Planet of the Apes Omnibus 2

by John Jakes

  Hero worship, Davidson thought sourly, though he didn’t feel much like a hero, and for the life of him couldn’t figure out why a teenaged boy with a smudgy face would even begin to think of him that way.

  Stupid, annoying little problems. He didn’t really dislike the boy—didn’t think much about him one way or the other, as far as it went, but who had time for kid stuff like that?

  Then Ari blew by him like he was standing still. Davidson looked up just in time to see her looking back at him. She appeared to be expending no more effort than he would on a peaceful morning stroll. Damned monkeys! It wasn’t fair, how much stronger they were than humans, and it didn’t help any that she was female, to boot. All the females around here, human and ape alike, seemed to be able to run him into the ground.

  He gave up. If Daena really intended to leave him in the dust, then it was going to happen, and there wasn’t anything more to do about it. Besides, it was either stop now because he chose to, or stop because he fell down.

  He stumbled to a halt, bent over, put his hands on his knees, and spent what felt like a long time getting reacquainted with his lungs, his heart rate, and his ever-growing collection of bruises, scrapes, and lacerations. After a while, he grew aware that everybody else had stopped, too. Maybe he wasn’t the only wuss in the neighborhood.

  Ari came loping back, barely breathing hard. As she rejoined the group, Tival vanished into the trees and returned a short time later with freshly picked fruit and some water. He immediately took this to Ari and offered it to her.

  Even Daena had decided to stop imitating marathon woman. He saw her standing near the edge of the group, arms folded, glaring at something. Something that, for once, didn’t seem to be him.

  Gunnar sidled over to where Ari was, glaring at the sight of the human servant tending to his mistress.

  “Look how they pamper her,” Gunnar growled.

  Ari glanced up, looked over at them, then turned back to Tival, shook her head, and waved him away.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  Daena gave her a jaundiced look. “Apes are always fine, as long as you have humans to serve you.”

  Ari lifted her head, her lips tightening, as Davidson watched and came to the conclusion that the two females were never going to get along. It could become a problem, but right now there were more pressing things to worry about.

  He’d pretty much recovered his breath, and despite his growing collection of aches and bruises, he thought he was good for a few more miles. He moved through the group and checked their back trail as well as he could in the night gloom. Which wasn’t very well. Something was itching at him, a nagging little scratchy feeling on the back of his neck, as if somebody he couldn’t see was watching him.

  He had nothing concrete to go on, but any soldier learns to trust his instincts in the field, especially when danger might be present. He thought their current situation certainly qualified as dangerous.

  He herded everybody back together and said brusquely, “Let’s keep moving.”

  It took a cruel amount of willpower to ignore the looks of exhaustion he got from folks like Tival, but Birn gave him a puppylike look of worship that said he was willing to follow Davidson for another hundred miles if necessary, and Daena showed him a flashing glimpse of teeth that he took to mean she’d be happy to run him right into the ground. Ari’s and Krull’s capabilities he already knew about.

  Eventually he got them all moving again, with Daena reluctantly in the lead. As Davidson started to follow, Krull grabbed his arm. The old gorilla might be going gray, and his mighty back a little stooped, but there was nothing weak about his grip.

  He leaned close and growled, “If this is some human trick, I will kill you.”

  Davidson thought, but didn’t say, that he’d pretty much already figured that out. He merely nodded and headed after the others, and after a final moment of hesitation, Krull followed.

  As they left, something stirred in the shadows. For just one instant, a pair of yellow eyes gleamed in the light of the fading moons. The eyes looked feral, vicious.

  Hungry.

  After Davidson and the rest of the party were gone, the eyes began to slip out of the shadows and into the trees, following them.

  * * *

  Dawn finally came as both suns peeped above the horizon at about the same time, sending a tangle of cross-hatched shadows weaving through the woods. Davidson thought that the two moons had been bad enough. But the sight of two suns, each a slightly different color from the other, made this whole world seem like some bizarre fantasy.

