Hellstrom's Hive

by Frank Herbert

  Saldo made record time coming up from the Hive’s 5,000-foot level where the researchers had moved their operations. There were fast elevators only in the so-called new galleries below 3,100 feet, but even these became progressively slower the higher he went. The work in the new galleries delayed him slightly at 3,800 feet, but he bulled his way through, making a note to ask Hellstrom if that work could not be put on minimum standby during the present crisis.

  He had left a young assistant at the relocated lab, seated at the southeast end of the long gallery with the secret weapon Saldo had commandeered: the binoculars once used by the Outsider, Depeaux. The binoculars revealed a spate of activity by the researchers which Saldo interpreted as readiness for a test of the system. He dared not approach the specialists, though. Hellstrom’s orders had been explicit on that score. Only Hellstrom might change that now and, knowing the urgency, Saldo went to argue for a small interruption of the lab work.

  It was almost midnight when the boom cage deposited him on the catwalk outside the aerie. A guardworker there passed him with only a casual glance of recognition. The inner room was dim and oddly hushed as he passed through the baffle, and he saw that most of the Hive’s leadership cadre had taken over the night duty with Hellstrom, who stood at the room’s north end, a blocky figure against the dark outline of the louvered window. Saldo found he did not have the highest regard for the leadership qualities of most of those present, excepting Hellstrom, and sometimes even Hellstrom. Some of these workers should be conserving their strength for the morrow. He knew this inner reaction reflected a pattern bred and conditioned into him, but the knowledge subtracted little from his assessment of his own personal qualities. Hellstrom – and at least half of those present – should be resting now.

  Saldo had known he would find Hellstrom here, though, and he found nothing inconsistent in the recognition that he, too, would have been standing there at that window to the north were he in Hellstrom’s place.

  Hellstrom turned and recognized Saldo making his way through the green gloom. “Saldo!” he said. “Is there something to report?”

  Saldo moved close to Hellstrom and, speaking in a low voice, explained why he had left the lab.

  “Are you sure they’re about to test it?”

  “It looks that way. They’ve been stringing the power cables for several hours. They didn’t bother with power cables on the other models until they were about to test.”

  “How soon?”

  “That’s difficult to say.”

  Hellstrom moved back and forth a few paces restlessly, fatigue visible in the controlled precision of his actions. He stopped in front of Saldo. “I don’t see how they could be testing it this soon.” He rubbed his chin. “They said the new model would have to use the entire gallery.”

  “They are using the gallery, all of it, and fans and a strange construction of pipes that they are connecting down the entire length of the gallery. They’re supporting the pipe on anything they can collect – chairs, benches – it’s a very strange thing they’re building. They even took a heavy-duty pump from level-forty-two hydroponics. They just went right in, disconnected it, and took it. The hydroponics manager was upset, as you can imagine, but they merely said you’d authorized it. Is that true?”

  “In essence,” Hellstrom said.

  “Nils, do you think it likely they’d behave this way unless they were about to test and were reasonably sure of success?”

  Privately, Hellstrom agreed with Saldo, but there were other considerations, and he had not yet dared to let himself hope. The specialists’ behavior might be a reflection of the upset that had spread throughout the Hive. Hellstrom did not think this likely, but it was possible.

  “Shouldn’t you go down and make a personal inquiry?” Saldo asked.

  Hellstrom sympathized with the impatience that had brought Saldo up from the lab. It was an impatience shared by many in the Hive. Was anything to be served by going down there now himself, though? The specialists might not tell him anything. They were naturally wary of predicting the outcome in any project. They spoke of probabilities when they did speak, or of possible consequences in certain “lines of development.” It was understandable. Experiments had been known to turn upon the experimenters. An earlier test model in Project 40 had created an explosive plasma bubble which had killed fifty-three workers, including four researchers, and had spread havoc two hundred feet in a side gallery at level thirty-nine.

  “What power-drain figures did they give Generation?” Hellstrom asked. “How much diversion do they require?”

  “The generation specialists asked, but were told the computation is not complete. I’ve posted another observer in Generation, however. Surely, the researchers must ask for the diversion.”

  “Will Generation make an estimate based on the size of the power cables being used?”

  “As much as five hundred thousand kilowatts. It could be less, though.”

  “That much?” Hellstrom took a deep breath. “Researchers are different from the rest of us in many ways, Saldo. They were bred for a rather narrowed vision, a concentration of intellect. We should be prepared for the possibility of a disastrous failure.”

  “A dis –” Saldo fell into stricken silence.

  “Prepare to evacuate the area for at least three levels around the test gallery,” Hellstrom said. “You are to post yourself in Generation. Tell the managing specialist not to connect the power cables until I have given permission. When the researchers come to make the power arrangements, call me. Ask them then, if you’re able, what range and error factor they are estimating for the project. Get the power figures and, at the same time, order the evacuation of the galleries. We will risk no more workers than necessary.”

