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