Planet of the Apes Omnibus 2

by John Jakes

  “This isn’t a city,” said Caesar. “It’s a catacomb.” He pushed forward, anyway, taking care to step around the rotting skeletons. Virgil followed. The two apes kept their eyes averted. MacDonald didn’t—he had realized something that they had missed. Not all of the skeletons were whole. Some of the bones were scattered about. And some of them looked gnawed.

  He raised his gun and moved closer to Caesar, without explaining why. Maybe there was nothing alive down here now, but there had been at one time.

  In the control center, Méndez switched to another camera to keep them in view.

  “There are only three of them,” he said.

  “There must be more,” said Alma. “I wonder how many?”

  Kolp rubbed his hands together slowly. “That’s a question we’ll get answered when we get them.”

  On the screen they saw that the three explorers had reached a narrow, short, dark tunnel. The two apes lit their torches and poked them carefully into the gloom. They moved cautiously forward, sniffing and listening. The air smelled of death, tasted of foulness and decay. Somewhere something was whirring softly.

  The passage was jammed with debris and rubble. There were places where it was piled so high that it brought them up close to the ceiling. They had to stoop to get through. As they moved through the tunnel, they could see that someone had once tried to live in one of its nooks. There were blankets, empty food tins, and a forlorn photo in a warped frame.

  Suddenly, startlingly, a figure leaped up before them, an ugly, misshapen silhouette. MacDonald tensed. He fumbled with his tommy gun, but before he could fire, the figure scurried off. He dropped his torch and grabbed the gun with both hands, but whoever or whatever it was had disappeared down a side corridor. Its footsteps echoed loudly and hung in the air for a long moment.

  The two apes and the man exchanged a startled glance. MacDonald forced himself to relax. He picked up his torch again and relit it from Virgil’s. He forced himself to take a deep breath, then another. And then he tensed again; he frowned and moved toward a wall, holding his torch close to it, his machine gun ready in his other hand.

  Written on the wall, dimmed by nine years of dust, dirt, and decay, were the words: “CONTROL CENTRAL—ARCHIVES SECTION.”

  “This is the place,” said MacDonald quietly. He gestured with the torch. “In there.” The light flickered to illuminate a twisted door and a crumbled room beyond. They began to clamber over the rubble and twisted metal, squeezing their way into the archives room.

  * * *

  Kolp finally turned away from the monitor screens. He picked up a microphone and, obviously enjoying himself, announced: “All security forces alert! Check out all sections in areas M-5, R-7, and R-8. Apprehend three strangers—one human and two apes.” Below him, on the floor of the great vault, the workers hesitated; they turned toward him curiously and stared up at the control center. Then, as the meaning of his words sank in, the crowd moaned with an odd wail of anticipation and foreboding, a long drawn out “Aaaah.” A mutter of fear.

  “But use caution!” urged Kolp. “I repeat, use caution! If they resist, you may shoot.”

  Beside him, Méndez winced.

  Kolp added, “But shoot only to maim. We want them alive for interrogation.”

  The crowd began to move then; it began to surge and flow in new directions. Like a great, amorphous, gray and white mass, the grotesque figures rolled restlessly through the cavern, sorting themselves into action, jerky and unsure. Section leaders began calling directions, but the movement was spastic.

  Gradually the routines and the drills took hold. The men began breaking out the savage tools of destruction. Hands reached for weapons, pulled them off racks on the wall. Other hands broke open cases, pulled out ammunition. The smell of excitement—and fear—rose in the air. The rifles were passed eagerly from hand to hand; the bolts were slid back and checked in their action. Cartridges were dropped into chambers. Bodies began to move toward the tunnels. They poured into the corridors, Kolp’s last speech still resounding through the cavern. Over and over, the words “Caution, caution!” rang along the walls.

  In the Archives Section, Caesar, MacDonald, and Virgil were still stumbling over chunks of fallen concrete. Virgil paused for a moment as his Geiger counter clacked a little louder and quicker. He moved on, and the noise subsided.

