Planet of the Apes 04 - Lord of the Apes Read online

  THE SCI-FI

  SERIES THAT’S

  EXPLODING IN POPULARITY

  Take two astronauts time-warped 1000 years into the future to find human civilization destroyed and the Apes in control—and you have a terrifying vision of what the world may someday be like:

  The Orangutans rule

  The clever Chimpanzees are the administrators and bureaucrats

  The powerful and brutal Gorillas staff the military and police

  And Humans are enslaved

  Only the astronauts Burke and Virdon, and their companion Galen are free in this savage world. But theirs is the freedom of perpetual fugitives . . .

  “The Tyrant,” based on the teleplay by Walter Black

  “The Gladiators,” based on the teleplay by Art Wallace

  “BRING ON THE GLADIATORS!”

  “TO THE WINNER—LIFE!”

  “TO THE LOSER—DEATH!”

  “HUMANS ARE SAVAGES—THEY ENJOY KILLING EACH OTHER!”

  The crowd was at a fever pitch. The Chimp Prefect Irnar leaned back and smiled—this was the way to rule a district. Put two humans in an arena and let them fight to the death. He had been staging these amusements for twenty years—twenty years without a rebellion.

  But this time one of the gladiators was Pete Burke. When Burke won and refused to kill his opponent, the crowd went berserk. The humans in the crowd were stunned—it was a flash of rebellion out of the long-gone past of a vanished civilization. Things would never be the same in Irnar’s district again . . .

  And Pete Burke would be the first to bear the brunt of Ape reprisals.

  The AWARD books based on the fascinating Planet of the Apes TV series:

  #1 MAN THE FUGITIVE

  #2 ESCAPE TO TOMORROW

  #3 JOURNEY INTO TERROR

  #4 LORD OF THE APES

  FIRST AWARD PRINTING 1976

  Copyright © 1974, 1976

  by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

  All rights reserved.

  AWARD BOOKS are published by

  Universal-Award House, Inc.,

  subsidiary of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation,

  235 East Forty-fifth Street, New York, N.Y. 10017.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For the whole gang down at the

  Modern Sports Center.

  THE

  TYRANT

  based on the teleplay

  by Walter Black

  ONE

  It was late summer. The days were still warm, but there was a hint of coolness in the evening air that warned of an end to the pleasant weather. Far away from the bustling cities, the changing of the seasons was marked more clearly, by the color of the foliage and the habits of the animals. In the country, one often felt closer to nature, at peace with oneself and with the world. The atmosphere encouraged contemplation and serenity. One went to the city for business, and to the country for tranquillity. This was often a mistake.

  A narrow, rutted road ran among the trees, following the curving path of a small creek. Great limbs of oak and maple trees overhung the road, and the leafy ceiling made the pathway seem like a cool green tunnel. Birds twittered in the trees, and bees buzzed lazily among the flowering shrubs on either side of the road. It was a peaceful scene, and a deadly one.

  The stillness of the picture was disturbed slightly by the gentle clopping of a horse, its rider walking it slowly through the forest. A horse and rider might well fit into this pastoral scene, but the rider was of gigantic stature, carried a rifle over one shoulder, and had a bestial, grizzled expression—he was a gorilla. The huge ape wore the black leather uniform of his kind, although he had removed his gauntlets and stowed them in the saddlebags thrown across the horse’s flanks. It was the standard uniform, worn throughout the ape empire by all police and military personnel, including the apes’ commander-in-chief, General Urko. The approaching gorilla was Lieutenant Daku, a local police officer. He was the principal aide to Aboro, the local chief of police.

