Hellstrom's Hive

Hellstrom sat thinking in his cell. His eyes were absently aware of the charts and diagrams pasted on the walls, the reassuring standby-blink of his repeater console. But he was not actually seeing these things. They’ll send in the first team now, he thought. They were just probing before. Now, we’ll get the real experts and from them we may learn enough to save ourselves.

It had been a long night and a longer day. He had managed to get a two-hour nap, but the Hive was tense and twanging with crisis awareness. Body chemistry told the workers what was happening if nothing else told them.

When he’d returned to the cell a little more than two hours before, Hellstrom had been so tired he had tossed his Outsider jacket onto a chair and flopped on the bed in his clothes. Something heavy in a pocket of the jacket had dragged the jacket into a mound on the floor beside the chair. He could see the lump of the heavy object in his pocket and wondered idly what he’d left there. Abruptly, he remembered the Outsider pistol he’d picked up before leaving his cell—how long ago? It seemed not only another lifetime ago, but in another universe. Everything had changed. Powerful Outside forces had developed an interest in something that was sure to lead them to the Hive.

Project 40.

The source of the leak appeared so innocent on the surface that Hellstrom shivered when he thought about it. Jerry, as one of the cameramen, had been assigned to the MIT sequences and, as part of that assignment, had been charged to do a special research project in the library. He remembered leaving the papers on a table “no more than a half hour.” They’d been in the same place when he’d returned and he’d collected them, thinking no more about it. How innocent! But that had been all the Outsiders needed. It was as though they were possessed of a malevolent genie who watched out to take advantage of such casual slips.

Jerry was heartsick. He felt he had betrayed his beloved Hive. And he had. But it was bound to happen someday. The miracle was that they had endured so long. How could they expect to go forever undetected? The peace of anonymity had its own life cycle, apparently. Peace at any price never quite worked out the way one hoped. There was always a higher price to pay.

Feeling nervous and irritable—emotions he knew his body would transmit like an invisible trail all along the way—but somehow not caring, Hellstrom arose suddenly, went down to check on Project 40. They had to speed things up down there. They had to!