Beneath The Planet Of The Apes Read online

  BENEATH THE PLANET

  OF THE APES

  . . . in the buried ruins of what was once New York City, lived an incredible race of men, mutated beyond belief by the effects of the ancient Holocaust.

  . . . in the ashes of atomic dust, chimpanzees picketed for peace while their gorilla leaders prepared for war.

  . . . where a great church once shone in the sunlight, dark religious ceremonies paid tribute to the Great Bomb, bringer of life and death.

  This is the Earth, thousands of years from now, and this the story of two men from the 20th century who somersaulted through a time warp into the most plausible and yet most fantastic adventure ever conceived.

  20th Century-Fox Presents

  An Arthur P. Jacobs Production

  BENEATH THE PLANET

  OF THE APES

  Starring

  JAMES FRANCISCUS • KIM HUNTER

  MAURICE EVANS • LINDA HARRISON

  Co-starring

  PAUL RICHARDS • VICTOR BUONO

  JAMES GREGORY • JEFF COREY

  NATALIE TRUNDY • THOMAS GOMEZ

  and

  CHARLTON HESTON

  as

  Taylor

  Produced by

  APJAC PRODUCTIONS

  Associate Producer

  MORT ABRAHAMS

  Directed by

  TED POST

  Screenplay by

  PAUL DEHN

  Story by

  PAUL DEHN and

  MORT ABRAHAMS

  Based upon Characters Created by

  PIERRE BOULLE

  Music by

  LEONARD ROSEMAN

  BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES

  A Bantam Book / published July 1970

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1970 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by

  mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  BENEATH THE PLANET

  OF THE APES

  1. GENESIS

  2. TAYLOR

  3. BRENT

  4. URSUS

  5. ZIRA AND CORNELIUS

  6. NOVA

  7. BRENT AND NOVA

  8. SPECTERS

  9. MENDEZ

  10. MASKS

  11. “TAY-LOR!”

  12. DR. ZAIUS

  13. APE AND MAN

  14. BOMB

  15. ARMAGEDDON

  For Pierre Boulle

  for his two very important

  contributions to the arts of

  Literature and Film—

  The Bridge Over The River Kwai

  and Planet Of The Apes.

  1. GENESIS

  Wasteland.

  Total, glaring, absolute.

  Stark, terrible.

  Nothing growing.

  Nothing moving.

  Ageless, perpetual silence. Eternal solitude. Only the piercing whine of the dry nameless wind blowing in from a distantly heard sea.

  Desolation. A universe of nakedness and nil.

  Utter, supreme. Everlasting.

  Nothing of Life. Only the unrelenting deathly stillness. The infinity of zero, emptiness, nothingness.

  This is the planet where Man has lost his supreme position in the scheme of things. Listen to the Wind.

  If it could speak, it would tell you of Taylor. The man, the scientist, the space-explorer. The scorching, chilling breath of the wind’s passage would carry the terrible tale to the walls of Infinity, down the endless corridors of that vast timelessness which seems to be the core of the land itself . . .

  Listen, the Wind . . .

  “This is the truth eternal: whatever thinks, can speak, And whatever speaks can murder,

  “But what is there to murder in this dead place?”

  There is no answer for the Wind.

  “When the astronaut, Taylor, came first among us from a voyage in outermost space, he perceived that his ship had passed through a fold in the Fourth Dimension, which is Time. And Taylor knew that he was older than when his journey had begun . . . by two thousand years and ten.”

  The Wind whines higher and louder, scoring eerily over a dead landscape. Weird lambent lights suffuse the terrain. There is a vast unearthly brilliance invested in a panorama of Nothingness.

  “But in the first days he did not know the name of the planet on which he had set foot—where Apes, risen to great estate, had acquired the power of tongues, while Man, fallen from his zenith to become a beast of the earth, had lost the means of speech, and was dumb . . .”

  The dead sands remained unmoving, the wind prowled over the monolithic expanse of desert-like desolation. And isolation. The unknown lights bathed the wasteland with a dull, inflexible glow.

  “Now Taylor hated war. And since Man had made war upon himself—murdered himself—over and over again, ever since the first town was built and burned and bloodied—Taylor believed that the race of Man was hopeless.”

  A Dead Sea. Dead like the Dead Land.

  The wind stole quietly over the still, stagnant, murky waters.

  “Yet the great Apes were hardly better. They put Taylor in a cage as they had once been caged. When he and his woman escaped from the City of the Apes into the wilderness called the Forbidden Zone . . . he found a desert land of rock and stone. Barren, unfruitful, devoid of life and eternally laid waste by Man’s vilest war in Man’s history. And in this wilderness, Taylor set eyes upon the Statue . . .”

  A statue with spikes.

  A stone lady, gazing out over the limitless endless acres of sand. Oblivious to the mean waves lapping at her copper-lined bosom. A Colossus, with upstretched arm, bearing aloft a torch that had lost all its meaning. All its truth. All its light.

  A long-dead lady of stone eyes, stone ears and stone senses—whose only companion for an eon had been—

  —the Wind.

  “. . . and Taylor knew he was back on Earth . . . an Earth defiled and destroyed by the hand of Man. Set this down: whatever speaks, can murder.”

