Ordinarily, I wouldn't respond to a discussion on one Yahoo site with posts on a different one, but because I don't trust the old group not to censor me -- the reason I no longer post there -- I'm gonna talk about a thread they delved into [around #66918, give or take].

In post #66918, James responds to Rory in regards to the notion that Cornelius and/or Zira were or weren't lying concerning the details they gave to Hasslein, E-1 and E-2 during their interrogation at Camp XI. James tells Rory, "I agree with you that I don't believe that C&Z were lying. They were being completely truthful in relating the facts as they knew them."

Which leads me to ask a pertinent question: If Zira is willing to deceive her own husband, why would she be 'above' deceiving Hasslein?

Let's remember, folks: Zira switched her male baby [Baby Milo, later renamed "Caesar"] with Heloise's female baby [Salome]. After Lewis and Stevie dropped Cornelius & Zira (carrying Salome) off near the oil rigs, the Apes headed through those oil fields towards the derelict ship area. While Cornelius walks on ahead, Zira pauses and purposely leaves her "carpet bag" behind -- the one in which her dress from Giorgio's is stuffed. Does Cornelius know that she's leaving behind a tell-tale "bread crumb" that will lead Hasslein directly to them?

Later, when they're on the derelict ship, Zira -- speaking of the female chimp, Salome, who is not their offspring -- tells Cornelius, "He wants feeding." HE wants feeding. HE. Zira is pretending that the child swaddled in her arms is their son, and Cornelius doesn't say "boo." Either Cornelius believes that the kid is their son, or he knows it isn't and is silently 'humo ring' Zira.

Why does Zira leave the carpet bag at the oil rig? Why does she refer to the baby as a "he"... when the only other person there is her very own husband?

Because Zira's prime concern is the long term safety of their son, whom she has left behind with Armando -- the only human being (other than Lewis and Stevie) whom she trusts.

She knows that Hasslein (et al.) will ultimately find them -- and kill them, eventually. But before they are killed, they just might be subjected to more interrogation -- including the use of sodium pentothal, the drug that got Zira to spill all the beans. Zira knows that unless both she and Cornelius are killed -- along with the baby they had with them at the derelict ship -- they run the risk of being compelled by drug-induced interrogations to revealing not only that they were illi citly aided by Lewis and Stevie, but also by Armando, and that their real baby was switched with his circus chimp's baby.

So, Zira -- being the smart person she is -- knows that the only chance that Baby Milo has to grow to adulthood, and not be murdered by Hasslein or his underlings, is for those antagonists to mistakenly think they've solved their problem... to think that they've successfully killed Cornelius and Zira and their baby.

That means that Zira purposely led Hasslein to their 'hide-out' on the ship, by leaving the carpet bag at the oil rig. That she intended for Hasslein to murder her husband, to murder her, and to murder the changeling baby -- falsely believing it to be hers.

Zira lies to Cornelius when she refers to that baby as a "he" because she doesn't want him to be captured alive b y Hasslein and then interrogated with sodium pentothal into revealing that the wrong baby is either dead or in custody -- and if she was willing, for a compellingly good reason, to lie to her beloved husband Cornelius... why the hell wouldn't she be willing to lie to those who are a threat to them and their baby?

Cornelius lied to the Presidential Commission when -- after having been asked if he knew Colonel Taylor -- he answered, "No... is he a soldier?"

Liar! But he lied for a good reason. Zira, who didn't want to lie -- and who didn't want to have to lie -- wanted to be honest with someone... and the only ones she felt she could be totally honest with were Lewis and Stevie, probably because they remind her of herself and Cornelius. 

After lying about Taylor to the Commission, and having "sinned by omission" by not telling them abou t having witnessed the destruction of the planet Earth, and about how the Apes of their time treated Humans, they then inform Lewis and Stevie of these matters. 

Why didn't they tell the Commission about the Earth being destroyed? Zira says, "Nobody asked" about it! As if they're supposed to know to ask them if they just happened, while up in space, to have seen the planet destroyed. Ludicrous! And insulting to them. It's no wonder that their interrogators went out of their way to be hostile in their questioning.

Zira was pregnant when E-1 and E-2 were slinging questions at them. She knows she's nearing her baby's birthing time. She cares about its future, doesn't she? Of course she does! And so, too, does Cornelius. I say that both Zira and Cornelius were most intent on telling Hasslein what they wanted him to know... what they wanted him to believe .

They wanted Hasslein to believe that the Human Race would have the tables turned on them after a lengthy period of time when humans had lorded it over enslaved Apes. They wanted Hasslein to believe that Mankind would not have to worry about this happening anytime soon, since a fearful Mankind might very well try to alter that future by committing genocide against the Apes right then-and-there.

