Hellstrom's Hive

by Frank Herbert

  I’ll go down.

  He had no idea how far underground he might be. They had brought him on elevators and there had been many floors, but his other self had not thought to count them.

  They’d fed him something to make him docile, of course. That other self was Hellstrom’s creation. It might even be the answer to Project 40. The MIT papers could just be a description of something needed to create the chemicals for manipulating humans.

  The searchers wouldn’t expect him to go downward, though. If there was any other way out of this human anthill, he’d find it by doing the unexpected.

  Keep doing the unexpected, he reminded himself.

  He still didn’t feel in complete command of himself, but he knew he couldn’t wait any longer. He held the captive weapon at the ready in his right hand, opened the door, peered out. There was less activity in the tunnel now, but a silent file of naked men and women crossed in front of him from left to right without a single curious glance. Janvert counted nine in the group. A longer line was passing in the other direction on the far side of the tunnel. They, too, ignored him.

  As they passed, Janvert slipped out of the cell and fell into step at the end of the line going left. He dropped back at the first elevator, waited for a down-car to appear, stepped up quickly as he saw a lean, blank-faced male doing. They both faced the front of the car, rode silently downward.

  The smell of the place began to repel Janvert more and more as he found himself growing increasingly alert. The man with him in the elevator appeared not to notice it. He breathed easily, but Janvert experienced a faint nausea every time he focused on the smell. Best not to think about it then, he warned himself. His partner in the elevator remained a figure of mysterious menace, but something kept the man from taking special notice of Janvert. The man’s pubic hair had been shaved or removed in some other way. His head was shiny in its baldness.

  The man leaped out as the elevator passed another floor and Janvert now had the car to himself. He counted gray walls and floors, got to ten before wondering how long he should stay with this car. He glanced up at the ceiling. It was as featureless as the floor. Something glistening gray was stuck to the ceiling near the wall on his left. He reached up, touched the substance. Some of it clung to his finger and he brought it back, sniffed it. The smell was that of the gruel in his food bowl. He rubbed it off on his thigh. The significance of food on the ceiling began to demand his attention. That ceiling might become a floor in the elevator’s return phase. The cars never seemed to stop. People leaped on and off them through the doorless openings. Everything spoke of an endless chain of cars circling between levels of Hellstrom’s anthill.

  Abruptly, the car lurched, tipped slightly to his left. It lurched again, tipped more. Janvert knelt against the lower edge, crouched there as the elevator turned flat on its side. Nothing but gray wall showed in the door opening as he walked the side around until the former ceiling became the floor, confirming his guess. The car was going up now. He leaped out at the first opening, found not another person in sight. He was in a tunnel illuminated by dim red light, but there was a brighter yellow glow off in the distance to his right. The tunnel stretched away into red gloom beyond that glow. He glanced left, found a gentle curve to the tunnel’s floor which bent it out of sight to the right. He decided to head for the glow, turned right, held himself to a normal walking pace. He had to be just another occupant of this warren going about his normal business. The weapon felt heavy in his right hand, slippery beneath the perspiration in his palm.

  He heard the sound of running water before he reached the area of the glow, but he could see by then that the light came from long slits parallel to the floor and the arched ceiling. The slits were eye height, and he had only to turn his head as he passed to look into a wide, low chamber with long tanks spaced through it, water running in them, people working with businesslike concentration around the tanks. Janvert peered at the nearest tank, discerned fish boiling in it, little fish about six inches long. He saw now that the people farther out in the room were scooping fish from a tank into a wheeled carrier.

  A fish farm, by God!

  Janvert continued past the glowing slits and there was another glow ahead of him now, a distinct cast of pink in it. The light came from floor-to-ceiling doors that revealed a chamber even larger than the first one. This chamber was jammed with waist-high benches, lights low over them and on the benches, lush plants with rich green leaves. Again, he heard the sound of running water, but fainter here. Workers wearing dark glasses moved among the benches, carrying bags slung from their shoulders and harvesting red fruit that Janvert took to be tomatoes. Filled bags were being carried toward openings in the far wall, dumped through there.

