Albina stirred anew. Silky, sinister, maddeningly lovely.
“We’ve caught some of their scouts. Hideous creatures. We had them here—precisely where you’re standing. But either their skulls are too thick. Or they actually know nothing…”
“And neither do I,” Brent cut her off violently. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
The Negro laughed. It was a very unpleasant sound.
He gazed at his white wall again.
On it, Nova materialized.
Caspay said gently, “You make me very sad, Mr. Brent.”
Brent looked from the Negro to Caspay, frowning. His mind tried to find an answer. And then, amazingly, he saw Nova being brought into the chamber, struggling between another set of implacable guards. The girl was clawing, scratching, but the guards might have been zombies. Nova, despite her torn garments, or perhaps because of them, looked more paganly desirable than ever. Brent bunched his fists, trembling.
“She can’t help you,” he blurted. “She can’t even talk. Don’t harm her…”
Albina made a low, feline sound in her silky throat and motioned regally to the guards who now released Nova. The girl, crying, ran headlong into Brent’s arms. He clasped her to him, reveling in the feel of her once more. He had ached to hold her again, without knowing it. Or realizing why.
“Of course not, Mr. Brent,” Albina purred. “We never harm anyone. You are going to harm her.” Her ivory face pulsed sensually. Her exquisite bosom rose and fell as she breathed deeply.
Smiling sadistically, his great black face wreathed in onyx power, the Negro closed his eyes. A grim Golem created for torment, dedicated to the art of cruelty.
Brent went into action like an automaton.
Mendez the Twenty-Sixth, royally purple and majestic, watched with great attention from his central position on the dais.
He and his four inquisitors, red, blue, green and white.
The weird magic of the wall shattered all that was left of Brent’s power, to fight back.
The chamber looked down on madness.
10
MASKS
Brent closed in on Nova.
He took her in his arms and unexpectedly kissed her on the trembling mouth. The Negro kept his eyes tightly closed. Mendez and the others watched, waiting. Their faces were a study in expectancy. Brent was oblivious of them. All of his being, his soul and his mind and body, was centralized on Nova. The girl in his arms.
The chamber held the odd tableau, like a pin point in the march of time, freezing the moment for all eternity itself.
Brent’s kiss was tender at first. Then some raging passion consumed him. Nova, bewildered, rode along with the first wave of bodily hunger embroiling her and Brent in this fantastic embrace.
The Negro’s eyes remained shut.
The kiss went from the loving to the lustful.
And then from the lustful to the lethal.
For all her unschooled, uncivilized, unsophisticated naivete, Nova sensed the difference. Brent caught her fast in a viselike hold that was all cruelty and mad desire. Nova recoiled in his arms, trying to shake him off, to run, to hide. Brent was remorseless. Now he had her trapped. He was pinching her nostrils, suffocating her mouth with his own. His other hand was digging into her flesh, tearing at her full breasts. He kept on hammering at her, cruelly hurting her until her weak struggles grew even weaker.
And the Negro did not open his eyes.
“Tell us about the apes, Mr. Brent,” the fat man said in a loud, clear voice.
The Negro’s eyes blinked open.
Brent released Nova, suddenly. She slipped from his grasp to the stone floor, sprawling in a lifeless spill of arms and legs. Brent stared down at her dumbly, appalled.
“Tell us about the apes,” the fat man repeated his request.
Brent fought to regain his mind; a compound of bewildered horror and returning intelligence. He knew he had to talk but somehow he also knew he must lie. Anything to save Nova from a possible death and the Bomb from potential activation. These people, whatever they were, no matter how intelligent and advanced, were all mad! Mad!
Shrilly, he found his voice. Anything to keep the Negro from closing his eyes again.
“The apes are a primitive, semiarticulate and underdeveloped race whose weapons have not progressed beyond the club and the sling!”
“You’re lying,” the fat man interposed, “and we know it!”
Caspay spoke up. “The ape scouts had rifles, Mr. Brent.”
Brent said nothing to that. Wearily, the Negro closed his eyes.