So they LIE to them, telling them that after the mysterious Plague killed off all the Dogs and Cats, those pets were replaced with Apes. The Apes were pets for "two centuries"... before Mankind turned them into Slaves. And, after "three more centuries" those enslaved Apes "turned the tables" on Mankind, following the appearance of an ape named ALDO who was the first ape to articulate, to say "No!"

By suggesting that Mankind will exist a s a Master Race for at least another 500 years, Cornelius and Zira effectively instill within the minds of Hasslein (and E-1 and E-2) a false hope... if they believe it, that is.

Cornelius must have been hoping that Hasslein had forgotten the earlier testimony before the Commission, in which he had stated that the "English" language had been the language of his people "for two thousand years, roughly." Hasslein, later knowing that the Earth-Time date of Earth's destruction was in the year 3955, would have been able to do the simple math... subtracting "roughly" 2,000 years from A.D. 3955 puts you smack dab in the late 20th Century... meaning that there might very well be talking apes in existence on Earth at that very moment in 1973. 

And Hasslein would've been right, since Mandemus -- portrayed as an "old" orangutan -- < i>had to have been older than Caesar... meaning that somehow the "evolved apes" had been introduced already, before 1973.

When Cornelius told the Commission about the 2,000-year use of the English language by his people, he had no idea that the NASA scientists would be able to discover the 3955 date. How could Cornelius know that the telemetry had been encoded on the ship's "flight synthesizer"? Chances are Cornelius didn't even know the ship had such a gizmo on it! I suspect that at some point, before any NASA scientists had a chance to look inside the cockpit, the power supply had run out completely -- erasing the information that had been displayed on the EARTH-TIME and SHIP-TIME clocks.

At no time during the Commission hearing did either Cornelius or Zira tell them about the dates they saw on the dual clocks -- neither the "3955" date before they made the 'jump' back in Time, nor the "1973" date they saw on the clock after the 'jump'. Zira tells them that "We came from your future"... but she never tells them how far into the future that is -- and neither she nor Cornelius has any way of knowing that that information is accessible by human scientists who will study the ship. They probably hoped that the Commission would believe that the Future date from whence they came is centuries more than the "2,000 years" of English-speaking... but the only reason that revelation becomes a problem is when Zira -- having been gotten drunk on Grape Juice Plus by Hasslein -- unwittingly divulged that the "date meter" read "Thirty-Nine... Fifty... something" after the "bright light and the tornado."

Cornelius didn't count on Zira getting plastered and revealing to Hasslein information that the two of them had only divulged to the two humans they trusted, Lewis and Stevie. Once Zira spilled the beans, their problems started -- although, to be fair, the problem would have arisen anyway once the findings of the NASA scientists' "microscopic scrutiny" of the ship became known. But the Apes had no idea that such findings were even possible. If, after splashing down and running out of power, the ship seemed to be 'dead'... why wouldn't Cornelius and Zira assume that it was effectively dead? That no information could be retrieved regarding the clocks' dates? Wouldn't that be like retrieving memories from a corpse? If 'dead men tell no tales', then doesn't the same maxim apply to dead spaceships?

Cornelius and Zira were privy to certain information about their own world's Past -- and the near-Future of the world they found themselves in. The Sacred Scrolls would not have had any information in it regarding a prior civilization o f intelligent Humans, since their culture's Articles of Faith are based on the teachings and writings of their Lawgiver -- that God created the Ape in His own image, gave him a soul and a mind, set him apart from the beasts of the jungle (i.e. from Man, especially) and made him the lord of the planet. 

Any earlier scriptures that may have existed prior to the writing of those Sacred Scrolls would, of necessity, have been kept hidden from the masses... and the only ones who were likely to be in possession of such documents evidently were intent on keeping them hidden. There's no evidence that Cornelius or Zira had any knowledge of them at any time during either PLANET or BENEATH... but we don't see what happens to them after their last appearance in BENEATH prior to the triggering of the Doomsday Bomb.

Somehow, Cornelius and Zira join Milo at the site where an ANSA spaceship is ready and able to be flown up into orbit and thence backwards through Time. Before they fly that ship up into orbit, they must have somehow gotten access to those "secret scrolls" (as page 55 of the ESCAPE script calls them). Who had those scrolls? My money's on Zaius. If Milo had had such documents, surely he would have clued Cornelius in on them years earlier, given the fact that the latter was an archaeologist/historian... and a fellow chimpanzee. Zaius had the motivation to keep those scrolls secret... until he saw that his former adversaries were now "the guardians of the higher principles of Science during my absence." Zaius had bequeathed to Cornelius and Zira the roles of preservers -- or destroyers -- of their very civilization... "so, think well before you act," he tells them.

I think that before Zaius left Ape City with Ursus and the Army, he made a gift of those "secret scrolls" to Cornelius and Zira... and that the two then learned what those scrolls had to say about how Mankind fell from his former state of "superiority" and how Apes rose. 

