Hellstrom's Hive

The short man with the deceptively youthful face listened attentively as Merrivale briefed Depeaux. It was early on a Monday morning, not yet nine o’clock, and the short man, Edward Janvert, had been surprised that an assignment conference could be called that early on such brief notice. There was trouble somewhere in the Agency, he suspected.

Janvert, who was called Shorty by most of his associates and who managed to conceal his hatred of the name, was only four feet nine inches tall and had passed as a teen-ager on more than one Agency assignment. The furniture in Merrivale’s office was never small enough for him, however, and he was squirming on a big leather chair within a half hour.

It was a subtle case, Janvert observed presently, the type he had learned to distrust. Their target was an entomologist, a Dr. Nils Hellstrom, and it was clear from Merrivale’s careful choice of words that Hellstrom had friends in high places. There were always so many toes around to be avoided in this business. You couldn’t separate politics from the Agency’s version of a traditional security investigation, and these investigations inevitably took on economic overtones.

When he’d called Janvert, Merrivale had said only that it was necessary to keep a second team in reserve for possible assistance in this case. Someone had to be ready to step in on a moment’s notice.

They expect casualties, Janvert told himself.

He glanced covertly at Clovis Carr, whose almost boyish figure was dwarfed in another of Merrivale’s big wing chairs. Janvert suspected Merrivale had decorated the office to give it the air of an expensive British club, something to go with his bogus accent.

Do they know about Clovis and me? Janvert wondered, his attention wandering under the onslaught of Merrivale’s rambling style. To the Agency, love was a weapon to be used whenever it was needed. Janvert tried to keep his gaze away from Clovis, but he kept glancing back at her in spite of himself. She was short, only half an inch taller than himself, a wiry brunette with a pert oval face and a pale northern complexion that turned to burn at the drop of a sunbeam. There were times when Janvert felt his love for her as an actual physical pain.

Merrivale was describing what he called “Hellstrom’s cover,” which turned out to be the making of documentary films about insects.

“Deucedly curious, don’t you think?” Merrivale asked.

For not the first time during his four years in the Agency Janvert wished he were out of it. He had come while a third-year law student working the summer as a clerk in the Justice Department. In that capacity, he had found a file folder accidentally left on a table of his division’s law library. Curious, he had glanced into the file and found a highly touchy report on a translator in a foreign embassy.

His first reaction to the file’s contents had been a kind of sorrowful outrage that governments still resorted to such forms of espionage. Something about the file told him it represented an intricately complex operation of his own government.

Janvert had come up through the “campus unrest” period into the study of law. He had seen the law at first as a possible way out of the world’s many dilemmas, but that had proved a will-o’-the-wisp. The law had led him only into that library with its damnable misplaced file folder. One thing had led inevitably to another, just as it always did, without a completely defined cause-and-effect relationship. The immediate thing, however, was that he had been caught reading the file by its owner.

What followed was curiously low key. There had been a period of pressures, some subtle and some not quite subtle, designed to recruit him into the Agency that had produced the file. Janvert came from a good family, they explained. His father was an important businessman (owner-operator of a small-town hardware store). At first, it had been vaguely amusing.

Then the pay offers (plus expenses) had climbed embarrassingly high and he had begun to wonder. There had been startling praise for his abilities and aptitudes, which Janvert had suspected the Agency invented on the spur of the moment because he’d had difficulty seeing himself in their descriptions.

Finally, the gloves had come off. He’d been told pointedly that he might find other government employment difficult to obtain. This had almost put his back up, because it was common knowledge that he’d set his sights on the Justice Department. In the end, he’d said he would try it for a few years if he could continue his law education. By that time, he’d been dealing with the Chief’s right-hand man, Dzule Peruge, and Peruge had evinced profound delight at this prospect.

“The Agency needs men with legal training,” Peruge said. “We need them desperately at times.”

Peruge’s next words had startled Janvert.

“Has anyone ever told you that you could pass for a teen-ager? That could be very useful, especially in someone with legal training.” This last had come out with all the overtones of an afterthought.

The facts were that Janvert had always been kept too busy to complete his valuable legal training. “Maybe next year, Shorty. You can see for yourself how crucial your present case is. Now, I want you and Clovis—”

That had been how he’d first met Clovis, who also had that useful appearance of youth. Sometimes, she’d been his sister; other times they’d been runaway lovers whose parents “didn’t understand.”

The realization had come rather slowly to Janvert that the file he had found and read was more sensitive than he had imagined and that a probable alternative to his joining the Agency had been a markerless grave in some southern swamp. He had never participated in a “swamping,” as Agency old-timers put it, but he knew for a fact that they occurred.

That’s how it was in the Agency, he learned.

The Agency.

No one ever called it anything else. The Agency’s economic operations, the spying and other forms of espionage only confirmed Janvert’s early cynicism. He saw the world without masks, telling himself that the great mass of his fellows had no realization whatsoever that they already lived in what was, for all intents and purposes, a police state. This had been inevitable from the formation of the first police state that achieved any degree of world power. The only apparent way to oppose a police state was by forming another police state. It was a condition that fostered its mimic forces on all sides (so Clovis Carr and Edward Janvert agreed). Everything they saw in the society took on police-state character. Janvert said it. “This is the time of the police states.”

They made this a tenet of their pact to leave the Agency together at the first opportunity. That their feelings for each other and the pact thus engendered were dangerous, they had no doubts. To leave the Agency would require new identities and a subsequent life of obscurity whose nature they understood all too well. Agents left the service through death in action or a carefully guarded retirement—or they sometimes just disappeared and, somehow, all of their fellows got the message not to ask questions. The most persistent retirement rumor in the Agency mentioned the farm; decidedly not Hellstrom’s farm. It was, instead, a carefully supervised rest home that none located with precise geography. Some said northern Minnesota. The story described high fences, guards, dogs, golf, tennis, swimming, splendid fishing on an enclosed lake, posh private cabins for “guests,” even quarters for married couples, but no children. Having children in this business was considered equal to a death sentence.

Both Carr and Janvert agreed they wanted children. Escape would have to occur while they were overseas together, they decided. Forged papers, new faces, money, the requisite language facility—all of the physical necessities were within reach except one: the opportunity. And never once did they suspect adolescent fantasy in such dreams—nor in the work that occupied their lives. They would escape—someday.

Depeaux was objecting to something in Merrivale’s briefing now. Janvert tried to pick up the thread: something about a young woman trying to escape from Hellstrom’s farm.

“Porter’s reasonably certain they didn’t kill her,” Merrivale said. “They just took her back inside that barn that we are told is the main studio for Hellstrom’s movie operation.”