Hellstrom's Hive

by Frank Herbert

Overview

America is a police state, and it is about to be threatened by the most hellish enemy in the world: insects.

When the Agency discovered that Dr. Hellstrom's Project 40 was a cover for a secret laboratory, a special team of agents was immediately dispatched to discover its true purpose and its weaknesses—it could not be allowed to continue. What they discovered was a nightmare more horrific and hideous than even their paranoid government minds could devise.

First published in Galaxy magazine in 1973 as "Project 40," Frank Herbert's vivid imagination and brilliant view of nature and ecology have never been more evident than in this classic of science fiction.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429969031
Publisher:	Tom Doherty Associates
Publication date:	08/24/2010
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	347,775
File size:	434 KB

About the Author

Frank Herbert is the author of the 1965 science fiction classic, Dune. He passed away in 1986.

Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune.  He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind.  His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre.  Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy.  It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies.

As a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading.  He loved Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be a author."  His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child's body.  In grade school he was the acknowledged authority on everything.  If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. He'll know."

His curiosity and independent spirit got him into trouble more than once when he was growing up, and caused him difficulties as an adult as well.  He did not graduate from college because he refused to take the required courses for a major; he only wanted to study what interested him.  For years he had a hard time making a living, bouncing from job to job and from town to town. He was so independent that he refused to write for a particular market; he wrote what he felt like writing.  It took him six years of research and writing to complete Dune, and after all that struggle and sacrifice, 23 publishers rejected it in book form before it was finally accepted. He received an advance of only $7,500.

His loving wife of 37 years, Beverly, was the breadwinner much of the time, as an underpaid advertising writer for department stores.  Having been divorced from his first wife, Flora Parkinson, Frank Herbert met Beverly Stuart at a University of Washington creative writing class in 1946.  At the time, they were the only students in the class who had sold their work for publication.  Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, one to Esquire and the other to Doc Savage.  Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine.  These genres reflected the interests of the two young lovers; he the adventurer, the strong, machismo man, and she the romantic, exceedingly feminine and soft-spoken.

Their marriage would produce two sons, Brian, born in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951. Frank also had a daughter, Penny, born in 1942 from his first marriage.  For more than two decades Frank and Beverly would struggle to make ends meet, and there were many hard times.  In order to pay the bills and to allow her husband the freedom he needed in order to create, Beverly gave up her own creative writing career in order to support his.  They were in fact a writing team, as he discussed every aspect of his stories with her, and she edited his work.  Theirs was a remarkable, though tragic, love story-which Brian would poignantly describe one day in Dreamer of Dune (Tor Books; April 2003).  After Beverly passed away, Frank married Theresa Shackelford.

In all, Frank Herbert wrote nearly 30 popular books and collections of short stories, including six novels set in the Dune universe: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune.  All were international bestsellers, as were a number of his other science fiction novels, which include The White Plague and The Dosadi Experiment.  His major novels included The Dragon in the Sea, Soul Catcher (his only non-science fiction novel), Destination: Void, The Santaroga Barrier, The Green Brain, Hellstorm's Hive, Whipping Star, The Eyes of Heisenberg, The Godmakers, Direct Descent, and The Heaven Makers. He also collaborated with Bill Ransom to write The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.  Frank Herbert's last published novel, Man of Two Worlds, was a collaboration with his son, Brian.

Read an Excerpt

Hellstrom's Hive

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By Frank Herbert

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 1973 Herbert Properties LLC
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6903-1

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CHAPTER 1

Words of the brood mother, Trova Hellstrom. I welcome the day when I will go into the vats and become one with all of our people.

(DATED OCTOBER 26, 1896.)

The man with the binoculars squirmed forward on his stomach through the sun-warmed brown grass. There were insects in the grass and he did not like insects, but he ignored them and concentrated on reaching the oak shadows at the hillcrest with minimum disturbance of the growth that concealed him even while it dropped stickers and crawling things on his exposed skin.

His narrow face, swarthy and deeply seamed, betrayed his age — fifty-one years — but the hair, black and oily, that poked from beneath his khaki sun hat belied these years. So did his movements, quick and confident.

At the hillcrest, he drew several deep breaths while dusting the binocular lenses with a clean linen handkerchief. He parted the dry grass then, focused the binoculars, and stared through them at the farm that filled the valley below the hill. The haze of the hot autumn afternoon complicated his examination as did the binoculars, a pair of ten-sixties of special manufacture. He had trained himself to use them the way he fired a rifle: hold breath, concentrate on rapid scanning with only eye movements, keeping immobile the expensive instrument of glass and metal that brought distances into such immediate detail.

