Battle For The Planet Of The Apes (2 page)

Aldo surveyed the scene with ill-concealed annoyance. Particularly the human-taught class. Humans teaching apes, indeed! Teacher had just finished chalking up the words “APE SHALL NEVER KILL APE” on the board. The chimp and orangutan children watched attentively. But behind them the gorillas were restless and mumbled to each other.

Teacher turned to the class. “Gorillas! Read me what I have written.”

There was glazed incomprehension and silence from the back row.

Teacher sighed. Then, more hopefully: “Orangutans? Chimpanzees?”

In unison, the front row recited, “Ape shall never kill Ape!”

Aldo moved into the classroom then to stand beside his usual place on the front bench. The class fell silent as he entered. Aldo eyed the teacher and growled, “Can Ape ever kill Man?”

There was a growl of approval from the gorillas in the back. As it subsided, Teacher said coldly, ignoring his question, “You’re late, General Aldo. Again.” He wrote something into a battered book he held.

“What are you writing?” demanded Aldo.

Teacher extended the book. “Come and read it. To the class.”

“I won’t,” the gorilla said sullenly.

“You won’t,” Teacher chided gently, “because you can’t. And you can’t, because you don’t want to learn.” He shut the book. “And it’s my duty to tell that to Caesar.”

Aldo’s growl was silenced by the word “Caesar,” which also prompted an alert little boy chimpanzee to rise to his feet. He said wistfully, “If my father were a gorilla, we’d all be learning riding instead of writing.”

The gorillas howled appreciatively. All the apes laughed, chimpanzees and orangutans too.

Teacher smiled kindly. “Cornelius,” he said to the boy chimp, “Remember you’re Caesar’s son and heir. Being a good rider won’t make you a good ruler. Although,” he added drily, “in human history, quite a number of monarchs—and military dictators—seem to have thought that was enough.” He looked at Aldo as he said this last. He turned back to the class. “Now all of you take your charcoal sticks and copy down what I’ve written. The best shall be hung from this hook on the wall.”

Aldo took his place grumbling and eyeing the teacher. “I can think of better things to hang from hooks.”

He picked up his charcoal stick clumsily and began to make marks on the papyrus. It was difficult; he looked around to see if anyone else was having problems. The chimpanzees and orangutans were writing clearly and rapidly; the other gorillas were working slowly and with difficulty. Aldo bent back to his papyrus; he pressed harder, as if that would help. The charcoal stick snapped in two. “Aaargh!” he snarled. He hated the school! He hated writing! It was a useless waste of time—it was an occupation fit only for men! And for the weaker apes, chimpanzees and orangutans! “Effete intellectuals,” he fumed; they weren’t much better than humans!

In cheerful contrast, at the classroom’s other end, the young orangutan Virgil was stimulating the minds of his three ape pupils. He was trying to exercise their brains with argument, not fill them with facts. The dialogue was quick tempoed.

“But, Virgil, can we
alter
destiny? Can we tamper with time?”

Virgil’s smile was mischievous. “Accept my premise, and I will prove it logically.”

“What premise?”

“That the legends are true—that Man learned to travel not only faster than sound but faster than light as well.”

“All right, we accept the premise.”

“Then imagine a musician giving a live broadcast from what was once London to what was once New York on a Wednesday. He then travels faster than light from London to New York, where he arrives on the previous Tuesday, listens to his own broadcast on Wednesday, dislikes its quality intensely, and travels back faster than light to London in time to talk himself out of giving the broadcast in the first place.”

The chimpanzees and the orangutan shouted with laughter at this dubious but invigorating idea.

On the other side of the room, Teacher heard the happy laughter and envied it; that was what teaching should be. He sighed and went on mechanically scrutinizing and stacking on the desktop the parchments that the last of the chimp and orangutan children were now submitting for his inspection, “That’s very good, Mirko. You’re dismissed.”

Cornelius was the last of the chimps to present his parchment. Teacher looked it over carefully. “Good, Cornelius . . . Oh, there’s a mistake. You’ve written a ‘B’ for the second ‘P.’ ‘APE SHALL NEVER KILL ABE.’ ” He smiled jovially, “Who’s Abe?”

There was a pause. Then Cornelius said softly, “Teacher, have you forgotten your own name?”

