“Well, let’s hope Judy can manage.” Jeff anxiously watched Judy sweep by the landing site, then bank around for a real approach.
The P-40 leveled off, and they could see the wing braking flaps coming down to slow the descent.
“Now, just hold her in there…” Jeff urged softly.
The wheels touched down and the plane bounced, making both Bill and Jeff jump, but then the craft set down solidly and rolled to a halt—almost at the end of the meadow! The two astronauts broke into a run.
“Perfect!” Jeff cried.
“We have to hurry on!” Bill shouted as they leaped across the grassy field. “Urko’s soldiers won’t be held up forever by that jam-up!”
* * *
Their jeep destroyed, Cornelius and Zira stood near the smoke-blackened bus that was to take them back to Ape City. Dr. Zaius, who looked rather uncomfortable, had cornered them.
“I have a feeling,” he said wearily, his eyes ranging from side to side as he watched the disheveled apes boarding the bus, “that it must have been Blue-Eyes.” He looked at Cornelius and Zira, his expression curious but unreadable. “Who else could have stolen the sky craft?”
Cornelius snorted. “Well, Doctor Zaius, if that Lark person can learn to fly, any ape can! It was perhaps some renegade.”
Zira spoke up. “Blue-Eyes may have a certain crude intelligence, yes. But remember, doctor, he’s only a humanoid.”
Zaius pinned her with his eyes. “Is he?” Zira compressed her lips as Zaius continued. “I suspect he might be more… much more.”
Cornelius started to speak. “But, Doctor Zaius—”
Zaius confronted both scientists with a stern expression. “Cornelius! Zira!” His voice was a warning. “It is a dangerous game you are playing. If you lose, I will not be able to help you!”
The two chimpanzees were silent. They exchanged nervous glances as Zaius turned and boarded the bus, with them, for the trip back to Ape City.
* * *
Bill backed up the truck carefully, watching Jeff on one side and Judy on the other, as they directed him with hand signals. Behind him, being carefully backed into a low, shallow cave near the meadow while the humanoids looked on, was the P-40.
“A little more, Bill… More… Okay! Stop!”
Bill cut the engine and jumped out. He helped Jeff unfasten the plane’s tailskid from the truck, then drove, the truck away, and back over to the road. By the time he returned, his two companions, with some help from the humanoids, had piled brush across the entrance.
“Don’t make it too obvious,” Bill said. “Just kinda like the stuff happened to blow here and catch. Better put some out there, so it isn’t all crowded up in one spot.”
They worked hard, and in a few minutes Bill called a halt. “That should do it.”
“Yeah,” Jeff agreed. “I think our little one-plane air force is safe here. Just as soon as we brush away these tire marks.”
As Bill helped Jeff and Judy use branches to smooth over the tire marks he said, “All I can say is, one plane is more than they have!”
Judy tossed aside the branch she had been using. “But there’s only a quarter of a tank of gas left.”
They walked down the road to where Bill had parked the truck, and glanced back, confident that the plane was completely camouflaged.
“It looks all right,” Judy said hopefully. “I’d hate to have it fall into the apes’ hands again. If we had any explosives, I’d booby-trap it!”
Bill started the truck and put it in gear.
“Wouldn’t that be strange?” Judy mused, speaking almost to herself.
“What, Judy?” Jeff asked, slamming the door.
She pointed a thumb back at the cave. “Strange that that old relic of the past might somehow help us get back home…”
Bill shrugged and put the truck into motion. What, after all, was “home”?
* * *
The truck, with its load of frightened humanoids, bumped and rattled over the road, which by now had become barely a path.
“This must be a little-used patrol road,” Jeff said through clenched teeth, fighting the wheel, for the truck had a tendency to twist and jam itself into the ruts.
“And it’s bound to run out soon,” Judy said. “It’s gotten less and less traveled as we’ve gone along.”