Brent raised a brutal foot above Nova’s insensate body. Within him rockets exploded, pain flashed, terrible ideas and thoughts took tangible shapes and forms.
His chest was on fire. Still he struggled against bringing his foot down to smash that lovely, defenseless figure.
“They should fall… an easy prey…” he gasped, “to stamp on the many peaceful weapons at your dispose… of her with your foot on her belly and stamp… GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” he snarled at the eyes-shut Negro who loomed above him.
The fat man spoke again when the Negro reopened his eyes.
“Tell us again about the apes, Mr. Brent. The first time—was not quite true, was it?”
“How do you know?” Brent raged at him. “How do you know?”
Quickly he knelt beside Nova, cradling her head in his hand, his senses all whirling, convoluting, pinwheeling riotously.
From behind the inquisitors, the wall threw up more projections. Taylor again. Taylor stumbling. Taylor heroically lost…
Nova, coming to in Brent’s arms, saw the wall from her position on the floor. Five images of Taylor, in red, white, blue, green and purple, sliding into identifiable focus. Her eyes widened, her lush mouth tried to form the name, “Tay-lor.” Brent could not see or understand her. He was too concerned with the terrible thought that he might have harmed her. Suddenly she lifted a feeble hand, trying to point at the far wall.
Simultaneously, the inquisitors lowered their eyes. The wall images vanished.
Brent saw only the bright white-nothingness when his own eyes sought what Nova was seeing.
Caspay smiled ingratiatingly.
“Now—what may we hope for in the way of help?”
“Nothing,” Brent muttered. “Unless you set us free. Me—and her.”
Caspay’s smile hardened subtly.
“You are free, Mr. Brent. Free to do what we will.”
Mendez the Twenty-Sixth made a motion with his hand.
“Now,” he commanded.
The fat man said, “Tell us about the apes, Mr. Brent.”
Brent took a long pause. He looked at Nova, looked at the council, and then shrugged helplessly.
“The apes are marching on your city,” he said quietly.
A great silence descended on the Chamber of Interrogation. The five robed figures digested the information, each to his own intensity. The opposite wall came alive again with varying degrees of color.
Brent hugged Nova to him, glad only of the fact that she was still alive.
That they both were.
He could feel her heart beating like a bird’s against his chest.
* * *
Ape City was aquiver with the sounds of an army in motion. Riding together at the head of long columns of mounted horsemen and rolling gun carriages, were General Ursus and Dr. Zaius. Behind them, the tramp of feet, the pound of horses’ hooves and the clatter of arms sounded through the streets and roadways of the settlement. The Grand Army of the Apes was on the march at last. Trooping past the house of Zira and Cornelius, taking the same uphill country route to the Forbidden Zone as had Brent and Nova. Ursus was in his glory. Bemedaled, befitting a military monarch, Ursus was in the full panoply of his being. Zaius, thoughtful and a trifle sardonic, rode at his side, musing to himself on the pomposity and pitfalls of self-imposed delusions of grandeur. He was sure Ursus was riding for a fall. But one, unfortunately, th
at might take Ape City with it! And all the important work that Zaius and his colleagues had labored for years to bring about.
As they rode by the house of Cornelius and Zira, Zaius dared not hazard a look at their intelligent faces. He knew what the expression on those faces would be. Rueful and scowling!
The Grand Army moved along, clattering, jubilant, eager for an engagement, a test of its skills. General Ursus’ horse fairly pranced. The general was all smiles and superiority. Sure of Gorilla Might and Gorilla Power. The pompous idiot!
From the window of their domestic castle, Cornelius and Zira were indeed witnessing the spectacle of Might on the Move.
Zira was disgusted, as always. “Dr. Zaius is with him. Some people’s convictions are about as deep as a mild case of mange.”
“They have to show unity,” Cornelius argued. Not too strongly.
“So should the chimpanzees.”
“But, Zira,” Cornelius protested. “We’re too few. We’d be cutting our own throats. How can we take any initiative, while—” he gestured toward the rolling gorilla army trooping past their home, “they’re here.”
