His army moved. Quickly, in full military pomp and precision. Orders were shouted, marching feet thundered, equipment rolled into position. Squadrons formed. Gorilla infantry, about fifty apes to each group, with a commissioned officer and a noncommissioned officer leading every command, flanked into attacking formation. The gun carriages wheeled up, clanking noisily. Bayonets gleamed from rifle tips. The assembled apes were ready to attack. To fight. To obey the Ursus dictim of Invade, Invade, Invade! Dr. Zaius looked on almost sorrowfully at the spectacle of force of arms triumphing over sober reflection and discourse with the enemy. Ursus, eyes shaded against the sun, peering toward New York in the distance, summoned a bugler to his side. His gimlet eyes were twin pools of ecstasy. His black gorilla face was exalted. The morning heat set a shimmering haze over the scene. It was a lovely day for the Invasion.
“Sound the advance,” Ursus commanded the bugler in the sudden total hush that preceded the strike of lightning forces from the kingdom of Ape Gty.
The horn brayed, a pealing blast of sound wafting over the formation. The army, in extended order, advanced. Uphill. Toward the visible reaches of the Forbidden Zone. Ursus’ mount pranced in the vanguard. Zaius trotted along behind him.
The hill was steep, sloping upward at a hazardous angle. The ape army swarmed upward, a vast body of moving gorillas, horses and ordnance. With skilled coordination of all units and a minimum of stumbling blocks, the advance platoons of Ursus’ forces gained the crest of the mountain which overlooked the buried grandeur of New York.
Ursus reached the pinnacle first. Then Zaius, then the troops directly behind them. Ursus lifted a paw to signal a halt. The army came to a stop. Waiting legions, motionless in the sun.
Zaius’ breath caught in his chest. Ursus groaned mightily.
The spectacle before them defied belief.
Where before there had been nothing but limitless expanses of arid desert in the vast sun-bleached acreage leading to buried New York, there was now nothing but horror.
Row upon row of naked gorillas, hanging from inverted crosses staked to the ground, glowed wickedly in the sunlight. A mass crucifixion, awesome in all its implications, to match the Roman massacre of Christians along the Appian Way in another equally terrible time. Zaius’ scholarly blood ran cold. Ursus’ face darkened. Fire and smoke, both sourceless and spread out like a blaze encompassing the world, had also appeared, seemingly from nowhere. And still the mutilated gorillas hung crucified from their upside-down crosses.
The ape army, particularly the infantry, closest to the sight, aghast and quivering in horror at the devastation below them, began to panic. A great tumult of shouting and anguished cries went up. Ursus, livid with rage, found himself being berated by Dr. Zaius.
“Ursus, I warned you! Look what we are faced with! I told you we should wait!”
“Whoever did this,” Ursus growled, “will pay heavily.”
The groans of the crucified gorillas were clamorous, rising from the bloody desert plain like a universal wail of misery, sorrow and agony. Dr. Zaius shuddered, reining in his horse.
“If you have any pity, order your soldiers to shoot our people.”
“I cannot order what the Lawgiver has forbidden. Ape shall not kill Ape,” Ursus snarled, wheeling his mount to shout an order to one of his nearest commanders. “Prepare to attack!”
“Attack what and whom?” Zaius demanded softly, his orangutan face constricted in lines of bewilderment and compassion.
The ape army suddenly rallied.
Gorillas, horses and guns moved up over the ridge, pounding over the crest, swarming down the other side. Ursus led the way. The infantry rushed forward, racing across the desert to the grim spectacle of their slaughtered comrades. Shouts and gunfire filled the air. Gorillas yelled and screamed, summoning up a banzai-like courage to grope with the situation. Or cope. The hot sun blazed down, as if trying to pierce the gathering smoke and fire filling the landscape. The infantry rushed. Ursus spurred his mount. Zaius galloped alongside.
And then . . .
A colossal effigy of the Lawgiver, the Great Ape reading a book, materialized in view, his stone feet among the scorching flames, his head seeming to touch the sky. The apes in the oncoming infantry group braked to a halt. Utter consternation and dread took over where before nothing but fear had ruled. These emotions—and a great joy!
“The Lawgiver!” a gorilla soldier squealed in delight. He dropped his rifle and kneeled. The soldier beside him, humbled by the vision of ape greatness, cried out, “He will avenge our crucified brothers!”
“Vengeance!” shouted the next soldier.
And the cry was taken up by the rest of the ape infantry. A mighty chorus of adulation, happiness and sheer exaltation echoed over the scene. Baffled by what he saw, General Ursus roared at all of his commanders, “Hold your positions!”
The gigantic figure of the Lawgiver now seemed to show the many holes and perforations in his great body, From these openings, red blood flowed in a scarlet spiderweb of color. Pumping, welling, spurting terribly. Ursus, in fear and horror, had to cling to his mount for support, his eyes two black marbles of disbelief. The Lawgiver, the Almighty, the Great One, the Nonpareil, the Master of all Apes, was bleeding to death before his very eyes!
“He bleeds!” General Ursus boomed. “The Lawgiver bleeds!”
An atavistic growl thundered from his chest; a trumpeting blast of animal sound that must have echoed in the days when his ancestors swung from trees and loped along the ground for their food. As for the ape infantry, it was completely demoralized by the spectacle. They threw down their rifles, pointing and gibbering with dismay at the Thing In The Sky. Simian cries of alarm and dismay rose in a blended medley of vocal terror that sounded exactly like the monkey house in a twentieth-century zoo. Above the blasted, cursed desert, the effigy of the Lawgiver, flung there by the hypnotic powers of the leaders of the Forbidden Zone, continued to bleed to death.
Only Dr. Zaius was able to retain his wits, to keep his head. The fufillment of all his hopes for a compromise of the minds hung on the action he was now steeling himself to take. Turning, he faced the paralyzed, screaming infantry of gorillas and raised his cultured voice to an unfamiliar authoritative shout.
“The spirit of the Lawgiver lives! We are still God’s chosen! And this is a vision and it is a lie!”
Before they could digest his words, he charged. Alone. On horseback. Out toward the bleeding image of the Lawgiver. The astounded gorillas quietened, stunned by the sight of the old scientist, the Minister of Science, galloping out toward his inevitable doom.
Dr. Zaius rode into the Vision.
Rode out between the row upon row of crucified apes. Past the inverted crosses, through the veritable forest of slaughter—toward the Effigy of the Lawgiver. His horse shied and whinnied but Zaius kept a tight rein. Soon the clattering hooves had led him up to the vision. The smoke and the flame. The scorching fingers of the blaze eating away at the very feet of the Lawgiver.
Behind him, General Ursus and the Grand Army of the Apes looked on in mounting wonder.
Zaius’ horse reared, kicking at the smoke and the flame.
The Vision.
And slowly, inexorably, the Vision toppled, falling down, hitting the sandy earth. It exploded with great violence, creating a huge sheet of flame and roaring black smoke.
The entire tableau vanished in an instant.