Hellstrom''s Hive

“No,” one of the observers called.

  “Then use radio,” Hellstrom said. “Call the district Forest Service office in Lakeview. Tell them we’ve had a little grass fire here, but our people have it under control. We will not need Outside help.”

  Saldo turned away to obey his instructions and marveled at the way all the scattered pieces of Hive security were gathered into Hellstrom’s consciousness. No one but Hellstrom had thought about the danger of Outside fire fighters. Another observer was calling to Hellstrom as Saldo let himself out of the aerie.

  Hellstrom took the call, recognizing a physical-research specialist on the screen. The specialist began talking as soon as Hellstrom came into range of the pickup. “Get your interfering observer out of here, Nils!”

  “Has the observer caused trouble in the lab?” Hellstrom asked.

  “We are no longer in the lab.”

  “Not in – where are you?”

  “We have taken over the main gallery at level fifty, the entire gallery. We must have it cleared for our installation. Your observer insists you told him to stay here.”

  Hellstrom thought about that gallery – more than a mile long. “Why do you need the entire gallery?” he asked. “We have essential support –”

  “Your stupid workers can use the side tunnels!” the specialist snarled. “Get this cretin out of here! He is delaying us.”

  “The entire gallery,” Hellstrom said, “is quite a –”

  “Your own information made this necessary,” the specialist explained in a tone of weary patience. “The Outsider observations you so kindly brought us. The problem is a matter of size. We are going to use the entire gallery. If your observer interferes, you will find him in the vats.”

  The connection was broken with an angry blap!

  From the Hive Manual.

  The most powerful socializing force in the universe is mutual dependence. The fact that our key workers eat an additional diet of leader food should never obscure from them their interdependence with those not chosen for this privilege.

  Clovis lay in deep shade beneath a madrona copse about five hundred yards southeast of the gate into Hellstrom’s farm. She could see swarms of people fighting the grass fires up by the fence and some of them obviously had guns, not those mysterious humming weapons she’d seen knocking some of her team flat. Christ! There must be hundreds of people up there fighting those fires! Blue gray smoke spiraled upward from the fires and she could smell the alkali bitterness of the smoke as some of it drifted across her position.

  She held her pistol in her right hand, resting it over her left forearm to steady it. They would come from that direction, obviously. DT had worked down to the right behind her with the burp gun. She glanced back, trying to spot him. He’d said to give him ten minutes, then move back. He’d cover her.

  She thought about the brief battle in the farmyard. Holy Jesus! She had never expected anything even remotely like that experience. Gawdawful, yes, but not that. Nude men and women carrying odd double-tipped weapons. She could hear the strange crackling hum of the damn things even yet. From the way her team had fallen under that weird barrage, she suspected the things were lethal.

  A new kind of weapon: that had to be the answer to Project 40. Well, they’d expected a weapon, but not something like this.

  Why were the people nude?

  She had not yet allowed herself to ask what might have happened to Eddie Janvert. Her original guess stood. Dead, and probably by one of those odd weapons. The things had a limited range, however: about one hundred yards, she made it. Bullets from her pistol had the reach on them. The trick was to keep the attackers at a distance and look out for the few with guns.

  She glanced at her wristwatch: three minutes before she could move out.

  God, it was hot. Dust from the grass tickled her nose. She stifled a sneeze. Something moved on the near slope of the hillside above the fence to the left of the gate. She snapped off two shots, reloaded, heard another shot from behind her and a call from DT. He was in place already. Good. To hell with waiting out the full ten minutes. She got to her knees, turned, and sprinted out of the tree shadows in a running crouch, not looking back. That was DT’s job, to cover her back trail. The odd humming sound came from the hillside behind her, but there was only a faint tingling sensation along her spine. She wondered if it could be imagination, but fear added new energy to her muscles and she increased her speed.

