Four stories from The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius (2013) Edited by John Joseph Adam

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination: Original Short Fiction for the Modern Evil Genius (2013)

Edited by John Joseph Adam 

* * *

"Mofongo Knows" by Grady Hendrix recalls some of Kim Newman's early stories: "Famous Monsters" (1988), "The Original Dr Shade" (1990), and "The Pierce Arrow Stalled, And... " (1995). It's an elegant exercise in poignant belatedness, coolly clocking the afterlives of adventurers.

      It's been thirty years without a whiff of Theresa Savage, yet here's her smell again like a golden oldie.    "We need to talk," she says, standing outside Mofongo's cage with three men in dark suits.

    "Let me guess," Mofongo says, sitting up. He is excited to have some new playmates, especially ones who wear suits. None of his visitors ever wear suits, and he hasn't seen a human being in forty hours. He can mentally dampen his hunger and thirst but his boredom knows no bounds. He points to them in order. "CIA, FBI, NSA."

    "CIA, FBI, and Animal Control," the youngest suit man says to him.

    "I am not an animal," Mofongo says.

    "You're not exactly human, either," the man says.

    Mofongo's nostrils flare.

    "What is this, Theresa?" he asks. "Why did you come back?"

    "Dad's dead," she says.

    "What?"

    "He's dead," she repeats.

    "Who did it?"

    "A bottle of Southern Comfort and a handful of Vicodin," she says. "Day before yesterday."

    "Wrong," Mofongo says. "One of his enemies, returned for revenge."

    "Mo, I appreciate that you're upset but this isn't part of you guys' soap opera. He killed himself."

    "No," Mofongo says, and he feels fear because he really does not know who did it. Old allies can turn into new enemies, old friends can become new foes. Men of Adventure are no stranger to psychosis. "One of his enemies is here. I may also be in danger. You must free me so I can defend myself."

    "I can't let you come to the funeral," she says, ignoring him. "People will want to know why a talking ape is there and you're kind of hard to explain."

    "I don't want to go to his funeral," Mofongo snarls. "I want to defend myself!"

    "I'm sorry," Theresa says. "I really am. On the plus side, we're getting you out of here."

    "Yes, free to defend myself. Free to destroy my enemies."

    "There's a Primate Refuge outside Austin," the Animal Control man says. "They've agreed to take you. You'll fit right in. That chimpanzee who did all those Geico ads is there."

    "Chimpanzees? Chimpanzees! Masturbating, shit-flinging, pants-wearing attention whores! I am Mofongo: Gorilla of the Mind. I am a threat to mankind! I'm on the UN watch list!"

    "You've been off that list for twenty-six years," the CIA agent says. "No one remembers you anymore."

    "If men do not still feel fear," Mofongo snarls, "why do they send the CIA? Why the FBI?"

    The FBI agent shrugs. "I just wanted to see a talking gorilla," he says.

* * *

"Blood & Stardust" by Laird Barron

     "Mary," he says. "You double-checked the array, I presume?" He scarcely acknowledges my answer; his mind is already three jumps ahead, and besides, my loyalty is unquestioned. "One of my specimens expired last night— but all is not lost. My revivification project awaits!"

    "Remember not to talk on the phone during the storm," I say. "I just saw an account of a woman who was fried doing dishes. Ball lightning exploded from the sink and set her on fire. It traveled through the pipes."

    Dr. Kob stares at me, his beady eyes narrowed. He rubs his temples as if experiencing a migraine. "You're watching the talk shows again. You know how I frown upon that, my dear. Less daydreaming, more physical exertion. Remind me to have Pelt assign you additional duties. Idle hands and all that."

    "Sure, gimme a pitchfork and I'll swamp out the stables."

    "Never mention pitchforks again!"

    "Or torches."

    "Out! Before I lose patience for your belligerence. And tomorrow, take the rod into our lovely village for quality-assurance testing. I've altered the design. It possesses more jolt than ever."

    "As you command," I say sweetly. After he wanders off, I chew my cup and swallow it piece by piece. It kind of frightens me that my Pavlovian dread of the Doctor has ebbed, replaced by an abiding irritation. This is very dangerous. He's a middle-aged megalomaniacal child— an L'enfant Terrible. We know what rotten children do with their toys, right?

    He gave me a puppy, once. I loved her, and often imagined how she had crept into the caves of my ancestors to escape the cold and the dark. I accidentally broke the puppy's neck. It's probably a good thing he didn't hand me the little brother I always wanted.

