Hellstrom's Hive Page 9

  “And you don’t agree with that?” Hellstrom asked.

  “Not that one,” Old Harvey said.

  “Why?”

  “She wouldn’t slip up on us.”

  “But why?”

  “We hit her hard with the low frequency. She was twitchy and nervous all afternoon, much too nervous to come for us.”

  “How do you know what her reserves of courage might be?”

  “Not that one, Nils. I watched her.”

  “She didn’t look like your type, Harvey.”

  “Make your joke, Nils. I watched her most of the afternoon.”

  “So this is no more than your opinion from personal observation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you pressing that opinion?”

  “I did.”

  “Given your choice, what action would you take?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I do, or I wouldn’t ask.”

  “First, I think she’s slipped down to the northeast among those cattle in the pasture. I’m guessing that she knows cattle. There was something about her –” He wet his lips with his tongue. “If she knows cattle, she could move among them with no problems. They’d mask her smell; they’d provide all the cover she needs.”

  “No one here agrees with you?”

  “They say those are range cattle and they’d have spooked at the first smell of her. We’d have detected that.”

  “And your response?”

  “A lot of spooking depends on whether a cow can smell your fear. We know that. We do it ourselves. If she wasn’t afraid of them and moved softly – well, we can’t just close our eyes to that possibility.”

  “They don’t want to search among the cattle, though?”

  “They’re bothered by the complications of a sweep down there. If we send workers, they’re sure to get out of hand and kill a few cows. Then we have local problems, just the way we have every time that happens.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you’d do.”

  “I’d send some of us. We’re trained to deal with the Outside. Some of us have lived out there. We have better control over the hunt response during a sweep.”

  Hellstrom nodded, spoke his thoughts aloud. “If she’s up here close to us, she hasn’t a rabbit’s chance of getting away. But if she’s down there among those cows –”

  “You see what I mean,” Old Harvey said.

  “I’m astonished that the others don’t see it, too,” Hellstrom said. “Will you lead the search party, Harvey?”

  “Sure. I see you’re not calling it a sweep.”

  “I’d just as soon you went out and brought back only one thing.”

  “Alive?”

  “If at all possible. We’re not getting much from that other one.”

  “That’s what I heard. I was down there when they first started questioning him, but – well, that sort of thing bothers me. I guess I lived too long Outside.”

  “I have the same reaction,” Hellstrom said. “This is something better left to the younger workers who don’t even know the concept of mercy.”

  “Sure wish there was some other way,” Old Harvey said. He took a deep breath. “I best get about the – search.”

  “Choose your men and see to it.”

  Hellstrom watched the old man move out into the room, and he thought about the often sheer perversity of the young. The old possessed a special value for the Hive, a kind of balance that could not be denied. This incident was a sure demonstration of their value. Old Harvey had known what to do. The young workers had not wanted to venture out into the night themselves, though, as common workers did, and they’d decided it was unnecessary.

  Several of the younger male and female apprentices and the security workers of middle years had heard Hellstrom’s conversation with Old Harvey. They made a shamefaced show now of volunteering for the search.

  Old Harvey picked some of them, instructed them briefly. He made a special point of naming Saldo as his second-in-command. That was good. Saldo displayed a devoted respect for Old Harvey and it was surprising that the younger worker had not taken his teacher’s side. This came out in the briefing when Saldo said, “I knew he was right, but you wouldn’t believe me, either.” Apparently Saldo had sided with his teacher, but the others had lumped them both in one bag. Ever conscious of his role as educator, Old Harvey chided Saldo for this remark. “If you thought that, you should’ve given your own arguments, not mine.”

  The troop filed out of the room properly chastened.

  Hellstrom smiled to himself. They were good stock and learned quickly. One had only to give them the correct example. “In age is balance,” as his brood mother had been fond of saying. Youth, to her, represented an extenuating circumstance which had always to be taken into account.

  The words of Nils Hellstrom.

  Of the billions of living things on earth, only man ponders his existence. His questions lead to torment; for he is unable to accept, as the insects do, that life’s only purpose is life itself.

  Tymiena Grinelli had not liked this assignment from the beginning. She hadn’t objected so much to working with Carlos (they’d combined forces many times in the past) as she did to the time she would spend with him when they were not working. Carlos had been flashingly handsome in his youth and had never accustomed himself to the gradual wearing away of his compelling attraction to women.

  She had known that the off-duty association would be a constant bout of sortie and repartee. Grinelli didn’t fancy herself as a femme fatale, but she knew from experience her own magnetism. She had a long face that might have been taken as ugly were it not for the personality behind it. This shone through overlarge and startlingly green eyes. Her body was slender, the skin pale, and there was about her an air of profound sensitivity that fascinated many men, Carlos among them. Her hair was a dark red-auburn and she tended to keep it confined in tight hats or berets.

  Tymiena was a family name and its original Slavic meaning had been “a secret.” The name described her manner. She held herself in constant reserve.

