Hellstrom's Hive

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. The 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.

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.