“I want to be the first to know,” Janvert quipped.
That fool! Peruge raged, rubbing his head. God, how his head ached – and his chest. He had to go out on a job as touchy as this one, and nothing but that fool up there to back him! It was too late to change that now. Peruge felt his hand tremble against his forehead.
“You still there?” Janvert asked.
Peruge winced at the sound. “I’m here.”
“Wouldn’t it be a gas if this Project 40 turned out to be an aphrodisiac?”
Shorty was impossible! He was like some perfect antithesis of everything Peruge needed right now. There was no doubt of the malice in Janvert’s responses, no doubt of the man’s unreliability. What could be done to change that now, though? The teams were scattered all over the area. And he had to be up at that damned farm in a couple of hours. He didn’t know how he was going to do that, but it had to be done. For just a moment, he tried to consider whether Janvert’s cynical banter might contain a small seed of good sense. What had that shot contained? Christ! If he could get a corner on that, it’d make more than ten metallurgical processes! Make a fortune under the counter.
“You’re taking an awful long time between answers,” Janvert said. “I’m going to send Clovis down to have a look at you. She’s had some nursing experience and –”
“She stays right there with you! That’s an order.”
“That dame could’ve done a helluva lot more than just charge you up as a bed partner,” Janvert argued.
“That’s all it was, dammit!” But Shorty’s words carried the seeds of panic. The night with Fancy had distorted his perceptions of many things, including his idea of woman. The uninhibited little cunt!
“I don’t like the way you sound at all,” Janvert said. “Is Sampson still around?”
“I sent him back to you.”
“The backup van isn’t here yet. What if we –”
“You contact them the way I told you and you get them up there! You hear me, Shorty?”
“But that would leave you in town alone. They’d have a team there and we wouldn’t.”
“They don’t dare attack me!”
“I think you’re wrong. I think they may already have attacked you. That town could be completely in their hands. The deputy sure as hell is!”
“I’m ordering you to stay up there with all of your teams,” Peruge said.
“We could have you at a clinic in Portland within two hours,” Janvert said. “I’m going to call for –”
“I am ordering you not to contact headquarters,” Peruge said.
“I think you’re out of your mind. A clinic might be able to examine you and tell us what was in that shot.”
“Not likely. Christ! She said it was – a hormone or something.”
“You believe that?”
“It’s probably true. Sign off now and do what I told you.” He dropped a hand onto his own cutoff switch, heard the blip as the transceiver went dead.
Damn! Everything took so damned much energy.
Willing every movement, he put away the transceiver, went into the bathroom. A cold shower. That was what he needed. If he could get fully awake. The bathroom still showed the scattered wetness of Fancy’s ablutions. He stepped into the tub, supported himself with a hand on the showerhead while he groped for the faucet. Cold water. He turned it on full. At the first shock of the chilling stream, he felt a sharp band of pain tighten on his forehead and chest. He staggered from the tub, trying to breathe, left the water running. He stumbled from the bathroom, dripping, knocked the remains of his coffee making from the counter as he passed, but didn’t even hear it. The bed! He needed the bed. He flopped his wet body on the bed, rolled onto his back. His chest was on fire, his skin trembling with a deep chill. It was so cold! He arched his back, tried to pull the bedding around himself, but his fingers lost their grip and his suddenly outflung hand fell over the edge of the bed. He was dead before his relaxing fingers touched the floor.
The words of Nils Hellstrom.
In the sense popularly believed Outside, it is not possible to fight back against any aspect of nature. What must be understood is that we fit ourselves into existing patterns, adapting as our influence on those processes brings about inevitable change. The way the wild Outsiders fight insects is particularly enlightening. By opposing themselves to a powerful aspect of existing processes, the wild ones unwittingly add fuel to the defenses of those they oppose. The Outsiders’ poisons bring instant death to most insects. But the few who survive will develop an immunity – a tolerance to ingest the poison with no harmful effect. Returning to the womb of the earth, these survivors pass on this immunity to new generations of billions.
The Hive was always so neat, efficient, and reassuring after the Outside, Fancy thought. She admired the way her fellow workers moved about their tasks without fuss, with that quiet, purposeful air of knowing what they did. Even the escort taking her down the familiar galleries, down the relays of elevators, gave off this same air. She did not think of her escort as captors. They were fellow workers. It was good to get out of the Hive occasionally, but so much better to come back. Especially with the almost certain knowledge that she had added to the Hive’s gene store by last night’s foray. The Hive comforted her mind and body now just by its presence around her.
Outsiders could be great sport, too; especially the randy wild males. In her fifty-eight years, Fancy had brought nine Outsider-fathered babies into the Hive, each concealed in the mysterious fecundity of her body. That was a great contribution to the gene pool. She understood gene pools just as she understood insects. She was a specialist. Outsider males and ants were her favorites.
Sometimes as she watched an ant colony in the lab, Fancy felt that there might be a way for her to move right into the colony with her charges, perhaps even become their brood mother. It might just require a period of chemical acclimatization for her charges to accept her as one of their own. In her fantasy, she could imagine the escort that now took her deep into the Hive as her own queen’s guard. She would be the ant queen. And the strange thing was that ants did tend to accept her. Ants, mosquitoes, many different kinds of insects showed no disturbance at Fancy’s intrusions. When she recognized this and had these fantasies, it was easy to imagine the Hive as her own colony.