  A shot sounded ahead of her on her left; another, another. DT using the burp gun on single shot to slow down pursuers. She shifted course slightly to curve around behind the place where the shots originated. She still couldn’t see DT, but there was an oak tree down there and some cows running away beyond it in an awkward, bounding gait. She picked an oak to the left of the cows as her target, ran, and caught the tree with her left arm as she came to it, swung around behind it, the tree and her arc of momentum stopping her. Sweat soaked her body and her chest ached with each panting breath. More shots came from DT’s position then, but she still couldn’t see him. Six nude figures were sprinting down the open rangeland from the valley, each carrying one of those weird weapons. She drew three deep breaths to steady herself, rested her gun hand against the tree, and spaced off four aimed shots. Two of the sprinters dropped with a jolting sprawl that said they’d been hit. The others dove into the grass.

  DT came into sight abruptly, dropping from the tree, and she realized he’d climbed the damn tree. Good man. He landed cat-footed and running, bore to his left, not looking back, not looking across at Clovis. A good teammate would cover for him and he had now accepted Clovis as a good teammate.

  Clovis reloaded, watching the grass move where the four survivors of her fusillade had gone to ground. They were crawling, obviously trying to get within range for their weapons. The grass rippled ominously, moving, coming nearer and nearer. She concentrated on gauging distance. At about four hundred feet, she lifted the magnum and began shooting. She took her time, spacing the shots carefully. At her third shot, a figure lurched into view, toppled backward. Three others arose from the grass, charged, pointing their weapons at her. Taking her time – each of the remaining three shots had to count – she sighted on the first figure, a bald woman with face contorted into a fierce grimace. Clovis’s first shot stopped her as though she had run into a wall. Her weapon flew through the air as she fell sideways. The others dove for the grass. Clovis used her two remaining shots, putting them into the grass where the attackers had dropped. Without waiting to see the effect, she turned and ran, reloading as she went.

  “Over here! Over here!”

  It was DT calling from another oak off to her left. She changed course toward it, guessing he’d called because there were no more trees in the rangeland beyond. It was open grassland down there and cropped close by cattle for at least half a mile. DT caught her arm to help stop her.

  “You know, that’s weird,” he said. “See how the cows have eaten the pasture down below us, but not up toward the farm. It’s almost as though the cows avoided that area. The ones I scared away from my first stand up there were real spooky, as though they’d been herded up there by something below us. I don’t see a sign of anyone down there, though.”

  She took a moment to catch her breath. “You have any bright ideas how we’re going to get out of this?”

  “Keep on like we are,” he said.

  “We’ve got to get out and report what we’ve seen,” she said. She looked up at him, but he was keeping his attention on their back trail.

  “I think you got another one of those creeps that dove into the grass,” he said. “Only one of them seems to be moving. You ready to make another run?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be. You see anything of the one I missed?”

  “He’s still crawling, but he’s gonna run outa grass pretty soon. Let’s separate now. You bear a bit to your left until you hit the road, then try to follow it. I’ll hold right. The creek should be over there; you can see the line
of trees off that way about a mile. We’ll give ’em two targets to chase. If I can reach the creek –”

  DT had been scanning the ground toward the farm as he began speaking and, still speaking, he turned to look in the direction they would run. Clovis whirled around at the startled way DT stopped speaking. She let out an involuntary gasp. A solid line of hairless, nude human figures blocked their escape route. The line stood about five hundred yards below them, beginning far off to their left in the scrub oaks of rising ground there and reaching into the distance at the right, even beyond the trees that marked the creekbank where DT had expected to take cover.

  “Jeeeesus!” DT said.

  There must be ten thousand of them! Clovis thought.

  “I haven’t seen that many gooks since Nam,” DT husked. “Jeeeeesus! It’s like we stirred up a whole anthill of ’em.”