Teacher was startled—and then touched. His eyes became moist. His voice fell to a whisper, and he mused, almost to himself, “So many people call me ‘Teacher,’ I’d almost . . .” He smiled at the chimp. “ ‘Ape shall never kill Abe.’ Thank you, Cornelius. That was a very kind thought.” He pulled himself together with visible effort. “You’re dismissed.” Cornelius trotted out.

He stood up and looked toward the back of his class. “Gorillas! Are you done?” He stared at them as firmly as he could; they were so much like children; discipline was all they understood. It was a shame their bodies had matured before their minds. With their incredible strength to force things to their will, they had no incentive to learn; they could accomplish what they wanted by the most direct—and brutal—method.

The gorillas were hunched, motionless yet menacing, on their back-row benches. Aldo rose from his place and slouched insolently toward Teacher. He slapped his parchment on the desktop beside the others.

Teacher picked it up and scrutinized it. “General Aldo, with respect, this is barely legible and will have to be written again. Your capital ‘A’ leans over like a tent in a high wind, and your ‘K’ is . . .”

Aldo curled his lip. Glaring at Teacher, he deliberately took Cornelius’ parchment from the top of the pile and began to tear it into shreds.

Teacher shouted at him, agonized, “No, Aldo! No!”

Abruptly, every ape in the room froze, shocked into hostility. Aldo turned apoplectic. The gorillas sprang to their feet in menacing unison. Virgil, appalled, raced across the schoolroom floor. “Teacher!” he cried. “You’ve spoken the unspeakable! You’ve said ‘No’ to an ape!”

Teacher went pale, shocked with the realization of what he had done.

“Teacher!” said Virgil. “You know better—you know why a human must never,
never
, say ‘No’ to an ape. In all our years of slavery to men, the word ‘No’ was the one word apes were electrically conditioned to fear. Caesar has forbidden men to utter it ever. An ape may say ‘No’ to a human. But a human may never again say ‘No’ to an ape!” He stepped in closer and whispered, “Tell them you’re sorry, Abe, and go home while you still have a home to go to. I’ll try to put in a word for you with Caesar.”

Teacher nodded slowly and turned to the gorillas. “I . . . I’m sorry. The writing you destroyed was by Caesar’s son. I . . . did not want you to suffer Caesar’s anger.”

Aldo snarled at the name. “What do I care for Caesar’s anger? Let me give you a taste of mine!”

The big gorilla lifted up a block of wood and hurled it at Teacher’s head. Taking their cue, the other gorillas began to run joyfully amok, roaring and screaming. They overturned Teacher’s desk and ripped up the papyruses. And then they headed for Teacher.

Teacher ran from the classroom. The gorillas boiled after him like bees swarming out of a hive. He lurched out into the street, stumbled, caught his footing and ran. The gorillas chased after him, and the rest of the students, seeing the excitement, came tailing after.

Teacher panted as he ran—he wasn’t used to this kind of exercise—his lungs ached from the effort; he charged through stalls of fruit and vegetables. The gorillas came barreling after, upsetting baskets and tables. Aldo was in the lead, shouting and roaring. The shoppers and stall-tenders screamed as they leapt out of his way.

Teacher dodged and whirled, around a house, down a street. There, ahead of him! There was a work area where humans were plaiting screen walls for houses. Maybe he could hide there! But the gorillas had already seen him. They came crashing through the screens after him.

Teacher tried to hold onto his glasses as he ran. He took off again, this time in a different direction—toward Caesar’s house. Caesar would help him!

But he wasn’t fast enough. Aldo came roaring down on him like a freight train and threw him roughly to the ground, pushing him into the dirt.

Grinning fiercely, Aldo drew his sword from his belt. It was broad and flat and short. He raised it high over his head.

Teacher tried to raise one arm in protest. Apes and humans alike gasped in shock.

And then someone,
an ape
, cried, “Stop!”

All heads whirled to look—it was Caesar, standing in his doorway. He was a tall, strong chimpanzee; he had the bearing of a leader. Just behind him stood MacDonald, his chief human adviser.

The gorillas stared at Caesar. Aldo glared sullenly at him, his sword still raised over Teacher.

Caesar stepped down from the doorway, his stare fiercer than Aldo’s. “I said . . . stop . . . Aldo.”

Their eyes locked. Aldo burned with a fierce red anger, but Caesar’s quieter strength was more effective. Aldo averted his eyes. He looked around for support, but there was none from the other gorillas; they were too thoroughly cowed by Caesar’s authority. And there was certainly none from any of the chimpanzees and orangutans in the crowd; they were eyeing the gorillas with cold disdain and Caesar with love and respect.

At last, slowly, Aldo lowered his sword. But he waved in the direction of the Teacher, shouting his frustration. “He broke the Law! With his own mouth he broke the First Law!”

Caesar seemed to grow. “
I
am the Law,” he said sternly. “And if I find that he has broken it,
I
shall pass judgment. What has he done?”

Virgil pushed forward through the crowd. “I can tell you. I was there.”

Caesar turned to him, his tone softening, “Yes, Virgil . . .?”

“I was there,” Virgil said breathlessly; he too was still panting from the chase. “Teacher only . . . only . . . reverted to type under provocation. He spoke like a slave master from the old days of servitude, He spoke the negative imperative used for the conditioning of mechanical obedience.”

Caesar smothered a smile. MacDonald grinned broadly. Caesar said, “Put that in words which even Caesar can understand.”

“He said, ‘No, Aldo, no!’ ”

The crowd gasped at that, the apes in anger, the humans in fear.

MacDonald stepped forward and began to help Teacher up. “Teacher, you’re old enough to be well aware that ‘No’ is the one word a human may never say to an ape, because apes once heard it said to them a hundred times a day by humans.”

“Yes,” Teacher nodded. “I am old . . . enough.”

“Then what was the provocation?”

Teacher was uneasy. He swallowed hard. He looked back and forth between Caesar, Aldo, and MacDonald. Finally, he managed to say, “General Aldo tore up a writing exercise written especially for me by Caesar’s son. It was very good and . . . respectfully affectionate.”

Caesar turned to Aldo and confronted him. “Why did you tear it up?”

Aldo sullenly refused to answer. From the crowd, a young chimpanzee called, “Because Teacher said that the general’s writing was very bad.”

The chimpanzees and orangutans in the crowd laughed. The gorillas didn’t; they fumed in silent embarrassment, and one or two curled their lips in anger.

Caesar said, after a pause, “General Aldo is a very good rider. My son is not, though he wishes to be. But my son
is
a very good writer. General Aldo is not. Apes cannot excel at everything,” he said, smiling obliquely at Virgil, “with very few exceptions. That is all there is to it. The matter will be forgotten. Now go back to school.”

“The schoolroom has been wrecked, Caesar,” Virgil said. “By the gorillas.”

Aldo snorted triumphantly. “Class ended! Schoolroom closed! Now we go back to riding horses!” There was an approving bark from the gorilla group behind him, but it was quickly checked as Caesar advanced to within an inch of the general’s face.

Caesar’s voice was firm. “You and your ‘friends’ will go back and put the schoolroom in order.”

Their eyes locked. Aldo glared back, not quite totally defiant, not yet. He fumed, but he sheathed his sword.

Caesar turned on his heel and headed back toward his house, summoning MacDonald to his side with a curt gesture.

MacDonald caught up to him, frowning. This might be a good time to broach the subject of what happened on the road. He offered, “Caesar, I think that Aldo’s hatred is not confined to humans.”

Caesar was charitable; he shrugged it off. “Aldo still remembers the old days.”

MacDonald couldn’t be that charitable. “I think he’d like to bring them back.”

Caesar looked at him curiously, but he did not ask the man to explain his odd remark.

Caesar’s house was large and airy, its architectural style simple and clean. It was decorated with wood and paper and plaited screens. The impression was that of a rich tropical forest brought indoors.

Caesar’s wife, Lisa, a pretty young chimpanzee, was preparing a meal of fruit, nuts, and vegetables for her husband and his adviser, MacDonald. A young, attractive serving girl was working with her.

Occasionally, Lisa would cast a motherly glance out the window. Directly outside was a collection of swings, vines, and perches on which Cornelius was playing with a human boy.

At the moment, Cornelius was poised on a perch. “Hey, Jimmy, d’you want to play follow-my-leader?” And with that, he executed a series of complicated flips, landing easily on a lower limb.

Jimmy watched sourly. When Cornelius stopped and looked at him questioningly, he made a disgusted face. “No. You’re always the leader.” He reached down and picked up a stick about rifle length; he pointed it at Cornelius, “Tchang, tchang! I got you!”

Cornelius clutched his breast, fell backward off the limb to the ground, uttering a loud cry of agony.

Almost immediately, Lisa stuck her head out the window. Seeing Cornelius lying on the ground, she hurried outside. “Cornelius, are you hurt?”