“She stays right there with you! That’s an order.”
“That dame could’ve done a helluva lot more than just charge you up as a bed partner,” Janvert argued.
“That’s all it was, dammit!” But Shorty’s words carried the seeds of panic. The night with Fancy had distorted his perceptions of many things, including his idea of woman. The uninhibited little cunt!
“I don’t like the way you sound at all,” Janvert said. “Is Sampson still around?”
“I sent him back to you.”
“The backup van isn’t here yet. What if we—”
“You contact them the way I told you and you get them up there! You hear me, Shorty?”
“But that would leave you in town alone. They’d have a team there and we wouldn’t.”
“They don’t dare attack me!”
“I think you’re wrong. I think they may already have attacked you. That town could be completely in their hands. The deputy sure as hell is!”
“I’m ordering you to stay up there with all of your teams,” Peruge said.
“We could have you at a clinic in Portland within two hours,” Janvert said. “I’m going to call for—”
“I am ordering you not to contact headquarters,” Peruge said.
“I think you’re out of your mind. A clinic might be able to examine you and tell us what was in that shot.”
“Not likely. Christ! She said it was—a hormone or something.”
“You believe that?”
“It’s probably true. Sign off now and do what I told you.” He dropped a hand onto his own cutoff switch, heard the blip as the transceiver went dead.
Damn! Everything took so damned much energy.
Willing every movement, he put away the transceiver, went into the bathroom. A cold shower. That was what he needed. If he could get fully awake. The bathroom still showed the scattered wetness of Fancy’s ablutions. He stepped into the tub, supported himself with a hand on the showerhead while he groped for the faucet. Cold water. He turned it on full. At the first shock of the chilling stream, he felt a sharp band of pain tighten on his forehead and chest. He staggered from the tub, trying to breathe, left the water running. He stumbled from the bathroom, dripping, knocked the remains of his coffee making from the counter as he passed, but didn’t even hear it. The bed! He needed the bed. He flopped his wet body on the bed, rolled onto his back. His chest was on fire, his skin trembling with a deep chill. It was so cold! He arched his back, tried to pull the bedding around himself, but his fingers lost their grip and his suddenly outflung hand fell over the edge of the bed. He was dead before his relaxing fingers touched the floor.
The words of Nils Hellstrom.
In the sense popularly believed Outside, it is not possible to fight back against any aspect of nature. What must be understood is that we fit ourselves into existing patterns, adapting as our influence on those processes brings about inevitable change. The way the wild Outsiders fight insects is particularly enlightening. By opposing themselves to a powerful aspect of existing processes, the wild ones unwittingly add fuel to the defenses of those they oppose. The Outsiders’ poisons bring instant death to most insects. But the few who survive will develop an immunity—a tolerance to ingest the poison with no harmful effect. Returning to the womb of the earth, these survivors pass on this immunity to new generations of billions.
The Hive was always so neat, efficient, and reassuring after the Outside, Fancy thought. She admired the way her fellow workers moved about their tasks without fuss, with that quiet, purposeful air of knowing what they did. Even the escort taking her down the familiar galleries, down the relays of elevators, gave off this same air. She did not think of her escort as captors. They were fellow workers. It was good to get out of the Hive occasionally, but so much better to come back. Especially with the almost certain knowledge that she had added to the Hive’s gene store by last night’s foray. The Hive comforted her mind and body now just by its presence around her.
Outsiders could be great sport, too; especially the randy wild males. In her fifty-eight years, Fancy had brought nine Outsider-fathered babies into the Hive, each concealed in the mysterious fecundity of her body. That was a great contribution to the gene pool. She understood gene pools just as she understood insects. She was a specialist. Outsider males and ants were her favorites.
Sometimes as she watched an ant colony in the lab, Fancy felt that there might be a way for her to move right into the colony with her charges, perhaps even become their brood mother. It might just require a period of chemical acclimatization for her charges to accept her as one of their own. In her fantasy, she could imagine the escort that now took her deep into the Hive as her own queen’s guard. She would be the ant queen. And the strange thing was that ants did tend to accept her. Ants, mosquitoes, many different kinds of insects showed no disturbance at Fancy’s intrusions. When she recognized this and had these fantasies, it was easy to imagine the Hive as her own colony.
So firmly had imagination taken hold of Fancy’s consciousness that when the escort brought her into Hellstrom’s presence, she looked upon him at first with queenly condescension, and she failed to observe the state he was in.
Hellstrom noted that she still wore the fur coat she’d taken from wardrobe and she appeared mighty proud of herself. He nodded to dismiss the guards. They retreated into the background, but remained alert and observing. Saldo’s orders had been explicit about that. Many security workers were growing to recognize that Saldo possessed qualities that demanded obedience. In this room of the Hive’s inner security processes, at least half of the workers harbored such divided loyalties.
“Well, Fancy,” Hellstrom said, his voice tired but carefully neutral.
There was a desk beside Hellstrom and she perched now on a corner of it, grinning at him.
Hellstrom took the chair behind the desk and sank into it with a feeling of gratitude. He looked up at her. “Fancy, would you try to explain to me what you thought you were doing in last night’s escapade?”
“I just spent the night breeding with your dangerous Mr. Peruge,” she said. “He was about as dangerous as any other Outsider male I’ve ever met.”
“You took things from Hive stores,” Hellstrom said. “Tell me about that.”
“Just this coat and a shot of our own male breeding hormones,” she said. “I hyped him up.”
“Did he respond?”
“Just like always.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Lots of times,” she said. Hellstrom was acting so strangely.
Hellstrom nodded to himself, tried to read another message into Fancy’s responses, something to confirm his suspicion that she was acting out of an awareness of the Hive’s most fundamental needs. Additions to the gene pool were beneficial, yes; and Peruge’s genes would be most welcome. But she had taken a prized Hive secret Outside, risked Outsider discovery that the Hive possessed a profound knowledge of the workings of human hormones. By her present admission, she had done this more than once. If Outsiders learned some of the things the Hive could do in manipulation of human chemistry . . .
“Did you ever discuss this with anyone?” Hellstrom asked. Surely, there must be some circumstance to explain such behavior.
“I’ve talked about it with lots of the breeder females,” she said. What possibly could be bothering old Nils? She saw now that he was working against deep tensions.
“With breeder females,” he said.
“Certainly. Lots of us use the hormones when we go Outside.”
Shocked, Hellstrom shook his head silently. Blessed brood mother! And none of the Hive’s ruling specialists had ever once suspected! What other unsuspected things might be going on here in the Hive?