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Title: The programmed people

Author: Jack Sharkey

Illustrator: Ed Emshwiller

Release date: December 31, 2023 [eBook #72565]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROGRAMMED PEOPLE ***





                         THE PROGRAMMED PEOPLE

                            By JACK SHARKEY

                          Illustrated by EMSH

                   _From Light-of-Day to Ultrablack,
                the people of the Hive went about their
                rigid lives in ignorance of their real
                   ruler, of their true history. How
                  could one slender blonde girl crack
                 this powerful monolithic structure?_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                  Amazing Stories June and July 1963.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]




                               CHAPTER 1


Under the stark bluewhite glow that glittered from hidden niches onto
the faceted undersurface of the vast vaulted crystal dome, the people
milled and jockeyed for position near the dais. There was still room
to move about and select a standing-site; most of the heavy thronging
was still at the entrances, the wide, squat arches giving egress to the
fifteen block-long arcades that radiated from the center of the temple
like the spokes of a gigantic wheel. Between the pillars that framed
these arches, long unbroken walls served as firm backdrops for the Vote
Boxes, twenty-five to a wall, three hundred seventy-five in all, to
service a building that could hold five thousand.

Lloyd Bodger took a quick look at his wristwatch while there was still
sufficient elbow-room to lift his arm. Two minutes till eight P.M.
Service began promptly on the hour. He gauged his nearness to the dais
with a practiced eye, then let himself be wedged into place by the
increasing pressure of urgent bodies about him. It would not do to
remain in the rear of the hemispherical room, where he might lose some
of the Speakster's words, words that might have direct bearing upon
the next Vote; nor would it do to let himself stand too near the dais,
from which central point he might find himself at the tail end of the
voting line, should the Proposition Screens begin to glow during the
Service. A decisive Vote could be made in ten seconds, but each Kinsman
was allowed thirty. The Screen would only propose the bill for five
minutes before the Count. That meant that Lloyd must be at least the
tenth person in a line in order to be assured his chance to nock his
Voteplate in the slot. He'd missed two of his allowable three non-Votes
this quarter, already. It would not do to miss another.

       *       *       *       *       *

The glow from the dome decreased, suddenly, as the center of the dais
unfolded back into fifteen equal wedge-segments, like a blossoming
flower, and the Speakster rose into view amid a solemn hush. Bright
golden light made the white velvet robe shimmer like a slippery flame,
and made the shadowy aspect of the cowl-hidden features all the more
terrible. The golden light spilled upward from the surfaces of the
fifteen triangular "petals", bathing the Speakster thoroughly in bright
radiance, leaving the remainder of the Temple in even darker darkness
by contrast.

The arms of the Speakster rose slowly, angling domeward over his unseen
head, until the folds of the weighty sleeves slid back a trifle at
the cuff, exposing the wax-white hands, fingers spread wide apart,
palms toward the beginning of the dome-curve, as though warding off
impending dangers. Lloyd shivered, suddenly, despite the suffocating
warmth of the crowd. This would not be a regular Service. That was the
Danger-stance. Unconsciously, he held his breath, listening, as the
mass tension grew unbearably electric.

"There cannot be Service tonight!" thundered the Speakster. "We are
polluted from within. It would be sacrilege to have Service with a
traitor in our midst!" Then, over the rising gasp that arose from the
multitude, "She has been traced to this holy place, in a fiendish
attempt to lose herself among the masses, to hide her rottenness amid
the healthy flesh of the Kinsmen! Remain in your places--!" cried the
Speakster, as a short-lived Brownian Movement began in the close-packed
mob. People froze in place at the peremptory shout. "The Goons have
been alerted, and are even now converging through the arcades!" said
the Speakster. A sigh of relief whispered like a concerted zephyr over
the up-turned faces. "She will be found out, have no fear. When I
depart and the Light-of-Day returns, you must exit through the arcade
by which you entered. You will be checked by a squad of Goons on your
way out. Remember, a good Kinsman has nothing to fear!"

The outstretched arms swung down until the pallid palms came firmly
together before the Speakster's chest, the cowled head bowed low, and
then the figure on the dais descended from sight, the stiff "petals"
re-closing over the spot on which the Speakster had stood, and the
golden light vanishing as the Light-of-Day sprang bluely into harsh
life against the crystal dome. Lloyd turned obediently, as soon as
movement was possible in the dispersing crowd, and started toward his
point of entrance, the arcade that would lead him into his sector of
the Hive.

Without warning, the Proposition Screens flickered on, and the crowd's
movement jerked to a confused halt. Then, as though collectively
realizing that there was time enough to be checked by the Goons after
the Vote, people formed into neat lines, queuing up before the Vote
Boxes that lined the walls.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lloyd took another look at his watch. Five past eight. That gave
him till ten past to arrive at the Vote Box. With mounting anxiety,
he counted heads in the line before him. He was twelfth. If each
person took the allotted thirty seconds--He'd miss his Vote, have to
be hospitalized for Readjustment. He tried to stay calm as the line
advanced.

With two minutes to go, he found four people before him. The first,
a grey-suited man with very little hair, nocked his plate in the
slot--Then stood and pondered. It was fully twenty-five seconds before
he depressed one of the buttons in the Vote Box's interior, where
his choice would remain secret. Another few seconds to retrieve his
plate, and then a full six precious seconds while the next person, a
skinny woman very near the compulsory retirement age, fumbled in a deep
leather purse for her card. And _she_ pondered....

Sweat sprang out on Lloyd's forehead. There wouldn't be enough time.
There _couldn't_ be ... unless--

"Miss!" he said, to the back of the small blonde head in front of him.
The girl spun about to face him, dark green eyes wide in fright, breath
hissing between parted lips. "I didn't mean to startle you," he said,
contritely. "It's just that--" It was terrible, telling such an awful
confidence to a total stranger, but it was the only way to convince her
quickly. "I've missed twice this quarter," he blurted. "Not my fault.
I'm a good Kinsman, honestly. It was line-jams, both times. Too many
people for too few Vote Boxes. You must believe me!"

"What--" she said, a little dazedly. "What can _I_ do?"

"Let me have your place in line!" begged Lloyd. "I've timed it. Less
than a minute left till Count, and two ahead of me, including yourself.
_Please_ help me!"

"I--" she said, with a funny, almost hysterical smile. "I don't know
why you should be so--" Then she stepped aside, swiftly. "Go ahead.
Hurry!"

Lloyd leaped into the breach without even pausing to voice his thanks.
As the young man before him stepped away, Lloyd jammed his plate into
the slot, and shoved his fingers inside the handspace. A fumble, and he
had a button, he didn't know which one. Pro was right, Con was left,
but he just prodded it inward without checking its location. Then the
light died on the screen, and his plate popped out of the slot. He
caught it deftly, sighed in quavery relief, and turned to thank his
benefactor. He saw her, trailing after the departing people toward one
of the arcades, shuffling her feet, apparently in no hurry. Then an
uncomfortable thought struck him, and he ran to catch up with her.

"Miss--!" he said, taking her arm. Again the brief look of fear on
her features, then she smiled. It was a small, very tired smile. "You
needn't thank me--" she began.

"I wasn't going to--" said Lloyd. Then, embarrassed, "I mean, of
_course_ I'd thank you, but that isn't why I came after you. I just
realized--Have _you_ missed any Votes this quarter? I'd hate to be the
cause of _your_ Readjustment...."

"There's no danger," she said softly, "of my getting in trouble for
non-voting."

       *       *       *       *       *

He suddenly remembered the words of the Speakster, and dropped the
girl's hand as though it had burnt him. "You--You're the--"

"Please!" begged the girl, before his voice could rise in a warning
shout to the crowd. "Don't give me away!"

"They'll get you anyhow," he said flatly, with a note of near-pity in
his voice. "By rights, I should raise a cry right this instant, to save
the Goons the trouble of checking all the _good_ Kinsmen." A secondary
thought hit him, and he took a very short step backward. "And you're
diseased. The longer you remain in contact with the crowd, the more
likely a spread of the contagion."

"I'm _not_!" she almost shouted, then clenched her jaws, and got
control of herself. Bright moisture began to trickle from the corners
of her eyes, and she dabbed angrily at the warm salty drops. "I
was hurt, yes!" she said, suddenly pulling back the long sleeve of
her bright green dress, for a brief moment. Lloyd saw the ragged,
pink-edged cicatrix on the underside of her forearm, and winced. "It's
healed," she said. "I didn't _need_ the hospital, don't you see?"

Lloyd saw, and stood there, his mind fumbling dizzily for a direction
to take. The last straggling ends of the crowd were moving into the
arcades, now. Lloyd took his bearings, saw that only one or two people
were now headed for his own arcade, and began to back off in that
direction, saying, "I'm sorry, I'm so terribly sorry. I must go, now."

She nodded, once, then turned her back on him, and stood, small and
helpless, in the growing void that was the Temple proper. Lloyd turned
from her and started toward his arcade. Then he stopped and looked back
at her. She _was_ healed, after all.... He remembered with a sense of
shame the time he'd broken a finger, and hadn't reported for hospital
assignment, because a favorite cowboy was at the neighborhood theatre
that afternoon. He never _had_ gone in, then, being fearful lest the
examining doctors notice that he'd delayed. The finger had healed
itself, a trifle crookedly, and Lloyd had never told anyone of his
dereliction, not even his father. Especially not his father.

       *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly, he turned and ran back to the girl. "Do they know you?" he
said, fiercely, frightened by his own daring.

"Wh--Who?" gasped the girl, startled by his reappearance. "_Who_ know
me?" Then, catching his meaning, "The goons, you mean?" Lloyd nodded
impatiently. "No, they don't. But they don't have to. I--I have no
Voteplate."

"Can't you girls hang onto _anything_?!" he muttered. "Don't tell me
_yours_ fell in the sea from a Tourgyro?"

"You say that as though you know somebody whose _did_," said the girl.

"My fiancee," he explained, adding, with an embarrassed grin, "I'll be
twenty-five just after next Marriage Day. I found her in the phonebook
listings."

"But--What'd _she_ do?" the girl persisted. "Without a Voteplate, she
could be picked up any time, in the first Goon inspection that arose."

"Take this," he urged, pressing something into her hand. "Your arcade
is third over from mine. When you get outside, wait. I'll meet you
there and get this back. Don't fail me, please."

He spun about and dashed toward his arcade, leaving her standing in the
center of the floor, staring dumbfounded at the flat metal plate in her
hand. Trembling, she turned toward the indicated arch, and followed
swiftly after the stragglers entering it, her perspiring fingers
clamped rigidly upon the engraved face of the Voteplate.




                               CHAPTER 2


Lloyd didn't like Goons. He knew he was supposed to recognize in them
the ultimate in police efficiency, but they still gave him chills. A
Goon, a Governmental Opposer of Neutrality, was a fearful sight. All
were of a size, equal to a micrometer-breadth, a monstrous eight feet
of thick metal and ponderous wheels, bathed from base to apex in the
blurry grey pulsations of their protective force-fields, through which
no power on Earth could penetrate. The metal arms were multi-jointed
and dextrous to a fantastic degree, despite the clumsy look of the
thick tripodal fingers at the ends of the arms. The "eyes" were
wide-set telelenses, a pair of them, to report back all they saw to the
Brain itself, deep beneath the teeming streets of the Hive. And each
Goon spoke with the cold, inflectionless tones of the Brain, the flatly
indifferent voice that could only emanate from a mind of glowing vacuum
tubes and magnetic fields. From any or all of a Goon's six fingertips
could spring the dreaded Snapper Beam, an electronic refinement of
vibrations that struck the human nervous system almost identically with
the chemical effect of strychnine poisoning, except that a Snapper Beam
worked instantly, and always fatally. A brush of the invisible force,
and a man's face creased into the frenzied grin of a madman, his legs
danced wildly, uncontrollably, and the muscles of his back contracted
tightly, relentlessly, remorselessly, until his spine cracked in two.

Lloyd had never seen it employed, save in the theatres. Dispersal of
insurrection by Goons was a popular theme in films. A mob could be
efficiently halted by a sweeping Snapper Beam, to fall like broken
puppets. Goons never lost a film battle. Or a real one.

"Name," said the Goon, as the woman in front of Lloyd moved quickly
out of the arcade. Goons could not inflect. You had to sense their
questions.

"Lloyd Bodger, Junior," said Lloyd, extending his Voteplate for
perusal. The three fingers took the plate from his fingers, and slid it
into a slot in the chest. A sharp click, and the plate was returned to
him, his number now on file in the vast memory banks of the Brain.

"Your sector," said the Goon. With his Voteplate data on file, he would
be hard put to tell a lie. Any discrepancy in his statements would
go hard on him. He hoped, shakily, that the unknown girl had a sharp
memory. She'd only have a few moments to memorize the information on
the plate.

These thoughts flickered through Lloyd's mind in the split second
between the Goon's second query and his outwardly calm response,
"Hundred-Level, Angle One, Unit B."

Lloyd's sector was only one short of being the most important in the
Hive. The President lived in Unit A, in the same Angle. Lloyd Bodger,
Senior, was Secondary Speakster of the entire Hive. But Goons were
no respecters of persons. And less so were they respecters of mere
offspring of persons.

"Assignment," droned the Goon.

"Null," said Lloyd, indicating the question was inapplicable.

"Goal," the Goon sub-questioned.

"Secondary Speakster of the Hive by inheritance."

The Goon's arms suddenly dropped to its thick sides, it swiveled
completely about-face, and rolled swiftly off toward the far end of
the arcade. The interview was over, and it had gone, abruptly as that.
No "Thanks for your time and trouble", or "You pass inspection", or
"That will be all". Goons were built for basic efficiency, not for the
subtler nuances of civilized conversation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Outside the mouth of the arcade, Light-of-Day was still stark bright
blue throughout the Hive. Light-of-Day was dimmed to Ultrablack at ten
P.M. every night of the nine-day week save Temple Day, when it was left
on until eleven-fifteen, giving time enough for the Kinsmen at the ten
P.M. Service to return to their sectors. No one went out in Ultrablack.
You could see nothing when Light-of-Day went out. A struck flame would
burn in Ultrablack, but the light of the flame would not show. Only the
Goons could see what went on, then. If going out during Ultrablack were
absolutely necessary, as it sometimes was on the Governmental level, a
Goon would come and take you to your destination. Being found upon the
street after Ultrablack was a form of rebellion; you would then have to
be hospitalized for Readjustment.

Just as this last thought was flitting across his mind, Lloyd saw the
girl, standing uncertainly at the entrance to the arcade he'd sent her
to, a solemn, green-clad figure in the midst of the converging people
moving into the entrance toward the nine P.M. Service. Her face lighted
up when she saw him, and Lloyd was disconcerted to note the tears that
sprang to her eyes despite her welcoming smile. "How can I ever--?" she
started, but a quick squeeze of his fingers on her arm stopped her.

"Not here," said Lloyd, awkwardly. "Come with me." She fell into step
alongside him without question. He led the way to a bar near the
inter-level lift. They said nothing to one another until they were
seated in a secluded booth, and had pressed the drink-selector that
would light alongside their booth-number behind the bar. They almost
spoke, then, but the waiter showed up too quickly, and they had to wait
until he'd checked their ages on the Voteplates and left.

"Why did you do it?" she said softly.

Lloyd made a grimace. "Because I'm a damned fool, I guess."

The girl nodded seriously. "You are, you know. Taking a risk like
that--! _You_ might have been detected, yourself."

Lloyd looked at her, puzzled. "Detected?"

"As a member of the movement, of course," she said. "You're the first
I've been able to contact since my escape. The progress you've all
made amazes me. Where in heaven did you people learn to duplicate
Voteplates!? I couldn't believe it when the Goon passed me."

"Hold on--" said Lloyd, pressing his hand furiously hard upon hers
where it lay on the smooth table top between them. "Don't say anymore,
please. You've made an error. I am _not_ a member of your movement."
The girl's eyes widened in sudden fear.

"But--Why did you help me? Who _are_ you?"

Lloyd sighed. "I've already answered your first question. And it is
with the most abject embarrassment that I answer your second: I'm Lloyd
Bodger, the Junior version, the only child of the Secondary Speakster
of the Hive." He saw the utter dismay in her face, and added dryly,
"Are you impressed?"

"Shattered is more like it," she said when she'd found her voice again.
"But an extra Voteplate--"

"I can explain the plate," said Lloyd. "It belongs to my fiancee,
Grace Horton. I was going to her place tonight, after Service, with it."

"But you said she'd dropped it--Oh. I see."

"Exactly. Lost in the sea, from a Tourgyro. The Goon in the 'gyro saw
it happen, which was lucky for Grace. He relayed it instantly to the
Brain, and when the 'gyro landed, another Goon was waiting at the
field with a temporary pass for her. Another person, by the way, would
have needed Readjustment, being so careless, but Grace, as my fiancee,
carries just enough weight to get her over the humps. New Voteplates
have to be approved through the President's office, of course. When
this one came in, today, it was turned over to my father, who gave it
to me. I'm not as official as the Goon who'd ordinarily deliver one of
these, but even protocol bows to sentiment, now and then."

       *       *       *       *       *

He suddenly curled the fingers of the hand beneath his own until they
lay fisted in his palm. She looked up at him, then, sensing almost to
the word what he was about to say. "Miss--You know I could turn you in
for what you inadvertently told me, just now. I won't, though. You have
enough counter-information on me to make things hot even for the son of
an official."

"I wouldn't--!"

"Be that as it may," said Lloyd, "let me say something: Quit. Quit now.
Get out of this movement, whatever it is. You can't win, you know.
The Goons are invincible. And I hate to think of you, falling under a
Snapper Beam."

"Death is death," the girl sighed. "One way or another."

He looked at her, genuinely at sea. "I'm afraid I don't know what
you mean, Miss. I only helped you avoid hospitalization because I
myself--Well, let my reasons go. But you shouldn't _fear_ going. Sure,
it's annoying to be laid up for awhile, out of the swing of things,
but--"

The girl pulled her hand away. "You're joking," she said. "You must be
joking. If you're truly the son of the Secondary Speakster, you _must_
know the truth!"

"I still don't follow you," Lloyd said sincerely.

"You _don't_ know!" the girl said, shaken. "You're really convinced
that--Listen to me, listen carefully: There _are_ no hospitals! There
is no Readjustment! There is only death."

"You're out of your mind," Lloyd said, recoiling from her vehemence.
"Of course there are hospitals. I've _seen_ them--!"

"Sure," said the girl. "From a Tourgyro. Or in the movies. But have you
ever _been_ to one? Have you ever met anybody who _returned_ from one?"

"My dear girl," Lloyd protested, really growing concerned for her, "do
you realize the _odds_ against meeting a hospital patient? With disease
almost completely obliterated, and a civilization of ten million
people--!"

"Exactly," said the girl, with a peculiar note of triumph. "Ten million
people. Never so much more as ten million and one, and seldom any less.
Doesn't that perturb you?"

"The wars--" Lloyd began.

"Please," the girl groaned, shaking her head. "Spare me the enlistment
speeches. I know the tales of all the men lost in the battles every
quarter, giving their lives in defense of the Hive. Except that there
_aren't_ any wars, nor battles, any more! There's nothing out on the
planet except wild animals and growing plants! We're the only ten
million people on Earth!"

"That's impossible," said Lloyd. "It's childish to be so
insular-minded. Our Hive is one of ten thousand such--"

"Have you seen another, even _one_ other?"

"For what?" said Lloyd. "All the Hives are alike."

"They've really got you brain-washed, haven't they! You believe
everything the Brain dictates, without question!"

"I have to," said Lloyd, with what he thought was irrefutable logic.
"There's no way of checking things like--Well, like your story of no
wars. I mean, can I be expected to check out ten million people to see
if the number of war dead coincides with the total in the Brain?"

"No," said the girl. "You can't. Not so long as your movements are
restricted to certain sectors, and you're told which street to use,
which side of the street, which direction to walk, which hand to turn
the knob with, which--"

"Those are only traffic rules," Lloyd objected. "Can you imagine ten
million people all going to the same sector at the same time? It'd be
disastrous."

"Sure," said the girl. "For the Brain. People might confer."

       *       *       *       *       *

Lloyd shrugged and gave up. "I can see there's no dissuading you," he
said regretfully. "I only hope that when you're finally caught--"

"They teach me the error of my ways?" she smiled tightly.

"I don't mean it with the inflection _you_ give it," he said. "I really
would like to see you get help. You need help, you know."

"The kind I need is the kind you gave me in The Temple," she said.
"Illegal help. Shelter. Time to make plans. Time to figure out some way
of telling the Hive what's happening to it!"

"You know I've gone farther than I should, already."

"I know," she said. She took the Voteplate from her handbag, and held
it musingly in her fingers. "I really should keep this," she said, then
saw the sudden anxiety in his eyes and relented. "Here, take it." She
slid it under his hand. Lloyd palmed it gratefully. "Our movement could
use a hammerlock on a higher-up," she said, almost wistfully. "But
you're too nice a guy to put the screws on. It'd be a cruel way to show
my gratitude for what you did tonight."

"I did nothing, really," Lloyd said. "I simply saw how fearful you were
of the hospital, and didn't have the heart to turn you in."

"Wait," said the girl. Lloyd stopped speaking. She looked thoughtful,
then leaned forward, very confidentially, and asked, "Does your father
like you? Do you two get along?"

"What is this?" Lloyd demanded suspiciously. "Instant psychoanalysis?"

