Depeaux recalled the bird the woman had knocked from the night sky. What was that weapon? Was it the answer to the mystery of Project 40? He decided to try another tack. “I saw some of your women friends kill a bird last night. They shouldn’t do that. Birds are an important part of –”
“Oh, be still!” Hellstrom spoke without turning. “Of course they killed a bird – and insects, rabbits, mice, and quite a few other creatures as well. We couldn’t waste the night sweep just picking you up.”
Depeaux shook his head. Night sweep? “Why do they do that?” he asked.
“For food, naturally.”
Hellstrom glanced back at his captive. “I must have time to consider the problem raised by your presence. I don’t suppose you’ll drop your subterfuges and tell me the whole story?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Depeaux protested, but he was sweating profusely and knew Hellstrom could read that sign.
“I see,” Hellstrom said. He sounded sad. “Do not try to escape. The two workers there know they must kill you if you try to get away. There’s no sense trying to talk to them. They don’t speak. They’re also quite jumpy; they can smell your difference. You are an Outsider in our midst and they’ve been trained to dispose of such intruders. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
Hellstrom strode from the room, pushing aside a sliding door. Before it closed, Depeaux glimpsed a wide corridor filled with milky light and thronging with humans – males and females, and all completely nude. Two of them passed the door as Hellstrom left, causing him to hesitate. The two, both women, carried what appeared to be a naked male body, the head and arms flopping, swaying.
From Nils Hellstrom’s diary.
It is a conceit that makes me write these lines, trying to imagine the specialists who will read them. Are you really there in some future time, or are you just creatures of my imagination? I know the Hive will need the abilities of readers for a long time, perhaps forever. But that’s an even longer time and it dwarfs my small utterances. You who may be reading these words, then, if you share my questionings, must realize that your talents as a reader may be abandoned eventually. It is a real question whether this specialty serves an infinite purpose. There may come a time when these words remain, but there will be no one to read them. In a practical sense, that is unlikely, too, because the material on which my words are recorded would then be recognized as useful stuff to be employed for other purposes. It must be a conceit then that I address myself to anyone. That I do so at all must be attributed to an instinct for short-term purpose. I support my brood mother’s solution to the Outsider problem. We must never merely oppose the Outsiders, but should work with compromise and constant pressure to absorb them into our unity. This is what we do now at my direction and, if you have changed that, I tell myself that helping you understand me may lie useful in your planning for the future.
Hellstrom had been awakened from his daysleep by a young female watchworker. Her observation screen had revealed the Outsider intruding on Hive territory. Hellstrom’s cell had been closed off for the privacy that a key worker could enjoy, and the young watchworker had come personally to Hellstrom, shaking his shoulder gently to awaken him. She had given him the information in the swift and silent gesture-language of the Hive.
The intruder could be observed on the hill above the Hive-head buildings. He was using binoculars to study the area. His approach had been noted far out by sensors in a perimeter tunnel. He had left a companion with a vehicle near the road to Fosterville. The entire message took three seconds.
With a sigh, Hellstrom slid from the foam-and-down warmth of his bed, flashed a hand signal indicating that he understood. The watchworker left the cell. Hellstrom crossed the floor’s smooth tiles, their coolness helping to awaken him, and he activated the bank of repeaters that gave him contact with the Hive’s security system sensors. He focused on the section the watchworker had indicated.
At first, Hellstrom had difficulty locating the Outside intruder in the tall grass. The light was always bad in that direction at this hour of the afternoon. He wondered if the watchworker could have been mistaken about the correct screen. The watchworkers got sensitive and twitchy at times, but he had yet to find one turning in a false alarm or making a major error.
Hellstrom studied the tall brown grass carefully. The panorama of dry grass in the hot afternoon light appeared unbroken. Abruptly, something moved in the grass at the ridgecrest. As though movement had created a new scene, he saw the intruder: the Outsider was a male clothed to match the grass so closely that it surely could not be accidental. More than seventy years of living the Hive life had made the necessity for concealment a reflex with Hellstrom. He had possessed the sense of caution long before he’d assumed a false age and moved out of the Hive to build an Outsider identity. Now, seeing the prying intruder, he moved briskly, slipped his feet into sandals, and draped a white lab smock over his body. As he moved, he glanced at the crystal-driven clock on his wall: 2:59 P.M. The clock, accurate to four seconds in a year, had been built by a brood mate whose breeding and training had sent her into the laboratories for life.
Hellstrom thought about the intruder. If this one waited as the others had, he could be taken in the dark. Hellstrom made a mental note to get the night sweep started early and with special preparations for this possibility. The Hive had to learn why these Outsiders were prying.
Before leaving his cell, Hellstrom studied the Hive’s outer perimeter on his repeaters and saw, far down in the valley, a van-camper with a woman seated beside it sketching on a tablet in her lap. He magnified the view, saw nervous tension in the woman’s shoulder muscles, an involuntary movement of the head that drew her gaze up the slopes leading to the Hive. She would have to be picked up, too. Why were they suspicious of the farm? Who was behind this? There was something professional about this intrusion which made Hellstrom’s heartbeat quicken.
He chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip while he searched inwardly for an instinct with which to meet this threat. The Hive was strong and hidden in a way that did not invite attention, but he knew how vulnerable it was, how little that strength would count against the shocked awareness of the Outsiders.
His gaze moved absently around his cell. It was one of the larger cubicles in the complex warren beneath the farm and the surrounding hills. It had been one of the first constructed by the original colonists who had brought their centuries-long migrations here under his brood mother’s guidance.
“It is time to stop running, my beloved workers. We, who have lived furtive double lives among the Outsiders for more than three hundred years, dissembling, always ready to move at the slightest suspicion, have come to the place that will shelter us and make us strong.”
She had claimed a vision guided her, a visit in her dreams from the blessed Mendel “whose words told us that the way we had always known was the true way.”
Hellstrom’s earliest education, the one he’d received before going Outside as a counterfeit teen-ager sent at last to get his “book learning,” had been filled with the thoughts of his brood mother.
“The best must breed with the best. In that way we produce the disparate workers we need for every task our Hive can confront.”
On that cold April day in 1876, when they had begun to dig out from the natural caverns beneath the farm, building their first Hive, she had told them, “We will perfect our way and thus become the ‘meek’ whose earth will one day welcome them.”
This cell he now occupied dated from that first digging, although the diggers and his brood mother had long ago gone into the vats. The cell was sixteen feet wide and twenty-two feet long, eight feet from floor to ceiling. It was not quite square at the rear to accommodate an arm of the original natural cavern. The cell could have had a door in that arm, but the decision had been made to put service conduits, piping, and other ducts there. From the original limestone labyrinth, the Hive had been extended downward more than a mile, reaching outwar
d in a circle almost two miles in diameter below the three-thousand-foot level. It was a teeming warren of nearly fifty thousand workers (far beyond his brood mother’s hopes), closely integrated with their own factories, hydroponics gardens, laboratories, breeding centers, even an underground river that helped produce the power they required. No wall of the original cavern could be seen now. All walls were a uniform smooth gray of their own mucilaginous prestressed concrete.
In Hellstrom’s own cell, over the years, the tough gray wall space had been covered with various plans and sketches involved in the Hive’s growth. He had never taken them down, a wasteful idiosyncrasy the Hive tolerated in very few workers. His walls were now thick with pasted-over records of the Hive’s vitality.
Although he had more cell space than others, his furnishings were otherwise Hive-standard: a bed formed of the mucilage slabs with rawhide lacing under a foam pad, chairs of similar construction, a desk of mucilage supports for a ceramic top in rich glass-green, twelve metal filing cabinets of Outsider manufacture (Hive cabinets were sturdier, but he fancied these for their reminder value), the repeater console with its screens and direct line into the central computer. A wardrobe with Outsider clothing in one corner marked him as one of the key workers who fronted for the Hive in that threatening world beyond their perimeters. Except for two adjustable lamps, one over the desk and the other over the repeater console, the room was illuminated by coved radiating tubes along the intersection of ceiling and walls, a standard practice in all of the galleries, tunnels, and cells of the Hive.
He could have had one of the newer and more sophisticated cells in the lower levels, but Hellstrom preferred this place that he had occupied since the day his brood mother had gone to the vats – “becoming one with us all.”
Hellstrom strode back and forth on the tiles of his floor now, worrying about the intruder. Whom did that man represent? Certainly, he was not there out of casual curiosity. Hellstrom sensed a powerful Outside force slowly turning its deadly attention toward the Hive.
He knew he could not delay his response longer. The watchworkers would be irritably restless. They needed commands and a feeling that proper action was being taken. Hellstrom bent to his console, coded his instructions, and sent them into the relay system. Those instructions would be transmitted throughout the warren. Key workers would take preassigned actions. Every worker selected by the relay system through the Hive’s central computer would see gesture signals on a screen. The silent language of the Hive would bind them into a common defense.
In common with many of the key workers who would unite thus, Hellstrom knew how thin the Hive’s defenses really were. The knowledge sent fear through him now and he longed for the mental oblivion of the common worker who had few concerns beyond immediate tasks.
Driven by his fear, Hellstrom opened a filing drawer, extracted a folder tagged “Julius Porter.” The ordinary vat mark had been stamped on the outside of the folder to tell what had happened to Porter’s flesh, as though he had been discarded breeding stock whose records were kept as commentary on offspring, but Porter had no offspring in the Hive. He had merely brought a sense of mysterious threat which he had left largely unanswered. Something about the new intruder made Hellstrom think of Porter. Hellstrom trusted such instincts. He glanced through the closely spaced lines of information inscribed in Hive code. Porter had carried credentials identifying him as an employee of the Blue Devil Fireworks Corporation of Baltimore. He had babbled something finally about “the agency.” This agency had represented in his terrified mind something that would revenge him.
Agency.
Hellstrom regretted now that they had sent Porter so soon into the vats. That had been callous and careless.
The idea of using the pain of a fellow creature, however, went against Hive sensitivities. Pain was a recognizable phenomenon. When it occurred in a worker and could not be eased, that worker might go to the vats. Outsiders did not behave this way, though. This was a Hive peculiarity. One killed to eat, to survive. The killing might cause pain, but that was quickly ended. One did not prolong it. Ohhh – survival might dictate another course, but the Hive had avoided those ways.