  Merrivale had alerted her sense of danger originally by assigning only the two of them to the case. She had not liked what she had read in Porter’s accounts and in the reports accumulated under the label of “The Hellstrom File.” Too many of these reports had been second or third hand. Too many of them were semiofficial. They smacked of amateurism. Amateurs were a deadly indulgence in this business.

  “Only two of us?” she’d objected. “What about the local police? We could file a missing-person report and –”

  “The Chief does not want that,” Merrivale had said.

  “Did he say so specifically?”

  Merrivale’s face darkened slightly at any reference to his well-known propensity for personalized interpretation of orders. “He made himself abundantly clear! This is to be handled with the utmost discretion.”

  “A discreet local inquiry sounds to me well within that requirement. Porter was in that area. He’s missing. These reports in the file indicate others may have disappeared there. This family of picnickers with the twin babies, for instance, they –”

  “A logical explanation has been accepted for every such occurrence, Tymiena,” Merrivale interrupted. “Unfortunately, logic and actuality do not always coincide. Our concern is for the actuality and, in our pursuit of it, we shall utilize our own tested resources.”

  “I don’t like their logical explanations,” Tymiena said. “I don’t give one particle of a damn what explanations local dumbheads may have accepted.”

  “Our own resources only,” Merrivale repeated.

  “Which means we put our lives on the line again,” she said. “What does Carlos say about this case?”

  “Why don’t you ask him? I’ve arranged for a briefing at 1100 hours. Janvert and Carr will be here, as well.”

  “Are they in this?”

  “They’re in reserve.”

  “I don’t li
ke that, either. Where’s Carlos?”

  “I believe he’s in Archives. You have almost an hour to explore this matter with him.”

  “Merde!” she said and swept from the room.

  Carlos was no more helpful than Merrivale. The assignment had struck him as “routine.” But then, assignments tended to strike Carlos as cast in some familiar mold. His response was a universal, clerkish thoroughness of preparation: read all of the material, study all of the plans. It had not surprised her that Carlos was in Archives. He had an Archives mind.

  The trip to Oregon and the cozy journey in the van-camper had been everything she’d expected. Crawling hands and a crawling mind. She had finally told Carlos that she’d contracted a serious venereal disease on her previous assignment. He refused to believe her. Quite calmly, she’d told him then that if he persisted, she would put a bullet in him. She had displayed the small Belgian automatic she always wore in its wrist holster. Something about the clear calmness of her manner told him to believe this. But he had taken the rebuff in muttering bad grace.

  The job was another matter, though, and she’d wished him luck when he took off in his ridiculous bird-watching clothes. All through the long day then, when she’d been fulfilling her part of the cover by painting, she had grown increasingly nervous. There had been no particular thing on which to focus her uneasiness, nothing concrete to explain it. The whole scene bothered her. It reeked of trouble. Carlos had been predictably imprecise about his estimate of return time. It all depended on what he saw in his preliminary scan of the farm.

  “Shortly after dark at the latest,” he’d said. “You be a good wife and paint your pretty pictures while I go look for birds. When I come back, I’ll teach you all about the birds and the bees.”

  “Carlos!”

  “Ahhh, my love, someday I shall teach you to say that exquisite name with true passion.” And the bastard had chucked her under the chin as he took his leave.

  Tymiena had watched him zigzag his way up the grass-brown slope into the trees. The day was already warm and filled with that special kind of insect-singing stillness that spoke of more heat to come. Sighing, she had taken out her watercolor materials. She actually was quite a good watercolorist and, occasionally, during the long day she had experienced real involvement in capturing the essence of the autumn fields. The golden browns were particularly warm and inviting.

  Shortly after midday, she put her painting aside temporarily and fixed herself a light lunch of sliced hard-boiled eggs and yogurt cold from the camper’s icebox. During the break, although the camper’s interior was oven hot, she stayed inside to check over the instruments. To her surprise, the speed-trap warning, which could be turned on its base and had a null indicator, showed radar activity in the direction of the farm. There was a clear signal aimed at the camper.

  Radar surveillance of her from the farm?

  She interpreted this as a danger sign and thought of going after Carlos to call him back. An alternative was to warm up the radio and report this development to headquarters. She knew with a sure instinct that headquarters would make light of it. And Carlos had ordered her to stay with the camper. In the end, she opted for neither course. Her own indecision added a frustrating accent to the nervousness that afflicted her throughout the afternoon. The sense of danger accumulated. She felt that something was warning her to get out of there. Leave the camper and get out of there! The camper was a big, fat target.

  In the half-light of dusk, she folded up her painting tablet, dropped it and her paints on the cab seat, and slipped into the seat. It took a moment to warm up the radio and she checked the signal monitor, found a search resonance fanning across her own frequency. When she keyed her transmitter, the search resonance homed on her signal and jammed it. The monitor howled with the interference. She slapped the off switch, stared up the dusky hillside toward the farm. The place was not visible from this parking spot, but she felt it out there as a malevolent presence.

  There was still no sign of Carlos.

  Darkness would be on her within minutes. She felt nervously for the little automatic in its wrist holster.

  What the hell was delaying Carlos?