So firmly had imagination taken hold of Fancy’s consciousness that when the escort brought her into Hellstrom’s presence, she looked upon him at first with queenly condescension, and she failed to observe the state he was in.
Hellstrom noted that she still wore the fur coat she’d taken from wardrobe and she appeared mighty proud of herself. He nodded to dismiss the guards. They retreated into the background, but remained alert and observing. Saldo’s orders had been explicit about that. Many security workers were growing to recognize that Saldo possessed qualities that demanded obedience. In this room of the Hive’s inner security processes, at least half of the workers harbored such divided loyalties.
“Well, Fancy,” Hellstrom said, his voice tired but carefully neutral.
There was a desk beside Hellstrom and she perched now on a corner of it, grinning at him.
Hellstrom took the chair behind the desk and sank into it with a feeling of gratitude. He looked up at her. “Fancy, would you try to explain to me what you thought you were doing in last night’s escapade?”
“I just spent the night breeding with your dangerous Mr. Peruge,” she said. “He was about as dangerous as any other Outsider male I’ve ever met.”
“You took things from Hive stores,” Hellstrom said. “Tell me about that.”
“Just this coat and a shot of our own male breeding hormones,” she said. “I hyped him up.”
“Did he respond?”
“Just like always.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Lots of times,” she said. Hellstrom was acting so strangely.
Hellstrom nodded to himself, tried to read another message into F
ancy’s responses, something to confirm his suspicion that she was acting out of an awareness of the Hive’s most fundamental needs. Additions to the gene pool were beneficial, yes; and Peruge’s genes would be most welcome. But she had taken a prized Hive secret Outside, risked Outsider discovery that the Hive possessed a profound knowledge of the workings of human hormones. By her present admission, she had done this more than once. If Outsiders learned some of the things the Hive could do in manipulation of human chemistry . . .
“Did you ever discuss this with anyone?” Hellstrom asked. Surely, there must be some circumstance to explain such behavior.
“I’ve talked about it with lots of the breeder females,” she said. What possibly could be bothering old Nils? She saw now that he was working against deep tensions.
“With breeder females,” he said.
“Certainly. Lots of us use the hormones when we go Outside.”
Shocked, Hellstrom shook his head silently. Blessed brood mother! And none of the Hive’s ruling specialists had ever once suspected! What other unsuspected things might be going on here in the Hive?
“Peruge’s friends have the bicycle,” Hellstrom said.
She looked at him, not understanding.
“The bicycle you took when you sneaked into town,” Hellstrom explained.
“Ohhh! The workers who picked me up were so insistent they made me forget all about it.”
“By taking that bicycle, you’ve created a crisis,” Hellstrom said.
“How could that be?”
“Don’t you recall where we got that bicycle?”
She put a hand over her mouth in sudden comprehension. All she’d been thinking about when she’d borrowed the machine was a quick way to get into town. There’d been a certain amount of pride in the action, too. She was one of the few workers who’d learned how to manage a bicycle. She’d demonstrated her ability for the engineers during the preceding week, even taught one of them to ride it. Her ingrained Hive-protective sense was fully aroused now, though. If that bicycle could be traced to the couple they’d thrown into the vats . . .
“What can I do to get it back?” she asked.
This is the Fancy I can work with and admire, Hellstrom thought, responding to her sudden alertness. “I don’t know yet,” he said.
“Peruge is coming to see you today,” she said. “Can I demand that he return it to me?”
“Too late for that. They’ve sent it away in an airplane. That must mean they suspect.”
She nodded. Fingerprints – serial numbers. She knew about such things.
“Our best move may be to deny that we ever had that bicycle,” she said.
“No telling who may’ve seen you on it,” Hellstrom said.
And he thought sadly: Our best move may be to deny that Fancy exists. We have others with a close enough resemblance to her face and body. Were her fingerprints likely to be on any of the documents she’d signed as Fancy Kalotermi? Not likely after this length of time.
“I’ve done wrong, haven’t I?” Fancy asked, beginning to grasp the extent of the problem she had created.
“It was wrong for you and other females to take Hive stores Outside. It was wrong to take that bicycle.”
“The bicycle – I see that now,” she admitted. “But the breeding hypes only insured fertilization.”
Even as she spoke, Hive honesty forced Fancy to admit to herself that this didn’t explain fully why she and the others used Hive stores this way. It had been an experiment at first, then a delightful discovery of how susceptible Outsider males were. She’d shared the discovery with a few sisters. They’d made up their own stories to explain to Outsider males who became curious. This was a very expensive new drug they had stolen. They might not be able to get more of it. Better to use it while they had it.
“You must name all of the females who shared your little trick,” Hellstrom said.
“Oh, Nils!”
“You must and you know it. All of you will give us detailed accounts concerning the reactions of Outsider males, how curious any of them may have been, who they were, how many times you’ve raided Hive stores this way – everything.”