“So, afterward we walk,” Bill concluded as he studied the landscape out the window. “The country is getting greener, and there’s more food—that is, berries. By my calculations, we must be nearing the river that flows out of the valley with the caves, where the humanoids originally lived. We’ve come southeast, and should run into it as soon as we’ve passed Mount Apemore. Maybe we can make boats and use the river to get these passengers of ours down to the forest south of the Forbidden Zone. Nova and the other humanoids will be getting worried. We’ve been gone for some days now—”
Jeff’s alert voice interrupted him. “Bill,” the black said, “look!”
From the tone of his friend’s voice, Bill knew he’d spotted trouble. He turned to look where the dark-skinned astronaut was pointing with a free arm.
“A scouting patrol!” Bill moaned.
“Two jeeps and five men—I mean gorillas,” Judy said.
“They’ve seen us!” Jeff warned.
The jeeps were on an opposite hill, but they started down toward the astronauts’ truck at once.
“Step on it!” Judy cried.
“I’m going as fast as I can!” Jeff answered. “Those lighter jeeps can go where this monster would get bogged down in second!”
“Speed isn’t the answer here,” Bill said calmly, reaching down to pull up the laser from between his feet, where he had carefully stashed it.
“You’re—you’re going to kill them outright?” Judy gasped.
Bill was checking the weapon, but he glanced sidelong at the pretty astronaut. “Yes, if I have to. What do you think they would do if they caught us?”
Judy gulped. “I don’t like to think about that!”
“Taking life isn’t my idea of fun, Judy, but this is self-preservation.”
“Just shoot straight, brother,” Jeff said, grunting as the truck still twisted in the ruts of the road.
They bounced wildly for a moment, and the engine stalled as the wheels jammed. Jeff worked at the starter but the engine wouldn’t catch.
“Don’t run the battery down,” Bill advised. He opened the door and jumped to the ground. “The jeeps are in that gully. I’ll run down and set up an ambush for them. You stay in the truck. They may think you’re a gorilla group.”
Bill slammed the door and started running toward the thicket at the edge of the road.
Jeff continued to try to start the truck, but the engine wouldn’t catch. “We must have shaken something loose,” Jeff said, opening his door.
“Bill said not to get out!” Judy shouted.
“I’ll be on this side, away from them,” Jeff replied as he jumped around to the front of the truck and quickly opened the hood, then slipped back around to the side and peered under it.
* * *
Bill had run among the bushes lining the road and dived in to he under a thorny shrub that offered good concealment. He thumbed the safety off the laser and brought it to his shoulder. A quick glance at the power setting showed that the solar receptor had brought the batteries to full power and that it was geared to millipulse setting that could slice the jeeps in two.
Bill could hear the jeeps grinding up the slope to his left. He blinked, readying himself for the moment to come.
No matter how Jeff clowns around about us being heroes, he thought, I still get scared. He grinned briefly to himself, then continued musing. Fear can put a setting on a man, too. Setting him up for what he has to face. A little fear does no harm… as long as it doesn’t panic him, or start him running.
Bill licked his dry lips. The jeeps were closer now. He suddenly remembered something he had heard one time, back when he was learning
to fly: “Heroes can’t imagine their own death, and that’s why they are heroes.” Bill did not agree with it. PEOPLE can’t imagine their own death—not just heroes. Or what people call heroes…
The blond astronaut knew that though his laser was highly advanced and very deadly, it was by no means the supreme weapon. The alert eyes of a gorilla might spot him in the thicket and he could die from a rifle bullet or a rock slammed into his head just as easily as from an atomic bomb or a laser.
It isn’t cowardly to wish for life, Bill thought. It might be cowardly to beg for it, or to give up something much bigger than you in exchange for it. You SHOULD wish for it, all right, and fight for it to the last breath… but when you know it’s all over—well, go with dignity.
He clenched the laser and sighted along the barrel, aiming at the place where the jeeps were likely to appear at any moment. The courageous thing to do is to face up to your weaknesses, he thought. To fear death is normal. To fear fear is a weakness. He took a stronger grip on the weapon and got ready. The jeeps were coming up the hill.
