“And another day or two from the edge of the Zone to the lake,” Bill said.
“You know this country better than we do,” Jeff said. “How long will it take us to reach the Forbidden Zone from here?”
“At least four days,” Cornelius answered.
“And,” Bill said, “since we’ll be on foot, about two days from the Zone’s edge to the lake.”
“Six days for us, and six days for Urko and his goons.”
“If you get started right away,” Zira reminded them, “and you don’t have any trouble finding the lake. After all, you’ve just sort of wandered around in the Forbidden Zone. Are you sure you can wander back in the same way?”
“No,” Bill said, “not at all sure. But Nova and her people know where the lake is—that much we’ve been able to determine. At one time they tried to cross the Forbidden Zone, I guess to get away from your people, and they stopped at the lake for a few days. It was the last water they found in the Zone, and they had to turn back. On the way back they stopped there again for a few days, and I guess the place stuck in whatever it is they use for minds.”
“That’s not fair, Blue-Eyes,” Zira said. “Just because they can’t speak doesn’t mean they don’t have minds.”
“You’re right, of course,” Bill said. “Sorry I said it. It’s just that it seems as if this whole planet is against us!”
“Not the whole planet, Blue-Eyes,” Zira said gently. “You do have some friends.”
Bill looked at the ground, ashamed of his outburst.
“What are you going to do when you reach your flying machine?” Cornelius asked. “You said it can’t be flown anymore, so how can you keep General Urko and Doctor Zaius from finding it?”
“There’s a device, the self-destruct system in the computer, that we can use to blow the ship up.” Jeff said. “There won’t be enough of it left for Urko or Zaius to make any sense out of—even if they do manage to dredge it up from the bottom of the lake.”
Bill turned to Nova, who had been standing behind him and Jeff all through their conversation with the two apes.
“Nova, you’ve got to lead us to the lake. The place of big waters.” He pointed toward the west and the Forbidden Zone, then toward the river, sweeping his arms out in a wide arc to indicate a large body of water.
Nova, who had been picking up smatterings of English, understood at once and jumped back, afraid, violently shaking her head no.
“Buh-hoy-ya! Buh-hoy-ya! Meg-yohs-gyuh-weh-rohs,” she said in her soft musical voice. But the pretty sounds carried a tone of fear.
“Why, it sounds as if she’s trying to speak,” Zira exclaimed. “Is that something you’ve taught her?”
“No,” Bill said. “I don’t think she’s trying to speak—not the way you and I speak, anyway. I’ve worked with her a bit, and what she’s doing is mouthing a set of sounds that are the sounds of something else. Like, when they want to indicate a bird, they trill like a bird. And a rabbit is a thump-thump. And a beaver a chewing sound. All these sounds are modified by long use and are somewhat standardized now. Which is probably how our language started, too.”
“Well,” Jeff said, “whatever it is she’s trying to duplicate the sound of today, it must be pretty nasty, judging from the expression on her face.”
Bill went through the pantomime of going to the Forbidden Zone once again, and again Nova tried to warn him.
“Buh-hoy-ya!” she exclaimed, trying to pull away from the grip Bill had taken on her arm.
“Nova, we must!”
The cavegirl looked up at Bill, tears starting in the corners of her eyes; then, hesitantly, she nodded her head yes.
“Okay,” Bill said, “if we’re going to beat the baddies to the ship, we’d best be getting on the road. Cornelius—Zira—I don’t know how we can thank you for all you’ve done for us.”
“You don’t have to thank us,” Zira said with a sniffle. “Just be careful, please? I’ve grown very fond of both of you. You’re almost like my children.”
Bill smiled at her, then shook hands with Cornelius as Jeff hugged Zira. As the two astronauts and the young humanoid girl scrambled up the cliff toward the cave where their supplies were kept, Zira looked up at them and then began to cry silently.
“Oh, Cornelius,” she said, “we’ll never see them again.”
“Come now, Zira, dearest,” Cornelius answered gently. “This is no way for a behavioral scientist to act.”
“Right now, I don’t feel like a scientist,” Zira mumbled, “I just feel like a woman.”
* * *
Three hours before dawn, Private Mungwort awoke with a start. Why are the barracks so frightfully cold? he asked himself. Then he remembered where he was—on the expeditionary force headed into the Forbidden Zone.
Now he heard again the noise that had awakened him from a sound sleep: the slippery metal click of a rifle bolt being closed, opened, then closed again. Some soldier outside was cleaning his weapon. Fully awake now, he listened and heard a few apes who were obviously moving about among the expeditionary vehicles. A truck engine roared to a start, then died away in the night with a cough. Though the force was at rest, dawn was approaching and they would soon be on the move again.
There was no movement inside Mungwort’s troop-carrier truck, and for that he was happy. Mungwort had tried to make friends with them, but the fact that he was part chimpanzee had always been a stumbling block. They teased him because of his chimp grandmother and because, more educated then they, he was clumsy with weapons and almost totally uninterested in a soldier’s life. They constantly played tricks on him, and never ceased teaching him. Nothing bad ever happened to Mungwort by accident. Of that he was sure.
He jumped carefully from the lowered tailgate of the truck and then looked around, trying to pick out the silhouettes of the jeeps and troop carriers and tanks of the expeditionary force in the darkness. He could make out two trucks besides his own, plus two of the heavily armored tanks—vehicles invented only months before by General Urko’s pet scientists. Each tank had a cannon and machine gun mounted on its front, and instead of tires, it had metal treads that ran on small, toothed wheels. Because of these treads, the tanks could go almost anyplace, leaving the roadbound trucks far behind. Mungwort had heard rumors that the tanks were so effective that the day of the common soldier was over—that he was soon to be replaced by equipment like these. Of this he was very glad.
It was too dark for Mungwort to see much else, but he turned west and started into the darkness at the line of low, dead-looking hills that marked the beginnings of the Forbidden Zone. Beyond was the dead, searching openness that contained all the fiends of Hell.
Led by Dr. Zaius but directed by General Urko, the expeditionary force had come west to the edge of the Zone last evening, arriving with just enough light for a final patrol before dark. The final patrol had, of course, been led by Mungwort: whenever there was a dangerous patrol to take out, Private Mungwort was chosen to lead it.
The main body of the expedition had stopped in a long, dusty line while Mungwort and his squad, along with a truck full of scientists, had continued down the road into the rapidly approaching dark. Mungwort stood in the carrier of the truck, with its top furled on either side, his elbows on the roof of the truck’s cab. With heavy binoculars, he was searching the area ahead of them while the men behind him relaxed, eating and gambling to pass the time, and unaware of what dangers might lay before them.
Private Pooka, one of the few gorilla soldiers Mungwort found intelligent enough to talk to, stood beside him. They scanned the country around them, though there wasn’t much to see. The country to their right was dry, and only stunted trees and brush were scattered here and there across it. To their left the ground climbed sharply to a long, low ridge of sun baked rocks. And ahead of them, in the direction of the Forbidden Zone, the land was curiously obscured by a heat haze.
“I can’t see a thing moving,” Mungwort told his companion.
>
“Maybe if you’d turn the binoculars around, Mungwort, and look in the small ends, you could see something,” Pooka advised his friend, punching him in the shoulder and chuckling.
“What? Oh! Well… let’s have a look, then,” Mungwort said as he adjusted the fieldglasses.
“Something’s moving up there,” said Pooka, pointing toward the Forbidden Zone.
Mungwort swung his binoculars toward the area Pooka had been scanning and saw a thin cloud of dust rising. He watched it for a moment, but whatever was making the dust remained invisible to him.
“Merely the wind, raising a bit of dust of the rocks,” he said in intelligent, un-gorilla-like speech. “Nothing to worry about. Nothing of importance.”
The driver, overhearing Pooka’s comment, had slowed the truck, but now he speeded up again, staying in the center of the dusty track that wasn’t quite a road. The other truck, driven by a scientist and convoying scientists and news-apes, stayed close behind, eating the cloud of dust the first truck was kicking up.
