A cold, unreal sunlight.
And Brent stared.
And Nova shuddered against him. Helpless and afraid again.
For Brent, the universe had once more turned over.
His intellect dissolved into a thousand more little pieces.
They were on the outskirts of a city.
City.
If he could have imagined a place that a conceivable nuclear war in the year, say, 1990 might have devastated and then become a refuge of survivors trying to evade fallout, this would be that place. How else to account for the parts of a 2000-year-old original structure that now greeted his eyes? His and the girl’s.
He saw twentieth-century brick, stone and concrete, corroded sewer signs, showing through the basic foundations of a metropolis of predominantly white architecture, and the interior decor of a twenty-second-century catacomb complex scooped out of ancient foundations. Narrow streets, more like white corridors, twisted and turned between buildings with windowless walls. There was an unearthly emptiness and nakedness, a lack of ornamentation and color. It was as if a world of impersonal stone greeted them.
“Are we in a city?” Brent whispered. “Or a cemetery?”
Nova stared at him, taking her eyes away from the dead metropolis. She still couldn’t understand his words but she had become very sensitive to his moods and emotions. Fear had made them companions.
Wordlessly she slipped her hand into his.
Brent couldn’t take his eyes away from the dead city.
It was a stone monster out of his wildest nightmares.
* * *
At the Research Complex in Ape City, the scarlet-clad minister had lingered to listen to a heated discussion between Minister of Science Dr. Zaius and General of the Armies Ursus. Though the minister was also an orangutan, it was very clear where his sentiments lay. Zaius felt as though he was boxed in by enemies.
“Supposing they turn out to be our superiors?” Zaius was reinforcing his point.
General Ursus unrolled a map, his expression pugnacious.
“Their territory is no larger than ours. We shall not be outnumbered.”
“I was not referring to their numbers,” Zaius said patiently. “My supposition concerned their intelligence.”
Ursus stared at him, his gimlet eyes cold.
“Then your supposition was blasphemous, Dr. Zaius.”
The minister nodded grandly, solemnly agreeing.
“The Lawgiver has written in the Sacred Scrolls that God created Apes in His own image to be Masters of the Earth. We are His Chosen,” he reminded Dr. Zaius.
Ursus glowered at the doctor.
“Do you doubt that?” Ursus snapped.
“What I doubt,” Zaius said softly, deftly parrying, “is your interpretation of God’s intention. Has He ordained that we should make war?”
Ursus rose, pointing with the partly unrolled map.
“Has He ordained that we should die of starvation?”
The minister chimed in again. “Has He ordained that we should make peace with the Human race?”
Zaius brushed that aside. “They are mere animals.” It is Zaius who says this.
Ursus snorted, stabbing at the map with a black forefinger. “And these?”
“They are unknown,” Zaius said.
“A godly Ape,” the minister said unctuously, “is not afraid of the unknown.”
“I,” said Zaius icily, “am not afraid. I am circumspect.”
Ursus jeered slightly, assuming an air of politic joviality, but Zaius was not fooled; there were still those gimlet eyes.
“Still not too circumspect to ride with me on the Day?”
Dr. Zaius seemed to consider that very carefully.
“No.” He too rose to his feet. “As a scientist I am also curious.”
* * *
Zira and Cornelius had worked far into the night on their human guinea pigs. Cornelius took copious notes while his wife ambitiously strove to make one of the caged subhumans learn the power of speech. Zira had worked long and hard on one particularly clever human, making lip gestures and sounds through the bar of the cage. The male human had mimicked her lip movements, heroically.
“Ma-ma-ma-ma—” Zira tried and tried again.
The human had tried—but no sounds came forth.
In frustrated fury, Zira had finally given up, turning away in disappointment.
“Oh, Cornelius,” she whimpered. “If I could teach one of them to talk…”
Cornelius nodded sympathetically.
She had set herself an impossible task to perform.
Teaching a human anything was never easy.
