Read Online Hellstrom's Hive by Frank Herbert - Free Book Online Page B

“whose words told us that the way we had always known was the true way.”
    Hellstrom’s earliest education, the one he’d received before going Outside as a counterfeit teen-ager sent at last to get his “book learning,” had been filled with the thoughts of his brood mother.
    â€œ The best must breed with the best. In that way we produce the disparate workers we need for every task our Hive can confront .”
    On that cold April day in 1876, when they had begun to dig out from the natural caverns beneath the farm, building their first Hive, she had told them, “ We will perfect our way and thus become the ‘meek’ whose earth will one day welcome them .”
    This cell he now occupied dated from the first digging, although the diggers and his brood mother had long ago gone into the vats. The cell was sixteen feet wide and twenty-two feet long, eight feet from floor to ceiling. It was not quite square at the rear to accommodate an arm of the original natural cavern. The cell could have had a door in that arm, but the decision had been made to put service conduits, piping, and other ducts there. From the original limestone labyrinth, the Hive had been extended downward more than a mile, reaching outward in a circle almost two miles in diameter below the three-thousand-foot level. It was a teeming warren of nearly fifty thousandworkers (far beyond his brood mother’s hopes), closely integrated with their own factories, hydroponics gardens, laboratories, breeding centers, even an underground river that helped produce the power they required. No wall of the original cavern could be seen now. All walls were a uniform smooth gray of their own mucilaginous prestressed concrete.
    In Hellstrom’s own cell, over the years, the tough gray wall space had been covered with various plans and sketches involved in the Hive’s growth. He had never taken them down, a wasteful idiosyncrasy the Hive tolerated in very few workers. His walls were now thick with pasted-over records of the Hive’s vitality.
    Although he had more cell space than others, his furnishings were otherwise Hive-standard: a bed formed of the mucilage slabs with rawhide lacing under a foam pad, chairs of similar construction, a desk of mucilage supports for a ceramic top in rich grass-green, twelve metal filing cabinets of Outsider manufacture (Hive cabinets were sturdier, but he fancied these for their reminder value), the repeater console with its screens and direct line into the central computer. A wardrobe with Outsider clothing in one corner marked him as one of the key workers who fronted for the Hive in that threatening world beyond their perimeters. Except for two adjustable lamps, one over the desk and the other over the repeater console, the room was illuminated by coved radiating tubes along the intersection of ceiling and walls, a standard practice in all of the galleries, tunnels, and cells of the Hive.
    He could have had one of the newer and more sophisticated cells in the lower levels, but Hellstrom preferred this place that he had occupied since the day his brood mother had gone to the vats—“becoming one with us all.”
    Hellstrom strode back and forth on the tiles of his floor now, worrying about the intruder. Whom did that man represent? Certainly, he was not there out of casual curiosity. Hellstromsensed a powerful Outside force slowly turning its deadly attention toward the Hive.
    He knew he could not delay his response longer. The watchworkers would be irritably restless. They needed commands and a feeling that proper action was being taken. Hellstrom bent to his console, coded his instructions, and sent them into the relay system. Those instructions would be transmitted throughout the warren. Key workers would take preassigned actions. Every worker selected by the relay system through the Hive’s central computer would see gesture signals on a screen. The silent language of the