Lab assistant Mary turns the tables on her employer, then finds a circus to join. Barron is at his ease with the material, calm and in control, far away from Universal Studios clichés. The tone is slangy, first-person, and assured.

Readers curious about subtle handling of sex and gender roles will appreciate the human sympathies the story portrays.

* * *

"Rural Singularity" by Alan Dean Foster is a droll story about a smalltown reporter following-up on a two-headed chicken story. He meets the farmer and the farmer's precocious daughter, Suzie.

     She showed him the antigravity projector the size of a cell phone, just like the one in her pocket that had kept the miniature solar system hovering above her palm. She showed him the homunculus Santa and elves that she only animated at Christmas. Showed him the robot cat that kept the barn free of rats and mice, and the extractor that drew water from the seemingly desiccated air, and the candy maker that spun elaborate gourmet treats out of plain sugar and simple flavorings. She showed him the small thermonuclear device.

     "But I can't get enough radium or tritium out of the old watches dad buys for me a flea markets so I'm gonna try and build my own centrifuges to concentrate enough U-235 to ninety percent from the ore in the hills around here." She eyed her father. "For my next birthday dad promised me enough lead to make some shielding."

     Gilcrease looked at his host. Parker shrugged. "It's harmless, I'm sure. Another one of her toys."

     "Yeah," Gilcrease mumbled. "Harmless." He was eyeing the girl not just out of curiosity now, but warily. "Suzie, some of these things, some of your toys— aren't you afraid they might be a little bit dangerous?"

* * *

"Ancient Equations" by L. A. Banks

Ernest Lassiter, engineering genius with access to the "Akashic records," gets ready to work a spell to save the world:

[....]There was nothing wrong with his mind and he was no extremist, no matter what the psychiatrists had said. He did not have a breakdown. Thinking differently than the zombified public did not mean he'd gone around the bend. He'd had an awakening on the job, is all . . . one that brought him clarity!

It's the usual mishmash of self-righteous social-misfit moralizing:

[....]The Bildebergers and the Illuminati still ran the entire fucking world. They were the devil, and they got regular people to buy into being blind consumers, suckered them into debt, poisoned them for profit, made them so unhappy with their lives, their looks, their bodies, their families that they had to spend money— somehow, somewhere in the food chain of greed— to make themselves feel better.

     Somebody needed to do something. Somebody really smart could fuck up their decadent Roman orgy party forever....

It's remarkable that a story by a professional writer,  selected for a professional anthology, cannot do more than spin its wheels for nineteen pages.

Jay

7 December 2021

The Possessors (1964) by John Christopher

     Blair's reply barely reached them through the glass. "I don't know who to trust, Mac." He was almost crying.

     "I know what you mean, Blair." Macready forced himself to sound convivial. "Trust's a tough thing to come by these days. Just trust in the Lord."

The Thing 

by Alan Dean Foster (1982)

One of the pleasures of T. E. D. Klein's story "The Events at Poroth Farm" (1972) and subsequent novel The Ceremonies (1984) is that the "hero" Jeremy Freirs places himself in the cosmic horror crosshairs when he retreats to a quiet place in the New Jersey wilds for a summer of reading Gothic literature. 

A useful reading list can be compiled from the books Jeremy fights with when not wrangling spiders and climbing trees to make "strange gestures and faces that no one could see."

Late in the novel:

....Still no rain. Read most of John Christopher's The Possessors. Pretty effective, drawing horror from the most fundamental question of human relations: How can we know that the person next to us is as human as we are? Then played a little game with myself for most of the evening, until I—

Later in the chapter:

....Afterward, he went to the living room and watched the cats at play; the four had moved inside this morning, away from the cold drizzle and the breeze. But the animals and their ceaseless quest for amusement now depressed him. A moving sock, the sound of a slither or scrape - anything seemed to excite them for a moment, then ultimately bore them. He, too, felt bored. Borrowing the radio and holding it under his shirt, he walked back to his room. He reopened The Possessors and came close to completing it, but soon his mind began to wander to all the books he hadn't yet read that summer, and the thought of them all so depressed and tired him that he laid aside the novel and turned on the radio. He found a New York news station, but though he listened for half an hour, there was once again no mention of the previous night's earthquake. We're too small to count out here, he decided. He felt abandoned. He switched to a local station, but it was the old religious bit. Maybe, though, they would give the news; weren't they required by law to do so every hour?

