Planet of the Apes Omnibus 4

by William Arrow

  “The same illusions as before, in the New York City subway tunnel,” Jeff sighed. “But why do the Underdwellers—if it is the Underdwellers—want to prevent us from reaching the lake and our spaceship?”

  “I’ve no better idea than you, my ole friend,” Bill remarked. “Unless it’s, well, because they live under the Forbidden Zone, and their solar dish reflector has to come aboveground for energy from time to time—and no Above World creature must see that!”

  * * *

  Twelve hours later, with the sun beating down mercilessly on their unprotected heads, the two astronauts and Nova topped a sandy rise and there, before them, was the placid surface of the sapphire-blue lake. Much to their surprise, in a deep lagoon near the shore, the nose of the Venturer had surfaced! The ship had evidently upended itself as air inside rose to the narrower cockpit and equipment-pod forward section of the craft. Perhaps, also, the extremely hot desert sun had reduced the water level of the lake by some feet since the astronauts’ arrival.

  “Wow!” Bill exclaimed. “That’s a help, since it pinpoints the ship and gives us an anchorage.”

  Near the rocks that fringed the edge of the lagoon lay the beached, but still inflated, life raft that Jeff had not forgotten to drag from the sinking ship when it crashed.

  Bill looked around the full extent of the huge lake. “Looks as if we’re in time,” he said. “No sign of the Gorilla Army yet!”

  “No,” Jeff answered. “But they probably aren’t far behind us, so let’s get it in gear!”

  The trio quickly scrambled down to the water’s edge, and the two men stripped off their T-shirts while Nova dragged the raft from where they had left it, wedged between two rocks, to the water’s edge.

  As the two astronauts climbed into the raft, Nova grabbed Bill’s upper arm before they could push off. “Buh-hoy-ya! Buh-hoy-ya!” she pleaded, trying to keep the light-haired ex-commander from venturing out into the lagoon.

  “Don’t worry, Nova,” Bill said softly, gently stroking her, cheek and wiping away the single tear that had run down to her chin. “Whatever it is you’re trying to warn us about, we’ll watch out for it. We’ll be careful.”

  Gently disengaging her hand, he helped Jeff push the raft away from the beach.

  It took them only a few minutes to paddle the two hundred feet or so to the metal tip that was the instrument-filled nose of the Venturer, sticking up out of the water now like the spire of a sunken cathedral.

  Jeff quickly made the tie-rope of the raft tight to an inset ring in the spaceship’s nose, while Bill took deep, gulping breaths, filling his blood with oxygen to give him more time below.

  “I’ll go for one of the oxygenators first,” he said between gulps of air. “Once I have that, we won’t need to rush to getting all the equipment we need.”

  “But remember, there’s an ape military column somewhere behind us,” Jeff warned. “We don’t have all day to strip the ship of equipment.”

  Bill nodded, took one last deep breath, then dived over the side of the raft, his body cutting cleanly into the water with hardly a splash. Using one hand to swim and the other to guide himself along the metal side of the spaceship, Bill drove downward through the clear water. Far below, he could see the crumpled and fire-blackened tail section of the Venturer; small, colorful fish were swimming in and out through rents in the hull. Irrelevantly, he wondered what changes the radiation from the spaceship’s power supply would have on the offspring of those fish, already probably mutated by whatever cataclysm must have created the Underdwellers and the talking apes.

  Out of the corner of his eye Bill caught a movement, but when he turned his head he saw nothing—nothing but shadows and tumbled rocks and sand, with waving fronds and bunches of fish, none of which could have made the movement he had half seen a moment before. Then his hand felt the edge of the hatchway, where they had made their escape from the disabled craft, and he forgot about the movement he believed he had seen.

  For a moment Bill’s leggings caught on the latch; then he was inside the spaceship. Dim green light filtered through the small ports and open hatch, just enough light to see by. His vision was weakening, however, as the oxygen in his bloodstream was nearly used up and his brain was beginning to fog from carbon dioxide buildup.

