The Ape Man's Brother Read Free Page A

world. He had made an aerial expedition all the way from New York City, based on old records written by an Italian sailing captain and navigator who claimed to have found a large island, possibly a continent, rising out of the ocean. It was thought for centuries to be a myth, or an incorrect sighting of some known land, but Dr. Rice had taken it seriously and flown over our world by zeppelin, feeling sure that through the mist he had seen a flash of green, lush land. He told his colleagues, The Big Guy’s parents, and they thought they could follow Dr. Rice’s navigational information, fly out of Greenland, but the navigational charts were off, or they misread them. It was a longer trip than they expected. Even though they wouldn’t have had enough fuel to return, they made it to our world, had seen the ruins of our civilization, and were most likely looking for some place to land when the accident happened that turned them from archeologist to well-done with no sides.
    I learned all this later, of course. Dr. Rice’s guilty feelings about his report leading to The Big Guy’s parents trying to come to our world and losing their lives, led to his coming back on a possible rescue expedition, something it took him years to finance. He had hopes they and their baby son might have survived, some nineteen years later by the way they calculated time.
    But, there we were, me and The Big Guy, The Woman having caught us in their pans. She was mad, surprised, and there was sweat on her forehead, her hair coming loose from being tied back, falling on her cheeks and neck, one leg bent forward, the back leg ready for another kick.
    The Big Guy, the most powerful being I have ever seen, was on the ground holding his melons like he was testing them to see how ripe they were. Me, I’m just standing there grinning. My race is like that. We grin. It may look friendly, and sometimes it is, but it’s a grin that can mean a lot of different things. From, how about you and me go over in the bushes, to I’m about to bite your face off, or how about we share that dead snake. Even we have trouble sorting out meanings from time to time, and mistakes are sometimes made.
    So, there we stood.
    That’s when one of the men, a tall, flame-headed one, came running up, pointing one of those clubs at me. I’m thinking he can’t do much business with it, the way he’s holding it, part of it tucked against his shoulder and all. And then The Woman hits the end of it and the club goes up and barks, and fire comes out of the tip of it, and something rattles off in the bushes, like a rock has been thrown, and an suspecting monkey falls dead out of a tree without so much as a squeak.
    I shit all over the place. It’s not an unnatural reaction to fear, I might add. It’s just I didn’t know it was unseemly or might even be thought of as cowardly by those of your race, so I just let it fly. There’s a comfort in it, and I want to add promptly that though I had this problem for quite some time, and the chimpanzee that played me in the movies certainly had some similarities, I was quickly civilized on the matter. I know. I’ve brought this up before, but I’m bothered by it, and I want people to know I’ve moved on from my primitive state, and though I’m a little embarrassed by the subject, I feel it is only fair that I trudge ahead and be honest and stress my developmental growth.
    Next thing I knew, The Big Guy was up, and stirring. He could always recover from something bad quicker than anyone I have ever known. He grabbed that banging club and jerked it out of that man’s hands and hit him in the head with it, knocked him down. Then he held it by what I now know to be the stock of the rifle, and grabbed the barrel, and he bent that barrel like it was a green vine. Bent it and tossed it into the greenery. Damn if he didn’t bang another monkey. It fell out of the undergrowth and into the moonlight and thrashed around on the ground, then sort of