  A fly settled on Daku’s brow. With a gesture of annoyance he batted it away. The warm weather, the traveling, and his duties had made Daku more irritable than usual. He grumbled as he reined in his slowly walking horse. The horse snorted and came to a halt in the middle of the deeply rutted dirt road. Daku turned in the saddle and looked back in the direction he had come from. For a few seconds there was nothing to see. Then a wagon appeared around a bend in the road. Daku waved to the uniformed gorilla driving the wagon. “Come on!” shouted the lieutenant. The gorilla driver on the wagon flicked his whip at the single horse pulling the vehicle, but said nothing in reply to his lieutenant. The horse did not increase its pace. Daku watched and waited impatiently, muttering under his breath. After a while the wagon had nearly reached the place in the road where Daku waited astride his horse.

  “Can’t you get that animal to move any faster than that?” asked Daku. Once more, the gorilla driver said nothing. Daku shook his head and gave his horse a light kick with his heels. The horse started forward. About a hundred yards further on, the road forked. Daku paused so that the wagon driver would be sure which fork the lieutenant had taken; Daku was not overwhelmingly impressed with the driver’s intelligence. Without looking back, Daku urged his horse along the right-hand fork. The wagon followed him. Daku was gratified to hear the rumbling of the heavy wagon’s wheels behind him. The driver had taken the correct way. Daku continued muttering to himself.

  Not far away, four human beings and one ape were hard at work together; this was somewhat strange for this time and this world. The humans and the ape—a chimpanzee—seemed to be working together in harmony and friendship. The ape was not supervising or shouting angry instructions; instead, he was laboring as hard as any of his companions.

  The chimpanzee, whose name was Galen, was an unusual individual in an unusual world. He had not been content to live his life according to the guidelines set down by the older and supposedly wiser apes. He had become interested in how the ape world had developed from its prehistory to its present level of sophistication. The apes in power controlled the schools and what was taught in them; Galen nevertheless had his private doubts. He became convinced that there was more to the story of the apes’ dominance than what he had been taught. These doubts, and a restless curiosity that sought to answer them, caused a great deal of trouble for young Galen. He ignored the warnings of his loved ones. Galen’s search for the truth took him, at last, too far; his actions could no longer be dismissed by the apes in power. Galen was branded a renegade, an exile from his own kind.

  At this time, a remarkable event occurred. Two human beings from the twentieth century appeared among the apes of this far-distant era. Alan Virdon and Pete Burke were astronauts whose spacecraft had become trapped in a storm of powerful and unknown forces. The astronauts were buffeted through space by giant stellar winds of unimaginable proportions. Their craft was barely able to stand the stress. Only seconds before they lapsed into unconsciousness, the men managed to trigger an automatic recall system, to guide the crippled ship back to Earth. This the rocket did—but somehow, due to the vortex of forces that had twisted the ship about like a cork on the ocean, when the astronauts found themselves on Earth, it was one thousand years after their original takeoff. They were on Earth, sure enough; it was the right planet but the wrong year. It was not the planet they had known. It was a planet of the apes.

  Virdon and Burke soon discovered that apes ruled the world and that humans had been reduced to a status only slightly above other animals. No official record remained of the time when human beings ruled the Earth. Yet once in a while,
Virdon and Burke discovered scraps of their old lives, unofficial evidence that threw the highest ape leaders into a constant state of doubt and fear. For this reason, Virdon and Burke, potential leaders of a human slave revolt, were hunted across the face of the changed world.

  It was a happy coincidence that brought the astronauts and Galen together. They had much to learn from each other, and all three shared a growing friendship and mutual respect. They also shared many adventures as they sought to avoid capture by the gorilla police and their leader, General Urko.

  Galen, Virdon, and Burke were enjoying a quiet period after their weeks of fugitive running. They were staying with humans of their acquaintance, two brothers named Mikal and Janor. The five of them were bagging grain. The grain had been harvested and the edible portions had been separated from the rest. In front of the farm’s small barn, Janor and Mikal shoveled the grain from a large pile into gunnysacks; the astronauts and their chimpanzee companion closed and tied the filled sacks and stacked them in another pile.

  “This is hard work, sure enough,” said Janor, the older brother, “but it is much easier when you have friends to make the time go quicker.”