  Finally, after what seemed to Bill like hours of fumbling around inside the ship, he found the locker with the red emergency marker and the plate saying OXYGENATORS—FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY. He tugged at the handle. For a moment, the door resisted his efforts. Then suddenly it swung open, releasing a large, shimmering bubble of air that had been trapped inside.

  His vision beginning to black-out from lack of oxygen, Bill fumbled with the clips inside, trying to release one of the masks. They were Lexan face shields with a skintight and strong, but flexible, cap. Finally Bill wrestled one of the masks out of the locker and quickly pulled it over his head, its tanks flopping painfully into place against his back. With frantic fingers he twisted the small knob that controlled the oxygen flow, and seconds later felt the cool breath of fresh air against his face. With an explosive sigh, he released the foul air mixture in his lungs, gulping in great breaths of life-giving oxygen.

  Moving more steadily now, with the sureness of long practice around the spaceship control room he had once spent so much time in, Bill checked lockers, gathering only important materials and taking them over the edge of the hatchway, ready to be ferried up to the lagoon’s surface. His first plan had been to grab everything of value he and Jeff could carry and tie it all together to carry back to the humanoids’ caves. But he now worried that the Gorilla Army might the more easily catch them if they were loaded down with heavy gear.

  Picking and choosing carefully, Bill began to dart around the cabin. He had already located the portable laser—the tool they would need it they were to build a safe base for the humanoids—and had collected a hand viewer and a box with two hundred microfilm spools (books, for entertainment, and, he hoped, for training the humanoids, including everything from Shakespeare to the engineering manual for Venturer-class spaceships). From over the engineer’s flight position he now grabbed the photo of Jeff’s family, and, as a quick afterthought, from one of the lockers he pulled the small makeup kit Judy had brought aboard. New flight suits and shoes were easily found, and a spare crash-survival kit as well as the solar power pack to recharge the laser batteries. Everything of real use that Bill could think of went into the pile by the hatch.

  Knowing that there were still many objects they could use aboard, Bill nevertheless now grabbed the laser and power pack and worked his way out the hatch, kicking clear and heading for the surface with powerful strokes of his leg muscles.

  “Here, give me a hand with this!” he yelled after breaking through to the surface a few feet from the raft.

  Jeff swiftly paddled the raft around the nose of the Venturer, to the limits of the rope which held it, closer to Bill. He, in turn, paddled towards the raft, using one hand to hold on to his precious load.

  In minutes the laser and power pack were in Jeff’s hands. The black, his engineer’s love for machinery showing, quickly broke the light tool down to check the ruby crystals and power leads. Then he noticed Bill preparing to dive into the sunken spaceship again.

  “Hey, man! Where you going?”

  “Back inside,” Bill answered. “There’s still a lot of stuff in there we can use.”

  “One thing we need more than anything else,” Jeff said, “is a good head start on the apes. Get the computer destruct set and let’s get out of here!”

  “Just a couple more loads. Small stuff. I’ve already got it piled near the hatch. All I’ll have to do is pull it out and—”

  “Buh-hoy-ya! Buh-hoy-ya!” Nova broke in suddenly from the shore, and when Jeff spun around to see what had upset her, he saw her hand flash out, one finger pointing toward the hills. “Buh-hoy-ya! Uh-roh-gohs!”

  In the distance, just over the rise behind the lagoon’s shoreline, wa
s a rising cloud of dust—dust raised by the jeeps, tanks, and troop carriers of General Urko’s expeditionary force.

  “There’s your answer, Bill,” said Jeff. “We don’t have time to get anything else out. Set the destruct timer on the computer bank, and let’s get away before the apes show up and ruin the rest of the day—permanently.”

  Bill took one look at the rapidly approaching dust-cloud, then flipped over in the water and headed down toward the open hatch. Once there, he grabbed the edge of it with his hands and levered himself inside, his feet barely clearing the pile of equipment he had intended as his next load to the surface—equipment they really needed if they were to make a new home for themselves among the humanoids.

