Two women and a man shared the car with him. One of the women looked like an older version of Fancy, but the younger one had a full head of blonde hair, one of the few he’d seen like that in the depths of Hellstrom’s hive. The man, completely hairless, with a narrow, foxy face and brightly alert eyes, reminded Janvert of Merrivale. All three showed obvious curiosity and the man bent toward him, sniffing. What he inhaled seemed to puzzle him because he sniffed again.
In panic, Janvert turned the captured weapon on him, swept its beam across the women. They slumped to the floor as the car passed another opening. A woman with heavy breasts and a round, blank face tried to enter, but Janvert kicked her in the midriff, sent her sprawling into the people behind her. The car passed another opening without incident, another – another. He dove out at the fourth opening into a throng of people, plunged through them across the tunnel and into a smaller side passage that had attracted him because it was unoccupied. Two of the men he’d sent sprawling behind him leaped to their feet and started to give chase, but he dropped them with a burst from the weapon, then fled, skidded around a corner to the left, another corner, and found himself back in the main gallery at least a hundred yards from where he’d left the elevator. A milling crowd could be seen down there with figures jammed into the side passage and more trying to enter it.
Janvert turned right, holding the weapon upright in front of him to conceal it from the people behind, forced himself to assume a slow walking pace while he tried to bring his heaving lungs under control. As he moved, he listened carefully for sounds of pursuit. The sounds of disturbance faded, but he heard no pursuers and, presently, he dared to cross the tunnel to his left, leaving it by a smaller right-angle passage that slanted upward steeply. This passage opened within a hundred paces into another large cross tunnel with an elevator directly in front of him. He wove his way without incident through passing people, stepped into the first upbound car. The car picked up speed the instant he entered. He glanced around to see if some operator he’d missed controlled this, but he was alone in the car. Openings flashed past him. He counted nine, wondering if Hellstrom had some secret control of this car and they’d sped it up to trap him. He didn’t dare try to leave at this speed.
His panic increasing, Janvert moved to the doorway, searching the sides of the car for controls, but there were none. As he moved, the car came to another opening, slowed. He jumped out, almost collided with two men guiding a long cart piled with what appeared to be yellow fabric thrown loosely into it. They dodged him, grinned and waved, their fingers moving in the same kind of intricate designs he’d seen in the gray-haired man beside the river. Janvert smiled ruefully, shrugged, and the pair accepted this, continuing to trundle their cart down the tunnel.
Janvert turned to the right, away from them, saw that the tunnel ended shortly in a wide arch with bright lights and machinery visible in a large room beyond the arch, people busily working there. He felt he didn’t dare turn around now, continued into a wide, low room with metal-shaping machinery on floor stands scattered through it. He recognized a lathe, a stamping press of some kind (the ceiling had been opened above it to take the machine’s upper part), and there were several drill presses with men and women bent over them, working steadily, ignoring his presence. There was an underlying smell of oil in the place and the biting acridity of hot metal. It could have been any large machine shop except for the nudity. Carts carrying bins of unidentifiable metal objects were being pushed along several of the aisles between the machines.
Janvert tried to act knowledgeably busy, strode as directly as he could across the room, hoping to find an exit on the far side. He noted that people were paying a different kind of attention to him now and he wondered why. One woman actually left a lathe and came up to sniff at his elbow. Janvert tried his universal shrug, glanced down to see perspiration glistening on his skin. Had his sweat attracted her, for God’s sake?
The far wall of the room he was crossing showed no open door and he was beginning to feel trapped when he saw a wheeled latch in the wall: it alerted him to one of the doors into the tunnel he’d used earlier. The door was only a faint line in the wall, but it opened outward when he worked the latch. He moved through the doorway as though he had every right there, sealed it behind him. The tunnel sloped up to his right. He listened for sounds to tell him whether others shared the tunnel, heard nothing, and set off upward.
His back and legs ached with fatigue and he wondered how much more of this he could endure. His stomach was a region of painful hollowness, his mouth and throat were dry. Desperation drove him, though, and he knew he would press himself upward until he dropped. He had to escape from this monstrous place.
From the Hive Manual.
Chemical releasers that can evoke a predetermined response from the individual of any animal species must be very numerous and may be infinite within the refined nuances of variation. The so-called rational mind of consciousness in the human animal presents no insurmountable obstacle to such a releasing process, but may be considered only as a threshold to be overcome. And once consciousness has been sufficiently depressed, the releaser is freed to do its work. Here, in this area once considered the exclusive domain of instinct, we of the Hive are sure to develop our greatest unifying forces.
Hellstrom stood in the aerie beneath a Hive-sign display that translated “Use everything – waste nothing.” It was past 3:00 A.M., and he had gone beyond wishing he could get a brief sleep. Now, he only prayed for rest of any kind.
“See those changes in the air pressure,” an observer behind him said. “He’s into the emergency ventilator system again. How is he doing that? Quick! Send the alarm. Where’s the nearest search team?”
“Why aren’t we blocking off that system, level by level, or at least every other level?” Hellstrom asked resignedly.
