Hélius, is, a minor antagonists of the 1963 Pierre Boulle novel La Planète des Singes, with the novel being known in English as The Planet of the Apes/Monkeys (the most literal translation), Planet of the Apes, or Monkey Planet.
He is a male chimpanzee that, while playing a minor role as an antagonist in the book, his work indirectly causes ape society to turn against the main protagonist.
Personality[]
Hélius is a young chimpanzee whose genius is praised to the skies by his fellow apes, who believe he has a brilliant future ahead of him. As head of the encephalic section, he engages in advanced neurological and medical experimentation, giving him deep insight into cerebral function and its manipulation. Despite his intelligence, Hélius reveals himself to be morally ambiguous.
He maintains a calm, clinical demeanor even in the face of grotesque experiments that would unsettle most observers. Oblivious—or indifferent—to the discomfort of others, he describes the suffering of his subjects with detached precision. Hélius shows no sympathy for their dignity or torment, displaying a chilling emotional detachment that suggests a profound desensitization. His focus is entirely on his work.
Hélius regards human subjects as mere biological specimens. He is untroubled by the ethical implications of his research, dismissing the suffering of his victims with the justification that they feel no pain—ironically, even in studies explicitly designed to examine pain. To him, the end justifies the means: humans are expendable, and their dehumanization is rationalized as necessary for scientific progress.
In addition to his detachment, Hélius is marked by a strong sense of arrogance and self-assurance. He is confident in the superiority of his methods and eager to showcase what he calls his “marvelous achievements.” Driven by ego, he views his work as groundbreaking and is quick to flaunt his success, even when it comes at great human cost.
Biography[]
In the novel Cornélius, the chimpanzee director of Institute for Advanced Biological Study, after having discovered an ancient city of an ancient civilization that contained human remains and predated the modern simian civilization, developed a hypothesis that there once existed a race of human beings on Soror who were endowed with intelligence like Ulysse Mérou, the human journalist from Earth. The race of humans on Soror though had degenerated and reverted to an animal state. Cornélius later found further support to his hypothesis, after Hélius corroborated his findings with his own research.
It was because of Hélius’ work in the connection of experiments on the brain, that despite Cornélius realizing apes to be imitators, he saw potential in his species for remarkable innovation in certain branches of science.
Cornélius wanting to show these “wonders” then arranged for Ulysse visit to Hélius’ department with him. But since Cornélius had urgent matters to attend, he was unable to join Ulysse on the tour of the encephalic section initially, leaving him alone with the young chimpanzee. Even without his presence, the older chimpanzee promises Ulysse he would see the pearl of Hélius’ experiments together with him, the one that afforded the evidence which he informed the journalist about.
Hélius eager to impress the human, personally guided the man from Earth to showcase his experiments which involved many classical cases of brain experimentation. The chimp led Ulysse to a room equipped with two rows of cages, with a pharmaceutical smell of chloroform. To there Hélius explained all surgical operations were performed on subjects put under anesthesia. As a way to show a high degree attained by simian civilization, it was stressed by the chimp that his work aimed to suppress all useless suffering in men. This only half reassured Ulysse, and even less so when Hélius mentioned an exception to this mandate, in that the very experiments his department conducted were aimed to make a study of pain and localize the neve centers from which it derives. Fortunately Ulysse was not to see any examples of this.
The chimpanzee failed to calculate the lack of sensitivity to Ulysse's human's sensibilities toward these experiments done. Nor did he give Ulysse any time to allow the man to turn away or retrace his steps. In fact he had the blind audacity to offer Ulysse to attend an operation, to see first of a subject suffering no pain at all. Not hearing an answer though, Hélius instead showed him the results of the operations.