She nodded dejectedly. It would have to be done, of course. The fun was ended.
“On the basis of our review, we may conduct some experiments Outside, fully controlled and observed,” Hellstrom said. “For that reason, be explicitly detailed in your account. Anything you recall could be valuable.”
“Yes, Nils.” She felt contrite now, but secretly elated. Perhaps the fun wasn’t ended. Controlled experiments meant further use of Hive methods on Outsiders. Who better qualified for such a project than those experienced in such tactics?
“Fancy, Fancy,” Hellstrom said, shaking his head. “The Hive has never been in greater peril and you continue to play your games.”
She clasped her arms around her body, hugging herself.
“Why?” he asked. “Why?”
She remained wordless.
“We could even be forced to send you to the vats,” Hellstrom said.
Her eyes went wide in alarm. She slipped off the desk, stood facing Hellstrom. The vats! But she was still young. She had many years of breeding service ahead of her. They needed her talents with the insects, too. Nobody was better than she was with the insects! She began to voice these arguments, but Hellstrom cut her short.
“Fancy! The Hive comes first!”
His words shocked her and she recalled suddenly the thing she had reminded herself to tell Hellstrom. Certainly, the Hive came first! Did he think her a moral reject?
“I have something else to report,” she said. “It may be important.”
“Oh?”
“The hype hit Peruge very hard. He thought I was asking him questions at one point. I wasn’t, but when I recognized what he was doing, I did ask questions. He wasn’t fully awake, just reacting. I think he spoke the truth.”
“What did he say? Out with it!”
“He said he’d come to make a deal with you. He said their study of the papers they’d found – about Project 40, you understand – led them to believe you were developing a new way to shape metals. Steel, that sort of metal. He said a metallurgical breakthrough could be worth billions. It didn’t always make sense, what he said, but that’s the gist of it.”
Hellstrom felt such elation at her words he wanted to get up and hug her. The Hive had been working through her!
Saldo came into the room as these feelings coursed through Hellstrom, and Hellstrom almost called the young male over to explain. Fancy’s discovery gave them a way out. It was a commercial invasion! This confirmed his deepest instincts about Hive learning. The lab would have to be told immediately. This might even help them in their own research. The wild Outsiders sometimes came up with rare insights.
“Have I helped?” Fancy asked.
“Indeed you have!”
Saldo, who had stopped for a few words with one of the observers at the banks of instruments, glanced across at Hellstrom and shook his head. Peruge was not yet on his way, then. Saldo had been instructed to give word at the first sign.
Hellstrom wanted Peruge to come now.
Metallurgy! Inventions! All those mysterious allusions now made sense, a remarkable degree of sense.
Fancy still stood at the desk watching Hellstrom.
“Did Peruge say anything else?” Hellstrom asked.
“No.” She shook her head.
“Nothing about the agency that sent him, the government agency?”
“Well, he did say something about somebody named Chief. He hates Chief. He cursed horribly.”
“You have helped enormously,” Hellstrom said, “but you must go into hiding now.”
“Hiding?”
“Yes. You’ve helped in many ways. I don’t even mind it any longer that you stole Hive stores. You’ve reminded us that we share the same body chemistry with Outsiders. We’ve changed somewhat in three hundred years, of course, because we’ve bre
d for that, but –” He gave her a brilliant smile. “Fancy, you must do nothing else now without consulting us.”
“I won’t. I really won’t.”
“Very good. Was Mimeca one of the breeder females you shared this little trick with?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. I want you –” He hesitated, taking in her pale face, the expectant expression. “Is there any chance that last night’s escapade was successful, that you’re impregnated?”
“A very good chance.” She brightened. “I’m right at peak fertility. I’ve become pretty good at judging it.”
“See if the gestation lab can confirm that,” he said. “If it’s positive, your period of hiding should be pleasant enough. If you’ve been impregnated, turn yourself in at Worker Gestation Prime. Tell them it’s at my instructions. Don’t go on dormancy, though, until we’ve sent someone down to interrogate you on your use of the breeding hype with Outsiders.”
“I won’t, Nils. I’ll go down to the lab right away.”
She turned, hurried across the chamber, several workers looking up at her passage. She probably still trailed some of the hype. Hellstrom had been too busy to notice. She was really a ridiculous female, he thought. What had they bred in this FANCY line?
Saldo approached Hellstrom’s alcove now, glancing back until Fancy left the chamber.
Hellstrom rubbed his chin. He kept himself on hair suppressants during most of his Hive days, but the beard insisted on growing anyway. He needed a shave and would have to get one before meeting Peruge. Appearance was important with Outsiders.
So it was metallurgy and inventions, was it?
As Saldo stopped just inside the alcove, Hellstrom asked absently, “What do you want?”
“I listened while you were talking to Fancy,” Saldo said.
“You heard what she said about Peruge?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still think you were at fault in letting her out of the Hive?” Hellstrom asked.
“I –” He shrugged.
“It was the Hive working this out in spite of us,” Hellstrom said. “The whole Hive can react as a single organism or it can react delicately through any one of us. Remember that.”
Hellstrom's Hive Page 21