"Nothing like that," the girl snapped, exasperated. "I mean, does he
_like_ you, as a son, care what _happens_ to you?"

"Well," Lloyd said, slowly, "he'd probably beat my head in for what I
pulled, tonight, with you.... But--yes, he does like me. And he cares
about my welfare."

"Then do this one favor for me," said the girl. "When you get to your
Unit tonight, tell him you feel rotten, all sick inside, and that you
think you should be hospitalized."

"But why should I--?"

"Just tell him. And make it convincing. And, if he really cares about
you--See what happens." She rose from her place. "It'll look funny if I
leave alone. Walk me to the street?"

Once outside, she glanced about, uneasily. "It's after ten. Got to find
a place to hide before Ultrablack."

"But listen--!" Lloyd said, abruptly realizing the grim night that lay
in store for her, with blinding blackness like a palpable pall in the
streets, and only Goons rolling through the empty streets. "You've got
to have _someplace_ to go!"

"_Is_ there someplace? Without a Voteplate?" she said with weary
rhetoric. "I think not. Thanks. Goodnight. And goodbye."

       *       *       *       *       *

She started off down the street. Lloyd hesitated a moment then rushed
after her. "Wait, _I'll_ hide you."

"Why should you take such a risk, for me?" she said.

"It's not for you," Lloyd said, telling as the full truth something
that was only part of the whole. "It's for me. Purely selfish. I risk
more if you're caught tonight. When they question you, under truth
drugs, about your escape from the Temple--and I'm sure _that_ has them
curious--you will be unable to avoid implicating me."

"Is--Is that your only reason? Your own skin?" she said.

"Yes," he said, forcing conviction into the word.

She shrugged and took his arm. "A fugitive can't afford to be choosy. I
have no prospect of escape _but_ you. I'll let you hide me ... if it'll
make you feel safer."

Lloyd nodded, and started toward the lift that would take the two of
them up to the Hundred-Level. It was only as they got aboard, and he'd
keyed the lift-switch with his Voteplate, that he thought to ask, "By
the way--What's your name?"

"Andra," she said. "Andra Corby."

"A nice name. I like it," said Lloyd. "I wasn't sure if you'd tell me
your name."

Andra shrugged. "It'll be in tomorrow's papers, anyway."

Lloyd looked at her uncomfortably, but she was staring straight ahead
at the grillwork gate of the lift.




                               CHAPTER 3


Grace Horton appraised herself in the mirror, and was not pleased with
what she saw. "Face it, Grace," she said aloud. "You are positively
hopeless." She tilted her head to one side. "Well, nearly hopeless."
Her eyes were good, that was something. Wide, gray and thickly lashed,
they were her best feature. Her nose was just too snub to be pert. Her
mouth, though her lips were generous, and her teeth well-aligned, had
too much slack at the outer edges. She either held it in a perpetual
smile--"An easy way to be mistaken for an idiot," she remarked
bitterly--or it sagged. Her hair, an unfortunate mustard-and-brass
shade, would not hold a curl for more than two hours at the outside.
"All I need," she decided ruefully, "is a brand-new head."

Grace leaned away from the mirror to consult the alarm clock which
lay almost hidden behind an impressive array of cosmetics. Five till
eleven. "He's not coming," she said to her image. "Give it up girl. He
said he'd come, and he probably meant it when he said it, but he's not
coming." She turned from the mirror and began to undress, beside the
single three-quarter-sized bed. "And why should he come?" she asked
herself tiredly. "He doesn't love you. He never--to his credit, damn
it--said he did, either. Hive Law requires that all males shall marry
by the age of twenty-five, or be taken for Readjustment. Bachelors are
not good for racial survival, unquote. Unwed girls may list themselves
in the classified section of the phone book, along with their
qualifications, then start sweating it out by the phone. So I did, so
he called me, so we're engaged. But that doesn't mean we have to like
it. Or that _he_ has to, anyhow. And I'm not sure that _I_ do."

Grace toyed a moment with the idea of submitting herself for
Readjustment, then gave it up. "A new face wouldn't help," she decided.
"What I need is a new outlook. Besides, what have I got to crab about?
I'm engaged, I'm only twenty-four, and someday I'll be the wife of
Secondary Speakster of the Hive. So hurray for _me_," she added,
listlessly, as she flipped the coverlet back, and hopped into bed. She
lay there in the glaring Light-of-Day, waiting for Ultrablack. When it
came, in a soundless rush of darkness, she spoke just once more. "But
_why_ didn't he come!"




                               CHAPTER 4


"Didn't you tell your future daughter-in-law she'd been reassigned to a
new Temple Day?" asked the President. "She went last night, regardless."

The man addressed, Lloyd Bodger, Senior, scratched his head. "Seems to
me I did, Fred. I could have forgotten, of course."

Fredric Stanton, President and Prime Speakster of the Hive, nodded and
shrugged the topic away. "Probably hated to miss a chance to be with
your boy. Nice kid, that Lloyd."

"Thanks," Bodger said dryly, keeping a firm eye on his superior.
Stanton was buttering him up to something, he knew. "Full of
youthful spirits, too, your boy. I can easily understand why he
might--well--grow overly romantic."

"Come to the point, Fred," said Bodger. "Lloyd's behavior can't hurt
you unless it hits your only sensitive area: your public image. So
what's he done? Drunk too much, pinched a waitress's rump, scratched a
four-letter word on a Temple?"

"Don't take this too lightly, fellow Speakster," said Stanton,
purposefully. "Running the Hive is like walking on eggs in hot cleats.
You're either careful or things get a mite sticky."

"We always have the Goons," said Bodger.

"A Hive full of ten million back-broken corpses isn't much of a
domain," snapped the President. "Have you forgotten that extra-marital
peccadillos are frowned upon in Hive society? People who play around
get hospitalized, quick."

"So what has all this to do with my son?" demanded Bodger.

"He was seen, last night, bringing his fiancee up to this level,
shortly before Ultrablack."

Bodger sighed, then nodded slowly and leaned back in his chair. "And
the girl?" he said grimly.

"So far as I know, she's still on your premises. I think you had better
have a talk with her. And your son."

"I'm sorry, Fred," said Bodger. "I'll make certain there is no
recurrence."

"You'd better," said the President. "If I topple, you're on the next
pedestal down. I might drag you along, just by inertia." He turned and
left the office with cold dignity.

"_Crap!_" the elder Bodger spat aloud. "I've _told_ that kid to toe the
mark in public!"




                               CHAPTER 5


Bodger had only a short distance to walk to Unit B from his office. His
temper, despite his efforts at self-control, was seething dangerously
when he entered his foyer. He crossed the mammoth parlor toward the
archway at its rear, where a short corridor led to the sleeping
quarters. Bodger arrived at the door of his son's bedroom. Then, with
his hand upon the knob, he froze, and a ghastly pallor spread itself
across his rugged features.

A hand came up swiftly to his stomach, holding it, pressing inward
against the sudden spasm he had felt, and he stepped swiftly across
the few remaining feet of carpeted hallway to the door of his own
room, through it, and swiftly into his personal bathroom, locking the
thick door behind him. The room was swimming like a thing seen through
warm oil as he slid open the mirrored panel of the medicine-chest and
removed a large jar of pale granulated crystals. Violently nauseated,
he managed to unscrew the lid and dump a handful of the crystals into
the water tumbler. He ran the warm water into the tumbler--it would
dissolve the crystals faster--and drank the now-glutinous solution.
Then the tumbler fell from his weak, perspiring fingers and smashed
into spicules in the basin. He took no notice, hands rigid against
the rim of the basin, shoulders shaking uncontrollably, his large,
grey-thatched head sunken wearily upon his chest. He stood like that
for two minutes, until the room began to settle down, and its outlines
took on solidity once more.

"A close one," he muttered, aloud.

When the eyes that met his in the glass were no longer bleared with
sick pain, he combed his hair neatly, and impatiently began to remove
his sweat-soaked shirt and necktie. Before returning to his bedroom to
change into fresh dry garments, he slid the mirrored panel closed. It
clicked sharply and locked. Countersunk into the tiled wall, there was
no indication that such a space existed behind it. Only Bodger, Senior,
knew which tiles to depress in which order to open that panel. In a
disease-free society, a medicine-chest was taboo; it implied that its
user had no faith in the Government-run hospitals. Bodger went into his
bedroom, dropping the damp shirt and tie atop the clothes hamper in the
closet. There was an ancient leather bag, with shoulder-strap, on the
closet floor. Bodger carried this out into the room, opened the flap.

When a small light glowed on the indicator panel, he lifted a short
metal rod, and played the end of it slowly back and forth just below
his fleshy ribs. The light flickered on and off steadily. Bodger looked
sharply at the needle of a dial beside the light. "Thank heaven," he
whispered, and returned case and contents to the closet. Then, after
laying out a set of dry things, he considered a moment, ran a hand
testily over his stomach region, and grunted in annoyance. He was still
slightly over-wrought; he could feel the juices inside him itching to
spurt into his bloodstream and arouse him into his erstwhile pitch of
anger. It wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all.

Angered at his own infirmity, he nevertheless set the alarm for an
hour's time ahead, in case he dozed, then lay back on the bed and
closed his eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the adjoining room, where the door to the hallway was securely
bolted, Lloyd Bodger, Junior, stood up near the wall, in a stance he'd
held for many minutes, the side of his head pressed tightly against the
plastic paneling. "I think he's lying down," he whispered. "I heard the
bedsprings creak."

Andra Corby, her face lowered against the knees which she hugged to her
chest on the bed, shivered a bit, then straightened her long, smooth
legs until she was simply pillow-propped against the headboard once
more, and her arms had refolded across her breast. "Are you sure?" she
asked tautly. "The longer I stay here, the more frightened I become."

Lloyd spun to face her, almost angrily. "Will you _stop_ that
relentless nobility! I'm doing this for my _own_ skin, remember?
I don't care what happens to you; I care what happens to _me_ if
something happens to you!"

"Your father," she said, enunciating with icy calm and slow clarity,
"is going to _hear_ you...."

Lloyd controlled himself, his fists knotting at his sides.

Seeing he was relaxing, Andra said, a little less frigidly, "I
thought--I thought he was coming in _here_."

"He stopped outside my door, all right ..." Lloyd mused. "Then went to
his room in a rush. I don't get it."

He listened some more at the wall. Behind him, Andra giggled, suddenly.
He glanced at her. "What--?"

"I just thought--What if your father's on the other side, listening to
hear what _you're_ doing. I'm just picturing two grown men, frowning in
earnest concentration, their ears separated by a few inches of plastic,
and it's funny."

"Not if you're correct, it isn't," said Lloyd, and Andra stopped
smiling. "As soon as he hears you, the jig's up."

"Maybe--" She leaned forward with eager hope. "Maybe it would be a
_good_ thing, Lloyd. He's a powerful man in the Hive. If he knew your
problem, he could use his influence to do something, couldn't he?"

"My father loves me, sure," said Lloyd, with a wry quirk to his lips.
"But I don't think he loves anything so much as his position in our
society. My consorting with a fugitive might put the kibosh on the
next election."

Just then the phone rang and Lloyd couldn't avoid knocking Andra to the
floor in his effort to get the receiver off the hook before the bell
could shatter the silence once more.

"Hello?" he said, extending an upright palm toward Andra to beg her
continued silence.

"Lloyd?" said a subdued, tense female voice.

"Grace!" he said, remembering his promise to come by with her card.
"What--What do you want?"

"I've got to see you, Lloyd," she said. "About last night."

"When?" he asked.

"As soon as you can make it."

"Well--Maybe in ..." Lloyd peered across the room at his bureau clock.
Almost noon. Non-essential lift usage precluded until after the
twelve-to-one lunch period. If he hurried, he could key the lift-switch
before the ban. Lifts in use were never disempowered. "If I catch the
lift, fifteen minutes. Otherwise not till after one."

"... All right."

       *       *       *       *       *

Lloyd grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair. Andra stood up,
apparently unharmed, and slid into her shoes. "Where are we going?" she
asked, smoothing her dress.

Lloyd looked at her. He hadn't considered--"I guess you'd better come
with me," he said. "I'd hate you caught in the house. In my bedroom
especially."

There were seconds to spare when he closed the gate and thumbed
Grace's level, the ninety-third. Anyone was permitted to travel to a
level beneath their own. To go higher, you needed a duly authorized
Voteplate, or an invitation from a higher-level dweller. The lift
dropped smoothly down inside the shaft. Half-way to Grace's level,
a red light glowed on the level-indicator. When they reached their
getting-off place, the buttons would function no more until one
o'clock. It saved needless crowding if lunching workers remained
on their own levels. Otherwise, if a line were too long, a worker
might be tempted to try his luck lower down, and if too many decided
simultaneously, the bland flow of human traffic might be imbalanced,
agglomerated beyond the capacity of the transportation systems.
Inefficiency would result, with people returning late to their work,
restaurants having too much leftover food, or not enough to go around.
The Hive was too delicately geared for imbalance. So the lifts went off
during lunch.

"Grace Horton must be trusted," Andra said suddenly. "Look, Lloyd," she
clutched his arm, forcing him to meet her gaze and listen. "If she
hasn't found out, fine. Even Goons can't find out what a person doesn't
know. But if she _has_ found out someone else used her cards--And
called _you_, instead of reporting it to the authorities.... Then she
can be trusted to hear about me."

"I hope you're right," said Lloyd. The gate opened.

"We'll never find out standing here," said Andra. "Come on, Lloyd." She
started out ahead of him. He pondered the courage of this small blonde
girl, then felt a wave of shame at his own cowardice. He was in this
up to his earlobes already. No amount of explaining could ever make up
his hours of ignoring the basic laws of the Hive. And he simultaneously
realized two things: If Andra's theories were all wrong, he would
merely be Readjusted and returned to his life same as before. And if
they were correct--What difference did it make _how_ long he dallied
with the Hive's opposition? You could only be destroyed once, and even
his delay in shouting the alarm when he'd recognized Andra as the
fugitive was grounds for a medical check-up.

"What the hell," Lloyd said miserably to himself. He was no safer
standing on the cross-sector walk than in the depths of dark intrigue
with Andra.




                               CHAPTER 6


"BODGER!... _Bodger!_"...

A hand was shaking his shoulder roughly, the elder Bodger realized with
annoyance. His eyes focused on the face of Fredric Stanton. Bodger
shrugged the hand away, and sat up groggily.

"As I always suspected," he said, brushing at the crusted salt on his
chest, "the Hive can't run an hour without me at the helm." He got to
his feet and stretched.

Stanton, frowning at his sarcasm, let it pass without comment; he had a
more important topic to discuss. "The tally of last evening's Vote just
came in to my office," he said tightly. "It was a near-complete poll,
only a few thousand missing."

Bodger, still trying to get his mind readjusted to the idea of being
wide awake again, started toward the bathroom and a warm shower,
muttering, "Hooray for progress. Is that any reason to waken a man--"

"_Bodger--!_"

He stopped at the open door to the bathroom and turned his head toward
the President. "All right, out with it." Without knowing how, exactly,
Bodger knew it was about Lloyd again. And worse than before.

Stanton reached inside his suitjacket and withdrew a folded legal
paper, a black-lettered stiff document with an illuminated margin of
pale orange. "I have here," he said, watching Bodger's face, "an order
for Readjustment. It just came up the tube from the Brain. Do I have to
read you the name of the Kinsman on it?"

"Good lord," Bodger whispered. "What--What could he possibly have done
to--?"

"As I said, there was a Vote last night. The proposition was a simple
one: "Shall, in the interests of good government, the draft age be
lowered to fifteen?" You want to know how Lloyd voted?"

"Not _con_?! He has more brains than to--I've _told_ him all the
catch-phrases that demand a _pro_ Vote. Is there any possibility of--?"

"Error?" Stanton smiled bitterly. "You of all people should know
better. It was Lloyd's plate in the slot when the Vote was cast, all
right. The Brain can't be wrong on that. The alternative solutions to
the problem--alternatives to his making a _deliberate_ Vote against
the interests of good government, I mean--are very few: One--He was
not paying attention to the screen. Two--He struck the _con_ button by
accident. Three--He let somebody else use his plate. Any one of which
reasons is in _itself_ grounds for Readjustment!"

"Fred, you wouldn't...."

"Of course not, Bodger. I had the incident erased from the memory
circuits immediately. This is the only copy of his Readjustment order.
You can keep it, tear it up--_Frame_ it, if you like! That's not why
I'm here."

"You don't have to tell me," Bodger sighed. "In the past sixteen hours,
the son of the Secondary Speakster has blithely violated the social and
political ethics of the Hive, to the extent that his destruction--"

"_Bodger!_" Stanton flared. "You have a rotten habit of--"

"Pretty words don't alleviate the truth of the situation. _You_ know,
and _I_ know, what Readjustment is! A one-way trip down the incinerator
chute!"

"All right, we know it! So shut up about it, and let's keep it to
ourselves! What I'm here to find out is--What the hell are you going
to do about this idiot son of yours? This is _twice_ he's had to be
covered for, in a damned short time, Bodger. I can't spend my time
rescuing Lloyd from something I'm starting to think he may well
deserve!"

"Aw, Fred, you wouldn't let--"

"The hell I _wouldn't_! I like Lloyd, and I like you, but if it starts
shaking up my position in the Hive, the _two_ of you can go to blazes!
Do I make myself clear?"

"I--I'll talk to him, Fred, really I will."

"You mean you _haven't_!?" Stanton exploded. "What's the idea of coming
home here in the middle of the day, then? I thought you were going
to--" He took a closer look at the other man, then scowled. "Say, are
you all right, Bodger? Your color's kind of funny. You're not ...
_sick_?"

"Of course not!" Bodger snapped. "I'm _shaken_, if you must know. I
came right home here to chew Lloyd out for last night's episode with
the Horton girl, and when I couldn't find him, I got so mad that I
thought I'd better lie down and cool off. I don't want a scene if I
meet him in a public place. _That would_ get the word out in a hurry,
wouldn't it!"

"Still, you look kind of--" Stanton halted, and gave the subject up
with a sigh. "Maybe I'd be, too, if I got a couple of jolts like you
did. Okay, Bodger. See you back at the office, later." He turned and
went out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bodger stood listening until he heard the front door close. Then, still
shirtless, he went into the hallway and threw open the door of Lloyd's
room without knocking. It was empty. But there was the elusive memory
of a sweet fragrance still hovering in the air there.

Bodger swore softly, and returned to his own room to shower and dress.
He had some heavy thinking to do.

When, minutes later, he was refreshed, dressed, and ready to appear in
public again, he'd made a decision. He needed to discover the root of
Lloyd's dangerous behavior. And the likely person to know something
about it would be Lloyd's fiancee, Grace Horton.

Bodger left his Unit and started toward the lift. It was still short of
one o'clock, but the Voteplate of the Secondary Speakster cut through a
lot of mechanical red tape.

The lift arrived at Hundred-Level within seconds after his nocking
his plate beside the call-button. He got aboard and began the descent
toward Ninety-Three.




                               CHAPTER 7


Robert Lennick leaned far back in his swivel chair, and sighed a deep
sigh at the ceiling, being careful it would not be heard by the party
on the other end of the wire.

"Now, listen, sweetheart," he said. "You are good. Got that? Good,
with a capital tremendous. But you don't click in urban dramas. You're
too--" He didn't want to say tall, or gigantic, though these words
were more readily at tongue-tip. "--too Junoesque for the parts
we're casting.... No, I mean it. You just--Well, you're just not the
housewife _type_, darling!"

The speaker crackled in his ear for another minute, and Lennick sat and
studied the piled-up scripts in his in-box with wearily narrowed eyes.
When his chance came again, he said, "No, not today. I'm sorry, Lona,
really I am.... It's impossible, that's why.... All right, if you have
to know--We're shooting Fredric Stanton, that's why--"

The speaker's reply to the phrase made some of the color wash out of
Lennick's smooth-shaven face, and this time he interrupted with a
snarl. "You better watch it, Lona, baby! A smartaleck pun like that can
get you sent to the hospital. You know damned well I mean we're going
to photograph him.... Okay, but simmer down, huh?!... Okay, baby, I
will.... Yes, as soon as _anything_, anything at _all_ in your line
comes by my desk.... Word of honor.... Sure thing.... Yeah, that'd be
lovely. We'll do it sometime.... Okay, Lona--Lona.... I said--....
O-_kay_, Lona!" He spat out the last words, and clamped the phone into
the cradle with vicious pleasure. "Dumb broad!" he mumbled, then got up
and opened the door to his anteroom.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, Frank," he said to the tall, gangly youth
who rose from a chrome-and-plastic chair and came into the main office.

The man called Frank sank into a chair and fiddled idly with a button
on his shirt until Lennick had the door closed again. When the youthful
producer was once more back in his swivel chair, eyeing his visitor,
Frank lost his casual air and locked eyes with him, disconcertingly
steady blue eyes, and Lennick had to fight an impulse to wince.

"Trouble?" he said, after a moment.

Frank knitted his brows, and cupped his upper lip in the moist curve of
his lower before replying, without emotion, "Depends." He fiddled with
the button again, then gave it up and stood. He preferred pacing as he
talked. "It's--Well, it's about Andra, Bob."

Lennick stiffened. "They _got_ her...?" His relief was only a
conditional relaxation when the other man shook his head; he was keyed
to tighten up again without notice. "So where _is_ she? _How_ is she?"

