“They don’t want to search among the cattle, though?”
“They’re bothered by the complications of a sweep down there. If we send workers, they’re sure to get out of hand and kill a few cows. Then we have local problems, just the way we have every time that happens.”
“You still haven’t told me what you’d do.”
“I’d send some of us. We’re trained to deal with the Outside. Some of us have lived out there. We have better control over the hunt response during a sweep.”
Hellstrom nodded, spoke his thoughts aloud. “If she’s up here close to us, she hasn’t a rabbit’s chance of getting away. But if she’s down there among those cows—”
“You see what I mean,” Old Harvey said.
“I’m astonished that the others don’t see it, too,” Hellstrom said. “Will you lead the search party, Harvey?”
“Sure. I see you’re not calling it a sweep.”
“I’d just as soon you went out and brought back only one thing.”
“Alive?”
“If at all possible. We’re not getting much from that other one.”
“That’s what I heard. I was down there when they first started questioning him, but—well, that sort of thing bothers me. I guess I lived too long Outside.”
“I have the same reaction,” Hellstrom said. “This is something better left to the younger workers who don’t even know the concept of mercy.”
“Sure wish there was some other way,” Old Harvey said. He took a deep breath. “I best get about the—search.”
“Choose your men and see to it.”
Hellstrom watched the old man move out into the room, and he thought about the often sheer perversity of the young. The old possessed a special value for the Hive, a kind of balance that could not be denied. This incident was a sure demonstration of their value. Old Harvey had known what to do. The young workers had not wanted to venture out into the night themselves, though, as common workers did, and they’d decided it was unnecessary.
Several of the younger male and female apprentices and the security workers of middle years had heard Hellstrom’s conversation with Old Harvey. They made a shamefaced show now of volunteering for the search.
Old Harvey picked some of them, instructed them briefly. He made a special point of naming Saldo as his second-in-command. That was good. Saldo displayed a devoted respect for Old Harvey and it was surprising that the younger worker had not taken his teacher’s side. This came out in the briefing when Saldo said, “I knew he was right, but you wouldn’t believe me, either.” Apparently Saldo had sided with his teacher, but the others had lumped them both in one bag. Ever conscious of his role as educator, Old Harvey chided Saldo for this remark. “If you thought that, you should’ve given your own arguments, not mine.”
The troop filed out of the room properly chastened.
Hellstrom smiled to himself. They were good stock and learned quickly. One had only to give them the correct example. “In age is balance,” as his brood mother had been fond of saying. Youth, to her, represented an extenuating circumstance which had always to be taken into account.
The words of Nils Hellstrom.
Of the billions of living things on earth, only man ponders his existence. His questions lead to torment; for he is unable to accept, as the insects do, that life’s only purpose is life itself.
Tymiena Grinelli had not liked this assignment from the beginning. She hadn’t objected so much to working with Carlos (they’d combined forces many times in the past) as she did to the time she would spend with him when they were not working. Carlos had been flashingly handsome in his youth and had never accustomed himself to the gradual wearing away of his compelling attraction to women.
She had known that the off-duty association would be a constant bout of sortie and repartee. Grinelli didn’t fancy herself as a femme fatale, but she knew from experience her own magnetism. She had a long face that might have been taken as ugly were it not for the personality behind it. This shone through overlarge and startlingly green eyes. Her body was slender, the skin pale, and there was about her an air of profound sensitivity that fascinated many men, Carlos among them. Her hair was a dark red-auburn and she tended to keep it confined in tight hats or berets.
Tymiena was a family name and its original Slavic meaning had been “a secret.” The name described her manner. She held herself in constant reserve.
Merrivale had alerted her sense of danger originally by assigning only the two of them to the case. She had not liked what she had read in Porter’s accounts and in the reports accumulated under the label of “The Hellstrom File.” Too many of these reports had been second or third hand. Too many of them were semiofficial. They smacked of amateurism. Amateurs were a deadly indulgence in this business.
“Only two of us?” she’d objected. “What about the local police? We could file a missing-person report and—”
“The Chief does not want that,” Merrivale had said.
“Did he say so specifically?”
Merrivale’s face darkened slightly at any reference to his well-known propensity for personalized interpretation of orders. “He made himself abundantly clear! This is to be handled with the utmost discretion.”
“A discreet local inquiry sounds to me well within that requirement. Porter was in that area. He’s missing. These reports in the file indicate others may have disappeared there. This family of picnickers with the twin babies, for instance, they—”
“A logical explanation has been accepted for every such occurrence, Tymiena,” Merrivale interrupted. “Unfortunately, logic and actuality do not always coincide. Our concern is for the actuality and, in our pursuit of it, we shall utilize our own tested resources.”
“I don’t like their logical explanations,” Tymiena said. “I don’t give one particle of a damn what explanations local dumbheads may have accepted.”
“Our own resources only,” Merrivale repeated.
“Which means we put our lives on the line again,” she said. “What does Carlos say about this case?”
“Why don’t you ask him? I’ve arranged for a briefing at 1100 hours. Janvert and Carr will be here, as well.”
“Are they in this?”
“They’re in reserve.”
“I don’t like that, either. Where’s Carlos?”
“I believe he’s in Archives. You have almost an hour to explore this matter with him.”
“Merde!” she said and swept from the room.
Carlos was no more helpful than Merrivale. The assignment had struck him as “routine.” But then, assignments tended to strike Carlos as cast in some familiar mold. His response was a universal, clerkish thoroughness of preparation: read all of the material, study all of the plans. It had not surprised her that Carlos was in Archives. He had an Archives mind.
The trip to Oregon and the cozy journey in the van-camper had been everything she’d expected. Crawling hands and a crawling mind. She had finally told Carlos that she’d contracted a serious venereal disease on her previous assignment. He refused to believe her. Quite calmly, she’d told him then that if he persisted, she would put a bullet in him. She had displayed the small Belgian automatic she always wore in its wrist holster. Something about the clear calmness of her manner told him to believe this. But he had taken the rebuff in muttering bad grace.
The job was another matter, though, and she’d wished him luck when he took off in his ridiculous bird-watching clothes. All through the long day then, when she’d been fulfilling her part of the cover by painting, she had grown increasingly nervous. There had been no particular thing on which to focus her uneasiness, nothing concrete to explain it. The whole scene bothered her. It reeked of trouble. Carlos had been predictably imprecise about his estimate of return time. It all depended on what he saw in his preliminary scan of the farm.