8
SPECTERS
There was a stone fountain in the center of the incredible graveyard-city. Brent did not notice it until, magically, it began to spout water. A steady, spurring stream which suddenly and gracefully began to spiral before his eyes. The tiny rippling sounds it made drew him and the girl like a magnet. In the harsh glare of the white stone city with its atmosphere of total antiseptic reality, they both began to drink. Nova lapped at the fluid greedily, like a thirsty dog. Brent drank more slowly, finally straightening when he was sated. Nova continued to drink. Brent watched her.
And then…
Abruptly, methodically, with no conscious thought of the movement, he reached down, placed both hands around Nova’s neck and forced her head beneath the surface of the pool surrounding the stone fountain.
Nova jerked spasmodically, her entire length stiffening. Brent tightened the grip of his hands, digging into the soft flesh of the girl’s neck. He pressed down, mercilessly.
The water rippled, coalesced, shimmered, shattered and rippled into a million extensions of unreality.
Brent increased his hold. Nova spluttered, fighting. Trying to fight back. Drowning…
Through a dim haze, Brent saw his own reflection in the agitated waters. Two reflections, really.
The one reflected in the waters of the fountain was an insane parody of his own face. A mask, depicting some intense struggle of mental combat between some outer and inner force over which he had no conscious control. He continued to hold the girl’s head below the surface of the fountain pool.
His other face mocked back at him.
Full of pity, horror and astonishment.
The reflected other face was distorted into the visage of some strange monster. A demented, rabid animal with bared teeth and glaring eyes.
Brent’s mentality rocked into chaos.
The outer force was saying: Put my hands around her throat. Hold her head down in the water till she dies.
The inner force was fighting back with: Take my hands off her throat. Get out of my head!
Brent groaned, mingling a gasp and a grunt, as both forces locked for possession of his soul.
With his hands still clasped about the girl’s neck, Brent’s voice tore savagely from his throat.
“Take… put my hands off… round her throat… hold her… throat… get out of my head… down in the water… till she…” his voice rose in a roar of sound, “DIES!” And then, “No…! NO!”
He wrenched his hands from her throat with a Herculean effort, reeling away from her. For a terrible moment he swayed on his feet, dumbly staring. He felt an appalled sense of horror. Nova came up from the pool, splashing, choking, gagging. She sagged against the stone circular side of the fountain, goggling at him with mingled terror and amazement. Brent fought himself not to approach her. The war in his mind was still raging. Kill her. Don’t kill her. He shook his head like a confused dog, fighting the outer pressures that wanted to push him toward her, destruction-bound. But Nova remained motionless, mutely staring at him.
Brent’s lips barely moved.
“Nova, keep away from her throat… her bare throat in the water until you get out…” His hand came up in a wild wave. As if pushing something away from himself. He stopped up his ears with both hands. “Get out!” he raged at the silence all around the
m. “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!”
He backed away from the girl frantically.
She stared up at him, her mouth hanging open.
He pushed out with both hands again.
The fountain—and Nova—receded…
Suddenly, his shoulders had touched something.
Huge double doors, abruptly behind him, loomed large and mysterious. Oddly unlocked. Brent’s athletic figure swung the doors open. He forced himself back, over a dim threshold, glad of anything that would keep him from harming the girl. Nova grew smaller in his erratic vision. He stopped, only for a second, to call back to her. For she was taking a hesitant step toward him, slender arms outspread.
“Wait for me—” Brent whispered, still fighting the forces engulfing him. “Nova—!” His brain was on fire. Her figure wavered in his sight. Shouting hysterically, Brent crossed the dark threshold and slammed the double doors behind him to close out the horror in his head. To block off Nova from his violence.
She disappeared from view.
Brent hung exhausted against the curved metal door grips on the inside and fought to catch his breath. For a long moment he wrestled with his inner and outer wills. Then he quietened. The strange fit had momentarily passed. He sucked air into his lungs and shuddered. Then he pulled himself erect once more. Turning, he surveyed the interior of this building he had fled into as a sanctuary from insanity.
