Earth-349: The Planet of the Apes

By Anton Psychopoulos, Ph.D.

 

Disclaimer 1: This story is based on a story in Superman #349, but is not limited by that story or any other.

 

Disclaimer 2: This story is based on characters and concepts copyright DC Comics, Marvel Comics, 20^th Century-Fox, Universal Studios and others.  It is written for entertainment only and is not intended to deny or disparage those copyrights.

 

Disclaimer 3: The Planet of the Apes was created by Pierre Boulle.

 

Disclaimer 4: The chronosynclastic infundibulum orbiting between Earth and Mars was created by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

 

Disclaimer 5:  The healing treatment used by Dr. Zaius was created by someone whose name I can’t recall.  If you’ve read the story, please let me know the title and author.

 

Disclaimer 6: This story is not recommended for persons under 18, or the easily offended, especially those who are uncomfortable with themes such as transgender.

 

            Colonel George Taylor of the United States Aerospace Force scratched under his filthy loincloth and wished one more time that he’d followed that guidance counselor’s advice and become a newspaper reporter.

            I could have been the editor of a great metropolitan newspaper by now.

            Instead, he had become a fighter pilot, then a test pilot, then an astronaut, and eventually been given command of Argo 4, charged with exploring the space warp that orbited the Sun between Earth and Mars.

            And look where that had gotten him.

            They’d emerged near a red giant star they were pretty sure was Betelgeuse.  Landing in a rare green spot on the mostly-desert second planet, they had found a band of mute and primitive but quite human people, and soon after they had shared the fate of the band: rounded up and killed or caged by a band of apes.

There was no two ways about it: the creatures had been recognizably gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees, though they had walked on two legs, talked, worn clothing, ridden horses and carried rifles.  Long, deadly rifles.

Taylor’s three comrades had been killed, so far as he knew, and he had been shot in the throat.

            Caged at a research station with other captive humans, he had pretty much picked up their language by listening to the staff.  By luck, a gorilla technician often brought her baby to work, and spent hours talking with him.  But with the wound in his throat, he couldn’t talk to them.

            If only he could talk, he could surely manage to get them to treat him as a person.  There were at least three intelligent species on this planet – surely they could find a place for a fourth.

            But for now, he sat in his cage, his only companion a pretty but witless female, praying that his wound would heal enough that he could speak intelligibly.

            A fat gorilla entered the room of cages and handed a printed form to the young chimpanzee who was feeding the captives.

            The chimp looked up at Taylor, startled.

            “Gee, Dr. Zira was hoping those two would mate.”

            The gorilla laughed.

            “Not after Lab Nine gets through with him!”

            The chimp chuckled nervously.

            “Um, guess not.”

            Taylor shook his head slowly, the implications of what the apes were saying sinking in.  It sounded as though they were going to castrate him.

            And why not?  He was only an animal, after all.  Naturally they could “geld” him, or even “put him down”, whenever they pleased.

            Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse. . . .

            The gorilla was saying something about “orders direct from Dr. Zaius”.  That was the old orangutan who seemed to be the most important official at the research station.  Not just a senior administrator, but a very distinguished scientist and a “pih ehr-bool”, a title which seemed to mean something like “defender of the faith”.  Zaius had the bearing of a bishop and the voice of a Shakespearean actor, and for some reason he radiated a severe hostility towards humans  in general and Taylor in particular.

            The chimp opened the cage, watching the two animals warily, while the gorilla readied a noose on a stick, the standard control device, to capture him.

            “If you knew what they were going to do to you,” the gorilla said nastily.

            At the last moment, Taylor snatched the descending loop and yanked at the stick, managing by surprise to pull it out of the gorilla’s grasp.  Leaping past the two startled apes, he dashed out into a corridor, then made for daylight.

            On the street, an unconfined human created a sensation, sending orangutan mothers snatching at their children, sturdy chimp males grabbing stakes and bricks to bring the beast down, gorilla teamsters calming their horses.  Surprising them with his perceptiveness, Taylor managed to evade the apes for several blocks, and he began to think he had a chance of escaping into the wilderness when a net suddenly entangled him and he was hoist into the air beneath a covered walkway.

