by John Jakes
The helmeted officers needed no further prodding. Truncheons began to rise and fall, thumping Aldo’s shoulders and skull with crunching sounds. Caesar started to tremble. Just a little at first, then more violently, in response to the repeated blows rained on the gorilla.
Aldo was already feeling the effects of the injection. He swayed sluggishly as he sat on the ground, groping, trying to find the tormentors who dodged in and out, hitting harder, harder…
Caesar heard Aldo moan; saw blood over the gorilla’s eyes. And all the horrors of the day found release in one long, agonized cry:
“You—lousy—human-—bastards!”
4
Aldo the gorilla pitched over on his side, blood from his head smearing the pavement. No one noticed. The waiters, the half-dozen policemen, the handlers, a scattering of ordinary citizens drawn to the scene, had all turned in the direction of the outcry. Caesar confronted a wall of eyes—some merely curious, most hostile.
The policeman who had recognized the governor’s assistant stormed forward. “Who said that?”
Armando’s face glistened with sweat as he replied, “I did.”
The policeman looked dubious. He and his colleague approached Caesar, studied him with stony-faced thoroughness. Caesar fought to subdue his own trembling; to appear docile, witless. He knew it was a matter of survival now, because the expressions of the officers said that they weren’t buying Armando’s explanation.
Neither was the murmuring crowd. Here and there, Caesar saw a hand pointing in his direction.
Making another desperate try to save the situation, Armando snatched a handbill from Caesar’s fingers.
“He’s a performing ape for my circus—here, look for yourselves. That’s why I dress him like a human—I have permission. Official documents—”
He started to search an inner pocket. The policemen didn’t seem interested. Their glances snapped back and forth from Caesar to the handbill’s blurry photo.
The first policeman returned the flyer. “A performing ape. He talks, is that right?”
“Talks? Why, no, officers, that’s impossible. Everyone knows apes are unable to speak—I am the one who made the remark you heard.”
Caesar watched Armando’s fingers twisting and turning the end of the leash. So did the two policemen, who were being joined by the four other helmeted men.
“Don’t you know it’s a criminal offense to show disrespect to a state official?” the second policeman said.
“Certainly, certainly!” Armando exclaimed. “Let me assure you that the remark was unintentional. Thoughtless! But being sentimental about animals, I—” His words trailed off as he gave a helpless shrug, which did not satisfy the officers at all.
The first one said flatly, “It didn’t sound like your voice to me. Why don’t you yell it again and let’s make sure.”
Panic claimed Caesar then. He felt trapped. Armando pretended not to understand, still trying to use his smile, his cheerful professional manner to disarm the suspicious policemen.
“What? You want me to…? Oh, sirs, please. Isn’t my profound apology sufficient to—?”
“No,” said the first policeman. “I want you to yell. Good and loud. ‘You lousy human bastards.’ Let’s hear it.”
“But—but that’s not what I said at all!”
Raising his truncheon, the second officer stepped close to Armando. The truncheon gleamed with the gorilla’s blood.
“That’s what we heard, mister,” the policeman said.
Voices in the crowd backed his statement. The policeman lifted the truncheon. “Yell it and yell it now.”
Armando swallowed hard, started to protest again. His glance flicked from face to hard face. His mouth turned down at the corners. Drawing in a big breath, he shouted, “You lousy human bastards!”
The first policeman jabbed his truncheon into Armando’s side. He gasped as the officer said, “We told you to yell!”
This time Armando’s cry had a strange timbre— “You lousy human bastards!”—and with a start, Caesar realized that what he’d heard was a passable imitation of his own voice.
Fresh murmurs broke out, more of the curious joining and swelling the crowd every moment. Caesar’s hope leaped a little then. On many of the human faces, he saw doubt.
The policemen who had started the questioning exchanged looks.
“Could be,” was the hesitant opinion of the second.
But the first shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Arguments started in the crowd as people took sides. For a moment or so, Caesar thought the decision might swing in their favor. Then a burly waiter exclaimed to the man next to him, “You’re fulla shit, Max, it was that goddam ape!”
