"Chimps are not completely independent," Dr. Bedoian said. "They live a group fife, they need love to be happy."
"We were talking about men, not chimps," Pan Satyrus said with dignity.
The driver laughed again, and then sat up straighter in his seat and turned the car off the secondary road they had been travelling, onto a dirt, or tertiary road that wound between hummocks and through patches of discouraged-looking palmettos.
"Dr. Bedoian, you should have taught me to eat an animal diet," Pan said.
Dr. Bedoian said nothing.
The car bumped along. Occasionally it would pass a raggedy-looking man in blue jeans and a straw hat. They would have been more convincingly bucolic if the straw hats had not all been of the same type and degree of wear. Still, a super straw hat salesman might have passed through there once, about four years before, and never returned.
"I shall refuse to be questioned if you aren't present," Pan Satyrus said.
Dr. Bedoian said nothing.
"Aram," Pan Satyrus asked, "what have I done to make you angry?"
"Who can live without love, who needs no friends?" Dr. Bedoian asked. "I was just trying you out. After all, I am a scientist."
Ahead of them a woven wire gate was marked with a big sign: pumping station, and the name of a natural gas company. But there were no pipelines anywhere around there.
A uniformed man, carrying a rifle, opened the gate, and the three cars bumped through and fined up alongside each other. Some more men with rifles came out, and the passengers disembarked, each car also disgorging its pair of security men.
Mr. MacMahon appeared from somewhere, and took charge. The terms in which he did it were ominous: "Take all four of the prisoners into the office together. They are not to talk."
From the outside the building resembled a corrugated iron shed for the protection of oil drums or pumping machinery. Inside, it was every government office in the country; waist high walls for the lower officers, ceiling high walls for their superiors, two bull pens full of desks for their inferiors.
Mr. MacMahon led the four culprits — prisoners-guests — to what any bureaucrat would have recognized as the most important of the offices.
Inside, a civil-service faced woman was typing. She did not look up as they went through to the inner office, which was marked, simply, private.
There was a huge desk in the office. Three men sat behind it. Though they wore their shirts and flowered ties and pleated slacks, at least two of them had the unmistakable look of military men in what used to be called mufti.
The one in the center had a closely cropped mustache, a deep suntan, and a jaw that rivalled Pan Satyrus'. He said, "Just line the people up, MacMahon, and leave us alone."
MacMahon said, "Sir, as a matter of physical security—"
"We've got two able bodied Navy men here, if we need them."
MacMahon looked unconvinced but he went out.
Pan said, "My name is Satyrus, sir. And yours?"
"You can call me Mr. Armstrong. And your name is Mem, a chimpanzee."
"Quite so, sir, but I do not care for the name of Mem."
Mr. Armstrong stretched his arms up above his head, then brought them down and caressed Ms shoulders with strong fingertips. "This damned air conditioning," he said. "Why, Mem, I do not care what you care for. To me, you are just an ape who is trying to make a monkey out of the United States." He let his stern glance rake the two sailors and the doctor.
"That's pretty good," Pan Satyrus said. "Make a note of it, Happy. Radioman Bronstein is my secretary," he said to Mr. Armstrong.
"I'm Mr. Satyrus' valley," Ape Bates said. Mr. Armstrong stared at them. "This is very funny, I know," he said. "It may cease to be so at any moment. Kindly remember that you are enlisted men to the armed forces, and subject to court-martial." "I don't see no officers present," Ape Bates said. Mr. Armstrong had the grace to blush. "Now, Mem," he said. "Or Satyrus if you prefer. Playtime is over. You did something to the controls of that spaceship, the Mem-sahib. All right, all right, I don't care for the name, either. What you did was not an accident. We — the government of your country—"
"No," Pan Satyrus said. "Not my country. Do primates, other than Homo sapiens, have a vote? Can a gorilla be President, a macaque governor, a rhesus Secretary of State?"
"My God," Mr. Armstrong said, "you're demanding votes for monkeys."
The man on his right had been busily cleaning a pipe. Now he laid it on the table. "Okay. Any monkeys or apes that get to be twenty-one and can pass 3 literacy test, they vote." "Very funny," Pan Satyrus said. The man took up his pipe and another cleaner. "But that is what we are here for," Mr. Armstrong said. "To find out your price for disclosing this very important secret to us, and to get it for you, if it is within reason." "Chimpanzees are not subject to human desires."
"Then we are prepared to fill some chimpanzee desires. A cage full of luscious young females? A daily carload of bananas? Name it."
Pan Satyrus laughed his alarming laugh.
"You may also — since you seem quite intelligent-have sensed that the atmosphere in this room is not quite like that of some other places where you have been. We are neither security guards nor politicians here. If it is clear, in our opinion, that you are not, at any price, going to cooperate, we are prepared to dispose of you, as humanely as possible, but as finally as possible, too. In other words, a gas chamber, a bullet, whatever is feasible."
"Hold on, mister," Ape Bates exclaimed.
The one of the three men who had not yet spoken spoke now. He barked, "'Ten-shun, Chief!"
Ape Bates came to attention; so did Happy Bronstein.
Pan Satyrus said, slowly, "I have seen your face, sir. In the papers. You are the admiral the Navy hates."
The third man chuckled slightly, and then was still.
"But you are intelligent," Pan said. "And nice looking. Given a little makeup you could pass for some species of giant gibbon. Do you think men ought to have the secret of faster-than-light travel?"
"I think, by and large, they'll have it sooner or later; much sooner, now that we know it is possible. And I think that if anybody is going to have it, our side should. Period."
"Satyrus, you can talk," Mr. Armstrong said. "We cannot let you loose, or even confined to a cage, with this knowledge unless we are sure you are cooperative. At the level of animal keeper, security becomes improbable, if not impossible."
"Has my spaceship been well examined?" Satyrus asked. "Have you had a metallurgist go over it?"
Mr. Armstrong kept his steady eyes on Pan's. The admiral and the pipe cleaner looked up.
"You'll find Mendelev's law confirmed in a new way," Pan went on. "Each of the metals has moved up one notch in his scale. Alchemy, gents, alchemy."
The unpopular admiral frowned. "Better check, Armstrong," he said.
Mr. Armstrong opened a drawer, took a microphone out of it, and held it to the corner of his mouth. He talked, apparently, but not a sound came out into the room. Then he put the microphone away.
"I think I know what this means, but someone fill me in, to be sure," he said.
The man with the mustache said, "Shoot up a load of copper, get back a load of gold."
"I was up there quite a while," Pan said. "I had to do something to occupy myself. Weightlessness and idleness don't go together in the chimpanzee's cosmos. I did not, however, expect to retrogress, or devolute, or devolve. Or I wouldn't have been so damned playful."
"You're not amusing us," Mr, Armstrong said.
"No," the admiral put in. "If this gets out, gold isn't worth anything at all."