❖

The Possessors (1964) begins in high Alpine cold and ends in flames. It strikes today's reader as quaint for sf/horror, filled with men squandering advantages in chess-style struggle while women go to make tea, distract the children, and retrieve hidden stores of gin for necessary daytime sedation.

[Jane Winchmore] decided to use the time remaining before lunch to write to Wendy Gabriel. Wendy was the only one of her old Oxfordshire neighbors with whom she had remained in touch, and even this link, she was well aware, had been kept in being by Wendy, not by her. She had scribbled a brief note, in reply to two long letters, mentioning the impending Swiss trip, and another fat letter had followed her out here. It was full of news about the people who had once rounded out her life, but whose doings now failed completely to interest her. Her first thought had been that a picture postcard would provide sufficient reply, but in the aftermath of her moments of self-criticism she decided to write a letter instead.

     Consciousness of virtue got her to the point of sitting down with pen and paper and writing the salutation, but could not take her much further. The bizarreness of what was taking place up here, she found, inhibited the telling of it. To say that one had been cut off by an avalanche would be easy enough, but to go on from that and recount the rest of it—a boy apparently dead, but resurrected, the mother gone mad and attacking her other son, the father apparently catching insanity from her, and the three of them wandering out somewhere in the mist-enshrouded snow—she felt irritated by the absurdity, the irrationality of it all. Letters to be successful required the ordinary, the undemanding; as life itself did. She put her pen down with a sigh of exasperation.

     Douglas, at this point, came in from the bar, and she turned to him with relief. The letter would keep, until it was all over and could be set down briefly and tidily, bracketed by the commonplace and, if possible, reduced to it. She greeted him lightheartedly before she noticed the tense, worried expression on his face. He said abruptly, "Have you seen Peter?"

     "Peter? No. Why?"

     "He seems to have gone missing."

This is an English thriller about a house under siege. But the tone is closer to Edgar Wallace or E. Phillips Oppenheim than Buchan or Household. The authorial voice is often passive, and in the opening chapter positively supine.

The novel's SF kernel has much in common with Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (1938) and Finney's 

The Body Snatchers (1955). Christopher's characters, however, are more emotionally reticent and circumspect, less prone to panic and hysteria. No dynamite, no pistols, no flame throwers: just a long gun, kerosene lamps, and a fuel oil furnace for mortal combat in defence of the human race.

Each character taken over by a possessor has been waylaid or ambushed by another already possessed. Only one is self-seduced into voluntarily succumbing. Since the novel takes place in and around a Swiss resort chalet and is populated by chalet proprietors, staff, and paying guests, there is a limited field for operations. This works to Christopher's advantage, as he is clearly at his best in small compass and when observing (in moderation) the Aristotelian unities. 

John Christopher (1922-2012) wrote a career-spanning series of soft SF and unsplattery horror novels. His "young adult" titles are tonally indistinguishable from titles aimed at the over-eighteen market. The Possessors, unlike earlier works by Campbell and Finney cited above, is strangely flaccid. In the end, Christopher suggests the possessors have found no foothold. The same fault befalls The Possessors itself.

Jay

23 October 2021

50 Years of Dean Koontz: Shadowfires (1987)

    

     Now take my hand and hold it tight. 

     I will not fail you here tonight, 

     For failing you, I fail myself 

     And place my soul upon a shelf 

     In Hell's library without light. 

     I will not fail you here tonight. 

    

     — The Book of Counted Sorrows

*     *     *

Shadowfires by Dean Koontz (1987) is a multi-character, multi point-of-view weird science thriller. In five hundred pages its three competing sets of characters and one mutating, villainous genetic scientist rush from Southern California's wealthy suburbs to a shuttered and dilapidated Las Vegas motel. The last half of the novel takes place in an apocalyptic desert thunderstorm, multiplying trouble for all: Koontz's way of showing the reader that, yes, he can accomplish anything he wants with the novel form.

*     *     *

Like T.E.D. Klein's The Ceremonies (1984), Dean Koontz's 1987 novel Shadowfires is a work of fiction that has attracted and defeated me on several attempts in the last three decades.