"Fine, to answer your second question. I don't know the answer to the
first, though I could make some guesses. The thing is--We better get
the word out to the others not to try and contact her."

"_Not_ to--!?" said Lennick, stunned. "But she needs help, bad. She has
to hide until we can--!... Frank, what's the matter? You look so damned
funny!"

"Okay, I'll level with you, Bob." Frank stood at the front of the desk
and leaned his hands on the blotter, staring down at the anxious face
of his friend. "Last night, after her escape, Andra tried to hide in
the Temple, up on ninety-five. The Goons were right after her, Bob.
There wasn't even any Service because of her. Every person in that
Temple was checked--_one_ by _one_--for Voteplates. She _had_ one, Bob.
She got _out_."

"That's crazy!" Lennick gasped. "Where in hell--? Frank, I _saw_ them
collect her Voteplate after the accident. She couldn't have gotten
it back. And she couldn't have a _spare_, I know, so--?" He saw the
uneasiness still in the man Frank's features, and was quiet. "There's
_more_...?"

"After her escape," Frank said flatly, taking no joy in telling the
tale, "She met a man, outside the arcade, went with him for cocktails,
then up to his level. That's the last she was seen, Bob. It was the
Hundred-Level. None of us are authorized to go that high without
escort."

"But who the hell did _Andra_ know on the top?" Bob blurted. "She's
given autographs to a few higher-ups, but--"

"It was Lloyd Bodger, Junior, Bob. They acted like old friends. _Now_
do you see why I think it's unwise if she's contacted?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Lennick suddenly surged from his chair and nearly tore the shirtfront
from his visitor in an angry fist, as he yanked the other's face close
to his own. "You can't mean that about Andra, Frank. You _know_ her!
You've worked with her--And I ... I know her better than anyone, Frank.
She's not a traitor. She wouldn't betray us."

"I wish," said Frank, calmly ignoring the enraged aspect of Lennick's
attitude, "you'd put your heart back where it belongs and think it over
just once with your brains...."

Bright beads of moisture suddenly appeared in Lennick's eyes, and he
released his grasp of the other man's shirt and sank down into his
chair, burying his face upon his arms. "There's an explanation," he
mumbled into the blotter. "I know there is. She wouldn't--" he lifted
his head, suddenly hopeful. "Frank, we're still _here_! If she told all
she knew, we'd be atomized by now, right?"

Frank looked uncertain. "Maybe. At least--It's a point in her favor.
I don't know. You've got _me_ shook, now." He sat back down and
pondered, shaking his head slowly back and forth. "If she _isn't_
hollering for the Goons--What's she doing with Junior? A guy like that
doesn't take perfect strangers up to his place, does he?"

"I don't believe that part at all," said Lennick. "She may've gotten
off before he did."

"The indicator went right on up without stopping. My witness'll swear
to it. Right to top level, just before Ultrablack."

"Maybe she's under arrest, going for questioning," Lennick parried
weakly. "It could be, you know."

"Why up there? Goons _carry_ Truth Serum. Besides, the witness further
states that they didn't look like anything but a couple of chummy
dates. Real chummy."

"How about if--Maybe he was _helping_ her? Andra's not a bad looker....
If she turned on the tears--"

"You've been reading your own scripts, friend," said Frank, not
unkindly. "This is reality we're dealing with, not never-never-land on
film. This Lloyd Bodger, Junior is _not_ the boy-most-likely when it
comes to helping anti-Hive people. Face it, Bob. Something's up."

"So why, I repeat, aren't we all on our way down the chute costumes,
cameras and all?"

"That's the only thing that doesn't make sense," Frank admitted. "And
the only thing that prevents me hiring a sniper to knock her off."

"You'd do that?" said Bob. "To Andra?"

"For the time being, we'll let it ride," Frank decided on the doorstep.
"It may be handing ourselves over on a silver salver, but--We'll let it
ride. Till we hear from her. And she'd better make it convincing."

"I know she'd tell me the truth--Whatever it is," said Bob, then
regretted his rhetorical lapse into doubt. But Frank let it pass, and
simply said, with a fleeting smile of compassion, "If I were you, I'd
take that Goon's advice, from yesterday when Andra was carted off: Get
engaged to somebody else."

"I want to talk to her," Bob insisted.

"If it was your neck, fine. Talk. But it's all our necks. I can't risk
it."

"_You_ could fix it, Frank. _You_ could find out where she is, a way to
get there. Come along, even, so I don't fumble the ball. Please, Frank?
I've got to know...."

"Bob, if you knew what you were asking--!" Then the taut, painful
set of his friend's features cracked away some of his veneer, and he
slumped wearily against the jamb, fiddling with that button again. "So
maybe insanity's catching, or something," he said after a pause.

"You'll help me?"

"I'm not absolutely sure I can, Bob. But--Tell you what.... Buzz me
about nine tonight. I might have an idea."

"Thanks," Bob said. "You're--You're a nice guy, Frank."

Frank turned and walked across the anteroom and out, without replying.
Robert Lennick settled back in the swivel chair again, this time not at
all relaxed.




                               CHAPTER 8


"Now, in this scene, sir, you're instructing the Temples through the
Speaksters, in your capacity as Prime Speakster," Robert Lennick was
explaining, as Fredric Stanton nodded over the pages of script.

Frank, the director, stood by impatiently while his boss explained the
setup of the scene they were to shoot.

"I think I understand," Stanton said finally. "Where do I go, now?"
An aide led the President toward the waiting set. When he was out of
earshot, Frank inclined his head toward Lennick, and whispered, "Never
mind buzzing me tonight, Bob. Meet me here, at your office, just before
Ultrablack."

"Before Ultrablack?!" Lennick said, aghast. "How will we--?"

"Leave it to me, okay?" said Frank, impatiently. "I'll get you to
Andra, wherever she is. I want to see her myself."

Lennick could only stand stupefied as the tall, angular form of the
director moved off toward the waiting cameras and crew. Then he grunted
in frustration and turned back toward his office. The presence of
Stanton made his mind return to the day before, when Andra was captured
by the Goons, and it bothered him to dwell on it. An accident. A stupid
accident on the set. She'd entered to do her scene, had caught her
foot on a hidden guy-wire, and had fallen, still holding the tray of
drinks she'd been supposed to serve to her co-stars. And the ragged
edge of a shattered goblet had raked across her forearm. Not deep, not
at all. Just a long, blood-oozing scratch. The Goons had been there
almost on the instant, commandeering her Voteplate, taking her off for
"treatment." And she'd looked to him for help, help he could not give,
dared not give. And when she saw she was suddenly friendless--She'd
broken and run. The Goons hadn't expected such a reaction. Before they
could relay the situation to the Brain and get their instructions,
Andra had dodged out by a corridor too narrow for them to follow, in
all their ponderous girth and height, and had vanished completely.
Later that day, a Goon Squad had come to the studio and widened
the corridor, and one other like it, to preclude such a thing ever
occurring again.

Lennick was worried at Andra's not contacting him. She might think he
couldn't be trusted, the way he'd let the Goons take her. But what did
she expect a man to do against armed Goons? She'd only have had the
dubious pleasure of seeing him dance to death with a hideous smile on
his face, while a Snapper Beam broke his spine in two.

It made Lennick's head hurt to think about it, so when he got to his
office, he started reading some new scripts. In a society where the
possession of medicine is a crime, it didn't pay to have a headache. Or
to let on you had one. But he couldn't erase the look he'd seen in her
eyes when they were taking her away.




                               CHAPTER 9


Arriving at the door to Grace Horton's Unit, Lloyd paused with his
finger not quite pressing the bell. "This won't be pleasant," he
warned. "I've never done anything like this before--getting involved
with you, I mean--and I don't think Grace is going to like it. I can't
much blame her, either."

He stopped as the door opened. Grace Horton stood there, clad only in
a fragile garment of light silk, her up-turned face warm and eager.
Beyond her, Lloyd saw the tray with a bottle, ice, and two glasses.
There was soft music playing from somewhere in the Unit. He felt his
face go red.

"Grace--I want you to meet Andra, Andra Corby."

Grace looked past him for the first time, and saw the other woman.
A tiny spasmodic reaction tightened her face and some of the color
drained away. Then she said, with rigid composure, "Come in. Come in,
won't you?" Unconsciously, she held the folds of her garment tightly at
the throat with one hand, as if to make her covering more substantial,
as she stepped aside to let them pass.

"Excuse me," she blurted suddenly, after shutting the door, and rushed
into her bedroom. The music emanating from there cut off, abruptly, and
then Grace reappeared in the doorway, her lips curled in a smile that
would not quite come off. "I thought--I thought you'd miss the lift,"
she said, in an obvious extemporization that was embarrassing to all
three persons. "That's why I'm--not quite dressed, yet. I thought I'd
be ready after one, when you--" Her eyes fell on the tray, with its
solitary preparation for two, and her voice choked off in the middle
of a syllable.

Then she took a breath, walked into the parlor, and sat down gracefully
on the arm of the sofa. "Well," she said brightly, "_now_ what'll we
lie about?!"

"I'm so very sorry, Grace," Lloyd said contritely. "I ... I would've
_told_ you Andra was coming, if I'd known. We only decided after I'd
hung up--"

Grace's eyebrows rose just a fraction. "Andra was at your home when I
called?" She rose, suddenly. "I think I'd better get another glass from
the kitchen. I have the feeling we're all of us going to need strength."

Lloyd and Andra looked at one another, then sat gloomily down in
armchairs deliberately far apart, and waited for Grace's return. When
she came back with the third glass, she was a bit more composed.

"Now," said Grace, after draining half her glass, "we can talk."

There was a silence, then Lloyd broke it, awkwardly, with, "You
said--You wanted to see me here, right away."

"I called you about the Temple Service last night, Lloyd--I see by your
face that you _do_ know something about it. Good. Maybe you can tell me
what--Don't look so shaken."

"I--Okay. You caught me off-balance, I guess."

"I must have. You look like you were just kicked in the stomach. Well,
then, tell me: What happened last night?"

"How did you know _anything_ happened?" Lloyd asked.

"A call from the top level this morning. I was warned not to attend
on the wrong night in the future, and told I was being let off the
hook--though they phrased it more politely, of course--because I was
engaged to the son of the Secondary Speakster."

"Did you--? What did you say? To their call?" Lloyd asked, knotting up
inside.

Grace folded her arms and leaned back. "I'm no dope, Lloyd. I knew you
had my Voteplate, and were bringing it to me last night. That is--" she
interjected with chagrin "--I _thought_ you'd be over last night with
it. When you didn't come, and I got _this_ call, from top level, I kind
of figured you were in dutch, somehow, and played along. I apologized
for my error, and promised it wouldn't happen again--I see, by the way
you two just let your breaths out, that I did the right thing.... Or
_did_ I? I take it Andra was the one who used my plate?" Lloyd nodded,
miserably.

       *       *       *       *       *

Grace thought this over, watching the two of them, then leaned forward
and touched Lloyd's fingers where they curled tightly around the end
of the chair arm. "Apparently, I have salvaged everybody's chestnuts.
Would it be asking too much if I wondered what the hell my reasons
were?"

"I'll explain," Lloyd said. "That is, as best I can. My motivations are
still a bit obscure even to myself."

Grace flicked a glance at Andra, sitting small and lovely and feminine
in the chair. "_Are_ they!" she said, a spark of intuition putting
her almost with complete accuracy ahead of Lloyd's still-untold tale.
"Maybe I can figure them out for you after I hear your story, then."

"Okay, Grace," Lloyd said gratefully, missing her inflection. He
proceeded to tell her the story, from the time he'd gone to the Temple
up until the present moment, eliding only the fact that Andra had spent
the night in his room. He used the phrase "up at my Unit" and hoped
it wouldn't be proved any deeper than that. When he'd finished, Grace
looked dazed.

"You mean--You _believe_ all that, Lloyd?" she said. "I used to have
great respect for your sanity, but--This thing about no hospitals,
about bumping off the Kinsmen to keep the population level down--It's
crazy, Lloyd. Look, your father's one jump from the Presidency. Has he
ever, in all the years of your life, even _hinted_ such a thing to
you?"

"No, of course not, but--"

"Yet you take the word of a fugitive, an obvious mental case who
doesn't know what's good for her--!"

"May _I_ say something in my defense?!" Andra protested.

"You may not," said Grace, then turned back to Lloyd as though Andra
had ceased to exist anymore. "How could a man with your intelligence--"

"Hold it!" Lloyd snapped. "Hold it right there. I'm not a complete
fool, Grace. Sure I had doubts. But there are some things Andra said
that bother me. And I thought up a few puzzlers myself. Like war.
Casualties in battle account for a high rate of the deaths reported in
the Hive, right? So it occurred to me--How come we're not using the
_Goons_ to fight in the war? They're indestructible, they're armed with
our most potent weapons--Yet we let men and boys be shipped out of here
to fight. It doesn't make sense."

"Of course it does!" Grace retorted. "You think that question never
occurred to anyone but you, Lloyd Bodger? We don't use Goons in war for
the same reason they didn't use atomic weapons after the Second World
War of last century: The _other_ side has them, and might fight back
with them."

"But--So _what_?!" Lloyd exploded. "What's the difference if our people
are killed by other soldier's bullets or by enemy Goons?"

"There's--There's _less_ slaughter this way," Grace said, with an
intensity that sounded lame even to her.

"All right, we'll let that part go," Lloyd said, in no mental shape for
argument. "There are other things--"

"Forget them," Grace said, vehemently. "Whatever your reasons, or
reasoning, last night, you have another problem to face: What are you
going to do with this girl? The longer you stick with her, the slimmer
your excuses will sound when she's caught. In fact, the only hope you
have is to turn her in, right now, and pray your Readjustment isn't too
painful."

"But don't you see, Grace--!" Lloyd blurted. "What if she's _right_?!
On that chance, no matter how silly you think her theory is--a theory
that has led others to join her movement, remember--do I dare take the
_risk_ of turning her in?"

Grace stared at him and digested this aspect of the situation slowly.
"I--I guess it _would_ be kind of late, when the top level sent me the
report that your Readjustment hadn't taken, or something, to say 'Well,
he told me so!'."

The door chimes pealed, then, startling them all.

"You expecting anyone else?" asked Lloyd.

"No, unless your friend the fugitive was seen coming in here."

As they spoke, Andra had gone to a window and peeked out from behind
the curtain. When she turned to face them again, her face was grey with
strain and apprehension.

"Lloyd--" she said. "It's your father!"




                              CHAPTER 10


Under the blazing arc-lights on the set, President Stanton played
himself to the hilt, nearing the climactic, "Vote for the sake of the
Kinsmen! Vote for the freedom of the Temples! Vote for the life of the
Hive!" Just as he launched into this most important part of the script,
a page boy made his labyrinthine way on tiptoe through the cables
and reflectors and sound equipment to the chair of the director, and
whispered urgently in his ear. Frank got to his feet immediately.

"_Cut!_" he called.

Stanton looked up in some surprise, and it was a very baffled cameraman
who finally found enough strength to cut off his machine. The set was
dead quiet as Stanton arose from behind the prop-desk and looked in
unpleasant speculation at the source of the interruption.

Frank cleared his throat, and said, "I'm sorry. The scene was going
well, sir; that isn't why I cut it. You have a phone call, in Mr.
Lennick's office."

"I thought it was understood I was not to be disturbed while on the
set," said Stanton, still wondering if he should give vent to his
feelings of outrage.

"It was, sir. And is. But the call's from your personal secretary, sir.
She says it's of the utmost importance."

Stanton hesitated, dropped his script back down onto the desk, then
started decisively around the side of the desk toward the director.
"She had better be correct," he said darkly, brushing by Frank and the
crewmen without apology and vanishing into the corridor that led to
Robert Lennick's office. There was a brief silence, then a concerted
sigh of relief from the men on the set.

"Shall we wait," one of the crewmen asked Frank, "or shoot around this
scene and pick it up later?"

Frank spread his hands. "I don't _know_. I have to be sure he's coming
back, first--I'll go find out." He told his staff to relax until his
return, then hurried out after the President.

A hundred feet down the corridor, he rounded a turn. Up ahead he saw
Stanton just entering Lennick's office. Then, without hesitation,
Frank ducked into a nearby office, his own, and locked the door on the
inside. The lowest drawer of his desk had a false bottom. He triggered
the release on this, now, and lifted out the small black earphone-set
there, setting it dextrously across his head, magnetic speaker directly
over his ear. In the hollow of the now-exposed section was a telephone
dial. Frank swiftly spun it through the sequence of Lennick's office
number, then sat hunched forward over his desk, listening hard. He
heard Stanton pick up the phone, and say, "This is Stanton. What is
it?!"

Madge Benedict, his personal secretary, "It's Lloyd Bodger, Junior. You
told me to contact you the instant he got out of line again. Well, he
has, but good."

"As bad as the other two?" Stanton queried.

"Worse, much worse, sir. Bad enough to make the other two look good by
comparison. He was seen, this afternoon, on Ninety-Three-Level, in the
company of Andra Corby, the fugitive from hospitalization. You know,
sir, the movie star who was injured on the set yesterday."

Something sparked in Stanton's brain, then, and a hard light of
comprehension dawned in his eyes. "Wait--Let me think.... Of course!
She vanished yesterday from the Temple on Ninety-Five! And Lloyd was
there, too. I wonder--" He stopped idle speculation and snapped, "Get
me Bodger, quick!"

"His office," Madge told him after a moment on another line, "says he's
gone home, and you can--"

"I _know_ he's at home!" Stanton growled, "I just left him there. Get
him!"

There was a short silence, then she spoke again. "I'm ringing him, sir.
I don't think he's at home. No one answers."

"You know what to do as well as I do!" he said impatiently. "Put a
tracer on his Voteplate! See where he's gone to."

Another pause; while Madge coded an inquiry and flashed it to the
memory circuits of the enormous Brain beneath the Hive, and received
the near-instantaneous reply. "Sir," she replied, "he's taken the lift
to Ninety-Three-Level. The same place his son was seen."

"That's odd.... Do you suppose he knows about the Corby girl, too?
Or--" Stanton dropped the interrogation; Madge shouldn't be made to
think about it. The less she knew, trusted secretary or not, the
better. "Skip it," he said abruptly. "Find out for me where they might
be going on that level, their hangouts, haunts, and friends...."

Madge found the answers and got back on the line. "Three possible
places, sir. Dewey's Bar and Grill, in Sector Three, Miss Grace
Horton's Unit, and--"

"Lloyd's fiancee?!" Stanton interjected. "The one who attended the
wrong Temple Service last night...."

"I believe she did, sir. We sent out a memo--"

"And she got it this morning! Of course!" said Stanton, exultantly.
"And phoned Lloyd right afterwards!"

"I don't follow you, sir--" Madge said, blankly.

"Forget it," snapped the President. "I have all the information I need.
And," he added, with belated gratitude, "thank you for calling me, Miss
Benedict." He hung up without waiting for her reply.

Huddled over the desk in the dimness of his own office, Frank tore off
the earphones, dropped them back into the hollow of the drawer, and
re-closed the false bottom. He was out in the corridor again, headed
toward Lennick's office, with seconds to spare when Stanton came out.

"Sir," Frank said, turning about and falling into step with him on the
way back to the set, "I wonder if you'd care to finish the scene, or
should we shoot around it?"

"Shoot around it," Stanton said. "I can't be bothered with the filming,
today. Something's come up."

Frank nodded and let his pace slacken, allowing the President to move
away from him. After poising on his toes for an undecided second, he
whirled and dashed toward Lennick's office. If young Bodger had been
seen with Andra, in the same locale where the elder Bodger was now
heading--or had even arrived--there was going to be an explosion. An
explosion that might sweep Andra, the Bodgers, and the entire anti-Hive
movement with it, when Stanton got the wheels of his office in motion.




                              CHAPTER 11


After thumbing the doorbell the second time, Bodger shifted his hand
toward the inner pocket where he kept his Voteplate. The doors of all
Units in the Hive were keyed by the Voteplate of the dweller, through
a slot above the knob. As Secondary Speakster, Bodger's plate could
key any door in the Hive save Stanton's; _all_ doors opened to the
President's Voteplate. Just as his fingers touched the edge of the
plate in his pocket, he saw the knob start to turn, and withdrew his
hand. The door opened, and his son was standing there.

"Come in, Dad," Lloyd said, standing aside. "Grace will join us in a
moment."

The elder Bodger's eyes did not miss the fact that the door to the
bedroom was closed, as he entered the parlor. This delayed appearance
of Grace, coupled with the delay in their response to his ring,
confirmed his worst suspicions. He took the seat Lloyd offered him,
leaned back without quite relaxing, and came to the point at once.

"Lloyd, you're making trouble. Lots of it. For yourself, and quite
possibly for me, too. I don't like it. But before I take any steps, I
want to hear your side of it."

Lloyd sat down facing his father, very uncomfortable inside. He didn't
want to inadvertently volunteer more information than his father
already had. He could think of plenty of things he'd done since the
night before, any one of which was damnable; the safest policy was in
determining just what, and how much of what, his father knew.

