Despite the anger in his eyes, Caesar managed to speak quietly.
“A most lucid explanation. I thank you.” He stepped a pace to the side, gestured to the snuffling apes behind him. “He is yours.”
Caesar bent down, unbuckled the belt at Breck’s waist, pulled it loose and passed it into the hand of a male orangutan, unmistakable meaning in his eyes.
The orangutan peered at the belt a moment. Then, salivating suddenly, the ape leaped forward and whipped the belt down across Breck’s shoulders. Breck shrieked.
The apes holding the governor dragged him to his feet, pushed him toward the stairs. The orangutan slipped around behind them and began to whip the governor without mercy. Breck’s back showed bloody stripes before he was manhandled out of sight up the stairs, followed by a mob of apes baying and barking approval.
“Lisa—?” Caesar turned in the gloom, shielded his eyes. The female chimpanzee trotted forward. “Find shackles. Shackles,” he repeated with quiet authority, pantomiming his meaning at the same time. Then he glanced at the black man. Again that cruel smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “We must restrain Mr. MacDonald, I think. He may not fully approve of what he is about to see.”
Eyes glowing worshipfully, the female chimpanzee darted away. When MacDonald’s ankles had been bound, Caesar stared at him a long moment, then turned and walked slowly toward the stairs.
MacDonald’s captors shoved him forward. From the foot of the stairs, he glanced up and saw Caesar’s stately figure disappear around the bend. Head raised. Shoulders high.
Kingly . . .
In chains, MacDonald ascended to the horror and the bedlam waiting above.
Smoke and the fumes of dissipating gas drifted across the Civic Center. In one of the miniature parks, apes were savagely uprooting shrubbery, overturning benches. The night sky glared orange, the high rises limned by the fires burning all across the city.
The paving stones of the plaza displayed a litter of bodies, human and animal. Near the entrance to the gaunt black building which housed Breck’s operations suite and penthouse, struggling police and firemen were being dragged into the open from avenues and boulevards. The humans were shackled—and the shambling apes beat the few protestors and stragglers with truncheons. MacDonald looked away, sickened.
He searched for Caesar, saw him silhouetted against the glow of one of the few light stanchions still burning. From the top of the stanchion, Governor Jason Breck had been tied by his wrists. Apes had gathered where the tips of the governor’s shoes rotated slowly, a foot or two from the pavement. The belt was passed from hand to simian hand, as each ape of sufficient stature took a turn lashing the red ruin of the governor’s back.
Watching from a distance, Caesar abruptly signaled an orangutan to his side. He communicated with a combination of words, gutturals, and gestures.
“The Pet Memorial—it is to be destroyed. Destroyed!”
The orangutan bobbed his head and trotted off. Crack went the leather against Breck’s back.
MacDonald stumbled toward the powerful chimpanzee, who was watching the whipping with fists firmly planted on his hips, nodding a little at each stroke. So far as MacDonald could tell, every human being within sight was dead, wounded, or being hustled into captivity in the holding area in front of the government offices.
“Caesar—”
The chimpanzee turned, his magnificent eyes picking up orange glare from the sky. The night was full of the sound of destruction and animal gibbering.
“This—this isn’t how it was to be.”
Coldly, Caesar answered, “In your view or mine?”
“Violence prolongs hate. Hate prolongs violence. By what right do you spill all this blood?”
Crack went the lash. Rotating by his wrists, Governor Breck shrieked again.
“By the slave’s right to punish his persecutors,” Caesar answered.
“Then I ask you to show humanity! I ask you as a descendant of men who were savages, then slaves themselves—”
“Humanity?” Caesar shrugged. “I was not born human.”
“Yes, I know. The child of the evolved apes—”
“—whose descendants shall rule the earth,” Caesar finished.
MacDonald grimaced. “For better—or for worse?”
“Do you honestly think that it could be worse than what I found when I first came into a city of men?”
Crack. Breck’s shriek diminished to a moan. The apes around him gibbered in ecstasy. From the far side of the plaza came the steady pulp-crunch of truncheons, and cries of human misery.
“How—” MacDonald swallowed. “How can you possibly think this riot can win freedom for all your kind? Why, by tomorrow, the central government—”
“I promise you,” Caesar cut in, “by tomorrow it will be entirely too late. If a small, mindless insect like an emperor moth can communicate with another over a distance of eighty miles, can’t you see that—”
“An emperor ape might do slightly better?”
“Slightly?” Caesar registered contempt. “What we have done tonight—a classic example of—if you will pardon me—” again that cruel smile “guerilla warfare—every ape on earth will be imitating tomorrow.”
MacDonald shook his head. “Knives against guns? Kerosene cans against flame-throwers? Artillery? Jet aircraft? Missile submarines?”
This time, Caesar’s shrug was eloquent. “We will not win everywhere. Perhaps not even in a majority of cities. But fire brings smoke, Mr. MacDonald. And in that smoke, from this night onward, my people will crouch. And conspire. And plot and plan against the inevitable day of man’s downfall. Because, you see, as Governor Breck stated—we have valuable allies. The savage ape that lives inside each man. There will come a time when our struggle will be aided by your own kind. Turning your own weapons desperately, self-destructively against your fellow human beings.”
His voice grew louder with the force of his passion. “We both know that day is inevitable, Mr. MacDonald. The day of the writing in the sky, when your cities lie buried under the radioactive rubble. When the seas have become dead seas, and every land a wasteland. That is the future—which my parents saw. In that future, I will lead my people out of their captivity. And we shall build our own cities, where there will be no place for humans—except to serve our own ends. We shall found our own armies, our own religion, our own dynasty—look, Mr. MacDonald!”
Triumphant, Caesar turned to gesture at the ruined city.
“The beginning of that day is upon you even now.”
Cries of animal fury filled the plaza. Governor Breck’s twitching body finally went limp. The screeching of the frustrated apes grew louder as they searched for new targets for their unleashed resentment. By two and threes, they broke away from the circle of light where Breck’s body turned slowly. They raced toward the growing crowd of human prisoners in the holding area.
Firelight. Gleaming eyes. The sound of truncheons. And apes screaming their blood-mad rage . . .
Almost pityingly, Caesar said to the black man, “Do you doubt me? Why don’t you answer, Mr. MacDonald?”
But MacDonald had closed his eyes as the silent tears ran down his face.