Planet of the Apes Omnibus 3 by Titan Books

Author:Titan Books
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

JOURNEY INTO

TERROR

“The Legacy”

based on the teleplay by Robert Hamner

“The Horse Race”

based on the teleplay by David P. Lewis and Booker

Bradshaw

Based on characters from Planet of the Apes

For Carol Antosiak, a supplementary Muse.

THE LEGACY

1

Two human beings and a large chimpanzee moved slowly across the wilderness. The two human beings had once been astronauts. They had been, and still were, close friends. Their names were Pete Burke, a tall, lanky, dark-haired man, and Alan Virdon, who was more muscular, blond, and possessed of a drive and a will that motivated even his companions. The chimpanzee, whose name was Galen, followed the humans in a kind of hunched-over scuttle. He was better dressed—for the times—than the men, and, considering the times, he spoke the language better.

These were strange times.

Men had lost control of their world, and intelligent apes had taken their place. There were orangutans, the administrators; chimpanzees, the thinkers and doers; and gorillas, the brutish soldiers. Humans rated a mention in this list only by default of other types of ape, and by the fact that they were economically essential to the continued prosperity of the ape world. Humans were slaves, servants, or indigent village farmers. Every aspect of their lives was overseen by an ape in authority. There was no such thing as freedom for a human, nothing like dignity, either. That was why it was so odd that Burke, Virdon, and the chimpanzee Galen had become close allies. It was a thing that had never before happened in the ape world. It was a thing that would mean their deaths if they were ever recaptured by the gorillas.

They fled across miles of unmapped wasteland. Ancient human cities were forbidden to the apes; humans went there sometimes, to avoid the constant scrutiny of their masters. But the humans who lived in the forbidden areas led a harsher existence than their fellows who remained slaves. These city dwellers were the ones who could truly define the price of liberty, such as it was.

Burke and Virdon had crash-landed back on Earth some two thousand years after their takeoff on an interstellar mission. The Earth they found had nothing in common with the one they had left; their families, their friends, even their society, had all been dead for twenty centuries. Galen, a renegade ape who was guilty of thinking too much, had joined them, and the three fugitives had fashioned an interdependent life together. Each had things to learn and teach; this they did, but their primary concern was just staying alive. This they had done, also, but as for tomorrow…

The countryside they were crossing looked like much of the landscape they had seen in the many months of their adventures. They knew that they were in what had been North America, for occasionally a landmark was unmistakable. But the ape civilization centered in North America, and the two millennia that had passed, had effectively erased any vestige of their old lives. Galen listened with amazement and his eager scientific curiosity when Burke and Virdon described the land as they had known it.

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