  She turned off all of the camper’s lights, sat in the settling darkness. Radar from the farm’s direction. They jammed her radio. This case had turned nasty. She stood up, moved softly to the rear door, slipped out on the side opposite the farm. The van itself would shield her from that searching beam. She dropped to all fours and worked her way swiftly into the tall grass. She had seen cows far down in the pasture below her and she headed for them with a sure instinct. She had grown up on a Wyoming cattle ranch and, although she preferred approaching cattle on horseback, she felt no threat from them. The threat was behind her, somewhere up at Hellstrom’s farm. The cows would offer her a masking confusion, concealment from that radar sweep. If Carlos returned, he’d turn on the camper’s lights. She would see that from a safe distance in the pastureland. Somehow, she did not expect Carlos to return. This whole situation did not make sense, and it had not made sense from the beginning, but she trusted her own instinct for self-preservation.

  The words of Nils Hellstrom.

  This primeval planet Earth is an arena of continual contest where only the most versatile and resourceful endure. On this testing ground where the mighty dinosaur staggered and fell, one silent witness hangs on. This witness remains our guide to human survival. This witness, the insect, has a three-hundred-million-year head start on mankind, but we will overtake him. He dominates our earth today and exploits his dominion well. With each new generation come new experiments in shape and function, transforming him into specters as limitless as the imagination of the insane. Yet, what this witness can do, we of the Hive can do because we are witness of him.

  Old Harvey led his troop from a concealed perimeter exit at the northern edge of the Hive. Sod rolled back, a stump with a mucilage-sealed earth plug folded outward on a silent hinge, and the troop emerged into the night. They were lightly clad in dark gray and the night was cold, but they ignored the chill. Each carried a stunwand and wore a night-vision mask with a powerful infrared emitter (of Hive manufacture) around its rim. They looked like a troop of skin divers and the wands were like strange double-ended spears.

  The stump-plug was seated securely before they left it, all sign of their passage removed.

  They fanned out over the field and moved northward.

  Old Harvey had chosen twenty-three of the key workers, mostly aggressive males, and he had seen to it that the females received hormones to hype them before he’d issued his careful instructions.

  They wanted this Outsider female alive. Nils needed the information she carried. She was probably down among the cows. The cows could be frightened off with a low stun, but none were to be killed. This was not a sweep; it was a search. Only the Outsider female would go eventually into the vats from this venture, but that would come after she had given up the necessary information.

  It had been a long time since Old Harvey had participated in a hunt and he felt the excitement of it pumping in his veins. There was life in this old worker yet!

  He signaled for Saldo to take the left flank and moved out to the right himself. The night air tasted of many scents in his nostrils. There were the cattle, the dust in the tall grass, the raw earth, and the subtle esters of insects, a touch of tree resin. It was all there in his sensitive nostrils, but he could not separate out an odor that said the Outsider female was ahead of him. If she were there, the nightsight would reveal her.

  Saldo had moved immediately to his assigned position and Old Harvey relaxed on that score. The young man was green, but his potential was enormous. The regular reports to Hellstrom pleased them both mightily. Saldo was among the twenty or so who might someday step into Hellstrom’s sandals. He was one of the smaller, energy-saving new breed, dark and slim, filled with a nervous energy and willingness to please, but with his own mind showing more strongly each day. He would be a p
ower in the Hive someday, or he might even take a swarm of his own out to start a new hive.

  The searchers had spread into a wide fan, walking openly down into the pastureland. Old Harvey noted that it was a good night for this search. Clouds were beginning to cover the sky, obscuring the late-rising waning moon. The cattle could be seen easily in the nightsight reflection. He kept his eyes on the scattered clumps of trees, however, ignoring the cattle for the moment. They passed one small herd with minimal disturbance of the animals, although the warm smell of the cows excited the hunter drive in the entire troop. Saldo and two others searched through the herd, making sure the animals screened no Outsider.

  Hunt excitement could not be denied, though. It was evidenced by an increasing nervousness in the troop and an outflow of external hormones that began to spook the cattle. More and more, individual cows and then whole groups of them snorted and ran off with a panicked thumping.

  Old Harvey began to regret that he had not included a selective hormone suppressant in his preparations. The subtle chemical signals that one animal could send to another had their uses at times, but they introduced complexities now. He kept his attention on the trees, however, leaving the cattle for Saldo and the others to scan. Nightsight gave his surroundings a faint silver cast, as though the light came from within every object he saw.

  She will hear us coming and she will try to hide in a tree, he told himself. It’s her style.

  He couldn’t say why or how he knew this from just one afternoon’s observation, but he felt certain of it. She would hide in a tree.

  Old Harvey heard a night bird call from far off to his right and felt his heartbeat quicken. He was not too old for the sweeps. Perhaps it would be a good thing to go out occasionally with the workers.

  The words of Nils Hellstrom.

  Unlike other creatures who struggled against their environment, the insect learned early to seek its protective embrace. He created an endless wardrobe of camouflage. He and his environment became one. When predators came, he was nowhere to be found. So artistic were his methods of deception that predators could crawl upon his body in their search for prey. He did not choose merely one means of escape, but countless means. Not for him speed or the treetops, but both of these, and more.