The Prometheus Project

by Steve White

In fact, that didn't begin to describe it. Curiosity was gnawing at my gut like some ravenous animal. Deep down, I knew my coyness was just a bluff—a display of the sheer, habitual contrariness that got me in trouble with depressing consistency. That was why I hadn't wanted to admit to these people my desire—no, my need—to know more. Maybe I hadn't even admitted it to myself . . . until that moment.

  I probably let it show, because Dupont smiled. "Besides, assume for a moment that we simply took your word that you'd never speak of these matters, and let you go." Renata Novak made a small strangling noise, which Dupont ignored. He lifted the papers significantly. "What would you have to go back to? You have no attachments. Your professional future is cloudy. After what's happened, Stafford will be skittish about employing you, even for 'normal' jobs. And don't forget, your car was left at the scene of that shoot-out. You're the only person involved whom the DC police will be able to identify. So you'll have to bear the entire brunt of their doubtless considerable curiosity about that incident."

  Actually, that last part had already occurred to me. I'd had other things on my mind, but finally the implications came home to me in all their unpleasantness.

  "I tell you what," I temporized. "You mentioned something about 'orientation' at this facility. Maybe, if I could be exposed to a little of the basics, I'd be in a better position to make an intelligent decision."

  It was just a shot in the dark. I was fully prepared for Dupont to sternly explain that I'd have to make a definite commitment before even the "basics" could be divulged to me. But instead, he simply smiled . . . and I could tell that he knew he'd won. I was hooked, and once I'd heard those "basics" there was no way I'd want to turn back even if I could.

  "It happens that we can accommodate you very well. A new group of recruits just arrived earlier today, and they're due for an initial presentation at nineteen hundred hours this evening. We'll just fit you in with them." Dupont stood up. "I'll send for someone who can direct you to your temporary quarters and arrange for you to get something to eat."

  "Thanks." I also rose to my feet. "I can hardly wait to learn something about your organization. I mean, so far I really have no idea of what you do . . . what you're for."

  "Well, let me satisfy your curiosity to this extent: as far as the dominant civilizations of the universe are concerned, we are the government of Earth." Dupont smiled, and extended his hand for the second time. "Welcome to the Prometheus Project, Mr. Devaney."

  * * *

  The "initial presentation" took place in one of the Quonset huts—well heated, thank God. Not until much later would I learn that there was a lot more to the base—"Section One" as everyone called it, for lack of any other name—than met the eye. Most of it was subterranean, like what I'd briefly experienced beneath a row of Chinese restaurants in Washington, only far more so. But the newbies were restricted to the aboveground facilities. To this day, I don't know whether that was a form of hazing or just a well-meant desire to shield us from an overload of strangeness.

  I filed in and sat down along with a small group of others, mostly about as young as myself, or nearly so, but otherwise immune to generalization. At least a third were women and two or three were nonwhite, which was noteworthy in 1963. We all gave each other slightly uneasy side-glances, for no one seemed to know anyone else. No conversation took place, and there were clearly no cliques. It began to occur to me that the circumstances of my own presence might not be quite as out of the ordinary as I'd assumed. Indeed, the term "ordinary" might be of very limited applicability here.

  In front of us was a slightly raised wooden platform that you couldn't really call a dais, holding a screen, a slide projector, and two chairs. Dennis Dupont occupied one. The occupant of the other was . . . more interesting.

  She looked younger than me, and—I ungrudgingly admitted—a lot prettier. Her figure was maybe a trifle on the sturdy side, but I'd never been attracted to the stick-figure ideal of high fashion. (Renata Novak came a lot closer to that.) Her medium-long hair was light brown, and framed a heart-shaped, high-cheekboned face with blue eyes and what I think novelists call a generous mouth . . . or at least it gave the impression that it could be generous, when she was a little less serious than she currently looked.

