Hellstrom's Hive by Frank Herbert Page A

fatigue. Others entered to fill the gaps. All knew what was required of them.
    At the elevator—one of the older, upper-level models visibly jerking past the open doorways—he was delayed a moment while a planting crew filed past him, headed for the hydroponics rooms with selected seed stock for replanting. There must be no delay in maintenance of the food cycle which lay at the very base of their survival.
    Hellstrom stepped into the open gap of the elevator doorway when space appeared on an upbound car. The heavy animal odor of the Hive, which the scrubbing systems erased from vented air exchanged Outside, was strong in the elevator, a sign that leaks were developing far down in the shaft and would have to be repaired. Maintenance was a constant drain on them and could not be ignored even now. He made a mental note to inquire about shaft maintainance. Within two minutes, he was in the subbasement of the barn-studio, his attention concentrated once more on the immediate emergency.
    We must not consign these new intruders to the vats too soon, he told himself.

 
    From Nils Hellstrom’s diary. In the oral tradition that spanned more than a hundred years before our progenitors began their first written records, it was said that the refusal to waste any colony protein dated from our earliest beginnings. I have come to doubt this. Outsider reactions indicate this is no more than a pleasant myth. My brood mother likened this to the openness that we of the Hive have with each other. The vats were for her a beautiful metaphor of the uninhibited internal communication and, as she often said, “In this way, when one dies, no secret dies with her; whatever each has learned will be contributed to the success of the whole.” Nothing in the more than two hundred years of our written records calls the original myth into question, and I will not do so now in our open councils. Thus, I conceal something in the name of a myth which strengthens us. Perhaps, this is how religions begin.
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    In the Hive-head subbasement, caution became a visible thing. A ladder of Hive steel was anchored in one corner of the open area beneath the baffles and sound dampers of the floor supports. The ladder led upward through the baffles to a concealed trapdoor that emerged in a cubicle of a communal toilet in the barn’s basement. A concealed screen at the top of the ladder slid into position when a worker climbed to that point. The screen revealed whether the cubicle was occupied. A remote locking system secured the cubicle’s door when a worker from below was emerging.
    There were secondary monitoring screens at the base of the ladder with a watchworker on duty there. The worker waved Hellstrom ahead, signaling that no Outsiders were in the studio area. The ladder was attached to a wall of one of the giant ventilation ducts that emerged in the barn roof. He felt the subtle vibrations as he climbed. He emerged from the cubicle presentlyand into an empty washroom, which gave him passage into the studio’s actual basement, a space of wardrobe stores, film stores, editing and processing facilities for film, dressing rooms and makeup areas, and props. By Outsider standards, it was all very normal. Workers were going about their activities in the area, but they ignored him. Ordinary stairs at the end of a long hallway gave entrance through a sound-baffle system into a double-doored lock passage and thence to the main studio which took up most of the barn’s cavernous interior.

 
    From the permanent minutes of the Hive Council. Present computations indicate that the Hive will begin to feel swarming pressures when it passes a population of sixty thousand. Without some protections, as Project 40 would offer, we cannot permit such a swarming to occur. For all of the ingenuity provided us by our specialist, we are helpless before the combined might of the Outside, whose killing machines would crush us. The total dedication of