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his heart more powerfully than anything he could remember.
    So strong had been the emotions of pity and awe in the presence of this monkey, that he had sat down on an outcropping of rock and studied the ape. Equally motionless the ape had regarded him. And thus they had remained for perhaps five minutes in silent contemplation, these two who had once had a common ancestor, and now were separated for ever by aeons of time and evolution.
    Thoughts which never before would have troubled the mind of young Bailey now racketed through his head. One of them was: “Why you and not I?” What cosmic accident had decreed that he, Timothy Bailey, should be sitting clad in the uniform of an officer of His Majesty’s Royal Artillery, a unit dedicated to the long-distance piecemeal dismemberment of his fellow man, looking upon a miserable caricature of himself, instead of vice versa?
    A wisp of his education floated through his stream of consciousness, a recollection that it all had something to do with the thumb; man had been made from monkey by the mobility of his thumb. Tim had looked at his own broad, stubby, capable ones and shuddered slightly.
    He had seen many of the apes before, scampering and mischiefing about the town, but had never paid any close attention to them. Now everything was different; he was O.I.C., Officer in Charge of Apes, and whether the position was nonsensical or useless, the fact was it existed. It was a regimental tradition, it had continuity, and inescapably as of that moment he was it. Now for the first time he was looking into and behind the eyes of one of these creatures and was feeling himself extraordinarily moved by what he saw there.
    What had it been? Disappointment—loneliness—regret—old, old echoes of a past that one could not remember or wholly grasp, but which left one sad and dispirited as when the residue of an unhappy dream remains with one long after waking? Or was it a compendium of all of these?
    Tim had looked into the misery that seemed to lie behind the golden-brown eyes of this monkey and suddenly found himself tormented by a whole host of questions that formulated themselves in his mind. “ You just missed it, didn’t you? Yet you almost made it! Why? Was it your fault? Was it anyone’s fault? Or anyone’s design? Who decreed that you should be monkey and I should be man? You were so very close to it at one time, weren’t you? And then something happened and now you can’t think or reason, or remember or look forward. You sit and scratch and pick bits of dried skin, and eat and fight and eliminate and procreate, and that’s the sum of it. You look like us. You can even get up and walk like us, and that’s as far as it goes.”
    Was this, Tim had wondered, the original Adam ejected from the Garden of Eden and now gazing longingly out of those unhappy eyes at the riches and treasures within that garden for ever denied them?
    As a boy, dogs, cats, birds, mice, had been casual pets, but this was something different again, this silent, unhappy creature who with its fellows had been entrusted to his care. Upon that care would depend whether they would go hungry or fed, be wet or dry when the rains came or the Levanter shrouded the Rock, be healed in sickness or left to suffer, survive or die.
    The Brigadier had sloughed off a job he obviously considered futile and absurd, but in this moment Tim knew that it devolved upon him as to whether these victims of Nature were comfortable or not. And in that same instant he had inwardly voiced the determination that, by God, since the Brigadier had seen fit to nominate him Officer in Charge of Apes, he was going to be just that.
    The Timothy Bailey who had descended from the heights and returned thoughtfully to his office that first day was not the same one who an hour or so before had ascended the side of the Rock to the village of the apes.
    Becoming an expert on the subject of Macaques, however, proved to be more difficult than Tim had