Hellstrom's Hive Read online

  The boom cage on its long arm swung down to the studio floor with all of the silent grace of a mantis reaching for its prey. Hellstrom stepped into the cage and it wafted him upward, swung in a wide arc, and deposited him at the edge of the loft floor. As he stepped out of the cage, Hellstrom reflected on how admirably this device served the needs of both security and cover. No one could get up to the loft without the help of a trusted boom operator, yet it was the most natural thing to think of a boom as an elevator and to use that as an excuse for leaving no other access into the security section.

  The loft had been set up with a central well running for half the length of the barn. The other half concealed the outlets for ventilators, with a bypass for visual examination of the valley’s upper reaches. Slide ropes had been coiled neatly at even spacings along the edge of the loft floor, each rope secured to one of the stanchions of the guardrail. The ropes, which the Hive’s workers had practiced on, but had never been forced to use, offered emergency access to the studio floor. Neither the ropes, nor the inner wall behind the walkway, nor the doors into the various security stations were visible from the studio floor.

  Hellstrom walked along the open area, noting a slight smell of dust that alerted him to remind the cleaning crews that the studio must be kept free of dust. The catwalk, with its view of the multiple activities in the studio below, led him along the soundproofed wall to an end door with both sound and light baffles.

  He let himself into Old Harvey’s station through the dark passage of the baffle. It was gloomy inside and filled with the smells of Outside that came in through open louvers at the end. An arc of green-glowing repeater screens had been installed along the inner wall against a thermite-bomb destruction system that could burn out the entire barn right down to the noninflammable mucilaginous quickplugs that could be triggered to seal off the Hive head. The present emergency made Hellstrom acutely conscious of all these preparations which had been a part of Hive awareness for so many years.

  Old Harvey looked up from the console as Hellstrom entered. The old man was gray haired, with a big, forward-thrust face like a Saint Bernard. He even had dewlaps at the edges of his jawline to accent the likeness. His eyes were widely spaced, brown and deceptively mild. Hellstrom had once seen Old Harvey behead a hysterical worker with one sweep of a meat cleaver – but that had been long ago in his own childhood and that hysterical line had been weeded out of the Hive’s breeding stock.

  “Where’s our Outsider?” Hellstrom asked.

  “He had something to eat a while back, then crawled off the hilltop,” Old Harvey said. “He’s working his way toward the upper end of the valley now. If he stations himself where I think he will, we’ll be able to look out the louvers at the other end and watch him directly with binoculars. We’re keeping all the lights off inside, of course, to reduce the chance that he’ll notice activity up here.”

  Good, cautious thinking. “Have you reviewed the Porter material? I noticed earlier that you –”

  “I’ve reviewed it.”

  “What’s your opinion?” Hellstrom asked.

  “Same sort of approach, clothing designed to give him concealment in the grass. Want to bet his cover is he’s a bird watcher?”

  “I think you’d win.”

  “Too much professionalism about him, though.” He studied one of the console screens over an observer’s shoulder, pointed, and said, “There he is, just as I expected.”

  The screen showed the intruder crawling under a stand of bushes to get a view down the length of the valley.

  “Is he carrying a weapon?” Hellstrom asked.

  “Our sensors indicate not. I think he has a flashlight and a pocketknife in addition to those binoculars. Look at that: there are ants up there on the ledge and he doesn’t like them. See how he’s brushing them off his arm.”

  “Ants? How long since we’ve swept that area?”

  “A month or so. Do you want it checked?”

  “No. Just have it noted that it may be time for another sweep there by a small crew. We need several nests in the newer hydroponics sections.”

  “Right.” Old Harvey nodded and turned to relay instructions by hand signal to one of his assistants. Presently, he turned back and spoke musingly. “That Porter was a strange one. I’ve been reviewing what he said. He told us quite a bit, really.”

  “He was in the wrong business,” Hellstrom agreed dryly.

  “What do you think they’re after?” Old Harvey asked.

  “We’ve somehow attracted the attention of an official agency,” Hellstrom said. “They don’t have to be after anything except satisfaction for their own brand of paranoia.”

  Old Harvey grimaced, shuddered. “I don’t like the feeling of this, Nils.”

  “Nor I.”

  “Are you sure you’ve made the right decision?”

  “To the best of my ability. Our first step must be to pick up this pair. One of them must know more than the late Mr. Porter.”

  “I sure hope you’re right, Nils.”

  From Nils Hellstrom’s diary.

  Three of our younger geneticists were in among the fertile females again today, and some of the older colonists in genetics complained. I had to explain to them once more that it was unimportant. The breeding impulse cannot be suppressed in active key workers who require the full functioning of their mental abilities. I have been known to indulge myself thus from time to time and the older genetics specialists know this very well. They were really complaining about me, of course. When will they ever understand that genetic manipulation has very severe limits, given our present stage of development? Luckily, the older ones are dying out. Our own truism applies here. “Into the vats old, out of the vats new.” Any offspring from this latest foray will be watched closely, of course. Talent is where you find it. We all know how desperately the Hive needs new talent.