  Janor was large and extremely muscular. He was generally quiet and not easily aroused. To those who didn’t know him well, he seemed docile.

  He put down his shovel and walked over to the pile of bulging sacks. Janor walked with a limp, the result of an injury he had sustained years before.

  “We’re just glad to be able to repay you for your hospitality,” said Galen.

  “Hospitality that must be paid for isn’t hospitality,” said Mikal. He was a smaller man than his brother, but no less fit. His fiery disposition was the direct opposite of Janor’s quiet nature.

  “Well,” said Galen, “what I meant was—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Alan Virdon. “Look.” He stopped his work and pointed toward the road that ran past the brothers’ farm. In the distance, coming around a gradual curve in the road, was a group of mounted gorillas, uniformed and armed with rifles. One gorilla evidently the leader, rode ahead; after a moment it became clear to the human observers that behind him trailed a wagon driven by an enlisted soldier.

  Mikal turned to his brother Janor with an expression of disgust and hatred on his face. “Those are Aboro’s troops, for sure,” he said. He made no attempt to conceal his seething emotions.

  Janor turned to Virdon, Burke, and Galen. “Quick,” he cried. “Get into the barn. As long as our grain is out here, they won’t bother going inside.”

  It didn’t take the two astronauts and their chimpanzee companion long to understand Janor’s meaning. They made for the barn’s interior, stopped to take one quick look back, and then disappeared inside. Mikal and Janor knew that there was no use in pretending to work. They turned to face the oncoming wagon and rider.

  As Daku, the police lieutenant, rode up, he pulled back tightly on his horse’s reins. The animal made a grunting sound and pranced, but Daku’s firmness on the reins held the animal in check. He contemptuously stopped the horse as close to the two farmers as he could, looking down on Mikal and Janor with scorn. He took a list from a saddlebag and consulted it for a moment.

  “This, I suppose,” said Daku in a bored and haughty voice, “is what one might call the farm of Mikal and Janor, humans permitted by the graciousness of the ape government to pursue their pitiable activities.” He checked off the names on the list and turned toward the gorilla who had alighted from the wagon behind Daku.

  “Shall I begin, Lieutenant?” asked the soldier.

  Daku looked supremely contemptuous. Even though the soldier was another gorilla, a beast incomparably superior to the lowly humans in the farmyard, Daku could not restrain his natural impatience. “Yes, Hosson,” he said to the driver, “you may begin. If you didn’t begin, we would be here for the greater part of the day. And this isn’t the most pleasant place to spend the greater part of the day, is it, Hosson?”

  The driver was chastized. “No, sir,” he said. “No, Lieutenant. I’ll begin.”

  “Begin what?” asked Mikal; his voice was filled with its accustomed hostility toward the ape rulers.

  Daku’s eyes gave a quick flick toward Mikal, barely noticing the existence of the human. There was no attention paid to Mikal’s reasonable question. There was no intention on Daku’s part to answer. Instead, the ape leader returned his eyes to the list he held in his hands. “Begin loading the grain,” he said to Hosson. “And don’t waste half the day doing it, either.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Daku,” said the driver.

  In silence the two farmers watched the beginning of this now-familiar drama. In silence they watched as Hosson ambled clumsily toward the pile of loose grain and the sacks of already bagged grain. There seemed to be nothing to do; that was the situation on the ape world, particularly where its human inhabitants were concerned.

  Hosson walked over to the stacked sacks of grain and lifted one with a loud grunt. Even for the muscular gorilla, it was heavy. He carried the sack to the wagon and threw it in the back. Three more trips he made; three more sacks of grain joined the first in the gorilla’s crude vehicle.

  “All right,” shouted Mikal. Janor tried to hold his impetuous brother back, but it was already too late. Daku’s evil eyes jerked toward Mikal.

  “That’s enough!” Mikal shouted. “You’ve taken enough! How much do you want?”

  “Well,” said Daku imperturbably, “I have this list. And as much as this list says, well, that’s how much I take. And, oftentimes, because of my special police powers, I can tell the list how much it says. If you know what I mean.”

