“Aw, you can do better than that, Hairy!” Bill taunted.
Girk put a hand on Wallo’s arm. “Better hold it! Urko wants him taken alive—if we can!”
“We’ll need help, then.” Wallo turned and bellowed back at the camp: “It’s the humanoid, Blue-Eyes!”
The camp had been alerted by the gunshot, and sleeping gorillas stumbled groggily from the hot tents to join their fellow soldiers, who were snatching at stacks of rifles.
General Urko strode out of the tent and peered up at the pass from under his black carved leather helmet. He could hear the ripple of voices.
“The humanoid!”
“It’s the humanoid! It’s Blue-Eyes!”
“Tell General Urko! It’s the humanoid!”
A lieutenant ran up to Urko’s tent, saluting by slapping a fist across his leather chestplate. “Sir, it’s—”
“Yes, lieutenant, I know!”
Two more junior officers ran up. “General Urko, the humanoid’s in the pass!”
Urko glared at them. “I can see that!” He smiled fiercely in the direction of the tiny figure he saw standing in the cleft. “At last!”
He began to shout orders. “Get the humanoid! Don’t let him get away! Mulla, you take a squad to the right! Trafuna, you go left!” Urko whirled to point at one of the officers emerging from the tent. “Major Surga!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Take a squad and go straight in! Capture that humanoid and bring him to me!”
“Yes, sir!”
As the major started to move, Urko stopped him. “Alive, major, if you can… If not, dead!”
Surga’s fist slapped hard against the leather of his breastplate. “Yes, sir!” He started running, gathering a squad around him as he went.
Urko started walking down the slight rise that led into the camp. “Come, gentlemen,” he said to his remaining officers. “Let’s watch the capture of this most unusual humanoid!”
* * *
From up on the ridge, Jeff watched the officers leave the tent. And he had already chosen his approach route. Conveniently, Surga had stripped the trucks of men. The athletic astronaut now slithered over the ridge and took temporary cover in a grouping of rocks. Then he rose and, bent over, ran to the line of trucks and jeeps. The general’s tent was directly ahead, up a slight rise.
But just as he started to advance, he saw someone move in the darkness of the tent, and he stopped short.
* * *
Urko climbed up on the hood of the outermost jeep in the circle of vehicles. He saw a movement deep in the pass and shouted to his men. “There he is! Close in!”
Three squads began to trot through the sand and sunbaked rocks.
* * *
Jeff decided to make a run for the tent. Gorilla sentry or no, he had only so much time to get to the laser. His booted feet thudded on the sand, and then he was inside the tent!
“Hey, what are—a humanoid!”
A thickset gorilla wearing earphones rose from behind the portable command radio. He fumbled for the gun in his holster, but Jeff was too quick for him. Still warm from the desert sun, a rock Jeff had carried with him from the ridge, crashed against the side of the radio operator’s head, and the ape staggered drunkenly. As he fell, the earphones ripped from his head and he toppled two chairs.
Certain that his gorilla adversary was out cold, Jeff kicked aside the now bloody rock and lurched for the laser.
* * *
Bill Hudson stood in plain sight.
A nervous ape had fired again, but Bill saw that the shot was far off-target. He expected the gorilla outfit to try to capture him alive first; then would come the attempts to kill him. He heard voices echoing in the rock passage, the voices of the quickly advancing simian force.
“Hurry!”
“Get him quickly—the general is watching!”
Bill glanced up at the lava spire over him, then back at the figures of the advancing gorillas.
“Hurry, Jeff!” he muttered to himself.
* * *
Jeff swung the heavy drill to his shoulder.
Standing in the shade of the general’s tent, he adjusted the laser’s sights for maximum range, making the cross hairs pinpoint his target: the base of the lava spire, right over Bill Hudson’s head.
Then he pressed the firing stud.
* * *
Bill looked up just as the ruby-red beam flashed out. The base of the finger of lava exploded, and the gorillas below stopped in surprise. Bill heard one of them curse. The laser beam had cut quickly into the rock—a purpose for which it was specifically designed. Hot chips and ragged chips of the exploding rock showered into the cleft below. Several gorillas cried out in pain as the hot rock shower cascaded onto them.