  As it did, he cocked his head curiously. There was another noise, a whirring sound. He stopped and looked around. He sniffed the air, his simian nostrils flaring. He blinked and held his torch aloft—and froze as he caught sight of the TV camera mounted high on the wall. It turned slowly this way and that, still scanning what had once been an entrance. The whirring came from its motor. It swung toward them and stopped. Virgil caught his breath.

  He touched Caesar, pointing. “Look…”

  Both MacDonald and Caesar stared at the camera. It stared impassively back at them.

  MacDonald laughed at Virgil’s fear. “It’s been there for years. Breck used to have all the corridors equipped with cameras.” He added wryly, “To forestall ape conspiracies, as I remember.”

  “No, no… it… was moving.”

  “What?”

  “Are you sure?” asked Caesar.

  Virgil nodded, never taking his eyes off the camera.

  MacDonald licked his lips. His mouth was suddenly dry. He swallowed and took a step sideways.

  The camera moved slightly to follow him, its motor whirring softly.

  “He’s… right. Virgil’s right!”

  Virgil lifted his gun and held the trigger down for one long, angry moment. A burst of machine gun fire tore the camera off the ceiling. Pieces of it scattered across the room, ricocheted off the walls. Only a few dangling wires remained.

  He stood there with his machine gun smoking. Caesar and MacDonald stared at him, hardly believing what he had done.

  “Whoever or whatever is down here…” began Caesar.

  “…already knows that we’re here too,” finished Virgil.

  “That camera was supposed to make automatic sweeps—it wasn’t,” said MacDonald. “It was being manually controlled.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” said Virgil.

  “Not until we find those tapes,” snapped Caesar. “Come on.” He scrambled forward. MacDonald and Virgil followed.

  4

  “Those apes!” cried Kolp. “I’ll get them for that!” He slammed his fist against the TV monitor. The screen remained blank. “‘They must have shot the whole camera off.”

  “If we shoot them,” said Méndez, “we break years of peace.”

  Kolp misunderstood him. “I know,” he said. “It’s been boring, hasn’t it?”

  Méndez didn’t answer. Frowning to himself, he began switching the monitor screens to show the views from other TV cameras. He couldn’t pick up the intruders, though. “They’ve gone all the way into the Archives Section.”

  “Huh?” Kolp looked at him. “Archives? What do they want there?”

  “It must be important, whatever it is.”

  “Blueprints,” muttered Kolp. “Plans for the underground city. That’s what they want. They must be planning to attack us again. That’s what it is, I’ll bet! I’m sure of it!” His expression grew cunning. And savage. “Well, we’ll get them. Yes, we will. We’ll get them.”

  In the Archives Section, MacDonald, Caesar, and Virgil were already ripping open cartons, pulling apart crumbling file cabinets, and pawing through piles of tape canisters.

  The two apes were trying to be systematic; they were picking up one tape canister at a time and reading its label, frowning darkly and moving their lips, then carefully discarding it as they decided it was not the one they were looking for and moving on to the next.

  MacDonald was less careful. He was in a hurry. He knew what he was looking for and approximately where it should be. He shuffled through the files and tapes with barely controlled fury. Impatience and a need to get out of there quickly drove him t
o this impetuosity. “It’ll be a tape, a big, round canister,” he said. But he was only repeating himself. He had briefed the two apes many times during their journey across the desert. They all knew what they were looking for and where it should have been stored.

  Should have been. But wasn’t. The room had collapsed long ago. Filing cabinets had toppled over, their contents scattered. Someone had been in here, too; whoever it was hadn’t shown much regard for the files. Papers and tapes were scattered haphazardly.

  The filing cabinets and shelves were of no help, either. The tape wasn’t there. It would have to be one of the ones buried in the rubble on the floor. The three of them began digging through the piles of papers and tapes and films. They had to examine them all, each one individually. Abruptly, Virgil straightened. He held a large tape canister in his hand. “MacDonald,” he said. “Is this it?” He read aloud from the label, “‘Proceedings of the Presidential Commission on Alien Visitors.’”

  Caesar and MacDonald joined him and looked over his shoulder. “I think…” said MacDonald. “Yes, that must be it.”

  “Good,” said Caesar. “Let’s play it.”

