spoiled that for you both.'
'We ain't babies. You ain't our papa.' Ape's voice was a low growl. 'You're only seven and a half years old. I'm fifty-two.'
'You like the Navy.'
'What the hell?' Ape shrugged his heavy shoulders. 'Outside the service, there's nobody to talk to. They don't know, outside guys don't.'
'Your friends are in the Navy.'
Ape looked at Happy, who had his black shoes and white socks off, and was examining his swollen feet. 'What's this Pan talkin' about?'
'That he's human, That he needs friends,' Happy said. 'But the way he told it, so do chimps.'
'I never had a friend,' Pan said. 'Just keepers, and doctors, and people who wanted to use me for experiments.'
Happy sighed and started to put his socks on. 'If that's the way it is, Pan, that is the way it has to be. It's the truth, Ape, and I can't make it out here in these boondocks.'
'And I can't make it without friends,' Pan said.
He let himself down off his knuckles and sat, his short powerful legs crossed under him. He began grooming himself with his fingers. 'I'll tell them I kidnapped you. Like King Kong, on the late late show, a sailor under each arm.'
'You're a kick, Pan,' Happy said, and finished putting his shoes on; and they headed for the highway, Pan occasionally skinning up a tree to take a sight.
Night was closing in when they hit the road; the concrete was hot to Pan's feet, and he walked in the deep ditch, squishing the grassy mud with his toes. The lights of a town glowed ahead of them.
'We don't got penny one of dough,' Ape said. 'Them Feds took it all away.'
'I had forgotten about money,' Pan said. 'I've never been bothered with it in my life.'
Happy said, 'Neither has Ape, two days after pay-call.'
Ape laughed. His Class A uniform was not the shining thing it had been that morning; but somehow he still looked neat; muddy and rumpled, but neat.
'Wait a minute,' Pan said. 'I've found something.'
The something was a long, thin chain, broken off something rusty and filthy.
Pan bent a link open with his powerful fingers, wrapped the chain around his waist and pinched it together again. 'Now I'm a trained ape,' he said. 'Can't you take me in a bar and make some money out of me?'
Happy peered down into the ditch. There was a little daylight left, but the headlights of the traffic shone on him intermittently. He began to laugh. 'Man,' he said. He stopped and corrected himself. Tan, Listen. There's an alarm out for us. A chief, a radioman and a chimpanzee. Maybe I could rip one stripe off and look like a radioman second, but outside of that, how are we going to disguise ourselves?'
'You're wrong, Happy,' Ape said. 'Pan's right Who's going to look for us, makin' a show in a saloon? Pan, anybody asks me, you're one of these here rhesus monkeys.'
'You got them on your brain. Ape,' Happy said.
Ape said, 'Thirty-five years in the Navy, I made every port, shipped with every kind of guys, sailed all the waters. An' then, at my age, I hear there's something I haven't seen. You think it wouldn't be on my mind?'
'You're crazy, both of you,' Happy said. 'But let's go'.
Pan said, 'The big lie. I have read about the big He. We are now going to perpetrate one.'
'The shoulders you musta looked over,' Ape said.
CHAPTER TEN
Communication, n. Act of imparting (esp. news.); intercourse.
The phone was painted a brilliant scarlet. Nowadays a thoughtful telephone company provides-for an extra fee — instruments to blend with any mood, decor or costume, but this mechanism of communication did not look like a creation of the phone company.
For one thing, the scarlet was brushed on and not baked in. For another, a padlock secured the dial to all but the initiated. For another, an armed guard stood over it, day and night, watching through the soundproof glass booth.
The man in the tropical worsted suit entered the booth, unlocked the dial with a key from his pocket, and lifted the phone. He dialed a single number and waited, sweating a little. Outside, the armed guards stood at attention, their flinty eyes regarding him without expression.
He said, 'Reporting, sir.'
Then he listened, and said, 'We don't know, sir. Absolutely no trace. Yes, helicopters, and a regiment of Marines. I thought of trying boy scouts. No? Well, all right. Yes, the two sailors are with him. I have our files in Washington going over their records. It's a possibility they kidnapped him. Or that agents killed the sailors and kidnapped him alone.'
Then he listened some more. It was hot in the glassed-in booth, and that may have been why his face began to take on some of the color of the phone instrument. Or it may have been why the phone was enameled scarlet in the first place — to match.
Finally, he spoke again. 'Yes, sir. Now, one thing has to be decided at your level, sir. I can't take the responsibility. May we shoot on sight?'
And again he listened, and now he leaned against the glass wall. 'Yes, sir,' he said, when he had a chance. 'But I questioned him, and so did my best men, and he is not going to tell us the secret of a super-luminous flight. He isn't going to tell us anything, not because we're us, but because we're men. But if the other side got him, they might get it out of him with torture or truth serums or— Yes, sir.'
For a third time he listened, and listened closely. And then he issued a final 'Yes, sir,' and hung up the phone. He snapped the padlock and tested it. He opened the door of the glass cage.
The guards did not come to attention, because they were already at attention.
He came out of the booth and looked at the nearest guard, standing so rigidly with his rifle and his sidearm and his bayonet. 'He's become a great national asset,' the man said. 'He's going on television for ten thousand dollars a week. The mothers of America seem to demand that their children see him, every seven days.'
The guard did not answer him, because the guard was at attention.
The man said, 'But you know what he is to me? To me he is a goddam — fugitive — ape.'
The guards remained rigid.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Their differences from man are largely correlated with habit.
As is so often the case, the last bar on the edge of town was not the nicest bar; but time — and the FBI — pressed. Happy went in first and cased the joint and came out and reported that nobody in there looked like a security man. 'None of them look like they could get any kind of job at all.'
'They got dough to buy drinks,' Ape said.
'You know, that was rather fun, that party with the girls,' Pan said. 'Do you think, when we get over being penniless—?'
