Quickly, Janvert dragged the body into the gloom at the edge of the ledge, hesitated. Should he dump the man into the river? There might be people downstream to see it and come looking for an explanation. He decided against it and went up the stairs.
The stairs ended at a platform that formed the anchor point for a catwalk across the rushing river. Janvert struck out boldly across the catwalk. He felt no particular qualms at having killed another denizen of Hellstrom’s warren. The oily movement of water about thirty feet below and the continuing pressure of the fetid odor combined to produce in him a feeling of vertigo, however, and he guided himself with his left hand on the rail beside him.
The catwalk entered a short, narrow tunnel at the far side of the river and there was an open, glowing yellow tube to fight his way from above. A door blocked the inner end of the short tunnel. It held a wheeled handle at waist height in its center and there was a green-glowing A above the wheel with a stylized symbol beside it which he took to be part of an insect’s body, segmented and tapering, but without a head.
Holding the weapon ready, Janvert applied left pressure to the wheel with his left hand. It resisted for a moment, then turned freely to an abrupt stop. He heaved outward on the wheel and it gave abruptly with a soughing sound and he felt a breeze on the back of his neck. Faintly glowing pink light beyond the door revealed another tunnel barely wider than the door. The light came from widely spaced overhead fixtures—small flat discs. The tunnel slanted upward at a gentle angle.
Janvert stepped inside, sealed the door behind him with a spin of a duplicate handle on the inside. He began to climb.
Hive Security Report 7-A: Janvert.
Worker whose description agrees with that of Janvert reported on level forty-eight near turbine station six. Although this would indicate fugitive is going down in the Hive instead of up, it is being investigated. Workers who reported the sighting say they thought he was a leader specialist because of his long hair and possession of a stunwand. This would tend to confirm the sighting, but it still seems unusual that he would not try to break through immediately to the surface.
Janvert estimated he had climbed almost three hundred feet in the narrow tunnel before he paused for a rest. The tunnel executed a sharp switchback approximately every thousand paces and he estimated the slope at about three percent. He guessed that the tunnel was a ventilator of some kind, but he had seen no openings thus far, and there was something about the stillness of the place and the occasional pockets of dust that spoke of long disuse. Could it be an emergency exit? Perhaps it had been dug for access while larger tunnels were being excavated. Could it possibly lead to an emergency exit? He didn’t dare let himself hope for that yet. The tunnel was just taking him upward.
He resumed his climb presently and in five more switchbacks came to another door with a wheeled handle. He stopped, looked at the door. What was on the other side? Should he pass it? He had a weapon. The weapon carried the deciding argument. He worked the door handle, put a shoulder to the door, and thrust it open. Air soughed against his face.
Janvert stepped out of the tunnel onto a narrow, railed platform about halfway up the wall of an immense circular and domed room. It stretched away from him in bright blue-white light for at least two hundred yards. The floor of the giant room curved slightly downward to the center and it was alive with men and women in a complexity of sexual couplings.
Janvert stared at them, frozen in blank astonishment.
The room was filled with an undercurrent of grunts and sounds of flesh slapping flesh. Couples were separating, stumbling to new partners, and just going on with their amazing sexual activity.
Breeding!
He recalled Peruge’s astonished account of the night with Fancy. She’d called it breeding. That was the only word that really fit this amazing scene. It excited no prurient interest in him. It even repelled him slightly. The place carried its own distinctive odor—a wild mixture of perspiration and a musty something that reminded him of saliva, all of it riding on the original stink of this whole warren. He noted now that the floor was damp and it appeared resilient. It was a faint blue gray and it glistened in the few places not occupied by writhing couples. Through the movement of flesh at the center of the room, he detected a wide circle of darker material which appeared to be a drain—it was grilled, by God! There were marks on some of the flesh to show the grill pattern.
What could be more efficient?
Still in a state of semishock, Janvert retreated into the tunnel, sealed the door, resumed his climb. His memory carried the wild image of that room. He didn’t think he would ever forget that scene. Nobody would believe him, though. That had to be seen to be believed.
He knew he was working against a background of semihysteria. So that’s what they mean by “sexual congress!”
He suspected he could have climbed down from his platform and joined the orgy without anyone the wiser. Just another male breeder. Janvert passed two more wheel-handled doors before recovering a semblance of mental balance. He looked at each door with revulsion, trying to imagine what he might find on the other side. This was a goddamned human hive! He stopped abruptly, frozen by the full import of that thought.
Hive.
He glanced around at the dimly lighted walls of the tunnel, sensed the faint humming of machinery, the smells, all the signs of teeming life around him.
HIVE!
Janvert took three deep, shuddering breaths before resuming his climb. His thoughts were in turmoil. It was a human hive. They lived here the way insects lived. How did insects live? They did things no human wanted to do—some things no human could do. They had drones and workers—and a queen and—they ate to live. They ate things that the human stomach would reject if the human consciousness didn’t reject it first. For insects, breeding was just—breeding. The more he thought about it, the more the pattern fitted. This was no secret government project! This was a horror, an abomination, a thing that needed to be burned out!
Hive Security Report 16-A: Janvert.
The body of a turbine specialist killed by stunwand has been found near the center of the primary watercourse. Janvert’s work for sure. Double guard has been ordered on all turbine inlets and screens, although no human could survive a trip through the power system. More likely he’s in the old construction access tunnels that were converted to emergency ventilation standby. Search concentrating there.
Janvert stopped at the next door, pressed an ear to the door’s surface, listening. He heard faint, rhythmic thumpings on the other side—some kind of machine, he guessed. There was a hiss accompanying the thumps. He released the wheel latch, opened the door a crack, and peered in. It was a much smaller room than the other, but still big. He guessed it to be a hundred feet on a side. The ceiling was low and the door opened directly onto the room’s floor. The light was only a dim red glow from tubes across the ceiling, revealing stubby benches, each with a maze of transparent glass tubing in pillars at both ends. The tubing pulsed with fluids in brilliant glowing colors and this distracted him for a moment from what lay between the pillars on the bench surfaces.
He stared at the objects, unwilling to believe his eyes were reporting accurately. Each bench carried what appeared to be the stump of a human body from about the waist to the knees. Some were grossly male and some female. Among the females were a few whose abdomens bulged as though they were pregnant. Beyond waist and knees there was nothing that could be thought of as flesh—only that tubing with its pulsing colors. Could they be real?