Bill became alarmed again, however, when he saw that some of the gorillas were still running toward him. But there was a sudden sharp crack—almost a metallic sound—and then several more ripping, breaking, snapping explosions, and the undercut tower of rock began to topple.
The attacking gorillas bellowed in fear. Some tried to run back to the retreating detachment of apes. Some stood rooted in shock. And some continued their run straight toward Bill.
Then the broken spire crashed into the pass.
The thunder of the falling rock obliterated any other sound, including the screams of the trapped simians. The fallen rock crushed their bodies, wedged itself into the pass, and exploded great clouds of dust up and down its length.
The first escaping ape reached Bill, before the dust did, but he only stared at Bill with wide, frightened eyes and ran past without attempting to capture him.
The second ape was more dedicated to duty. His red-rimmed eyes filled with hate, the gorilla ran at Bill with arms spread wide. “You killed Girk!”
When the dusty, blood-streaked gorilla was almost upon him, Bill suddenly dropped to his knees. The gorilla fell over him, striking his head on a rock. Then the cloud of dust obliterated everything. Bill saw no more apes escape the fallen debris. Choking, he ran back out of the cloud of dust.
Good boy, Jeff! he thought.
* * *
General Urko swiveled his head around to look at the tent he had just vacated, a hundred yards behind him. He could see a dark figure holding the object Brutar had brought him. A ruby-red beam had winked out.
“What in the name of Kerchak!” Urko snapped at a nearby officer. “Captain Wimja, go back there and tell that crazy radio operator he’s under arrest! He just killed half my men!”
“Sir, he was probably trying to help!”
“That stupid ape has the brain of a humanoid! I want him arrested! We’ll have the court-martial just as soon as we capture this blasted Blue-Eyes! Then I’ll see the ape hung myself!”
“Yessir!”
“Mulla! Form up a column! We’ll have to go the long way around to get to the pass, but he can’t escape!”
“Yes, sir!”
Captain Mulla began shouting orders. Men piled into the trucks quickly, a little awed at what they had just seen.
Colonel Trafuna came up to the general and saluted smartly. “We’re prepared to go, sir!”
Urko glared at him. “I don’t need you for this, colonel. You and the other officers get busy on the plans to attack the humanoids’ caves when we leave the Forbidden Zone. And get me that report on my secret weapon!”
“Yes, sir!”
The colonel stepped back as the column of trucks and jeeps started off. They went northeast, to outflank the ring of rocky hills and ambush Blue-Eyes in the pass or in the plain beyond.
Trafuna started back toward the tent. “Come, we must prepare Urko’s next triumph!”
Other officers followed him toward the general’s tent.
Jeff saw eight or nine officers coming toward him as he crouched just under the tent. With them coming this way, I can’t slip away now without being seen! he thought, and clutched the laser. Looking around him, he tried, to think of a way out, but decide
d it was too late to do anything except hide behind the radio table.
“Wontor!!” Colonel Trafuna shouted as he came up the slope to the tent. “Captain Wontor, you blundering fool! Why did you use that device on—”
“Look, colonel! There’s Wontor—dead!” one of the other officers shouted, pointing.
“What’s going on here?” Trafuna snarled. “And where’s that device Sergeant Brutar found in the desert?”
“Who’s that behind the—?”
Jeff stood up and started firing.
* * *
General Urko’s command vehicle bounced and rattled over the trackless sands. The gorilla leader held on to the sides of the twisting jeep with a grip of steel.
“We’ll have to go all the way around this ridge to the other side,” he growled to Captain Mulla, “but we’ll beat him to it! Blue-Eyes will have to go on foot the rest of the way through the pass. He has no other way out!”
* * *
Jeff ran up the slope that led into the pass. His footsteps echoed in the cleft as he trotted along. He came upon the body of a broken-legged gorilla who had dragged himself away from the rock fall before he died. A little further, and Jeff came upon the great pile of broken stone that choked the pass.