  Davidson was running easily, pounding along the muddy beach that edged a broad expanse of deep, still water, where ripples and tiny waves glittered softly in the light of the rising suns. He didn’t quite recognize his surroundings yet, but everything looked familiar: the dark, looming jungle on his left, and the steely glitter of water on his right.

  After everything that happened—the beatings he’d suffered, the injuries, and then a night spent running through a nearly impenetrable jungle, he knew he should be ready to drop. But he felt fine, even exalted, racing along on the mixed fuel of adrenaline and hope.

  He’d taken the lead now. Behind him, the rest stumbled along in a wavering gaggle of exhausted humans and apes. Finally he found what he’d been looking for all along, and he screeched to a halt. He turned, looked back, and saw the others also slowing and stopping, their jaws dropping in expressions of mingled surprise and awe.

  Here the forest looked as if it had been split by a giant’s flaming sword. The leafy green canopy had been seared away. All that remained was a line of mighty tree trunks charred into twisted matchsticks, leading directly toward the water.

  Davidson found himself staring, too. He remembered the wild ride in, when he thought his death might come first by ice, then by fire. Now, looking at the vast, black scar, he was privately amazed that he’d survived at all. He gestured at the devastation as the others came straggling up.

  “This is where I flew in…”

  The humans simply stared, their confusion at the massive devastation plain on their faces. Davidson could also see an uneasy fear growing among them as well. Ari and Krull, more sophisticated, looked mostly puzzled, as if trying to figure out what could have caused such a thing.

  Finally, Ari stepped forward. She pointed accusingly. “You caused this?”

  Davidson shrugged. “My retro burners…”

  Then he saw the look on Ari’s face and realized what he had said. She knew as much about retro burners causing forest fires as he knew about a world with two moons and two suns where apes were in charge.

  It was hard to keep from laughing in her face, especially with his own excitement bubbling up inside him like an unquenchable fountain. He saw the kid, Birn, staring at him wide-eyed. Davidson knew the boy was picking up on his own burgeoning hopes.

  Gunnar, looking even more dour and gloomy than usual, stomped up to Daena, his uneasiness more than obvious.

  “The soldiers will be hounding us. We can still make it to the mountains.”

  It was plain he held this mysteriously scorched jungle and Davidson’s pipe dreams in equally low regard. Daena barely heard what he said. She walked over to the nearest tree and put her fingers on its scorched hide, a look of wonder on her face.

  “I don’t understand. You fell from the sky?” she said.

  Davidson grinned at her, then nodded. “With my ass on fire,” he replied.

  Krull looked no happier than Gunnar, and he obviously was extremely skeptical of Davidson’s unenlightening account of his arrival. His glance in Ari’s direction made his feelings extremely plain.

  Ari caught his look and said reassuringly, “I’m sure he’ll explain everything.”

  Krull grunted scornfully. “How can you explain what can’t exist?”

  Davidson had had just about enough of listening to a lot of guff from a bunch of jumped-up monkeys. Krull definitely qualified. He caught the hulking
gorilla’s eyes and said, “I’ll tell you what can’t exist. You. Talking monkeys.” He swept his arm in a wide gesture. “This whole place.”

  Krull leaped over a couple of the others at Davidson, tackled him, held him down as he growled, “Apes. Monkeys are lower on the evolutionary ladder. Just above humans.”

  After a long moment, Krull released Davidson, who stood, peered at the scorched black line slashed through the jungle, then turned and tried to estimate where the pod, traveling along that line, would enter the water. Farther out, the water showed the dark blue of great depth, but in closer to the shore, the bottom was shallow and boggy.

  Still trying to figure it, he stepped out into the shallows. Ari started after him, but Krull touched her shoulder, stopping her. Davidson noticed and said, “What’s wrong?”

  Ari stared at the water. “Apes cannot swim,” she said. “We will drown in deep water.”

  Daena came up behind her, and said malevolently, “That’s why we pray for rain every day.”