  Dupont stood up, interrupting my agreeable thoughts. "Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I won't ask you to call out your names, since you'll all be getting to know each other over the next few months. At present, you're all strangers, having been recruited in various ways and various places. So I thought you might be interested to meet someone who was not recruited for the Project. Instead, she was practically born into it. And she can give you a uniquely personal perspective on its origin. I give you Miss Chloe Bryant."

  The young woman, who now had everyone's rapt attention, stood up. She was, I finally noticed, wearing a dark gray-brown skirt and a light golden-brown turtleneck sweater which highlighted her healthy figure without any conscious affectation of fashion whatever.

  "That's not strictly true about me being 'born into' the Project," she began in a pleasantly husky voice. "In fact, I was five years old when Mr. Inconnu arrived in 1946 . . . and I became one of the first people to see him."

  That caused a stir. I did some quick mental arithmetic, and looked at Chloe Bryant with renewed interest. I'd known she was young . . . but twenty-two? She looked older than that. Maybe it was her seriousness, which nonetheless was of a very different sort from Renata Novak's.

  She activated the slide projector, and an early-middle-aged man in Naval officer's khakis appeared on the screen.

  "My father, Lieutenant Commander Curtis Bryant," she explained. "In the summer of 1946, he was in command of the destroyer USS Elijah Ashford. He was bringing his ship back to Norfolk, Virginia, after a training cruise. Off the Virginia Capes, they spotted a castaway in a . . . very unusual life craft."

  I studied the image, and reflected on the fact that fathers' looks are not always a reliable guide to predicting those of daughters. Commander Bryant had the kind of face most charitably described as engagingly homely. In particular, the nose was unforgettable, with its bulbous, bifurcated tip. His crew must have sometimes found it hard to maintain proper military decorum, with that proboscis protruding from beneath the bill of the captain's hat.

  "As you've probably surmised," continued Chloe Bryant, peering down a nose that bore absolutely no resemblance to the paternal one, "that castaway was Mr. Inconnu. By the time Ashford made port at Norfolk, he had demonstrated to my father that he was, indeed, what he claimed to be.

  "I think I can be forgiven a little pride in my father—who, incidentally, was killed in the Korean War six years later. The world unknowingly owes him a great debt. If he hadn't been able to recognize the importance of what he was dealing with, and the absolute necessity of keeping it under wraps . . . Well, the consequences simply don't bear thinking about.

  "My mother and I were waiting on the pier when the ship docked. Mother had brought a camera to catch Dad as he came ashore." Chloe Bryant paused. "Mr. Inconnu has always . . . discouraged the taking of photos of himself. This is one of the few in existence." She dropped another slide into the projector. It had been made from a clearly amateurish photo. It showed Commander Bryant, nose and all, coming off a gangway. Walking beside him was a taller, leaner man, also wearing khakis but without rank insignia—he'd doubtless been given them to wear aboard the ship. Beyond the obvious fact of his humanity, what stood out most was the hideous, freshly stitched gash on his left cheek.

  "And that," continued Chloe Bryant, "was when I saw him. I ran up to Dad for a hug, and then noticed the man with him. I looked up at him. I was frightened at first, partly because of that disfiguring injury, but mostly because of a quality of unfathomable strangeness. But then he smiled down at me." Her voice changed, and she spoke more to herself than to us. "I've never forgotten that smile he gave me—nor have I ever been able to interpret it, except that I could have sworn it held a deep sadness. For a s
econd, I thought he was actually going to cry. But I also sensed a great love." She suddenly remembered when and where she was, and gave a short, self-deprecating laugh. "Merely my imagination, of course. He was probably just trying to be nice to a little girl. And I've never seen him since.

  "Anyway," she concluded briskly, "some of you already have a general idea of what happened after that. Dad turned Mr. Inconnu over to his superiors—who, thank God, could also be made to understand what was at stake. All of you will learn the details shortly, as part of your basic orientation. The upshot was the Prometheus Project. It was the beginning of a story you're now becoming a part of. It will be a very different life. You'll know things that the human race at large cannot be allowed to know—including the very existence of the Project, and the work we do. It's lonely. But I can promise you one thing. You'll have something most people will never have, although the intelligent ones wish they had it: the sure and certain knowledge that what you're doing matters." Amid a profound silence, she sat down.

