A long-dead lady of stone eyes, stone ears and stone senses—whose only companion for an eon had been—
—the Wind.
“. . . and Taylor knew he was back on Earth . . . an Earth defiled and destroyed by the hand of Man. Set this down: whatever speaks, can murder.”
And Taylor, sliding down from the back of his horse, with the savage woman Nova also dismounting, staggered toward the gigantic spikes upthrusting from the cruel sand and blurted his cry of agony to the unheeding skies all around them: “Goddamn you all to hell!”
Falling to his torn knees, he buried his head in his hands. Sobs racked his tall, magnificent figure. Nova watched and listened in dumb incomprehension. The dead landscape remained mute.
The Statue of Liberty could not hear Taylor weeping.
Stone has no heart.
Or soul
It does not even hear the wind.
2.
TAYLOR
Taylor and the girl, Nova, departed wearily from the staggering spectacle before them. Behind them, the half-buried statue of Miss Liberty beckoned mutely from her sandy grave. The dead waters lapped pitifully at her stone shoulders and obsidian face.
Taylor’s mind reeled.
He was rendered incapable of any thought but that of the greatest wonder.
The scientist in him was mocked.
The space-explorer in him was confounded.
The man in him was brutally stunned.
The nameless planet, ruled by a hierarchy of intelligent apes was This Planet Earth! Or rather, more bizarrely, more fittingly, what was left of it.
His own imagination, his own instincts and senses, boggled before the import of what he had seen. What he now knew for an unalterable fact. The world as he had known it, when he had left Earth for outer space with his three fellow scientists, was now a madhouse. A mathematical equation of unequivocal madness and nonsense.
Even as he wandered futilely across the arid desert stretches of this monumental Nowhere, with Nova limply and stickily plastered to his back astride the poor, tired horse, he tried to sort out the memories and experiences of the most recent past.
How long ago had it been that he and the three others, one of them a woman, had lost their way in limitless space and come down on this alien soil in their ailing spacecraft? Time and torture at the hands of the militant apes had robbed Taylor of his ability to think. Now he could not even remember the names of his space comrades. All he could recall was the terrible incident of landing. The woman had been dead, on first contact with the terrain. It was not the physical hardship of a crash landing but the inherent qualities of the flight itself. All four astronauts, through some intricate process aboard the spacecraft, had aged eighteen months in a time lapse of 2000 years from Earth. Being female, the woman had not survived the flight. Taylor and the two men had swum for shore, reaching a wasteland of Arizona-like proportions. All brown dry earth and long shelves of rock stretching as far as the eye could see. It was then that the men from Earth reached some form of vegetation in their aimless wanderings and encountered the horde of filthy, unkempt, savage, barbaric humans who had lost the power of speech—if they had ever had it. Nova had been one of them. A long-haired, wild-eyed beauty who could do no more than look at you with her eyes to convey her meaning. Someone you had to teach how to smile!
Then, sweeping down through the bushes and the trees, had come the cavalry of apes. Leather-jacketed, truncheon-wielding, rifle-shooting gorillas. The barbaric whites had tried to run; Taylor and his two comrades among them. Terrified, speechless with horror. With whips, nets and hooks, the militia of gorillas had rounded them all up, killing those who dared to fight back. One of Taylor’s crew died in the attack. But the worst part of the whole bloody nightmare was what followed.
Taylor found himself led to a complex. An area of stone warrens, of houses and cages, where the ape was the ruler of all that was left of the civilization on this planet. It was a simian state, ruled by a kingdom of gorillas, with chimpanzees and orangutans serving as medical men. Of the remaining two astronauts, one was lobotomized and converted into an unthinking vegetable. For Taylor, the simian rulers decreed emasculation and a brainwashing which would eradicate his memory. But with the help of chimpanzee scientists, who felt the ape autocracy was far from a benevolent one, Taylor had made his escape. With Nova. A doglike, mute love had sprung up between them because the girl could not speak. Might never speak though Taylor had tried to teach her.
And now that he had found his way into the Forbidden Zone, leaving his tormentors God knew how far behind, Taylor could still remember the unbelievable aura and reality of the Ape Kingdom. The signs all over the place: THE ALMIGHTY CREATED THE APE IN HIS OWN IMAGE—ONLY HUMANS KILL FOR SPORT, LUST OR GREED . . . HUMAN SEE, HUMAN DO . . . and all those incredible statues and artifacts of ape culture: the hear-no-evil-see-no-evil-speak-no-evil symbol; the mother gorilla holding a baby ape in her arms like Michelangelo’s Pieta, the whole abominable concept of Ape as Human Being!
Yes, Taylor remembered that much.
The shock might never wear off.
With humans in cages, people being whipped and driven, the race of mankind lorded and ruled by a panel of intellectual apes who had revised the entire scheme of the order of heredity and nature. It was something that would haunt whatever was left of his own life . . .
Ape had evolved from Man.
Detecting menace and extinction from the twin conditions of human ignorance and bestiality, the society of apes had presumed that their own well-being depended upon the mastery and domination of the inferior being known as Man. It was a thoroughgoing example of genocide in action, as Taylor had actually seen it.
Man as slave labor, Man as expendable creature, Man as Nothing.
The world had come to a fitting irony after another 2000 years of Knowledge, Culture and Freedom. It had descended back to the apes, climbed back into the same tree from which it had escaped.
And all it had obviously needed to upset the applecart had been one madman’s thermonuclear bomb. Some nation’s plunge into the Final Solution. Whose? America? France? Red China? Russia? Germany? England? Israel . . .?
It didn’t matter, now.
It was Man’s epitaph, no matter how you looked at it.
Whether as man, scientist or space-explorer.
The wheel had come full cycle.
There was nothing left—but death.
Their aimless, sluggish trek across the vast wasteland had been an amalgam of scorching heat, discomfort and mind-pounding weariness. Taylor could hardly feel the bones in his body. Bearded, bronzed, clothed in fragments of leather garment, he felt like some archaic Adam lost in a new world. Nova, her lithe body hugging him, was as silent as ever. The poor mare accommodating them both had almost lost the power to move.
The sun beat down from a blue sky hazed with white clouds. Taylor’s eyeballs ached. The sweat ran down his strong-planed face and gauntly formidable shoulders.
They saw the oasis at the same time. The girl almost frantically pummeled his back. Taylor nodded. It was there, all right. No mirage, no trickery. The country was as arid as ever but he could clearly see trees, a pool of oddly clear water. The dark scowl which had been fixed like a graven image on Taylor’s face, lifted.
Slowly he led the horse to the water’s edge, staring down. Yes, it was real. He could see their reflections in the low pool. It was no more than a waterhole, flanked by low, gnarled trees which perhaps had never known foliage.