As they rode by the house of Cornelius and Zira, Zaius dared not hazard a look at their intelligent faces. He knew what the expression on those faces would be. Rueful and scowling!
The Grand Army moved along, clattering, jubilant, eager for an engagement, a test of its skills. General Ursus’ horse fairly pranced. The general was all smiles and superiority. Sure of Gorilla Might and Gorilla Power. The pompous idiot!
From the window of their domestic castle, Cornelius and Zira were indeed witnessing the spectacle of Might on the Move.
Zira was disgusted, as always.
“Dr. Zaius is with him. Some people’s convictions are about as deep as a mild case of mange.”
“They have to show unity,” Cornelius argued. Not too strongly.
“So should the chimpanzees.”
“But, Zira,” Cornelius protested. “We’re too few. We’d be cutting our own throats. How can we take any initiative, while—” he gestured toward the rolling gorilla army trooping past their home, “they’re here.”
They watched as the rear columns of Ursus’ forces passed the house and receded up the hill, going away, disappearing into the horizon. Zira snorted, her cute face puckered.
“Has it occurred to you that tomorrow—they won’t be here?”
Cornelius looked at her.
Their eyes locked.
A patient, knowing smile curled Zira’s mouth.
Cornelius swallowed nervously.
It was pretty obvious what his adorable, firm-minded little wife meant. What she had always meant, since the very beginning of unrest.
Revolt!
Miles up the road, moving briskly in broad sunny daylight, the Grand Army was making good time. Ursus, Zaius, a bugler, the vanguard and vanguard commander, had rounded a corner on the outskirts of Ape City, to be confronted by a sight not to Ursus’ liking. Or Zaius’ for that matter. Being the only non-gorilla in the group, Zaius was keenly affected by the spectacle of a chimpanzee student demonstration.
Half a dozen earnest, outspoken young chimpanzees were squatting directly across the line of march, sitting in the roadway, blocking the advance of the Grand Army of Apes. Ursus growled menacingly in his deep chest. The two demonstrators in the center of the pathetically valiant little group were holding aloft a banner on which the paint-scrawled plea GIVE US PEACE was clearly visible and advisory. Ursus’ brow darkened. Zaius feared the worst.
“Halt,” Ursus commanded in an undertone to the bugler.
The primitive horn blared a tinny signal which was picked up and relayed by successive buglers all down the column of gorillas and guns. The column came to a full stop some twenty yards from the little knot of demonstrators barring the roadway.
Ursus, almost chidingly, smiled down at the chimpanzees.
“Get off the road, young people.”
The “young people” continued to sit, ignoring him and his army, obstinately and sincerely contemptuous of Ursus and all he might do in retaliation. Zaius’ eyes narrowed.
Ursus wheeled to the vanguard commander, braking his mount.
“Get them out of the way!” he bellowed.
The commander leered and drew a heavy pistol from his uniformed middle, but Zaius, quickly reaching across, took the ugly muzzle in both his paws.
“Wait,” he urged. He turned on General Ursus. Their eyes dueled again. “We don’t want martyrs, do we?”
General Ursus said to the commander, “And do it quietly.”
The demonstrators had gone limp in the roadway, the usual weapon of advocates of non-violence. The commander rapped out some orders and soon, and swiftly, gorilla hands had lifted the demonstrators, carrying them by the arms and legs and piling them into the cage-wagons at the army’s disposal, closing out the incident. The army was able to advance again. Wheels rolled over the abandoned peace signs. Ursus smiled smugly at Dr. Zaius. The good doctor stared pointedly ahead, his eyes on some unseen calamity on the horizon. In the future. With the inscrutability that General Ursus was never able to connect with the seething anger that boiled inside Dr. Zaius’ intellectual breast. Something his ape mentality would never have understood. Or liked.
Dr. Zaius knew how to wait.
To bide his time.
Without giving up his ideals or his ethics to the code of Brute Force. To the ethos of Ape Logic and Ape Stupidity. Gorilla, that is.
General Ursus did not care.
So long as he had things his own way.
He would show the good doctor the efficacy of Power in due time.
All in due time.
Briskly, blindly, unknowingly, Ursus led his marching legions toward the horrors of the Forbidden Zone.
Where he thought the Fist would solve everything.
Where Dr. Zaius knew it would not.
In the great cathedral where the Bomb was lord and master of all it surveyed, a mass was in progress. The vaulted reaches of the dimly lit nave echoed with the chorus of voices raised in adoring harmony to the words of the hymn known as Psalm to Mendez II.
To Brent, forced to attend the weird ritual, the entire schema was a frightening mutation of the ancient Christian observance. All the singing and chanting seemed to have its origins in sacred songs of the twentieth century, now all cannibalized to match the coldness and cruel barrenness of this strange new cosmos into which he had blundered. He wondered how it all must sound to the mute Nova, at his side in the front pew, flanked by the fat man, Caspay, the beauteous Albina and the Negro, with four armed guards directly behind them.
At the high altar, now dark, Mendez stood facing a congregation of white-robed listeners. Brent was struck by the demeanor of the entire gathering. An inward spiritual serenity hovered about every face and figure. An outward gracefulness and gentility in mocking contrast with the reason for the radiance and exaltation of those faces and singing voices. The Bomb hung suspended above the altar, still invisible in the gloom of the ceiling.
Mendez was chanting sonorously, his purple robes dazzling as his arms and his voice rose in unison:
“The heavens declare the glory of the Bomb. And the firmament showeth his handiwork.”
To a man, woman and child, the congregation answered him. A full-throated, deep, reverent response. The gloomy cathedral echoed with the words:
“His sound is gone out unto all lands. And His light unto the ends of the world”
Now the hidden choir joined with Mendez in an invocation that soared up to the nave. The sound was spectral, ghostly:
“He descended from the outermost part of heaven. And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. There is neither speech nor language. But His voice is heard among them.”
The congregation responded:
“Praise him. My strength and my redeemer.”
Mendez knelt at the prie-dieu; his white-gloved hand pressed a button on the bejeweled panel. The floodlight control was released and dramatically, illuminatingly, the Great Bomb, with its inscribed fins, filled the eye. ALPHA and OMEGA glowed like constellations in a sky of gun-metal silver.
Mendez and the choir sung aloud: