army uniform, with the black harness of General Urko’s personal guard, checked his credentials, then passed him through with a scowl. This told Julius quite a bit about how seriously the government was taking the rumors of intelligent humanoids. Standing back against the wall, looking confused and almost pathetic, was the grizzled old chimpanzee, a retired Senate page, who normally guarded the door and checked the news-apes in and out.
After having his identification papers checked twice more by army gorillas, Julius slipped into his seat in the press gallery, high above the Senate floor. Noting the sharp odor of fear in the hall, Julius quickly slipped on the earphones that picked up the speeches from the floor.
A young orangutan Senator was on his feet, his long golden finger covered with coarse tan fur pointed at the platform where the Supreme Council sat. Dr. Zaius was-seated in the center, listening with impatience as the politician ranted at the council, his words actually intended for the rabble outside, who were listening, too, over the loudspeakers that had been set up hours before. It had long since become apparent that the spectator galleries would not hold all the crowd demanding to be present for this extraordinary Senate session.
“…And furthermore,” the young Senator was shouting, “if these terrible rumors prove to be true, if intelligent humanoids have invaded our fair planet, what is to stop them from actually educating our native humanoids? What is to stop them from teaching the humanoids to think? What is to stop them from giving the humanoids weapons—weapons to destroy us? What is to stop them from—”
“There is no such thing as an intelligent humanoid—or a flying saucer, for that matter!” Dr. Zaius shouted from the platform, pounding his gavel. “The very term ‘intelligent humanoid’ is a contradiction. Because it is unthinkable. To even entertain such a thought is… is… blasphemy!”
“It is not blasphemy!” the orangutan Senator yelled back. “It is not unthinkable. It is a very possible threat to every ape on the planet. If these intelligent humanoids have arrived, and they teach the normal humanoids to think, do you realize what will happen? They’ll revolt! They’ll fight! It will mean an all-out war between us and the humanoids—and you know what the Books of Laws says about fighting the beast: we must protect our families, our loved ones, our nation, from the deadly and ever-possible Humanoid Threat, the Book says. The humanoids must therefore die!”
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