The unrealities again ruled.
Even here.
He was in a cathedral.
In direct contrast to the bright white glare without, here was only blessed gloom. Brent’s eyes roved quickly.
He saw a row of wooden pews flanking a great arched nave. There was a threshold up front, past the choir stalls, beyond the pews. He saw a prie-dieu directly below a high altar of some kind. Brent blinked in the occult semidarkness.
There was a man standing on the sacred threshold up front.
A white-robed, white-hooded apparition kneeling in homage or religious fealty of some kind. A figure as still as any statue. The figure had not moved when the great doors had slammed shut. Brent, for all his dazed condition, recognized in that tiny unimportant fact a universal truth and oddity: why shouldn’t a cathedral door always be open to devotees?
Brent watched the hooded figure, not daring to breathe. Or even speak. The hush of the place was emotionally demoralizing.
The hood lifted upward, the robed arms spread out like bat wings and a sonorous voice suddenly intoned: “I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God!” The voice rang with the clarity and persuasion of unshakable faith and belief. Brent found his eyes ranging upward, following the direction of the stentorian declaration.
Slowly, from the space of darkness above the high altar, an eerie light appeared. Growing, expanding, as if on a rheostat; the gloom transformed from dim illumination to a full, blazing intensity. The outflung arms of the hooded figure held in a posture of crucifixion. And utter adoration.
Brent saw what the new light held.
Not a statue of Christ.
Not even some strange unknown pagan god.
The hooded figure’s exhortations were for something else.
The ultimate blasphemy.
Something mounted and enthroned and positioned with all the care and reverence of any highly esteemed religious curio.
A Twentieth-Century Atom Bomb.
Perfectly preserved and slung, like some great inverted cross, between two supporting brackets of hammered gold, it hung from the arched nave in all its illuminated wonder. On one of its impressive steel fins there were stenciled the two Greek letters: ALPHA and OMEGA.
The Beginning and the End.
Brent stared in mounting horror from the depths of the double doors. “In a church—?” His racked whisper was alien to his own ears. It was as if someone else had spoken.
A tiny scratch of sound came on the door behind him. Back to the barrier, Brent suddenly drew taut. The scratching continued. He closed his eyes. “Nova?” The scratching burbled into a flurry of sounds. Brent slid both hands into the door grips, blocking the portals with his body, his muscles congealing into lead. He didn’t budge. “Keep away, Nova,” he whispered urgently to the door. “Keep away from me—and from here…”
But the tapping had become almost a crescendo, punctuated with fist-pounding and low moans of appeal. Brent tightened his resolve; perspiration broke out on his forehead. He couldn’t let the girl in here, no matter what happened…
The hooded figure on the dais had turned.
An ornate panel at his side, with three jeweled buttons of emerald, topaz and ruby set into the top of the prie-dieu, was pressed. Brent saw the gesture, realizing that the figure had heard Nova’s attempts to get in.
The figure rose to its full height and made another gesture. Brent started. He knew somehow, with some weird sense of comprehension, that what he was seeing was the Sign of the Bomb.
An inverted Sign of the Cross. With the figure making a vertical downward gesture to depict the body of the Bomb and then two lateral gestures to indicate the fins at its base. The supreme sacrilege! A sign from Hell.
The whole cathedral suddenly flooded with new light.
Even as Nova continued to pound away, the hooded figure came down from the dais and stalked toward Brent huddled at the doors of the strange place of worship. And when the pounding stopped, with Brent blinking in the sudden fresh glare of illumination, the hooded figure advanced like a specter. Brent wondered at the silence beyond the door. He started to open it, then, checked himself and turned to confront the advancing figure. Nova was forgotten.
The hood framed a face of startling purity.
The man drew closer and halted, staring at Brent.
Brent stared back.
