“Jeeeesus!” DT said.
There must be ten thousand of them! Clovis thought.
“I haven’t seen that many gooks since Nam,” DT husked. “Jeeeeesus! It’s like we stirred up a whole anthill of ’em.”
Clovis nodded, thinking: That’s exactly what we’ve done. The whole thing fell into place: Hellstrom was a front for some kind of weirdo cult. She noted the pale skins. They must live underground. The farm was just a cover. She stifled a hysterical giggle. No, the farm was only a lid! She raised her gun, intending to take as many of that ominous advancing line as possible, but a crackling hum from close behind numbed her body and mind. She heard one shot as she toppled, but could not decide whether it was from her gun or DT’s.
From Nils Hellstrom’s diary.
The concept of a colony planted directly in the midst of an existing human society is not unique. There have been many secret groups and movements in human history. Gypsies provide a crude analogue of our way even today. No, we are not unique in this. But our Hive is as far removed from those others as they are removed from primitive, cave-dwelling humans. We are like the colonial protozoan, carchesium, all of us in the Hive attached to a single, branching stem, and that stem concealed in the very ground beneath the other society that believes itself to be the meek who will inherit the earth. Meek! That word originally meant “mute and silent.”
It had been a frantic and confused flight from JFK Airport—an hour’s layover at O’Hare, the quick transfer to a chartered flight at Portland and the noisy discomfort of a single engine all the way up the Columbia Gorge, and, then, as evening came down over them, the long haul diagonally across Oregon into the southeastern corner. Merrivale was in a violent mood when the plane set him down in Lakeview, and it was a mood amplified by the elation simmering in him.
When he had least expected it, in fact when he had resigned himself to a degrading personal defeat, they had called on him. They—a board whose existence he had known about, but never identified—they had chosen Joseph Merrivale as “our best hope to salvage something from this mess.”
With both Peruge and the Chief dead, who else did they have? This gave him a sense of personal power which, in turn, fed his anger. Who was he to be subjected to such discomfort?
The report passed to him quickly in Portland did little to mollify him. Peruge was exposed as criminally careless—spending the night with a woman like that! And while on a job!
The small plane landed in darkness and there was a gray station wagon with only a driver to greet him. The fact that the driver introduced himself as Waverly Gammel, SAIC (FBI-Special Agent in Charge) renewed the worries Merrivale had managed to keep largely suppressed on the flight, and this, too, fed his anger.
They could be throwing me to the wolves, he thought, as he got into the car beside the driver, leaving his luggage for the pilot to dump in the back. This thought had simmered throughout the long trip from Portland. He had looked down at the occasional winking of lights and thought bitterly that people were going about their ordinary business down there—eating, going to movies, watching television, visiting friends. It was a comforting, ordinary life which Merrivale often fantasized should have been his lot. The other side of his fantasy told him, though, that the silent pattern of safety below depended largely upon his efforts to maintain it. They did not know down there what he was doing for them, the sacrifices he made . . .
Even when you followed your orders to the letter, that didn’t help protect you one bit. The sudden promotion had not changed this. It was a universal law: the big fed upon the small and there was always a bigger to make one smaller.
Gammel was a man with a young face and iron gray hair, harshly chiseled planes in his face that suggested American Indian ancestry. The eyes were deeply set and shadowy in the light from the car’s dash. His voice was deep and revealed a faint twang. Texas?
“Bring me up to date,” Merrivale said as Gammel took the car out of the airport parking lot. The FBI man drove with an easy competence without concern for extending the car’s life. They bounced out a rough track from the airport and turned left onto blacktop.
“You know, of course, that there hasn’t been a word from the team you sent into the farm,” Gammel said.
“They told me in Portland,” Merrivale said, forgetting momentarily to impose his superior British accent. He added quickly, “Bloody lash-up!”
Gammel stopped for an arterial sign, turned left onto a wider blacktop, waited for a noisy bus to pass before continuing. “For the moment, we agree with your assessment that the Fosterville deputy is untrustworthy and that there may be other questionables, both in the sheriff’s office and in the community itself. Therefore, we are trusting no locals.”
“What’re you doing about the deputy?”
“He was taken along by your people, you know. He hasn’t been heard from, either.”
“What’re you telling the local authorities?”
“Spy stuff; hush-hush.”
“They’re willing to stand aside?”
“Not willing, but they’ve let discretion overcome their valor; the political suggestions we initiated on high have the general tone of absolute commands at this level.”
“Quite. Presumably, you’ve already invested the countryside around the farm.”
Gammel took his eyes off the road for a moment. Invested? Oh, yes: occupied. He said, “We’ve only brought in eleven men. It must remain at that for the moment. The Oregon Highway Patrol sent three cars and six men, but we haven’t let them fully into the picture. We’re mounting a limited operation on the rebuttable presumption that your office’s assessment is correct. However, at the slightest sign that you’ve misjudged the situation, we’ll be forced to return to our book of rules. Understood?”
Rebuttable presumption, Merrivale thought. It was his kind of phrase and he savored it, tucking it away for later personal use in other company. He did not, however, like the implications behind the phrase and he said so.
“Surely,” Gammel said, “you understand that we’re operating well outside conventions. That team you sent in there had no legal standing whatsoever. That was an assault force, pure and simple. You guys make up your own rules as you go along. We can’t always do that. My instructions are clear. I’m to do everything in my power to help you with a cover story and/or provide reasonable protection for your people as I am able, but—and this is a mighty large but—these instructions hold only for as long as your assessment of the situation is borne out.”
Merrivale listened in frozen silence. It looked more and more as though the board had not promoted him, but were throwing him to the wolves. He had been an associate of two people, now dead, whose policies no longer could be defended. The board had sent him out here in the field all alone, saying, “You’ll get every assistance from the FBI in the field. If it is consistent with policy, other backup will be sent along as you request it.”
Gobbledygook!
He was one clear target if things went any more sour. As though that were possible! He could almost hear the reorganization gears grinding back in Baltimore and Washington. Well, you knew what kind of a business this was when you got into it, Merrivale. They’d look professionally sorrowful while they brought up that standard phrase always used for such occasions: In this business, you take your lumps when that’s required of you.
That was the situation. No doubt of it. If the situation could be salvaged, he’d do that, but first he had to salvage himself. “Bloody hell!” he muttered and meant every syllable of it. “Let’s have the rest of it. What’ve you managed to learn about my people?”