"Caesar! Caesar!" At the sound of his name being called, the chimpanzee got up from where he and his wife, Lisa, sat in front of the warm fireplace and ran over to the door of the treehouse. Pulling aside the thick curtain and venturing outside to look over the railing, he saw the figure of Virgil below. The orangutan was shivering slightly in the cold and snow as he spoke. "Caesar, you must come! Foragers have found two human strangers in the snow near here. One is dead, and the other is half-frozen! We do not know if he will survive!"

"I will be there," Caesar responded, before ducking back inside the hut and saying to Lisa "I have to go out. I will try not to be long." A few minutes later he and Virgil were trudging through the deep snow, the harsh wind stinging their faces. It had been over a decade since the nuclear devastation, but the winters were still much more severe than they used to be. He reflected that it would shortly be the time of the human holiday of Christmas, and remembered celebrating it in his childhood with Armando, the kindly human who had raised him upon the deaths of his parents. Happier times, before the blood and destruction, the pain of loss, first of Armando, then of his own son, Cornelius.

The interior of the hut, when Virgil opened the door and Caesar followed him through, was occupied by three humans - MacDonald, Caesar's ally and best human friend; Megan, who had once been a nurse and had tended to Caesar's son before the child's untimely death; and an unconscious man lying on a bed, covered up to his neck by a thick blanket. His hair was long and black, as was his beard. MacDonald saw Caesar and walked over. "Sorry for dragging you out like this, Caesar, but we thought you'd want to see this."

"You did well to send for me, MacDonald," Caesar replied with a nod, and approached the man on the bed. "Will he live?" he asked Megan.

Megan shrugged. "Hard to say. He's suffering from extreme exposure. If he stays warm, he might just pull through."

"A pity about his friend," muttered MacDonald.

At that moment, the stranger on the bed moaned and stirred. Slowly, his eyes opened and saw Caesar and Megan leaning over him. Squinting at Caesar, he gasped "Galen...?"

"Galen?" Caesar repeated. "No, my name is not Galen...I am Caesar. What is your name?"

Hearing this, the man was silent a moment, his expression one of mild surprise, before murmuring "Alan...where's Alan? He was...with me..."

Megan glanced at Caesar and bit her lip, having dreaded this moment, then said as gently as she could to her patient "I'm afraid your friend didn't make it...he's dead."

The man gazed up at her, then squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, groaning in anguish. "No...not Alan...he can't be...not after everything we went through...No!"

Megan placed a hand on his shoulder and said "Sir, I understand how you must feel, but it's important that you get some rest...please." Gradually, the man stopped tossing and turning, and fell into a deep sleep. A sleep they all hoped would not be permanent.

OOOOOOOO

"He says he's a what?" Caesar exclaimed incredulously as he and MacDonald walked towards the hut a few days later.

MacDonald shrugged. "An astronaut. And that his ship crashed just days ago. At least that's what he claims."

Caesar shook his head, perplexed. "But...there haven't been any space flights in years, since before the war!"

"And I'll tell you something else," MacDonald added as he and Caesar neared their destination, "he also wanted to know what year it is."

Caesar's interest in their guest was even stronger now. As he and MacDonald entered the hut, they saw the recuperating man sat up in his bed. He had been finishing off a bowl of soup, and looked up at their approach. "Good afternoon, Mister Burke," Caesar said, "how are you feeling?"

The man smiled slightly. "Please, call me Pete. And I'm feeling okay, I guess. Thanks for the hospitality."

Caesar sat on a wooden chair next to him. "I am pleased to hear you are better, but...when you first saw me, you called me Galen. Is Galen a friend of yours?"

"Yeah, a real good friend," Burke replied. "One of the few apes me and Alan were glad to know, back where I've been."

"And where is that?" asked Caesar.

Burke sighed and leaned back in his bed. "This may sound nuts, but...over a thousand years in the future."

At this, Caesar's eyes widened in awe. "You mean...you're actually from the future?" Like my parents, he thought.

In his bed, Burke gave a little chuckle. "Actually, I'm from the past. See, when Alan and me left Earth, it was 1980. When we passed through a space warp and crashed, the ship's chronometer read 3085." Caesar and MacDonald listened intently as Burke described how he and his companion, Alan Virdon, soon encountered humans living in thralldom to their ape overlords, and made enemies in the gorilla military leader Urko and orangutan Zaius, and a friend in the kindly chimp Galen, and how the three became fugitives in a hostile world, searching for a way home.

They listened a he described how he and his friends, after some years of wandering and evading capture by Zaius and Urko, one day came across a functional spacecraft in one of the old cities, and knew their chance of escape had come at last. "Me and Alan were ready to go," Burke explained, "but Galen...he got cold feet. Became scared about how he might fit in back in our time. We tried to convince him to come with us, but in the end, he decided to stay and take his chances with Urko and Zaius." Hearing this, Caesar wondered if Galen may have been right, remembering his parents' fate when they had arrived in the year 1973 from the fortieth century.

Burke continued: "We blasted off into space, and...well, we hit some kind of space warp; it seemed like the first one we'd encountered in 1980. Next thing I knew, our ship was on fire and falling back through the atmosphere! When we landed, I just managed to drag Alan out before the ship blew up. We couldn't see nothing through the snowstorm. Weren't even sure we'd gone back in time. But Alan had been hurt real bad in the crash...I had to find help. I must've carried for miles in the storm, then passed out. When I came to, I was here, over twenty years after I left...and Alan was dead." Again he sighed and closed his eyes as the frustration and regret came flooding back. "We didn't even go back far enough...my world's still gone."

"Perhaps not everything from your world," Caesar told him sympathetically.

OOOOOOOO

The winter was at last coming to an end. A chimpanzee, an orangutan, and two men stood together on the frosty ground on the outskirts of the settlement below the clear, ice-blue sky. "Peter, are you sure this is what you want?" Caesar asked the man stood before him.

Burke hefted the large bag slung over his shoulder as he replied. "This is a great place you got here, Caesar...but I gotta see what else has survived out there. Find out if any old friends or family...or Alan's family...made it. Try to help where I can. But I'm sure not gonna forget any of you. And who knows, maybe one day you'll see me again."

"You will always be welcome here," said Virgil.

MacDonald stepped forward and firmly shook Burke's hand. "Have a safe journey."

"Godspeed, Peter," Caesar added, smiling sadly. Their goodbyes said, Peter Burke turned round and walked away across the field, through the trees, finally disappearing over a hill. They watched him go the whole way.

Stood beside Caesar, MacDonald asked "What will he find out there, Caesar?"

Caesar's voice held a hint of hope as he replied: "His destiny...maybe."