Beneath the Planet of the Apes - Avallone Michael - Страница 4

But the world was truly mad.

The elements had run amuck.

Nature was still awry.

Rising directly in his path—his, the girl’s and their horse—was a wall of ice. A thick, glassy, solid, unmelting barrier of ice. A paradox of eye and mind, giving the lie to the bright ball of sun blazing down from the blue sky above.

Taylor’s mind stopped.

He was frightened now, really frightened. The awesome mass of crystal towering down dwarfed all his logic, all his strength.

“That wasn’t here,” he murmured. “A minute ago, that wasn’t here!” He turned to Nova; the girl was cowering behind him, hiding her eyes from the terrible apparition. “And it isn’t just me who’s seeing things,” Taylor breathed scratchily. He steadied the horse’s restive head. “Can two people have the same nightmare?”

Shocked, he led the horse away from the precipice of ice. The girl hugged him, her nails digging into his weary body. Taylor shook himself dumbly. Before he could make another move, a tremendous, seismic crescendo of sound rumbled behind him. The girl blurted a scream. Taylor caught himself in time. A gigantic fissure, as palpable as death and fear itself, had yawned in the earth and Taylor desperately managed to careen the horse so that it avoided the mammoth canyon of nothingness that had suddenly loomed before its hooves. Thank God the poor beast was sufficiently exhausted for him to control it. If it had bolted suddenly . . .

Taylor turned to Nova. Urgency made him mime the words he spoke to her now. It was imperative that she understand him.

“Nova! If you—” he pointed to her, “lose—me—” he pointed to himself, “go to Ape City.” She recoiled in horror at the words. He shook his head. “Not to the gorillas. Go to the chimpanzee quarter. There’s no other way.” He fought against the incomprehension in her terrified eyes. “Find Zira. Zi-ra . . .”

She nodded now, less fearfully, recognizing the name of the sympathetic female chimpanzee doctor who had helped them escape to the Forbidden Zone. But she clung to his hand, not letting go until she knew he wished it. Taylor dismounted from the horse, purposefully unslinging the rifle from the bolster on the saddle. There was now a ten-yard ledge between the crevice and the precipice of ice. Taylor shook himself once again, feeling his brains boiling over.

“Impossible! But it’s there—I’m not dreaming. Or else I—or maybe the whole universe—has gone mad!”

He advanced furiously on the ice face.

Nova, on the horse, watched him, fright fixing her face.

Taylor used the butt of the rifle, attempting to chop out a foothold. The gun cut a swath through the air. Taylor followed through hard. Yet the phenomena, the amazements, the unrealities, were a long way from done.

The rifle struck. With a flick of sound.

And passed clean through the wall of ice, vanishing.

Taylor, unbalanced by the unexpected lack of resistance, followed the vicious swath of the rifle.

And also vanished.

It was as if he had stepped through a bead curtain.

There was nothing on the ice face of the precipice to indicate where he had been. Or had gone.

And then the wall of ice was gone too.

It was nowhere to be seen.

There wasn’t anything anywhere for miles around but the flat, ordinary, cruel wasteland. The landscape was completely deserted.

The girl Nova screamed.

And kept on screaming.

Until her screams were lost in the vast wilderness of silence.

Until there was Nothing.

3.

BRENT

He clambered through the open escape hatch, carrying the vital medical equipment and oxygen apparatus. The crumpled steel sides of the small reconnaissance spacecraft had never seemed so vulnerable to him. Now, set down in a crash landing on some unknown, perhaps alien planet, it was twice as toylike and futile. Being lost in space was one thing, but this was the penultimate in Nowhere. Never had he seen so much limitless desert waste, so much unending distance between things. He felt like a small boy wandering amidst the vast trackless expanses of Time itself. There was no telling where Life began—or ended.

The skipper was still lying where he had left him. Head propped on a mound of sand, his rugged body spent and looking for all the world like a battered rag doll. The impact of the crash had banged the skipper up plenty. There was no immediate telling the extent of the personal damage.

As he bent over the skipper, the equipment clattered metallically. The skipper stirred, eyes open, face haggard in the fierce blaze of an unseen sun.

“Who’s that?” The question was a feeble attempt at authority.

“Me again, Skipper.”

He passed his hand twice over his superior’s eyes. He saw that they did not flicker at all.

“Brent?”

“Sir?”

Skipper was breathing with great difficulty now. Brent busied himself quickly. First he gave Skipper a pill, then an efficient injection by hypodermic in the left arm, and then settled down to a rhythmic, powerful chest massage with his bare hands. Skipper almost smiled at that but the look in the dulled brown eyes was remote, distant, as though fixed on some faraway place that only he could see. The emblem swatches of the United States flag sewn into the left sleeve of the tunics both men wore, shone like blood in the tropical blaze of daylight. Brent resisted the mental image.

“Did you contact Earth?” Skipper rasped, his voice getting weaker with each breath he drew.

“Tried to, sir. Not a crackle.”

“Isn’t the set operational?”

Brent frowned. “I don’t know, sir. I ran a cross-check of the Operations Manual. As suggested, I took an Earth-Time reading just before re-entry.”

“Well?”

“Three—nine—five—five.” Brent spaced the numbers very very slowly, as if he still couldn’t believe them himself.

“Hours?” Skipper stirred again, almost trying to rise. Brent steadied him with a firm restraining hand. “There are only twenty-four . . .”

“Not hours,” Brent said. “Years.”

Skipper breathed hoarsely. The unseeing eyes seemed to freeze.

“Three thousand—nine hundred—and fifty-five?”

“A.D.” Brent agreed, drily.

“Almighty God.”

In the brief silence, both men might have been listening to the hissing, scorching wind sweeping over the baking landscape.

“We were following Taylor’s trajectory,” Brent continued, trying to hang onto his calm. “So whatever happened to us, must have happened to Taylor—” he continued to massage his superior’s chest.

“What about us? Where are we?”

Skipper sounded like a desperate blind man, trying to see what he never might again.

“In my opinion, sir, we’ve come through a Hasslein Curve, a bend in Time.”

Skipper groaned feebly, falling back in greater pain than before. The damning facts had only augmented his poor condition. Brent tried to rally him, knowing how hopeless that was on the face of it. His superior, by all the signs, was a dying man.

“Look,” Brent spoke rapidly. “I don’t know what planet we’re on. I know it’s fantastic but the fact is, we’re both of us here, wherever that is. Breathing. Conscious. There’s oxygen on this planet—and water. You’ll be okay, Skipper. We’ll run a navigational estimate . . .”

The unseeing man at his side stared mightily up into the alien sky. His face was bleached, almost lifeless.

“God, if I could only see the sun!”

“You can feel it on your hand, Skipper,” Brent said very quietly. But his brain wasn’t quiet at all. It was rioting.

“Yes—but which sun?”

“I don’t know. Our computer is shot. We’re lucky to be alive.”

“Lucky—?” Skipper echoed with sudden fury and strength. “No! If it’s A.D. 3955—oh, God! My wife—” His breathing was obviously becoming more difficult. “My two daughters. Dead. Their sons. Daughters. Dead. Everyone I ever knew. Everyone!”