  Inside the Venturer, as Bill turned and headed back up to the computer panels in the nose, his foot hit the spare survival pack and it fell slowly down toward the base of the ship, hitting with a muffled clank against the aft bulkhead. He hardly noticed the falling box, but a hundred feet below, between two large rocks and under a blanket of gently waving blue-green fronds, two giant eyes blinked open as the clank echoed through the water.

  By now, Bill had the emergency destruct key panel open. The device had been standard on all NASA spaceships ever since one ship had been forced to make an emergency landing in one of the smaller Arabian countries and the local sheik had sold the ship’s computer to the Chinese for a reported one hundred million dollars. The Chinese had pulled the programs out of the computer and showed that the ship, owned and operated by NASA and a supposedly civilian operation, had been engaged in military reconnaissance in the Far East. NASA quickly decided that never again would such an event occur to embarrass the agency or the United States government. From that date forward, all spacecraft computers were equipped with a high-explosive package to be triggered should there be any danger of the ship’s falling into unfriendly or mercenary hands.

  With a quick twist of his wrist, Bill set the destruct timer for ten minutes, pressed the twin interlock switches to release the arming mechanism, and snapped over the firing switch. There was no way, now, to turn the destruct mechanism off. In five minutes, a peewee atomic device— actually one of the Venturer’s main batteries—would explode with roughly the force of five hundred pounds of dynamite. Force sufficient to destroy the computer—arid tear apart the ship as well. Once the battery went off, General Urco and Dr. Zaius would have a hard time finding proof that a flying object had landed anywhere in the Forbidden Zone…

  Bill stood at the panel for a moment, to make sure the timer was working properly; then he turned and swam down toward the hatch. On the way he stopped at a locker and pulled out a harness designed to hold a working pack of deep-space repairs, stripped it of its tool pouches, and used a light cord to tie the remaining items he wished to salvage on to the harness. Pulling the straps of the harness over his shoulder, he fastened its buckle, then slipped out through the hatch—out to where gleaming malevolent eyes were watching the white, foreign shape of the spaceship.

  As he came through the hatch he froze—first, at the sound, a bubbly growl that sent waves against the hull of the Venturer, then at the mutated “something” which had made the lake its home: a horrifying, grotesque, snake-like creature, fifty feet long, plated with iridescent scales that glinted in the soft light of the lagoon. The scales by themselves were beautiful, but that did nothing to ease the horror Bill felt at the sight of the creature as it headed toward him, his foot-long razor-sharp fangs angling forward from the slightly open jaw!

  Bill saw immediately that he could not reach the surface of the lagoon before the creature reached him. Even if he did, the snake-like thing was easily big enough to drag the raft, and Jeff with it, to the bottom.

  Quickly, he swam around to the opposite side of the Venturer, looking for an escape route away from the monster. There in the distance, he spotted it: a cave in a submerged rock face, just big enough for him to get into. And, hopefully, too small to allow the monster to follow.

  In his haste to get away, Bill forgot about the harness strapped to his back—and that lapse of memory almost cost him his life. He made it to the cave with room to spare, the monster not spotting him until he had covered half the distance from the sunken spaceship. But Judy’s makeup kit, strapped to the outside of the harness, caught on a rock at the cave’s entrance and held Bill back. For long seconds he fought to free it, while the monster snake arrowed closer and closer, scenting a helpless meal in the waters that it ruled as an absolute monarch.

  Bill got the harness free with less than five seconds to spare. The monster was only twenty feet away, when the rock that, the kit was caught on crumbled, freeing him and letting him dive into the cave, which proved to be less than six feet deep.

  But now Bill faced two new problems. The rock, which had crumbled and freed the harness to allow him to enter the cave, was crumbling even faster under the infuriated attack of the monster’s teeth. And back aboard the Venturer the clock controlling the self-destruct mechanism was rapidly counting down toward an explosion that would destroy the spaceship—and Jeff—and at the same time kill Bill if he were still underwater, where the shock wave could reach him.

  The monster, wanting his dinner, meanwhile thrashed more and more frantically, his long fangs tearing at the porous rock and ripping away chunks the size of Bill’s head with each bite. Above, in the raft, Jeff was becoming more and more concerned as sounds of the approaching ape forces became clearer and clearer, the dustcloud from the column of vehicles looking as though it was less than a half-mile away.

