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Entering yet another white corridor, Buck embarked on yet another trip into isolation and the bizarre world-within-worlds.
Buck, flanked by his grim guards, found himself being ushered down a long, bare corridor, a narrow passageway that was lined all along the route with uniform busts, honoring some form of dynamic succession. It wasn't until the last bleak, awesome stone head and shoulders that Buck got any inkling of what he was seeing. This last impressively mounted face had a plaque at its base which proclaimed in etched lettering: MENDEZ XXVI. Mendez the Twenty-Sixth! Buck wagged his head, to clear it of cobwebs.
As Buck wagged his head, trying to shake off the cobwebs of his memory, a familiar image flashed before his eyes. It was the face of an extraterrestrial despot he had encountered in his intergalactic adventures. The tyrant's name was Nalok, and he ruled over the planet Mendora.
Just like the impressive face of Mendez XXVI that Buck had just witnessed, Nalok also had a line of uniform busts honoring his succession. Each bust represented a different ruler from his bloodline, stretching back for generations. The intricate details etched into each sculpture captured the essence of their reign and served as a constant reminder of their power.
Buck vividly remembered standing before those imposing busts on Mendora, feeling an overwhelming sense of dread and oppression. The cold, lifeless eyes staring back at him seemed to hold the weight of centuries of tyranny and cruelty. It was as if each bust whispered tales of conquered worlds and subjugated civilizations.
At last, the guards led him through another door into another room, where he found himself facing yet another nightmare. The transition from darkness to broad daylight did nothing to alleviate the horrors that awaited him.
It was a room shaped like an amphitheater, with curved white walls, the hallway forming a well below. This was where Buck and the two guards stood, waiting for some kind of audience. At the head of the room, Brent could see the living replica of that last bust in the narrow passageway. The same smooth marble face, the luminous eyes, the glasslike rigidity. All of it was enveloped in brilliant purple robes, lying like a shroud about the imposing figure of Mendez the Twenty-Sixth, as he sat like a judge presiding in some Supreme Court conclave of this incredible city. Buck stared up at the paradox of five robed inquisitor-rulers, sitting in carved chairs, regarding him with an impassivity of gaze that was bloodcurdling in its lack of human emotion. Buck held his ground, staring back. His eyes, which had been the most important part of his physical tools these last terrible hours, were now fully strung to the maximal pitch of their efficiency. Seeing was believing---but here, in the 25th century, it was also disbelieving. The senses, all five of them, could assimilate only so much.
His eyes swept over Mendez and his court.
He saw a magnificent Negro, robed all in white, his onyx face startling in contrast with his garments. He saw a mountainous fat man, serene and cool, garbed in red robes. To Mendez's left, there was a woman---a strikingly beautiful woman, whose ivory face rose like an orchid from a gown of sheer blue. To Mendez's right, a green-robed elder statesman type---very much like the mysterious verger---squatted prominently. But unlike his companions, this one was almost charming and cheerful in demeanor.
He waited, wondering, trying to control the fear moving like a Nobulan glideworm in his stomach.
All five of these phantasmagorical figures struck Buck like some odd concatenation of Rembrandt's famous Syndics of the Cloth Guild. With the terrible difference of an imposed horror. And the fantasy of the Unknown.
He waited, wondering, trying to control the fear moving like a snake in his stomach.
He didn't realize that the five seated figures, looking down, could see him directly. or that if they looked straight ahead, they could see, projected on the opposite wall, the visual impress of their own thought projections. Buck had no way of wondering into what technological wonderworld he had stumbled, though his encounter with the verger had given him some advance notice of the miracles to be found in this strange city.
Nor could he yet fully understand the traumatic hypnosis that the people of this civilization could inflict upon him. As they had done with him at the water fountain in that episode with Nova. Buck's own stubbornness would bring on such an attack.
This was the mad world into which Buck had all unknowingly awoken to. The phenomenon of A.D. 2492!
Buck found himself the target of Mendez, the Negro, the woman, the fat man, and the elder statesman.
He knew they were talking to him; he felt it even though he could hear no words, see no lips move, and knew nothing about the wall behind him with its color-scheme code of interrogation.
Mendez said nothing.
The fat man jerked his head ever so slightly.
The far wall lit up in red colors.
"Rogers," Buck answered.
The fat man jerked his head again.
"Buck," Buck said politely. "And you are---?"
Another jerk.
"I see...." Buck found himself understanding, in spite of the impossibility of it all. And the improbability. "You---are the only reality in the universe. Everything else is an illusion. Well, that's nice to know."
The red colors flared on the opposite wall. The others said nothing.
"I got here by accident," Buck explained to the fat man. "How did you get here?"
There was no answer from the fat man.
