Hellstrom's Hive Read Free

training.” This last had come out with all the overtones of an afterthought.
    The facts were that Janvert had always been kept too busy to complete his valuable legal training. “Maybe next year, Shorty. You can see for yourself how crucial your present case is. Now, I want you and Clovis—”
    That had been how he’d first met Clovis, who also had that useful appearance of youth. Sometimes, she’d been his sister; other times they’d been runaway lovers whose parents “didn’t understand.”
    The realization had come rather slowly to Janvert that the file he had found and read was more sensitive than he had imagined and that a probable alternative to his joining the Agency had been a markerless grave in some southern swamp. He had never participated in a “swamping,” as Agency old-timers put it, but he knew for a fact that they occurred.
    That’s how it was in the Agency, he learned.
    Â 
    The Agency.
    No one ever called it anything else. The Agency’s economic operations, the spying and other forms of espionage only confirmed Janvert’s early cynicism. He saw the world without masks, telling himself that the great mass of his fellows had no realization whatsoever that they already lived in what was, for all intents and purposes, a police state. This had been inevitable from the formation of the first police state that achieved any degree of world power. The only apparent way to oppose a police state was by forming another police state. It was a conditionthat fostered its mimic forces on all sides (so Clovis Carr and Edward Janvert agreed). Everything they saw in the society took on police-state character. Janvert said it. “This is the time of the police states.”
    They made this a tenet of their pact to leave the Agency together at the first opportunity. That their feelings for each other and the pact thus engendered were dangerous, they had no doubts. To leave the Agency would require new identities and a subsequent life of obscurity whose nature they understood all too well. Agents left the service through death in action or a carefully guarded retirement—or they sometimes just disappeared and, somehow, all of their fellows got the message not to ask questions. The most persistent retirement rumor in the Agency mentioned the farm ; decidedly not Hellstrom’s farm. It was, instead, a carefully supervised rest home that none located with precise geography. Some said northern Minnesota. The story described high fences, guards, dogs, golf, tennis, swimming, splendid fishing on an enclosed lake, posh private cabins for “guests,” even quarters for married couples, but no children. Having children in this business was considered equal to a death sentence.
    Both Carr and Janvert agreed they wanted children. Escape would have to occur while they were overseas together, they decided. Forged papers, new faces, money, the requisite language facility—all of the physical necessities were within reach except one: the opportunity. And never once did they suspect adolescent fantasy in such dreams—nor in the work that occupied their lives. They would escape—someday.
    Depeaux was objecting to something in Merrivale’s briefing now. Janvert tried to pick up the thread: something about a young woman trying to escape from Hellstrom’s farm.
    â€œPorter’s reasonably certain they didn’t kill her,” Merrivale said. “They just took her back inside that barn that we are told is the main studio for Hellstrom’s movie operation.”

 
    From the Agency report on Project 40. The papers were dropped from a folder by a man identified as a Hellstrom aide. The incident occurred in the MIT main library early last March as explained in the covering notes. The label “Project 40” was scribbled at the top of each page. From an examination of the notes and diagrams (see enclosure A), our experts postulate