BENEATH THE PLANET

OF THE APES

. . . in the buried ruins of what was once New York City, lived an incredible race of men, mutated beyond belief by the effects of the ancient Holocaust.

. . . in the ashes of atomic dust, chimpanzees picketed for peace while their gorilla leaders prepared for war.

. . . where a great church once shone in the sunlight, dark religious ceremonies paid tribute to the Great Bomb, bringer of life and death.

This is the Earth, thousands of years from now, and this the story of two men from the 20th century who somersaulted through a time warp into the most plausible and yet most fantastic adventure ever conceived.

20th Century-Fox Presents

An Arthur P. Jacobs Production

BENEATH THE PLANET

OF THE APES

Starring

JAMES FRANCISCUS • KIM HUNTER

MAURICE EVANS • LINDA HARRISON

Co-starring

PAUL RICHARDS • VICTOR BUONO

JAMES GREGORY • JEFF COREY

NATALIE TRUNDY • THOMAS GOMEZ

and

CHARLTON HESTON

as

Taylor

Produced by

APJAC PRODUCTIONS

Associate Producer

MORT ABRAHAMS

Directed by

TED POST

Screenplay by

PAUL DEHN

Story by

PAUL DEHN and

MORT ABRAHAMS

Based upon Characters Created by

PIERRE BOULLE

Music by

LEONARD ROSEMAN

BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES

A Bantam Book / published July 1970

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1970 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by

mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: Bantam Books, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

Title

Copyright

Dedication

BENEATH THE PLANET

OF THE APES

1. GENESIS

2. TAYLOR

3. BRENT

4. URSUS

5. ZIRA AND CORNELIUS

6. NOVA

7. BRENT AND NOVA

8. SPECTERS

9. MENDEZ

10. MASKS

11. “TAY-LOR!”

12. DR. ZAIUS

13. APE AND MAN

14. BOMB

15. ARMAGEDDON

For Pierre Boulle

for his two very important

contributions to the arts of

Literature and Film—

The Bridge Over The River Kwai

and Planet Of The Apes.

1.

GENESIS

Wasteland.

Total, glaring, absolute.

Stark, terrible.

Nothing growing.

Nothing moving.

Ageless, perpetual silence. Eternal solitude. Only the piercing whine of the dry nameless wind blowing in from a distantly heard sea.

Desolation. A universe of nakedness and nil.

Utter, supreme. Everlasting.

Nothing of Life. Only the unrelenting deathly stillness. The infinity of zero, emptiness, nothingness.

This is the planet where Man has lost his supreme position in the scheme of things. Listen to the Wind.

If it could speak, it would tell you of Taylor. The man, the scientist, the space-explorer. The scorching, chilling breath of the wind’s passage would carry the terrible tale to the walls of Infinity, down the endless corridors of that vast timelessness which seems to be the core of the land itself . . .

Listen, the Wind . . .

“This is the truth eternal: whatever thinks, can speak, And whatever speaks can murder,

“But what is there to murder in this dead place?”

There is no answer for the Wind.

“When the astronaut, Taylor, came first among us from a voyage in outermost space, he perceived that his ship had passed through a fold in the Fourth Dimension, which is Time. And Taylor knew that he was older than when his journey had begun . . . by two thousand years and ten.”

The Wind whines higher and louder, scoring eerily over a dead landscape. Weird lambent lights suffuse the terrain. There is a vast unearthly brilliance invested in a panorama of Nothingness.

“But in the first days he did not know the name of the planet on which he had set foot—where Apes, risen to great estate, had acquired the power of tongues, while Man, fallen from his zenith to become a beast of the earth, had lost the means of speech, and was dumb . . .”

The dead sands remained unmoving, the wind prowled over the monolithic expanse of desert-like desolation. And isolation. The unknown lights bathed the wasteland with a dull, inflexible glow.

“Now Taylor hated war. And since Man had made war upon himself—murdered himself—over and over again, ever since the first town was built and burned and bloodied—Taylor believed that the race of Man was hopeless.”

A Dead Sea. Dead like the Dead Land.

The wind stole quietly over the still, stagnant, murky waters.

“Yet the great Apes were hardly better. They put Taylor in a cage as they had once been caged. When he and his woman escaped from the City of the Apes into the wilderness called the Forbidden Zone . . . he found a desert land of rock and stone. Barren, unfruitful, devoid of life and eternally laid waste by Man’s vilest war in Man’s history. And in this wilderness, Taylor set eyes upon the Statue . . .”

A statue with spikes.

A stone lady, gazing out over the limitless endless acres of sand. Oblivious to the mean waves lapping at her copper-lined bosom. A Colossus, with upstretched arm, bearing aloft a torch that had lost all its meaning. All its truth. All its light.

A long-dead lady of stone eyes, stone ears and stone senses—whose only companion for an eon had been—

—the Wind.

“. . . and Taylor knew he was back on Earth . . . an Earth defiled and destroyed by the hand of Man. Set this down: whatever speaks, can murder.”