It was an oddly isolated farm that met his amplified gaze. The valley was about half a mile long, perhaps five hundred yards wide for most of its length, narrowing at the upper end where a thin trickle of water spilled down a black rock face. The farm buildings occupied cleared ground on the far side of a narrow stream whose meandering, willow-bordered bed was only a thin reminder of its spring affluence. Patches of wavering green moss marked the stream's rocks, and there were a few shallow pools where water appeared not to flow at all.

The buildings sat back from the stream — a cluster of weathered boards and blind glass at rustic variance with the neatness of harvested plantings that ran in parallel rows within cleanly squared fencelines over the rest of the valley. There was the house, its basic unit in the old saltbox pattern, but with two added wings and a bay window on the wing that pointed toward the creek. To the right of the house there was a large barn with big doors on the second level and an upjutting cupola arrangement along its ridgeline: no windows there, but louvered ventilators were spaced along its entire length and at the visible end. Up on the hill behind the barn there stretched a decaying feed shed; a smaller building on this end that could be an old out-house; another small wooden structure higher on the hill behind the farmhouse, possibly an old pumphouse; and, down by the higher main fence at the valley's northern end, a squat concrete block about twenty feet on a side and with flat roof: new pumphouse was the guess, but it looked like a defensive blockhouse.

The watcher, whose name was Carlos Depeaux, made a mental note that the valley fitted the descriptions. It was full of default messages: no people stirring about on the land (although a distinctly audible and irritating machinery hum issued from the barn), no road coming up from the north gate to the farm buildings (the nearest road, a one-way track, came up to the valley from the north but ended at the gate beyond the blockhouse). A footpath with narrow indentations apparently from a wheelbarrow stretched from the gate to the farmhouse and barn.

The valley's sides were steep farther up and in places almost craggy with brown rock outcroppings at the top on the far side. There was a similar rocky upthrust about a hundred feet to Depeaux's right. A few animal tracks wound their dusty ribbons through oak and madroña along the valley sides. The black rock of the tiny waterfall closed off the southern end where a thin cinnamon tracery of water spilled into the stream. To the north, the land undulated away out of the valley, widening into pasture meadows and occasional clumps of pine intermingled with oak and madroña. Cattle grazed in the far distance to the north and, although there were no fences immediately outside the farm's barrier, tall grass revealed that the cattle did not venture too near this valley. That, too, accorded with the reports.

Having satisfied himself that the valley still matched its descriptions, Depeaux wriggled backward behind the crest, found a shaded patch beneath an oak. There, he turned onto his back and brought his small knapsack into a position where he could explore its interior. He knew his clothing would blend well with the grass, but he still hesitated to sit up, preferring to wait and listen. The sack contained his binocular case, a well-thumbed copy of Naming the Birds at a Glance, a good thirty-five- millimeter camera with a long lens, two thin beef sandwiches wrapped in plastic, an orange, and a plastic bottle of warm water.

He brought out a sandwich, lay for a moment staring up through the oak's branches, his pale gray eyes not really focused on anything in particular. Once, he pulled at the black hairs protruding from his nostrils. This was an extremely odd situation. Here it was mid-October and the Agency still had not been able to observe the farmers in that valley through an entire harvest. The crops had been harvested, however. That was obvious at a glance. Depeaux was not a farmer, but he thought he recognized the stubby remains of corn plantings, although the stalks had been removed.

He wondered why they had cleared away the stalks. Other farms he had seen in the long drive to this valley were still littered with harvest remains. He wasn't sure, but he thought this was another default message in the valley that interested his Agency so much. The uncertainty, the gap in his knowledge, bothered him, however, and he made a note to check on this. Did they burn the stalks?

Presently, sensing no watchers around him, Depeaux sat up with his back against the oak's bole, ate the sandwich, and drank some of the warm water. It was the first food he had allowed himself since before daylight. He decided to save the orange and other sandwich for later. It had been a long, slow approach to this vantage point from the place far back in the pines where he had concealed his bicycle. The van and the stake-out where he had left Tymiena were another half hour's bicycle ride beyond that. He had decided not to venture back before nightfall and knew he was going to be very hungry before he got back to the van. Not the first time on such a job. The peculiar nature of this case had become increasingly obvious the nearer he came to the farm. Well — he'd been warned about that. Stubborn persistence had kept him pressing forward past the imaginary hunger line he knew he'd have to pass on the return. The countryside was much more open and empty of concealment than he'd expected from the aerial photos, although Porter's reports had made specific mention of this. Depeaux had expected to approach from a different direction, however, and find his own cover. But there had been, finally, only the tall brown grass to conceal his stalking climb across a wide pastureland and up to the hill.

