Hellstrom's Hive

  “Yes. They would’ve been delivered just about the time Carlos and Tymiena were supposed to be there.”

  “Weird, isn’t it?”

  “It fits an odd kind of pattern,” Peruge said. “We just haven’t found the precise nature of that pattern.” He cast about in his mind, wondering at the reason for diamond drill bits in a movie company. There was just no explaining it and no sense wondering without more evidence. More likely to come up with a wrong answer than a right one, and, either way, he couldn’t be certain.

  “I agree,” Janvert said. “Anything more for this report?”

  “Nothing.” Peruge signed off, replaced the equipment in its cover packaging, stored it in his shaving kit.

  Janvert had been more talkative than usual, and the surface attempts to be pleasant couldn’t be anything but false from that feisty little bastard.

  Peruge thought about this as he lay in the quiet darkness of his motel bed. He knew he had been cut off. He was alone, removed even from the protection of the Chief, and he wondered why he went on.

  Because I want to be rich, he thought. Richer than the bitch of the board. I will be, too, if I can get my hands on Hellstrom’s Project 40.

  Script consultation, Nils Hellstrom speaking.

  On the screen, the audience will see a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. We will see much more and, in a deeper sense, we want the audience to see what we see, unconsciously. The butterfly personifies our own long struggle. It is the long darkness of humankind when the wild ones imagined they talked, one to another. It is the metamorphosis, the transformation of our Hive into the salvation of the human species. It foreshadows the day when we will emerge and show our beauty to the admiring universe.

  “The transmitter is in his wristwatch,” Saldo said. “We caught it just before he turned the thing off.”

  “Good work,” Hellstrom said.

  They stood in the electronic gloom of the barn aerie, the security command post, workers going about their jobs quietly all around, a sense of determination in every movement. Nothing would get through this guard.

  “Those probes we detected came from Steens Mountain,” Saldo said. “We’ve located the position on the chart.”

  “Excellent. Is their lack of success igniting a renewed effort or are they quiet now?”

  “Quiet. I’ve arranged to send a picnic party into the area tomorrow. They’ll play and enjoy themselves and report back tomorrow night. The party will be composed only of extremely experienced fronts.”

  “Don’t count on them learning much.”

  Saldo nodded agreement.

  Hellstrom closed his eyes tightly in distress and fatigue. He couldn’t seem to get enough rest and what little he got failed to restore him. What they needed and would never find was a way to send Peruge packing, a way to answer all of his questions without answering them. Those mysterious, probing questions about metallurgy and new inventions irritated Hellstrom. What could that possibly have to do with Project 40? New invention – yes, possibly. But metallurgy? He decided to communicate his question to the lab at the earliest opportunity.

  Saying of the Hive specialists.

  How primitive and far behind us are the behaviorists of the wild Outside!

  Peruge heard the scratching at his door as part of a dream. It was a dog from his childhood calling him to get up for breakfast. Good old Danny. Peruge could see the wide, ugly face, the dripping jowls, in his dream. He actually felt the fact that he was in bed, clad only in pajama bottoms as had always been usual for him. Abruptly, circuits closed in his memory. That dog had been dead for years! He was awake instantly, silent and probing with all of his senses for evidence of danger.

  The scratching continued.

  He slipped his heavy automatic from under his pillow, arose, and went to the door. The floor was cold against his bare feet. Standing at one side with the weapon ready, he jerked the door open on its chain.

  There was a night light outside his door. It cast a yellow glow on Fancy, who stood there wrapped in something furry, dark, and bulky. She supported a bicycle with her left hand.

  Peruge closed the door, released the chain, swung the door wide. He knew he appeared strange standing there in his pajama bottoms with a big man-killer automatic in his hand, but he sensed the urgent need to get her out of sight into his room.

  He felt a surge of elation. They’d sent this little pussy to compromise him, eh? But he had one of them outside their goddamned farm!