  And that was the first time I saw Chloe.

  Chloe . . .

  Chloe, where are you now?

  Chapter Four

  Winter settled in, and so did we.

  Orientation was exactly that: basic familiarization with things foreign to what we'd always believed to be reality. In a sense, our total ignorance was probably an advantage for the instructors. They had no preconceptions to overcome. It wasn't like, for example, military basic training, where the newbies arrive thinking they know something. We had no such illusions.

  They roomed us two-by-two, pairing new arrivals with relative old-timers. I think the idea was that the veterans would save the instructors some trouble by passing on information in advance and preparing us for what lay ahead. At any rate, that was how I met Dan Buckley. He was former Air Force, and at one time had been a contender for the astronaut program. Then something had happened. We got along well, for each of us instinctively recognized in the other a kindred disinclination to talk about the past.

  One of the first things we learned was the organizational structure of the Project. Dupont himself handled that.

  "As you can see," he said, pointing to an organization chart, "we report ultimately to the President—through Mr. Inconnu, who has direct access to him. No one else knows about the Project in its entirety, although there are some presidential aides who sometimes come into contact with us, usually indirectly, and never know anything more than the identities of the individuals they deal with.

  "The Project comprises five Sections, each with its own headquarters. Section One, as you already know, is Administration, including personnel matters such as training.

  "Section Two is Security. Its job is twofold: making sure the secret of the Project is kept from the general populace, and preventing aliens from learning the truth about how backward and disunited Earth really is. In the first capacity, Section Two operates on Earth; in the second, its personnel often find themselves deployed beyond the atmosphere."

  By this point in Dupont's lecture, I had a pretty good idea which Section I'd be assigned to.

  "Section Three," Dupont continued, "is Research and Development. It produces new technology from the knowledge Mr. Inconnu brought, and also from what Section Four—which I'll get to in a moment—obtains from alien cultures. It also decides when these technologies can be safely released, on the basis of its projections of their societal effects. In this latter role, it coordinates with Section Two to devise ways things can be 'discovered' or 'invented' without compromising the Project." Dupont chuckled. "Remind me to tell you sometime about Shockley and the transistor. That's always the way it's done: the secret is subtly 'fed' to someone with no connection to us. But that was an early case . . . and, I gather, a particularly important one."

  Somebody a few seats down from me raised a diffident hand. "Uh, why is that so important, sir? So what if teenagers have those little tiny radios to listen to bad music?"

  "I once asked an acquaintance in Section Three very much that same question. He told me that according to his Section's forecasts it's going to change the rules of the game more than they've been changed at any time since the Industrial Revolution. He said we've already seen a straw in the wind. Remember the attempted coup by the French army command in Algeria, year before last? In the past, it probably would have succeeded; the young conscripts would have obeyed their officers and sergeants as they were conditioned to do. But the government had distributed thousands and thousands of simple transistor radios to the troops. So De Gaulle was able to address them directly, bypassing those officers and sergeants. But it goes beyond that. My acquaintance, speaking from the experience of civilizations immeasurably older and more advanced than ours, says the real changes will come about when the transistor is wedded to electronic computers and to the kind of communications satellites we're beginning to see even now. He claims that I wouldn't recognize the society that's going to develop after the next three or four decades. From what he's told me, I suspect that if I'm still alive then, I won't like it very much. But I also suspect it will survive my disapproval.

  "Section Four is Intelligence. Its job is to supply Section Three with new alien technologies—borrowed, bought or stolen—with which to continue the human race's 'crash course.' This mission requires it to work closely with Section Five.