  Saldo stood in subdued awe. He felt depressed, rebounding from his former pride. None of these precautions had entered his mind. He had thought only to argue Hellstrom into one particular course of action. The stratagem of stationing an observer in Generation with the authority to delay the power hookup, however, filled the demands of Saldo’s own plan and did far more.

  “Perhaps you’d better send somebody with more imagination and ability to Generation,” Saldo said. “Maybe Ed –”

  “You are the one I want in Generation,” Hellstrom said. “Ed is a seasoned specialist with long experience Outside. He can think like an Outsider, which you cannot. He also has had sufficient tempering that he seldom overestimates his own capabilities, nor underestimates them. In a word, he is balanced. If we are to survive these next hours, we require this quality above all others. I trust you to carry out my orders carefully and completely. I know you can and will. Now, get back to your station.”

  Saldo’s shoulders came up and he looked at Hellstrom’s fatigue-lined features. “Nils, I didn’t think –”

  Hellstrom interrupted in a softer tone. “In part, it is my fatigue being short and severe with you. This is something you should have taken into consideration. You could have called me on the internal system without leaving your post. A true leader considers many possibilities before acting. If you were ready for leadership, you would have thought to conserve my energies, as well as your own. You will grow into this ability, and the delay time between your consideration of many courses and your decision to act correctly will grow shorter and shorter.”

  “I’m going back to my post at once,” Saldo said. He turned, started across the room. As he moved, voices were raised at the observer stations. A garble of sound could be heard coming over one of the communicators. An observer could be heard asking, “Who else is there to take charge?” Another garble erupted from the communicators. “One at a time!” the observer shouted. “Tell them to hold their stations. If too many of us are running around without coordination, we’ll just get in each other’s way. We’ll take charge of the search from here.”

  The observer, a young female subleader-in-training, whose face appeared an oval mask of shock in the light from her screen, lifted herself ha
lf out of her chair to peer across the bank of instruments at Hellstrom. “One of the captives has escaped in the Hive!”

  Hellstrom was at her side as soon as he could get there in a thrusting rush across the room. Saldo hesitated at the door.

  “Which one?” Hellstrom demanded, bending over the observer.

  “The one called Janvert. Shall we dispatch workers to –”

  “No.”

  Saldo spoke from the door. “Nils, should I –”

  “Get to your station!” Hellstrom called, not moving his gaze from the screen in front of the young observer. A frightened guardworker appeared on the screen, a young male with the shoulder mark of dronedom. “Which level?” Hellstrom demanded.

  “Forty-two,” the worker on the screen said. “And he has a stunwand. I don’t see how he could – he killed two workers, the ones who said they were sent to - to – at your orders to –”

  “I understand,” Hellstrom interrupted. They were the specialists he had sent down to bring Janvert to sufficient alertness for use as an envoy. Something had gone wrong and Janvert had escaped. Hellstrom straightened, gazing at the workers around him in the aerie. “Awaken your replacements. Janvert has been Hive-marked. No common worker would recognize him as an Outsider. He can move anywhere in the Hive without attracting attention. We have a double problem. We must recapture him and we must not upset the Hive any more than it already is. Make that clear to every searcher. Send your replacements after Janvert with a physical description. Issue Outsider guns to at least one worker in each search party as long as the guns last. I don’t want stunwands used in the Hive under these circumstances.”

  “You want him dead and in the vats then,” a worker behind Hellstrom said.

  “No, I do not!”

  “But you said –”

  “One gun with each party,” Hellstrom said. “The gun is to wound him in the legs only if nothing else can be done to stop him. I want him taken alive. Do you all understand that? We need this Outsider alive.”

  From the Hive Manual.

  Life must take life for the sake of life, but no worker should enter this great wheel of regeneration with any motive other than the perpetuation of our species. Only in the species are we linked to infinity and this has a different meaning for the species than it does for the mortal cell.

  Janvert had taken a long time to realize the strangeness of his position. For a while, he felt he had become two distinctly different people and he remembered both of them clearly. One had studied law, joined the Agency, loved Clovis Carr, and felt trapped in activities that dehumanized him. The other appeared to have awakened as a fully recognizable individual while eating a meal with Nils Hellstrom and a rather doll-like woman named Fancy. This other individual had behaved in a wildly detached manner. This individual remembered walking meekly with Hellstrom into a room where people stood around and asked questions. As this weird other, Janvert remembered answering those questions with complete candor. He had answered willingly, searching out details that might expand the answers. He had actually worked very hard to make his answers understood.