  And Taylor, sliding down from the back of his horse, with the savage woman Nova also dismounting, staggered toward the gigantic spikes upthrusting from the cruel sand and blurted his cry of agony to the unheeding skies all around them: “Goddamn you all to hell!”

  Falling to his torn knees, he buried his head in his hands. Sobs racked his tall, magnificent figure. Nova watched and listened in dumb incomprehension. The dead landscape remained mute.

  The Statue of Liberty could not hear Taylor weeping.

  Stone has no heart.

  Or soul

  It does not even hear the wind.

  2. TAYLOR

  Taylor and the girl, Nova, departed wearily from the staggering spectacle before them. Behind them, the half-buried statue of Miss Liberty beckoned mutely from her sandy grave. The dead waters lapped pitifully at her stone shoulders and obsidian face.

  Taylor’s mind reeled.

  He was rendered incapable of any thought but that of the greatest wonder.

  The scientist in him was mocked.

  The space-explorer in him was confounded.

  The man in him was brutally stunned.

  The nameless planet, ruled by a hierarchy of intelligent apes was This Planet Earth! Or rather, more bizarrely, more fittingly, what was left of it.

  His own imagination, his own instincts and senses, boggled before the import of what he had seen. What he now knew for an unalterable fact. The wo
rld as he had known it, when he had left Earth for outer space with his three fellow scientists, was now a madhouse. A mathematical equation of unequivocal madness and nonsense.

  Even as he wandered futilely across the arid desert stretches of this monumental Nowhere, with Nova limply and stickily plastered to his back astride the poor, tired horse, he tried to sort out the memories and experiences of the most recent past.

  How long ago had it been that he and the three others, one of them a woman, had lost their way in limitless space and come down on this alien soil in their ailing spacecraft? Time and torture at the hands of the militant apes had robbed Taylor of his ability to think. Now he could not even remember the names of his space comrades. All he could recall was the terrible incident of landing. The woman had been dead, on first contact with the terrain. It was not the physical hardship of a crash landing but the inherent qualities of the flight itself. All four astronauts, through some intricate process aboard the spacecraft, had aged eighteen months in a time lapse of 2000 years from Earth. Being female, the woman had not survived the flight. Taylor and the two men had swum for shore, reaching a wasteland of Arizona-like proportions. All brown dry earth and long shelves of rock stretching as far as the eye could see. It was then that the men from Earth reached some form of vegetation in their aimless wanderings and encountered the horde of filthy, unkempt, savage, barbaric humans who had lost the power of speech—if they had ever had it. Nova had been one of them. A long-haired, wild-eyed beauty who could do no more than look at you with her eyes to convey her meaning. Someone you had to teach how to smile!

  Then, sweeping down through the bushes and the trees, had come the cavalry of apes. Leather-jacketed, truncheon-wielding, rifle-shooting gorillas. The barbaric whites had tried to run; Taylor and his two comrades among them. Terrified, speechless with horror. With whips, nets and hooks, the militia of gorillas had rounded them all up, killing those who dared to fight back. One of Taylor’s crew died in the attack. But the worst part of the whole bloody nightmare was what followed.

  Taylor found himself led to a complex. An area of stone warrens, of houses and cages, where the ape was the ruler of all that was left of the civilization on this planet. It was a simian state, ruled by a kingdom of gorillas, with chimpanzees and orangutans serving as medical men. Of the remaining two astronauts, one was lobotomized and converted into an unthinking vegetable. For Taylor, the simian rulers decreed emasculation and a brainwashing which would eradicate his memory. But with the help of chimpanzee scientists, who felt the ape autocracy was far from a benevolent one, Taylor had made his escape. With Nova. A doglike, mute love had sprung up between them because the girl could not speak. Might never speak though Taylor had tried to teach her.

  And now that he had found his way into the Forbidden Zone, leaving his tormentors God knew how far behind, Taylor could still remember the unbelievable aura and reality of the Ape Kingdom. The signs all over the place: THE ALMIGHTY CREATED THE APE IN HIS OWN IMAGE—ONLY HUMANS KILL FOR SPORT, LUST OR GREED . . . HUMAN SEE, HUMAN DO . . . and all those incredible statues and artifacts of ape culture: the hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil symbol; the mother gorilla holding a baby ape in her arms like Michelangelo’s Pieta, the whole abominable concept of Ape as Human Being!

  Yes, Taylor remembered that much.

  The shock might never wear off.

  With humans in cages, people being whipped and driven, the race of mankind lorded and ruled by a panel of intellectual apes who had revised the entire scheme of the order of heredity and nature. It was something that would haunt whatever was left of his own life . . .

  Ape had evolved from Man.

  Detecting menace and extinction from the twin conditions of human ignorance and bestiality, the society of apes had presumed that their own well-being depended upon the mastery and domination of the inferior being known as Man. It was a thoroughgoing example of genocide in action, as Taylor had actually seen it.

  Man as slave labor, Man as expendable creature, Man as Nothing.

  The world had come to a fitting irony after another 2000 years of Knowledge, Culture and Freedom. It had descended back to the apes, climbed back into the same tree from which it had escaped.