  "Section Five is the Project's Diplomatic arm. It is arguably the most important section of all . . . and certainly the oldest, for the Project's first order of business was to run the most terrifying bluff of all time. Using the knowledge Mr. Inconnu had brought, it cobbled together a false front that convinced the Delkasu—you'll learn who they are shortly—that they were dealing with a unified, not-too-primitive world, and persuaded them to agree to limit their contacts with that world to a 'treaty port' on its satellite." Dupont smiled as he watched our understanding dawn. "That's where Section Five maintains its headquarters: at Farside Base, as its called, on the back side of the Moon. There, it handles all official contacts with aliens. It sends out missions which try to keep those same aliens played off against each other, while seeking out allies and doing everything else you can imagine—as well as quite a few things you can't, at least not yet. These missions naturally have Section Four components . . . and also Section Two personnel to 'ride shotgun.'"

  I found myself more and more attracted to Section Two.

  Someone else raised his hand, and posed a question I'd wondered about myself. "Sir, I don't understand. With alien ships coming and going, why don't they pick up radio broadcasts from Earth? Just one newscast and that would be it for the 'false front.'"

  "There are a couple of answers to that," Dupont explained. "First of all, the Delkasu haven't used the radio wavelengths over long ranges for centuries. Their communicators employ specially treated neutrinos." There were a blank looks on a number of faces, including mine, even though the elementary particles with zero rest mass had been postulated for a long time, and named by Enrico Fermi in 1933. "In short, they simply aren't listening. At any rate, part of the agreement is that they communicate only with Farside Base."

  "But sir, that's another thing," the questioner persisted. "How is this 'Farside Base' on the Moon going to be kept secret from the human race? From what I understand, President Johnson has reaffirmed President Kennedy's commitment to putting men on the Moon by the end of this decade. What happens when people are there on the surface, exploring and colonizing and mining?"

  Dupont's face took on the careful expressionlessness of a man who had to take care not to say too much. "I'm not personally involved with that problem. But you're not the only one to whom the question has occurred. As I understand, countermeasures are in the works. But those countermeasures are political and cultural rather than technological in nature."

  I suppose we all looked puzzled, because Dupont just smiled and changed the subject. "At any rate, all alien contacts are restricted to Farside Base . . . or at least they're supposed to be. Of late, it
appears that Earth is drawing some unwelcome attention from the Tonkuztra."

  That got my attention, for I remembered hearing the name before. It evidently meant nothing to anyone else, though, for a puzzled murmur filled the room. Dupont raised a hand to forestall questions. "That's something else you'll learn more about later. For now, I'll just tell you that it is an organization among the Delkasu race I mentioned earlier . . . a criminal organization."

  This caused a stir. It didn't quite fit with our preconceptions of alien races.

  "'Organization' is actually too strong a term," Dupont continued. "It's decentralized to the point of being chaotic. But certain of its elements have evidently begun to suspect that Earth is not as they've been led to believe it is. And they have been making efforts to investigate further."

  "You mean," someone said, a little unsteadily, "that they're right here on Earth?"

  "No. There's no evidence of a direct Tonkuztra presence here. They seem to be working through human proxies—doubtless obtained through the same traitor or traitors who gave them their initial information." Dupont let that sink in for a moment or two before continuing. "Yes: there is no room for doubt that someone within the Project is compromising us. But very cleverly, doling out vague hints that something is not right on Earth. Fortunately, the Tonkuztra are so divided among themselves, and so hostile to the larger interstellar society in which they operate, that the information has gone no further. They have, however, begun to act more overtly, through their human cat's-paws . . . most notably in a recent incident in Washington."

  As he said this, Dupont's eyes met mine briefly. I kept my mouth shut. If he didn't want to go public with the fact that I had been involved, I wasn't about to blurt it out.

  * * *

  The organizational stuff was very interesting, of course, but it wasn't what we had all given up various things to learn. No, we wanted the knowledge that would set us apart from other mortals: what the Prometheus Project was really about.