  Clovis nodded, thinking: That’s exactly what we’ve done. The whole thing fell into place: Hellstrom was a front for some kind of weirdo cult. She noted the pale skins. They must live underground. The farm was just a cover. She stifled a hysterical giggle. No, the farm was only a lid! She raised her gun, intending to take as many of that ominous advancing line as possible, but a crackling hum from close behind numbed her body and mind. She heard one shot as she toppled, but could not decide whether it was from her gun or DT’s.

  From Nils Hellstrom’s diary.

  The concept of a colony planted directly in the midst of an existing human society is not unique. There have been many secret groups and movements in human history. Gypsies provide a crude analogue of our way even today. No, we are not unique in this. But our Hive is as far removed from those others as they are removed from primitive, cave-dwelling humans. We are like the colonial protozoan, carchesium, all of us in the Hive attached to a single, branching stem, and that stem concealed in the very ground beneath the other society that believes itself to be the meek who will inherit the earth. Meek! That word originally meant “mute and silent.”

  It had been a frantic and confused flight from JFK Airport – an hour’s layover at O’Hare, the quick transfer to a chartered flight at Portland and the noisy discomfort of a single engine all the way up the Columbia Gorge, and, then, as evening came down over them, the long haul diagonally across Oregon into the southeastern corner. Merrivale was in a violent mood when the plane set him down in Lakeview, and it was a mood amplified by the elation simmering in him.

  When he had least expected it, in fact when he had resigned himself to a degrading personal defeat, they had called on him. They – a board whose existence he had known about, but never identified – they had chosen Joseph Merrivale as “our best hope to salvage something from this mess.”

  With both Peruge and the Chief dead, who else did they have? This gave him a sense of personal power which, in turn, fed his anger. Who was he to be subjected to such discomfort?

  The report passed to him quickly in Portland did little to mollify him. Peruge was exposed as criminally careless – spending the night with a woman like that! And while on a job!

  The small plane landed in darkness and there was a gray station wagon with only a driver to greet him. The fact that the driver introduced himself as Waverly Gammel, SAIC (FBI-Special Agent in Charge) renewed the worries Merrivale had managed to keep largely suppressed on the flight, and this, too, fed his anger.

  They could be throwing me to the wolves, he thought, as he got into the car beside the driver, leaving his luggage for the pilot to dump in the back. This thought had simmered throughout the long trip from Portland. He had looked down at the occasional winking of lights and thought bitterly that people were going about their ordinary business down there – eating, going to movies, watching television, visiting friends. It was a comforting, ordinary life which Merrivale often fantasized should have been his lot. The other side of his fantasy told him, though, that the silent pattern of safety below depended largely upon his efforts to maintain it. They did not know down there what he was doing for them, the sacrifices he made . . .

  Even when you followed your orders to the letter, that didn’t help protect you one bit. The sudden promotion had not changed this. It was a universal law: the big fed upon the small and there was always a bigger to make one smaller.

  Gammel was a man with a young face and iron gray hair, harshly chiseled planes in his face that suggested American Indian ancestry. The eyes were deeply set and shadowy in the light from the car’s dash. His voice was deep and revealed a faint twang. Texas?

  “Bring me up to date,” Merrivale said as Gammel took the car out of the airport parking lot. The FBI man drove with an easy competence without concern for extending the car’s life. They bounced out a rough track from the airport and turned left onto blacktop.

  “You know, of course, that there hasn’t been a word from the team you sent into the farm,” Gammel said.

  “They told me in Portland,” Merrivale said, forgetting momentarily to impose his superior British accent. He added quickly, “Bloody lash-up!”

  Gammel stopped for an arterial sign, turned left onto a wider blacktop, waited for a noisy bus to pass before continuing. “For the moment, we agree with your assessment that the Fosterville deputy is untrustworthy and that there may be other questionables, both in the sheriff’s office and in the community itself. Therefore, we are trusting no locals.”

  “What’re you doing about the deputy?”

  “He was taken along by your people, you know. He hasn’t been heard from, either.”