They watched as the rear columns of Ursus’ forces passed the house and receded up the hill, going away, disappearing into the horizon. Zira snorted, her cute face puckered.
“Has it occurred to you that tomorrow—they won’t be here?”
Cornelius looked at her.
Their eyes locked.
A patient, knowing smile curled Zira’s mouth.
Cornelius swallowed nervously.
It was pretty obvious what his adorable, firm-minded little wife meant. What she had always meant, since the very beginning of unrest.
Revolt!
* * *
Miles up the road, moving briskly in broad sunny daylight, the Grand Army was making good time. Ursus, Zaius, a bugler, the vanguard and vanguard commander, had rounded a corner on the outskirts of Ape City, to be confronted by a sight not to Ursus’ liking. Or Zaius’ for that matter. Being the only non-gorilla in the group, Zaius was keenly affected by the spectacle of a chimpanzee student demonstration.
Half a dozen earnest, outspoken young chimpanzees were squatting directly across the line of march, sitting in the roadway, blocking the advance of the Grand Army of Apes. Ursus growled menacingly in his deep chest. The two demonstrators in the center of the pathetically valiant little group were holding aloft a banner on which the paint-scrawled plea GIVE US PEACE was clearly visible and advisory. Ursus’ brow darkened. Zaius feared the worst.
“Halt,” Ursus commanded in an undertone to the bugler.
The primitive horn blared a tinny signal which was picked up and relayed by successive buglers all down the column of gorillas and guns. The column came to a full stop some twenty yards from the little knot of demonstrators barring the roadway.
Ursus, almost chidingly, smiled down at the chimpanzees.
“Get off the road, young people.”
The “young people” continued to sit, ignoring him and his army, obstinately and sincerely contemptuous of Ursus and all he might do in retaliation. Zaius’ eyes narrowed.
Ursus wheeled to the vanguard commander, braking his mount.
“Get them out of the way!” he bellowed.
The commander leered and drew a heavy pistol from his uniformed middle, but Zaius, quickly reaching across, took the ugly muzzle in both his paws.
“Wait,” he urged. He turned on General Ursus. Their eyes dueled again. “We don’t want martyrs, do we?”
General Ursus said to the commander, “And do it quietly.”
The demonstrators had gone limp in the roadway, the usual weapon of advocates of non-violence. The commander rapped out some orders and soon, and swiftly, gorilla hands had lifted the demonstrators, carrying them by the arms and legs and piling them into the cage-wagons at the army’s disposal, closing out the incident. The army was able to advance again. Wheels rolled over the abandoned peace signs. Ursus smiled smugly at Dr. Zaius. The good doctor stared pointedly ahead, his eyes on some unseen calamity on the horizon. In the future. With the inscrutability that General Ursus was never able to connect with the seething anger that boiled inside Dr. Zaius’ intellectual breast. Something his ape mentality would never have understood. Or liked.
Dr. Zaius knew how to wait.
To bide his time.
Without giving up his ideals or his ethics to the code of Brute Force. To the ethos of Ape Logic and Ape Stupidity. Gorilla, that is.
General Ursus did not care.
So long as he had things his own way.
He would show the good doctor the efficacy of Power in due time.
All in due time.
Briskly, blindly, unknowingly, Ursus led his marching legions toward the horrors of the Forbidden Zone.
Where he thought the Fist would solve everything.
Where Dr. Zaius knew it would not.
* * *
In the great cathedral where the Bomb was lord and master of all it surveyed, a mass was in progress. The vaulted reaches of the dimly lit nave echoed with the chorus of voices raised in adoring harmony to the words of the hymn known as Psalm to Mendez II.
To Brent, forced to attend the weird ritual, the entire schema was a frightening mutation of the ancient Christian observance. All the singing and chanting seemed to have its origins in sacred songs of the twentieth century, now all cannibalized to match the coldness and cruel barrenness of this strange new cosmos into which he had blundered. He wondered how it all must sound to the mute Nova, at his side in the front pew, flanked by the fat man, Caspay, the beauteous Albina and the Negro, with four armed guards directly behind them.