As Bill took aim at the first vehicle an old English proverb popped into his head: “A hero is the one who was afraid to run away.” He grinned and pressed the firing stud.
The beam sliced through the radiator and engine of the lead jeep; then Bill angled it up and took out the driver. The jeep swerved, bringing the jeep’s other occupant right through the still-pulsing beam. The jeep crashed into the thick brush on one side of the road. Its engine stalled and one half of a body fell out.
Alerted, the second jeep swerved to a stop and the three gorillas in it jumped out and fired toward the source of the red beam even as Bill swung the deadly laser toward them. His first shot exploded their gas tank, showering the area with flaming pieces of metal and rubber. His second sliced through the three apes themselves.
As Bill rose from under a sheltering bush, he noted that a bullet had snapped off a twig only an inch from his face. He stepped carefully into the road, his eyes still searching for survivors.
A minute’s survey told him all five of the soldiers were dead. Their rifles were either burned or rendered useless by the laser’s silent sword. Bill put the first jeep in neutral and shoved it back until it touched the now smoldering second jeep. Though he tried to avoid looking at the severed bodies, his stomach grew queasy at the sight.
Back at the truck, he told Jeff and an anxious Judy, “I hope it will look as if they had an accident. We don’t want the Gorilla Army to know about us being here—or about the laser, if we can help it.”
Jeff was wiping his oily hands on a piece of waste paper from beneath the truck’s seat. “Well, ole buddy, now we walk. This thing is finished. It was almost out of gas anyway.” He looked back at the column of black, oily smoke rising from the gorillas’ jeeps. “That’ll bring them fast. Let’s split, hero.”
“Stop that hero stuff,” Bill said. “I’m not a hero, I…” He grinned: “I just scare easy and have fighting reflexes.”
Jeff grinned back at him, and the three astronauts urged the humanoids out of the truck and started them walking quickly away.
“They’ll trace the truck in time, but by then… well, maybe we’ll be far enough away,” Bill said hopefully.
“Thanks for that ‘maybe,’ tiger,” Judy joked.
“Shut up and walk,” Bill replied. “We have a good day’s hike before we reach the river.”
They went down the slope and into the trees, three rather dirty and disheveled humans with about fifteen fur-clad humanoids behind, following obediently.
* * *
Jeff thumbed the checking switch on the laser and read the dial. “It’s getting a little hot,” he said, and put the weapon down.
“No wonder!” Judy said, gesturing toward the trees he had deftly sliced off at ground level.
The fallen trees had been cut at random; the astronauts did not want an ape patrol to run across an obvious timber cut. Furthermore, the ground-level stumps were then covered with casual-looking piles of pebbles or a single large, flat rock.
In some cases the humanoids had been directed to transplant small bushes so that they would grow over the severed bases of the trees.
“Only a laser could cut things off, so neatly and so low,” Jeff said with satisfaction. “Not even any chips are left to give us away.”
Jeff had also trimmed away the limbs of the trees, leaving only long, post-like trunks. Then, most of the limbs had been carried off for use as firewood and their twigs and leaves scattered.
“Well, we won’t be around here very long,” Judy said, “so it won’t really matter.”
Jeff handed Judy the laser. “Watch this, will you? When that dial turns from red to the cooler green, give me a call, huh? I’m going down to see how they’re doing with the rafts.”
Judy nodded and cradled the precious laser—that valuable “relic” from their own time, brought along in the Venturer. Jeff walked down to the riverbank through a small grove of trees.
It’s a beautiful day, he thought. Too bad it has to be spoiled by the fear of gorillas coming over the hill at any moment. He shivered, knowing that a horrible fate awaited all of them if Urko and his gorilla army ever caught them unawares.
Jeff saw Bill supervising the construction of the rafts. Two were already finished and were tied to trees along the bank with fiber ropes woven by the females. Two more rafts were under construction, and the tree trunks Jeff had just felled were being dragged down the muddy bank to be joined with others.
“Good work!” Jeff said to the humanoids as they went past. They work hard, he thought, once you get the idea through to them.