  Fancy entered without speaking, wheeling her bicycle. She leaned the bicycle against the wall as Peruge closed and locked the door. When he turned toward her, she was facing him and removing her outer garment, a long fur coat. She threw the coat over the bicycle’s handlebars, stood there in the thin white smock she’d worn when he’d last seen her. Her eyes were focused intently on his with a smoky, mocking look.

  Fun first? Peruge wondered. Or business first? His hand was slippery with perspiration against the butt of the automatic. God, she was a sexy bitch!

  He went to the window beside the door, slipped back the draperies, peered out. He could see no watchers. He crossed to the rear window, looked out over the parking lot toward the mountain. No prying strangers visible there, either. Nobody. What time was it, for Christ’s sake? And why wasn’t the bitch talking? He crossed to the nightstand, lifted his wristwatch: 1:28 A.M.

  Fancy watched all of this activity, a half-smile on her lips. Outsiders were such strange creatures. This one appeared even stranger than usual. Their bodies told them what they should do and they constantly disobeyed. Well, she had come prepared.

  Peruge glanced at her from his position by the nightstand. Her hands were clenched into fists, but she appeared to be carrying no weapon. He slipped his gun into a drawer of the stand. Was she being quiet because this room had been bugged? That couldn’t be! He’d made certain the room was clean. He moved carefully, being sure not to turn his back on her. Why had she come on a bicycle? And in a fur coat, for the love of God! He wondered if he should alert the night watch on the mountain. Not yet. Fun first.

  Fancy reached up with her left hand as though she had read his mind, unbuttoned the front of her smock, shrugged out of it, and let it fall. She stood there naked, a sensuous pocket-venus body that sent his pulse racing. There were open sandals on her feet. She kicked them off, stirring up dust from her ride into town.

  Peruge, his eyes glittering, wet his lips with his tongue, and said, “Aren’t you something!”

  Still without speaking, Fancy approached him, reached up, and clasped both of his bare arms. His left arm tingled as she touched it and he smelled a sudden, heavy musk. His gaze jerked toward the tingling in shocked alarm and he saw a tiny, flesh-colored ampule crushed beneath her forefinger against his skin, a fleck of his own blood there. In panic, he knew he should hurl her away from him, call for help from his night watch, but his muscles remained frozen while that tingling spread through his body. His gaze slipped from the ampule on his arm to Fancy’s firm breasts, the dark nipples protruding with sensual tension.

  As though a fog was creeping up from his loins, Peruge felt his will dissolve until his only awareness was of the woman who was now clinging to him, pressing against him with surprising strength, forcing him backward onto the bed.

  Now, Fancy spoke. “You want to breed with me? That’s good.”

  From the Hive Manual.

  A basic aim of the socializing process should be to create the widest possible tolerance of diversity among the society’s components.

  “Fancy’s missing!” Saldo said.

  He had come to Hellstrom’s quarters, racing down the corridors and galleries that were never lacking activity, ignoring the upset his running passage created among the workers.

  Hellstrom sat upright in his bed, rubbing sleep from his eyes, shaking his head to wake himself. He had been in deep sleep, his first in days; praying for a good rest before tomorrow’s certain confrontation with Peruge and whomever Peruge a
dded to the pressure on the Hive.

  Fancy missing!

  He peered up at Saldo’s frightened face in the cell glow. “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Hellstrom exhaled a sigh of relief. “How did she get out of the Hive? Where is she?”

  “She used that faulty emergency ventilator in the rock at the north perimeter. She had a bicycle.”

  “Weren’t there guards?”

  “She stunned them with de-hype.”

  “But the security watch!”

  “They missed it,” Saldo confessed. “She’s obviously used this route before. She went into the trees and avoided every one of our detectors.”

  Of course, Hellstrom thought. A bicycle. Why a bicycle? Where had she gone? “How did she get a bicycle?” he asked.

  “It’s the one we took from the Outsider, Depeaux.”

