“Admit you’re worn out. Cooperate with us. Everything will be much easier. We’ll give you a chair, a good meal—”
“My chimpanzee cannot speak,” Armando said. “I am the one—”
“Yeah, for the hundredth time, you’ve told us!” Hoskyns exploded, half-rising from the chair.
Kolp lifted a plump hand. The other investigator sank back, disgusted.
Armando took a little cheer from that. The men were growing weary.
But it was short-lived comfort. Armando was so drained of strength his own mind didn’t seem to be functioning properly.
“Let’s try another tack,” Kolp said, rummaging in the folder Armando had seen earlier in Breck’s office. Kolp pulled out a glossy photo of a male chimpanzee with an almost human expression in its large, liquid eyes. He slip the photo across the desk.
“Tell me, have you ever seen that ape before?”
Weakly, without thinking, Armando answered, “Isn’t—isn’t that Cornelius?”
Hoskyns came bounding from his chair, grabbed Armando’s shoulder. “I thought you told us you didn’t know him!”
“Know him? Of course I didn’t—” Desperately trying to rally, repair his blunder, Armando spoke much too fast: “I must have seen similar photos twenty years ago. They must have been widely published—”
Hoskyns shook his head. “I don’t believe that was the case. How do you know his name?”
“You must have showed me the photo. Mentioned it—Yes! That tape the governor talked about—he referred to the talking ape who was murdered along with his mate—”
Hoskyns glared. “Be careful, Señor. The term isn’t murdered. The term is executed. And I’m still confused. You know the name. And you immediately connected the name with this private government photo. How? Why?”
Armando sensed a snare somewhere, tried to prepare for it, but couldn’t. Hoskyns’s face blurred in front of him, close and hostile.
Armando’s knees throbbed. His calves and thighs began to tingle with stabbing needles of pain. The room seemed to tilt ever so slightly one way, then another. Armando knew he was close to fainting. He dug his nails into his palms.
But Hoskyns was prowling back and forth between Armando and the desk, tugging something from his pocket. “I have a theory, Kolp. A pretty good theory about why he identified Cornelius so fast. He looked at that picture—and he remembered this one.”
Hoskyns whipped the handbill under Armando’s nose. The familiar, colorful type, with the dim picture of Caesar riding bareback.
“Wouldn’t you say there’s a definite resemblance?” Hoskyns asked.
“No,” Armando breathed, trying to sound emphatic. Hoskyns stepped even closer, insistent. “Like father, like son, wouldn’t you say?”
“No!” Armando cried as his legs began to shake uncontrollably. “No, there’s absolutely no connection, absolutely—no—”
His voice trailed off as he fell, fainting.
EIGHT
On the morning following Caesar’s admittance to the training cells in the chimpanzee wing, a day handler arrived with four sets of leg shackles. The chains were long enough to permit relatively free movement, but short enough to prevent the long striding of which a desperate, runaway ape might be capable.
Caesar gave a protesting grunt as the handler fastened on the two iron cuffs with links between. The grunts were strictly for effect. He intended to be very careful about how he distinguished himself as special. Given the speed with which he’d passed through conditioning, a certain amount of extra intelligence might be expected—and could be shown. But not too much. He would dissemble, pretend.
His strategy was based on the assumption that, since wild apes were received at this facility, and conditioned apes were employed in the city, he would be shipped out again eventually—if he survived. He could do that by showing he was clever, quick to learn. But as to exhibiting power to dominate the other apes—as he’d rashly done the preceding evening—no. That would merely arouse suspicion.
As the handler started to shackle the second chimp in the cage, the ape scuttled away, whimpering. The handler had to resort to a couple of strident exclamations of “No!” In response, Caesar cringed with appropriate realism. The handler noticed.
Finally, with all four chimps individually shackled, the handler ran another chain between their legs, fastening it to each ankle chain with special catches. Caesar displayed no interest in heading the line, opting instead for the anonymity of second to last. He noticed the handler studying him as the file waited for the elevator. With the pleasure of playing an elaborate game, Caesar chittered and scratched his belly, his expression momentarily vacant. He meant to be simply another animal slave.
He saw no more of the kindly Morris. There were new handlers, less gentle. Evidently Morris was assigned only to reception and initial conditioning, and Caesar and his trio of associates had graduated to a program of more specialized training.
The first class concentrated on instructing the animals in the proper way to put on and take off the servant garments they would wear later. In a way, the class amused Caesar. There was always one slow learner—a male who donned his coat backwards, or his trousers.
Females were instructed in the same large, unfurnished classroom as the chained males. The antics of the female apes seemed particularly funny to the trainers forced to go through the same routine over and over. Typically, the females tried to push their heads through the sleeve hole of a uniform—and got their heads stuck. One such mishap led to a female going into complete panic. She ran screaming along the wall, hunting a way of escape, and even the instructors, barking the “No!” which always preceded correction of an error, couldn’t calm her. Handlers were summoned with prods and hypodermics to beat and tranquilize the hysterical female into unconsciousness.
That incident removed all trace of the comical from garment training, as far as Caesar was concerned. When he made his own, deliberately “forgetful” mistake—climbed into his trousers backwards, then cringed at the firm, “No!”—he was still full of anger at the treatment of the deranged female.
A special washroom-like facility served as the hygiene classroom. Each ape was put in front of a stainless steel basin whose faucets were foot-pedal operated. Above each basin was a paper towel container; below it, a waste basket. An instructor hovered behind each group of three or four apes, constantly correcting—“No!” “No!”—as the animals tried to imitate earlier demonstrations of the proper way to wash and dry their faces and hands.
To maintain his protective cover, on his first attempt Caesar deliberately ripped off a paper towel first, crumpled it between his hands, threw it away, then pedaled the cold water to wash.
“No!”
On the second try, he washed and dried his face and hands in proper sequence, impressing his instructor. The effect was precisely the one Caesar wanted.
In the table-waiting class, the chimpanzee ahead of Caesar was making his fourth unsuccessful attempt to pour ice water from a huge pitcher into a glass. The chimp, one of Caesar’s group, just kept pouring until the water cascaded over the glass rim and flooded the table top.
“No, damn it!” yelled the instructor, an older man who seemed unusually irritable. He snatched up the glass, flung its contents toward a wet floor drain, and whacked the glass down on the table—looking as if he’d prefer to whack the miserable chimp instead.
“Again,” the instructor demanded.
The chimp started to pour. Caesar could tell the poor creature was confused, and might earn a beating for overflowing the glass this time.