Counting seconds, then minutes, became a mental game to relieve the mounting worry. Finally, though, he gave it up. He leaned his head against the concrete, closed his eyes, and wrapped his hands around his legs. He was frightened. More frightened than ever before in his life. As Armando had observed, he did have a good time sense. He was well aware that two hours, and more, had gone by.
Yet he refused to leave. He kept sitting there in the dark midway between the two ceiling lights, his breath hissing in and out between his teeth while he told himself over and over, any moment now Armando will come.
As if willing the miracle to reality, he heard sounds down the tunnel to the right. He leaped joyfully to his feet, began to run toward the sounds . . .
He skidded to a stop. The sounds were all wrong. He recognized the snarl of some type of small engine.
Instantly, light speared along the tunnel to wash over him. He’d waited too long. Late-night activity below the city was beginning.
Some sort of vehicle was speeding toward him, its cowl lights increasing in size. Caesar turned and fled in the opposite direction.
Ahead, along the tunnel walls, his flickering shadow preceded him. Behind, an air horn sounded. He’d been seen!
Doubling his speed, he plunged toward the tunnel mouth ahead. The motorized vehicle whined into a higher gear. A man yelled a command to stop.
Focusing all his attention on that growing semicircle of darkness in front of him, Caesar ran as fast as he could, but the motor vehicle was closing the gap. Caesar’s shadow became sharper on the concrete walls.
There was now but a short way to run. He could smell open water, dank and sulphurous with industrial emissions. He remembered the smell from journeys the circus had made up the coastline through the California provinces. And he fixed his mind on the source of that polluting stink. Man. The enslaver of Caesar’s own kind.
Remembering who was pursuing him behind those huge looming lights, Caesar replaced his terror with hatred. The hatred pumped new strength into him. His lips peeled back from his teeth—and a moment later he burst from the tunnel mouth onto a mist-slimed concrete pier.
He nearly toppled off the edge into the vile-smelling water. Recovering his balance just in time, he glanced both ways. A short distance on his right, the pier ended. So he went left, bent over and scuttling fast through a misty patch of light cast by a fixture on a tall stanchion. Midway up the iron pole a sign read Pier 39.
Behind him, Caesar heard a cry of dismay. His face showed ugly pleasure. The pursuing vehicle did not emerge from the tunnel. He was momentarily safe in the harbor darkness.
Caesar ran swiftly, keeping close to the windowless wall of what appeared to be an immense warehouse. A glance to the rear showed him the headlights of the pursuit vehicle spilling through the night mist from the tunnel mouth, but the vehicle didn’t appear.
The intensity of the lights began to diminish. The vehicle was abandoning a pursuit that the darkness and the night would make virtually futile. But Caesar knew that, having been seen in the harbor area, he dared not remain in it for long. Also, Armando would probably not risk returning to the tunnels at their busy time—if he ever returned at all. Caesar decided to escape the area as quickly as he could. He stopped under the warehouse wall, trying to recall what Armando had said about ape shipments being unloaded at night. He didn’t care for the idea of trying to lose himself in one of those shipments, but he supposed it was a better alternative than attempting to hide in an unfamiliar city, constantly exposed to the danger of capture.
Now his vision had adjusted to the misty darkness. Further up the pier, he detected two winking spots of reddish light. Silently, he moved in that direction. He picked up sounds: men’s voices, power winches, clanking chains. Perhaps after all the bad luck of the recent hours, he was in for something better—because the looming outline that gradually revealed itself to him was the massive curved stem of a huge freighter tied up to the pier.
Running lights picked out the sleek vessel’s identification—S. S. Pacifica, Atomic General Lines, Inc.
Other pale yellow lights gleamed high up along the ship’s superstructure. But what interested Caesar most was the pair of blinking red dots on the pier itself. He crept toward them, careful to place his weight with each step so as not to make an unnecessary sound with his heavy boots!
From a vantage point of about ten yards, he saw that the flashing lights were part of the rear bumper of an open-bed van parked near the freighter’s hull. He kept watching, detecting men and activity on the ship, but there was no sign of the van driver. Puzzling. The van’s rear gate was open. The driver might well be inside the streamlined cab. There was no way to tell. But with luck, the van might depart shortly. Whatever its destination, it was better than the pier. Someone back in the tunnels might report a runaway ape, and institute an organized search.
Caesar reached down and tugged off his boots, leaving them in the dark beside the warehouse wall. The pier concrete was damp against the bottom of his feet, but now he was able to move with his natural silence. He closed the distance to the van’s open bed in seconds.
Up on the ship, he saw figures passing along the rail; they were little more than blurs against the background of the misted superstructure. So far as he could tell, none of the men was looking toward the truck.
His body limned briefly by the intermittent glow of the flashing red lights, Caesar slipped forward without a sound, squatted down in the corner between side wall and rear cab partition. But his sense of security lasted no more than a few moments.
Chains rattled. A voice bawled through the fog, “Okay—lower away!”
Caesar snapped his head up, eyes flying wide in alarm. A massive boom was swinging out from the freighter’s deck. A chain hung from the boom, and at the end of the chain, a glinting steel power-claw held a black rectangle which began to descend toward the truck bed with alarming speed.
As the chain paid out, Caesar understood the nature of the rectangle. It was the bottom of a crate, coming straight down on top of him!
Wild gibbers and grunts keened up into shrill squeals as the crate began to sway. Caged apes!
Caesar’s instincts warned him that he had already waited too long—the massive cage would just barely fit into the bed of the van. If he didn’t leave instantly, he could be crushed to death . . .
As the black rectangle filled his vision, he hurled himself desperately to one side, averting his head and flattening his hands against the cold metal of the side panel.
The cage slashed past him with only inches to spare. It struck the van bed with a whang and a thump.
Caesar opened his eyes to see wooden bars close to his face. The cries of the animals cramped into the cage’s totally inadequate space filled the night with a maniacal chorus. The claw-lift released, began to rise as the chain reversed. Outside the van a man exclaimed, “Don’t drop so fast next time! You think we can afford to respring these trucks after every delivery?”
There were footsteps on the pier. The cab door opened and shut again with a metallic sound. All these were peripheral sounds counterpointing the wild squalls and barks of the helpless apes in the cage.
Caesar’s breathing was returning to normal after the close escape. With an effort, he focused his attention on the howling cargo inside the bars. Naked orangutans were stumbling and bumping against one another, struggling up again, salivating and grimacing, still disoriented by the cage’s wild seesaw descent. The arms of the terrified apes flailed wildly so that, without intended malice, they hit one another—and began to snarl in fury. One ape who had fallen clutched and clawed at another in an effort to regain its feet. Abruptly, the confusion in the cage turned to blows and cruel biting.