I first became preoccupied with reading the novel when I read the paperback's plot description: 

Rachael's request for a quick and clean divorce enraged her husband. She had never seen Eric so angry, so consumed by pure and terrifying hatred. Then, in the heat of the moment, Eric was struck down in a traffic accident. His death was instantaneous. Shocked and relieved, Rachael had nothing left to fear. Until Eric's body disappeared from the morgue—and Rachael was stalked by someone who looked like her dead husband . . .

Shadowfires shares a jumping-off point with Brian Moore's 1983 novel Cold Heaven (another of my must-reads), though there the similarities end.

In the last forty years I have read several Koontz novels. (I have also read his outstanding non-fiction book Writing Popular Fiction (1972), which excels similar works by authors like Lawrence Block in focus and perspicacity.) Stand-outs include Midnight (1989), The Taking (2004), a wonderful comment on the "Left Behind" novels, and The Good Guy (2007). I don't remember the plots or characters, but the reading experiences left a positive residue. Odd Thomas (2003), on the other hand, remains indelibly perfect and completely memorable.

As I read these Koontz novels, Shadowfires cast its shadow: unfinished business.

*     *     *

Thanks to Covid, I have been unemployed since 3 March 2020, and reading daily.

The prospect of a start date at a new job began sharpening my priorities two weeks ago. Hence my desire to finish unfinished business: Klein's The Ceremonies and Koontz's Shadowfires.

*     *     *

Shadowfires is very much a novel of its time.

Whatever historical shortcomings and dishonesties Koontz may present about his characters and their backgrounds, it is a novel emerging from political tumult of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and the Vietnam Syndrome curbing Washington's war moves in the Carter-Reagan interregnum.

Characters

Eric Leben: entrepreneur and geneticist. A man who went "too far."

Rachael Leben: his ex-wife. Hunted by the genetically evolving Eric, whose last human thought is to destroy her.

Ben Shadway: Realtor, Rachael's boyfriend. Also: three-time volunteer for Vietnam, a man with "a certain set of skills."

Detectives Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom: Good cop and Good cop: coping with collateral carnage created by Eric Leben, sticking to the case even when ordered not to.

Anson Sharp: all-around creep and human villain: an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency leveraging his position to carry out a personal vendetta against old nemesis Ben Shadway.

Jerry Peake: Sharp's lieutenant, a lover of Dashiell Hammett and Agatha Christie, who thwarts Sharp and finds a way to be the hero.

*     *     *

Dean Koontz has been hard at it every day for over fifty years.  He is a tireless worker accused of being a hack, accused of retreading ideas and effects better craftsmen inaugurated. 

He puts his heart and his beliefs on his sleeve, a rare trait any today. His horizon is that of bourgeois right. He quotes with approval Reinhold Niebuhr: "Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility."

S.T. Joshi sums up his prosecutor's case  against Koontz by noting his "popularity among the herd." (A conclusion which says more about Joshi and his view of we genre readers than about Koontz).

I have been trying to arrange out of my Koontz reading notes a succinct descriptive definition the Koontz oeuvre. In an afterword to a reissue of his 1993 thriller Mr. Murder, tongue firmly in cheek, Koontz writes:

....The biggest idea I was ever offered came at a cocktail party where a gentleman stipulated that he wanted only "a reasonable commission," and then announced, "I've got a whole new genre of fiction that'll make you the richest guy in publishing." I always explain that I can put in the long hours and the hard work to write a novel only when I'm passionate about a story and that I'm only passionate about stories that arise in my own—admittedly strange— head. This gentleman, like every other bearer of big ideas, ignored me and then gave me the shortest pitch I'd ever received, describing his new genre in seven words: "Tom Clancy without all the military stuff." That was it. He had no more....

I reflected on this donnée. I have read Clancy's thrillers since 1986, and I have to state that Clancy is simply Koontz with a lot of military hardware and ideological bullshit added. 

Koontz preceded Clancy; both are passionately curious about tech and its repercussions. The only difference is that Clancy is delighted to serve as a defense industry glove-puppet; Koontz revels in creating tech-based domestic nightmare melodramas.

Unlike Clancy, Koontz always hits his target. 

*     *     *

Jay

19 July 2020

House of souls on the planet of the apes.

'I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?

The White People

***

Planet of the Apes
Pierre Boulle


Scientists perform brain experiments on human women. Unsettling ancestral memories emerge.

Hardly Machen, I know, but the male tinkering with women's "doors of perception" is a common and uncanny element.