  For a moment, Davidson thought he was about to have another brawl between the two females, but then Daena backed off. Uttering an inward sigh of relief, he turned and began to splash along the shore, and a moment later, Ari followed.

  Both suns were now burning brightly above the horizon, casting a blinding glare across the water. Davidson shielded his eyes and squinted, trying to find what had caught his gaze earlier.

  It took him a few moments, but then he saw it: several yards out, the remnants of a rainbow-colored oil slick still floated on the water. He pointed at it.

  “There’s where I went in!”

  Before anyone could do much more than stare in the direction he was pointing, he made a running dive into the bog and vanished beneath the water.

  After that, everybody waited for what seemed like a long time. Nobody had much to say. None of them, neither ape nor human, had any idea what Davidson had been raving about. What were retro burners?

  Birn went right to the edge of the bog and stood silently, staring at the spot where Davidson had vanished.

  Ari seemed as if she were the most nervous of them all. Finally she muttered to herself, “How long can a human hold his breath beneath the water?”

  Birn glanced at Daena, the question plain in his eyes: was Davidson in trouble?

  Daena made no reply, but suddenly ran out into the water several feet and then dived. Ari watched the woman vanish in a flurry of powerful kicks, and marveled at Daena’s grace. She might be three times as strong as the human, but she couldn’t match her in the water.

  Daena pulled herself along beneath the surface with powerful strokes, though the going was difficult. The bog plants that showed their tips above the surface of the water were like small trees below, and there were wavering forests of weeds as well. Finally she fought her way past an especially dense thicket and broke into an underwater clearing.

  She almost gasped, which would definitely have been a mistake several feet down, but she caught herself in time. Still, for a woman who had lived her entire life in a society where the horse was considered high-tech transportation, the sight of Davidson’s wrecked pod was easily the most amazing thing she’d ever seen.

  She’d come out of the weeds almost on top of the pod; a couple of short, powerful strokes put her right next to it, close enough to slide her hand across the scorched metal skin of the ship. She ran her fingers in wonder along the surface, trying to puzzle out the bizarre pictures that were painted there: USAF, which made no sense at all, except it looked sort of like the stick-men paintings her people sometimes found in ancient caves; and another form, which reminded her vaguely of something with which she was quite familiar.

  Suddenly a cloud of bubbles erupted from the alien vessel, followed by Davidson, who was cradling a metallic box in his arms as if it were the most precious thing on earth. He saw her, smiled, jerked his head toward the surface, and began to kick in that direction. She followed, but before they’d gotten more than a few feet, a pair of frightening shapes drifted up from the murk and blocked their path. She recoiled, then realized that the two waterlogged ape corpses weren’t any threat; something had hacked them almost into pieces. Neither she nor Davidson had any idea who the apes were, or how they’d gotten there, but General Thade would have recognized the two soldiers he’d slaughtered not a hundred yards up the beach…

  Davidson tugged her away from the grisly sight, and a moment later they broke through to the surface and began to splash back toward shore. As they sloshed through the shallows and up to the stagnant little beach, Davidson saw Krull staring at him. He grinned.

  “You guys don’t go near the water?”

  Krull bared his teeth, but turned away as Davidson carefully sat his box down on the ground. As with almost everything from the Oberon that was part of the official stores, the box had the ship’s logo embossed on its lid.

  Davidson stared at the box a moment, then shook his head and turned to the others.

  “How come there’re two monkeys down there?”

  Now everybody stared at him, and a few began to mutter. Krull pushed forward, angry. “Someone else knows about you,” he said.

  Davidson shrugged him off. Now that he had what he wanted, he didn’t have to care about monkeys, no matter whether they were alive or dead. He knelt, worked at the catches on the lid of the box, opened it, and began to rummage through the contents inside. After a few moments he found what he was looking for, and stood up holding what looked like a small laptop computer.

  None of the natives, whether ape or human, knew what to make of this, and Davidson was in no mood to enlighten them. He walked off a few paces, scanning the woods, the sky, and the water, checking for lines of sight and optimum transmission windows. Once he found a likely spot, he set up the transmitter, initiated its maintenance routines, and waited for it to warm up, mentally crossing his fingers until he saw a couple of digital lights flicker.