Presently, Hellstrom put the folder aside, depressed a key at his repeater station. He asked for one of the security overseers in the aerie watchroom of the barn-studio. The instrument that carried his voice was of Hive construction and he admired its flat functionalism as he waited for a response. Presently, Old Harvey came on the screen above the instrument. His voice quavered slightly. Old Harvey would have to go into the vats before long, Hellstrom reflected, but that could be delayed because this man had talents that the Hive required, and never more desperately than right now. Old Harvey had been one of the first breeders. His seed was all through the Hive. But he was also knowledgeable in the ways of the Outside and an imaginative guardian of Hive security.
They spoke openly on the internal circuit. There wasn’t even the remotest chance that the Outsiders possessed instruments that could penetrate the Hive’s electronic barriers. In this field, Hive specialists already had moved far ahead of Outsiders.
“You know about the intruder, of course,” Hellstrom said.
Yes.”
“You’ve been watching him personally?”
“Yes. I sent the watchworker to call you.”
“What’s he been doing?”
“Just watching. With binoculars mostly.”
“Do we have anyone out?”
“No.”
“Any exterior activity scheduled?”
“Only a delivery – diamond bits for our level-fifty-one drills.”
“Don’t pick it up until you clear with me.”
“Right.”
“Is there any chance he’s carrying relay instruments that could monitor his activities from a distance?”
“Porter carried no such instruments.”
Hellstrom suppressed a feeling of irritation, but noted that Old Harvey had also made that unconscious connection. “I mean, have we checked?” Hellstrom asked.
“Not completely; we’re still in process of checking.”
“Ahh, you’re being thorough,” Hellstrom said.
“Of course.”
“Tell me as soon as you’re sure.”
“Yes.”
“What about aircraft?” Hellstrom asked. “Anything?”
“Two jets very high more than an hour ago.”
“Any indication of probes from the jets?”
“Nothing. They were commercial transports. Clean.”
“Does the intruder look as though he’s settled in for a long stay?”
“He has a knapsack and lunch. We think he’ll wait for nightfall before leaving. We’ve been hitting him with an occasional low-frequency burst to keep him jumpy.”
“Excellent.” Hellstrom nodded to himself. “Keep up the subsonics. If he’s nervous, he’ll make mistakes. But don’t use too much; you could drive him off before dark.”
“I understand,” Old Harvey said.
“Now, as to that woman waiting by the vehicle out near our perimeter: what do you make of her?”
“We’re keeping her under close surveillance. The intruder came from her direction. We think they’re associated.” He cleared his throat, a loud and rasping sound which said something distinct about his age. Hellstrom was made acutely aware that Old Harvey must be more than two hundred years old and that was very old for first colonists who’d not had the benefit of an entire lifetime under Hive regimen.
“Undoubtedly they’re associated,” Hellstrom said.
“Could they be innocent intruders?” Old Harvey asked.
“Do you really entertain that idea?” Hellstrom asked.
There was a long pause. “Not likely, but possible.”
“I think they come from the same source as Porter,” Hellstrom said.
“Should we have our people in the East look into the Blue Devil Fireworks Corporation?” Old Harvey asked.
&nbs
p; “No. That might betray the extent of our influence. I think extreme caution is indicated – especially if this pair has come to find out what happened to Porter.”
“Perhaps we acted too hastily with that one.”
“I’ve had my own misgivings on that score,” Hellstrom admitted.
“What is this agency that Porter represented?”
Hellstrom reflected on this question. It contained his own unease. Porter had talked profusely at the end. It had been disgusting and had hastened his transit into the choppers and the vats. Yet, the necessities of that incident could have clouded its content. No member of the Hive would ever have behaved that way, not even an ordinary worker, although they could speak no language intelligible Outside. Porter had said the agency would get them. The agency was all-powerful. “We know about you now! We’ll get you!” Porter had been the first adult Outsider ever to see the inner workings of the Hive, and his hysterical revulsion at the ordinary things necessary for Hive life had shaken Hellstrom.
I responded to his hysteria with a hysteria of my own, Hellstrom thought. I must never do that again.
“We will question this pair more carefully,” Hellstrom said. “Perhaps they can tell us about this agency.”
“You think it wise to capture them?” Old Harvey asked.
“I think it necessary.”
“Perhaps other responses should be considered first.”
“What are you suggesting?” Hellstrom asked.
“Discreet inquiry by our people in the East, while we dissemble for these new intruders. Why should we not invite them in and let them watch our surface activities. They surely cannot prove we are responsible for the disappearance of their fellow.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Hellstrom said.
“Surely, their reaction would’ve been different if they knew we were responsible.”
“They know,” Hellstrom said. “They just don’t know how or why. No amount of dissembling now will put them off. They’ll keep worrying at us like ants at a carcass. We must dissemble, yes, but we must keep them off balance at the same time. I am keeping our people Outside informed, but my instructions remain that we exercise the utmost restraint and caution there. Better to sacrifice the Hive than to lose all.”