The sandwich finished and half his water gone, Depeaux sealed the bottle, restored it and the rest of the food to his pack. For a moment, he peered along his back trail to see if anyone had followed. There was no sign, but he couldn't put down an uneasy feeling that he was watched. The lowering sun was picking up his trail with a shadow line, too. No helping that; the crushed grass represented a track, and it could be traced.

He had driven through the town of Fosterville at 3:00 A.M., curious about the sleeping community where, so he was told, they generally refused to answer questions about the farm. There had been a new motel on the outskirts and Tymiena had suggested they spend a night there before reconnoitering the farm, but Depeaux was playing a hunch on this case. What if there were watchers in the town to report strangers to the farm?

The Farm.

It had been capitalized in all of the Agency's reports for some time, from quite a while before Porter had turned up missing. Depeaux had driven on to a turnoff several miles below the valley and had left Tymiena there shortly before dawn. Now, he was a bird watcher, but there were no birds visible.

Depeaux returned to the gap in the grass and had another look into the valley. There had been a massacre of Indians here in the late 1860s — farmers killing off the remnants of a "wild" tribe to remove a threat to grazing stock. As a marker of that all but forgotten day, the valley had been named "Guarded." According to a historical footnote Depeaux had located, the original name of the valley was Running Water, after the Indian name. Generations of white farming, however, had depleted the water table and now the water did not run year round.

As he studied the valley, Depeaux thought about the record of human nature carried in such names. A casual observer passing this way without doing his homework might think the valley had achieved its name because of its setting. Guarded Valley was a closed-in place with apparently only one real avenue of easy access. The hillsides were steep, a cliff marked the upper end, and only to the north did the valley open out. Appearances could be deceptive, though, Depeaux reminded himself. He had reached his vantage point successfully; his binoculars might just as well be a violent weapon. In a sense, they were: a subtle weapon aimed at the destruction of Guarded Valley.

For Depeaux, that pattern of destruction had begun when Joseph Merrivale, the Agency's operations director, had called him in for an assignment conference. Merrivale, a native of Chicago who affected a heavy English accent, had begun by grinning at Carlos and saying, "You may have to waste a few of your fellow humans on this one."

They all knew, of course, how much Depeaux hated personal violence.

CHAPTER 2

From Hellstrom's Hive Manual. The significant evolutionary achievement of the insects, more than a hundred million years ago, was the reproductive neuter. This fixed the colony as the unit of natural selection and removed all previous limits on the amount of specialization (expressed as caste differences) that a colony could tolerate. It is clear that if we vertebrates can take the same route, our individual members with their vastly larger brains will become incomparably superior specialists. No other species will be able to stand against us, ever — not even the old human species from which we will evolve our new humans.

The short man with the deceptively youthful face listened attentively as Merrivale briefed Depeaux. It was early on a Monday morning, not yet nine o'clock, and the short man, Edward Janvert, had been surprised that an assignment conference could be called that early on such brief notice. There was trouble somewhere in the Agency, he suspected.

Janvert, who was called Shorty by most of his associates and who managed to conceal his hatred of the name, was only four feet nine inches tall and had passed as a teen-ager on more than one Agency assignment. The furniture in Merrivale's office was never small enough for him, however, and he was squirming on a big leather chair within a half hour.

It was a subtle case, Janvert observed presently, the type he had learned to distrust. Their target was an entomologist, a Dr. Nils Hellstrom, and it was clear from Merrivale's careful choice of words that Hellstrom had friends in high places. There were always so many toes around to be avoided in this business. You couldn't separate politics from the Agency's version of a traditional security investigation, and these investigations inevitably took on economic overtones.

When he'd called Janvert, Merrivale had said only that it was necessary to keep a second team in reserve for possible assistance in this case. Someone had to be ready to step in on a moment's notice.

They expect casualties, Janvert told himself.

He glanced covertly at Clovis Carr, whose almost boyish figure was dwarfed in another of Merrivale's big wing chairs. Janvert suspected Merrivale had decorated the office to give it the air of an expensive British club, something to go with his bogus accent.