And, I think that they fully intended to tell as much of the truth of that hidden history as they possibly could to Hasslein, E-1 and E-2... provided such information didn't backfire against their foremost agenda: ensuring the safety and rise-to-power of their own soon-to-be-born child.

If the scroll from which the BATTLE Lawgiver (A.D. 2670) is one of the "secret scrolls"... if... then Cornelius and Zira would have every reason to believe that the king named "Caesar" was their own son... maybe even the very unborn child Zira was carrying then-and-th ere. That scroll refers to Caesar's "two parent apes, who descended on Earth from Earth's own future"... and, after Cornelius and Zira actually did this, and became aware of it, following Milo's talk with them the night before his death, they would have every reason to believe that they were 'destined' to be "brutally murdered."

"... but the child ape survived..."! That document doesn't seem to say exactly how the child ape -- Caesar -- survived, which left it up to Zira (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Cornelius) to figure out a way to ensure his survival.

And the first thing they would have to do is mislead their enemies, giving them a false sense of security -- pretending that Mankind would enjoy the status of a Master Race at least another 500 years. But, all the while, Cornelius and Zira would know that Man's days w ere numbered in years rather than centuries. If that "secret scroll" actually had a chronicle form -- telling its readers how many years there were between each chronicled event -- then it might very well say that Caesar's parents were murdered in "Year 1" [1973]... that the Plague killed off Man's pets in "Year 11" [1983]... that Caesar freed a city full of Ape slaves in "Year 19" [1991]... that the "vilest war in Man's history" which flattened the cities and turned them into lifeless deserts happened later in "Year 19" [i.e. also in 1991, as my own scenario's chronology now has it]... that General Aldo murdered the son of Caesar and Lisa in "Year 32" [2004]... and that Caesar died around the "Year 98" [i.e. 2070, "six hundred years" before 2670]... etc.

We cannot know exactly what Cornelius and Zira knew regarding the contents of those "secret scrolls"... only what they wanted Hasslein to believe they said. And, when they divulged those details, they had no idea that Hasslein would soon be administering sodium pentothal to Zira, forcing her to give up the Truth, rather than whatever Half-Truths they had been feeding Hasslein.

They are lucky that Hasslein was satisfied with Zira's drug-forced testimony, and didn't also subject Cornelius to such treatment. For, if they had done so, and if they had asked Cornelius whether or not he had been completely truthful regarding the information from those "secret scrolls"... Cornelius might very well have been compelled by the effects of the drug to spill the beans -- to let Hasslein know that Mankind would soon be waging "the vilest war" in human history... a war in which cities would be flattened. That would mean only one thing to Hasslein: Global Thermonuclear War. A world- changing, civilization-destroying event that was slated to occur a mere eighteen years in the future!

"Later we'll do something about nuclear war! We think we have all the time in the world; how much time has the world got?!"

That's a good question... and it's one that he should have asked Cornelius under sodium pentothal-induced grilling. Hasslein makes the mistake of taking Cornelius and Zira at their word for most of what they tell him. It's only that tape recording of Zira saying, "As to humans, I've dissec--... I've examined thousands," that sticks in his craw. He knows she stopped short of admitting to having dissected humans... and, when she tries to fudge her way out of it, even going so far as to pretend she'd had the hiccups -- another of Zira's LIES -- with Cornelius chuckling as if the matter were nothin g to them but some kind of joke... well, it is then that Hasslein calls for Dr. Dixon to shoot her up with Truth Serum and put an end to what he must consider her bullshit.

The whole point of this is Irony. Zira, throughout PLANET and BENEATH and ESCAPE, wishes she could be totally truthful all the time about everything. "I hate deceit," she says. But she lived in a culture where "scientific truth" had been declared HERESY by the Powers-That-Be. In such a society, a truth-seeker had no alternative but to use the Scientific Method as best they could... avoiding running afoul of the authorities, who would expeditiously punish them for having sought out the Truth. 

Cornelius secretly violates Ape Law by exceeding his Travel Permit's orders -- by going into the Forbidden Zone, where travel is < i>never permitted (save by authority figures like Zaius & his gorilla troops, when they hunt after fugitives who had fled there).

Zira takes "Bright Eyes" -- once she learns that he can write! -- to Cornelius' office, where she can show him her amazing specimen, and they both can question him and have him give to them written answers. 

By the way, when Zaius asks Zira why she's brought the Man to Cornelius' office, when humans aren't allowed anywhere outside save in the outdoor Cage/"compound" -- and most certainly without a leash -- Zira LIES to Zaius, pretending that she and Cornelius are conducting a new experiment. She does not tell Zaius that the Man has a name -- "TAYLOR" -- and that he not only can WRITE, but that he has already written down answers to the questions that she and Cornelius had posed to him... as well as questions ["What happened to Landon?"] that they've tried to answer as best they could. By not divulging the truth of what they had been doing in Cornelius' office, those two chimps were being deceptive.