Several feet and one bloody hand protruded from the rocks. None of them showed any signs of life.
Jeff put a hand to his mouth and shouted, “Bill! Are you all right?”
Jeff could barely hear his friend’s cry. “Hey! That you, Jeff?”
“Yeah! I’ve got the laser here!”
“I can’t climb up over the rocks! Too steep and too shaky!”
“Urko has gone around the ridge!” Jeff shouted. “We only have a few minutes before he’ll find out you aren’t running out the other side! If you can’t climb over that pile, I’ll cut through with the laser!”
“All right! Good idea!”
“Stand back! Over to the left! Uh—your right!”
“Okay, shoot!”
Jeff leveled the powerful laser drill at the rocks and pressed the stud. The red beam sliced into the soft pumice, cutting it like butter. The harder parts of the rock exploded, showering Jeff with hot fragments, but the beam cut steadily through. Steam and dust billowed from the cut.
“It’s through!” Bill cried.
Jeff started slicing the beam back and forth, cutting the rock into pieces to enlarge the hole. More choking steam and dust emerged, but Jeff grimly kept at it. He heard pieces of loose rock fall inside the tunnel he was cutting, and knew they were being reduced to gas by the deadly ray. Jeff stopped a moment and peered into the hole, watching the steam dissipate until the tunnel was clear.
But it still wasn’t big enough. He began to cut again, enlarging the narrow passage with long, carefully aimed shots.
* * *
Urko grunted as the jeep bounced high over a rock. The vehicle righted itself and sped on. Following the jeep, sharply jostled by invisible dust-clouded rocks, other gorilla trucks and jeeps roared across the desert. They rounded the last hill and turned west, toward the northern exit of the pass.
Urko laughed harshly to himself, then spoke to no one in particular. “I’ve waited a long time for this moment! Blue-Eyes, you troublesome beast! I’ve got you now!”
The jeep roared and battered its way onward, crunching low-growing cactus and small rocks under its wheels. Tiny lizards and dry-skinned snakes felt the vibrations far in advance and hopped and slithered into hiding.
* * *
The steam drifted out of the hole and Jeff shouted through to Bill. “Take a look!”
The black astronaut saw his blond partner stick his head into the hole at the other end. “Careful,” Jeff called. “The rocks are still pretty hot!”
“How long before they get cool enough?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know,” Jeff shouted into the tunnel. “This is my first time using this gun like this! Just keep testing, I guess!”
“Hey!” Bill’s voice was sharp with alarm. “I think I hear the apes coming!”
“Take off your shirt! Wrap it around your hands!”
Bill quickly peeled off his shirt and hopped up onto the slag that had flowed out of the laser-cut tunnel. Crouching, he began to walk through the hole. The rock was still hot, quickly heating up his boots. He started sweating in the confines of the yards-long tunnel.
“It’s like a sweatbox in here!” he called to Jeff.
“Never mind that!” shouted Jeff. “You’ve got to hurry! Get through here!”
Bill tiptoed as fast as he could, the bottoms of his boots smoking. He touched the sides of the tunnel only to keep his balance.
“Hurry!”
“I am hurrying! But these rocks are—”
There was a rumble and a thud, followed by a whooshing rain of gravel and dirt. Jeff looked into the tunnel and saw it filled with dust. He shouted Bill’s name.
“I’m okay,” Bill yelled back. “Just some rubble from above. This isn’t solid rock, you know.” Another dirt slide began and a solid thunk rang out, but it was behind Bill. He emerged from the cloud of dust and scrambled out into the open air of the pass.
“Thank God, you’re safe!” Jeff gasped. “I’ll just take the laser and collapse the—”
Another rumble followed Jeff’s firing, then the whole tunnel collapsed thunderously. Bill, dusty and sweating, looked at friend with his eyes wide.
Jeff grinned fleetingly at his friend. “Just in time.”
Bill followed Jeff back down the pass. “They won’t find a way through that, not now,” the blond astronaut said.