“We only have enough teams to keep a ten-level guard on the system,” a male voice to his left said.
Hellstrom peered through the green gloom of the aerie, trying to identify who’d spoken. Had that been Ed? Was he back from checking the Outside patrols already?
Damn that Janvert! The man was diabolical in his ingenuity. Dead and injured workers, behavior disruptions from the disturbance of his passage, the growing turmoil left in the wake of running searchers – everything was conspiring to upset the entire Hive. They would be years finding and clearing up all of the traces of this night. Janvert was terrified, of course, and the chemistry of his terror was spreading through the Hive. As more and more workers read that subtle signal from a human who, according to his other chemical markers, seemed one of them, their fears moved like an outspreading wave. It could damned well provoke a crisis if he wasn’t caught soon.
It had been a mistake not to increase his guard as they brought him back to normalcy.
My mistake, Hellstrom told himself bitterly.
The chemistry of fellowship was, indeed, a double-edged blade. It cut both ways. Those guarding him had been lulled by it unconsciously. When had a worker ever attacked his fellows?
He listened to the observer stations coordinating this new turn in the search. Their hunt juices were up and he sensed the excitement in their voices. It was almost as though they didn’t want to catch Janvert too soon.
Hellstrom sighed and said, “Get the female captive up here.”
Someone off in the gloom said, “She’s still unconscious.”
That was Ed for sure, Hellstrom told himself. He said, “Well, revive her and get her up here!”
Hive-sign display over the central vat chamber.
It is right and holy that we yield up our bodies when we die, that the compounds of our transient lives are not lost to that greater force manifested in our Hive.
At the eighth switchback door on his upward flight, Janvert brought himself to a stumbling, panting halt, slumping against the door. He could feel its coolness through his hair as he pressed his head against it, looking down at his bare feet. God, it was hot in the t
unnel! And the stink was worse. He felt he could not move another step without rest. His heart was pounding, his chest ached, sweat poured from his body. He wondered if he dared venture back into the main tunnels and search for an elevator. He pressed an ear against the door, listened, could hear no special activity on the other side. This worried him. Were they waiting there for him to emerge?
Only faint sounds of machinery and an omnipresent sense of human movement came to him. An odd sense of almost silence beyond this door, though. Again, he pressed an ear against it, heard nothing he could identify as a direct menace.
There would be more people out there, though, these weird denizens of Hellstrom’s hive. How many were there? Ten thousand? Not one of them on the census rolls. He knew this. The whole place conveyed a secretive sense of purposes that cut across everything outside in the sharpest and most outrageous ways. Here were people who lived by rules that denied everything the outside society believed. Did they have a god in here? He recalled Hellstrom saying grace. Sham! Pure sham!
It was a damned crawling, revolting hive.
The last words of Trova Hellstrom.
The defeat of the Outsiders is assured by their arrogance. They defy powers greater than themselves. We in the Hive are the true creatures of reason. We will wait patiently in the manner of the insects, with a logic that perhaps no wild Outsider will ever understand, because the insects have taught us that the true winner in the race for survival is the last to finish that race.
Janvert guessed he’d waited five minutes before fear overcame his fatigue. He wasn’t really rested, but he had to go on. He was breathing easier, but the ache remained in his legs; there was a lancing pain in his side when he took too deep a breath, and the arches of his feet felt as though knives were cutting them, a consequence of running barefoot. He knew his body could take little more of this driving punishment before collapse. He had to go out there and find an elevator. He straightened, intending to open the door, and the corner of his left eye caught a flicker of movement down the tunnel. Pursuers carrying guns rounded the corner below him, but their weapons were not raised as they climbed, and they reacted with a brief moment of shock that saved Janvert. His weapon had been held across his left arm as he reached for the door’s wheel latch and he had only to press the stud, which his hand did almost of itself. The figures below him collapsed as the bap-hum filled the tunnel.
In falling, one of the pursuers raised a pistol and fired one shot that hit a light fixture below Janvert and sent a searing shard of some shattered material into his cheek. His left hand, clapped reflexively against the wound, came away with the glittering shard and a bright smear of blood.
Janvert had no way of knowing if the weapon in his hand worked through walls, but the deepest panic he’d known thus far dictated his next actions. He lifted the weapon, depressed the stud on it, and fanned it across the door in front of him before opening it.
Six figures lay in a tangled sprawl beyond the door as it opened, and one of them held a nickel-plated .45 automatic with carved ivory grips. Janvert lifted it from relaxed fingers as he stepped into the room. He glanced around, saw what appeared to be a long, narrow barracks with triple-tiered bunks around the walls. The only occupants were the six figures on the floor – all males, all nude, all but one bald, and all of them breathing. So the weapon only knocked people out when a solid barrier attenuated its force. Janvert nodded to himself. He had a weapon in each hand now, and one of them felt reassuringly familiar.
Hive translation from “The Wisdom of the Wild.”
The path to species extinction begins with the proud belief that in each individual there is a mentalistic being – an ego or personality, spirit, anima, character, soul, or mind – and that this separated incarnation is somehow free.