  MacDonald started to say something, then closed his mouth. He wanted to leave, but Caesar was right— the tape had to be played. There were no videotape players in Ape City. Quickly, he threaded the tape into a machine, all the while muttering, “Oh, please let it work.” He pressed the switch. The tape reels began turning slowly; the tape slid past the playback head. “Thank you,” MacDonald whispered to no one in particular.

  Caesar seated himself very close to the monitor and waited impatiently. He fidgeted. MacDonald touched the fast-forward button and moved to a later point on the tape. Abruptly the screen came alive with the image of a female chimpanzee, an oddly beautiful face, somehow both kind and alien.

  “Is that her?” whispered Caesar hoarsely, shifting in his seat to look at MacDonald. “Is that her?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He pressed his face close to the screen and sniffed. “Mother…” he said. “Mother?” The word felt curious in his mouth.

  “Is there sound?” prompted Virgil.

  “Oh…” said MacDonald. He touched another control. Abruptly, Zira’s voice came from the speaker: “It wasn’t our war. It was the gorillas’ war. Chimpanzees are pacifists. We stayed behind. We never saw the enemy.”

  “Why does her voice sound so thick?” asked Virgil.

  “They got her drunk; it was the only way they could get her to talk.”

  “Mother,” whispered Caesar. His face was rapt.

  Another voice on the tape, a human voice, asked, “But which side won?”

  Zira’s voice replied flatly, “Neither.”

  Virgil and MacDonald exchanged a worried glance. Caesar didn’t react; he was too absorbed in the flickering images of his mother. The screen was flashing through a series of color stills. Zira was lovely; her eyes were bright, large and brown and alive with warmth. Most of the pictures showed her smiling; her face creased easily into a smile. Zira had been a true madonna.

  The voice on the tape continued, “How do you know if you weren’t there?”

  “When we were in space,” said Zira, “we saw a bright white, blinding light. We saw the rim of the Earth melt. Then there was a… tornado in the sky.”

  After a pause, the human voice asked, “Zira, was there a date meter in the spaceship?”

  “Mmm.”

  “What year did it register after Earth’s destruction?”

  Zira’s speech was blurred, but the words were still understandable. “Thirty-nine fifty.”

  The monitor screen went white.

  Caesar snarled bitterly and looked up at Virgil. “And you talk to your pupils about eternity!”

  The screen flickered, and another image appeared, this one a male chimpanzee. Caesar’s father, Cornelius. Caesar reached out and touched the image’s cheek. “Father…” He felt odd saying this word. And somehow hollow.

  The same human interrogator was asking, “How did apes first acquire the power of speech?”

  Cornelius’ voice—oddly like Caesar’s—came from the speaker. “They learned to refuse. At first they barked their refusal. And then on a historic day, commemorated by my species and fully documented in the secret scrolls, there came an ape who didn’t bark. He articulated. He spoke a word which had been spoken to him, times without number, by humans. He said ‘No.’”

  The screen flickered and went black; the tape had run out. The end of it flapped around the takeup reel. Absent-mindedly MacDonald stopped it. He switched off the machine and removed the tape. “Since your father was right,” he said, “we must assume that your mother was right about the year of the world’s destruction.”

  “No wonder the governor was so anxious to have me killed.”

  “Not just the governor. All mankind thirsted for your blood and wanted your birth aborted. In the year 3950, apes will destroy the Earth.”

  Virgil interjected quickly, “Not apes. Gorillas. But that’s only one possible future.”

  They both looked at him. “How can there be more than one?” asked Caesar.

  “Time has an infinite number of possibilities,” said Virgil. “It must have. We can change the present, can’t we? We must be able to change the future. There must be a way.”

  Caesar stood up. “Yes,” he agreed. “There must be. Because if there isn’t then there is no point in going on. No point in planning and building and learning. No point in justice. There’s no point in building a better world if you know it has no chance of survival.”

  “That’s precisely why we have to change the future,” said Virgil. “And the way to do it is by making a world where wars are impossible. If we can do that, then there will be no final war. We must continue to have hope!