He assumed that the man was the verger of this strange cathedral. But beyond that, the appearance of the face before him was astounding.
The man was tall, of an indecipherable age, but his face was one of great beauty. Unwrinkled skin, as smooth as marble, deep-set luminous eyes in shadowed sockets, with the barest accentuation of lip line, which somehow makes a man or a woman look sexy. The man’s mouth seemed to speak. To say something. But Brent heard nothing, orally.
“What did you say?” Brent asked fiercely, frightened again.
The verger had said nothing.
He merely stood there, regarding Brent.
“What do you mean, there’s no point?” Brent answered the unspoken words he heard in his own brain. “Will they hurt her?”
Again the verger’s lips did not move.
“Maybe not physically,” Brent agreed. “But you can hurt here.” He tapped his own head. “I know.”
The verger spoke his unheard words.
“Yes, it’s gone now,” Brent answered. “But outside—” Suddenly he twitched. A great spasm took hold of him. His eyes leaped. “Your lips don’t move. Your lips don’t move… but I can hear… no, not hear—I mean I know what you are thinking.”
The fixed grin left the verger’s face.
Brent nodded. “I saw nothing. You were in darkness.”
The verger spoke again, silently.
Brent looked quickly over his shoulder. His mind raced to remain calm, to keep pace with this new-found unreality.
Two men had appeared at the double doors behind him. Unarmed, but strangely alien and enigmatically marble-faced; two more denizens of this strange and terrible city. They touched Brent’s elbows briefly with the fingertips of velvet-textured hands.
“All right, all right,” he muttered, not resisting.
Unable to understand, incapable of assessing anything, he allowed himself to be led out of the cathedral. The verger remained where he was. Shadowy, inscrutable. But now there was a worried gleam in the deep-set luminous eyes.
There was no sign of Nova beyond the big doors.
But around the stone fountain, capering in the awful white glare of the city’s atmosphere, were a dozen or more children of many races and ages. Thei
r squeals of pleasure sounded grotesque in the daylight. Brent restrained a shudder. The children had ringed the fountain, romping in a dancing circle, their voices gaily blending in a terrible refrain:
Ring-a-ring o’neutrons
A pocketful of positrons
A fission!
A fission!
We all fall down!
On the last word, they spilled backward, forming a star shape, and lay deathly still. Like some dreadful parody of an old Busby Berkeley musical dance routine from one of the old Warner Brothers movies of the thirties. Brent shuddered again, remembering—it was only a game, wasn’t it? But…
The silent guards egged him on, courteously almost, gently prodding his elbows again. Brent kept on moving. The playing children were soon lost somewhere behind him. The ghastly white complex of the metropolis engaged all of his attention. The tomblike buildings jutting sheer from the barren earth. The all-encompassing glare, of white and cold daylight. Dimly he could hear the echoing words of the playing children as they picked up yet another chorus of the deadly song. It sounded like something they had learned by rote. A Child’s Garden of Verses set to the meaning and reality of a terrible code of destruction and doom. Armageddon set to Mother Goose!
It was terrifying.
And he had no idea where Nova was. Or what they might have done to her. Whoever They were.
They!
In his torn-apart and beleaguered intellect, he was no longer able to make any judgments or solve any mental problems. His entire universe of consciousness and stable thinking was awry; he had lost all sense of rhythm, balance and common sense.
He was only hurtingly aware of one great truth.
He had fled from the mockery of the Great Apes into something perhaps twice as alien, a dozen times more hazardous. A hopeless morass of terror, horror and who knew what else?
Meaning—he had jumped from the frying pan directly into the fire.
As perhaps—Taylor had?
It was too early to tell. Too early to tell anything.
He didn’t know.
He might never know.
Blindly, obediently, he suffered himself to be led by the marble-faced guards to another part of this Crazy House forest.
All he did wish, and hope for, with every fiber of whatever of his being still belonged to him by right of his own individuality, was that the girl was all right.
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