  “What’re you telling the local authorities?”

  “Spy stuff; hush-hush.”

  “They’re willing to stand aside?”

  “Not willing, but they’ve let discretion overcome their valor; the political suggestions we initiated on high have the general tone of absolute commands at this level.”

  “Quite. Presumably, you’ve already invested the countryside around the farm.”

  Gammel took his eyes off the road for a moment. Invested? Oh, yes: occupied. He said, “We’ve only brought in eleven men. It must remain at that for the moment. The Oregon Highway Patrol sent three cars and six men, but we haven’t let them fully into the picture. We’re mounting a limited operation on the rebuttable presumption that your office’s assessment is correct. However, at the slightest sign that you’ve misjudged the situation, we’ll be forced to return to our book of rules. Understood?”

  Rebuttable presumption, Merrivale thought. It was his kind of phrase and he savored it, tucking it away for later personal use in other company. He did not, however, like the implications behind the phrase and he said so.

  “Surely,” Gammel said, “you understand that we’re operating well outside conventions. That team you sent in there had no legal standing whatsoever. That was an assault force, pure and simple. You guys make up your own rules as you go along. We can’t always do that. My instructions are clear. I’m to do everything in my power to help you with a cover story and/or provide reasonable protection for your people as I am able, but – and this is a mighty large but – these instructions hold only for as long as your assessment of the situation is borne out.”

  Merrivale listened in frozen silence. It looked more and more as though the board had not promoted him, but were throwing him to the wolves. He had been an associate of two people, now dead, whose policies no longer could be defended. The board had sent him out here in the field all alone, saying, “You’ll get every assistance from the FBI in the field. If it is consistent with policy, other backup will be sent along as you request it.”

  Gobbledygook!

  He was one clear target if things went any more sour. As though that were possible! He could almost hear the reorganization gears grinding back in Baltimore and Washington. Well, you knew what kind of a business this was when you got into it, Merrivale. They’d look professionally sorrowful while they brought up that standard phrase always used for such occasions: In this business, you take your lumps when that’s required of you.
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  That was the situation. No doubt of it. If the situation could be salvaged, he’d do that, but first he had to salvage himself. “Bloody hell!” he muttered and meant every syllable of it. “Let’s have the rest of it. What’ve you managed to learn about my people?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Merrivale was outraged. He turned, studied Gammel’s face in the light of an oncoming car. The FBI man held his features immobile, a dark piece of stone for all the emotion showing.

  “I would like that nothing explained, provided you’re able to explain it,” Merrivale said, his tone distant and acid.

  “As per our instructions,” Gammel said, “we have been waiting for you.”

  Just following orders, Merrivale thought.

  He could see the implications in that. There was going to be only one responsible target in this situation. That was in Gammel’s orders, too. No doubt of it. No bloody doubt of it.

  “I find this almost inconceivable,” Merrivale said. He turned, looking out at the darkness flashing with vague movements on his right as the car sped toward Fosterville. He could make out that they were passing through open countryside, the road climbing slightly, dim shapes of hills ahead in starlight. Few other cars shared the road. The dark landscape carried a sense of loneliness which rubbed at Merrivale’s feelings of abandonment.

  “Let’s not misunderstand each other,” Gammel said. “I came out here alone to pick you up just so we could talk openly.” Gammel glanced at Merrivale. The poor sod was in the jaws of the vise, no mistaking that. Was he just now becoming aware of it?

  “Then why aren’t you talking openly?” Merrivale demanded.

  He’s more on the attack than the situation requires, Gammel thought. Does that mean he has information that might throw his agency’s position into doubt? I wonder . . .

  “I’m doing my best within my instructions,” Gammel said. “I had less than an hour at Fosterville before they signaled that you’d be coming in at Lakeview. I had to rush like hell to get there. They said you were coming in at Lakeview because it had the nearest field with lights. Was that it, or was there another reason?”