Weak though he was, Caesar was possessed of an almost maniacal determination. He hurled the guard to the landing under the force of his leap, twisted the truncheon from the man’s hand, bashed him three times across the curve of his forehead.

Bone cracked. The man’s brief yell faded instantly.

Caesar struck the man perhaps a dozen more times—long after he was dead. Then he flung the gory truncheon away and hurried on down the concrete stairwell.

He hoped no one had heard the guard’s outcry. Caesar wanted to do as much damage as possible in the time left to him—and he wanted to stretch that time to the maximum. There were only two possible outcomes. He would live and succeed. Or they would destroy him. He would permit no third choice.

Peering through the crack between the service door and the jamb, Caesar saw rows of cages flanking a hall. This should be G-West. He slipped into the hall, looked into the first cage. The penned gorillas reacted by rushing to the bars, grunting and squealing.

Caesar’s commanding gaze and one low bark quieted them. He repeated this at each cage he passed. But even his authority could not silence the gorillas completely. The right knee of Caesar’s green trousers showed a drying bloodstain; the guard’s blood. Perhaps the apes smelled the blood—and something more—for they massed restlessly at the bars of every cage as he raced along the corridor toward the reception area.

The reception area looked deserted except for a white-smocked figure seated at the console. A woman, judging from the hairdo.

The woman rose abruptly, her monitors showing activity in the gorilla cages. Then she heard Caesar coming. She whirled around. He recognized the lantern-jawed Miss Dyke.

She wasted no time slapping the console switch, bending to a mike. “This is training reception. We’ve got some kind of disturbance. An ape on the loo—”

With a vengeful growl, Caesar was on her from behind, slinging her aside as he leaped to the console and reversed a switch, silencing a voice demanding to know what the disturbance was.

Breathing heavily, Caesar threw Miss Dyke’s chair out of the way and began hitting push-buttons on her console. Cage doors along corridor G-West sprang open. Gorillas surged into the hallway, yipping, snarling. Caesar opened every cell on the floor.

Just as he touched the last one, he heard a familiar voice exclaim from O-East: “Miss Dyke, who opened the cage doors?”

Caesar turned, saw a bushy-haired young man racing toward the reception area only steps ahead of maddened gorillas. With dismay, Caesar stared at Morris—who in turn gaped at the bloodied chimpanzee crouching over the console.

“Morris, get out!” Caesar cried.

The young man turned white, realizing Caesar had spoken human language. Caesar did not have time for another warning. Apes pounced on Morris from behind, clawing and pummeling.

Gorillas and chimpanzees from the other corridors crowded into the reception area. Mercifully, Caesar could not see exactly what happened as Morris went down beneath a howling, biting, tearing pack of apes.

The regret in Caesar’s eyes did not linger long. He signaled a group of apes to follow him toward the elevators. At any moment he expected alarms to begin ringing. And much remained to be done.

He was sorry about Morris’s violent death. Morris was one of the few kind ones. He glanced back, saw the apes hurl the broken body against the wall like a toy. The casualties of war, he thought, and darted inside an elevator with his simian comrades. He thumbed the control to start the car down to the communications center.

On the small paved quadrangle devoted to Night Watch Training, the handler and the trainer were having difficulty with a quartet of male orangutans.

Prodding and sharp commands did little to stir the animals to cooperation. The trainer couldn’t get even one to leave the huddled group and begin the lesson. Under the floodlights, the trainer’s face was strained.

“What the hell’s wrong with them tonight?”

Before the handler could answer, headlights swept across the face of the training building. Three limousines were departing toward the city via one of the service roads.

“Damned if I know,” the handler replied, at last. He gestured to the vanishing vehicles. “But the governor’s been inside for the past hour. That’s his party leaving now. Something big must be going on.”

With an uneasy look at the orangutans, the trainer muttered, “You’d almost think they know—”

He started to loop his silver whistle over the head of the nearest orangutan. The ape knocked the whistle from the trainer’s hand and glared.

The elevator door opened. Caesar and his apes rushed into the reception area, some leaping to overcome the startled guards on duty at the fingerprinting barrier, others following Caesar toward the door that led to the communications center beyond.

A guard at the barrier went down under the ape onslaught. One of the operators on duty beyond the glass saw the sudden carnage and leaped to trigger a locking mechanism that bolted the door from inside.

Frustrated, Caesar let go of the handle and glanced around. He signaled two of the apes. They helped him pick up the fingerprinting table, hurl it against the glass. Inside the communications center, a woman screamed and fainted as Caesar clambered through the sawtoothed opening.

Other apes followed, blood-maddened and less careful about the glass. They landed on the floor with slashed feet, their anger that much greater. They fell on the hysterical men and women manning the center, snarling, battering them down . . .

Caesar scanned the banks of lighted equipment. He freed one man from the grip of two chimpanzees, twisted the front of the man’s smock.

“Can you open all the cages from down here?”

The man’s mouth went slack. “Good God! a talking—”

“I said can you open all the cages from down here?”

“Only—only about half of them,” the helpless man gasped.

“Then do it—or you’re dead.”

He released the man, gestured for the gibbering apes to stand back. The man reeled to one of the equipment boards and began throwing switches. Behind him, Caesar’s mouth curled up at the corners. He waved the eager apes forward.

The man swung around, realizing the betrayal. “You—!” The single syllable of accusation became a scream as a mass of hairy bodies swarmed on top of him. The grunts and exclamations of the apes soon muffled his screams.

A siren began to howl, joined by a klaxon. Caesar ran to the dock side of the room, looked through the glass at more apes struggling with handlers. The sirens and klaxons multiplied, adding to the din of animal voices, triumphant in their fury.

With the sirens, Caesar’s brief advantage of surprise was gone. Now the war would begin in earnest.

One of the operators in Fire Conditioning heard a click. It sounded as if the door of the cage-wall bisecting the room had unlocked. He ran forward to check, pulled—and to his horror, the door opened.

Three female chimpanzees grouped at the rear lunged forward en masse. They bore the operator to the floor on the human side of the bars as the second operator fled.

Eyes glinting, one of the chimps yipped commands. The others hoisted the dazed operator between them while the first chimp surveyed the console. Finally, she poked a control.

With a whoosh-and-roar, the horizontal column of fire jetted from the wall aperture. The chimp at the console signaled, and the other two pitched the writhing attendant directly into the blast of flame. Howling, he hit the floor, all his clothing afire. His hair blazed as he rolled, trying to extinguish the flames devouring him. The bright-eyed chimp at the console continued to scrutinize it, one finger still pressed down to maintain the roaring jet.