Hellstrom's Hive (30 page)

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 light 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 switch-backs 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. Could 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.

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 blond 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 up-bound 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 car 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.