  “What was that still doing around? Why wasn’t it reduced for salvage?”

  “Some of the engineers were playing with it. They were thinking of manufacturing our own model to speed up delivery service in the lower galleries.”

  “Which direction did she go?” Hellstrom levered himself out of the bed. What time was it? He glanced at the crystal clock on his wall: 3:51 A.M.

  “She apparently went across the Palmer Bridge. There are tracks.”

  Toward town then. Why?

  “The guards she stunned say she was wearing Outsider garments,” Saldo said. “Wardrobe reports a fur coat missing. She was into Hive stores again, too. We haven’t yet determined what she took.”

  “How long has she been gone?” Hellstrom asked. He slipped his feet into Hive sandals, groped for a robe. It was cold, but he knew that was only his own lowered metabolism.

  “Almost four hours,” Saldo said. “Guards were unconscious for a long time.” He rubbed at the healing wound on his jaw. “I’m sure she’s gone into town. Two chemical trackers went as far along her trail as they dared. She was still headed for town when they broke off.”

  “Peruge,” Hellstrom said.

  “What?”

  “She’s gone to breed with Peruge.”

  “Of course! Shall I call Linc and have him –”

  “No.” Hellstrom shook his head from side to side.

  Saldo trembled with impatience. “But that bicycle belonged to one of Peruge’s agents!”

  “Who identifies bicycles? They’re not likely to make the connection. Fancy won’t tell him where that machine came from.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. Fancy has a one-track mind where breeding is concerned. I should’ve realized that when I saw her go on the attack with Peruge as target.”

  “That man is clever! She could tell him something without even realizing it.”

  “A possibility we’ll have to investigate. But for now, you will alert Linc. Tell him where she is and see that he makes certain they don’t take her away for interrogation. Peruge is sure to have his friends watching him. We don’t want any more activity around that motel than absolutely necessary.”

  Saldo stared at Hellstrom in shocked silence. He had expected Hellstrom to call up all of the Hive’s defensive resources. This was not an adequate response!

  “Any more indications of swarming pressure?” Hellstrom asked.

  “No. The – the ventilation appears to have helped.”

  “Fancy is fertile,” Hellstrom said. “Getting her pregnant by an Outsider will help, too. She becomes quite tractable while producing a child.”

  “Ahhhhh –” Saldo stood in admiration of Hellstrom’s wisdom.

  “I know what she took from stores,” Hellstrom said. “She will have a male sex-fraction in an ampule to hype up Peruge. She wants to breed with him, that’s all. Let her. Outsiders have extremely odd reactions to this natural form of human behavior.”

  “So it is said,” Saldo murmured. “I’ve studied the behavioral precautions for work Outside.”

  “Depend on it,” Hellstrom said, smiling. “I have seen this happen many times. Peruge will show up here tomorrow the figure of contrition. He will be with Fancy and very defensive. He will feel guilty. That will make him vulnerable to us. Yes – I believe I know how to handle this situation now, thanks to Fancy. Bless her.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The wild Outsiders aren’t all that different from us, chemically. It took Fancy to remind me of this. The same techniques we use to make our workers tractable, domesticated, and yielding to the Hive’s needs will work on Outsiders.”

  “In their food?”

  “Or their water or even their air.”

  “Are you sure Fancy will return?” Saldo could not keep down the niggling doubt.

  “I’m sure.”

  “But the bicycle –”

  “Do you really think they’ll identify it?”

  “We cannot risk it!”

  “If it makes you feel better, warn Linc about this possibility. I think Peruge’s senses will be so dulled after a night of hyped-up breeding with Fancy that he wouldn’t even recognize a bicycle when he saw it.”

  Saldo frowned. There was a manic note to Hellstrom’s manner and voice which was deeply disturbing. “I don’t like this, Nils.”