  Merrivale did not like the tone of voice Peruge was using over the telephone, but he managed to conceal this fact under an even flow of reasonable responses. Peruge was angry and was not attempting to conceal it. To Merrivale, Peruge represented the one major obstacle between himself and another promotion. Merrivale thought he understood Peruge very well, but felt offended by those reactions in Peruge that spoke of the other man’s superior position in the Agency.

  Merrivale had been called away from the early afternoon briefing session they had set up for the new teams being sent out to Oregon. He had left the session reluctantly, but without delay. One did not keep Peruge waiting. Peruge was one of the chosen few who had daily face-to-face contact with the Chief. He might even know the Chief’s real identity.

  There was a letterknife in the form of a cavalry saber on the smooth gray blotter of Merrivale’s desk. He picked it up, pricked at the blotter with the sharp tip while he listened, gouging deeply when the conversation took a painful turn.

  “That was earlier in the month, Dzule,” Merrivale said, knowing the explanation was insufficient, “and we did not know as much then as we know now.”

  “What do we know now?” The question was biting and accusatory.

  “We know there’s someone out there who does not hesitate to make our people just-disappear.”

  “We already knew that!”

  “But we had not gauged the extent of our opposition’s determination to defy us.”

  “Do we have so many people that we can just waste them finding out such important facts?” Peruge demanded.

  The hypocrite! Merrivale thought. Nobody has wasted more agents than Peruge! He gave me the explicit orders that cost us these teams!

  Merrivale dug a deep gouge in the blotter, frowned at the disfiguration of the surface. He reminded himself to have the blotter replaced as soon as this call was completed. “Dzule, none of our agents believes this business is safe. They know the chances they take.”

  “But do they know the chances you take with them?”

  “That’s unfair,” Merrivale blurted, and he wondered what Peru
ge was doing. Why this abrupt attack? Was there trouble farther upstairs?

  “You’re a fool, Merrivale,” Peruge said. “You’ve lost us three good people.”

  “My orders were explicit and you know it,” Merrivale said.

  “And given those orders, you did what you thought best.”

  “Naturally.” Merrivale could feel sweat collecting under his collar and he rubbed a finger around against his skin there. “We had no way of knowing precisely what had happened to Porter. You told me to send him in alone. Those were your very words.”

  “And when Porter – just vanished?”

  “You said yourself that he could’ve had personal reasons for disappearing!”

  “What personal reasons? Porter’s record was one of the best.”

  “But you said he’d quarreled with his – wife.”

  “Did I say that? I don’t remember that at all.”

  So that’s the way it is, Merrivale thought. His stomach felt painfully knotted. “You know you offered that as a possible reason for sending in a double team, but with identical orders for them.”

  “I don’t know anything of the kind, Merrivale. You’ve sent Depeaux and Grinelli down that Oregon rathole and you sit there making excuses. When Porter was missed, you should’ve originated an official inquiry for a vacationer believed to be missing in that region.”

  So that’s going to be our new approach, Merrivale thought. And if it succeeds, Peruge gets the credit. If it fails, I get the blame. How neat!

  Merrivale said, “I presume that’s the line of attack you’ll take when you get out to Oregon.”

  “You know damned well it is!”

  The Chief himself is probably listening to this, Merrivale thought. Oh, God! Why did I ever get into this business?

  “Have you told the new teams that I’ll be leading them personally?” Peruge asked.

  “I was briefing them when you called.”

  “Very well. I’ll be leaving within the hour and I’ll meet the new teams in Portland.”

  “I’ll tell them.” Merrivale spoke with weary resignation.

  “And tell them this: tell them I want it emphasized that this new operation must be handled with the utmost discretion. There will be no grandstand plays, understood? Hellstrom has powerful friends and I don’t mind telling you that this ecology issue is explosive. Hellstrom has said all the right things to the right people and they think he’s some kind of ecological messiah. Luckily, there are others who realize he’s a fanatic madman, and I’m sure we’ll prevail. Understand me?”

  “Perfectly.” Merrivale did not try to conceal his bitterness now. The Chief was listening to Peruge. No doubt of that. The whole thing was a staged performance: preparation of the sacrificial goat. The goat’s name was, of course, Merrivale.

  “I doubt very much that you understand me perfectly,” Peruge said, “but it’s likely that you understand me well enough to follow the orders I’ve just given you without any more disgusting errors. See to it at once.”

  There was a sharp click on the line.

  Merrivale sighed, replaced the receiver in its cradle on the elaborate scrambling phone. The signs were clear. He must juggle his own hot potato. And if he dropped it, or if anyone else dropped it, fingers would point in only one direction. Well, he had been in this position before, just as he had placed others in the identical position. There was only one safe response. He must delegate authority, but do it so subtly that everything still appeared to be in his own hands. The logical candidate was Shorty Janvert. As a first step, Shorty would be named as number two on this project, right under Dzule Peruge himself. Peruge had not specified who he wanted as number two. That had been a mistake on his part. If Peruge changed this assignment, a thing he might very well do, then he would be responsible for the actions of his new second. Shorty was a logical choice. Peruge had made it clear on several occasions that he didn’t fully trust Janvert. But the little man was imaginative and resourceful. The choice could be defended.