If Zira could/would/did lie to Zaius and Maximus (et al.) when it suited their purpose, then it stands to reason that they would not hesitate to give deceptive answers to those humans who are antagonistic towards them: Hasslein and his CIA interrogators.

The only people they are completely honest with are Lewis and Stevie. They admit to them -- and to them only -- that they, indeed, knew Taylor... that Apes in their time did not love humans... that the gorillas hunted them for sport, and the survivors were used for scientific research and experimentation... and that they saw the End of the World.

How much abo ut the Pet Plague... Apes-as-Pets... Apes-as-Slaves... (etc) did they tell to Lewis and Stevie? Did they tell them that there would be a city-flattening "vilest war" in a mere 18 years' time? 

Somehow, Caesar was able to rant (at the end of CONQUEST) about how Man's cities would lie "buried under radioactive rubble"... "where the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland"... The only persons who could possibly have informed him of this are Armando -- who, until he brought him to Breck's city, was the only human being who knew that Caesar even existed -- or Lewis & Stevie, who (just possibly) might have been able to communicate with Caesar via telephone... if, that is, Caesar had been able to call up Dr. Dixon on a phone from Breck's city during his stint as Breck's slave. 

If, then, Cornelius and Zira had informed Lewis and Stevie (during their final car ride together) about the upcoming events that had been chronicled in the "secret scrolls"... including the notion that the "cities of the world" would be flattened... then Lewis and Stevie could begin to prepare for that End. Armando would have undoubtedly told Caesar about the only other two humans who had befriended his parents; thus, when Caesar begins planning the Ape Revolt, wouldn't it be possible -- even probable -- that he would seek to contact them, so as to elicit their aid? 

Imagine Lewis answering the telephone one day in May of 1991... and hearing a voice on the other end of the line telling him, "My name is Caesar... but the name my mother chose for me was 'Milo'... and my foster-father, Armando, has just died -- forced to give his life in order to keep my secret..."

If Lewis knows -- from C&Z -- about how the Future is supposed to unfold, due to the "secret scrolls"... if he knew there would be the Plague in 1983... Apes taken in as replacement Pets in 1986... Apes turned into Slaves in 1988... and an Ape Revolt led by an ape named "Caesar" in 1991 -- an ape who, as king in the aftermath of the War, would rule over Apes and Humans living in friendship... would he not do what he could to assist him?

After all, the triggering of a Global Thermonuclear War is out of Caesar's hands. The ones who will be guilty of that atrocity would be the leaders of the nations who wage the war, the ones who have the Bombs, the "buttons" to push that will trigger the war, and their very fingers on the buttons.

But that's beside the point. The crux of the matter, though, is that there's no hope for any kind of future without the empowerment of the son of the "pa rent apes" who came from Earth's own future. And the empowerment of King Caesar hinges on his initial survival as "Baby Milo who has Washington terrified."

His very survival necessitates that Zira and Cornelius do whatever they can -- even if that means telling some Truths... some Half-Truths... and some bald-face LIES, to Hasslein and his ilk.

And if Zira can deceive Cornelius ["He needs feeding..."] in order to safeguard their son -- whom she knows is in Heloise's hands and under Armando's care -- then why in bloody blazes is it that some obstinate POTA fans insist that Cornelius and Zira "were being completely truthful in relating the facts as they knew them" and that "they weren't lying"?

Zira is a person who is forced by circumstances to do what she hates to do, just as Zaius is willing to falsify evidence "with no pleasure" -- when it serves an agenda he agrees with, which he sees as saving the Future. Zira hates deceit... but, time after time, she's forced to be deceptive. Remember how she tries to save Brent and Nova, who are being sent off for target practice? At the last moment, she tells the gorilla wagon-driver to "Wait! Wait!... I'd better double-lock the door."

And then she unlocks it... ensuring that Brent and Nova will have a chance to survive, to go and find Taylor. Even though that survival will almost assuredly result in the gorilla being hurt -- perhaps even killed -- by a desperate Brent.

Zira, when forced by necessity, can and does practice deception. And that's a good thing! When the Allies fought the Axis powers, all sorts of deceptive stra tegies were used, to excellent effect. Hitler was fooled into thinking that the Allies would invade Europe at Calais... which prevented him from assigning more troops to Normandy, making D-Day a success despite all the loss of life. Believing their Enigma code to be unbreakable, the Nazis were fed all sorts of disinformation by the geniuses at Bletchley Park. Deception, when used by the Good Guys against the Evil Villains, is a good thing.

Patrick Michael Tilton

EARTH-TIME 11-20-2011