  “You will,” Hellstrom assured him. “Trust me. Tell Linc you are sending in a special security team. I want their instructions to be explicit, no misunderstandings. Go over them with the utmost care. They are not to interfere tonight. Their major task is to insure that Fancy is not removed from that motel. She must spend an uninterrupted night with Peruge. In the morning, they are to collect her at the first opportunity and bring her to me. I wish to thank her in person. The Hive does learn; it does react to danger as a single organism. It is just as I have always suspected.”

  “I agree we should make sure she gets back here,” Saldo said, “but thank her?”

  “Naturally.”

  “For what?”

  “For reminding us that Outsiders share our chemistry.”

  Wisdom of the Hive.

  The superior specialist, bred to the demands of our most basic needs, will win for us in the end.

  Peruge awoke in the gray dawn gloom, swimming up to consciousness from some faraway, energy-drained place. He turned his head to see the tangled confusion of his bed, came to the slow realization that he was alone in the bed and this should be important information. A bicycle with a coat thrown over the handlebars stood against the wall beside the door. There was a crumpled white garment on the floor between bed and door. He stared at the bicycle, wondering why he felt that a bicycle should be so important.

  A bicycle?

  Water splashed in the bathroom. Someone was humming.

  Fancy!

  He pushed himself to a sitting position, his mind as muddled as the bed. Fancy! For the love of God! What had she used on him? He had a foggy remembrance of what he thought were eighteen orgasms. An aphrodisiac? If so, it was more potent than anything in his wildest fantasies.

  Water still splashed in the bathroom. She was taking a shower. God! How could she move?

  He tried to reassemble the night in his memory, met only the wildest confusion, a recurrent image of writhing flesh. He thought: That was me! For God’s sake! That was me! What was that stuff Fancy had given him? Could that be Project 40, for the love of heaven? He wanted to laugh hysterically, but couldn’t summon the strength. The sound of splashing water came to an abrupt stop. His attention moved to the bathroom door. Movement there, the voice humming. Where did she get the strength?

  The door opened and Fancy emerged, a towel wrapped around her loins, another towel in her hands with which she was drying her hair.

  “Good morning, lover,” she said. And she thought: He looks completely used up.

  He stared at her without speaking, memory searching.

  “Didn’t you like breeding with me?” she asked.

  That was it! That had been the thing he had tried to remember but couldn’t until she spoke. Breed with her?
Could she be one of those kooky, turned-on members of the new generation: sex for procreation only?

  “What’d you do to me?” he asked. His voice came out in a husky croaking which shocked him.

  “Do? I just –”

  He lifted his left arm to expose the area where she had injected him with that mysterious musky substance. Faint discoloration there revealed a subcutaneous bruise.

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Didn’t you like it when you were hyped up?”

  He levered himself back against the bed’s headrest, adjusted a pillow behind him. God, he was tired. “Hyped,” he said. “So you shot me with some kind of dope.”

  “I only gave you an additional store of what every male has when he’s ready to breed,” she said, knowing her tone betrayed her own puzzlement. Outsiders were so strange about breeding.

  Peruge’s head ached and he felt that her words increased the pain. Slowly, he turned, looked squarely at her. God! What a voluptuous body! He spoke painfully, but clearly, “What’s this breeding crap?”

  “I know you use other words for what we did,” she explained, trying to sound reasonable, “but that’s what we like to call it – breeding.”

  “We?”

  “My – friends and I.”

  “You breed with them?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Crazy communal hopheads! Could that be what Hellstrom was hiding: sex orgies and aphrodisiac drugs? Peruge felt a deep and sudden prurient envy. Suppose that was what these crazies did! Suppose they had regular parties such as the one he’d experienced with Fancy. It was wrong, of course. But what a hold an experience like that could get on a man! On a woman, too, no doubt.

  It was criminal to do such things, but . . .

  Fancy dropped her towels, began putting on her smock, seemingly with no more concern about her nudity than she’d experienced the night before.

  Despite his headache and profound lassitude, Peruge marveled at her sensuous grace. She was all woman!