Just as he touched the last one, he heard a familiar voice exclaim from O-East: “Miss Dyke, who opened the cage doors?”
Caesar turned, saw a bushy-haired young man racing toward the reception area only steps ahead of maddened gorillas. With dismay, Caesar stared at Morris—who in turn gaped at the bloodied chimpanzee crouching over the console.
“Morris, get out!” Caesar cried.
The young man turned white, realizing Caesar had spoken human language. Caesar did not have time for another warning. Apes pounced on Morris from behind, clawing and pummeling.
Gorillas and chimpanzees from the other corridors crowded into the reception area. Mercifully, Caesar could not see exactly what happened as Morris went down beneath a howling, biting, tearing pack of apes.
The regret in Caesar’s eyes did not linger long. He signaled a group of apes to follow him toward the elevators. At any moment he expected alarms to begin ringing. And much remained to be done.
He was sorry about Morris’s violent death. Morris was one of the few kind ones. He glanced back, saw the apes hurl the broken body against the wall like a toy. The casualties of war, he thought, and darted inside an elevator with his simian comrades. He thumbed the control to start the car down to the communications center.
On the small paved quadrangle devoted to Night Watch Training, the handler and the trainer were having difficulty with a quartet of male orangutans.
Prodding and sharp commands did little to stir the animals to cooperation. The trainer couldn’t get even one to leave the huddled group and begin the lesson. Under the floodlights, the trainer’s face was strained.
“What the hell’s wrong with them tonight?”
Before the handler could answer, headlights swept across the face of the training building. Three limousines were departing toward the city via one of the service roads.
“Damned if I know,” the handler replied, at last. He gestured to the vanishing vehicles. “But the governor’s been inside for the past hour. That’s his party leaving now. Something big must be going on.”
With an uneasy look at the orangutans, the trainer muttered, “You’d almost think they know—”
He started to loop his silver whistle over the head of the nearest orangutan. The ape knocked the whistle from the trainer’s hand and glared.
The elevator door opened. Caesar and his apes rushed into the reception area, some leaping to overcome the startled guards on duty at the fingerprinting barrier, others following Caesar toward the door that led to the communications center beyond.
A guard at the barrier went down under the ape onslaught. One of the operators on duty beyond the glass saw the sudden carnage and leaped to trigger a locking mechanism that bolted the door from inside.
Frustrated, Caesar let go of the handle and glanced around. He signaled two of the apes. They helped him pick up the fingerprinting table, hurl it against the glass. Inside the communications center, a woman screamed and fainted as Caesar clambered through the sawtoothed opening.
Other apes followed, blood-maddened and less careful about the glass. They landed on the floor with slashed feet, their anger that much greater. They fell on the hysterical men and women manning the center, snarling, battering them down . . .
Caesar scanned the banks of lighted equipment. He freed one man from the grip of two chimpanzees, twisted the front of the man’s smock.
“Can you open all the cages from down here?”
The man’s mouth went slack. “Good God! a talking—”
“I said can you open all the cages from down here?”
“Only—only about half of them,” the helpless man gasped.
“Then do it—or you’re dead.”
He released the man, gestured for the gibbering apes to stand back. The man reeled to one of the equipment boards and began throwing switches. Behind him, Caesar’s mouth curled up at the corners. He waved the eager apes forward.
The man swung around, realizing the betrayal. “You—!” The single syllable of accusation became a scream as a mass of hairy bodies swarmed on top of him. The grunts and exclamations of the apes soon muffled his screams.
A siren began to howl, joined by a klaxon. Caesar ran to the dock side of the room, looked through the glass at more apes struggling with handlers. The sirens and klaxons multiplied, adding to the din of animal voices, triumphant in their fury.
With the sirens, Caesar’s brief advantage of surprise was gone. Now the war would begin in earnest.
One of the operators in Fire Conditioning heard a click. It sounded as if the door of the cage-wall bisecting the room had unlocked. He ran forward to check, pulled—and to his horror, the door opened.
Three female chimpanzees grouped at the rear lunged forward en masse. They bore the operator to the floor on the human side of the bars as the second operator fled.
Eyes glinting, one of the chimps yipped commands. The others hoisted the dazed operator between them while the first chimp surveyed the console. Finally, she poked a control.
With a whoosh-and-roar, the horizontal column of fire jetted from the wall aperture. The chimp at the console signaled, and the other two pitched the writhing attendant directly into the blast of flame. Howling, he hit the floor, all his clothing afire. His hair blazed as he rolled, trying to extinguish the flames devouring him. The bright-eyed chimp at the console continued to scrutinize it, one finger still pressed down to maintain the roaring jet.
The stench of searing human flesh began to fill the oval chamber. The chimpanzee picked up a pen from the console. Experimentally, she wedged it into the switch. She lifted her hand away—and grinned as the column of fire continued to roar.
Chittering delightedly, the chimpanzees ran for the door.
In a dim, hexagonal chamber perched on the roof of the ape management tower, five men hunched over monitors and control boards. Through the smoked glass windows, the floodlit grounds surrounding the center looked peaceful. But the confusion of lights on the boards indicated hell breaking loose.
“This is Master Security,” one man yelled into a mike. “Come in, Reception Communications. I said come—”
He gave up, cursing the garble from the speaker in front of him. He heard glass breaking, apes gibbering, and most frightening of all, humans crying out in pain.
The men in the chamber had already activated sirens and klaxons in response to a sudden influx of alarm signals: the report of a murdered man in No Conditioning on nine; a suddenly aborted request for help from Training Reception on three. Now another cry went up inside the rooftop outpost.
“Where’s the supervisor? I’ve got sensors picking up a fire in Fire Conditioning.”
A shadowy figure shouldered up alongside. “Do they answer?”
“No.”
“Well, I don’t know what the hell’s happening, but we’d better not let all this prime flesh get burned up by accident.” The supervisor slapped a control, swiveled a gooseneck mike up close to his mouth: “Attention all handlers and keepers. Attention all handlers and keepers. This is Master Security. We have a possibility of a serious fire on six, as well as some kind of trouble in reception. We have fifty thousand dollars’ worth of apes in jeopardy if that fire spreads. So get them out of here—repeat, get them out of here, alive. Fire crews, report to six.”
He broke the connection, whipped his head around. “Did the sprinklers kick on?”
“Yes, but the sensors show they’re not doing much good. It’s spreading. There’s enough heat and flame in just one of those conditioning rooms to melt iron—”