  And all it had obviously needed to upset the applecart had been one madman’s thermonuclear bomb. Some nation’s plunge into the Final Solution. Whose? America? France? Red China? Russia? Germany? England? Israel . . .?

  It didn’t matter, now.

  It was Man’s epitaph, no matter how you looked at it.

  Whether as man, scientist or space-explorer.

  The wheel had come full cycle.

  There was nothing left—but death.

  Their aimless, sluggish trek across the vast wasteland had been an amalgam of scorching heat, discomfort and mind-pounding weariness. Taylor could hardly feel the bones in his body. Bearded, bronzed, clothed in fragments of leather garment, he felt like some archaic Adam lost in a new world. Nova, her lithe body hugging him, was as silent as ever. The poor mare accommodating them both had almost lost the power to move.

  The sun beat down from a blue sky hazed with white clouds. Taylor’s eyeballs ached. The sweat ran down his strong-planed face and gauntly formidable shoulders.

  They saw the oasis at the same time. The girl almost frantically pummeled his back. Taylor nodded. It was there, all right. No mirage, no trickery. The country was as arid as ever but he could clearly see trees, a pool of oddly clear water. The dark scowl which had been fixed like a graven image on Taylor’s face, lifted.

  Slowly he led the horse to the water’s edge, staring down. Yes, it was real. He could see their reflections in the low pool. It was no more than a waterhole, flanked by low, gnarled trees which perhaps had never known foliage.

  “Water,” Taylor murmured. “But the trees are dead.”

  He helped Nova dismount, never unaware completely of the fine animal body, the nubile beauty of her. Nova’s eyes were like two eternal question marks. As if existence itself were something for which she could never find the answer.

  Taylor leaned over the water, testing it tentatively. It seemed all right. It wasn’t brackish or foreign-tasting. He gestured to Nova and pulled the horse over. All three drank. Lustily, busily, as though it were the most important single act in the world.

  Sated, Taylor flopped back on the sand, staring up at the remorselessly hot sky. Nova came over to him, lying down dutifully, and he locked an arm around her, still staring up.

  His blue eyes slitted sardonically. It might be a sky anywhere in a normal universe. A mantle over New York on a summer day. Or Vermont or Kansas. Or Arizona . . . it was over New York, all right. A Manhattan or a Brooklyn or a Bronx buried under hundreds of feet of thermonuclear sand. What a travesty!

  “Where in hell do we go from here?” he growled up at the sky. There was no answer. He twisted to look at Nova. “Or do we just stop off and found a human colony? And the kids would learn to talk better—sense than the apes.”

  Suddenly he placed a bronzed forefinger on Nova’s lips. Those full, uncosmetized labias that made of her face an appealing miracle.

  “Try to say the name I gave you,” he commanded softly. “No-va.”

  She remained mystified and mute, as always. He pointed at her, conscious of the surge of her splendid body against its pitiful fragments of costume. Then he pointed again, each time repeating her name as if it were a litany.

  “No-va . . . No-va . . . No-va . . .”

  Still she remained mute, her eyes puzzled.

  Then, and to his intense pleasure, she pointed her own finger at him, peering closely into his eyes.

  “Taylor” Taylor said, understanding what she was after.

  She pointed once more.

  “Taylor,” he echoed his own name.

  She squinted in the sun. “Taylor,” he said again, watching her mouth. Her lips were struggling with a sound but nothing came forth. A dumb and mute Eve. Beautiful but incommunicado.

&nbsp
; From among the rags of his body, Taylor produced his identity tag. The metallic ID from another world, another time. He looped it around his own neck and pointed to it. The disc gleamed in the sunlight. Nova followed his every move, like a child trying to learn.

  “Tay-lor—” he said, very slowly and carefully.

  Her lips barely moved in a brave attempt at mimicry. But no sound issued. Taylor sighed. Nova frowned, still trying. He reached across and kissed her tenderly on the lips, as he struggled to his feet. It would take more time than they had now . . .

  “Let’s find a home,” Taylor said.

  Home.

  It was not to be found in the limitless mass of wasteland. They plodded on, the horse dutifully carrying their combined weight. The sun beat down, a remote circle of fire far above in the leaden skies. Taylor guided the horse up a long slope that closed off any view of the horizon and what might lay before them. Nova clung to him like a frightened child.

  Finally, they had cleared the crest of the slope.

  Taylor halted in stupefaction, checking the horse with a violent tug.

  It was a view from Hell.

  A huge burial mound of scattered rock and rubble, stretching as far as the eye could see. Like some endless cemetery in which, like small and large tombstones, jutted the recognizable artifacts of a civilization long since destroyed and—ended. The ravaged and identifiable tops of Manhattan’s major skyscrapers shone dully in the glare. The pointed spire of the Chrysler Building, the powerful snub of the Empire State, the symmetrical squared roof of the RCA Building and the glittering, glasslike—

  Taylor blinked, closed his eyes and opened them again.

  The vision did not dissolve or shimmer or go away.

  Bitterly, his heart dying within him, he knew he was staring at the remnants of a long-since-buried New York.