At the high altar, now dark, Mendez stood facing a congregation of white-robed listeners. Brent was struck by the demeanor of the entire gathering. An inward spiritual serenity hovered about every face and figure. An outward gracefulness and gentility in mocking contrast with the reason for the radiance and exaltation of those faces and singing voices. The Bomb hung suspended above the altar, still invisible in the gloom of the ceiling.
Mendez was chanting sonorously, his purple robes dazzling as his arms and his voice rose in unison:
“The heavens declare the glory of the Bomb. And the firmament showeth his handiwork.”
To a man, woman and child, the congregation answered him. A full-throated, deep, reverent response. The gloomy cathedral echoed with the words:
“His sound is gone out unto all lands. And His light unto the ends of the world.”
Now the hidden choir joined with Mendez in an invocation that soared up to the nave. The sound was spectral, ghostly:
“He descended from the outermost part of heaven. And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. There is neither speech nor language. But His voice is heard among them.”
The congregation responded:
“Praise him. My strength arid my redeemer.”
Mendez knelt at the prie-dieu; his white-gloved hand pressed a button on the bejeweled panel. The floodlight control was released and dramatically, illuminatingly, the Great Bomb, with its inscribed fins, filled the eye. ALPHA and OMEGA glowed like constellations in a sky of gun-metal silver.
Mendez and the choir sung aloud:
“Glory be to the Bomb and to the Holy Fallout—As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; world without end Amen.”
“Amen,” the congregation spoke as one.
Brent had a bad taste in his mouth. His ears ached with the awful, ridiculous, puling blasphemy of it all. Behind him, the four guards, their faces radiant and inspired, were singing with brilliant sincerity. The fat man, Caspay, Albina and the Negro were showing nothing of the revulsion that beat through Brent’s brain like a prairie fire. Only he and Nova, of all the souls in that damned cathedral, were remote and out of place and out of time. Their rags may have been covered at last with decent robes, but nothing had changed. Brent was still frightened and repulsed by all that he saw and heard.
; The multitude of Amens fell away to a whisper. And still the Bomb gleamed down from its religious base. The main lights of the cathedral had all dimmed, leaving only the Bomb spotlit above the altar where no eye could miss it. Brent pulled his eyes away; the dread in his stomach was as tangible as a cancer in its most advanced stage.
Somewhere, the unseen organist struck a note.
From the prie-dieu, the kneeling Mendez’s voice rose once more:
“Almighty and everlasting Bomb, who came down among us to make Heaven under Earth, lighten our darkness. O instrument of God—Grant us Thy peace.”
The organ bleated a series of low, muted chords. All of them climactic, beseeching, uplifting, followed by a final hosannah.
Mendez stood up, back to the congregation, his purple robes a blazing field of color. He raised adoring arms to the Bomb suspended above him. His voice reached up, as if to touch it. To caress it with syllables, words.
The choir’s multiple voice rose in song:
“Almighty Bomb—who destroyed Devils—to create Angels! Behold His glory!”
Mendez chimed in with the choir:
“Behold the truth that abides in us, His handicraft!”
The choir stilled and Mendez’s chant rose on a single note of prayer and supplication:
“Reveal that truth unto that Maker!”
And now, incredibly, exaltedly, Albina, the fat man, Caspay and the Negro and all the leaders of this ghastly mass stood up as a body and chanted in a synchronized blend of many voices: “I reveal my Inmost Self unto my God!”
Brent blinked.
As if he had been struck between the eyes.
Nova shrank against him, mewing like a terrified kitten.
The topmost totem of unreality in this world of unrealities had been reached. Once more the universe had reeled and the mind boggled at what the eyes saw—had to believe—had to accept as Truth.
All about them, the leaders were unveiling. Albina, the Negro, Caspay, the fat man—everyone. Unmasking, as it were. Pulling and tugging at their heads and faces—taking off rubberized, plasticized masks which had concealed their inmost selves, their true appearance. Now Brent and the girl could see in all its blasphemous, unmatchable horror the true depths that their nightmare had bought for them when it set them down in this terrible city of lost souls.
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