Depeaux returned to the gap in the grass and had another look into the valley. There had been a massacre of Indians here in the late 1860’s—farmers killing off the remnants of a “wild” tribe to remove a threat to grazing stock. As a marker of that all but forgotten day, the valley had been named “Guarded.” According to a historical footnote Depeaux had located, the original name of the valley was Running Water, after the Indian name. Generations of white farming, however, had depleted the water table and now the water did not run year round.
As he studied the valley, Depeaux thought about the record of human nature carried in such names. A casual observer passing this way without doing his homework might think the valley had achieved its name because of its setting. Guarded Valley was a closed-in place with apparently only one real avenue of easy access. The hillsides were steep, a cliff marked the upper end, and only to the north did the valley open out. Appearances could be deceptive, though, Depeaux reminded himself. He had reached his vantage point successfully; his binoculars might just as well be a violent weapon. In a sense, they were: a subtle weapon aimed at the destruction of Guarded Valley.
For Depeaux, that pattern of destruction had begun when Joseph Merrivale, the Agency’s operations director, had called him in for an assignment conference. Merrivale, a native of Chicago who affected a heavy English accent, had begun by grinning at Carlos and saying, “You may have to waste a few of your fellow humans on this one.”
They all knew, of course, how much Depeaux hated personal violence.
From Hellstrom’s Hive Manual.
The significant evolutionary achievement of the insects, more than a hundred million years ago, was the reproductive neuter. This fixed the colony as the unit of natural selection and removed all previous limits on the amount of specialization (expressed as caste differences) that a colony could tolerate. It is clear that if we vertebrates can take the same route, our individual members with their vastly larger brains will become incomparably superior specialists. No other species will be able to stand against us, ever—not even the old human species from which we will evolve our new humans.
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.”