            He made one last, desperate attempt to force intelligible words from his throat, but a club to the back of his head silenced him for the rest of the day.

            Taylor awoke to find himself lying in a bed, tucked under white sheets.  For a moment, he thought that the whole episode of the monkey planet had just been a dream.  But his wrists and ankles were restrained, and the walls had the odd curving surfaces of the ape architecture he’d come to know.

            And it stank of ape musk.

            His body ached, on the edge of acute pain, especially at the joints and between his legs.  He suppressed a moan of dread as he contemplated that fact, and prayed for a chance to examine himself and know the worst.

            An orangutan whose jacket indicated a fairly low rank entered the room, noted that Taylor was awake and began to prod his chest with long hairy fingers.

            “Get your stinkin’ paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”

            The orang retreated, eyes wide, hands raised, thin lips quivering.  Taylor was hardly less surprised to hear his voice.  The wound in his throat seemed finally to be healed, he could speak without pain, but his voice was strangely altered.

            Altered.

But that was nonsense.  It was a myth that an adult male’s voice would rise in pitch after he was castrated.  But as Taylor continued to snarl invective at the cringing technician, there was no question about it: he was cursing, if not singing, soprano.

The orang had finally had enough.  He bolted from the room, shouting, “Doctor Zaius!  Doctor Zaius!”

The stern-faced old orangutan soon entered, followed at a cautious distance by his trembling subordinate.

“Well, now, let’s see how Bright Eyes is doing today,” he said with a confident air.

“My name is Taylor,” Taylor said flatly.

The old orang started momentarily, then straightened himself and dismissed the technician.

“So, it’s true, you can talk.  My worst fears realized.  But you won’t be talking for long.”

The old ape began untying Taylor’s ankles and wrists.

“Let’s just see how the rest of your body functions.  The treatment seems to have healed all of your wounds, as usual, but let’s just see if you can walk, shall we?”

Feeling as weak as a centenarian, Taylor pushed himself up on his hands to a half-sitting position, then dropped back down with a high-pitched shriek.

“What did you do to me?” Taylor demanded, forcing himself to sit up again and look at his body.

“You tell me, Bright Eyes.  What do you see?”

“This is impossible.  You can’t do that, it doesn’t work that way . . . .”

Zaius gave a brief series of dignified hoots of amusement.

“We were nearly as startled, the first time we saw it.  We had been trying to develop a means of curing crippling wounds, and had gotten as far as testing it on the higher animals, when we discovered this curious side effect.  Male becomes female, female becomes male.  Fascinating.”

Taylor swung her legs out of the bed, sitting up dizzily, still much too weak to stand.  Her shoulder and hip joints had been dramatically altered, and something was different about her spine.  Her waist was tiny, her thighs rounder, her calves much smaller.  Even the weight of her modest breasts seemed to unbalance her.

Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse . . . .

The senior ape prodded Taylor in various places.  She didn’t bother to object.

“Most of the humans we have used in testing Dr. Milo’s treatment had their minds shattered by the experience.  I’d hoped that would happen to you as well.  Since it didn’t, we’ll simply have to cut your vocal chords, and perhaps use you in one of my neurological studies.”

“Cut up my brain?”

“Of course.  It would be a shame to lose such an unusual specimen – but perhaps you will attract less attention as part of Laboratory Nine’s collection.  We already have quite a menagerie here of exotic specimens from all over the planet.  Perhaps . . . .”

Taylor slapped her thigh and forced herself to her feet, to look Zaius in the face.

“Damn it, Doctor, how can you keep treating me like just another specimen?  Can’t you see that I’m. . .”

She groped for the right word in their language.

“. . . I’m an ape, too?”

Zaius glared at her, nostrils flaring.

“No,” he said firmly, “you are not.”

The orangutan began pacing back and forth, his professorial bearing contrasting strangely with his loping short-legged gait.

