Brent didn’t understand. He couldn’t.
Albina stirred anew. Silky, sinister, maddeningly lovely.
“We’ve caught some of their scouts. Hideous creatures. We had them here—precisely where you’re standing. But either their skulls are too thick. Or they actually know nothing . . .”
“And neither do I,” Brent cut her off violently. “And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
The Negro laughed. It was a very unpleasant sound.
He gazed at his white wall again.
On it, Nova materialized.
Caspay said gently, “You make me very sad, Mr. Brent.”
Brent looked from the Negro to Caspay, frowning. His mind tried to find an answer. And then, amazingly, he saw Nova being brought into the chamber, struggling between another set of implacable guards. The girl was clawing, scratching, but the guards might have been zombies. Nova, despite her torn garments, or perhaps because of them, looked more paganly desirable than ever. Brent bunched his fists, trembling.
“She can’t help you,” he blurted. “She can’t even talk. Don’t harm her . . .”
Albina made a low, feline sound in her silky throat and motioned regally to the guards who now released Nova. The girl, crying, ran headlong into Brent’s arms. He clasped her to him, reveling in the feel of her once more. He had ached to hold her again, without knowing it. Or realizing why.
“Of course not, Mr. Brent,” Albina purred. “We never harm anyone. You are going to harm her.” Her ivory face pulsed sensually. Her exquisite bosom rose and fell as she breathed deeply.
Smiling sadistically, his great black face wreathed in onyx power, the Negro closed his eyes. A grim Golem created for torment, dedicated to the art of cruelty.
Brent went into action like an automaton.
Mendez the Twenty-Sixth, royally purple and majestic, watched with great attention from his central position on the dais.
He and his four inquisitors, red, blue, green and white.
The weird magic of the wall shattered all that was left of Brent’s power to fight back.
The chamber looked down on madness.
10.
MASKS
Brent closed in on Nova.
He took her in his arms and unexpectedly kissed her on the trembling mouth. The Negro kept his eyes tightly closed. Mendez and the others watched, waiting. Their faces were a study in expectancy. Brent was oblivious of them. All of his being, his soul and his mind and body, was centralized on Nova. The girl in his arms.
The chamber held the odd tableau, like a pin point in the march of time, freezing the moment for all eternity itself.
Brent’s kiss was tender at first. Then some raging passion consumed him. Nova, bewildered, rode along with the first wave of bodily hunger embroiling her and Brent in this fantastic embrace.
The Negro’s eyes remained shut.
The kiss went from the loving to the lustful.
And then from the lustful to the lethal.
For all her unschooled, uncivilized, unsophisticated naivete, Nova sensed the difference. Brent caught her fast in a viselike hold that was all cruelty and mad desire. Nova recoiled in his arms, trying to shake him off, to run, to hide. Brent was remorseless. Now he had her trapped. He was pinching her nostrils, suffocating her mouth with his own. His other hand was digging into her flesh, tearing at her full breasts. He kept on hammering at her, cruelly hurting her until her weak struggles grew even weaker.
And the Negro did not open his eyes.
“Tell us about the apes, Mr. Brent,” the fat man said in a loud, clear voice.
The Negro’s eyes blinked open.
Brent released Nova, suddenly. She slipped from his grasp to the stone floor, sprawling in a lifeless spill of arms and legs. Brent stared down at her dumbly, appalled.
“Tell us about the apes,” the fat man repeated his request.
Brent fought to regain his mind; a compound of bewildered horror and returning intelligence. He knew he had to talk but somehow he also knew he must lie. Anything to save Nova from a possible death and the Bomb from potential activation. These people, whatever they were, no matter how intelligent and advanced, were all mad! Mad!
Shrilly, he found his voice. Anything to keep the Negro from closing his eyes again.
“The apes are a primitive, semiarticulate and underdeveloped race whose weapons have not progressed beyond the club and the sling!”
“You’re lying,” the fat man interposed, “and we know it!”
Caspay spoke up. “The ape scouts had rifles, Mr. Brent.”
Brent said nothing to that. Wearily, the Negro closed his eyes.
Brent raised a brutal foot above Nova’s insensate body. Within him rockets exploded, pain flashed, terrible ideas and thoughts took tangible shapes and forms.
His chest was on fire. Still he struggled against bringing his foot down to smash that lovely, defenseless figure.
“They should fall . . . an easy prey . . .” he gasped, “to stamp on the many peaceful weapons at your dispose . . . of her with your foot on her belly and stamp . . . GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” he snarled at the eyes-shut Negro who loomed above him.
The fat man spoke again when the Negro reopened his eyes.
“Tell us again about the apes, Mr. Brent. The first time—was not quite true, was it?”
“How do you know?” Brent raged at him. “How do you know?”
Quickly he knelt beside Nova, cradling her head in his hand, his senses all whirling, convoluting, pinwheeling riotously.
From behind the inquisitors, the wall threw up more projections. Taylor again. Taylor stumbling. Taylor heroically lost . . .
Nova, coming to in Brent’s arms, saw the wall from her position on the floor. Five images of Taylor, in red, white, blue, green and purple, sliding into identifiable focus. Her eyes widened, her lush mouth tried to form the name, “Tay-lor.” Brent could not see or understand her. He was too concerned with the terrible thought that he might have harmed her. Suddenly she lifted a feeble hand, trying to point at the far wall.
Simultaneously, the inquisitors lowered their eyes. The wall images vanished.
Brent saw only the bright white nothingness when his own eyes sought what Nova was seeing.
Caspay smiled ingratiatingly.
“Now—what may we hope for in the way of help?”
“Nothing,” Brent muttered. “Unless you set us free. Me—and her.”
Caspay’s smile hardened subtly.
“You are free, Mr. Brent. Free to do what we will.”
Mendez the Twenty-Sixth made a motion with his hand.
“Now,” he commanded.
The fat man said, “Tell us about the apes, Mr. Brent.”
Brent took a long pause. He looked at Nova, looked at the council, and then shrugged helplessly.
“The apes are marching on your city,” he said quietly.
A great silence descended on the Chamber of Interrogation. The five robed figures digested the information, each to his own intensity. The opposite wall came alive again with varying degrees of color.
Brent hugged Nova to him, glad only of the fact that she was still alive.
That they both were.
He could feel her heart beating like a bird’s against his chest.
Ape City was aquiver with the sounds of an army in motion. Riding together at the head of long columns of mounted horsemen and rolling gun carriages, were General Ursus and Dr. Zaius. Behind them, the tramp of feet, the pound of horses’ hooves and the clatter of arms sounded through the streets and roadways of the settlement. The Grand Army of the Apes was on the march at last. Trooping past the house of Zira and Cornelius, taking the same uphill country route to the Forbidden Zone as had Brent and Nova. Ursus was in his glory. Bemedaled, befitting a military monarch, Ursus was in the full panoply of his being. Zaius, thoughtful and a trifle sardonic, rode at his side, musing to himself on the pomposity and pitfalls of self-imposed delusions of grandeur. He was sure Ursus was riding for a fall. But one, unfortunately, that might take Ape City with it! And all the important work that Zaius and his colleagues had labored for years to bring about.