  From the Hive Manual.

  The neutered worker is the true source of freedom in any society. Even the wild society has its neutered workers, the neutering being maintained behind a mask of actual fertility from which real offspring come. But such offspring have no share in the free creative life of the wild society and thus are effectively neutered. Such workers can always be recognized. They are not burdened with intellect, with unrestricted emotion, or with individual identity. They are lost in a mass of creatures like themselves. In this, neither our Hive nor the insects are giving the universe anything new. What the insects have and what we are copying is a society formed in such a way that its workers toil together to create the illusive Utopia – the perfect society.

  It took Hellstrom’s number-two camera crew almost six hours to shoot the new lab sequence with mice and wasps. Even then, Hellstrom was not satisfied that they had the proper effect on film. He had become very sensitive to the artistic merit of what they created. He expected the rushes to be far short of what he had hoped for in this sequence. The demands for excellence he was making now went far beyond the implicit knowledge that quality brought more income to the Hive. He wanted quality for the thing itself, just as he wanted it for every aspect of the Hive.

  Quality of specialists, quality of life, quality of creations – all were interrelated.

  Hellstrom had the boom lift him to the aerie after they finished shooting, trying to conceal his worries over the latest reports on the night sweep. Because he had been in this sequence, he had been tied to the set during the most important part of the sweep. It was still many hours to dawn and the problem had not been solved: the female who had accompanied their captive intruder remained at large.

  One of the Hive’s chief concerns had always been to produce workers who could “front” for them with the Outside, incorruptible workers who would not betray even by chance what lay beneath Guarded Valley and its surrounding hills. Hellstrom wondered now if they might not have uncovered a breeding defect somewhere in the personnel charged with the sweeps. The male intruder had been picked up easily beyond the bordering trees of the west meadow. A sweep detail had enveloped the van-camper almost immediately afterward, but somehow they had missed the female. It didn’t seem possible that she could escape, but none of the sweepworkers had even smelled her trail.

  Many key security workers were in the aerie command post when Hellstrom entered. They noted his entrance, but stayed at their jobs. Hellstrom scanned the dimly lighted room with its arc of repeater screens, its little clutches of workers discussing the problem. Saldo was there, dark in the manner of his breeder mother, Fancy, but with the harsh hawk features of his Outsider father. (That was one thing Fancy did well, Hellstrom reminded himself. She bred Outside at every opportunity and the resultant new genes were prized by the Hive.) Old Harvey’s post at the security console had been taken over by a younger male of Fancy’s line. He took the name of Timothy Hannsen in his Outside guise. Hannsen had been chosen as a front because of penetrating good looks that tended to overpower the conscious balance of Outsider females. He also had a sharply incisive mind which made him particularly valuable in a crisis. That was true of many in Fancy’s line, but particularly so of Saldo. Hellstrom had high hopes for Saldo, who had been taken on as a special educational charge by Old Harvey.

  Hellstrom paused inside the door to gauge conditions in the aerie. Should he take over? They would defer to him at the slightest indication that he was assuming command. Brood mother Trova’s decision had never been really questioned. They always sensed how much more potent was his commitment to the Hive, how much more effective his decisions. They might disagree at times, and occasionally even prevail over him, but there remained a subtle air of deference even when they voted him down in the Council. And when, as often happened, his view later proved to have been the correct one, his hold on them became even stronger. It was a situation toward which Hellstrom maintained a constant mistrust.

  No w
orker is perfect, he told himself. The Hive itself must be supreme in all things.

  Old Harvey stood against the wall at Hellstrom’s left, arms folded, his face underlighted by the glowing screens, giving the illusion that he had been cast from green stone. There was movement in his eyes, though. Old Harvey was watching the room critically. Hellstrom crossed to his side, glanced once at the dewlapped old face, then at the consoles. “Any sign of her yet?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t we have her under constant infrasurveillance?”

  “Radar and sonics, too,” Old Harvey muttered.

  “Did she have instruments to detect us?”

  “She tried to use her radio, but we jammed it.”

  “That alerted her, then?”

  “Probably.” Old Harvey sounded tired and displeased.

  “But no other instruments?”

  “The vehicle had a small radar-type speed-trap warning device. I think she may have detected our surveillance that way, too.”

  “But how could she slip through our sweep?”

  “They’re reviewing the tapes again. They think she could’ve gone searching for her companion and been lost in the general confusion our sweep created on the instruments.”

  “The sweep would’ve picked her up despite that.”

  Old Harvey turned, looked directly at him. “So I told them.”

  “And they overruled you.”

  Old Harvey nodded.

  “What do they believe happened?” Hellstrom asked.

  “She took a calculated risk and went right into the midst of our searchers.”

  “Her smell would’ve given her away!”

  “So I said, and they agreed. They then suggested she slipped away from the truck to the north, using it as a shield. Their thought is that she walked softly to hide her movements in the background static. There was a time gap between darkness and when our sweep reached her vicinity. She could’ve done it. She had two choices: get away or slip up on us from another direction. They think she’s out there stalking us.”