Hellstrom's Hive by Frank Herbert Page A

occasions that he didn’t fully trust Janvert. But the little man was imaginative and resourceful. The choice could be defended.

 
    From the Hive Manual. The neutered worker is the true source of freedom in any society. Even the wild society has its neutered workers, the neutering being maintained behind a mask of actual fertility from which real offspring come. But such offspring have no share in the free creative life of the wild society and thus are effectively neutered. Such workers can always be recognized. They are not burdened with intellect, with unrestricted emotion, or with individual identity. They are lost in a mass of creatures like themselves. In this,neither our Hive nor the insects are giving the universe anything new. What the insects have and what we are copying is a society formed in such a way that its workers toil together to create the illusive Utopia—the perfect society.
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    It took Hellstrom’s number-two camera crew almost six hours to shoot the new lab sequence with mice and wasps. Even then, Hellstrom was not satisfied that they had the proper effect on film. He had become very sensitive to the artistic merit of what they created. He expected the rushes to be far short of what he had hoped for in this sequence. The demands for excellence he was making now went far beyond the implicit knowledge that quality brought more income to the Hive. He wanted quality for the thing itself, just as he wanted it for every aspect of the Hive.
    Quality of specialists, quality of life, quality of creations—all were interrelated.
    Hellstrom had the boom lift him to the aerie after they finished shooting, trying to conceal his worries over the latest reports on the night sweep. Because he had been in this sequence, he had been tied to the set during the most important part of the sweep. It was still many hours to dawn and the problem had not been solved: the female who had accompanied their captive intruder remained at large.
    One of the Hive’s chief concerns had always been to produce workers who could “front” for them with the Outside, in-corruptible workers who would not betray even by chance what lay beneath Guarded Valley and its surrounding hills. Hellstrom wondered now if they might not have uncovered a breeding defect somewhere in the personnel charged with the sweeps. The male intruder had been picked up easily beyond the bordering trees of the west meadow. A sweep detail had enveloped the van-camper almost immediately afterward, but somehow they had missed the female. It didn’t seem possible that she could escape, but none of the sweep-workers had even smelled her trail.
    Many key security workers were in the aerie command post when Hellstrom entered. They noted his entrance, but stayed at their jobs. Hellstrom scanned the dimly lighted room with its arc of repeater screens, its little clutches of workers discussing the problem. Saldo was there, dark in the manner of his breeder mother, Fancy, but with the harsh hawk features of his Outsider father. (That was one thing Fancy did well, Hellstrom reminded himself. She bred Outside at every opportunity and the resultant new genes were prized by the Hive.) Old Harvey’s post at the security console had been taken over by a younger male of Fancy’s line. He took the name of Timothy Hannsen in his Outside guise. Hannsen had been chosen as a front because of penetrating good looks that tended to overpower the conscious balance of Outsider females. He also had a sharply incisive mind which made him particularly valuable in a crisis. That was true of many in Fancy’s line, but particularly so of Saldo. Hellstrom had high hopes for Saldo, who had been taken on as a special educational charge by Old Harvey.
    Hellstrom paused inside the door to gauge conditions in the aerie. Should he take over? They would defer to him at the slightest indication that he was assuming command. Brood mother Trova’s decision had