Mungwort let the driver carry on until they were barely a quarter-mile from the edge of the Forbidden Zone; then he signaled for the truck to turn along parallel to the Zone boundary and halt. Just ahead were three small abandoned stone buildings, right against the demarcation line. A small sign attached to one of the buildings warned that beyond lay the Forbidden Zone, forbidden to all non-military apes by the Book of Laws. Mungwort knew the buildings were religious shrines from an earlier, more primitive period in ape history. But the warning was not primitive, and Mungwort shuddered when he thought about how, the next day, he would undoubtedly once more have to pass over that line into the hot desert of the Forbidden Zone. He hoped the Underdwellers would not raise their mountains. up again, so strangely and so unpredictably!
He shook his head sharply, clearing such thoughts from it. Well, I’d better jump-down and scout around, he told himself. Picking up his rifle, he looked directly into the barrel of it to see if it was loaded, but fortunately did not pull the trigger to make certain.
“I’m going to reconnoiter the area, Pooka. You stay here in command of the truck, my fine fellow.”
Mungwort lowered himself from the truck carrier and made his way cautiously, like some stealthy burglar, off the side of the road, peering at each bush as if it were going to attack him.
Suddenly, freezing Mungwort in his Sherlock Holmesian pose, mountainous flames sprang up around the two trucks, running back in long, yellow streaks to surround the tanks and jeeps and other carriers that had stopped some distance behind the two forward trucks and were already setting up tents for the night. Every vehicle and every ape was clearly outlined before Mungwort’s horrified gaze as the fire arced upward, seeming to burn the very sky.
The ground began to shake, and yawning fissures opened in zigzag paths across the ground. Rocking back and forth, Mungwort lost his balance and fell backward, squarely on top of an immense round cactus!
This finally scattered any bravery Mungwort might have had.
“They’ve stabbed me!” he screamed. “The enemy is upon us!” he yelled, bolting away from the cactus and running back toward the line of trucks and his fellow apes. But his running path was not straight; it was a series of angles as he dodged opening and closing chasms—each, he was sure, leading directly to Hell.
Mungwort almost made it back to the safety of his truck. Almost, but not quite. As he dodged a final crack in the ground, bright orange and green flames spurted from it and, panting and terror-stricken, he rushed down the road now at full tilt, hardly noticing where he was running. Pooka and his patrol truck were left far behind!
Mungwort did not notice the half-inch-thick rope stretched across his path. The rope supported one end of a large, ornate tent.
He landed, rolling, almost at the feet of Dr. Zaius and General Urko. The general pierced Mungwort with a look that boded nothing but trouble for the unfortunate soldier, and Mungwort wondered if perhaps death among the spouting flames might not be better than the wrath of the burly Urko.
Mungwort was saved, however, by Dr. Zaius.
Soldiers were clustered around the tent, cowering before the flames, their weapons clutched in desperation as they sought targets. Zaius was gazing about at the geysers of fire, awed by the sight and somewhat afraid of forces he could not understand, but unwilling to give in to those fears.
For a moment, the ground stopped rocking and Zaius took advantage of the relative peace to step forward toward the flames. Fifteen feet from the road, he turned back towards the tent and raised his arms.
“Look, at me!” he shouted in a voice that could be heard even over the roaring of the flames. “Look at me! There is nothing to fear! This is but an illusion!”
To emphasize his point, he walked straight toward a yawning chasm to his right. As he reached it, yellow flames licked up at him and a loud groan went up from the troops huddled around the tent. But Zaius walked through the flames, over the empty space of the chasm!
“It’s an illusion!” he repeated. “It can’t hurt you!”
With those last words, the flames disappeared and the cracks in the earth healed themselves. For a moment Dr. Zaius thought he had prevailed over whatever, or whoever, was causing the illusions. But then a new apparition appeared in the sky over the expeditionary column.
The Elder had almost made it back to the tent when a clap of thunder pounded down above his head and streaks of lightning began to race across the cloudless sky. A bolt hit the ground twenty feet from the tent, leaving behind a smoking crater three feet deep and ten feet across.