As the interview progressed, a pattern began to become very clear. The fat man probed for facts, the woman for emotional feelings, the elder statesman for beliefs and opinions. The Negro would ask no questions at all. He was there merely to induce pain; the catalyst for the workings of a man's conscience. Buck only sensed all this. He could not have said where the knowledge came from.
Mendez sat through it all, implacable as a Buddha.
The elder statesman now jerked his head, his genial smile almost benevolent. But only almost.
It was like being caught in the crossfire of four laser guns. Only you could not hear the whine of the beams. Only the ferocity of the assault hit you like some withering invisible hail of terror.
Openmouthed, Buck once more answered.
"You're way off. Why should I want to spy on you? Personally, I'm not even sure you exist." It was true. Was it all a bad dream? Would he awaken in the bedroom of his Chicago home to find his mother poking him to get up?
The puckish inquisitor jerked his head.
"Certainly, I know who I am," Buck rasped impatiently. "I'm an astronaut. I'm here because I'm lost."
No surprise showed on the five faces up above him. Only a sudden interest. Mendez's eyes glistened like a cat's.
The fat man again jerked his head.
"From this planet," Buck answered him. "But from another time. Five hundred years ago."
There was still no surprise evident. Only that deepening of interest in the marble faces above him.
"I know, it sounds insane. But if so, it's my insanity, not yours. So I can abolish you---all of you---anytime I want."
They all smiled at that. Benevolently. Matching the elder statesman's habitual facade.
Buck bit his lip.
He couldn't see the opposite wall.
The inquisitors had projected, in their various color schemes, a montage of all that had happened.
An image of Taylor, looking like some prehistoric Tarzan, with a bedraggled Nova-Eve in tow, was shown approaching buried New York. The last shot left him striking the wall of ice and vanishing into its wilderness, with Nova screaming behind him.
"No, I don't know how to get back," Buck almost mumbled, still oblivious of the story on the wall. "I was thrown into a vast orbit by cosmic forces, put in suspended animation by gases that leaked out of some burst pipes. I was awakened last year by the Draconians."
He caught himself, feeling a wave of self-pity swamping him. "My parents were killed during the Nuclear Holocaust. Aside from my friends back in the Inner City, it's just me."
Instantly the images of Taylor and the girl on the wall vanished. They were supplanted by five images of Nova riding westward on a horse across the desert wilderness. And then....
She was projected in all of the inquisitorial colors:
The fat man saw her pulling herself through the octagonal vent. A burst of flaming red.
The beautiful woman saw her asleep in Buck's arms on the bench in the public square. A shimmering blue ocean of color.
Mendez saw her hammering on the outside of the cathedral's double door. A purple flash of violence.
The elder statesman envisioned her being seized and removed by the guards on duty in the strange city. A twisting garland of green.
Only the Negro's wall remained colorless. Bare, blank and white.
The beautiful woman in blue jerked her lovely face.
Buck was instantly on the defensive.
"Who?" he hesitated.
The woman jerked again.
"Nova?" Buck lied. What's that? A star? A galaxy?" His heart pounded with sudden alarm for the girl.
At that, the Negro shut his eyes.
Buck cried out. A poker-hot inferno ignited his skull. His brain revolved in stunning flashes of agony. He went down on his knees, tears coming to his eyes. The Negro opened his eyes. Slowly.
Gradually, painfully, Buck straightened. The agony had left as suddenly as it had come.
"I know her---yes....."
Silence greeted that.
Buck lost his temper, shouting, "She's harmless! Let her alone!"
The Negro closed his eyes again.
Rivets of white-hot pain hit Buck from every direction. He went down again, writhing as his whole body was stitched and needled with agonizing pinpricks. He clutched his stomach as if he'd been poisoned. His vitals were on fire. His face twisted, his tongue lolled. "All right..." the breath forced itself from his lungs. "I'll---tell you!"
Smiling, the Negro opened his beautiful eyes.
The woman jerked her head again.
"Yes, I found her," Buck gasped.
Again, a jerk.
"Some weeks ago."
Another jerk.
"Don't be crude," Buck groaned. "I'm fond of her, but I'm also fond of...."
The beautiful woman arched her head once more.
"I had to help her! She was pregnant!"
Another tilt of that lovely face.
"She also helped me.....get away from Ape City."
All five of the faces looming over him leaned forward. Now all of the heads twitched in unison. Buck's hands shot to his ears. They were engulfing him from all sides, attacking on every front of his personality and intelligence.
"Stop!" he begged. "I can't understand---can't separate---you're all screaming at me---at the same time! Please...."
He groveled, still blocking his ears in order to hear nothing more. Suddenly, incredibly, the face of Mendez softened. His rubbery lips parted, and a deep, mellifluous voice sounded in the chamber of new horrors. Buck stared up at him in amazement.
"He's right," Mendez said. "He has only limited intelligence. We should speak aloud. And one at a time. Albina." He looked at the strikingly beautiful woman in blue.