  He was encountering more people in the tunnel now and there was a humming sound ahead that grew louder as he approached. He realized he’d been hearing that sound for some time now but had been filtering it out of his consciousness.

  Thus far, none of the people he had met paid any special attention to him.

  He felt it was getting warmer in the tunnel as he neared that irritating humming. The sound was almost painful in its intensity. He came presently to larger slits in the tunnel’s left-hand wall, peered through into a gigantic chamber. It went down at least two stories, up an equal distance, and was filled with tall tubular objects that dwarfed the workers moving on the floor far below him. He estimated that the things were at least fifty feet high and probably a hundred feet in diameter. They were the obvious source of the humming and there was a noticeable ozone smell coming through the slits into the tunnel.

  Electrical generators, Janvert guessed.

  But it was the biggest generator plant he had ever seen. It stretched away at least half a mile to his left and more than that on his right and looked to be at least half a mile wide. If those were generators, he wondered what was driving them.

  Janvert answered his own question as he came to the far end of his tunnel. It turned left there with a double ramp. One ramp went down into the lighted room and the other ramp, parallel to the first on the right and separated from it by a thin wall, slanted down into a gloomy area where he could discern the oily rush of water passing beneath dim lights.

  Water – was that his escape route?

  Janvert turned purposefully down the ramp to the water, passed another file of people without a side-glance. He emerged onto a black ledge beside the water. It was a damned river! The thing stretched away in the gloom and he could detect moving lights on the far side about a quarter of a mile away.

  The ledge beside the river decreased in width as Janvert moved along it below the generator room. He could hear the water beneath his ledge, the muted humming on his left.

  The possible dimensions of this enterprise beneath the earth began to insinuate themselves into Janvert’s awareness. It was so large he began to suspect the government must be involved in it somehow. What other answer could there be? It was too big to escape notice. Or – was it?

  If the government had a hand in this, why had the Agency known nothing about it? That didn’t seem possible. The Chief had been privy to some of the touchiest secrets in the land. That had been made clear on many occasions. Even Merrivale probably would have known about something this big.

  In this questioning reverie, Janvert almost collided with a gray-haired man who stood in his path at what appeared to be the end of the ledge. A spidery open stairway climbed upward beyond the man. The gray-haired one lifted his right hand, wiggled the fingers oddly in front of Janvert’s face.

  Janvert shrugged.

  The man wiggled his fingers once more, shook his head from side to side. He was obviously puzzled.

  Janvert lifted the weapon, pointed it at the man.

  The other stepped backward, shock apparent on his face. His mouth was open, eyes wide and staring, muscles bunched defensively. Once more he held up his hand, wiggled his fingers.

  “What do you want?” Janvert asked.

 
It was as though Janvert had struck him. The man took another step backward, stopped at the edge of the spidery stairs. Still, he didn’t answer.

  Janvert glanced around. They appeared to be alone on this ledge and he could feel tension mounting. The hand signal obviously was supposed to mean something to him. The fact that it didn’t was growing increasingly apparent. With abrupt decision, Janvert flicked the firing stud on his weapon, heard a short bap-hum, and the gray-haired man crumpled.

  Quickly, Janvert dragged the body into the gloom at the edge of the ledge, hesitated. Should he dump the man into the river? There might be people downstream to see it and come looking for an explanation. He decided against it and went up the stairs.

  The stairs ended at a platform that formed the anchor point for a catwalk across the rushing river. Janvert struck out boldly across the catwalk. He felt no particular qualms at having killed another denizen of Hellstrom’s warren. The oily movement of water about thirty feet below and the continuing pressure of the fetid odor combined to produce in him a feeling of vertigo, however, and he guided himself with his left hand on the rail beside him.