The waiter bulled toward the policeman to enforce his point. “I heard him and I heard him plain. The ape yelled it, not this greaseball in the fancy suit.”
At once, those who had leaned toward believing Armando became a minority. Caesar knew that many who probably weren’t at all certain were agreeing with the majority just because it was natural to think of apes—all apes—as potential troublemakers.
“All right, everybody shut up!” yelled the first officer. The crowd quieted. “I want to see hands. Who heard it and thinks it was the ape?”
Hands shot up, more than Caesar could quickly count. Sounding desperate, Armando said, “You’re wrong!” Then, louder: “You’re all mistaken! I have already admitted my behavior was inexcusable, and I’m deeply sorry. But I am the one responsible—”
“I think we’ve got evidence that says otherwise,” responded the first policeman. “So we’ll let headquarters decide.”
Armando’s cheeks blanched. “Headquarters?”
“Where you’re going for interrogation.” The policeman closed his finger’s on Armando’s wrist. The older man winced, started to struggle.
“This is grossly unfair! I have offered my apologies—pleaded guilty to an error in judgment— and you still refuse to believe me!” While he struggled and protested, the end of the leash slipped from his fingers, dropped to the pavement. The two officers warned him to calm down…
A woman screamed. Every head whipped toward the source of the cry. Aldo had somehow gathered strength for one last fight against the ravages of the injection. He was on his feet, swaying, eyes glassy as he clinked his chains. Any moment he might fall again—or whip a chain at someone’s head.
The waiters and spectators around him began to retreat, but the policemen and the two handlers moved in.
Aldo’s face was pain-wracked, a mess of drying blood and barely clotted wounds. Just one policeman stayed with Armando, holding his arm. No one at all was watching Caesar.
“Let’s take him from both sides,” one of the handlers said to the other, readying another injection. Warily, they began to edge toward the gorilla, whose fisted hands still waved back and forth, the dangling chains clinking—
It took Caesar only a moment to reach his decision.
He was the cause of Armando’s trouble. Therefore he must get his mentor out of trouble as best he could. He took a step backward.
Eyes alert, he watched for possible reaction. There was none. Every person in front of the building was concentrating on Aldo, whose eyes were slowly closing, then coming open again as he fought his drowsiness.
Aldo seemed to focus on the nearest handler. His shoulders went back, his right fist flew up, chain lashing. The handler screamed, “Now, Leo!”
Darting in beneath Aldo’s massive right arm, the other handler rammed the needle into Aldo’s side. He pushed the plunger home with his other palm. Aldo stiffened, howling.
The first handler leaped in, caught the whipping ends of both chains, gripped them tight. The policemen swarmed over Aldo then, truncheons crunching down. The officer holding Armando released him, to run forward to help. By then, Caesar had backed up seven or eight steps, in the direction of a narrow street that led off the Civic Center Plaza.
As the police
piled on Aldo, Caesar pivoted, dropped the last of his handbills and bolted.
Armando saw the move. “Caesar, no! You’ll only—” Too late. Caesar was already sprinting toward the chosen route of escape.
With one last glance at the pack of officers again bludgeoning Aldo to the ground, Armando made his own decision—and ran after Caesar full speed.
Caesar dodged around a strolling family; shoved aside a female chimpanzee who let out a chitter of alarm. Only a dozen steps to the corner—and escape down the narrow street, where pedestrians were little more than blue shadows in the fast-lowering dusk.
Caesar twisted around, saw Armando chasing him. Further back, one of the policemen, grabbed by a frantic waiter, broke from the crowd around Aldo to shout, “Stop! Both of you halt!”
Caesar reached the building’s corner, plunged into the blue shadows of the avenue at a full run. Noise or commotion, cursing drifted from the plaza behind him. Then came the sound of hammering boots.
Puffing hard, Armando drew up with Caesar, who cried, “You shouldn’t have come!”