  Suddenly, with a tremendous splash, the tail of the monster broke the water’s surface not fifty feet from the raft.

  Onshore, Nova screamed, pointing at it with horror on her face. “Buh-hoy-ya! Gyuh-weh-rohs!” she wailed, tears beginning to run down her face.

  Jeff took one look and instantly analyzed the situation. He did not know what the creature was, or how it had come to be attacking, but he was sure it had Bill trapped somewhere below. It was up to him to get his partner out. Without hesitation, he grabbed the laser and dived cleanly overboard, knifing deep into the water, headed for the bottom. Hopefully the creature wouldn’t see him until he had a chance to figure out what was going on.

  The water was fast filling with mud and debris from the monster’s thrashing and digging at the cave entrance, but Jeff could see Bill’s body, pressed against the back wall of the cave, only inches now from the thrusting fangs.

  Jeff swam rapidly to one side of the cave entrance, his lungs already beginning to ache, to a spot where he could get a clear shot at the monster with the laser. Taking careful aim along the discharge tube, he pressed the actuating button, using the tool like a rifle.

  And, like a rifle, the laser did the job that had to be done.

  It burned into the side of the creature, releasing clouds of pinkish blood into the water—blood that swirled in surrealistic patterns, giving both Bill and Jeff cover as they raced for the surface, for the moment forgotten by the beast as it thrashed in agony.

  Seconds later, Bill was in the raft, pulling his coughing and sputtering companion in after him.

  Quickly untying the rope holding the raft to the nose of the sunken Venturer, and paddling frantically, Jeff and Bill propelled the raft toward the shore. The water behind them was churning into a pink-and-white froth as the monster thrashed about in pain. Then its head came out of the water, cascading sheets of foam over the fleeing boat, and it came after them. Its small brain had told it that these puny creatures were the cause of its agony.

  The two astronauts jumped out of the raft onto the beach, Bill with the harness still about his shoulders and Jeff carrying the precious laser and the solar power supply. With Nova between them, they scrambled up the bank behind the beach just as the monster threw its body up out of the shallow water in a vain attempt to reach them, but lunging and snapping its fangs uselessly. Then its giant head and arms flapped back into the cool water—back into its own element—and it
groaned mournfully as it floated back out into the lagoon, dying. One of its arms had caught on the raft and was pulling it along to sink, punctured and collapsed, in the lagoon.

  “Phew!” Bill gasped. “That was way too close!”

  “Speaking of close,” Jeff said, “listen to that!”

  Just over the small hill behind them they could hear the sound of trucks laboring through loose sand and dirt and the clank made by the steel treads of the apes’ tanks.

  “Come on, let’s get moving,” Bill urged them, reaching down to help Nova to her feet.

  The three climbed a line of rocks that led away from the lagoon and lake.

  Just as they reached the ridge line, a red-and-orange explosion rocked the water, sending a spout of mingled fire and water a hundred feet into the air. The earth shook and mud pelted the astronauts as they crouched, hidden, their two bodies shielding the girl between them. Giant waves soon crashed against the beach below them, then receded. As the water began to calm, the monster loomed up one last time, bleeding from half a hundred cuts, and at the same moment the command car carrying Dr. Zaius and General Urko plowed over the hill into view of the lagoon. The car was less than a hundred yards from where the three humans were crouched, blocked from the apes by a line of boulders.

  * * *

  The jeep slid to a stop in a cloud of dust and the two simians in the back seat jumped to their feet, different expressions on their faces. Dr. Zaius started to laugh, while General Urko looked out at the lagoon at the giant snake still snapping at the air, fifteen feet out of the water. Anger was plain on the general’s heavy features.

  “Well, general,” said Zaius, still laughing, “there’s your Unidentified Flying Object! Scales, teeth, and all! And not a sign of a humanoid—talking or otherwise—anywhere.”

  “The ship must have sunk when it landed…” Urko snarled. “They must have escaped…”