Escape From The Planet Of The Apes Read Online Free Page A

important thing is, we are here.”
    Cornelius nodded. “All right. We’re in our own past. What an opportunity!”
    “For an historian like yourself, yes,” Milo agreed. He looked around the cage and up at the electric lights, and waved his arms expansively. “Marvelous equipment! Think, Cornelius, all the old legends are true. Humans did have a machine civilization, with power to do almost anything they wished!”
    “And destroyed it,” Cornelius reminded him.
    “And destroyed it,” Milo repeated. He lowered his voice in wonder. “But why, Cornelius? With all this, with so many amazing things, so much we have not seen but must exist for all this to exist, could they not have been happy with it? We would have been dazzled by a tenth of this.”
    “For how long?” Zira asked.
    Milo nodded. “True. Humans and apes alike, never satisfied with what they have.” He sighed and paused a moment. “Your first question,” he said. “Consider. If we speak, the humans will ask us about our origin.” He had turned very serious. “Will we be able to conceal enough from them? I do not think they would be edified to learn that one day their world will crack like an egg and fry to a cinder because of an ape war of aggression.”
    “I see,” Cornelius said. “I think you are right. Zira? Do you agree?”
    “No.” She looked around the semidarkened cage. “If we don’t talk to them, they’ll keep us in cages. They won’t give us any clothes. We don’t even have sanitary facilities! Cornelius, I can’t live like a barbarian! We are civilized intellectuals.”
    “Shh,” Milo said. “You’re disturbing the gorilla.” He pointed to the inhabitant of the next cage.
    “Oh. Sorry,” Zira called. There was no answer and she looked up, not too surprised. Gorillas were never polite.
    “He doesn’t understand you,” Milo reminded her. “Apes, at this instant in time, cannot yet talk. And I believe that for the moment, we would do well to follow their example. We can reveal nothing if we will not communicate with them.”
    “All right,” Cornelius said. “I’ll go along. Zira?”
    “Good night,” she told him. She stretched out on the straw and grimaced. “I think we will need the sleep. Good night.”
    Zira woke early. The zoo was filled with unfamiliar noises: birds whistling, the growls of large carnivores, mechanical sounds of the zoo machinery. She could identify almost none of it. The whole concept of a mechanically dominated world was alien to her, although her husband’s historical research had at least made her intellectually familiar with the idea. She knew about this world, but she couldn’t feel it.
    Cornelius and Milo were still asleep as Zira got up from the straw and washed herself in the shallow pool in one corner of the cage. The big male gorilla still slept in his own cage; Zira curled her lip at him. She had never liked gorillas, although she knew it was an indefensible prejudice.
    Zira spent the next few minutes exploring the cage. It was certainly secure, fastened with padlocks that required keys. She didn’t wonder that the humans had used that kind of lock. In her own world and time, men in cages would play with the locking system so that if there were any way it could be opened without a key, they’d get it open. She supposed that apes must do the same here and now.
    Wherever and whenever that was. The thought frightened her. They had seen the world destroyed. All agreed they’d seen it. But it was beginning to fade, a memory harder and harder to call up, like a dream from a long time ago. It had happened so fast. They had barely launched Colonel Taylor’s ship and made orbit when the world flamed white and red and orange, the shock wave hit them, and their ship had begun an automatic re-entry sequence.
    Her reverie was interrupted when the main door opened and the man who had tried to give her the banana last night came in. He smiled, his lips pressed carefully together so that