“Save—your breath—for escape,” Armando panted. “Under the city there’s—a network of tunnels. If we can reach one in time—”
Side by side, they ran into a narrow street, oblivious of the people around them, and not looking back.
Their flight drew stares and occasional exclamations of surprise from pedestrians. They even attracted the attention of a policeman in the center of a footbridge arching over part of a small mall through which they dashed. But they were gone into the relative darkness of another street before the policeman could react.
Caesar, who had started the escape, now let Armando lead. With a ragged explosion of breath, the circus owner suddenly exclaimed, “There!” and thrust Caesar down an alley serving the loading entrances of two back-to-back high rises.
Caesar loped into the semidarkness, leaving behind two astonished human children and their orangutan nursemaid. Armando stumbled, grasped Caesar’s arm for assistance. By the light of a glowing panel halfway down the alley, the alarmed ape saw that Armando’s cheeks were an ugly dark red. His chest heaved violently.
Supporting Armando, Caesar hurried toward the concrete stair that descended from street level under the glowing sign. The sign read: Service Levels Sectors Gamma 9-11.
Within a minute they had pushed through a metal door, descended another stair, and emerged at an intersection of six concrete tunnels, each sparsely illuminated by softly shining globes set in the ceiling at wide intervals. Each of the tunnels looked interminably long.
“Three more levels lie below this,” Armando gasped, still making the most of Caesar’s support. “After midnight the tunnels will be crowded. Pods of refuse going out, pods of produce driving in, with ape crews and human supervisors. But for a few hours we should be safe—let’s go that way. Find a dark spot. I must rest—”
Caesar helped him limp into the tunnel indicated. Occasionally they passed under a ceiling vent. Though dark, and covered with metal grille, the vents admitted sounds from the city above: muted voices, music, the clack of shoes. And the announcer’s strident voice.
“—fugitives positively identified while fleeing through the Mall of the Four Muses. All teams in the vicinity—”
Hurrying on, Caesar was glad not to hear the rest. “By means of these passages,” Armando explained, breathing less raggedly now, “the city above is kept free of delivery vehicles—the ugly sight of its own outpouring of garbage—”
“You mean the city is kept beautiful by its slaves,” Caesar retorted. “The tunnels, the—what did you call them? Pods? Those are incidental. It’s the animal population doing the hard work, the filthy work, to make it all run. Isn’t that right?”
Armando gave a weary nod. “You had to learn it eventually. Here—we’ll stop—”
Slipping from Caesar’s grip, he sank to the concrete floor at a point equidistant from two of the glowing ceiling fixtures. The circus owner’s sweating cheeks glistened with reflected light.
Further along the tunnel, Caesar heard a peculiar, unfamiliar sound. A deep, booming horn that blared once, then twice again. The echo rolled up the tunnel and slowly receded to silence.
Without recrimination, Armando asked, “Why did you run?”
“Señor Armando, I knew I put you in danger by not being able to control my feelings—by yelling what I did—” The circus owner waved that aside, leaning his head back against the concrete. “You only said aloud what I was thinking.”
“I ran because I believed I could draw the police after me. I suppose I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I hoped they might leave you alone—so you could get away in the confusion. Instead, you followed—”
“I’ve cared for you twenty years, my boy,” said the exhausted man. “Did you think I would abandon you at the first difficult moment?”
Stung with emotion, Caesar could not reply immediately. He shivered. The tunnels were eerie, forlorn. The chimpanzee’s eyes were unhappy as he said at last: “I—I am very sorry for what happened.”
Armando’s shrug was fatalistic. “I was the one who decided on today’s trip. I thought you were ready for it, but I was wrong. That is past history. I might have bluffed it through at the Civic Center if you hadn’t bolted first. Because now you realize how the police will regard you—”
Caesar shook his head, puzzled.
“On top of a suspicion that you can speak, they will be reasonably certain that you understood all that was said. Only a unique ape would have that capability.”
Miserably, Caesar sank down beside Armando. He closed his eyes and said in a small, hesitant voice, “Let’s go back to the circus.”
