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Hellstrom's Hive

Frank Herbert

This work was originally published under the title PROJECT 40 in Galaxy Magazine.




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 outhouse; 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