For a moment, Dr. Zaius stood with his head bowed under the weight of noise from the sky. Then he stepped over to the edge of the tent, next to General Urko.
“Scared, Zaius?” Urko asked with a sneer.
“Of course I’m frightened,’” Dr. Zaius replied. “I know it’s only an illusion. But whatever has the power to create such illusions has perhaps enough power to stop us—if that’s its aim.”
Urko began to say something in answer to Zaius, but his words were drowned by a giant, piercing shriek that echoed across the sky, accompanied by sheets of white-hot lightning bolts.
The eyes of both apes were yanked skyward, and there, almost directly above them—ringed by lightning,—was the skull of a screaming ape. A skull fully a hundred feet across, with bolts of electricity flashing from its eye sockets and clouds of colored fire billowing from its ears.
The skull screamed again, and fire streamed out from its mouth as it roared. Then, as every ape in the expedition watched, the skull turned slowly, as if scanning the entire line of trucks and tents, and stopped, pointed at the tent where Zaius and Urko were standing.
“Remember the Book of Laws!” the voice thundered from the sky. “Enter not the Forbidden Zone unnecessarily, lest your souls be sent to the fiery pit forever!” And again the piercing scream tore the sky, along with sheets of fire from the skull’s mouth.
“Begone!” Dr. Zaius yelled back, stepping forward. “You’re nothing but an illusion, and you cannot hurt us!”
A sheet of fire abruptly flashed down from the skull and enveloped the old ape, but the orangutan Elder held his ground, staring defiantly up into the sky.
Suddenly the night was quiet again, the only light a rosy tint on the eastern horizon, heralding the dawn.
“That was a brave thing you did, Zaius,” the general said, with grudging respect in his voice.
“Humph! Not really. ‘You can fool some of the apes some, of the time, but you can’t fool all of the apes all of the time.’ And you can’t fool me at all! Not with an illusion!”
Again Zaius walked to the side of the road, then turned and looked along the column, illuminated by the lights of the many trucks and a few campfires. “You see,” he shouted to the troops. “There is nothing to worry about!”
Zaius stepped back to the tent. “How about some supper, general?”
“I’ll have the orderly bring us some.
Shall we discuss our plans for the coming day, doctor?”
Zaius nodded his head and started to step into the tent, but stopped suddenly. “Who is that?” he asked.
Trying to make himself invisible, Mungwort eased back out of the circle of light from the tent. General Urko looked sharply at him again, but said nothing, and Mungwort got quickly to his feet and set off at a trot back toward his truck.
* * *
Ten miles ahead of the halted ape expeditionary column, in a rocky valley on the other side of the Forbidden Zone line, similar flames boiled in a hot orange-red holocaust across the desert, completely blocking any passage through a narrow neck in the middle of the valley. Three human-shaped beings had hoped to get through the valley before darkness fell.
“There’s got to be some way through,” Jeff groaned, crouching behind a boulder and shielding his face from the heat with his hand.
“You have any idea how?” Bill asked him.
“Nope. I’m just a tourist here. Unless—”
“Yes. That’s just what I was thinking. This fire and lightning may be just illusions like the ones that scared us at first in the subway tunnel. And nothing worse.”
He looked at his partner and Nova for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and began to walk toward the sheet of flames.
Nova lunged after him to pull him back, but Jeff caught her wrist and then put an arm about her shoulder to calm her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Bill is just trying out something. We think there’s no harm in this fire.”
Meanwhile, Bill had reached the line of flames and walked through it. Unscathed, he came back through the glare once more and walked back to his friends.
“Come on, Nova,” Bill said. “You’ll come to no harm.”
Timidly the cavegirl took Bill’s hand, and together he and Jeff led her through the glaring fire. An eerie glow still lightened the sky above them, and for each hundred or so feet they walked, the earth shook violently. Frequently they were tumbled to the ground, but each time they rose and walked on, the frightened girl between them. Once, a thirty-foot-wide slash in the earth loomed before them, but they walked directly across it, steady and determined.
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