“Alas, that’s impossible now. The circus is the first place they will search.”
Armando rubbed his eyes, pondering. Caesar wanted to say something to encourage or comfort him. But he could think of nothing appropriate. He watched in helpless silence as Armando continued to rest his forehead on his hand. From down the tunnel, the strange horn sounded again.
Finally Armando raised his head. Then he stood up, brushed off his trousers. “I have decided what must be done. I will go to the police—”
“You don’t dare!” Caesar cried.
“My boy, there’s no other way.” Armando began to pace, as if still taking the measure of his solution to their plight. “I’ll tell them I couldn’t find you. That I only ran off myself in order to capture you. And I’ll say you’ve run away from me before—because cities frighten you. Sounds perfectly plausible, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose. But where can I go while—?”
“You will go nowhere. You will stay here. You’ve always had an excellent sense of time, Caesar. If what I plan works as I hope, I should return within two hours at most. As I told you, there’ll be no activity down here until around midnight. Allow me those two hours and I’ll be with you again.”
“But what if you aren’t?”
The long silence indicated to Caesar that Armando himself had doubts. Caesar blurted, “It’s too risky! Suppose they refuse to let you go.”
“Oh, no, they won’t.” But Caesar was not deceived by the false confidence in Armando’s voice. He’d lived too close to the circus owner for too many years not to recognize uncertainty passed off as just the opposite. “However, just in case I am not back by the time you judge two hours have elapsed—” Armando’s hand lifted, no more than a pale glimmer in the darkness between the overhead lights—“follow along the way we were going. I chose this tunnel because it leads to the harbor. Those horns you heard—ships on the water. Freighters. Should I be detained longer than a couple of hours, you must have a hiding place. You can’t roam loose up above—you’d be picked up at once. And down here, you’ll be surrounded by the service crews after midnight. At the harbor though—the docks are dark. Ape shipments coming in from other parts of the world are frequently unloaded there at night. Perhaps you can find one of those shipments… Infiltrate it— hid
e among your own kind. Should that fail, at least there are shadowy places along the wharves. Somehow, I’ll get back and find you…”
Caesar was not the bold, defiant animal of an hour ago. The prospect of being abandoned in the tunnel filled him with fright.
Armando pressed his arm. “One more thing to remember, should you go to the harbor. Apes imported from overseas arrive naked. You’ll have to get rid of those clothes.”
“But I don’t want to hide and cower like—”
“Caesar, we must have an alternate plan! If I don’t succeed in convincing the authorities quickly, the only true sanctuary for you is among your own kind.”
Caesar knew further protest was useless. Certainly the circus owner would know what the urgencies of the situation required. So the ape simply nodded in forlorn agreement.
Armando forced a smile, patted Caesar’s shoulder. “I am only preparing you for an outside chance. I fully expect to talk my way free in thirty minutes. Wait here and I’ll see you soon.”
He turned and walked sluggishly back along the tunnel. Caesar watched the man’s figure dwindle, passing in and out of the soft pools of light, growing smaller until it disappeared altogether. The harbor horn sounded mournfully.
“An hour—two at most—that’s really a very short time,” Caesar said to himself. Yet huddled against the bare concrete wall, he was unable to avoid one chilling realization. For the first time in his entire existence, he was utterly alone. He kept staring after Armando with huge, rounded eyes, as if just wishing would bring his only friend back.
5
Jason Breck stood on the terrace of his operations suite and studied the high rises of his city, brilliantly illuminated shafts piercing the night sky. It was his city. He took pride in the fact that he could claim that at age thirty-three.
The goal had not been won without immense effort, long hours, and some bureaucratic in-fighting he preferred not to remember—along with its victims. But he’d made it. Now he could stand at the rail gazing at the orderly rows of buildings—Breck delighted in order, neat arrangements, all loose ends tied—and take pleasure from the view. Perfect. Except for one problem waiting to be solved immediately, just inside, in his personal office. Perfect—Except for the dark stain in view on the pavement many stories below. There, earlier today, a gorilla had gone berserk.