Do they know about Clovis and me? Janvert wondered, his attention wandering under the onslaught of Merrivale's rambling style. To the Agency, love was a weapon to be used whenever it was needed. Janvert tried to keep his gaze away from Clovis, but he kept glancing back at her in spite of himself. She was short, only half an inch taller than himself, a wiry brunette with a pert oval face and a pale northern complexion that turned to burn at the drop of a sunbeam. There were times when Janvert felt his love for her as an actual physical pain.

Merrivale was describing what he called "Hellstrom's cover," which turned out to be the making of documentary films about insects.

"Deucedly curious, don't you think?" Merrivale asked.

For not the first time during his four years in the Agency Janvert wished he were out of it. He had come while a third-year law student working the summer as a clerk in the Justice Department. In that capacity, he had found a file folder accidentally left on a table of his division's law library. Curious, he had glanced into the file and found a highly touchy report on a translator in a foreign embassy.

His first reaction to the file's contents had been a kind of sorrowful outrage that governments still resorted to such forms of espionage. Something about the file told him it represented an intricately complex operation of his own government.

Janvert had come up through the "campus unrest" period into the study of law. He had seen the law at first as a possible way out of the world's many dilemmas, but that had proved a will-o'-the-wisp. The law had led him only into that library with its damnable misplaced file folder. One thing had led inevitably to another, just as it always did, without a completely defined cause-and-effect relationship. The immediate thing, however, was that he had been caught reading the file by its owner.

What followed was curiously low key. There had been a period of pressures, some subtle and some not quite subtle, designed to recruit him into the Agency that had produced the file. Janvert came from a good family, they explained. His father was an important businessman (owner-operator of a small-town hardware store). At first, it had been vaguely amusing.

Then the pay offers (plus expenses) had climbed embarrassingly high and he had begun to wonder. There had been startling praise for his abilities and aptitudes, which Janvert had suspected the Agency invented on the spur of the moment because he'd had difficulty seeing himself in their descriptions.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Hellstrom's Hive by Frank Herbert. Copyright © 1973 Herbert Properties LLC. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

1. Words of the brood mother, Trova Hellstrom,
2. From Hellstrom's Hive Manual,
3. From the Agency report on Project 40,
4. From the recorded comments of brood mother Trova Hellstrom,
5. Hellstrom's own addenda to the dietary notes,
6. From the Hive Manual,
7. From Dzule Peruge's original report on Joseph Merrivale,
8. Broad instructions for selected workers,
9. From Nils Hellstrom's diary,
10. From Nils Hellstrom's diary,
11. From Nils Hellstrom's diary,
12. From Nils Hellstrom's diary,
13. From the permanent minutes of the Hive Council,
14. From the Hive Manual,
15. From Nils Hellstrom's diary,
16. From the Hive Manual,
17. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
18. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
18. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
19. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
20. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
21. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
22. Minutes of the Hive Council,
23. General memo from Joseph Merrivale,
24. Inter-Hive Memo: Project 40,
25. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
26. Coded memo from Peruge,
27. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
28. From the Hive breeding record,
29. The words of brood mother Tova Hellstrom,
30. The words of Tova Hellstrom,
31. The words of Tova Hellstrom,
32. Comment on the current film,
33. The words of Tova Hellstrom,
34. Peruge's private instruction to Daniel Thomas (DT) Alden,
35. Script consultation, Nils Hellstrom speaking,
36. Saying of the Hive specialists,
37. From the Hive Manual,
38. Wisdom of the Hive,
39. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
40. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
41. The words of Nils Hellstrom,
42. The wisdom of Harl,
43. Privately circulated memo to the Agency board,
44. Mimeca Tichenum's report on Outside use of Hive stores,
45. The words of Tova Hellstrom,
46. From the preliminary oral report on the autopsy of Dzule Peruge,
47. From a news story, dateline Washington, D.C.,
48. The wisdom of Harl,
49. From the diary of Tova Hellstrom,
50. From the diary of Tova Hellstrom,
51. From the Hive Manual,
52. From Nils Hellstrom's diary,
53. From the Hive Manual,
54. From Joseph Merrivale's private notes,
55. From the Hive Manual,
56. Hive Security Report 7-A: Janvert,
57. Hive Security Report 7-A: Janvert,
58. From the Hive Manual,
59. Hive-sign display over the central vat chamber,
60. The last words of Trova Hellstrom,
61. Hive translation from "The Wisdom of the Wild",
62. From the Hive Manual,
63. What the drone said (Hive axiom),
64. From the Hive Manual,
65. From the Hive Manual,
66. From the Hive Manual,
67. From Joseph Merrivale's report to the Agency board,

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