  The catwalk entered a short, narrow tunnel at the far side of the river and there was an open, glowing yellow tube to fight his way from above. A door blocked the inner end of the short tunnel. It held a wheeled handle at waist height in its center and there was a green-glowing A above the wheel with a stylized symbol beside it which he took to be part of an insect’s body, segmented and tapering, but without a head.

  Holding the weapon ready, Janvert applied left pressure to the wheel with his left hand. It resisted for a moment, then turned freely to an abrupt stop. He heaved outward on the wheel and it gave abruptly with a soughing sound and he felt a breeze on the back of his neck. Faintly glowing pink light beyond the door revealed another tunnel barely wider than the door. The light came from widely spaced overhead fixtures – small flat discs. The tunnel slanted upward at a gentle angle.

  Janvert stepped inside, sealed the door behind him with a spin of a duplicate handle on the inside. He began to climb.

  Hive Security Report 7-A: Janvert.

  Worker whose description agrees with that of Janvert reported on level forty-eight near turbine station six. Although this would indicate fugitive is going down in the Hive instead of up, it is being investigated. Workers who reported the sighting say they thought he was a leader specialist because of his long hair and possession of a stunwand. This would tend to confirm the sighting, but it still seems unusual that he would not try to break through immediately to the surface.

  Janvert estimated he had climbed almost three hundred feet in the narrow tunnel before he paused for a rest. The tunnel executed a sharp switchback approximately every thousand paces and he estimated the slope at about three percent. He guessed that the tunnel was a ventilator of some kind, but he had seen no openings thus far, and there was something about the stillness of the place and the occasional pockets of dust that spoke of long disuse. Could it be an emergency exit? Perhaps it had been dug for access while larger tunnels were being excavated. Could it possibly lead to an emergency exit? He didn’t dare let himself hope for that yet. The tunnel was just taking him upward.

  He resumed his climb presently and in five more switchbacks came to another door with a wheeled handle. He stopped, looked at the door. What was on the other side? Should he pass it? He had a weapon. The weapon carried the deciding argument. He worked the door handle, put a shoulder to the door, and thrust it open. Air soughed against his face.

  Janvert stepped out of the tunnel onto a narrow, railed platform about halfway up the wall of an immense circular and domed room. It stretched away from him in bright blue-white light for at least two hundred yards. The floor of the giant room curved slightly downward to the center and it was alive with men and women in a complexity of sexual couplings.

  Janvert stared at them, frozen in blank astonishment.

  The room was filled with an undercurrent of grunts and sounds of flesh slapping flesh. Couples were separating, stumbling to new partners, and just going on with their amazing sexual activity.

  Breeding!

  He recalled Peruge’s astonished account of the night with Fancy. She’d called it breeding. That was the only word that really fit this amazing scene. It excited no prurient interest in him. It even repelled him slightly. The place carried its own distinctive odor – a wild mixture of perspiration and a musty something that reminded him of saliva, all of it riding on the original stink of this whole warren. He noted now that the floor was damp and it appeared resilient. It was a faint blue gray and it glistened in the few places not occupied by writhing couples. Through the movement of flesh at the center of the room, he detected a wide circle of darker material which appeared to be a drain – it was grilled, by God! There were marks on some of the flesh to show the grill pattern.

  What could be more efficient?

  Still in a state of semishock, Janvert retreated into the tunnel, sealed the door, resumed his climb. His memory carried the wild image of that room. He didn’t think he would ever forget that scene. Nobody would believe him, though. That had to be seen to be believed.

  He knew he was working against a background of semihysteria. So that’s what they mean by “sexual congress!”

  He suspected he could have climbed down from his platform and joined the orgy without anyone the wiser. Just another male breeder. Janvert passed two more wheel-handled doors before recovering a semblance of mental balance. He looked at each door with revulsion, trying to imagine what he might find on the other side. This was a goddamned human hive! He stopped abruptly, frozen by the full import of that thought.