“I only hope we get back to Judy in time,” Jeff grunted as they started running.
* * *
“What took you so long?” Judy asked anxiously. “What happened?”
Bill shook his head. “No time to explain. We had a little trouble getting the laser back.” He turned to Krador. “The reactor cavern is directly below us, is that right?”
Krador nodded. “That is correct.”
Judy put her hand on Bill’s arm. “What’s your plan, Bill?”
He pointed down. “The other passages into the reactor room are blocked, right?”
Again Krador nodded. “Either by flowing lava, or they are just too hot or in danger of collapse.”
“All right,” Bill continued, “we’ll cut right through here and lower ourselves into the reactor room. With the laser we’ll blast a path into the side of an underground fault that shouldn’t be far from here—one of the faults that ran under old New York City. That vent will allow the lava to escape downward.”
Bill turned to Jeff, about to give the order to start, but was stopped by his expression.
Jeff looked up. “I’m not so sure we will.”
“What’s wrong?” Judy asked nervously.
Jeff pointed at an empty power cell compartment. “One of the energy cells is missing.”
“What happened to it?” Bill questioned, looking around. “Did the apes take it? Did it fall out?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Jeff replied. “It’s gone. I just hope we have enough power left to cut through into the fault.”
Krador turned to look at the television monitor, tuned still to the reactor room. The lava was flowing faster now, rising through the crack in the floor and spreading over it. The workbenches were burning, or had collapsed into the molten rock. Only the reactor, sitting on a raised platform of stone, still remained untouched.
“Come on,” Bill said. “We don’t have much time!”
* * *
General Urko’s armored column came slowly back around the ridge and returned to Red Leader One camp in a cloud of dust. The command jeep slowed to a halt outside the tent and Urko slumped out.
“That cursed humanoid eluded us again!” he snarled.
“Sir, maybe the patrol we left will turn him up hiding out there in the desert,” Captain Mulla suggested.
Urko glared at him. “If one patrol can do what our who
le force couldn’t do, I’d be quite surprised, captain.” Urko shook his head, ripped off his dusty leather helmet, and ran thick, stubby fingers through the matted fur on his head. “I’m convinced he got back this way, over that pile of rock—somehow.”
The general looked around, then ordered foot patrols to search the perimeter of the camp for any sign of the blue-eyed humanoid. Then, as he and his aide-de-camp walked up the slope to his tent, he ordered: “Get me a drink, Mulla!” As an afterthought he added, “Pour yourself one, too, you old battle-toad! Now, where are my officers I left behind to plan to attack the caves on our way back to Ape City?”
He halted abruptly.
Stunned by the sight of the slaughtered officers, he wailed, “Greak Kerchak! What in the name of all simian gods—!”
Mulla raced from one body to another. “Dead, sir. Every one. Cut down by some huge sword, I think.”
The general threw his helmet to the sandy floor of the tent. “By the claws of my ancestors! That humanoid will pay! All humanoids will pay!” He glared down at the bodies sliced into meat, and cursed fluently. “May his belly be spread for the birds! May his eyes shrivel into pits! May Kerchak chew on his legs! May his teeth be drilled with nails! Nearly my whole staff! Dead!” He slammed his fist down on the top of the radio cabinet fiercely. “They’ll die for this! And not quickly, not quickly at all!”
* * *
Cornelius and Zira were in Dr. Zaius’s study in Ape City. Cornelius paced up and down while his wife sat twisting one hand into the other.
“Now, when Doctor Zaius comes in,” Cornelius warned, “remember to talk about the humanoid in scientific terms.” He gave Zira a searching look. “We don’t want anyone to think we care about Blue-Eyes as much as we would, say, another ape.”
Zira’s hands stopped fluttering and she spoke with conviction. “Cornelius, I know how to act.”
“Yes, I know, Zira, I know. But this is important and—”
The door of the study opened and Zaius paused as he saw the pair. “Ah, yes… Cornelius… Zira… What do you want?”
Planet of the Apes Omnibus 4 Page 34