The woman stared down at Buck, her impeccable face almost kind and sympathetic. But it was the illusion of her beauty and her rich, deep tones.
"Are we to understand," she said, soothingly, "that you----were in the City of the Apes....?"
"Yes. Two days ago."
The fat man intervened. "What did you see?"
Buck dodged that, side-stepping the question.
"You're talking.....?"
The elder statesman nodded cheerfully. "Certainly, we can all talk. A rather primitive accomplishment. We use it when we have to. I, Caspay, consider it a vulgar thing."
"When we pray," the fat man interjected again.
"When we sing to God," the Negro said fervently.
Then all of them, all five on the dais, made the hateful Sign of the Bomb. Buck wince, in memory of that sleek monster atop the high altar of the cathedral. St. Patrick's---my God!"
"Your God---what a joke! You worship something my people made five hundred years ago. An atom bomb!"
The fat man heaved a long and ponderous sigh. The folds of his fat stomach wriggled beneath his red robes.
"Ah. You've seen the Bomb, Mr. Rogers."
"Above the altar in your cathedral. An obscenity...."
All the inquisitors rose as one in response to his heated indignation. Their faces were ominous. Even Caspay was no longer smiling. Regal Mendez rose like a lean colossus, his eyes flashing.
"Mr. Rogers, you have beheld God's instrument on Earth!" he intoned majestically. He motioned his fellow inquisitors to be seated. He alone stayed standing.
He looked down at Buck.
"It is written that, in the First Year of the Bomb---the blessings of the Holy Fallout descended from above.
"What kind of crap is that?" Buck interrupted harshly. Mendez ignored him.
"....and my people built a new city in the blackened bowels of the old...."
"Bullshit!" Buck roared, trembling, angry.
"Blessed be the Bomb Everlasting...." Mendez droned.
"You don't have the faintest idea what you've got in that cathedral, do you?"
".....to whom alone we may reveal our inmost truth, and whom we shall serve all our days in peace."
"Yeah, until you fire it at the apes," Buck concluded.
There was fresh silence at that. Mendez then stirred. His deep eyes held strange lights in them.
"You fool!" With a rustle of his purple robes, he sat down again. "The Bomb is a Holy Weapon of Peace."
Buck began to laugh.
He couldn't help it.
Amusement shook him. A terrible humor that put aside all concern for his own safety. The Negro shut his eyes. Quickly. Sadly almost.
More pain, more mental injections of torture, made Buck a writhing, twisting, burlesque of a human being on the floor of the chamber. Animal sounds tore from his throat. He sounded half bestial.
The Negro waited a full minute. and then reopened his eyes.
"We're a patient people, Mr. Rogers," he said softly, his voice nevertheless filling the chamber. "We can repeat this little lesson as often as we want. Because we are determined to know what the apes want. War, or peace."
Buck waited for the waves of agony and nausea to recede. He recovered more slowly this time. He propped himself up on his hands and knees, fighting off hysteria. Caspay's puckish voice came down to him, reprovingly.
"Try to understand---the only weapons we have are purely illusion."
Albina's soothing contralto filtered down too."
"You imagined he was hurting you."
Buck smiled at her crookedly, shaking his head.
"Because I imagined I was hurting you," the Negro explained without malice. "Are you in pain now?"
"No," Buck admitted.
"No imaginary bones broken? Or blood flowing?" The Negro's voice took on echoes of sadism; he was enjoying his thoughts. "Or eyeballs bursting? Or guts spilling?"
"No," Buck said, louder than before.
"Then I have hurt but not harmed you," the Negro affirmed.
Albina smiled triumphantly.
"Traumatic Hypnosis is a weapon of peace."
Caspay's eyes twinkled mysteriously.
"Like the Visual Deterrent."
Before Buck had time to ask what that was, there was a mammoth whoosh of sound and within a yard of where he stood, a pillar of flame shot up. Buck reeled back. A vertical geyser jet of steam behind him licked at his rear so that he had to stumbled forward again. Only to be cut off by the wall of fire. Between two horrors.
"Or the Sonic Deterrent," Caspay chuckled delightedly.
Abruptly there was a rat-tat-tat, a gobbling medley of rapid-fire noises to the right of where Buck stood imprisoned. As if an invisible machine gun had cut loose. Then to his left, an ear-skewering electronic scream of sound rose in such deafening volume that soon the entire chamber and the outside world seemed to reverberate with the caterwauling. The sounds rose to a deafening tumult, then just when Buck was sure his eardrums would explode, vanished with terrifying, miraculous abruptness. His body swayed with the assault from all sides.
"Weapons," Caspay continued blandly, "of peace, Mr. Rogers."
"Like all our weapons," the beautiful Albina agreed from her sea of blue robes.
The Negro nodded firmly. "Mere illusion."