Hélius then guided Ulysse to the cages where the first example was a young handsome man who was extremely emaciated, propped up on a litter with bowl of mash almost under his nose. Yet despite the sight of food and his hunger, the man only gazed at it in confusion, without moving. Hélius revealed that the boy had not eaten for 24 hours as a result of partial ablation of the frontal brain that was performed on him some months ago. Since then, the apes routinely had to force feed him. Due to the subject's thinness, it is suggested that the apes were not consisted and the nurses on staff only did only unless ordered by Hélius. Once they received a signal, the nurse would plunge the young man's face into the bowl, were upon he would immediately start lapping up the food. The chimp treated the starvation of the human as a clinical commonplace case, finding other cases more interesting.
The tour then continued with Hélius showing Ulysse, subjects which the apes performed operations that affected various areas of the cerebral tissue. Said subjects that Hélius had caged and conducted experiments on were done on men and women of all ages. Their cage doors each having a panel that specified their operation which Hélius provided a wealth of technical details.
The next cases dealt in area related to natural reflexed and acquired reflexes. In one case, Hélius showcased to Ulysse a man who had his whole zone of occipital area removed. It left the man unable to distinguish the distance or shape of objects. His disability manifested in a series of disorganized gestures whenever a nurse approached him. It left him incapable of avoiding objects in his path and objects like fruit inspired him with fear, causing him to draw away in terror. More pitifully he could no longer grasp the bars of his cage, instead closing his fingers at empty air.
Another victim of said experiments was an man who Hélius hailed to be a remarkable subject. He had been trained by the apes to an astonishing degree, able to answer his name, obey simple commands, solve fairly complicated problems, and learn how to use rudimentary tools. Though that same day, just before Ulysse came to the encephalic section, he had forgotten all his education. Instead he was now the stupidest man in the department, as a result of a difficult operation involving the extraction of the temporal lobules. The grinning ape who said these comments had causes Ulysse to become uncomfortable as he witnessed horror after horror.
More of Hélius victims were presented, men partially or totally paralyzed, others artificially deprived of sight. One sight that was too much for Ulysse that Hélius showed him, involved a young mother and her child as it reminded him of Nova, as she was expectant and baring his child. The woman was said to possessed a highly developed maternal instinct, which disappeared after the apes in the department interfered with her cervical cortex. As a result the mother kept pushing away her young child whenever it approached her. Hélius failed to notice the rage Ulysse was keeping under his composure, though distracted the human enough to calm down as he was shown another room.
The next room Hélius took him to was where the chimp explained with a bit of mystery, claiming that his people indulged in more, delicate research. Here proudly boasted that the apes no longer used scalpels, instead used a far more subtle medium---electrical stimulation of certain spots of the brain. At this moment Hélius' curiosity provoked him to ask Ulysse if men on Earth practiced such experiments. He was met with a furious retort from the journalist in the affirmative and that apes were used in as test subjects. Surprisingly despite the deprecating jab of apes being used as lab animals on Earth Hélius kept his temper and even smiled. It was Hélius belief that the men from Earth could never obtain such perfect results like his department, in fact they were what Cornélius wanted to show him.
Before going to that, Hélius insisted on going about his rounds to show Ulysse the commonplace cases of electrical stimulation. Unlike the other room which contained human test subjects who had already been operated on, the cages contained nurses in the process of operating on subjects stretched out on tables with incisions made into their skulls, laying bare certain areas of the brain, electrodes applied and anesthesia injected to them. The chimpanzee explained that the nurses put the subjects asleep using a mild anesthetic, to avoid the results from being falsified, and insisted that the subject felt no pain.
The subjects Hélius showed Ulysse made various movements, depending on the placement of the electrodes. A man jerked his leg up at each electric shock and relaxed it once the current was off. Another performed the same movement but with the arm. And in another case, was an example where the whole shoulder twitched under the effect of the electric current. More disturbingly there was even a young adolescent boy, who jaw muscles were toyed with by the current, where he kept on endless clamping, giving off a ghastly grin while the rest of his body remained motionless.
