Hellstrom had been awakened from his daysleep by a young female watchworker. Her observation screen had revealed the Outsider intruding on Hive territory. Hellstrom’s cell had been closed off for the privacy that a key worker could enjoy, and the young watchworker had come personally to Hellstrom, shaking his shoulder gently to awaken him. She had given him the information in the swift and silent gesture-language of the Hive.
The intruder could be observed on the hill above the Hive-head buildings. He was using binoculars to study the area. His approach had been noted far out by sensors in a perimeter tunnel. He had left a companion with a vehicle near the road to Fosterville. The entire message took three seconds.
With a sigh, Hellstrom slid from the foam-and-down warmth of his bed, flashed a hand signal indicating that he understood. The watchworker left the cell. Hellstrom crossed the floor’s smooth tiles, their coolness helping to awaken him, and he activated the bank of repeaters that gave him contact with the Hive’s security system sensors. He focused on the section the watchworker had indicated.
At first, Hellstrom had difficulty locating the Outside intruder in the tall grass. The light was always bad in that direction at this hour of the afternoon. He wondered if the watchworker could have been mistaken about the correct screen. The watchworkers got sensitive and twitchy at times, but he had yet to find one turning in a false alarm or making a major error.
Hellstrom studied the tall brown grass carefully. The panorama of dry grass in the hot afternoon light appeared unbroken. Abruptly, something moved in the grass at the ridgecrest. As though movement had created a new scene, he saw the intruder: the Outsider was a male clothed to match the grass so closely that it surely could not be accidental. More than seventy years of living the Hive life had made the necessity for concealment a reflex with Hellstrom. He had possessed the sense of caution long before he’d assumed a false age and moved out of the Hive to build an Outsider identity. Now, seeing the prying intruder, he moved briskly, slipped his feet into sandals, and draped a white lab smock over his body. As he moved, he glanced at the crystal-driven clock on his walclass="underline" 2:59 P.M. The clock, accurate to four seconds in a year, had been built by a brood mate whose breeding and training had sent her into the laboratories for life.
Hellstrom thought about the intruder. If this one waited as the others had, he could be taken in the dark. Hellstrom made a mental note to get the night sweep started early and with special preparations for this possibility. The Hive had to learn why these Outsiders were prying.
Before leaving his cell, Hellstrom studied the Hive’s outer perimeter on his repeaters and saw, far down in the valley, a van-camper with a woman seated beside it sketching on a tablet in her lap. He magnified the view, saw nervous tension in the woman’s shoulder muscles, an involuntary movement of the head that drew her gaze up the slopes leading to the Hive. She would have to be picked up, too. Why were they suspicious of the farm? Who was behind this? There was something professional about this intrusion which made Hellstrom’s heartbeat quicken.
He chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip while he searched inwardly for an instinct with which to meet this threat. The Hive was strong and hidden in a way that did not invite attention, but he knew how vulnerable it was, how little that strength would count against the shocked awareness of the Outsiders.
His gaze moved absently around his cell. It was one of the larger cubicles in the complex warren beneath the farm and the surrounding hills. It had been one of the first constructed by the original colonists who had brought their centuries-long migrations here under his brood mother’s guidance.
“It is time to stop running, my beloved workers. We, who have lived furtive double lives among the Outsiders for more than three hundred years, dissembling, always ready to move at the slightest suspicion, have come to the place that will shelter us and make us strong.”
She had claimed a vision guided her, a visit in her dreams from the blessed Mendel “whose words told us that the way we had always known was the true way.”
Hellstrom’s earliest education, the one he’d received before going Outside as a counterfeit teen-ager sent at last to get his “book learning,” had been filled with the thoughts of his brood mother.
“The best must breed with the best. In that way we produce the disparate workers we need for every task our Hive can confront.”
On that cold April day in 1876, when they had begun to dig out from the natural caverns beneath the farm, building their first Hive, she had told them, “We will perfect our way and thus become the ‘meek’ whose earth will one day welcome them.”
This cell he now occupied dated from that first digging, although the diggers and his brood mother had long ago gone into the vats. The cell was sixteen feet wide and twenty-two feet long, eight feet from floor to ceiling. It was not quite square at the rear to accommodate an arm of the original natural cavern. The cell could have had a door in that arm, but the decision had been made to put service conduits, piping, and other ducts there. From the original limestone labyrinth, the Hive had been extended downward more than a mile, reaching outward in a circle almost two miles in diameter below the three-thousand-foot level. It was a teeming warren of nearly fifty thousand workers (far beyond his brood mother’s hopes), closely integrated with their own factories, hydroponics gardens, laboratories, breeding centers, even an underground river that helped produce the power they required. No wall of the original cavern could be seen now. All walls were a uniform smooth gray of their own mucilaginous prestressed concrete.
In Hellstrom’s own cell, over the years, the tough gray wall space had been covered with various plans and sketches involved in the Hive’s growth. He had never taken them down, a wasteful idiosyncrasy the Hive tolerated in very few workers. His walls were now thick with pasted-over records of the Hive’s vitality.
Although he had more cell space than others, his furnishings were otherwise Hive-standard: a bed formed of the mucilage slabs with rawhide lacing under a foam pad, chairs of similar construction, a desk of mucilage supports for a ceramic top in rich glass-green, twelve metal filing cabinets of Outsider manufacture (Hive cabinets were sturdier, but he fancied these for their reminder value), the repeater console with its screens and direct line into the central computer. A wardrobe with Outsider clothing in one corner marked him as one of the key workers who fronted for the Hive in that threatening world beyond their perimeters. Except for two adjustable lamps, one over the desk and the other over the repeater console, the room was illuminated by coved radiating tubes along the intersection of ceiling and walls, a standard practice in all of the galleries, tunnels, and cells of the Hive.