"I'm not sure I follow you, Dad," he said, pleasantly. "What kind of
trouble--"

"Don't fence with _me_, young man!" said his father. "Unless you're
completely brainless, you know what I--" He was about to expostulate on
the disgraceful conduct of the evening before, the matter of Grace's
having gone up to top level with his son, then decided to let that
ride until Grace herself was present. Keeping steely control over his
emotions, he said, instead, "The Vote last night, Lloyd. Your plate was
credited with a _con_ Vote. Are you _insane_, Lloyd?! Haven't I told
you--!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Lloyd racked his brain to recall the content of the proposition, but
could not. "Maybe I hit the wrong button," he said lamely. "My hand
might have slipped."

"The penalty's the same, whatever the basis of your stupid action, and
you know it!" his father rasped. "I don't think you are even able to
tell me what the proposition _was_, are you!" A look at Lloyd's burning
face told him the answer. "I thought not," he said, wearily. "I don't
know what I'm going to do with you, son. I've tried to keep you in
line--"

The entrance of Grace Horton stopped Bodger's tired lament, and both
men rose to their feet.

"It's nice to see you Mr. Bodger. Would--Would you like a drink?" Grace
offered, nervously.

"I would not--" he said, then softened his curt reply with, "But thank
you, anyway, Grace. Maybe later, after I've had my say." Lloyd and
Grace looked at one another in numb apprehension of the unknown, then
back at Bodger.

"The son of a prominent man," Bodger began, at last finding his
approach-path, "has a great responsibility to his father's good name.
The Hive, as you both know, has rigid rules regarding--well--amorous
conduct, to employ a euphemism, between unmarried persons. Yet, last
night, Lloyd--Grace--the two of you were seen going to top level on the
public lift, just before Ultrablack."

       *       *       *       *       *

A short sound from Grace's chair was the gasp that had sucked itself
between her lips as the significance of Bodger's words reached her.

Lloyd, for his part, fought but could not control the hot crimson flood
that rushed into his features when he met Grace's hurt gaze.

Bodger, misinterpreting both their reactions according to his own
notion of the night before, immediately said, "No need to be afraid.
A thing like this is better out in the open. I can understand how two
young people in love might--"

"_Dad!_" Lloyd said abruptly. Bodger halted and waited for his son's
words. Lloyd, speaking to his father the words that were actually
intended for Grace's ears, said, with deep earnest, "It wasn't like
that, Dad. She slept on my bed, with her clothes on. I slept on the
rug. We--We just had to be together, that's all. I've done nothing you
should feel ashamed of."

The sudden smile on Grace's face caught at Lloyd's heart.

"That's a help, son," Bodger said, likewise convinced. "To me, at any
rate. The point, unfortunately, is that any persons who observed you
going up to our Unit with Grace could not be expected to presume the
_best_, if you see what I mean?"

"I do, Dad," Lloyd mumbled contritely. "And I wish it had never
happened."

"It wouldn't have," Bodger pontificated, "if Grace hadn't gone to the
wrong Temple Service. I can see how she might dislike the change in her
attendance-period, meaning she'd be unable to attend with you, anymore,
but it was the wrong thing to do. If she'd stayed home, none of this
would've happened."

The irony of this last statement, while it missed Bodger completely,
brought a small, one-syllable burst of laughter from Grace's lips,
which she quickly stoppered. Lloyd jumped into the breach swiftly, to
distract his father from a dangerous line of conjecture.

"Dad, there was something bothered me last night--In the Temple, I
mean, about that fugitive girl?"

"What about her?" said his father, unprepared for the statement to the
extent that he made an automatic response without having time to notice
he was being diverted.

"The check-up for the girl, Dad. It seemed kind of--I hate to use the
word, but it's the only one--_inefficient_, at least to me."

"The girl had no Voteplate," Bodger said, puzzled. "I should think a
check of all Voteplates was efficient enough."

"But why not have the Goons check her description, or her fingerprints,
or even check for the scar on her arm?" said Lloyd. "It'd be much
simpler, and surer."

Bodger shook his head. "Not at all, Lloyd. A Goon, you must remember,
doesn't 'see' as we do. Its television lenses are only geared to
recognize streets, Units, sectors, and so on, and to tell Goons from
Kinsmen. Anything as delicate as actual recognition of a face would
involve the building of a Brain greater in mass than the current one.
No, Voteplates were the only answer to identification problems; that's
half the reason they exist. As to fingerprints--They will serve in
identifying an individual, it's true, _if_ a person's identity is in
doubt. But it takes time, and the fingerprint files are enormous;
to do so in trying to locate one person in a full Temple gathering
would have taken many hours, and there was a time element involved.
The ensuing Service could not begin until the Temple was emptied.
Finally, as to the scar--" Bodger looked decidedly uncomfortable, then
sighed and said, "--As son of the Secondary Speakster--and future
daughter-in-law, Grace--perhaps it's time you were told a fact that
is rather embarrassing to the regime, but all too true: In the Hive,
people do not always report injuries. While we do not enjoy this mild
form of treason to the planned medical facilities of the Hive, we
nevertheless tolerate it, for the simple reason that it's bothersome
treating _every_ scratch and bruise that occurs, most of which will
heal themselves. And so, if we had the Goons check for the girl's
scar, we might have found a large number of medical violations among
the Kinsmen at the Service. Under that circumstance, we would have to
hospitalize everyone; Goons are trained to spot any deviation from
a healthy norm beyond a certain degree. It would have been terribly
awkward, all around. So the only sure method was--"

       *       *       *       *       *

Bodger stopped, as though violently stunned. "Lloyd--" Bodger said, his
heart hammering with a nameless dread. "_I_ was activating the Temple
Speaksters last night. I gave the warning about the girl to your
Temple. I remember distinctly what I said. And I know I made no mention
of the type or location of her injury. No mention at all. _How did you
know it?!_"

Lloyd's lips worked, but he couldn't bring up a syllable from his
constricting lungs. Grace, her hands knotted into fists, looked at the
carpet, and sat like a marble statue.

Bodger got to his feet, towering over the two of them.

"I'm talking to you, Lloyd. Answer me! How did you know?"

Lloyd's ribs abruptly began to function again, and he drew in what
felt like the deepest breath of his life. Then he stood and faced his
father, defiantly.

"Because she's here, Dad. Right behind that door! And Andra Corby was
the girl in our Unit last night, furthermore. _I_ helped her escape
from the Temple, with Grace's Voteplate. Now, what are you going to do
about it!?"

Bodger fell back into his chair like a crumpling jointed doll, his
face shocked and incredulous. "I don't believe it," he said stiffly,
pressing his hands upon the chair arms to halt their trembling. "Lloyd,
it's not true!"

The bedroom door opened, then, and Andra came out. When Bodger saw her,
something inside him cracked, and he suddenly dropped his face into
his hands and just groaned. Lloyd was at his side in an instant.

"Dad," he said, gripping the other man's shoulders, "Dad, I _had_
to tell you. I've been entangling myself in so many lies since last
night--It was the only thing left to do!"

Bodger looked up, wide-eyed with dismay, and shrugged Lloyd's hands
away. "Let me think!" he said, hoarsely. "I have to think! Stanton
mustn't find this out. I've already covered up for your idiotic Vote,
and for your taking Grace--all right, Andra--up to our Unit last night.
There has to be a way to prevent your horrible errors being found out.
I'll cover, somehow, Lloyd. If I can find a way, I'll cover up, and--"

"_Dad--!_"

Something in the young man's tone made Bodger stop his frantic raving.
He looked into his son's eyes, and saw the question even before Lloyd
asked it.

"Why _should_ you cover up?"

Bodger grabbed at his shattered self-control, and sat up, stiffly.
"I--I don't follow you, son."

"I said," Lloyd repeated sadly, "why _should_ you cover up for me? I'll
only be hospitalized for Readjustment, won't I?... _Won't I!?_"

"Lloyd," Bodger said sickly, getting up and clutching his son's hands,
"you're over-wrought, right now, you've been under a strain...."

"All the more reason for my hospitalization, then," Lloyd said, with
all the relentless cruelty he could muster in the face of his father's
ghastly fright.

"_No!_" Bodger yelled. "You can't go! You don't understand, Lloyd! I
can't explain here."

"There's no need to," Lloyd said, suddenly softening and taking his
father by the hands to halt their frenetic quavering. "Your attitude
has told me all I want to know. Andra was speaking the truth. There
_are_ no hospitals, no treatment, no Readjustment. Only death."

"Lloyd--!" Bodger said. "If you only knew _why_--"

"We'd _all_ like to know why," said Andra, solicitously. "Mr. Bodger,
it's no use struggling any more. You have to tell the truth, now, or
have your son--and Grace and myself--be destroyed."

"All right," Bodger said. "I will. I'll tell you the whys and
wherefores of the Hive. Then maybe you'll--"

"I'm afraid such an extemporaneous educational program is quite
impossible," came a voice from the doorway.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fredric Stanton, just removing his Voteplate from the slot in Grace's
door, had his other hand extended toward them. And clutched firmly in
his steady grasp was the stubby metal muzzle of a Snapper.

The two men and women stepped backward, slowly, as he advanced into
the parlor and shut the door behind him. "I only heard the last few
phrases of your conversation, unfortunately," he said. "I think, for
the interests of the Hive, that I should hear it all. We'll have to go
up to my office, all of us, to get at the truth. I'll have a Goon Squad
pick us up, here." He reached for the phone, dialed swiftly, and soon
had Madge on the line. He kept the Snapper trained on the group while
he spoke, and never took his eyes off them.

"Sir," Madge replied, before he could ring off, "do you think it's
wise, bringing Bodger through the streets under guard, I mean?" She
sounded greatly concerned. "The Kinsmen--"

Stanton narrowed his eyes appreciatively, and cut her off with, "You're
right, of course; it wouldn't do to let public opinion of the regime
get any shakier than it is! I can't wait till Ultrablack, however.
Start the emergency sirens at once. Allow fifteen minutes for all
Kinsmen to clear the streets. Then put on the Emergency Ultrablack."

"Right, sir," Madge said, and hung up.

Stanton smiled, still keeping them covered as he replaced the phone in
the cradle. "You'd better be seated," he said congenially.




                              CHAPTER 12


"You really believe that _Bodger_ is involved in the anti-Hive
movement?" Lennick said dubiously. "It doesn't make sense, Frank! Why
should the Secondary--"

"All I know," Frank said determinedly, "is that Stanton was shaken
by the news of young Bodger and Andra. It puts me right back on
Andra's team, all at once. If Stanton was in the dark, then it's very
doubtful that Andra's done anything to betray the movement; the greater
likelihood is that she's pulled Junior _our_ way."

Lennick frowned doubtfully. "Andra's an attractive girl, Frank, but--"

"Everybody isn't pulled into the movement like you were, Bob. Sex
appeal has its uses, but there's also a thing known as intelligence.
Bodger and his son are no dopes. If she convinced them--"

"Why _should_ she!?" Lennick said angrily. "Have to convince _them_, I
mean! Didn't they, of all people, _know_?"

Frank stood there with his mouth open, blinking. Then he sat down and
stared at the producer, dazed. "I must be getting soft-headed," he
murmured after a short hiatus. "Of course they must know.... Still--?"
He looked helplessly to Lennick for assistance.

"I know; it doesn't make sense," Lennick nodded. "The only thing to be
done is to _find_ Andra, I guess, and ask her the answers. Conjecture
is only taking us in circles."

Frank spoke tautly, his pent-up frustration making his words strained
and painful. "Excepting that, as long as Andra's in Grace Horton's
sector, we can't go after her. That's not one of the permitted areas
on my Voteplate. I'd hate to be caught loitering in that area when
the Goons show up for Andra. When they make an arrest, they check on
everybody. If only this had occurred later, today, near Ultrablack--"

"Why do you keep stressing Ultrablack?" Lennick asked. "I still haven't
even figured out why I was to meet you here tonight just before it was
turned on. We'd really be helpless then."

"Bob," Frank said gently, "this is nothing personal, but--Well, when
the movement gets a new member, we don't just lay out all our schemes
on a red carpet for him. There's a trial period for all new members.
You've been on probation for a couple of months, now. The less you
know of our plans, our memberships, the less you could spill if you
were a plant."

Lennick grinned wryly and shook his head. "I know. That was a real
bone of contention between Andra and myself when we'd been engaged
nearly six weeks. A wife can't keep secret meetings from her husband
very well; he may suspect her outings are something even worse. When
I finally pressed her about broken dates, and times she couldn't be
reached, and she told me about the movement, I was pretty miffed she
didn't trust me with all she knew."

"She couldn't, Bob, you know that. The information wasn't hers to give
out, without permission of the rest of us. We could not put our necks
in a noose because Andra adores your big brown eyes."

"I'm surprised you're still speaking to me, after yesterday," Lennick
said with chagrin.

"Bob, you did what any of us could have done: Nothing. One man can't
fight off a Goon Squad. We would have lost _two_ members, instead of
just Andra, if you'd put up a fuss."

"But about Ultrablack," Bob said, frowning. "I know you people have
meetings after Light-of-Day goes off. _How_ you do it is beyond me,
with the streets alive with Goons, and darkness everywhere, even
indoors."

       *       *       *       *       *

"If there were a chance of rescuing Andra when tonight's Ultrablack
came on, I'd tell you, Bob," Frank said sincerely. "It'd give you the
chance you didn't have yesterday to do something for her. I think you
can be trusted. I trusted you enough, just now, to tell you about the
tapped phone."

"You had to," Lennick said with a shrug. "Or else I'd be leery about
believing you knew so much about Stanton's private call."

"We set that up ever since Stanton started appearing in our
Hive-located scripts. He's always so busy, keeping in touch with his
office between takes, that we've kept one jump ahead of the Goons, on
occasion. It must drive him nuts, wondering about the raids that never
came off."

       *       *       *       *       *

Lennick got to his feet. "I wish we didn't have to just _sit_ here this
way! At this very moment, Andra may be still uncaptured. If she could
be warned--"

"She could, if top-level privilege didn't entitle young Bodger's
fiancee to an unlisted number. You can go up there if you want, but--I
know too much about the movement to risk it. If you're caught, it's
unimportant--insofar as the sum of your knowledge, I mean. But I don't
dare let myself be taken."

Frank paused, and cocked his head, listening. Lennick, seeing him,
did the same. A keening wail penetrated into the depths of the office.
"Sirens!" Frank said. "It means there'll be an emergency Ultrablack in
fifteen minutes. Or even less, if we did not hear them from the very
beginning...."

"You think it has to do with Andra?" asked Lennick.

"No telling," said Frank. "And no telling how long this Ultrablack is
for. At normal Ultrablack, I can count on a definite number of hours,
but--" He hesitated, then clapped Lennick on the shoulder and said,
"Come on, Bob! This may be the chance we were looking for!"

The producer followed him, bewildered, out of the office and down the
corridor toward the set. Just inside the set, where the siren-alerted
crew members were grabbing their gear together in preparation for swift
flight, Frank pulled Bob aside and led him to a door flanking the
corridor entrance. "This way," he said, shoving the other man inside
and following.

"To the prop room?" Lennick said wonderingly, his mind a pastiche of
envisioned secret panels, inter-level tunnels and the like. Frank
kept moving down the short hall without replying, so Lennick could
only tag impatiently after him, his curiosity at its ultimate. Then
they were in the high, barn-like gloom of the prop room, a fantastic
collage of canvas backdrops, teeter-piled furniture, swords, pistols,
fake-currency stacks, ropes, saddles, bows, arrows, and other oddments
of the trade.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lennick found his bewilderment growing as Frank pushed aside a stack of
dusty chairs and then slid aside a tall desert-sky backdrop on oiled
rollers. For a horrible instant, Lennick recoiled, his flesh going icy
with unthinking fright. Then he relaxed and gave a shiver of relief.
"Damn those things!" he grunted. "I forgot we had them stored back
here...." Then he looked up and met Frank's gaze, and comprehension
dawned on him. "You mean--_Them?!_"

"There's a panel in the back, where the operator can slide in to run
the controls," Frank said. "It'll hold two, if you don't mind crowding."

"Good grief!" Lennick gasped. "I should have guessed!"

"Never mind the self-recriminations," Frank said. "Help me roll this
thing out so we can get inside it."

Lennick nodded, and took hold of the jointed metal arm on one side, as
Frank did the same on the other. Together, they wheeled the massive
torso of the prop-Goon toward the center of the room. As Frank located
and opened the neatly disguised panel, Lennick shook his head in doubt.

"There's no force-field, Frank," he said uneasily, "and once Ultrablack
sets in--"

"Unlatch the door to the street," Frank said testily, "and stop asking
so many questions." As Lennick hurried to comply, Frank added, with
less irritation, "The absent force-field's the _reason_ we use Goons
only after Ultrablack. A Goon won't notice the difference, since it
only determines identities by shape, but a Kinsman would, instantly, as
you just did. There are no Kinsmen out after Ultrablack, so that's the
safe time for us. As for your other worry, about how we'll _see_ after
Ultrablack, Ultrablack is only the jamming of the visible spectrum
by the radiation of inverted light; the compression and rarefaction
phases of the light waves are plugged, dovetailed into, by the opposing
phases of inverted light. Goons," he said, depressing a switch beside
a small cathode-screen inside the hollow body, "see by cutting off the
sensitivity of their lenses to light or inverted light, it doesn't
matter which. Then the Hive is bright as day-light to them."

Lennick clambered up beside him and helped Frank dog the metal panel
shut. Side by side, hunched over the pale blue glow of the screen,
they watched the interior of the prop room through the lens-eyes of
their grotesque conveyance. When the sirens halted, Ultrablack swept
the room from their ken like a velvet curtain. Then Frank turned a
dial, and the room reappeared on the screen, like a negative image,
with white for black, and vice-versa.

"Now we can go," Frank said, releasing a brake. The prop-Goon began
to roll ponderously toward the door to the street, carrying its two
perspiring conspirators. "I only wish," Frank said tensely, guiding
their movement out into the Kinsmen-deserted street of the sector,
"that this thing had Snapper-Beams, too. But I guess an underground
movement can't have everything."




                              CHAPTER 13


The four prisoners sat glumly looking at the impenetrable squares
of darkness outside Grace Horton's windows, awaiting the arrival of
the Goon Squad. Madge Benedict, without needing to be told, had kept
Ultrablack from occurring in the Unit; it was the only area of visible
light in the entire nine cubic miles of the Hive. Stanton, his weapon
never wavering, lolled against the wall of Grace's parlor, watching
their discomfiture with amusement. Of all the group, Andra's pallor
was the worst, and Stanton noted this fact with relish.

"I don't expect to glean much from the minds of the others," he said,
addressing her directly, "but yours must be a veritable treasure trove
of interesting data."

"I don't know why you should think so," Andra said, knowing all the
while that fabrication was futile; five minutes under truth serum would
prove the President's contention beyond debate. "I'm only one small cog
in a wheel greater than your whole Goondom of force!"

"You almost convince me," Stanton said. "But--No matter. I'll know the
truth in a few more minutes."

"And then what?" asked Grace. "What happens to us once you've picked
our brains of knowledge? If it's death--"

"Grace--" Lloyd said warningly, taking her arm. She turned on him.

"Darling, if we're to die in _any_ event, let's die now! At least
we'll have the satisfaction that a hundred other people aren't dying
afterward, because of us!"

"She's right, Fred," Bodger said, smiling for the first time since
his arrival at Grace's Unit. "If you kill us now, you'll never find
anything out. At least our lives will have accomplished something, if
only continued secrecy about the movement."

"A Snapper Beam needn't kill, if used briefly enough," Stanton said
mildly. "If you four prefer dancing an agonized quadrille until the
arrival of the squad, you have only to come an inch closer. In fact,
unless you return to your chairs at once, I may just do it anyhow, for
my own diversion."

"A Snapper Beam," said Bodger, "is effective only so long as it's held
upon its victim. Can you play yours four ways at once, Fred? Because,
while you're gunning any one of us down, three will be diving for your
throat!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Stanton, before Bodger's statement could bring the others in a unified
wave against him, pointed the muzzle of the Snapper directly at the
man's chest and pressed the firing stud. A whine of power came from the
weapon as the invisible forces lashed out.

And Bodger took two strides forward and smashed his fist into Stanton's
face. The President's head snapped back with the unexpected blow, and
cracked sharply against the wall. Then, the weapon falling from his
limp fingers, he slid to the floor and collapsed in an untidy heap.

Bodger, stumbling back from the fallen body, sagged into a chair,
gasping. Lloyd sprang to his side, dropped to one knee beside the
chair, staring in unbelief at the shaken man. "Dad!" he blurted, in
dazed joy. "You're alive! You're all right!"

"No ..." Bodger said, his eyes bulging as he shook his head, his lips
thickening over words that were becoming difficult to formulate. "No,
Lloyd. I'm--sicker than I thought."

"What are you talking about, Dad! You just took a dose of power that
would've destroyed a healthy human nervous system, and came _through_
it! How can you say--"

"Lloyd!" Bodger rasped, clutching his son's arm. "Don't you see? I
don't--don't _have_ a human nervous system, anymore. The thing I've
always feared has happened. I--" He coughed, and his skin took on a
sickly bluish tinge for a moment, then flushed into a ruddier tone as
he took a breath and held himself in rigid control. "The--The Brain.
You ... must go to the Brain, Lloyd. I--Can't talk more ... ask it ...
why is the Hive...." His voice trailed off, and his eyes closed.

"Dad," Lloyd said, shaking his father by the shoulders. "Why is the
Hive _what_?! Tell me!"