Jay

7 April 2019

***

CHAPTERTHIRTY-FOUR

I entered the room and at first could see nothing to justify this air of mystery. The equipment was the same as in the previous room: generators, transformers, electrodes. There were only two subjects, a man and a woman, lying strapped down on two parallel divans. As soon as we arrived they started observing us with a strange intensity.

The gorilla assistant welcomed us with an inarticulate grunt. Helius and he exchanged a few words in deaf-mute language. It was a far from commonplace experience to see a gorilla and a chimpanzee moving then" fingers like this. I do not know why, but it seemed to me the height of absurdity and I almost burst out laughing.

"All is well. They are quite calm. We can begin a test right away."

"What sort of test?" I implored.

"I'd rather keep it as a surprise for you," Cornelius grinned.

The gorilla anesthetized the two patients, who presently fell asleep, and started up various machines. Helius went up to the man, carefully unrolled the bandage that covered his skull, and, aiming at a certain spot, applied the electrodes. The man remained absolutely still. I was questioning Cornelius with my eyes when the miracle happened.

The man began to talk. His voice echoed around the room with an abruptness that made me start, rising above the buzz of the generator. It was not an hallucination on my part. He was expressing himself in simian language, with the voice of a man from Earth or that of an ape on this planet.

The faces of the two scientists were a study in triumph. They looked at me with a mischievous glint in their eyes and reveled in my stupefaction. I was about to utter an exclamation, but they motioned me to keep quiet and listen. The man's words were incoherent and devoid of originality. He must have been captive in the institute for a longtime and kept repeating snatches of sentences he had heard spoken by the nurses or the scientists. Cornelius presently put a stop to the experiment.

"We'll get nothing more out of this chap. But the main point is, he talks."

"It's amazing," I stammered.

"You haven't seen anything yet," said Helius. "He talks like a parrot or a gramophone. But I've done much better with her."

He indicated the woman, who was sleeping peacefully.

"Much better?"

"A thousand times better," said Cornelius, who showed the same excitement as his colleague. "Just listen. This woman also talks, as you'll soon hear. But she doesn't merely repeat the words she has heard hi captivity. Her talk has an exceptional significance. By a combination of physico-chemical processes, of which I shall spare you the details, this genius Helius has succeeded hi awakening hi her not only her own individual memory but the memory of the species. Under electrical impulse her recollections go back to an extremely distant line of ancestors: atavistic memories reviving a past several thousands of years old. Do you realize what that means, Ulysse?"

I was so amazed by this extravagant claim that for a moment I really believed the learned Cornelius had gone mad; for madness exists among the apes, particularly among the intellectuals. But the other chimpanzee was already handling his electrodes and applying them to the woman's brain. The latter remained inert for some time, just like the man, then she heaved a deep sigh and started talking. She likewise expressed herself in simian language in a rather low but extremely distinct voice that changed from time to time, as though it belonged to a number of different persons. Every sentence she uttered has remained engraved on my memory.

"For some time," said the voice in a slightly anxious tone, "these apes, all these apes, have been ceaselessly multiplying, although it looked as though then" species was bound to die out at a certain period. If this goes on, they will almost outnumber us . . : and that's not all. They are becoming arrogant. They look us straight in the eye. We have been wrong to tame them and to grant those whom we use as servants a certain amount of liberty. They are the most insolent of all. One day I was jostled hi the street by a chimpanzee. As I raised my hand, he looked at me in such a menacing manner that I did not dare strike him.

"Anna, who works at the laboratory, tells me there have been a great many changes there as well. She dares not enter the cages alone any more. She says that at night a sort of whispering and chuckling can be heard. One of the gorillas makes fun of the boss behind his back and imitates his nervous tics."

The woman paused, heaved several anguished sighs, then went on:

"It's happened! One of them has succeeded in talking. It's certain; I read about it in Woman's Journal. There's a photograph of him, too. He's a chimpanzee."

"A chimpanzee, the first! Just as I thought," Cornelius exclaimed.

"There are several others. The papers report fresh cases every day. Certain biologists regard this as a great scientific success. Don't they realize where it may lead? It appears that one of these chimpanzees has uttered some ugly threats. The first use they make of speech is to protest when they are given an order."

