Hive

The Old Ones had touched his mind and given him this. No, no, he couldn’t believe that. Maybe it had been in him all along and they just, well, woke it up, brought it to the fore from wherever it had been dreaming away the millennia. Hayes was thinking that maybe all men had it inside them, they’d just forgotten how to use it and now and then somebody would be born with the faculty fully activated and be labeled as a freak . . . or quietly go mad.

It was too much.

LaHune had to hear this shit.

14

LaHune was looking pretty much like he’d bitten into something sour as Hayes told him what had happened out in Hut #6. You could see that he did not want to be hearing shit like this. Whether he believed in any of it or not was immaterial, the idea of those dead minds still being somehow active and animate was really beyond the scope of things as he saw them. What could you do with information like that? You surely couldn’t crunch it on your laptop or scribble it on your clipboard or slip it in a folder and file it away. This was buggy stuff, now wasn’t it? This kind of thing surely upset the old applecart, threw a wrench into the machine, and put the monkeyshit in the mayo.

But Hayes was going to be heard and that was that. Maybe it was the intensity of his voice or the wild look in his eyes, but LaHune listened, all right. Listened while Hayes went on and on, all of it coming out of him in a tidal flow, running from him like waste.

Hayes hadn’t come straight to LaHune from the infirmary. No, he went back to his room, had a few cigarettes and a few more cups of joe, thought it out, took himself down a notch. Leveled a bit. Organized his thoughts, pressed and folded them into orderly rows. And then, maybe a few hours later, went to see LaHune and promptly started raving like a madman.

“You think I’m nuts, don’t you?” Hayes said when he’d finished, not needing telepathy to reach that shining conclusion. “You think this is just a bad dream or something?”

LaHune licked his lips. “To be honest with you, I don’t know what to make of it. I’ve been out to the hut several times and have suffered no ill effects from close proximity to the . . . the remains.”

Hayes almost started laughing.

He knew it had been a mistake coming here. But he’d thought it was worth a try. LaHune was the NSF administrator, right? As such, he had to be notified of any impending threat to the installation, right? Isn’t that what it said in the bylaws? Yes, it certainly did. Sure as dogshit drew bluebottle flies.

“I don’t care whether you’ve suffered any effects or not, LaHune. Maybe you need the right sort of mind and maybe they’re not interested in you. Maybe they just go for dumbasses like Lind and me and maybe Peter Pan is hung like a horse, but I don’t think so and it don’t matter, now does it? Those things are dangerous is what I’m saying to you. Can you at least get on the same page with me on that? You know the way they’ve been getting to people around here.”

“Paranoia, isolation . . . it’ll do funny things to people.”

“It’s more than that and you know it. I’ve spent a lot of years down here, LaHune, and never, ever once have I felt something like this. These people are threatened, their scared . . . they just aren’t sure of what.”

“And you are?”

Jesus, what a guy LaHune was. Just about everyone at the station was having crazy nightmares and Doc Sharkey admitted she was handing out sleeping pills like candy at Halloween. Dreams weren’t infectious, they didn’t spread. Yet everyone was having some real doozies since those ugly bastards had been brought in. Maybe it was wild, fringe thinking, the sort of crazy horseshit you found out on the Internet, but it was true and Hayes — and quite a few others by that point — felt it right down to his toes.

Not that you could ever convince LaHune of it.

He was an automaton, a brainwashed, officious little conservative company man. Hayes talked and LaHune clipped his nails, arranged the pens in his desk by color, sorted paperclips by size. He sat there in his L.L. Bean’s, perfectly erect in his seat, never slouching, his teeth even and white, his face freshly shaven, his hair perfectly coiffed. Looking either like a mannequin or the latest Republican wonderboy . . . clean and shiny on the outside and empty as a drum on the inside, just waiting for his puppetmasters to pull his strings.

“I’m telling you they’re a danger to the well-being of our group here, LaHune. I’m not shack-happy and I’m not drunk and I haven’t smoked a joint in fifteen years. You know me, you know how I am. I come from sturdy stock, LaHune, my people and me in general don’t see lights in the sky or read tabloids. What I’m telling you is the truth.”

LaHune was buffing his nails with an emery board. “So what, Hayes? You want me to destroy the single most important find in the history of the race?”