Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“Thank you,” said Bentley, stepping forward. “You know, perhaps, how the Colombian ape behaves, enough that you can coach me how to walk, how to gesture?”

“Certainly. It will take perhaps an hour to prepare you to fill your role creditably.”

Jackson’s face flushed with enthusiasm. He was launched on a task which fired his interest. He was an authority on apes and anything relating to them inspired him.

“Seat yourself on a chair,” said Jackson. “The Colombian ape sits upright like a man.”

Bentley seated himself as Jackson had bidden him.

“Now spread your legs apart awkwardly, with the knees straight. The Colombian ape doesn’t exactly sit on a chair or a rock or a tree, he leans against it in a half sitting position.”

Bentley quickly assumed the awkward strained position suggested by Jackson.

Jackson stepped up to him and placed Bentley’s arms, unbent, so that his fists hung down outside his wide-apart knees, and cupped his fingers so that they seemed perpetually in the act of closing on something.

“You can’t possibly take the proper position with your toes,” went on Jackson, “for it’s beyond a man’s ability to curve his toes as he does his hands. The Colombian ape’s toes are prehensile.”

“Can’t you say in your next news story, Doctor,” suggested Bentley, “that the Colombian ape, the nearest animal relative of man, seems to be in an advanced stage of evolution. Can you not say that the Colombian ape is by way of losing the use of his toes?”

“Many scientists know that to be untrue,” said Jackson, “but perhaps we can help you through your scheme before they begin denying details in the newspapers. Too bad we can’t send secret suggestions to all anthropologists that they remain discreetly silent until the mantle of horror is lifted from Manhattan. But of course we can’t, since we’d betray ourselves. Our only hope, then, is to work at top speed.”

“I am as eager as anyone to finish a particularly horrible task,” said Bentley.

Under Jackson’s instructions Bentley walked up and down the room. His shaggy shadow on the several walls as he turned, marched and countermarched at Jackson’s commands, filled Bentley with self-loathing. He found himself repulsive. His body perspired freely impregnating the ape skin with a harsh odor that was biting and terrible in his nostrils. It was sickening. He tried to close his mind to the repulsiveness of what he was doing.

He walked with a swaying, side-to-side gait, something like a sailor’s rolling walk, while his arms swung free at his sides as though they merely hung from his body. The Colombian ape walked like that, Jackson said.

“How about the intelligence of the Colombian ape?” asked Bentley.

“We shot the only specimen so far seen by man before we could discover any facts bearing on his intelligence,” said Jackson.

“Then you can safely say that he possesses intelligence far beyond that of known apes,” said Bentley quickly, “somewhere, let us say, between that of the lowest order of mankind and civilized man.”

Jackson nodded his held dubiously.

“It seems,” he said unsmilingly, “that I arrived in the United States at exactly the right time! You would have failed signally to convince the Mind Master in the role of an African great ape.”

Bentley managed a short laugh. How horribly it came from the lips of an ape!

“I’m not overly superstitious,” he said, “but I regard this as a good omen. I feel we’re sure to succeed in what we are planning. I think Barter will surely wish to experiment with me if he thinks I am in reality a great ape from Colombia. He’ll welcome the chance to examine any ape which so nearly resembles man. I’m an important link in his plan to create a race of supermen. At least that’s how we must hope that Barter will estimate the situation when my story is told in to-morrow’s papers.”

An hour before dawn Doctor Jackson, weary from his arduous instruction of the equally exhausted Bentley, pronounced Lee a satisfactory “ape.”

“Now here’s where you come in,” said Bentley tiredly to the curator. “I’m to be taken now to a cage in the Bronx. During the rest of to-day you will quietly instruct your attendants that their guard to-night at the zoo must not be too strict. I must be in position to be stolen by the minions of the Mind Master.”

Now the full significance of the desperate expedition upon which Bentley was embarking came home to them all. Their faces were white. Bentley shuddered under his ape robe. His mind went catapulting back into the past to the time when he had been Manape. This was much like it, save that all of him was now encased in the accouterments of an ape and he did not suffer the mental hazards which had almost driven him insane when he had been Manape, with the perpetual necessity of keeping close watch over his own human body which had held the brain of an ape.

He stiffened. “I’m ready,” he said.

Immediately upon arrival the curator had been asked to have a closed car, quickly walled with a mixture of lead and zinc—which Bentley and Tyler hoped would thwart the spying of Caleb Barter—brought to Tyler’s door.

Three or four zoo attendants entered with a cage when Bentley pronounced himself ready. They stared agape at Bentley and their faces went white when he strode toward them upright, like a man.

Bentley would have spoken to reassure them, but Tyler signaled him to keep silent. The zoo attendants might talk and entirely spoil their scheme.

Two hours later, long before the first crowds began to arrive at the Bronx Zoo, Lee Bentley was driven from his small cage in the car, into a huge cage at the zoo. From a dark corner, in which he crouched as though overcome with fear, he gazed affrightedly out across what he could see of Bronx Park.

“When I used to feed the animals here,” he said to himself, “I never expected that the time would come when I myself would be caged—and one of them.”

The curator had ridden out with the cage. But, save for making sure of the fastening on the big cage, he paid no heed to Bentley. He treated him, of necessity, as though he were actually the Colombian ape he pretended to be. From now on until he succeeded or failed, Lee Bentley was an ape from the jungles of Latin-America.

Just before the crowds could reasonably be expected to begin arriving, curious to see this strange thing Doctor Jackson had brought from Colombia, an attendant arrived with a freshly painted sign.

“Colombian Great Ape,” it read, “Presented to Bronx Zoo by Doctor Claude Jackson.”

It seemed to close entirely behind Lee Bentley the vast door which separated the apes from civilization. Miserably he crouched in his corner and awaited the coming of the curious.

A numbing fear began to grow upon Lee Bentley as the ordeal of waiting began.

Naturally he could not eat the food given usually to apes and of course he could not be seen calmly eating bacon and eggs with knife and fork. And because he couldn’t eat he was assailed by a dreadful hunger, which, however, he managed to fight down partially. He smiled inwardly as he looked ahead and understood that despite the warnings not to feed the animals, children of all ages, from four years to sixty, would surreptitiously toss peanuts and walnuts into his cage.

He felt a little hopeful about it. They would at least allay his hunger.

But no, he could not do that, either. Nobody had thought to ask Doctor Jackson how a Colombian ape manipulated his food. Even a certain clumsiness in that respect might start questions which would cause the public to doubt the authenticity of Jackson’s find.