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.”