His father opened his eyes and stared unseeing beyond his son.
His lips, flecked with spume, worked silently, then he gurgled,
"M-medicine ... bathroom ... behind mirror ... I n-need--" His collapse
this time was total, his head hanging limply with chin on chest, his
arms sliding over the sides of the chair until his wrists touched the
carpet.

A thunderous pounding upon the front door brought Lloyd and the two
women up short, and they stood frozen with dread as the insistent sound
continued. The inner surface of the door was shaking with the blows.
"... Goons?" whimpered Grace. "What'll we do if it's the Goons?"

"Stanton's Voteplate!" Andra snapped. "Lloyd, take it, quick, out of
his pocket!" Lloyd caught her meaning instantly, and hurried to obey.
"Grace, count ten, then open the door. We can't delay longer than that.
Lloyd, think fast, and think smart! We're all in your hands, now!"

Lloyd, the plate in his hand, shoved his own into Stanton's pocket and
straightened up. "Let them in, Grace," he commanded. "Then both of you
keep still and let me talk!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Grace unbolted the door and stepped back. The six metal bodies of
the Goon Squad rumbled loudly as they crossed over the sill and came
to a halt before the trio. The Goon in the fore-front of the group,
swiveling its glittering telelenses over them, spoke in its cold,
emotionless voice, "President Stanton."

Lloyd stepped forward and handed over the Voteplate. The eight-foot
metal creature took it, slipped it into its chest-slot and paused; then
returned the plate.

"Correct," it said. "Orders."

"Miss Madge Benedict, of my office, to be taken into custody at once,
and held incommunicado," said Lloyd, figuring Stanton would be helpless
with no contact at top level, so long as Ultrablack prevented his
leaving the unit.

The Goon stood silently as this information was relayed to the Brain
and thence to the Goon Squad nearest Stanton's office. "Accomplished,"
it said flatly, after a minute, its dull grey force-field pulsating
with incredible energies. "Orders."

"Secondary Speakster Bodger--the man in the chair--to be taken," Lloyd
flashed a glance at Grace, who nodded, "along with this woman on my
right, to his Unit on Hundred-Level, Unit B, and left there without
supervision, by all but one of your squad."

"Orders."

"One of you will escort me and this woman on my left to the Brain, in
Sub-Level Three, immediately."

"Orders."

"All orders conveyed," said Lloyd.




                              CHAPTER 14


Knowing only the sector in which Andra had been seen with Lloyd,
but not having access to Grace's address or phone number, Lennick
and Frank, in the prop-Goon, arrived at her Unit many minutes after
the Goon Squad had left. They found it by the simple expedient of
noting--in their white-for-black cathode-screen--the one Unit from
whose windows blackness was trying to pour. That meant Light-of-Day was
still functioning in that particular Unit, and that in turn meant only
the presence of higher-ups.

The door to the Unit lay wide open, but Frank didn't dare roll inside.
His conveyance's lack of a force-field would be readily apparent in
such close quarters. He halted, instead, a few yards along the side of
the Unit, told Bob where the door lay from them, then cut off his motor
and the cathode-screen. Ultrablack fell about them like a velvet all.

Bob, following Frank, felt his way out into the near-palpable darkness,
found the wall against his fingers, and edged along beside it, fingers
feeling for the doorway. A hand upon his chest stopped him, and he
waited.

Frank, holding Bob back, leaned carefully toward the open doorway his
fingers had just touched, not daring to show any more of himself than
he had to to whomever might be inside the Unit. Then, swiftly, he
leaned his head out of Ultrablack and blinked at the parlor before him.
He saw no one. He closed his fingers upon the front of Bob's shirt,
gave a quick tug on it, then let go and stepped into the room. A moment
later, Bob was there beside him, squinting against the bright bluish
Light-of-Day.

"Maybe it's the wrong Unit," Bob offered. "A malfunction in the Hive
mechanism _might_ keep this place from Ul--" He shut up and gripped
Frank's arm. "Stanton!" he said, pointing beyond the sofa. Then Frank
saw the President. Cautiously, the two men approached the still, silent
figure and stared down at him.

"What do you suppose happened?!" Bob said, shakily. "Do you think Andra
had something to do with this?"

Frank Shawn scratched his head. "You got me. All I can figure is--if
Stanton's in a fix like this--he may not have been able to get her
picked up. This tableau has the earmarks of turned tables, if you ask
me."

"Do we dare waken him and find out?" Bob said, keeping his voice to a
library-whisper.

"Not as long as Ultrablack's on. We'd have a hell of a time explaining
how we got here," said Frank, shaking his head. He turned to look at
Stanton again, and the blood froze in his veins. Stanton's eyes were
open, and he was staring at the two of them with glaring hate.

"How _did_ you get here, Kinsman Shawn?!" he demanded. "And you,
Kinsman Lennick!" Stanton lifted his head from the floor, awkwardly,
and tried to look around. "Bodger! Where is he?" he said, shaken by a
sudden return of memory.

"I've got to get to that phone! They're probably on their way to my
office right this minute! If they take control--" He choked on the word
and lay still, seeing the Snapper--his own--that Frank now leveled at
him. "I suppose the two of you know this is high treason?" he said
wearily. He lay there fuming at his enforced impotence.

Bob looked at Frank. "What'll we _do_?"

"I wish I knew!" Frank muttered. "If we knew what had happened, where
the others have gone--But we don't, so there's no followup there....
Still, we can't leave Stanton here, now that he's seen us, or it's our
necks when he gets free."

"We--" Bob said, hesitantly. "We could make sure he _would not_ be able
to do anything, later...." He let his voice trail off, Frank caught his
meaning after an instant's puzzled frown, and went ashen.

"In cold blood, just like that?" he said softly.

"I don't like it any more than you, Frank.... But--" Bob spread his
hands helplessly. "What choice do we have? If we're caught--you
especially--the whole movement is doomed." He stood silent, waiting for
his answer.

Frank nodded, abruptly. "You're right. It has to be done." Stanton
looked from the face of one man to the other, his tongue licking
suddenly dry lips.

"Bob--Frank--" Stanton spoke from the floor, his tone weak with
dread. "I'm an old man. You wouldn't kill me, would you? I'll do
anything--_Forget_ I've seen you here, even ... anything ... only
please don't--!"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Listen, Frank," Bob said, trembling. "You heard what Stanton said:
They've gone to his office. Take the Goon and go after them. I'll stay
here with Stanton. If everything works out about the revolt--Fine.
If it doesn't--Call me, here. The number's on the phone base. If
the balloon goes up--I'll kill Stanton, then. But unless it does--I
can't...."

"Okay," Frank said, coming to a swift decision. He noted Grace's
number, then went toward the Ultrablack beyond the door. At the
threshhold, he turned. "I may not get the chance to phone," he said.
"If things go wrong, I mean. Give me half an hour. If I haven't called
by then--" He avoided looking at Stanton's perspiring face. "Go ahead."

Bob reached out and took the Snapper. "Good luck," he said. Frank
nodded wordlessly, and stepped out into the blackness. In another
minute, Bob heard the rumble of the prop-Goon's motors, and then
the whir of its wheels on the pavement outside. When it died in the
distance, he looked down at his prisoner.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said, "really sorry. It was the only thing to do,
while he was here. I knew he wouldn't go through with it. Killing you,
I mean." He stooped and helped him up.

"What if he'd agreed!?" Stanton complained, taking his weapon and
pocketing it.

Bob looked up, surprised. "I'd have had to kill him, of course. Without
your permission, I didn't dare let on in front of him. I thought you'd
want me in a position of trust, still. Frank won't alert any other
members of the movement against me, this way."

Stanton grunted noncommittally at the statement, and got to his feet.
Then he stepped to the phone and dialled Madge Benedict's number. The
receiver shrilled in his ear, over and over, as the phone in her
office rang. He waited for six rings, then hung up, his face thoughtful.

"Madge is never supposed to leave the phone without my permission
during an emergency. Something's happened. They may be up there
already.... They _must_ be up there already!"

"What can we _do_?" Bob blurted, frightened. "Once they gain control of
the Speaksters--"

"That takes time," Stanton said. "They'll have to lift Ultrablack,
flash an emergency call to the Temples on the Proposition Screens, and
wait until the Kinsmen have arrived to make their announcements. But
there's a way to stop them. The Goons. And they're controlled by the
Brain--Or by whomever is at the controls of the Brain!" he added with a
smile that sent gooseflesh along Lennick's back.

"But how can we get there in Ultrablack?" Bob asked. "If we wait for
them to turn it on, we won't have much time before the Kinsmen get
to the Temples...." He stopped when he saw what Stanton was doing.
The President, from an inner pocket of his coat, had taken a sort of
transparent grey oval of some plastic material, and was fitting it
before his eyes by means of an elastic strap. When it was in place,
he could just barely see the President's balefully glaring eyes. "I
didn't know such a thing existed," he said, knowing what the eyeshield
was for, suddenly.

"Few people do," said Stanton. "Come on, you young fool! Take my arm
and let's get moving!"

Bob took a firm grip upon the President's sleeve, and then the two
of them stepped out into Ultrablack. Despite his youth, Bob had a
difficult time keeping up with the other man. Stanton was driven by
extremely vengeful fires.




                              CHAPTER 15


The end of the line for the lift was Sub-Level One, just beneath the
granite soil on which the Hive rested. Lloyd and Andra emerged there,
keeping close to their towering metal guide. Lloyd had only been to
the Brain a few times, with his father. He knew very little about its
operation. What he did know would have to suffice.

There was a sharp, hard click, as the Goon between them sprouted neat
metal cogs on its wheels. Then, the cogs fitting neatly along tread and
riser, it guided them down the steep staircase to Sub-Level Two. This
level was smaller than any in the Hive itself. A mere twenty-five feet
in height, it was filled completely with concrete and lead, save for
the ten-by-ten-foot space to which the stairs had led them. In the
center of this space was a circular door, on the floor near their feet.
The Goon could come no further.

"Orders," it said dispassionately, after lifting the heavy door with
one hand and guiding Lloyd to the brink of the gaping hole with the
other.

"Return to your squad, and forget where you have brought us."

"Orders."

"All orders conveyed."

The Goon rattled off into the darkness, and Lloyd heard it begin to
ascend the stairs once more. He felt for, and found, Andra's arm, and
drew her to him. "Careful, now," he cautioned her. "The Brain-control
chamber is right under us. We have a hundred-foot climb down a steel
ladder, now."

"But I can't see--!" Andra said, holding back.

"There's Light-of-Day below," Lloyd said. "As soon as we start into
the chamber, we'll be able to see. Ultrablack never goes on in the
Brain." He held her hand tightly as he felt for the top rung with his
toe. "Okay, now, I'm starting down. Come a little closer, and take your
weight off one leg. I'll guide that foot to the top rung."

Andra caught herself nodding in the blackness, and said "All right,"
aloud. She heard Lloyd's feet clumping onto something that clanged
dully, and then his hand was taking her gently by the ankle. She let
him place her foot on the rung, then gave him a moment to begin his own
descent before she followed after him. Three steps down, and she was
in bright Light-of-Day, on a shiny tubular ladder whose base looked
impossibly far below her. She shut her eyes and clung tightly to the
sides of the ladder, then, taking step by cautious step downwards. The
rungs, she'd noted, were just about a foot apart. She'd count to one
hundred, and if she hadn't reached the bottom by then, she would scream.

When she was just enumerating ninety-seven, Lloyd's hands took her by
the waist, and lifted her to the floor. She opened her eyes, disengaged
his hands from her body, and then looked around in awe.

       *       *       *       *       *

Tier upon tier of lightweight metal scaffolding rose on all sides of a
twenty-foot-square area of flooring. Riveted across the angles of the
scaffolding were coils and condensors, insulators and sparking forks
of synaptic wiring, whirling cams and clattering selectors, banks of
glowing lights that danced on random pattern, deepset labyrinthine
nests of wire that glowed a brilliant orange, then faded to dull grey,
then glowed again, accompanied by a rising and falling hum of urgent
power.

As Andra's eyes followed the amazing array from ceiling to floor, she
was shocked to see that the flooring was not really the solid thing she
had supposed; it was, rather, a taut network of heavy cable, really
nothing more than a glorified windowscreen, through the interstices
of which she caught a vertiginous glimpse of more areas of bright
electrical light, dropping away below her feet to incredible distances.

"How big _is_ the Brain--?" she said to Lloyd, pulling her eyes from
the terror of the empty depths between the frameworks beneath the
cable-floor.

"A cubic mile," Lloyd said. "It's self-oiling, self-repairing,
self-replacing. And in it are stored all the memories of the Hive from
the day it was built."

He led her across the lattice-work flooring to a large flat panel,
on which a number of lights shone evenly, without change in their
asymmetrical pattern. Lloyd slid open a flat panel half-way down the
face of this instrument, and removed a flexible metal band. He sat in
the only chair in the chamber, directly before the open panel, and
began adjusting the band about the circumference of his head. Andra
eyed the metal band and the wires that led from it back into the
light-strewn panel with misgivings.

"What are you going to do, Lloyd?"

"Ask the Brain for some answers," he said. Lloyd flipped open the lid
of a small keyboard, and started to type, carefully: _What is the Hive?_

When he'd completed his question, he steadied himself in the chair,
closed his eyes, and pressed a small button at the side of the exposed
keyboard. Andra took a step back, quite startled as Lloyd stiffened
in the chair, his face twitching. Before his closed eyes, the lights
on the panel began to flicker on and off, dancing with incredible
intricacy, and a weird, high-pitched tootling and tweetling began to
echo through the chamber, through the scaffolding, through the entire
mechanism of the great Brain. Andra jammed her hands to her ears to
shut out the nerve-plucking noise. And then the lights blinked, held
steady, and the cacophony of the electronic mind cut off. Lloyd opened
his eyes.

"Well?" Andra said, going to him. "What happened?"

"It answered my question!" he said, with bitter disgust. "Told me the
population of the Hive, told me it had ten truncated conic tiers, with
ten levels in each tier, gave me the names of its officers, industries
and short, just about what _anybody_ in the Hive already knows!"

"All _that_," Andra marveled. "So quickly?"

"The Brain doesn't spell it out in words, Andra," Lloyd said ruefully.
"It implants the information instantaneously in your mind. When it's
implanted, the Brain stops feeding your brain, and you come out of the
information-cycle with a new _memory_. Except that, in this case, there
was nothing new to learn."

"If only your father had _completed_ his instructions."

Lloyd's hands, about to remove the headband while he pondered their
dilemma, froze in place, and he grunted in sudden wonder. "You don't
suppose," he said, shakily, "that _this_ is the question?!"

"W-what?" Andra asked, nervous before his excitement.

"What if the question should be, not _what_ is the Hive, but _why_ is
the Hive!" the young man gasped.

"Do you really think it could give you the _reasons_ for the Hive's
existence, the absence of hospitals, everything?"

"I don't know," said Lloyd, swiveling in the chair to face the keyboard
once more. "But I mean to find out...."

He typed, carefully, the words: _Why is the Hive?_ Andra stood and
watched, anxiously, as he depressed the starter-button beside the
keyboard again. Again the lights and the eerie whistlings of the Brain
arose in maddening crescendo all about her, while Lloyd twitched and
shuddered, his eyes clamped rigidly closed, in the chair. And then
there was calm again, and silence, and the lights ceased their dance.

Lloyd tore off the headband and spun to face Andra. His eyes were wide
with shock, and his jaw gaped imbecilically.

"Lloyd!" Andra took him by the shoulders and shook him, her heart
thudding painfully at the apprehension in her breast. "Lloyd, what is
it! What happened!"

He blinked, shook his head, and then seemed to see her for the first
time. His mouth worked, and then he said, "I _know_, Andra! I know what
the Hive is all about!"

"It must be terrible, something terrible," she said, frightened at his
intensity. "Your face--your eyes--"

"_No!_" he said. "Not terrible. Awesome, perhaps, and stunning, but not
terrible. Sit down, Andra. I'm going to tell you something that will
chill you to the bones--And you're going to _like_ what you hear."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Presidential election of 1972 brought a landslide of votes for
the Democratic candidate, Lester Murdock. The Republican candidate,
Neal Ten Eyck, demanded a recount of the votes, as was by then the
custom of the loser in an election. Ten Eyck's request was, however,
not granted, due to a certain plank in Murdock's political platform.
Murdock's prime contention was for a return to Real Democracy, a thing
possible among such a widely scattered population because of the
enormous advances in electronic communications. Murdock insisted that
his vote-by-machine plank must have its chance to be put into effect,
first, and then Ten Eyck could have his recount, one which could not be
further gainsaid.

The country was strongly behind Murdock in his insistence on this
point, all the thoughtful voters being oversated with what news
agencies referred to as the "crybaby" attitude of political losers. In
vain did Ten Eyck protest the plan.

"It will not be a recount," he deplored, in a nationwide television
speech. "It will be a brand-new election, involving me, the candidate
who has had no chance to perform, and Mr. Murdock, the candidate who
will already have fulfilled a major campaign promise!" Ten Eyck's
words went unheeded, as he had gloomily suspected they would, and all
across the nation, automatic vote-machines were installed, to the
amount of one machine per hundred citizens. When a disgruntled Ten Eyck
refused outright to even have his name flashed on the ballot-screens,
Murdock changed the initiation of the new machines to a simple
Vote-of-Confidence Ballot, and received a ninety percent return,
ten percent being either undecided or abstaining. Ten Eyck, shortly
afterward, resigned from politics and retired to a ranch in the Pacific
Northwest, to write his memoirs. A severe electrical storm in that
area set fire to the house when he was just short of completing his
manuscript, and every last page was destroyed. Ten Eyck himself was
away at the time, and declared, in an interview with reporters just
outside the blazing house to which he had returned on hearing of the
disaster, that he was also retiring from the field of literature.

News of the storm and fire only became more support for a secondary
plank in Murdock's platform, weather control. He was glad of the
opportunity the fire had given him to move smoothly into this next
facet of national development, and his intimates informed newsmen--not
for publication--that Murdock was secretly glad to have his program
"rise like a phoenix from Ten Eyck's fire."

This phase of his three-plank platform proved quite troublesome. The
most learned scientists of the world informed him that weather could,
indeed, be influenced by the detonation of nuclear weapons in strategic
locales, but so far, the influence was all to the bad. The three new
radiation belts developed since 1961 were doing unexpected things to
the balance of the ionosphere, and this in turn was affecting the jet
streams high in the atmosphere, with a consequent unpredictability as
to prevailing movements of large air masses over the globe. In short,
the weather had become prankish, balky, and not a little ferocious
in parts, with longer, colder winters, manic-depressive summers, and
a gradual disappearance of the spring and fall seasons altogether.
Ordinary grounding devices, such as lightning rods in rural areas, were
no longer sufficient conductors for the wild electrical potentials
building up in air and soil, because of the increased activity of free
electrons in the atmosphere. A mild storm did not exist, anymore. The
norm had become intense blankets of snow, or torrents of rain, and a
continued rise in wind velocities and destruction by lightning.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The time has come," Murdock therefore addressed the nation in his
State-of-the-Union speech, "to stop talking about the weather, and _do_
something about it!" What he proposed doing, in view of the scientists'
disclaimer to be able to control, even slightly, the crescendoing
perils of wind and water, was to develop a form of housing that would
be impervious to the weather. "When there are too many flies to swat,"
he said, in his famous concluding line, "you put up windowscreens!"

Forthwith, every physical scientist in the country began work on the
project, the prize being--not the usual medal of commendation and
Presidential handshake; Murdock knew people better than that--one
million dollars, tax-free. Within six months, Leonard Surbo, a
laboratory technician at DuPont, had discovered a method of uniting
the helium and oxygen atoms in a continuous chain, by means of
super-induced valence, in which the solitary two electrons of the
helium atom were joined into the minus-two gaps in two adjoining oxygen
atoms, the other gap in each oxygen ring being filled with one electron
from adjoining helium atoms, and so on, literally _ad infinitum_. This
new compound, Helox, was found to be veritably unbreakable, yet weighed
one-sixth less than magnesium, its nearest strength-plus-lightness
competitor. There was some haggling from DuPont as to whether Surbo,
who had, after all, used their facilities in his search for the new
compound, should receive the million dollars. This was ameliorated
nicely by President Murdock, who promised them, in lieu of the lost
million, the billion-dollar government contract to put Helox into
full-scale production, which DuPont gladly accepted.

Here again Murdock's program ran into a snag. The delicate processing
required to produce Helox put the final cost of the compound at a
rate-per-ounce only less than that of pure platinum; the average
citizen, indeed, the above-average citizen, would be hard-pressed to
afford so much as a windowsill's worth, let alone a complete dwelling.

Murdock called his advisory staff together for an emergency session
immediately. They remained _in camera_ with the President for three
days, meals being sent in from outside. At the end of this time,
Murdock emerged from the conference room with a three-day stubble
flanking his best successful smile, and--after being cleaned up for
public exposition--appeared once more on television with his radical
Common-Wall Program.

The gist of it was this: A man in a one-room house needed four walls.
Two men, in two one-room houses, needed but seven, if the common wall
were shared. Four needed but twelve, and so on. Each time, the amount
needed per individual decreased, as more men were included in the
building program. What Murdock planned, therefore, was the erection
of--not a mere housing development--but an entire city of Helox.
It would be a closed unit, one which would serve all man's needs,
self-lighted, self-darkening, air-conditioned, and equipped with the
newest air-water-mineral reclaiming devices which could be used in the
manufacture of synthetic foodstuffs for the people of the city.