These examples were only short durations, as Hélius directed Ulysse attention to an ongoing experiment where the length of time of current was increased and carried to its limit. The subject in which this treatment was imposed on a young girl, who reminded Ulysse of his lover Nova. Whilst she was unconscious several ape nurses hovered over her body, fixing electrodes on her face. Once the current was turned on, the girl's fingers started moving. But unlike the other cases in which the apes kept the current on for a few seconds, the duration prolonged and it was observed that the fingers became frenzied, gradually spreading to her wrist, forearm, upper arm and shoulder. The twitching soon enough spread from one hand to the hip to the thigh to the leg and all the way to the toes. After ten minutes the whole wretched girl's naked left side was convulsing into spasms.
Despite the dreadful spite, and the girl's artificial seizures growing more rapid and violent, Hélius merely calmly observed it and explained to Ulysse on the scientific value of the convulsions as the symptoms of epilepsy and its oddity. For Ulysse who had been enduring an hour's worth of these macabre displays of the apes callously maiming creatures similar to himself, finally was unable to contain his outrage and raised his voice demanding the apes to stop their experiment on the girl. However his outburst merely surprised the apes in the room, and received reproving looks. As it so happened Cornélius had returned to tell him he sympathized with Ulysse's feelings toward the bloodcurdling experiments, especially if one was not used to them. However the chimpanzee justified the morally questionable experiments in saying that without them simian medicine and surgery would have never made enormous progress in the last quarter of a century. The argument did not convince Ulysse, any more than he witnessed such experiments being conducted on apes on Earth. Before Ulysse could voice any more of his argument, he was dragged off to another room which contained the experiment Cornélius wanted him to see.
Hélius was said to be personally in charge of this particular research. So far only four people knew of its existence, him, Cornélius, a carefully selected gorilla assistant and Ulysse. The sensitivity of the results of the experiment were that Hélius chose his assistant to be a dumb brute, who was also a mute and could only speak in sign-language.
The experiment involved two subjects, a man and a woman, who were strapped to two parallel divans and upon seeing their visitors started observing them with uncanny intensity. Once Hélius gave instructions to his assistant, the two test subjects were anesthetized and fell asleep. Hélius the proceeds to start up several machines and unrolled the bandage that covered the man's skull to apply electrodes to a certain spot. Soon enough a miracle happened as the man began talking, expressing himself in the simian language. Hélius and Cornélius reveled mischievous at seeing Ulysse's stupefaction, and before Ulysse could ask any questions, they motioned him to listen. The man's words were devoid of any originality, and were snippets of conversations which he heard in captivity during his long time at the Institute, But the point was made clear by Hélius that he talks like a parrot or gramophone, In contrast the chimpanzee expressed with excitement that he had better result with the woman.
The woman also talked, but not just merely repeat the words she heard in captivity. Her words held significance as through a combination of physico-chemical processes, Hélius succeeded in awakening not only her own individual memory but the memory of the species. Her recollections contained atavistic memories that went back to an extremely distant line of ancestors, that were thousands of years old. To demonstrate, Hélius activated his machines and applied the electrodes to the woman's face.
The words she spoke became engraved in Ulysse memory, as she spoke as a number of different people, explaining how the apes on Soror were originally teetering on extinction. And that only to the species multiply carelessly after they were domesticated as servants. Slowly the ancient Sororians began to witness a subtle shift of the behavior of the apes in the charge. The apes were learning and becoming arrogant and near defiant to their masters. A number of the woman's ancestors testified of being driven from their homes or even reduced as tamed beasts or lab animals by their former ape pets. In the end the woman's talk culminated in the apes uprising openly, hunting and driving the free Sororians to the wilds.
Due to Hélius enthusiasm for success, some of the results obtained from the woman were leaked out to the public. Which at the same time the discoveries of the Sororian city were discussed in the press. While most of the apes fully pieced together the significance, some suspected the truth. Due to this a increased wariness was directed towards Ulysse by the authorities due to the threat he represented of a resurgence race of men.
Trivia[]
- Hélius character is never adapted in the modern adaptions of Planet of the Apes, as the role as the ape mad scientist is mostly overtaken by Zaius.
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