  There were other strange memories, too – big open tanks in a tremendous room, some of the tanks bubbling and seething; another equally large room crawling with toddlers, little children who bounced and played in odd silence on a screened floor that surged under them in places like a trampoline. He recalled an acid smell in that room, but with a sense of cleanliness about it. He remembered water spurting suddenly from the ceiling onto the toddlers as he passed, and then that other smell, the one he recalled from the whole other experience and was around him even now. It was fetid, rank, and warm in the nostrils.

  The self he thought of as his original identity appeared to have been dormant all during the other experience, but it was aware now. He recognized where he was in both sets of memories. It was a room with rough gray walls, a depression with a hole centered in it in one corner for relieving himself, a waist-high shelf about one foot by three feet near the room’s only door, apparently of the same material as the walls. A black plastic pitcher and glass occupied the shelf. They held warm water. There had been a food bowl on the shelf earlier. He recalled that bowl and the blank-faced nude male who’d brought it – no conversation in that one at all. There were no windows in the room, just that one door and the toilet depression. He heard water rushing under the toilet hole occasionally. There were water jets around the depression, too, and they had turned on once, cleaning the area. There was no chair, only the floor to sit on, and he had been stripped to the skin. He could see nothing in the place that might make a weapon. The plastic water pitcher and glass wouldn’t break; he’d tried.

  His memory presented him with the images of other visitors, too – a pair of older females who held him with remarkable ease while they examined him intimately, then injected something into his left buttock. The area of the injection still tingled. The return of his original awareness had begun soon after that injection, though. He estimated that had been at least three hours ago. They’d taken his watch and he felt unsure of time, but guessing at it made him feel he was doing something positive.

  I have to escape, he told himself.

  His weird other self, lapsing into a dormancy of its own now, brought up memories of hordes of nude people swarming in the tunnels through which he had been brought to this place. It was a human anthill. How could he escape through that?

  The door opened and a relatively young woman entered. In the moment she left the door open he glimpsed an older, tougher looking female outside, carrying one of those mysterious weapons that looked like a whip with a double end. The young woman who came in had a stubble of black hair around the genitals and a similar cap on her head, and there was no moon-faced vacancy in her features or her movements. She carried in her left hand what appeared to be an ordinary stethoscope.

  Janvert leaped to his feet as she entered, moved around near the shelf with his back to the wall.

  She seemed amused. “Relax. I’m just here to see how you’re taking all this.” She clipped the stethoscope around her neck, took up the other end in her left hand.

  Janvert groped for the water pitcher without taking his attention from her and his hand knocked the pitcher from the shelf.

  “Now, look what you’ve done,” she said, bending to recover the pitcher which lay in a puddle of its own water.

  As she stooped, Janvert moved in desperation, brought his right hand down in a vicious chop across her neck. She fell flat and didn’t move.

  Now, there was the other guard outside. Relax and think, Janvert told himself. Cool green light from a recessed cove around the ceiling washed the room, creating a death pallor in the skin of the woman on the floor. He bent over her, felt for a pulse, found none. Quickly, he recovered her stethoscope, listened for a heartbeat. Nothing. The realization that his one frantic blow had killed her filled him with a chill sense of his own perilous position. Moved by urgency, he dragged the woman’s body out of the way to the right of the door, looked back to see if he’d left any sign of struggle. The water pitcher still lay there, but Janvert hesitated. The hesitation saved him.

  Once more, the door opened and the older woman ‘poked her head inside with a look of obvious curiosity on her face.

  Janvert, leaping from behind the door, grabbed her head, yanked her into the cell, bringing a knee up into her midriff. She grunted, dropping her weapon, and he released her, chopped her as he had the first one, whirled, and slammed the door.

  Now, he had both of them and one of their weapons. He examined the odd whip-like object. The thing was black plastic, similar in color and texture to the pitcher and water glass. It was about a yard long with a stubby handle indented for fingers. There was a click-notched dial in the handle base and a yellow stud under the index-finger indentation.

  Janvert pointed the double end at the guard he had just knocked down, and he depressed the stud. The wand went bap-hummmm, and he released the stud. The humming stopped. T
he older woman had jerked as the weapon came alive. Now, the skin along her exposed side began to turn a dark red-purple. He bent, felt for a pulse. Nothing. Two of them dead. He backed away, looked at the door. It opened inward, he knew, and there was a cupped indentation at waist height that he had tried earlier. The door had refused to open then. He wondered now if, in his panic, he had locked himself in. Desperation moving him, he tried the door. It opened immediately with only a faint click and he glimpsed people thronging past the door before he closed it.

  “I have to think,” he told himself, speaking aloud.

  They would expect him to head for the surface, of course. Could they have other ways of leaving, though? What lay below him? He knew there must be at least one lower level. His captors had led him past an open, doorless double-elevator shaft with bare-bones cars passing upward on one side and downward on the other. He held one of their weapons and he now knew it could kill. Hellstrom’s people would search for him. They’d move room by room through their tunnel warren, and they obviously had the manpower to be thorough.