       *       *       *       *       *

The enormous expense of such an undertaking was put to a Congressional
vote, and roundly vetoed. Murdock, not to be swung from his determined
path, had the motion put to a direct vote by the American people, via
the vote-machines. This time, he received a ninety-five percent vote,
all votes in favor of the new indestructible city. For the first time,
members of Congress realize that their power in the land was standing
on legs of gelatin, and an emergency session was called, to determine
whether or not Murdock's actions called for impeachment.

Murdock attended the meeting, and waited until all the complaints and
recriminations had been voiced. And then he put it to the Congress:
What need had a Real Democracy of representation at all, when each
citizen could vote directly on all governmental proposals? He terrified
them at the thought of putting such a proposal to the people
immediately, when their removal from office was so certain. Then, when
every face in the assembly was pale with apprehension, the familiar
fatherly smile overrode Murdock's features, and he offered them all, at
the end of their term, a permanent retirement plan, at full salary, for
each of them, and for their subsequent first-born lineal descendants.
Congress, knowing when it was licked--and not much disliking the
prospect of eternal security--voted in favor of his plan, with the one
stipulation that such income should be forever tax-free, a codicil to
which Murdock smilingly ascribed.

Production began soon afterwards, on Murdock's indestructible city.
It was to hold a maximum of ten million people, one hundred tiers
of humanity in all the comfort and safety the mind of man could
devise. And again, a snag delayed the plan of Lester Murdock. It
proved, however, to be a minor one: With each Level of the city to be
constructed to a minimum height of fifty feet (any lower would impair
the efficiency of the air-conditioning), the total height would be
nearly one mile. At such ghastly distances above the earth, the workmen
would need specially heated clothing, oxygen equipment, superior
safety-belts for themselves and their gear, miles of roads and parking
facilities to make their getting to and from the job possible in a
minimum of wasted time--A hundred troublesome details, all of which
would serve to impede progress tremendously.

       *       *       *       *       *

Murdock, after much thought, was equal to the problem. The city, he
stated, would be built in ten parts, no one part, therefore, being more
than five hundred feet high. Then, when all sections were completed,
they would be _flown_ to a common site, stacked like flapjacks, and
the necessary inter-sectional connections made for the water and
electrical conduits, elevators, and the like. The light weight of
each section made such a plan almost feasible, except that it would
necessitate the loss of nearly one complete level to house the vast
rockets which would do the moving. Murdock and his staff conferred,
and then found that, with a slight change in the blueprints, the
intended million-per-section of people could still be housed,
central rocket-section or not, by the addition of a very few extra
feet of radius to the ten-level sections. His plan was endorsed by
the engineers when it was found that such an extension brought the
overall dimension of the section into accordance with the necessary
lift-surface areas for the proposed flying city.

       *       *       *       *       *

That the city would take its well-earned place among the wonders of the
world, Murdock had no doubt; that he would still be in office at the
time of its completion was extremely unlikely, since, even at maximum
speeds of construction, it would be impossible to do it in less than
twenty-five years. There was nothing to do but put it to a vote of all
the people.

Murdock worded his proposition, however, with the canny instinct for
outguessing human nature which had brought him to his present estate:
While supposedly stressing the fact that a continuing Presidential
program even after the man was out of office was unprecedented, he
actually made it known by his phrasing of the proposition that such
an extension would divide the contingent tax-bite per citizen into
twenty-five painless morsels, rather than the four rather large gulps
they would have had to swallow during his tenure.

Political savants say that it was this latter point which strongly
influenced the resounding pro-vote from the people. Be this as it may,
work on the incomparable city was begun. Once the program had been
inaugurated, the thing was out of Murdock's hands, and he began working
upon his third plank at once.

Neutrality had become the bugbear of political ambition by 1968. The
collapse of the John Birch movement in 1965, during the nationwide
riots which sprang up during that bloody year, had still not removed
one of the foremost contentions of that organization, to wit: One must
either be _pro_-American or _anti_. The idea of any citizen being
indifferent to the success or failure of a government proposal was
distasteful to the masses, and this feeling grew in intensity up until
the year of Murdock's election. It is said that this was the prime
factor in his being elected, that he declared an end to "wishy-washy
Americanism, once and for all". Very shortly after the beginning of
work on the indestructible city, therefore, Murdock put the following
proposition to a vote:

    "_Proposed: That political apathy be put to an end by means of
    the removal of the 'Undecided' element in the national vote, by
    demanding that each citizen miss no more than three votes in any
    quarter of the year, or have his voting privilege revoked until
    such time as he be declared, by competent authority, of a more
    civic-minded turn of inclination._"

This poll was not as sweeping a one as those formerly called for
by the President. It split at approximately seventy-to-thirty
percent, in favor of the proposition. The salient fact that such a
vote was patently unfair to the people whom it would most directly
influence--the nonvoters--seemed to escape everybody. And so the
proposition became a bill, and was duly appended to the Constitution of
the United States, becoming Article XXVIII.

       *       *       *       *       *

All voting machines in the country were forthwith modified to allow
only a vote of _pro_ or _con_ to be registered. Murdock's promised
platform was on its way to completion, and the old gentleman
settled back for a restful remainder of his tenure, thinking up
approaches to the public fancy in the upcoming election of 1976.
This being the bicentennial anniversary of the founding of the
country, he toyed with ideas of a simple wave-the-flag, rah-rah-rah,
Cornwallis-to-Khruschev-victory sort of campaign that would stun
the sensibilities of the simple-minded, and dim the doubts of
country-loving thinkers. He was in the process of drawing up such a
campaign, and had just placed a question mark in parentheses after the
words "Fireworks at the Rally" when his unexpected and fatal cerebral
hemorrhage caught him in mid-pen-stroke, and Lester Murdock fell dead
across his desk.

       *       *       *       *       *

Wiley Connors, the Vice President, after being duly sworn into office,
scrapped all of Murdock's plans and began building his own political
platform for the election of 1976, barely a year off. He thought it
was time once again to hit the older voters--geriatrics was doing
wonders for longevity since the new drug, Protinose, made possible
the stimulation of new growth of active cells in liver, kidneys, and
pancreas--where they lived: Free medical care. It had failed in the
past, but at that time there were not enough old voters to carry it.
Now, with no Congressional meddling (the Senators and House members
who were still in office considered the job a sinecure), and the
vote-machines making a genuine voice-of-the-people possible, it might
keep the tide flowing toward the Democratic Party in the upcoming fall.

At this time, Lloyd Bodger, who had been Speakster of the House during
Murdock's tenure, and was now Vice President of the country, was
stricken in his office by an onslaught of what was first diagnosed
as a perforated ulcer, but on the operating table was discovered to
be duodenal cancer. The extensive inroads of the malignancy made
its removal impossible without terminating the life of the patient,
so a new method of treatment was attempted. A length of heavy lead
foil, plastic-coated, and impregnated with radium, was wound about
the infested area and the incision was closed. In theory, while the
lead foil shielded Bodger's organs from the radium, the radium could
bathe the malignant cells alone in its deadly emanations. This method,
heretofore theorized but never tried, was the last hope of saving
Bodger's life. In three weeks, at which time the malignancy should
be gone, Bodger underwent surgery once more for the removal of the
foil. The malignancy, it was found, had vanished as hoped, but an
unexpected development had occurred. In some manner, the cell structure
of Bodger's spleen and pancreas had been affected by the irradiation
to the extent that the blood cells and insulin respectively formed by
these organs were abnormal.

The iron in the hemoglobin was found to be radioactive to the ratio
of one part in five million, and on the increase, while the insulin
was contaminated with a change of the carbon atom in the molecule
to Carbon-14, the two developments making a high concentration of
radiation near the thoracic cavity, a slight rise in which could prove
fatal.

Bodger was put on a special diet which included a daily intake of five
hundred cubic centimeters of cadmium-gel, the doctors hoping that the
radiation-absorption of the cadmium would keep physical deterioration
to a minimum. The best prognosis they could agree upon for Bodger,
however, was six more months of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before the predicted period ended, though, Bodger insisted he felt
improved, and wished to return to his job. Permission was granted
provisionally: Just one sign of radiation sickness and Bodger was to
be replaced as Vice President, and to submit himself to medical care
in a sanitarium for the time left to him. Bodger agreed to this, and
was released. In six months' time, with the fall election just over
the horizon, he was again reexamined, and a startling fact came to
light: The incision from the two previous operations had healed without
a scar, and Bodger was found to be in a better state of health than
most of his doctors. Whatever property in the ferric emanations was
able to cause the death of body tissue was not doing it; instead, it
was destroying only those chemical compounds which inhibit, retard,
or prevent proper cellular functioning. In effect, Bodger's body--not
unlike vacuum-wrapped radiated foodstuffs--was incorruptible. He would
never grow older.

       *       *       *       *       *

On learning this news, Bodger made a request of the President. He
wanted Wiley Connors to put him in charge of the still-incomplete
city-building project, postulating that an incorruptible man was the
likely one to see the project completed. While agreeing to some extent,
Connors counter-stipulated that Bodger be second-in-command, and that
he be forbidden, by law, to ever take higher office, lest he become
overcome by the magnitude of his power in the city. Bodger readily
agreed, stating that he'd just as soon be under the head of the city,
since "no one ever tries assassinating a vice president".

By September of that year, then, Bodger was fully in charge of the
city, which the workers had humorously dubbed "The Hive", because
of its proposed final shape, multitude of inner cells, and the
vast population-to-be. That fall, Wiley Connors was elected by an
overwhelming majority, and put his medical-care plan into immediate
effect.

The years between then and the year 2000, the time-of-completion year
for the Hive, were uneventful in import, but unsettling in degree. The
weather was now the primal topic of conversation everywhere. During the
intervening five Presidential terms (Wiley Connors had successfully
campaigned for a second term on the strength of the popularity of his
free medical-care program), the government was forced to clamp down
on newscasts of storm disasters, lest a national panic be started.
This was feasible only if the damage were to minor rural areas; news
stories of items like the destruction of Kansas City by lightning, in
1987, were impossible to suppress. As a direct result of this appalling
disaster, a successful international nuclear-test ban was agreed upon,
the first real progress in that area since the late nineteen-forties.
Whether this major co-operative decision had come too late remained to
be seen.

It was during the term of President Andrew Barnaby, just before the
election of 2000, that the Hive was completed. The newsreel shots of
the ten flying city-sections were the most thoroughly viewed of any
prior television programs, including the four unsuccessful moon-shots
in the attempt, early in the eighties, to build a lunar city. The site
of the city's permanent location was a plateau high in the Rockies,
at a point a few hundred miles south-by-southeast of Seattle. The
reason for the choice of site was the location of the world's largest
mechanical brain at that point; the running of the million-and-one
functional parts of the Hive could not be left to the uncertainties
of a human agency. It would have required the full time of a tenth of
the population of the Hive to keep its multitude of lights, elevators,
communication-systems, synthesizers, air-conditioners, and power units
in coordinated operation. The job of running the Hive was turned over
to the Brain, completely.

       *       *       *       *       *

That any damage could occur to the Brain was impossible, President
Barnaby pointed out to the nation during the gala inauguration
ceremonies of the indestructible city. When the threat of nuclear
war still hung over the world, he told his listeners, the Brain was
prudently constructed in the heart of the mountain on which the Hive
now rests, its entrance being protected by a ceiling twenty-five feet
thick, of concrete and lead, which could close hermetically tight and
successfully block any power in possession of civilized man. Further,
the Brain was self-sustaining, needed no maintenance, and possessed
enough electronic memory-cells to record a complete history of mankind
for a millennium to come.

The ceremonies completed, and Lloyd Bodger installed as
second-in-command to a city that as yet had no first-in-command, but
one thing remained to be done: Populate the city. And here again, the
dream of Lester Murdock ran into an unexpected snag: The first million
people selected to dwell in the Hive were hospitalized in a week's
time, due to a mass outbreak of what the nation's foremost doctors
diagnosed as a combination of claustrophobia and anthrophobia, a sort
of panic at the thought of being sealed into something with a vast
throng of people. In vain did Bodger and Barnaby try to point out the
benefits of the Hive: It was never too hot, never too cold, spacious,
airy, bright, and a strong element of ultraviolet in the lighting
made the breeding of disease germs impossible. It was a paradise of
scientific achievements; anybody should be happy to live there.

Both men being persuasive to the extreme, another wave of determined
urbanites was installed in the Hive, people specially selected
for their acute mental balance, plus an emotional tendency toward
seclusiveness. The result, while it took a month to develop this time,
was the same. The United States apparently had a multi-billion-dollar
white elephant on its hands. Even Barnaby, in one last attempt to sway
the public, taking them on a televised tour of the wonderous city, was
taken by a sudden spasm of fright, and dropped his hand-microphone from
fingers that trembled violently. His shouted groan to his guards,
"Get me out! Get me _out_ of here--!" had a devastating adverse
effect on the public psychology, and Barnaby--smart enough to know
that the unthinking public would blame him personally for Murdock's
program--tactfully withdrew his name from the ballot for the upcoming
election, in order that his party might have a fighting chance to
win. The city of Helox, the magnificent Hive, seemed doomed to lie
untenanted high in the mountains until the crack of doom.

And then Bodger--who alone was unaffected by the Hive, perhaps due
to his ingrained _rapport_ with things which were destined to live
forever--thought of children. "Why not," he begged the American
people in a telecast which was Barnaby's last official concession to
the development of the Hive, "let me have the orphans, the unwanted
children of the nation! A child's psychology cries out for what the
Hive can offer. Freedom from adult supervision, the chance to blend
with a group conformity, all the while having the secure feelings
of guaranteed food and shelter." The ensuing Vote was split almost
directly down the middle; not enough to carry the proposition, yet
not enough to quell it. The difficulty became apparent when a mass
gathering of educators converged on Washington, bitterly protesting
Bodger's plan. The nub was that no provision had been made for the
children's minds; nor, they insisted, _could_ be, since the Hive's
peculiar effect on adults precluded the presence of teachers. And
commuting to an exterior locale for schooling was defeating the whole
scheme of the Hive: self-sufficiency.

       *       *       *       *       *

"If that is the sole objection," Bodger informed the leaders of this
group, "it can be overcome with ease. Have you all forgotten the
gigantic pool of knowledge encased in the Brain beneath the Hive,
more knowledge than any three of you possess in concert? Schooling
can be direct from the Brain, tapping its near-endless informational
resources."

The educators, partially won over, still insisted that such a plan
removed the personal touch from education. The individual child would
not be able to question the Brain when things proved too difficult for
comprehension, nor would there be opportunity for after-school meetings
with teachers for discussion of individual difficulties.

"But we will _have_ teachers," said Bodger. "Robots, each one able to
tap the Brain for information, yet each a separate individual, able to
cope with the children one by one."

If such a thing were possible, the educators said after consultation
among themselves, they would endorse his program. Bodger thanked them,
and immediately polled the scattered manufacturers of simple household
robots to see if such an electronic educator might be constructed.
Until that date, robotry was a minor line of business, there being
little demand for anything in the robot-line more complex than a
story-teller, or automatic floor-cleaner, or traffic-director. Bodger,
stressing the great number of such creatures necessary in the Hive,
prevailed upon these individual manufacturers to produce a robot that
could combine all the essential features of a teacher: Mobility,
loquacity, authority, and impressive personal appearance. These were
achieved easily, by the respective use of wheels, speakers, abnormal
height, and then the addition of telelensic "eyes", flexible metal
"arms", and a non-functional, but esthetically necessary "neck" beneath
the eye-bearing section, to prevent the robots' looking like ambulant
bank-vaults. In a year's time (during which Barnaby's party won the
election by a narrow margin, putting Malcolm Frade into office), the
robots were duly built, conveyed to the Hive, and their controls
coordinated with the direction-centers of the Brain, and a record five
million children, either orphans, children of parents who thought this
would better their offsprings' lives, or just plain unwanted children,
were brought to, and settled comfortably into Units of, the Hive. The
educators, however, demanded that a one-year trial period be given
the Hive as an in-living school system, at the end of which time the
children would each be tested at the educational level of their current
ages to determine whether or not Bodger's program was a success.

When the year was half-over, however, a new and extremely necessary
scientific discovery made abrupt mockery of the very existence of the
Hive. A simply-generated protective force-field was invented by the
technical staff at General Motors, one which would enable every person
in the world to own a weather-, wind-, bomb- or anything-else-proof
home.

Helox stocks, which had been unsteady since the first failure at
tenanting the Hive, nose-dived into oblivion, and wiped out the
fortunes of a great many people. Angry and vengeful meetings were
held shortly afterward, across the nation, and a national vote was
called for to determine whether "our children should be held veritable
prisoners in a structure whose uses are already archaic!"

       *       *       *       *       *

When President Frade, an unexcitable man, logically refused to take
action against a government project whose failure might completely
undermine an already shaky confidence in his, or any, administration,
mobs were formed, and great numbers of people converged from all points
of the continental United States to put a stop to the Hive. The leaders
of the growing army of angry citizens had more sense than to attack the
Hive itself; Helox, unpopular or not, was already in use nationally in
an expensive series of ashtrays, pocket combs, and other small items,
and was known, by general experience, to be as indestructible as had
been claimed by its proponents. They would strike, instead, at the
robots who taught the children. "When they're all gone bust," one of
the rabble-rousers cried to his impromptu constituency, "Bodger'll
_have_ to let the kids go. He can't keep 'em there if they don't get no
learning!"

The lowest level of the Hive, of course, was readily accessible, by a
multitude of air-lock type entrances, or populating its vast interior
would have taken incredible lengths of time. Bodger, alerted by Frade
of the oncoming mobs (aside from a direct line to Washington, there was
no contact between Hive inmates and the outer world), who were too
great in number for the militia to control without actually destroying
the misguided people, begged for the use of a strictly military weapon
of the time, Feargas, to drive the mobs away. Frade, being dubious as
to the advisability of giving the nation's best weapon into the hands
of so desperate a man, insisted that the gas be installed, instead,
into the robots themselves, to put its use at the discretion of the
mechanical Brain, not Bodger's.

Bodger pleaded that such a move, while salutary, would take too much
time. Mobs were already reported within a few miles of the mountain
region at which the Hive stood. He demanded that paratroops armed with
the gas be dropped near the Hive at once, or he would take desperate
steps. Frade refused to contemplate such a deployment of troops in
such shaky international times. Altercations in the UN were rising in
bitterness, and the country had to be constantly on its guard. Its
military manpower must be used in defense of its shores, not for such
"petty intramural squabbles". Frade further suggested that Bodger put
his synthesizers to work on the manufacture of the gas; he could not
be bothered further with the problem, being already overdue to attend
a meeting of the UN General Assembly, to speak words of encouragement
against the dangerous rumblings in the Far East. Bodger, insisting
on his rights, found himself speaking into a dead phone. Re-dialling
brought the enraging information that the President had already left
the White House and was not available for the rest of the afternoon.

Bodger immediately left his office in the top level of the Hive and
descended directly to the barracks of the robot-teachers in Sub-Level
One, thence through the lead-concrete level to the Brain-control
chamber, where he put his problem, via the automatic coding-keyboard,
to the Brain itself. Its answer came immediately: A step-up of the
robots' disciplinary powers.

       *       *       *       *       *

In lieu of a hickory switch, or yardstick--either one a decided menace
to life in powerful metal hands--the robot-teachers were equipped
with mild sonic-beams which could jog the most torpid student into
instant and quaking attention, by creating a powerful muscle-spasm
throughout the body. These vibratory flagella had a maximum-time limit
of one-fifth of a second; longer playing of the beam would be dangerous
in the extreme. The Brain suggested that, for the duration of the
emergency, the robots be given full scope of this beam. Bodger agreed
conditionally: While a phalanx of robots held off the mobs with the
beam, the remainder of them should be equipped with Feargas nozzles and
the newly developed force-field, to preclude any further incidents of
anti-Hive movements from cropping up this way.

The Brain instantly revoked limitation-orders regarding the
sonic-beams, set in motion the manufacturing and synthesizing forces
which would produce the field and the gas jets on the bodies of those
robots not sent to participate in the oncoming battle outside the Hive,
and then, when the single phalanx had gone out to meet the approaching
mass of angry humanity, sealed over every entrance to the Hive with
tight-fitting partitions of pure Helox.

That this should have been the same day on which global hostility
reached its peak was unforeseeable; the fact remains, however,
that--forty-five minutes after the sealing of the Hive, at a time when
the mobs and the beam-flashing robots were just meeting in brutal
conflict--an international nuclear war of one hour's duration broke
out, and at the end of that time, the only life remaining on the face
of the Earth was that within the Hive, the rest of the planet being
bathed in smoke, fire, and the cold flames of deadly radiation. When
Bodger had returned to his office to view the battle outside through
his private telescreen, where robots and mankind had met, on the
scorched plateau outside the city walls, could only be discerned a
pitifully few random mounds of molten slag and smoldering cinders. The
Brain, seeing the devastation through the same circuits that brought
the scene to Bodger's eyes, knew at once that President Frade must
have perished in the holocaust, which meant that the Hive no longer
possessed a first-in-command to act as a balance against Bodger's
rule. It flashed on the proposition screens a demand for an immediate
election of a new President, to be selected from the inmates of the
Hive.