Buck lost his temper and what was left of his discretion. He had been a toy for too long; a mere mortal buffeted and battered about by what was seemingly an impossible manifest destiny.
"Damn your hypocrisy!" he bellowed.
The Negro turned to look at Caspay. Then he looked at his white wall. There, projected, was an image of Buck set afire, clothes and flesh blazing, screaming soundlessly in a void of death. Caspay returned his gaze down to Buck. His expression was gentle.
"We very much need your help, Mr. Rogers."
"Why?" It was a helpless groan from Buck.
"We are the Keepers of the Divine Bomb. That is our only reason for survival. And yet---as you see---we are defenseless."
Buck sneered. Bitterly.
"Yes, I can see that."
"Defenseless," Caspay continued, "against the monstrous, slobbering, materialistic apes."
"I don't help anybody except my friends back at the Inner City!" Buck rallied, with deep but slow confusion. "You and the Apes can kill each other off, for all I care."
Caspay smiled.
"Mr. Rogers, I apologize for your language. There are times, I know, when your sanity---is about to give way. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope you can tell us..."
"Exactly," the fat man interrupted again, as seemed to be his conversational forte, "what the apes are planning!"
Buck didn't understand. He couldn't.
Albina stirred anew. Silky, sinister, maddeningly lovely.
"We've caught some of their scouts. Hideous creatures. We had them here---precisely where you're standing. But their skulls are too thick. That, or they truly know nothing...."
"And neither do I," Buck cut her off violently. "And if I did, I wouldn't tell you."
The Negro laughed. It was a very unpleasant sound.
He gazed at his white wall again.
On it, Nova materialized.
Caspay said gently, "You make me very said, Mr. Rogers."
Buck looked from the Negro to Caspay, frowning. His mind tried to find an answer. And then, amazingly, he saw Nova being brought into the chamber, struggling between another set of implacable guards. The girl was clawing, scratching, but the guards might have been zombies. Nova, despite her torn garments, or perhaps because of them, looked more paganly desirable than ever. Buck bunched his fists, trembling.
"She can't help you," he blurted. "She can't even talk. Don't harm her...."
Albina made a low, feline sound in her silky throat and motioned regally to the guards who now released Nova. The girl, crying, ran headlong into Buck's arms. He clasped her to him, reveling in the feel of her once more. He ached to hold her again, without knowing it. Or realizing why.
"Of course not, Mr. Rogers," Albina purred. "We never harm anyone. You are going to harm her." Her ivory face pulsed sensually. Her exquisite bosom rose and fell as she breathed deeply.
Smiling sadistically, his great black face wreathed in onyx power, the Negro closed his eyes. A grim Golem created for torment, dedicated to the art of cruelty.
Buck closed in on Nova.
Mendez the Twenty-Sixth, royally purple and majestic, watched with great attention from his central position on the dais.
He and his four inquisitors, red, blue, green and white.
The weird magic of the wall shattered all that was left of Buck's power to fight back.
The chamber looked down on madness.
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"Ten minutes to landing," Zyrax announced, swiftly activating the shuttle's controlled descent mode. "We'll have a topography reading of the landing site in five minutes."
"Captain Zyrax," Draxon suggested, "Shouldn't we radio the Inner City before landing? We need to share the valuable information we've gathered from Colonel Rollins and his team."
"We can't," Zyrax shook his head, "We're too far for a scrambled signal. We'd risk broadcasting on an open frequency, making it possible for the wrong people to intercept."
Elara knew she had to speak up now. Once they were on the ground with the three men from Earth's past, there would be no other chance. "Zy," she began, "I have a concern that could put us all in danger."
"What?" the captain frowned, his sandy hair tousled.
"Those men are from the 20th Century and want to go back there," she said, her expression tight-lipped.
"So they may think, Elara, but it's impossible for them to pull off. Traveling forward in time through interstellar travel is possible, but going backwards..."
"Zy, you don't get it," Elara interjected. "The scientists from the 20th century must have found a solution, even if our records don't reflect it. Why else would their superiors send them on a rescue mission? They must have had a clear plan to travel back 504 years to their own time."
"If I grant you that point, what's your concern?"
"They have the power to change history," the engineer stated, causing Draxon and Quill to pale, while Zyrax's face filled with a slow, uneasy realization.
"You mean..." Zyrax began, memories of his past readings flooding back.
"Yes," Elara confirmed, her expression grave. "And if I'm correct, everyone in the Inner City could be in danger."
"It's just a theory, Elara," the captain warned, "One of many about the effects of time travel. Our science isn't advanced enough to test any of these theories yet."
"But can we really take that chance?" she countered softly. "Zy, let's face it. We can assist in the search for Colonel Taylor and his crew, but we cannot allow any of them, not even Buck, to return to Earth's past."
An hour-long, uneasy silence filled the cockpit as the shuttle descended.
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