“Now he has a gun,” Hellstrom said. “That’s great! That’s just great. Is he a superman? Less than half an hour ago he was in the central breeder section. I was assured we had him trapped there and now – now I’m told he has knocked out two entire search teams eight levels higher!”
Hellstrom sat almost at the middle of the aerie’s observation arc, directly behind the observer at the center position. The chair he occupied was his one concession to a body demanding relief from its mounting fatigue. He had been active now for most of twenty-six hours and the aerie clock showed just past 4:00 A.M.
“What are your orders?” the observer in front of him asked.
Hellstrom stared at the observer’s head outlined against the glowing screen. My orders?
“What makes anyone believe my orders have changed?” he asked. “You are to capture him!”
“You still want him alive?”
“More than ever! If he’s really this resourceful, we need to mingle his blood with ours.”
“He’s obviously out in the main tunnels again,” the observer said.
“Of course! Tell the searchers to concentrate on the elevators. He’s had a long climb. He’ll be tired. Concentrate every search team in the upper levels along the elevators. Have them scan every car and knock out any doubtfuls. I know –” Hellstrom held up a silencing hand as the observer turned in shocked alarm. “It can’t be helped.”
“But our own –”
“Better we do it than leave it to him. Look at what he’s done. He obviously has his stunwand turned to maximum and doesn’t know much about it. He’s killing workers close up with it. I feel the same outrage as all of you over this, but we must remember that he is panic stricken and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“He knows enough to stay out of our hands!” someone behind Hellstrom muttered.
Hellstrom ignored the sign of discontent and asked, “Where is that female captive? I ordered her brought up here almost an hour ago.”
“She had to be revived, Nils. They’re bringing her.”
“Well, tell them to hurry.”
From the Hive Manual.
One of our strengths lies in the recognition of the diversity we gain through a unique application of the social behavior of insects as opposed to the social behavior evolved by the wild human animal. With this lesson ever before us, we are, for the first time in the long history of life on this planet, designing our own future.
Janvert stood behind two females and two males in an upbound elevator. The quartet had shown disturbance at his entry and he had interpreted this as growing out of the wound on his cheek. A peremptory gesture with the gun, however, had quieted them, but he was left with the odd feeling that the gesture, not the gun, had elicited the response. To test this, he tucked the automatic under his right arm when one of the men turned, and he waved a palm at the man. It was as though Janvert had said turn around and leave me alone. The man turned, wiggled his fingers at his companions, and all of them ignored Janvert from that point.
He had the hang of the elevators now. You stood to the back in these upper-level cars. The act of stepping forward slowed them at a passing floor. Near the doorway there was a critical area that operated an invisible sensor.
One of the women glanced back at him presently, nodded at the doorway which was passing a blank gray wall. Last stop coming up? Janvert wondered. The others moved forward in a body. Janvert readied himself to join them, lifting the captured wand in his left hand. As he moved, the first thin edge of the opening gaped above him. The car slowed and he saw a cluster of bare legs, two weapons pointing inward at the elevator car.
Janvert depressed the stud on his own weapon, fanned it across the doorway as the opening deepened. He caught his fellow passengers as well as those outside. He leaped over the passengers, spraying his weapon right and left in a humming arc of destruction, and ran down the tunnel to the right, partly on the cold floor, partly on fallen flesh still warm under his feet.
As he ran, he heard a gushing crunch behind, glanced back without breaking stride. One of his fellow passengers had fallen with head across the door opening. The upward-surging car had left a head rolling on the floor in a patch of g
ore.
Janvert turned away, finding it odd that he felt nothing. Nothing at all. That denizen of this hive had been dead already, killed by one of his own kind’s weapons. It made no difference what was done to the body after that. No difference at all.
Continuing to depress the firing stud for short bursts of humming, Janvert trotted down the tunnel, clearing a path as he went. In this way, he rounded a corner, caught another group of elevator watchers. They collapsed as he burst upon them, but there was a new group running toward him down the tunnel ahead and Janvert heard the thrumming of their weapons. Obviously they were out of range. He lifted the automatic, emptied it into this group, dodged into the first up-car, and rode it two floors before emerging into another tunnel where the opening had been left unguarded.
Janvert dodged hurrying figures to cross this tunnel, entered another sharply slanted up-ramp which he abandoned at the first doorway on his right. This led into another hydroponics garden full of harvesters. He recognized tomatoes and hurled the empty automatic at a worker who ran toward him protesting the intrusion. He ran, firing the captured weapon ahead and to both sides. Tomatoes splashed on the floor from tumbling harvest sacks, and their red pulp spattered over his feet and legs as he skidded through them. His chest was one big band of flame, throat dry and painful, his body almost ready to quit.
A series of small openings became visible in the far wall of the hydroponics room as he approached. They were about chest height and he could see sacked produce whisking upward – then baskets, bins. He recognized berries, what appeared to be deep green cucumbers, string beans . . .
Hellstrom's Hive Page 31