“You must understand that I am very much of two minds regarding you, er, Taylor.  On the one hand, I am a scientist, and would like nothing better than to study you at indefinite length.  And as a lover of justice, I would like to find a place for you in our society.  But I am also a Defender of the Faith, and simply by being what you are, you pose a threat to the established order of things.  A threat I cannot tolerate.”

Taylor was wobbling unsteadily on her feet, feeling terribly weak.  Zaius stepped forward and scooped her up in his arms, cradling her as easily as a child.  The old ape swung her into a fireman’s carry and bore her through the corridors of Lab Nine, past startled subordinates.

Zaius lowered Taylor gently onto a mat of straw in a cage, much smaller than the one she’d shared with the female, and locked her in.  Recovering herself a little, she looked around and saw that a chimp sat in the next cage.  The creature was young, male, quite large, and naked.

“Say, fella, aren’t you on the wrong side of that cage?”

Zaius hooted once.

“You won’t get much conversation out of that one, I’m afraid.  He’s one of our specimens, from a tribe of mute, almost mindless savages recently found in a remote jungle region.”

“I get it.  The talking human and the mute chimp, a pair of amusing freaks.”

Zaius laughed more freely, sounding a bit like the fat gorilla who had first come to bring her to this place.

“Indeed, you will make an interesting pair.  We’d already had in mind to try mating him with a human female, and you seem the obvious choice.”

Her jaw didn’t actually drop, but she sat motionless for a good long time.  She remained silent as Zaius spoke with an attendant and left.  Finally she looked through the bars at her intended mate, and saw how the partition between their cages was demountable.

Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse . . . .

They left her alone for a few days, letting her sleep and eat and recover her strength.  Dr. Zaius checked on her once or twice a day, and various tests were performed.  They drew blood, took her temperature and her blood pressure, prodded her new genitalia with a frightening speculum.  Any day, she expected to return to her cage to find the partition removed.  She wondered if she’d be able to put up enough of a fight to get the chimp to kill her.

She saw a few of the other specimens at Lab Nine, including an orangutan-human hybrid brought in by an embarrassed farmer.  The child was mute, but Taylor wondered if that might be because no-one had spoken to her since she was born.

Taylor also saw the adult human just three feet tall, and heard the thunderous rumbling of some very large animal that was being held in a pen adjoining Lab Nine.  There was a lot of talk about an unusual gorilla brought back from the Sin’Ges Islands, which apparently were quite remote, but she didn’t see him in the lab.

One morning the mute chimp was agitated, and seemed to be very eager to get close to Taylor.  She sat against the opposite wall of the cage, away from, his groping arm.  He wasn’t the only one upset – the big animal, whatever it was, was growling like an earthquake all morning.

Dr. Zaius examined her personally that morning, seeming to be very pleased by what he found when he probed her vagina with a blunt brown finger.  He rubbed his fingers together, feeling their stickiness, and sniffed at them in a way she found revolting.

“Yes,” said the old ape, “I do believe that today –“

He was cut off by a renewal of the immense roaring, accompanied by a crashing of broken timbers and falling rock that could only mean that part of Lab Nine had somehow fallen down.

Lab technicians screeched in panic.  Zaius stood firm, briskly ordering them to move into doorways.  The old ape surprised Taylor by bending over her to shield her with his own body.

Brilliant daylight cut through the gloom of the room of cages, and Taylor saw over Zaius’ shoulder that part of the roof was missing.  Then something else blocked the light, and she heard one of the terrified gorillas scream, “The island king!”

Zaius was brushed aside like a fly, and Taylor was crushed in a bearhug by some large animal with too many limbs.  But they weren’t limbs, she realized as she was hauled up through the gap in the roof.  They were immense black fingers.

And then she was sitting in the palm of a gorilla’s paw, with eyes like manhole covers peering at her, and nostrils big enough to receive her fists sniffing her.

Taylor gave a short, painful bark of laughter.

Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse . . . .

 

Note: More Earth-349 stories are posted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/earth349

Contact Dr. Psycho at doctor_p99@hotmail.com