The woman fell silent again and resumed in a different voice, a somewhat pedantic man's voice:

"What is happening could have been foreseen. A cerebral laziness has taken hold of us. No more books; even detective novels have now become too great an intellectual effort. No more games; at the most a hand or two of cards. Even the childish motion picture does not tempt us any more. Meanwhile the apes are meditating in silence. Their brain is developing in solitary reflection . . . and they are talking. Oh! not very much, and to us hardly at all, apart from a few words of scornful refusal to the more intrepid men who still dare to give them orders. But at night, when wearer not there, they exchange impressions and mutually instruct one another."

After a long silence a woman's voice continued, in anguish:

"I was too frightened. I could not go on living like this. I preferred to hand the place over to my gorila. I left my own house.

"He had been with me for years and was a loyal servant. He started going out in the evening to attend meetings. He learned to talk. He refused to do any work. A month ago he ordered me to do the cooking and washing up. He began to use my plates and knives and forks. Last week he chased me out of my bedroom. I had to sleep in an armchair in the sitting room. Not daring to scold him or punish him, I tried to win him over by kindness. He laughed in my face and his demands increased. I was too miserable. I abdicated.

"I have taken refuge in a camp with other women where they are in the same plight. There are some men here as well; most of them have no more courage than we have. It's a wretched life we lead outside the town. We feel ashamed and scarcely speak to one another. During the first few days I played a few games of patience. I haven't the energy any more."

The woman broke off again and a male voice took over:

"I had found, I believe, a cure for cancer. I wanted to put it to the test, like all my previous discoveries. I was careful, but not careful enough. For some time the apes have been reluctant to lend themselves to these experiments. Before going into Georges', the chimpanzee's, cage I had him held down by my two assistants. I got ready to give him the injection—the cancer-producing one. I had to give it to him in order to be able to cure him. Georges' eyes looked resigned. He did not move, but I saw his crafty eyes glance over my shoulder. I realized too late. The gorillas, the six gorillas I was holding in reserve for the infection, had escaped. A plot. They seized us. Georges directed the operation. He copied my movements exactly. He ordered us to be tied down on the table, and the gorillas promptly obeyed him. Then he picked up the hypodermic and injected all three of us with the deadly liquid. So now I have cancer. It's certain, for though there may be doubt as to the efficacy of the cure, the fatal serum has long since been tested and proved effective.

"After emptying the hypodermic, Georges gave me a friendly pat on the cheek, as I often did to my apes. I had always treated them well. From me they received more caresses man blows. A few days later, in the cage in which they had locked me up, I recognized the first symptoms of the disease. So had Georges, and I heard him tell the others that he was going to begin the cure. This gave me a new fright. What if it killed me off more quickly! I know I am condemned, but now I lack confidence in this new cure. During the night I succeeded hi forcing the bars of my cage and escaping. I have taken refuge in the camp outside the town. I have two months to live. I am spending them playing patience and dozing."

Another feminine voice succeeded his:

"I was a lady animal tamer. I used to do an act with a dozen orangutans, magnificent beasts. Today I'm inside the cage instead of them, together with some other circus performers.

'To give them their due, the apes treat us well and give us plenty to eat. They change the straw of our bedding when it becomes too dirty. They are not unkind; they punish only those of us who show reluctance and refuse to perform the tricks they have taken it into their heads to teach us. These are extremely advanced! I walk on all fours; I turn somersaults. So they are very good tome. I'm not unhappy. I have no more worries or responsibilities. Most of us are adapting ourselves to this regime."

This time the woman fell silent for a long time, during which Cornelius gazed at me with embarrassing insistence. I could read his thoughts only too well. Had it not been high time for such a feeble race of men, who gave in so easily, to make way for a nobler breed? I grew flushed and looked away. The woman continued in a more and more anguished tone:

"They now hold the whole town. There are only a few hundred of us left in this redoubt and our situation is precarious. We form the last human nucleus in the vicinity of the city, but the apes will not tolerate us at liberty so close to them. In the other camps some of the men have fled far off, into the jungle; the others have surrendered in order to get something to relieve their hunger. Here we have stayed put, mainly from laziness. We sleep; we are incapable of organizing ourselves for resistance. . . .

"This is what I feared. I can hear a barbaric din, something like a parody of a military band. . . . Help! It's them, it's the apes! They are surrounding us. They are led by enormous gorillas. They have taken our bugles, our drums and uniforms, our weapons, too, of course. . . . No, they haven't any weapons. Oh, what bitter humiliation, the final insult! Their army is upon us and all they are carrying are whips!"