  Thank God, he thought, the water didn’t damage anything…

  As he worked, Birn gingerly approached the box, squatted, and peered inside. After a moment his curiosity got the better of him, and he began to pull things out. The first item he discovered was a compass. He held that up to the light, shook it, watched the needle whirl and then steady. He handed it to Daena, reached in for more, and in quick succession came up with a flare, a packet of field rations, a thermal blanket, a high tensile strength rope, and finally a medical kit.

  All of this garnered quite a bit of interest, since most of it was several hundred years advanced over the current state of their own civilizations. As the bits and pieces went from hand to hand, accompanied by grunts and puzzled expressions, it became obvious that while nobody knew what to make of these things, the fact that Davidson had them and seemed to know what they were for went a long way toward backing up his wild claims.

  Gunnar ended up holding the package of field rations, examining the sleek plastic cover with a mixture of curiosity and distaste. This wasn’t surprising, since his world was at least a century away from developing a plastics industry.

  He peered at the markings on the cover but, not being able to decipher them. Meals: Ready to Eat— Baked Chicken, Gravy, Generic Vegetable, Rice, Dessert… he soon lost interest and turned to the package itself. He poked it, twisted it, and finally got the notion of trying to tear the tough plastic sack open. It was harder than he expected, but with a powerful jerk he finally succeeded in ripping the bag apart and spilling some squarish brown lumps of desiccated air force-issue chicken onto the ground.

  Why would they wrap up little chunks of shit in such a fancy bag? he wondered to himself. They must be very strange people…

  He’d jumped suddenly, as he heard a sound that had never before been heard in his world: the distinctive electronic squawk of a digitized vocal transmission coming through a high-gain filtered speaker.

  Ari’s eyes widened. “What is it?” she asked.

  Davidson glanced up, amused. “It’s called a me
ssenger. It keeps an open frequency with my ship so I can talk to them.”

  Ari’s eyes widened. She stared at the little instrument as if it might suddenly sprout wings and start chasing her.

  “It can talk?”

  Davidson nodded. “With radio waves.”

  From the looks everybody gave Davidson, as well as the messenger, it was plain that the term radio waves hadn’t done much to clear up the general confusion. Davidson sighed. “Invisible energy that floats all around us,” he added.

  Evidently the notion of energy hadn’t yet gained much traction in either ape or human society, either.

  “This is sorcery,” Krull growled, eyeing the little electronic box menacingly.

  Davidson waved one hand soothingly. “Not sorcery, science. I just have to monkey with it a little.”

  I wonder if they caught that one?

  Ari and Krull glanced at each other. Maybe they did, Davidson thought.

  A high-pitched, piercing tone, the electronic equivalent of a four-alarm scream, spiked through the air. It caught everyone by surprise, even Davidson, who had been hoping to hear it. Everybody jumped like startled jackrabbits. The two monkeys covered their ears. Davidson jumped, too, but for different reasons.

  “Contact!” he shouted, pumping his fist in triumph. Behind him, Birn crept forward and peered carefully over his shoulder, snatching a peek at the mysterious alien machine. What he saw on the screen, though it didn’t make any sense to him, was a single brightly colored line sweeping back and forth. As the line reached different parts of the screen, two tiny pinpoints of light would blaze up and then disappear. When Birn looked up into Davidson’s face, he saw that it was shining as brightly as the lights.

  “Jesus,” Davidson gasped. “They’re already here!” With one trembling finger, he traced the short distance between the two flickering lights.

  Ari moved closer, her mouth open in amazement. Daena also approached, her face a study in contrasts. She glanced at Ari, then at Davidson, and said, “You’d better warn them about the apes.”

  Davidson stared at her in disbelief, and then snorted out loud. “Better warn the apes about them. We’re in control now. We’re the eight-hundred-pound gorilla!”