Hellstrom's Hive

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!