Beneath The Planet Of The Apes Read Online Free PDF Page A

uniformed like some kind of military personnel, brutally herding half-naked humans into wagon cages. The air was filled with the sounds of barked commands, cries of fright and pain. And something else Brent couldn’t quite fathom. Not in his frenzy of fear and bewilderment.
    “What are they doing to those people down there?” he almost begged the question of Nova. Behind him, crouching and remembering all too well, the girl did not answer. She couldn’t.
    At the arena’s main gate, a picket-like arched entranceway, Brent could now see a small gathering of chimpanzees. Chimpanzees, armed with banners, walking around in circles, gesturing defiantly toward the center of the arena. The banners read: FREE THE HUMANS! UNITE IN PEACE! Nobody of the gorilla stamp was paying any attention to the dissenting chimpanzees. Brent shook himself, blinking. He was seeing things. He had to be—uniformed gorillas, chimps in civvies . . .
    “This is a nightmare,” he said huskily, mutely, his tongue thick in his mouth. His frantic eyes searched the arena dumbly.
    He could feel Nova’s hands trembling on his back.
    Nova, who still remembered the ordeal of Ape City.
    Brent was stupefied.
    Nova was only— afraid .

4. URSUS
    Down below on the perimeter of the stone arena, too far away for him to have spotted Brent and Nova in the concealment of thicket above, stood General Ursus. General Ursus had eyes only for the crowd. His audience. He stood on a dais, surrounded by the populace of Ape City, all eager to hear what he had to say—to offer. General Ursus was a very large, very imposing gorilla whose military costume of braid, epaulettes and medals merely enhanced the ferocity and brute strength of his appearance. Behind him on the dais, Nova would have recognized the elderly Dr. Zaius, the stern but kindly orangutan who had at least attempted to understand the freedom that Taylor had wanted and needed. Other members of the ape hierarchy filled the chairs ringed around the platform. But for the moment, the center of all eyes and ears was the mighty General Ursus.
    Ursus the Powerful.
    Ursus the Great One.
    Even as he now spoke, holding out his long arms, his full-chested voice sweeping over the throngs, the great white statue of the Lawgiver behind him seemed to wrinkle in a smile of simian approval. Ursus was a man of the people.
    “Greetings, members of the Citizens’ Council,” Ursus boomed. “I am a simple soldier—” Deafening applause and a wildly cheering multitude greeted this pronouncement. From the cover of the shrubbery above, Brent almost broke down in total astonishment. His eyes glittered insanely in his bronzed face. “God, this is not real. It can’t be—!” Nova, terrified, pulled him back to cover.
    “As a soldier,” Ursus resumed, placidly, in control of his audience, “I see things simply—” His listeners had stilled, ready to absorb the rest of what he had to say.
    Brent was talking to himself now, in a shattered whisper.
    “I see an ape. He talks . . .! I know what happened . . . Re-entry: twenty thousand miles an hour. A force of 15G. It made Skipper blind, and muddled my brains. So everything here is delusion—” he turned to Nova almost helplessly. “Even you—which is too bad . . .”
    Nova, somehow understanding the horror of what had come to him, quickly placed her hand over his mouth.
    The next words of Ursus came up to them, sonorous and clear. Like shining rocks aimed at what was left of Brent’s sanity.
    “What I saw, when I became your Army Commander, broke my heart. I saw our country imprisoned on one side by the sea, and by north and south and west—by naked desert. And inside our country, we found ourselves infected by those enormous parasites which we call Humans. By parasites who devoured the fruits that we had planted in a land rightly ours; who fattened on the fertility of fields that we had made green with wheat; who polluted the pure and precious water of our lakes and