But in a curious way the humanoids made Jeff uncomfortable. They looked so human—they were so human!—but their inability to speak and their almost animal-like fear of apes and even of others like themselves who talked made them somewhat unhuman to Jeff.
The black astronaut laughed to himself as he climbed down the muddy bank toward Bill. Maybe that’s why Frankenstein and Dracula were such marvelous horror figures, he thought. They were human… almost. They had human form—almost—and it was this “almostness” that seemed to frighten people.
Jeff remembered an old black-and-white Brian Donlevy film he had seen on television. It was one of a Series about this British scientist and adventurer, Quatermass. A capsule from space landed on Earth and a man opened it and got a spot of something sticky on his hand. He didn’t think much of it until the spot grew… and grew… and grew, until there was a huge blob of what looked like rubber cement covering his whole hand. To hide his deformity and what he had done, the man hid his hand in a raincoat. But still it grew. In the end, Jeff remembered, the thing consumed the man—kept growing and growing, feeding upon anything and everything, until it ended up filling the whole inside of Westminster Abbey, a gigantic blob with tubes and sores and other things hanging out of it. But the great, icky blob in the cathedral wasn’t as frightening to Jeff as the man who was 95 percent human and just a touch unhuman, because of his gruesome hand.
The rush through time to this distant, hostile, and strange future version of Earth had made Jeff uneasy and distrustful. Everything seemed turned around, and strange. Intelligent apes, strange sea animals, mutated humans, P-40’s more than two millennia out of place, volcanoes where New York used to be…
Jeff shook his head and walked up to Bill, who was standing ankle-deep in mud, his hands on his hips, watching the humanoids wrestle another log into position.
“Tie it fast!” Bill called out, making a knotting motion with his hands. He glanced up as Jeff sloshed closer. “Hi. Finished?”
“Almost. Just thought I’d baby the laser and give it a cool. How much longer before the rafts are finished?”
“A day, at the most.”
Jeff glanced around at the hills. “We’ve got to hurry. Urko may attack at any minute.”
“If he finds us…” Bill reminded his friend.
Jeff, squinted at the hills. �
�Oh, he’ll find us. In time. God knows, he has enough patrols out!”
“I’ve got scouts up on the hills. They’ll come running down at first sign.”
“Jeff!” It was Judy calling. Jeff turned to see her pointing at the laser. He nodded at her-and turned back to Bill. “It’s ready again. I’ll be finished in a short time; then we can both work on putting the last two escape rafts together.”
Bill called out to several of the humanoids who were floating a log into place. “No, no!” He made turning-around gestures. “Alternate the big and little ends!” He glanced at Jeff. “Oh, boy. I’m turning into a pantomimist! If we ever get back to Houston, I’m going to be really great, trying to tell someone how to fly a rocket with my hands!”
Jeff laughed, and climbed up the bank to walk back to Judy.
As he took up the laser, he got down on his knees and selected a tree. With two quick spurts, he cut a notch in the tree about a foot off the ground. Then he looked around to be certain no one was in the drop zone. He took aim, shouted “Timber!” and sliced through the tree trunk like butter. It fell with a crash, and Jeff aimed the laser at the ground to slice off the stub.
As he was getting up, Judy smiled at him. “You just love yelling ‘Timber!’ don’t you?”
Jeff grinned back. “You bet! Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to cut down a big tree and watch it go smack! But today I’m getting an overdose of tree-cutting.”
“Want me to spell you?”
“No. You could go see how the women are doing, though.”
Judy walked through the sparse grove to where the women were building up a supply of baskets—crudely woven from palm fronds—and bags made of animal skins. Most of the children were scouring the hills and valleys for berries, fruit, nuts, and edible roots, as well as checking their little traps for wild rabbits or other small animals they might have snagged.
One old woman, Judy noticed, was stuffing a wooden carving into one of the skin bags. Holding the wrist of the woman, she tried to pantomime her reason for insisting that the object be left behind. When the woman protested, Judy seized the carving.
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