“Skeletons,” he says. “Not one, but a whole collection, discovered in such order and circumstances as to make it incontestably clear that we had come upon a graveyard. Enough evidence to convince the most obtuse mind. Our orangutans, of course, insist on regarding it as a mere coincidence.”
“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.
This was not calculated to appease my human sensibility. I remembered that Zira had tried to dissuade me from visiting this section, where she herself came only when she had to. I felt like turning around and retracing my steps; but Helius did not give me time to do so.
“If you would like to attend an operation, you will see for yourself that the patient suffers no pain at all. No? Well, let’s go and see the results then.
Passing by the closed cell from which the smell emanated, he led me toward the cages. In the first I saw a young man of fairly handsome appearance but extreme emaciation. He was propped up on a litter. In front of him, almost under his nose,
stood a bowl containing a mash of sweetened cereals to which all the men were partial. He was gazing at it in bewilderment without making the slightest gesture.
“You see,” said the director. “This boy is famished, he has not eaten for twenty-four hours. Yet he does not react when confronted with his favorite food. This is the result of partial ablation of the frontal brain, which was performed on him some months ago. Since then he has been continuously in this state and has to be fed by force. You can see how thin he is.
He signaled to a nurse, who went into the cage and plunged the young man’s face into the basin. The latter then began lapping up the mash.
“A fairly commonplace case. Here are some more interesting ones. On each of these subjects we’ve performed an operation affecting various areas of the cerebral tissue.”
We walked past a series of cages occupied by men and women of all ages. At the door of each of these was a panel specifying the operation performed, with a wealth of technical details.
“Some of these areas are related to the natural reflexes; others to the acquired reflexes. This one, for instance—”
This one, according to the case history, had had a whole zone of the occipital area removed. He could no longer distinguish the distance or shape of objects, a disability he manifested by a series of disorganized gestures whenever a nurse approached him. He was incapable of avoiding a stick placed in his path. On the other hand, a piece of fruit held out to him inspired him with alarm and he tried to draw away from it in terror. He could not grasp the bars of his cage and made grotesque attempts to do so, closing his fingers on empty air.
“This other one here,” said the director with a wink, “was once a remarkable subject. We had succeeded in training him to an astonishing degree. He answered to his name and, to a certain extent, obeyed simple orders. He had solved fairly complicated problems and learned how to use rudimentary tools. Today he has forgotten all his education. He does not know his name. He cannot perform the slightest trick. He has become the stupidest of all our men—as a result of a particularly difficult operation: extraction of the temporal lobules.”
With my stomach heaving at this succession of horrors accompanied by comments from a grinning chimpanzee, I saw men partially or totally paralyzed, others artificially deprived of sight. I saw a young mother whose maternal instinct—once highly developed, so Helius assured me—had completely disappeared after interference with the cervical cortex. She kept pushing away her young child whenever it attempted to approach her. This was too much for me. I thought of Nova, of her impending motherhood, and clenched my fists with rage. Luckily Helius showed me into another room, which gave me time to recover my composure.
“Here,” he said with a mysterious ah”, “we indulge in more delicate research. It’s no longer the scalpel that is brought to bear, it’s a far more subtle medium—electrical stimulation of certain spots of the brain. We have brought off some remarkable experiments. Do you practice this sort of thing on Earth?”
“Yes, on apes!” I retorted in fury.
The chimpanzee kept his temper and smiled.
“Of course. However, I don’t think you could ever have obtained such perfect results as ours, comparable to those that Dr. Cornelius wishes to show you himself. Meanwhile let’s continue with our rounds of the commonplace cases.”
He again led me up to some cages where nurses were in the process of operating. The subjects here were stretched out on a sort of table. An incision in the skull laid bare a certain area of the brain. One ape was applying the electrodes wfiile another was attending to the anesthetic.
“You will note that here, too, we put the subjects to sleep: a mild anesthetic, otherwise the results would be falsified, but the patient feels no pain.”
Depending on the point at which the electrodes were applied, the subject made various movements, usually affecting only one side of his body. One man jerked his leg up at each electric shock, then stretched it out again as soon as the current was switched off. Another performed the same movement with one arm. In the next case it was the whole shoulder that began twitching spasmodically under the effect of the current. Farther on, with a very young patient, it was the area commanding the jaw muscles that was brought into play. The poor wretch started champing, endlessly champing, with a ghastly grin on his face, while the rest of his adolescent body remained motionless.
“Now look what happens when the duration of the contact is increased,” said Helius. “Here is an experiment carried to its utmost limit.”
The creature on which this treatment was imposed was a lovely young girl who in certain respects reminded me of Nova. Several nurses, male and female apes in white smocks, were buzzing about her naked body. The electrodes were fixed by a she-ape to the young girl’s face. The girl at once started moving the fingers of her left hand. The she-ape kept the current on instead of switching it off after a few seconds, as in the other cases. Then the movements of the fingers became frenzied and gradually the wrist started twitching. A moment later and it was the forearm, then the upper arm and shoulder. The twitching presently spread, on the one hand to the hip, the thigh, and the leg all the way down to the toes, on the other to the muscles of the face. After ten minutes the whole of the wretched girl’s left side was shaken by convulsive spasms, a dreadful sight, growing more and more rapid and more and more violent.
“That’s the phenomenon of extension,” Helius calmly observed. “It’s well known and culminates in a state of convulsions presenting all the symptoms of epilepsy—an extremely strange epilepsy, moreover, affecting only one side of the body.”
“Stop it!”
I had not been able to stifle the cry that rose to my lips. All the apes gave a start and turned toward me with reproving glances. Cornelius, who had just come in, gave me a friendly tap on the shoulder.
“I admit these experiments are rather bloodcurdling when you’re not used to them. But you must bear in mind that thanks to them our medicine and surgery have made enormous progress in the last quarter of a century.”
This argument did not convince me, any more than the memory I had of the same treatment applied to chimpanzees in a laboratory on Earth. Cornelius shrugged his shoulders and dragged me off toward a narrow passage leading to a smaller room.
“Here,” he told me in a solemn tone, “you’re going to see a marvelous achievement, which is absolutely new. Only three of us ever go into this room—Helius, who is personally in charge of this research and who has made such a success of it; myself; and a carefully selected assistant.
He’s a gorilla. He’s dumb. He’s devoted to me body and soul and, what is more, he’s an utter brute. So you see the importance I attach to this work. I’m willing to show it to you because I know you’ll be discreet. It’s in your own interests.”
CHAPTER THIRTY - 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 their 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.
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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 long time 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 in 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 in awakening in 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.