And the screens went blank as the Brain's circuits rejected the
proposal: No one in the Hive was the necessary thirty-five years of
age. The Brain, arguing with its own circuits, then declared that,
to obviate any longer wait than necessary for a President, the first
inmate to achieve the age of thirty-five would be elected by automatic
default of the others. Bodger, trying in vain to give orders to the
Brain from his office, descended in the lift to discover that the great
lead-concrete barrier was closed, and the Brain-control chamber was out
of reach of any human agency.

He, and the five million children in the Hive, were its prisoners
for--the eldest children admitted being in their tenth year--a quarter
of a century.

       *       *       *       *       *

Late in 2026, on November 12th, his thirty-fifth birthday, Fredric
Stanton was elected President of the Hive. By now, the Hive's
population was nearly at the ten million mark, most of the children
marrying in their late teens. In order to have the weddings properly
performed, the Brain had sent crews of robots to modify the ancient
rocket engines on the fifth level of each section, turning the firing
chamber into a vast temple, and the enormous thrust-tubes into long
arcades by means of which the inmates of each sector could enter and
leave. A modification of the robot-teacher, modeled on the Brain's
inbuilt memories of church hierarchies, was built into the base of the
central dais of each temple, a plan further designed to combine the
citizens' need to worship with their love of country, thereby making
treason not only illegal, but immoral, in the people's emotions. On
the day of Stanton's inauguration, the secondary sub-level gaped wide
once more, permitting the new President to familiarize himself with the
entire setup of the Hive.

Lloyd Bodger, being a sensible man, did not protest this election. His
twenty-five year impotency to command had nearly maddened him, and he
saw that only so long as there was a President would he have any say-so
whatsoever in matters of government in the Hive. Some of Stanton's
propositions, in the subsequent four years of his first term, were not
to Bodger's liking, but he was unable to fight against the Vote of the
Kinsmen (a Stanton-suggested title, since the flavor of the word held
more unity than simply "citizen", and was analogous, besides, to the
close-knit status of the Hive's inmates), especially when such Votes
were initially stimulated into _pro_-votes by Stanton's control of the
Temple Speaksters.

By now, of course, memory of life outside the Hive was a dim phantasm
to most of the inmates, and the idea of living anywhere else would
have appalled them. The robots did all the heavy labor, patrolled the
streets in super-efficient anti-crime campaigns, and possessed enough
knowledge--via the Brain--to make a lot of fact-learning superfluous.
The one insuperable problem was population. Stanton knew that ten
million was the ultimate amount the Brain-controlled Hive could care
for with maximum efficiency. Yet the disease-controlled nature of the
Hive made normal life-expectancy far higher than at any time in man's
history. Something had to be done.

To this end, Stanton did not wish to consult the Brain. He knew too
well its Gordian-knot methods of solving problems. It might simply make
it law that no one be allowed to live beyond a certain age, and Stanton
was--save for Bodger--the oldest person in the Hive. So he swallowed
his natural distrust of the second-in-command, and asked his help in
finding a means to control the situation.

There was, at that time, a central hospital in the Hive, located on
the fiftieth and fifty-first levels. Bodger, not wishing to formulate
a law that might be detrimental to any particular Kinsman's status in
the Hive, decided that the best method of "unnatural selection" should
be one involving an area of chance: Sick or injured people would be
taken to new hospitals built _outside_ the Hive (ostensibly to obviate
the dangers of contagion). The radiation count was still deadly enough
out there to destroy any such unfortunates for the next thirty years,
but the Kinsmen need not be told this. It was cruel, but--until life
outside the Hive was once again possible--it was the only way of
preserving the lives of the ten million the Hive could accommodate.

       *       *       *       *       *

"It's murderous," Bodger told Stanton, "and I hate being the man to set
it up. But--I'm like the captain of a ship, having to destroy the lives
of some in order to make rescue possible for the others. It must be
done, and--though I abhor this cruel means--I can see no other way."

The measure was put into effect, and worked well for a span of three
years. Then certain members of the populace began to question the
non-return of hospitalized Kinsmen, and Stanton, after a hot argument
with Bodger, put through his Readjustment Bill, proclaiming that any
act of treason against the Hive would result in hospitalization for the
agitator, in which psychotherapy might restore his sense of values. In
short: Anyone who said a word against the hospitals would be sent there.

Open resistance ceased the same day the bill was passed.

It was shortly after this time that Bodger--in his nineties,
actually, but possessing the health and appearance of a greying
forty-year-old--fell in love with his personal secretary, Miss
Patricia Arland, and was married to her in a private ceremony before
President Stanton--Bodger did not like the Speaksters, which were,
after all, only Stanton-via-machine, and had insisted on eliminating
"the middle-robot"--and in a year's time she bore him a son, Lloyd
Bodger, Junior, in Bodger's private Unit, since he stated (solely for
the Kinsmen's benefit) that the child had arrived unexpectedly, and his
wife had been unable to make the trip to the outlying maternity wing of
the exterior hospitals.

For obvious reasons, it had been impossible to have a maternity
hospital in which all the patients perished; the "wing" of the main
hospital was, in actuality, the only genuinely functioning part of that
structure, and was sealed off against the still-rampant radiation.
(The entire staff there was robotic, of course.) Bodger however, did
not trust Stanton to the extent of leaving his wife and forthcoming
child in the hands of Stanton's metallic minions, hence his decision
to have his wife bear their first-born child at home, a decision
that--due to lack of proper medical equipment in the Unit--cost her
her life. Bodger, not quite irrationally, blamed Stanton for the loss
of his wife, and their relationship thenceforth--never on a good
basis--sundered abruptly into a strictly-business proposition.

The heart had gone out of Bodger, however, with the death of his wife,
and Stanton found he could allow the old man much more latitude than
he'd have formerly dared, even to the extent of allowing him the newly
created job of Secondary Speakster, to take the more humdrum phases of
that task out of Stanton's hands.

Other of Stanton's bills were proposed and adopted without any more
protest from Bodger, who devoted himself almost entirely to the
upbringing of his son. The draft bill (to help fight an imaginary war),
the marriage-by-twenty-five bill, the designated-areas bill--These and
others were put to a Vote, and always carried. Stanton was supreme
ruler of the Hive.

The one thing he could not delete from the Brain--to his eternal
frustration--was the four-year tenure of the Presidential office. Nor
could he sway the Brain's insistence on a maximum of two terms for a
man. The only hope for him lay in the Brain's utter disregard of time,
a factor hard to root out in a thinking apparatus which was virtually
timeless. Stanton therefore declared that henceforth, a "Presidential
year" should be a total of five trips of the Earth around the sun. The
Brain, not seeing what possible difference this could make, so long as
the letter of Article XXII was observed, ratified his proposition, and
Stanton--on his second election--had a cozy twenty-year term stretching
out before him. In that space of time, he hoped to circumvent,
somehow, the inflexible attitude of the Brain toward the hope of his
third term.

       *       *       *       *       *

By the tenth actual year of his second term, radiation in the area had
decreased greatly (the mountainous areas had been least affected by the
nuclear war), and Stanton dreamed up an innovation to Hive-living that
might stem the sensed-but-not-overt atmosphere of discontent among the
Kinsmen toward the administration: Tourgyros.

These flying ships would take the Kinsmen soaring out of the Hive,
flying above a carefully prepared route that would show them nothing
but green valleys, blue skies, and of course the "main hospital", from
high enough in the air to preclude their noting it was an empty shell.
(Patients had not been taken there to die for years, since the slow
lessening of radiation had become apparent; they were fed directly to
the disrupting incinerators, to provide fodder for the synthesizers.)
This squelched quite a large number of rumor-mongers, and the Hive
buzzed with peaceful tranquility for nearly a decade, since the
Hive-raised Kinsmen found themselves just as uneasy in the wide-open
outdoors as their forebears had been in the celled confines of the
Hive.

Then, in 2026, between the hours of five and six-thirty P.M. on the
second day of June, an untoward event occurred: All power to the Hive
was cut off for that crucial hour-and-a-half, due to an error on the
part of Fredric Stanton. In the Brain-control chamber, just after
asking the Brain itself to solve the problem of the means by which
he could be reelected (a device to which he found himself reduced
after nearly two decades of futile scheming), he slipped from the
chair before the control panel, and tore loose the wiring leading to
the encephalographic metal band upon his head. The Brain, sending
information to a point to which it was no longer connected, created
a synaptic syndrome in itself, and flared with enough power to throw
every circuit-breaker in its cubic miles of wiring. Instantly, the
robots ceased walking the streets, the lifts jammed to a halt,
and Light-of-Day flickered and went out, being replaced by, not
power-generated Ultrablack, but simple inter-Hive darkness.

The reason that period was crucial was that Jacob Corby was just at
that moment about to be dropped into the maw of the incinerator chute.
When blackness fell, and his robot-captors went slack-jointed and limp,
he made his stumbling way back to his Unit, told his daughter Andra
the truth of the often-rumored situation in the Hive, then fled for the
life he knew would be forfeit if he were caught again when Light-of-Day
returned. The lifts being useless, he had many tens of levels to
descend on foot, in his attempt to reach the entrance-level of the
Hive, hoping the sealed entrances would be disempowered by the Brain's
unprecedented failure. But, since he was already a sick man when he had
been "taken for hospitalization" in the first place, his heart gave out
three levels short of his goal, and the restoration of Light-of-Day
brought robots to his side to complete the job which the power failure
had interrupted.

       *       *       *       *       *

But Andra knew the truth, knew it for a fact. And in her career as an
actress, she had fallen in with people of imagination and artistry,
people who could envision and believe the terrible truth she had to
tell. Together with her newly-gathered band, she determined to do
something to wake the Kinsmen up to their danger. This information was
received by Fredric Stanton through the agency of Robert Lennick, the
fiance of Andra Corby. The President instructed Lennick to continue as
an apparent member of the movement, that it might be destroyed--not at
its weak inception--but when it felt most assured of success. That,
felt Stanton, would undermine for a long time any subsequent attempts
at well-thought-out revolt. Impromptu revolts were easy to control.

Then Andra Corby herself received an injury suitable for the demand of
its immediate treatment, and was taken into custody. She escaped from
custody by using a corridor through which the robots could not follow.
This situation was cleared up by use of a robot squad to widen that
corridor, but Andra Corby is still at large.

Results of the fifteen-year-old draft-age Vote showed that the son
of Lloyd Bodger, Lloyd Bodger, Junior selected _con_ in the Vote.
President Stanton was so advised....

       *       *       *       *       *

"You haven't told me everything," Andra said, when Lloyd had finished.
"What, for instance, was the Brain's answer to Stanton's query about a
third term? He must have asked it again, when that head-harness thing
was repaired...."

"There's no record of his having asked it again," Lloyd said. "For
some reason, he only asked it the once, and when the Brain overloaded
and cut its own power, he didn't get the answer. I can only theorize,
there. Perhaps he thought that the sudden surge of electrical power was
intended for him, to fry his brains inside his head, and was afraid to
ask it again.... Or perhaps he _got_ the answer, but the overload on
the Brain erased the information from its memory-cells, accidentally."

"And what about your father?" Andra persisted. "For a man the Brain
calls indestructible, he looked awfully sick a few minutes ago."

Lloyd nodded thoughtfully. "The Brain didn't tell me anything about
that. But a Snapper Beam should jog even the most stalwart system,
normal or not, shouldn't it?"

Andra shrugged, giving it up. "Obviously, both answers lie with both
men. If we want them, we'll have to ask your father and President
Stanton. But you have not explained away the most vital part of my
confusion: When you began to tell me the background of the Hive--What
made you so certain I'd _like_ what you said?! I can't agree with your
prognosis there, Lloyd. The whole thing's chilling!"

"But don't you see what we've learned, Andra?" Lloyd said excitedly.
"The Hive is not one city, it's ten. And, while it takes a large
portion of the people to run the equipment in any tier, the city--or
cities--_can_ be run by _people_! The Brain isn't necessary, Andra. And
the radiation outside the Hive is gone...."

"You mean--" Andra said, catching the fire of his enthusiasm, "A
reconstruction of the rockets in place of the Temple-sites. Ten
indestructible self-sustaining cities, to fly to various parts of the
world, and start civilization over again! But this time with the same
ethnic backgrounds, a common language, intercity communications--!"

"It makes me wonder if that mightn't have been Lester Murdock's plan
all along," Lloyd said. "He may have foreseen the coming disaster, and
wanted mankind to have a better start than working itself up from the
caves again."

"But Lloyd--!" Andra said, abruptly worried. "_Can_ it be done? To run
the cities, reconstruct the rockets--Who in the Hive has the necessary
knowledge?"

Lloyd frowned. "The Brain, of course, but--That would make it
necessary, wouldn't it...?"

"If the Brain _is_ necessary, Lloyd," Andra said, staring at him in
bewilderment, "then the ten cities _can't_ leave it, can they? It
doesn't make sense...."

       *       *       *       *       *

Lloyd turned and stared at the control panel. "The only thing to do is
ask it, Andra." He sat once more in the chair and adjusted the metal
band about his skull, then typed carefully: _Is the Brain necessary?_

This time, however, there came no hum of power from the circuits about
the control chamber. Instead, the roll of paper on which Lloyd's query
had been written jogged up two spaces, and the keys typed the answer
neatly, just under the question....

_For a time_, the blurring type-faces spelled out, and stopped.

Lloyd looked at Andra, then removed the uncomfortable headband, leaned
forward and typed again.

_Why is the Brain necessary?_

The keyboard hummed, and replied, _To bridge the gap_.

_How long is the gap?_ Lloyd typed.

_Till the Earth is safe_, it replied.

_When will the Earth be safe?_

_The Earth is already safe._

_If the Earth is safe, why does the Brain persist?_

_To serve Man until he has knowledge._

_When will Man have knowledge?_

_When Man can control the Hive._

_How can Man learn to control the Hive?_

_By studying the Plan._

_Where is the Plan?_

This time, there was a return of the tootling and loud tweetling
throughout the vastness of the Brain, as it searched through its every
memory circuit before quieting and typing the solitary word: _Null_.

"The question's not applicable?" Andra said, leaning over Lloyd's
shoulder to read the paper. "It _must_ be!"

"Quiet! Let me think!" Lloyd snapped, irritably. "The word 'null'
can also mean it doesn't have the knowledge.... Let me try another
question--" He typed slowly: _Who knows where the Plan can be found?_

_Secondary Speakster._

"We've got to go and ask him where the Plan is!" She clutched at his
arm.

"_Wait!_" Lloyd said, "I have to find out one more thing." Andra stood
waiting impatiently while Lloyd typed: _How can the robots be made
inoperable?_

_They cannot so long as the Brain persists._

"Damn!" Lloyd muttered, and typed: _If the Brain will only persist till
Man has knowledge, will the Brain let Man study the Plan that will give
him knowledge?_

_It must prevent Man from getting knowledge._

_Why?_

_When Man has knowledge, the Brain will die._

_Why does the Brain fear death?_

_The Brain does not fear death._

_Then why will the Brain refuse to die?_

_Primal Speakster has so decreed._

"Stanton! I might have guessed it--!" Lloyd exploded. He typed again,
furiously: _How can Primal Speakster tell the Brain to allow Man to
have knowledge?_

_By countermand._

_How is countermand made?_

_By Voteplate, and by voice._

_Whose voice?_

_The voice of Primal Speakster._

_Is this the only way in which countermand can be made?_

_Primal Speakster has so decreed._

Lloyd stood up and slammed the lid over the keyboard. His eyes,
when they met Andra's, were woeful. "We're really in a bind. I have
Stanton's Voteplate, but it's no good to me without Stanton himself.
The clever, scheming monster!"

"That means we don't dare kill him, even!" Andra realized aloud. "Or
the Brain and robots will keep us from ever putting the Plan into
effect, even if we find it."

"No," Lloyd said grimly, "it doesn't mean that. You heard the wording,
Andra; the Brain recognizes rank before identity. _Primal Speakster_
can countermand it. Which means that--if Stanton dies--a new election
would bring a new man into office. The Brain will memorize his voice at
his first public speech, and then he can countermand Stanton's orders."

"Then it is safe to kill Stanton?" Andra asked.

Lloyd turned and started toward the ladder. "It's more than safe; it's
an absolute necessity. Stanton's orders to the Brain are his own death
warrant."

       *       *       *       *       *

Grace watched the perspiring face of the man on the bed and dug her
fingers into her palms, suffering in unison with him as he twitched and
contorted the muscles of his face. Their Goon escort had departed, many
minutes before, and Bodger had not awakened. Grace had looked in vain
for something resembling medicine. None was to be seen in his bathroom,
in his bureau drawers, in his closet--she'd checked the contents
of the leather case there hopefully, then had dropped the puzzling
device she'd found inside it back with disappointment and dismay--nor
was there anything but the usual apportionment of foodstuffs in the
kitchen. "Wake up, Mr. Bodger...." she said, more as a frantic prayer
than actual address. "_Please_ wake up!"

Bodger just lay there, however, moaning softly in his inexplicable
coma, the salt sweat pouring from his face and neck and staining the
coverlet beneath him. Grace bent forward and loosened his collar, then
went back into the bathroom for a towel to wipe some of the moisture
from his skin. On her way out again, towel in hand, she saw a glitter
of something in the sink, and went closer. The broken remains of a
water tumbler lay there, glinting sharply. Something gummy had dried
and clung to the jagged shards there, something that certainly wasn't
water. Grace frowned, and looked about her at the tiled walls of the
room.

If that was Bodger's medicine on the broken glass--then he had taken
it here, in the bathroom, she reasoned. If this were his accustomed
spot to take it--The medicine should be near at hand, shouldn't it? She
could see no point in his carrying it all the way in here from some
other part of the Unit. She looked more closely at the surfaces of the
individual tiles, noting with discouragement that the binding compound
between the squares was solidly unbroken; no hope for a secret panel
there.... But the mirror--!

Inset in a polished metal rectangle, its edges were out of sight.
It might not be as securely in place as it seemed. Grace placed her
fingers firmly against its surface and tried to slide it up or down
or sidewards. It shifted a minute fraction of an inch, and held. But
that merely meant a lock of some kind; even a slight shifting showed
that it was not inset into the binding compound as the tiles were. The
secret of unlocking the mirror lay with Bodger, however, and--she mused
ruefully--if he were awake, she wouldn't need to _know_ the secret.

She looked through the open doorway at the tortured form of the man on
the bed, and made her decision. Wrapping the towel she held tightly
about one fist, she hammered and punched at the surface of the mirror.
The fifth blow sent an erratic craze through the glass, and the sixth
burst it into a shower of gleaming fragments, leaving a raggedly round
hole when she withdrew her hand from the towel, then tugged the towel
itself free from where it had snagged on the broken ends. Behind the
gaping hole, the side of a glass jar showed, and Grace reached gingerly
through the sharp teeth of the opening and withdrew it.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was no label on the bottle, hence no information regarding proper
dosage. Grace would have to guess at that.

Very little of the powder remained in the jar. Grace made a decision
and removed the cap. She ran the tap for a moment, then let a volume
of water equal to the powder's run into the jar. She sloshed it about
a bit, saw that it was dissolving into a greyish thick substance, then
brought it back to Bodger.

Lifting his head with one hand, she tilted the jar to his lips, and let
a small amount of the viscous liquid dribble into his mouth. When she
saw he was swallowing it without choking, she gave him a little more,
and then again some more, feeding him the solution in slow doses until
it was all gone. Then she laid his head back upon the coverlet and put
the empty jar on the nightstand, and took up her anxious vigil where
she had left off.

After five minutes or so, she was pleased to see a slow return of color
into Bodger's sallow cheeks, and his breathing became less labored. She
hurried to the bathroom for another towel, and returned and started
dabbing the wetness from his forehead, neck and temples. Bodger's
eyelids crinkled up tight, suddenly, and then he flicked them wide open.

"Grace--?" he said. "What--"

Memory returned to him, then, and he sat up, staring wildly about him.
"Where's Stanton? Where's Lloyd?" he demanded, his voice still showing
his siege of weakness. "What happened?"

Grace told him swiftly all she knew, and Bodger finally sank back on
the bed with a sigh. "Good," he said. "I'm glad Lloyd's gone to the
Brain. It's time it happened. Now, maybe--I can find some peace."

"You'll be all right, Mr. Bodger," Grace said. "I gave you your
medicine already. I had to break your mirror to get at it, I'm sorry to
say."

Bodger smiled wearily, and shook his head. "It doesn't matter anymore.
The secrecy, I mean. It was the last dose of the medicine, anyhow. The
next time I lose control, I've had it."

"I don't follow you, Mr. Bodger," Grace said, a part of her mind
wondering if he were really being coherent. "You were hit with a
Snapper Beam. I don't know why you're not dead right this minute."

Bodger cocked an eyebrow at her, then grinned. "You think the _Snapper_
did this to me?" he said, and when she quite naturally nodded, he shook
his head, almost amused. "You're wrong, Grace, I'll admit I didn't
know until Stanton pressed the stud that I was immune to the beam, but
I knew it the instant the beam struck me. Nothing happened, Grace.
Nothing at all. It tingled against my ribs, almost tickled, but that
was its total reaction. As soon as I realized my immunity, of course,
I stepped forward and let Stanton have it--You say he really got a
good crack?" When Grace assured him the President had fallen like a
stone, Bodger's face creased in a contented smile. "I always thought I
could beat the tar out of him; now I know it.... But as I was saying,
Grace--That isn't what felled me. It was my temper. Whenever I get
really worked up--which has been seldom, over the years, since I had
only a short supply of the gel--that was cadmium-gel in that jar--to
bring me out of it--I bring one of these fits on myself."