  Caesar looked at him. “Yes, Virgil, you’re right. As usual.” He smiled. “There’s much that we have to change. Let’s get started. Let’s go.” He headed for the door.

  As the three squeezed out of the Archive Section, they heard a noise. Virgil cocked his head, then Caesar. MacDonald’s ears were not as keen, but he caught it, too. Shouts. And the sound of running feet. A lot of them.

  “This way!” he cried, and pointed. “Come on!” They raced down a lateral corridor.

  A corridor scanned by a TV camera.

  “There they are again!” cried Alma, pointing to the TV monitors. Kolp and Méndez crowded close to watch the progress of Caesar and his friends.

  Kolp grabbed a microphone. “Area Fourteen Security! They’re running away! Stop them! They’re going down corridor 11-M.”

  From a console speaker, a voice replied, “We’re at the junction of corridor 11-M and 44-W. Subjects will have to pass us to escape!”

  “Stop them! Do you hear? Bring them to me!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Caesar, Virgil, and MacDonald were just approaching that junction. Caesar stopped abruptly and sniffed. He paused, sniffed again, turning his head this way and that. His eyes flicked from side to side. Virgil did the same. MacDonald scuffed to a stop and stared at them. “What’s holding you up? We have to get out of here!”

  Virgil’s Geiger counter clacked louder. He aimed it forward and its incessant clatter increased even more.

  Caesar said, “Do you smell them, Virgil?”

  “Yes… they’re humans… but not like MacDonald.”

  Caesar moved ahead carefully, signaling for the others to do the same. He kept his head cocked, listening, alert, ready for trouble. He moved slowly into the junction of the passageways.

  And screaming, hideous figures jumped on him from the side corridors. They were dressed in grubby black uniforms and heavy goggles.

  MacDonald leveled his gun, but held his fire—they were too close to Caesar. The chimpanzee snarled, whirled around, biting and snapping, suddenly breaking free of the grabbing hands. Seeing MacDonald and Virgil with their guns ready, he hollered, “Shoot! Now!” He leapt clear and began firing his own gun.<
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  MacDonald and Virgil blasted away at the mutants. Backing away as they fired, they followed Caesar into a darkened corridor, suddenly turning and running. Their assailants, confused and shocked, came scrabbling after them.

  Watching his screens, Kolp was enraged. “They got past! They got past! All right—then shoot them on sight. Never mind about bringing them here! Just get them!”

  His voice reached a hysterical pitch. His face was contorted with rage. Méndez and Alma exchanged concerned glances.

  “Get them!” Kolp was shouting. “Get them! Get them! Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!”

  The deformed creatures slogged up the corridor after the trio of intruders. Kolp’s words blasted in their ears—from walkie-talkies and loudspeakers, from remote command posts and individual ear pieces. “Get them! Kill them! Kill them!”

  The chimpanzee, the orangutan, and the man struggled up the corridor, exhausted by their run-in with the mutants. They approached another junction.

  There was a sharp flash and an explosion of sound ahead of them, then a rapid staccato. They were being shot at. MacDonald felt something thump into his side, blossoming into a rivet of molten pain—he clutched at his wound, almost toppled, then threw himself backward against the wall. The two apes dropped backward, too. Seeing that MacDonald had been hit, Virgil crawled to him. Bullets ricocheted around them. “We’ve got to get out of here!” gasped the man.

  Virgil gently pulled MacDonald’s hands away from his side and peered carefully at the wound. “It appears to be only a crease in the epidermis,” he remarked, then asked, “Is there another way out of here?”

  MacDonald pointed back down the way they had come.

  “I’ll find out,” said Caesar. “Stay here, but be ready to move… fast!” He strode off down the corridor, away from the mutant-controlled junction. As he moved, in his funny hunchbacked way, he watched for an alternate exit from the maze of underground passages. He cast his gaze from side to side.

  There it was! A large door that they had passed on their way up, leading to a closed-off side corridor. He pushed at it—it gave a little bit, then stopped. He pushed harder—it gave a little more. Caesar anchored his feet against the rubble and pushed with all his strength. If he could get it open just enough for them to squeeze through…