“What about these skeletons?”
“They are not simian.”
“I see.”
We look each other straight in the eye. With his enthusiasm somewhat diminished, he slowly continues, “I can’t hide it from you; you’ve already guessed. They are the skeletons of men.”
Zira is certainly in the know, for she shows no surprise. Both of them again observe me closely. Cornelius finally makes up his mind to discuss the matter frankly.
“I am now certain,” he admits, “that there once existed on our planet a race of human beings endowed with a mind comparable to yours and to that of the men who populate your Earth, a race that has degenerated and reverted to an animal state. . . . Furthermore, since my return here I have been given additional evidence to support this hypothesis.”
“Additional evidence?”
“Yes. It was discovered by the director of the encephalic section, a young chimpanzee with a great future. He may even be a genius. . . . You would be wrong to think,” he continued with heavy sarcasm, “that apes have always been imitators. We have made some remarkable innovations in certain branches of science, especially in connection with these experiments on the brain. I’ll show you the results some day, if I can. I’m sure you’ll be amazed by them.”
He seems anxious to convince himself and expresses himself with unusual aggressiveness. I have never attacked him on this point. He was the one who first mentioned the lack of creative faculty in apes, two months ago. In a boastful tone he continues:
“Believe me, the day will come when we shall surpass men in every field. It is not just by accident, as you might imagine, that we have managed to succeed them. This result was foreordained in the normal course of evolution. Rational man having had his day, a superior being was bound to succeed him, preserve the essential results of his conquests, and assimilate them during a period of apparent stagnation before soaring up to even greater heights.”
This is a new way of visualizing the outcome. I might well retort that many men on Earth have had the presentiment of a superior being who may one day succeed them but that no scientist, philosopher, or poet has ever imagined this superhuman in the guise of an ape. But I do not feel inclined to pursue the point. The essential, after all, is that the mind should embody itself in some organism. The form of the latter is of little importance. I have many other more pressing subjects. I bring the conversation around to Nova and her condition. He makes no comment and tries to console me.
“Don’t worry. It will be all right, I hope. It will probably be a child like any other human child on Soror.”
“I certainly hope not. I’m convinced it will talk!” I cannot help protesting indignantly. Zira gives a frown to make me keep quiet.
“Don’t be too hopeful,” Cornelius solemnly says, “for her sake and for your own.”
He adds in a friendlier tone, “If he talked, I don’t know if I should be able to go on protecting you as I do. Don’t you realize that the Grand Council is on tenterhooks and that I’ve been given the strictest orders to keep this birth a secret? If the authorities discovered you knew all about it, I should be dismissed, so would Zira, and you’d find yourself alone among . . .”
“Among enemies?”
He turns his head away. That is exactly what I thought: I am regarded as a danger to the simian race. Nevertheless, I am happy to feel I have an ally in Cornelius, if not a friend. Zira must have pleaded my cause more fervently than she gave me to understand, and he will do nothing that might displease her. He gives me permission to go and see Nova—in secret, of course.
Zira leads me to an isolated little building to which she alone holds the key. The room into which she shows me is not very big. It “contains only three cages, two of which are empty. Nova occupies the third. She has heard us coming and her instinct has warned her of my presence, for she has risen to her feet and stretched out her arms even before seeing me. I clasp her hands and rub my face against hers. Zira gives a contemptuous shrug, but she hands me the key of the cage and goes to keep watch outside in the corridor. What a good soul this she-ape is! What woman would have been capable of such tact? She knows we must have a lot of things to say to each other and therefore leaves us to ourselves.
A lot of things to say? Alas! I have again forgotten Nova’s miserable condition. I rush into the cage and fling my arms around her. I speak to her as though she is able to understand—as I might speak to Zira, for instance.
Does she not understand? Does she not have at least a vague intuition of the mission for which both of us are responsible from now on, she as well as I?
I lie down on the straw by her side. I stroke the incipient fruit of our outlandish passion. It seems to me nonetheless that her present condition has given her a personality and dignity she did not have before. She trembles as I pass my fingers over her stomach. Her eyes have certainly acquired a new intensity. Suddenly, with a great effort, she stammers out the syllables of my name, which I have taught her to articulate. She has-not forgotten her lessons. I am overwhelmed with joy. But her eye dulls again and she turns aside to devour the fruit I have brought her.
Zira comes back; it is time to say good-by. I leave with her. Sensing my feeling of loss, she accompanies me back to my apartment where I burst into tears like a child.
“Oh Zira, Zira!”
While she cradles me in her arms like a mother, I begin to speak to her, to speak to her with affection, without stopping, relieving myself at last of the surfeit of emotions and thoughts that Nova is unable to appreciate.
CHAPTER THIRTY - THREE
Admirable she-ape! Thanks to her, I was able to see Nova fairly often during this period, without the authorities knowing. I spent hours on the lookout for the intermittent gleam in her eye, and the weeks went by in impatient expectancy of the birth.
One day Cornelius decided to take me to the encephalic section, the wonders of which he had described to me. He introduced me to the head of the department, the young chimpanzee called Helius, whose genius he had praised to the skies, and apologized for not being able to show me around himself because of some urgent work.
“I’ll come back in an hour’s time to show you the pearl of these experiments myself,” he said, “the one that affords the evidence I told you about. Meanwhile I’m sure you’ll be interested in the classic cases.”
Helius showed me into a room similar to those in the institute, equipped with two rows of cages. On entering, I was struck by a pharmaceutical smell reminiscent of chloroform. It was indeed an anesthetic. All the surgical operations, my guide informed me, were now performed on subjects who had been put to sleep. He stressed this point, as though to show the high degree attained by simian civilization, which was at pains to suppress all useless suffering, even in men. I could thus be reassured.
I was only half reassured. I was still less so when he ended by mentioning an exception to this rule: the very experiments, in fact, whose aim is to make a study of pain and localize the nerve centers from which it derives. But I was not to see any of these today.