  Hosson pushed Mikal roughly out of the way; there was a minor scuffle, but Mikal quickly backed off. Any show of force against an ape meant instant death. Meanwhile, Daku was urging Hosson to load more of the grain onto the wagon.

  “No more!” cried Janor; even he at last realized the extent of the gorillas’ thievery. “You have already taken more than you’ve ever taken before!”

  “This time,” said Daku evenly, hatefully, “we are taking it all.”

  “There’ll be nothing left for us . . .” said Mikal, his voice trailing off into hopelessness.

  In the barn, Virdon, Burke, and Galen watched angrily but helplessly. Many times in the past they had witnessed similar scenes of cruelty and savagery by the apes. It had been rare indeed that the three companions had been able to do anything to stop it. Now, the situation appeared beyond salvation. The two astronauts and their chimpanzee friend rested at full length on the floor of the barn’s loft, peering down through a partially boarded-up window. They watched as Mikal hotheadedly stormed toward the gorilla soldiers, attempting to wrest a sack of the grain from the hands of Hosson. At this, Daku could control his arrogant contempt no longer. The human would have to be punished for his actions. From his place astride his horse, Daku drew his rifle, urged his horse closer to Mikal, and slammed the butt of the weapon against Mikal’s head. Mikal collapsed immediately and lay on the ground without moving. There was a muffled gasp from Galen in the barn. From Virdon and Burke there was only worried silence. It seemed to all three that Mikal might be seriously injured, possibly even dead. Still, there was nothing for the three fugitives to do.

  Janor moved a few steps forward toward his stricken brother, but stopped as Daku and Hosson both raised their rifles toward him. Burke half-raised his tall, dark-haired form from his hidden position in the barn until Galen placed a restraining arm on the astronaut’s shoulder. “This is no time to be playing hero, Pete!” whispered the chimpanzee.

  Below them, in the farmyard, Mikal had risen to his feet, stunned and somewhat dazed by the blow from Daku’s rifle.

  “Be thankful,” said Daku haughtily. “I could have just as easily shot you both for attacking a member of the police.”

  “Why—” began Mikal angrily, rubbing the sore and bleeding area where he had been struck. His brother caught his arm and silenced him once again
.

  “Why didn’t I?” finished Daku. “It didn’t seem to me to be worth the expense of the rifle shells, at the time.” The police lieutenant turned his attention carelessly away from the humans and back to Hosson. “Hurry it up!” he cried at the luckless soldier.

  “I’m doing the best that I can, Lieutenant,” said Hosson in a near whimper. “These sacks are heavier than they look.”

  “And you are weaker than you look,” said Daku. “If that’s the best you can do, maybe we should have had these human scum load their own grain onto the wagon, except that they could hardly be trusted.”

  “I’m all finished, Lieutenant,” said Hosson.

  “Wonderful,” said Daku sarcastically. “I’m very proud. Once again we’ve demonstrated the overwhelming superiority of the simian race. My gorilla, Hosson, has accomplished what the two humans, working together, might have done in a quarter of the time.”

  Hosson tossed the final sack of grain onto the wagon. Left behind was only a scattering of loose grain, already beginning to disperse in the light breeze that blew across the courtyard. The remaining grain was too coarse, too unfit, and too unplentiful to be bagged by the brothers. The gorillas ignored it, but Mikal and Janor stared at it with almost unbearable sadness. It was all that remained of the labors of their entire spring and summer. And for the future . . .

  Hosson leaped into his seat at the front of the wagon and gathered up the reins. Daku wheeled his horse around, his business completed, his mind already considering the next human farm, the next collection of grain. “Move out!” called Daku. “We’ve got more farms to visit and the day is already half gone.” He turned again and faced the two farmers, who stood dejected and helpless in their farmyard. Daku frowned. “I will be back next month,” he warned.

  “Next month?” cried Janor. It seemed impossible. What was left?