  Hive.

  He glanced around at the dimly lighted walls of the tunnel, sensed the faint humming of machinery, the smells, all the signs of teeming life around him.

  HIVE!

  Janvert took three deep, shuddering breaths before resuming his climb. His thoughts were in turmoil. It was a human hive. They lived here the way insects lived. How did insects live? They did things no human wanted to do – some things no human could do. They had drones and workers – and a queen and – they ate to live. They ate things that the human stomach would reject if the human consciousness didn’t reject it first. For insects, breeding was just – breeding. The more he thought about it, the more the pattern fitted. This was no secret government project! This was a horror, an abomination, a thing that needed to be burned out!

  Hive Security Report 16-A: Janvert.

  The body of a turbine specialist killed by stunwand has been found near the center of the primary watercourse. Janvert’s work for sure. Double guard has been ordered on all turbine inlets and screens, although no human could survive a trip through the power system. More likely he’s in the old construction access tunnels that were converted to emergency ventilation standby. Search concentrating there.

  Janvert stopped at the next door, pressed an ear to the door’s surface, listening. He heard faint, rhythmic thumpings on the other side – some kind of machine, he guessed. There was a hiss accompanying the thumps. He released the wheel latch, opened the door a crack, and peered in. It was a much smaller room than the other, but still big. He guessed it to be a hundred feet on a side. The ceiling was low and the door opened directly onto the room’s floor. The light was only a dim red glow from tubes across the ceiling, revealing stubby benches, each with a maze of transparent glass tubing in pillars at both ends. The tubing pulsed with fluids in brilliant glowing colors and this distracted him for a moment from what lay between the pillars on the bench surfaces.

  He stared at the objects, unwilling to believe his eyes were reporting accurately. Each bench carried what appeared to be the stump of a human body from about the waist to the knees. Some were grossly male and some female. Among the females were a few whose abdomens bulged as though they were pregnant. Beyond waist and knees there was nothing that could be thought of as flesh – only that tubing with its pulsing colors. Co
uld they be real?

  Janvert slipped into the room, touched the nearest one, a male stump. The flesh was warm! He jerked his hand away, felt vomit rising in his throat. He backed against the door to the tunnel, unable to take his gaze from the contents of this room. Those were live stumps of human flesh. They had to be!

  Movement in the room’s far corner caught his attention. He saw people parading along the benches there, bending, studying the stumps, examining the tubing. It was like a caricature of doctors doing their rounds. Janvert slipped back into the tunnel before he was seen, closed the door, and stood there with his forehead pressed against the smooth, cool surface.

  Those were human reproductive sections. He could imagine Hellstrom’s hive keeping those monstrosities alive for breeding purposes. The thought of his own flesh subjected to such indignity sent shudders coursing through him. His back, neck, and shoulders trembled and his knees felt incapable of supporting him. Reproductive stumps!

  Somewhere below him there sounded a dull thud and in his ears he felt a change in the tunnel’s air pressure. Bare feet could be heard slapping the tunnel floor, running.

  They’re in here after me!

  Terror driving him, he jerked open the door, slid through, sealed the door behind him. The medical procession noticed him this time, but they could only jerk upright in surprise before the stunwand in Janvert’s hand sent them tumbling. He plunged through the nightmare room, trying not to look at any of the stumps. An arched passage led from the room into a large gallery thronging with people. Terror still hounding him, he whirled left, shouldered through the throng, pushing people aside, heedless of the disturbance and curiosity he obviously was arousing. Milling turmoil marked his path. There were waving hands behind him, a few inarticulate outcries, and one oddly piercing female voice calling after him, “Say there! Say there!”

  At the first elevator entrance, he shouldered a man away from the opening, leaped into an upbound car, staring down at faces that kept staring upward with puzzlement and some alarm until the floor of the car closed off the opening.