MacDonald laughed at Virgil’s fear. “It’s been there for years. Breck used to have all the corridors equipped with cameras.” He added wryly, “To forestall ape conspiracies, as I remember.”

“No, no . . . it . . . was moving.”

“What?”

“Are you sure?” asked Caesar.

Virgil nodded, never taking his eyes off the camera.

MacDonald licked his lips. His mouth was suddenly dry. He swallowed and took a step sideways.

The camera moved slightly to follow him, its motor whirring softly.

“He’s . . . right. Virgil’s right!”

Virgil lifted his gun and held the trigger down for one long, angry moment. A burst of machine gun fire tore the camera off the ceiling. Pieces of it scattered across the room, ricocheted off the walls. Only a few dangling wires remained.

He stood there with his machine gun smoking. Caesar and MacDonald stared at him, hardly believing what he had done.

“Whoever or whatever is down here . . .” began Caesar.

“. . . already knows that we’re here too,” finished Virgil.

“That camera was supposed to make automatic sweeps—it wasn’t,” said MacDonald, “It was being manually controlled.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Virgil.

“Not until we find those tapes,” snapped Caesar. “Come on.” He scrambled forward. MacDonald and Virgil followed.

FOUR

“Those apes!” cried Kolp. “I’ll get them for that!” He slammed his fist against the TV monitor. The screen remained blank. “They must have shot the whole camera off.”

“If we shoot them,” said Méndez, “we break years of peace.”

Kolp misunderstood him. “I know,” he said. “It’s been boring, hasn’t it?”

Méndez didn’t answer. Frowning to himself, he began switching the monitor screens to show the views from other TV cameras. He couldn’t pick up the intruders, though. “They’ve gone all the way into the Archives Section.”

“Huh?” Kolp looked at him. “Archives? What do they want there?”

“It must be important, whatever it is.”

“Blueprints,” muttered Kolp. “Plans for the underground city. That’s what they want. They must be planning to attack us again. That’s what it is, I’ll bet! I’m sure of it!” His expression grew cunning. And savage. “Well, we’ll get them. Yes, we will. We’ll get them.”

In the Archives Section, MacDonald, Caesar, and Virgil were already ripping open cartons, pulling apart crumbling file cabinets, and pawing through piles of tape canisters.

The two apes were trying to be systematic; they were picking up one tape canister at a time and reading its label, frowning darkly and moving their lips, then carefully discarding it as they decided it was not the one they were looking for and moving on to the next.

MacDonald was less careful. He was in a hurry. He knew what he was looking for and approximately where it should be. He shuffled through the files and tapes with barely controlled fury. Impatience and a need to get out of there quickly drove him to this impetuosity. “It’ll be a tape, a big, round canister,” he said. But he was only repeating himself. He had briefed the two apes many times during their journey across the desert. They all knew what they were looking for and where it should have been stored.

Should have been. But wasn’t. The room had collapsed long ago. Filing cabinets had toppled over, their contents scattered. Someone had been in here, too; whoever it was hadn’t shown much regard for the files. Papers and tapes were scattered haphazardly.

The filing cabinets and shelves were of no help, either. The tape wasn’t there. It would have to be one of the ones buried in the rubble on the floor. The three of them began digging through the piles of papers and tapes and films. They had to examine them all, each one individually. Abruptly, Virgil straightened. He held a large tape canister in his hand. “MacDonald,” he said. “Is this it?” He read aloud from the label, “ ‘Proceedings of the Presidential Commission on Alien Visitors.’ ”

Caesar and MacDonald joined him and looked over his shoulder. “I think . . .” said MacDonald. “Yes, that must be it.”

“Good,” said Caesar. “Let’s play it.”

MacDonald started to say something, then closed his mouth. He wanted to leave, but Caesar was right—the tape had to be played. There were no videotape players in Ape City. Quickly, he threaded the tape into a machine, all the while muttering, “Oh, please let it work.” He pressed the switch. The tape reels began turning slowly; the tape slid past the playback head. “Thank you,” MacDonald whispered to no one in particular.

Caesar seated himself very close to the monitor and waited impatiently. He fidgeted. MacDonald touched the fast-forward button and moved to a later point on the tape. Abruptly the screen came alive with the image of a female chimpanzee, an oddly beautiful face, somehow both kind and alien.

“Is that her?” whispered Caesar hoarsely, shifting in his seat to look at MacDonald. “Is that her?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He pressed his face close to the screen and sniffed. “Mother . . .” he said. “Mother?” The word felt curious in his mouth.

“Is there sound?” prompted Virgil.

“Oh . . .” said MacDonald. He touched another control. Abruptly, Zira’s voice came from the speaker: “It wasn’t our war. It was the gorillas’ war. Chimpanzees are pacifists. We stayed behind. We never saw the enemy.”

“Why does her voice sound so thick?” asked Virgil.

“They got her drunk; it was the only way they could get her to talk.”

“Mother . . .” whispered Caesar. His face was rapt.

Another voice on the tape, a human voice, asked, “But which side won?”

Zira’s voice replied flatly, “Neither.”

Virgil and MacDonald exchanged a worried glance. Caesar didn’t react; he was too absorbed in the flickering images of his mother. The screen was flashing through a series of color stills. Zira was lovely; her eyes were bright, large and brown and alive with warmth. Most of the pictures showed her smiling; her face creased easily into a smile. Zira had been a true madonna.

The voice on the tape continued, “How do you know if you weren’t there?”

“When we were in space . . .” said Zira, “we saw a bright white, blinding light. We saw the rim of the Earth melt. Then there was a . . . tornado in the sky.”

After a pause, the human voice asked, “Zira, was there a date meter in the spaceship?”

“Mmm.”

“What year did it register after Earth’s destruction?”

Zira’s speech was blurred, but the words were still understandable. “Thirty-nine fifty.”

The monitor screen went white.

Caesar snarled bitterly and looked up at Virgil. “And you talk to your pupils about eternity!”

The screen flickered, and another image appeared, this one a male chimpanzee. Caesar’s father, Cornelius. Caesar reached out and touched the image’s cheek. “Father . . .” He felt odd saying this word. And somehow hollow.

The same human interrogator was asking, “How did apes first acquire the power of speech?”

Cornelius’ voice—oddly like Caesar’s—came from the speaker. “They learned to refuse. At first they barked their refusal. And then on a historic day, commemorated by my species and fully documented in the secret scrolls, there came an ape who didn’t bark. He articulated. He spoke a word which had been spoken to him, times without number, by humans. He said ‘No.’ ”

The screen flickered and went black; the tape had run out. The end of it flapped around the takeup reel. Absent-mindedly MacDonald stopped it. He switched off the machine and removed the tape. “Since your father was right,” he said, “we must assume that your mother was right about the year of the world’s destruction.”

“No wonder the governor was so anxious to have me killed.”