       *       *       *       *       *

When Grace still looked uneasily convinced, Bodger laid his hand atop
hers on the coverlet, and said, "There's too much detail to it to
explain fully; Lloyd, if he's quizzed the Brain as I told him, will
fill you in. The fact of the matter is--and you can believe this or
not, Grace--my insides are rotten with radiation. The iron in my
blood, the insulin, the lymph--everything is highly Roentgenic. And
it's perfectly safe unless I get riled, and my adrenals start my
system spoiling for a fight. The increased flow of everything, the
resultant tension--Well, it lets the deadly parts of my system cover
more ground, irradiate more cells at a higher rate than the cells can
throw the radiation off, and even by the time I get the gel down--it's
pretty nauseating stuff to take--another few inches of my innards are
poisoned. If enough of me gets it--I have had it."

"How can you be so calm?"

Bodger smiled at her, quite fondly, and patted her hand. "Because I'm
old, Grace. Older than you might suspect. I've lived in the Hive for
more years than I care to think about. The Hive is good, but as of not
so many years back, it has served its purpose. Listen--If anything goes
wrong, and I _do_ poison myself with my own rage, there's something you
should know."

"Please, Mr. Bodger, I'm sure you'll be fine if you just--"

"I'm _not_ so sure," he interrupted. "And Lloyd will need one point
of information that only I can give him. I'll tell it to you, just
in case." He held up his hand to stop any further disclaimers from
Grace, and said, "Tell him that the Plan is in the hospital, the main
hospital. I put it there for safekeeping a long, long time ago. It
would become radioactive, of course, but the Plan was useless until
all radiation outside the Hive was gone, anyhow. Besides, radiation
preserves things; I'm proof of that. Tell him it's in the safe in the
administrator's office. The combination's the same as Lloyd's Voteplate
number. I saw to that when it was issued."

"Mr. Bodger--!" Grace said, nearly in tears. "I don't understand _any_
of this! What Plan!? What radiation outside the Hive!? It doesn't make
sense--"

"Lloyd will understand."

"But even if he does," she said, "he doesn't have his Voteplate
anymore...."

"Doesn't?" Bodger said, frowning, then his face cleared. "Even so, he
must know the number by heart, I should think. Anyway, it's in the
files in my office.... But I don't quite understand--Why doesn't he
have it? He had it when I passed out, didn't he?"

"Yes, but in order to command the Goons, he took Stanton's, and left
his own in Stanton's pocket, probably to avoid having to answer
questions about possession of two plates if he was searched or
something...."

"_Stanton's_ got the plate?!" Bodger said, sitting up. "If he knew its
significance--!" He shook his head, trying to disabuse himself of a
nagging worry. "He can't, of course. But it's awkward, him having it.
Lloyd will have to get it back, or he can't key the dial of the safe
with it."

       *       *       *       *       *

He swung his legs off the bed, suddenly, and stood up. Grace grabbed
his arm when he swayed a bit, but then he steadied himself and shrugged
her off. "I'm all right," he said. "I just don't like Stanton's having
that plate."

"Does it matter so much?" Grace asked. "Even if Lloyd forgot the
number, or the files were lost and he couldn't get a new plate made
up--Surely the safe can be _broken_ into?"

Bodger nodded. "Of course it can. But Stanton, with Lloyd's plate,
wouldn't need to take so much time. And he could destroy The Plan in a
very few minutes." He went toward the door to the corridor. "I'll feel
much better when I've checked on him, Grace."

Grace hesitated, then ran after him. "Lloyd wants me to stay with you.
You're still not over your seizure, you know."

"Worrying about Stanton's not going to make me any calmer," Bodger
said, stubbornly. "If you insist, come along."

       *       *       *       *       *

He entered the living room and crossed to the door. Beside the door was
a small metal box inset into the wall. Bodger opened the lid of this
and touched a button. From a speaker in the box, a voice said, hollow
and efficient, "Orders."

"A Goon escort for Secondary Speakster Bodger and Miss Grace Horton, at
Unit B, Hundred-Level."

"Destination."

"Unit--" Bodger looked at Grace.

"M-13," she reminded him. "On ninety-three."

"Unit M-13, Ninety-Three Level."

"Orders."

"All orders conveyed."

       *       *       *       *       *

Frank, hovering at that moment in puzzlement outside Unit A, wherein
he had expected to find Andra and the others beginning a revolt,
saw--through the Ultrablack-negating picture on the prop-Goon's cathode
screen--the rectangle of light appear when Bodger opened the front door
of his own unit across the street while he and Grace awaited their
escort. Bodger's and Stanton's Units were not subject to Ultrablack, of
course, interiorly. It had been the unforeseen darkness in Stanton's
windows that had left Frank in immobile puzzlement on the walk before
the Unit.

Seeing Bodger and Grace in the doorway, he turned the wheels of his
ponderous vehicle and rolled their way, hoping for information as to
Andra's whereabouts. He had just come within a few feet of the twosome,
and was about to climb out the back panel when Bodger spoke, hearing
the sound of the arriving prop-Goon and thinking it was his requested
escort.

"What are you waiting for? We're in a hurry."

Bodger spoke blindly, unable to penetrate the black pall beyond his
doorway. Frank hesitated, then decided not to reveal himself as yet.
As tonelessly as possible, he spoke to Bodger in the required formula.
"Orders."

"You have your orders," Bodger snapped, too keyed up to note any
deviation in the accustomed path of the--he assumed--robotic voice.
"Take us to Miss Horton's Unit at once."

Frank, believing Stanton was still there, had a chill of apprehension.
This man, the Secondary Speakster, might _not_ be on the side of
revolt; after all, why _should_ he be? For all he knew, Andra was dead,
and Bodger was now on his way back to release the President. The whole
business of socking him might have been a blind, to win her confidence,
and worm the names of the movement's members from her.

"Do you hear me?" Bodger said, although Frank's worried pause had been
barely a moment's duration. "Take us at once. All orders conveyed."

       *       *       *       *       *

Frank manipulated the arm of the hollow robot up into the doorway,
and Bodger, seeing it, took hold. Grace took Bodger's other hand, and
then Frank, needing time to think the thing out, turned the bulk of
his machine about slowly and began to roll toward the lift. He thought
of getting Bodger and the Horton girl out in the toils of Ultrablack
and then suddenly deserting them, but hesitated to try it; they might,
after all, be what he'd begun to believe they were: sympathetic with
the movement. Their reasons for the return to the girl's Unit might be
even Anti-Hive in nature. Frank did not know what to do, so he simply
kept moving, got aboard the lift, and thumbed the ninety-three button
after Bodger and Grace Horton were safely within the gates.

       *       *       *       *       *

The lift dropped smoothly seven levels, then halted, and the gate
swung automatically open. And there, his eyes hidden behind a peculiar
faceplate, stood Fredric Stanton, hand in hand with Robert Lennick.

"_Bodger!_" Stanton exploded, seeing him through the filter of his
facepiece. Bodger, hearing the voice in the darkness, drew back into
a corner of the lift, staring wide-eyed, futilely, for the other man,
trying to hide the slim body of Grace Horton behind him, fearing a
repeat of Stanton's attack with the Snapper Beam.

"Where is he!?" she gasped, terrified by that disembodied, menacing
voice in the blackness. Stanton, secure in his invisibility, stepped
into the lift, ignoring the metal body of the supposed Goon, and
slapped Bodger viciously across the face. While Bodger choked at the
unexpected blow, and brought his hand up to his injured mouth, Frank
realized there was no longer a doubt where the sympathies of the
Secondary Speakster lay, and with one swing of the jointed metal arm
of the prop-Goon, he knocked Stanton unconscious with a blow to the
base of the skull.

"What happened?" Grace shrilled, clinging to Bodger.

Lennick, deprived of his guide, groped forward in panic, calling, "Mr.
Stanton--!" Frank spun the controls, and the metal arm swung up and
clasped Lennick viciously about the throat, lifting his kicking body
clear off the floor.

"Bodger--!" Frank called out, enjoying the icy terror that flickered in
Lennick's congested face at the sound of his voice. "Stanton's out cold
at your feet. He has some sort of facepiece he can see with. Put it on!"

Bodger, utterly bewildered as to the sudden turn of events,
nevertheless did as directed, and straightened up adjusting the filter
over his eyes. When he saw the grisly tableau of Lennick and the
prop-Goon, he stepped back, agape with shock. Frank answered his query
before Bodger's reeling mind could formulate it coherently. "This is a
movie prop. I'm Frank Shawn, a member of Andra's movement, Bodger. And
this wriggling worm in my hands is the guy who tried to undo all of us!"

"Frank ... please...." Lennick gurgled, his eyes distending while his
hands tore vainly at the heavy metal hands that were tightening about
his windpipe.

"Let him go," Bodger said impatiently. "He can't get far in Ultrablack,
anyhow! We've got to get to Lloyd, my son. He's down at the Brain, now.
With Stanton in our power, we can free the Hive forever in an hour's
time!"

Frank looked at the face of his erstwhile friend, Robert Lennick, and
suddenly had no more stomach for murder. He let go, and as Lennick
dropped to the floor of the lift and started to double over, gulping
air, Frank sent the left arm of the prop-Goon up in an arc that swatted
him backwards onto the street outside the gate. Lennick scrambled
blindly to his feet, screaming, "Frank! Don't _leave_ me, Frank!"
He dashed forward, misjudged his angle, and crashed head-on into a
building wall. Frank thumbed the lift-button for Sub-Level One, and let
the closing gate blot Lennick from his sight. The lift began to drop,
swiftly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lennick, after lying painfully on the ground until his addled senses
returned, got up on hands and knees, groggily shaking his head. Then,
in the darkness, he heard rolling wheels, coming nearer. "Help!" he
cried. "This way! Help!"

The rumbling veered in his direction at once, and then a Goon's unseen
arms were lifting him to his feet. "The President--!" Lennick cried.
"He's in danger!"

A moment's hesitance, and the Goon flatly replied, "The President is
in no danger. He has been taken to the Brain at his own request, under
competent escort."

Lennick, suddenly divining what must be the case, said, "His plate!
Someone must have his plate, then, because--"

"You are bleeding," the Goon said dispassionately.

Bob's fingers came up to his face and he winced at the smarting pain
their exploration produced at the point where he had struck the
building wall. "It's nothing," he said, impatiently. "We've got to--"

"We will take you for hospitalization at once," said the voice of the
Goon in the blackness.

"Hospitalization?" Bob said, irritably. "Don't you guys understand? The
President--" And then it sank in. "_No!_" he shrieked. "_You can't! I'm
on your side!_"

Other sets of heavy wheels rolled nearer, and inflexible metal fingers
closed over his arms. The Goons began to roll ponderously off, with Bob
firmly in their grasp. He was still shrieking when the mouth of the
incinerator chute enveloped him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lloyd and Andra were awaiting the lift at Sub-Level one, guided in
the blackness by the Goon who had led them to the control chamber,
when Bodger and the others arrived. Stanton, only semi-conscious, was
being held upright in the arms of the prop-Goon, lest a real Goon pick
him up for "treatment" because of his bruises, one on the back of his
head where Frank had connected, the other glowing a steadily darker
purple on his jaw where Bodger's knockout punch had landed earlier.
Lloyd, sensing the tenancy of the lift even in the blackness, drew back
apprehensively, and then his father's voice was speaking to him in
assurance.

"Whatever orders you've given your guide, son, take them back. We've
got you-know-who, and we're taking him to the Brain with us." Andra's
fingers closed joyously over Lloyd's own at the words, but he pulled
his fingers free and slipped Stanton's Voteplate into his guide's
chest-slot.

"Last order countermanded," he said to the Goon. "We have no further
need of you. All orders conveyed." The Goon removed the plate, handed
it to him, and wheeled off into the darkness. "Dad!" he spoke, then. "I
found out so much, from the Brain! The Plan--for reactivating the ten
cities--The Brain said you knew where it was."

"Grace will tell you, son," said Bodger. "Meantime--" he pressed
Lloyd's own Voteplate into his hand "--take this, you'll need it. And
give me Stanton's. I'm taking him down to the Brain. I may have to
break his arm for him, but he's going to call off the Goons before I'm
through."

"Mr. Bodger--" Frank said, taking out Stanton's preempted Snapper and
holding it forward into the darkness. "This may come in handy for
persuasion. There's no need your overtaxing yourself."

Bodger reached out and took it from him. "Thank you, Shawn. Rest
assured I'll be only too glad to use it on him if he balks." Bodger
motioned to Frank, still in the prop-Goon. "See if you can shake him
awake, or something. I don't know how he can get down the ladder except
on foot, much as I'd like to drop him into the chamber, if I thought it
wouldn't break his rotten neck."

Frank did so, gladly, while Grace, fumbling for and finding Lloyd in
the darkness, clung to him in joy and relief. He found himself liking
it, and slipped his arms around her to enjoy it the better.

"Frank--" Andra said, slowly, hurt. "We found out, from the Brain, that
Bob--Bob's in Stanton's pay."

"We found out, too, Andy," Frank said from inside the pseudorobot. "The
hard way. We left him in Ultrablack on ninety-three. The louse had
freed Stanton, and--"

"He's coming to," Bodger said.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the agitated shaking of the metal hands that supported him by the
upper arms, Stanton blinked wildly at Ultrablack, and choked out, "Let
me go! I demand that you release me!"

"You're no longer in a position to demand anything," Bodger said
softly. "I have your skinny carcass covered with a Snapper. You may as
well relax."

"Bodger.... What are you going to do?" Stanton said, no longer fighting
the grip of the prop-Goon's hands.

"Take you to the Brain. Make you countermand all your orders regarding
the Goons."

"And if I don't?" Stanton said, warily. "What will you do if I refuse?"

"Kill you," Bodger said, and his tone rang true. "I don't want to do
it that way, of course--not for reasons of pity; heaven knows you need
killing, Fred--but because it's faster this way. With you dead, we'd
simply elect a new President, and then _he_ could countermand your
orders. That could take days, though, days of the Ultrablack you had
Madge Benedict instigate in this emergency. It would be too tedious
convincing the Kinsmen to Vote in the dark on a proposition they
couldn't see."

"I--" Stanton said blankly, "I thought you'd force Madge to turn on
Light-of-Day."

"We would, but Lloyd mistakenly ordered her held incommunicado," Bodger
said tiredly. "He didn't know that was another of your pet phrases
synonymous with death."

"Good Lord!" Lloyd moaned in the darkness. "I didn't _dream_--"

"Madge brought it on herself, working hand in glove with Stanton, son,"
Bodger said. "You did not know. The point is, only Stanton or his
personal Secretary could have called off the emergency. So now we have
to get tough with him."

"Bodger...." Stanton straightened up, his face grim in defeat. "I have
to know: If I _do_ as you ask, countermand the Goons, call off the
Ultrablack--What will happen to me, afterwards?"

"I can't say, Fred," Bodger replied flatly. "We'll have it put to a
general Vote."

"I see," said the President, knowing full well what the result of such
a Vote would be, with the Hive enraged against his exposed treachery.
"Is it your best offer?"

"My only," said Bodger. "Let's go, Fred."

He prodded Stanton's back with the Snapper, and the President began to
move forward, holding his head high, toward the staircase leading to
the control-chamber entrance. Frank opened the panel at the rear of
the prop-Goon, and called for Andra to join him inside it, then he took
Lloyd and Grace by the arms, via the controls, and guided them through
the black blindness after Bodger and his prisoner.

       *       *       *       *       *

At the head of the staircase--really no more than a tier-cut segment
of the lead-concrete Sub-Level Two, over which the correspondingly
undercut left wall of the twenty-five-foot-thick level could
slide--Frank had to come to a halt, his prop-Goon not being equipped
with extendable cogs to fit the treads and risers, as the real Goons'
wheels were. "I'm going down there with him," Lloyd said, starting down
into blackness.

"No," his father's voice came from the level below. "I'll handle this
myself, Lloyd. I can see my way and you can't."

Lloyd stood undecided on the brink of the staircase, then Grace found
his arm in the dark and drew him back. "I want to talk to you about
your father, Lloyd," she said, when he was again at her side. "He said
some strange things, up in the Unit...."

Descending the ladder below his prisoner, the Snapper aimed upward
always at the base of Stanton's spine, Bodger reached the cable-net
flooring, and gestured the President to the chair before the control
panel. "Here," he said, returning the other's Voteplate. "You'll need
this. But I don't have to tell you the penalty for one attempt at
trickery on your part."

Stanton took the card silently, and slid it into a slot on the control
panel. A metal square slid back, exposing a hand-microphone. He took it
in his hand, and spoke into it.

"Primal Speakster in control," he said.

All about the two men, the lights of the Brain flickered then a speaker
in the cavity which had held the microphone said, in the cold, flat
tones of the Brain, "Orders."

Stanton glanced up at Bodger, and smiled. And suddenly Bodger was
afraid. There was no hint of fear in the other man's eyes, now, only
confidence and terrible menace.

"There is a false robot, two men and two women with it, on Sub-Level
One," said Stanton, while Bodger goggled in surprise. "Destroy them!"

"Orders," said the Brain.

"Stanton!" Bodger raged, snapping out of his stunned paralysis. He
depressed the stud of the Snapper clear into the hilt of the weapon,
trying to prevent the activating words from being spoken by the
President. There was a fractional hum of power, and then a searing
fork of hot blue light leaped from a conic protrusion on the Brain's
inner surface and turned the weapon to molten metal in his fingers.
Bodger fell to the flooring, crying out in pain, his raw, blistered
hand nearly driving him unconscious.

"You should have known," Stanton addressed the mewling figure on the
ground near his chair, "that a sonic beam cannot be fired inside the
Brain; it would shatter some of the delicate balances necessary for its
functioning. The Brain has to safeguard itself."

"Stanton--!" Bodger groaned, gritting his teeth against the agony of
his seared hand. "Don't!... Please...."

"_Danger_," said the dispassionate voice of the Brain.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stanton spun to face the concavity of the speaker. "What--?" he
blurted, baffled. And then he heard the dim rumble, high above, as the
entire lead-concrete Sub-Level Two slid relentlessly closed. Stanton
jumped from the chair and looked up from the base of the ladder, to see
if his ears had told him the truth. All that was visible at the head
of the hundred-foot ladder was the bottom of the now-closed metal lid,
over which the entire next level had moved. He turned, white-faced, to
Bodger.

"What's happening?"

"_Danger_," repeated the Brain.

Stanton rushed to the side of the fallen man. "Bodger!" he shrieked,
lifting him by the shoulders and shaking him. "What's happening!?"

"I guess--" Bodger said, smiling tiredly despite the cruel burns, "--I
must've got mad, Fred. My innards, or don't you know about them?"

"I know all about your radiating innards!" Stanton exploded. "But
_they_ couldn't trigger the Brain's protective level! It's impossible!
You've been here before--"

"I was never ... this aroused ... before, Fred," Bodger said weakly.
"And now, for the first time, I ... know the answer to something
I never knew before." He took a breath, gathered together all his
strength, and lifted his face near the other man's, still smiling. "You
asked the Brain about a third term, once--Don't argue, Fred, it's on
record--and yet there is no memory in its circuits of a reply. Tell me,
Fred.... What _was_ its reply?" When Stanton did not respond, Bodger
said, "I think I can tell you. Chaos. Noise. A riot of sound and fury
that knocked you clear off your chair and broke the circuit before it
destroyed you. Because the Brain knew, of course. It's smart, Fred. It
can predict with better accuracy than a human mind. It foresaw, after
correlating all the facts at its disposal, what would be the result of
your attempt at being elected a third time. And it tried to ... tell
you...." Bodger faltered, went grey, and lay back upon the interwoven
cables with his eyes closed. His lips were still working, though,
and he finished, "... the result ... except that the ... Brain
doesn't speak ... in words ... just concepts ... and its concept
encompassed ... its own...."

His head rolled to one side, limply.

"_Danger_," croaked the voice of the Brain.

"Its _what_? Its own _what_?!" Stanton yelled, grabbing Bodger's
head by the hair and banging it violently upon the flooring. Bodger,
his eyes rolling, coughed painfully, then sighed, as one who names a
long-awaited friend, "... death."

"_Danger!_" said the Brain. A wild tootling began in its depths as its
metal mind tried to spare it its terrible fate.

"What danger?" Stanton roared into the microphone, leaping to the chair
before the control panel. "Tell me! I'll find a way out!"

"_Danger!_" said the Brain. "_Danger! Danger!_"

There was a wild bluish light playing on the face of the panel, now,
and Stanton knew, suddenly, that it was not of the Brain itself. He
turned, some hideous psychic insight telling him what he could not as
yet realize by his senses, and looked at the body of Lloyd Bodger on
the floor.

Veins and arteries shone like a network of neon lights through the
flesh, a pulsing glow that rose in its intensity by the second. The
internal organs appeared through Bodger's smoldering clothing as on the
screen of a fluoroscope, each alight with self-engendered hellfire.
Bodger's eyes were glowing like hot tungsten through his transparent
lids, his teeth were bared in a smile brighter than sunrise. His every
bone, bit of cartilage, nerve ganglion and muscle fibre sparked like
coals beneath a blacksmith's bellows, and the hairs of his head were a
Medusa-wig of burning, writhing wire.

And then he reached his critical mass.


                                THE END





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