The Prometheus Project

by Steve White

  That was reserved for later. But Dan Buckley prepared me for it somewhat, as I'm sure other people's unofficial mentors did for them.

  First, we had to get the basic groundwork in what the universe was really like. This started with basic descriptive astronomy—not too different, I gathered, from the conventional wisdom of 1960s Earth—and went on from there.

  Our principal instructor in these matters was an Ira Fehrenbach, Ph.D. Knowing him gave me a better understanding of the things that brought diverse people into the Project. He would never have the fame—and the Nobel prize—that certainly would have been his had he stayed outside, for the knowledge he now possessed could not be made public. But that meant nothing to him. Only the knowledge itself mattered.

  He made us see a galaxy swirling into form, its primordial hydrogen condensing into whorls whose mass—and therefore gravity—was sufficient to ignite them into the fusion-fire of stars. A small number—not that any number in the realm of astronomy was really what I thought of as "small"—were so massive that their fires were too intense to burn for long. They died spectacular early deaths as supernovas, roiling the interstellar medium and enriching it with the heavy elements generated by thermonuclear alchemy in their inconceivable furnaces. But most stars were far less massive—they belonged to the "main spectral sequence". As Dr. Fehrenbach explained, that meant they could burn for billions of years at the steady rate that allowed for the formation of planets, and for the appearance of life on those planets . . . eventually.

  "That's the kicker," Doctor Fehrenbach told us one day. He was a lively little guy, and something of a polymath, very different from the overspecialized clam-cold astronomer of stereotype. "How many of you read science fiction?"

  A few hands went up with various degrees of hesitancy. Mine was among the more hesitant ones. Most of my science-fiction reading dated back to my adolescence. Since then, I'd seen a few movies like George Pal's War of the Worlds, and watched a few Twilight Zone episodes, but that was about it. So I felt a bit out of date.

  "A lot of those writers," Dr. Fehrenbach continued, "have figured out that certain types of stars—the main-sequence ones of the F, G and K types, the ones not too different from the Sun—can have planets like Earth, and that life can arise on those planets . . . eventually, maybe intelligent life. But they sometimes seem to assume that all planets like that must have intelligent life right now. That's their fallacy. Suppose you picked a thousand people at random out of the population of New York. What are the chances that all of them would be exactly thirty-two years, seven months and eleven days old? No, they'd be all different ages, from infants to octogenarians. Well, so are stars. They're being born and dying all the time . . . and the Sun is actually above average in age. Most of them are too young for life to have developed even if the conditions for it are right. A few others have lasted so long that cosmic accident or their inhabitants' folly has scrubbed them clean of life. At any given time, there are only a very few intelligent races—no, let's not be snobbish, let's say 'toolmaking races'—in existence in the galaxy.

  "And of those few races, the probability of any one of them being technologically advanced is very small."

  "You mean," someone queried, "that most of them aren't as smart as we are?"

  "No, no, no! To the extent that it can be measured, all civilized races seem to be about equal in innate intelligence. It figures that they'd get that far and no farther. Once a species goes the tool-using route it comes under evolutionary pressure to become a better tool user . . . and then a tool maker. Our remote ancestors didn't develop tools because they had big brains; they got the big brains because they had already become tool users. As somebody once said, 'Man didn't invent tools, tools invented man.' But once that happens, the race starts molding the environment to suit itself, rather than adapting. And organized societies protect their weaker members. In short, evolution stops.

  "No, it's not a matter of brains. It's a matter of social conditions. If those hadn't been just right in Western Europe five hundred years ago, the Scientific Revolution wouldn't have happened. The Chinese were the most inventive people on Earth. But in a unitary empire run by a leisure class that rewarded cultural conservatism above all else, those inventions were like seeds dropped on gravel. Civilizations are a lot more likely to be like China—or ancient Egypt, or the Byzantine Empire—than like Renaissance Europe. Europe just had a lucky break—although it must not have seemed like it at the time—when neither Justinian nor Charlemagne nor anybody else succeeded in putting the Roman Empire back together again."

  I spoke up hesitantly. "Uh, Doctor, this doesn't seem to square up with what we've been told about the galaxy being full of superadvanced civilizations."

  "Very good, Mr. Devaney." Coming from some pedagogues, the words might have been sarcastic or patronizing. But Fehrenbach spoke with the unaffected eagerness of a man who'd been given precisely the cue he'd wanted. He was a teacher . . . not to be confused with an educational bureaucrat. The difference is that a teacher wants—no, needs—for everyone to know everything he knows, while an educational bureaucrat sees the general dissemination of knowledge as a threat to his status. Unfortunately, there are a lot more educational bureaucrats than there are teachers. (As usual, Shaw got it wrong. Those who can, do; those who can't, become educational bureaucrats.)

  "The solution to this seeming contradiction," he continued, "is simple. I've been describing to you what might be called the rules of the game. A few centuries ago, those rules changed. They were changed by a race called the Delkasu.

  "You'll learn more about the Delkasu later. Briefly, they drew one of the 'lucky numbers' in the game. They had a Scientific Revolution of their own, and arrived at a political solution which permitted it to become self-sustaining, neither immolating it in a nuclear holocaust nor smothering it under the sociological by-products which our own world is beginning to see in their early manifestations. They then moved on into the realms of what we consider science fiction. They became the first ever to discover the secret of faster-than-light interstellar travel. They began to explore and colonize many worlds. They encountered other, less advanced civilizations, and imparted their techniques to those civilizations . . . which then became secondary centers of the colonization process. All at once, life in the galaxy was no longer a matter of blind, spontaneous chance. Instead, it was consciously extending itself, spreading from world to world and altering those worlds to accommodate itself. Nothing would ever be the same again."

  "How can we be sure these, uh, Delkasu were really the first ever to discover interstellar flight?" someone wanted to know. "After all, you've told us that the galaxy has been around for . . . how many billions of years?"

  "We can be certain they were the first because if somebody else had discovered it in the course of all those billions of years, we wouldn't be here. Neither would the Delkasu. Neither would any of the other races we know. Those initial discoverers would have filled up the galaxy and foreclosed the possibility of anybody else coming into existence in the future. No, we're living at a unique moment in the history of the universe: the moment when intelligent life becomes a cosmic force."

  I spoke, at least as much to myself as to Dr. Fehrenbach. "But we're around, and at the technological level—barely—to do something about it, at precisely that 'unique moment.' What are the odds against that?"

  "Incalculable," Dr. Fehrenbach admitted cheerfully. "They couldn't be expressed comfortably even in powers of ten. But at any given time there are always some locally evolved races on some planets here and there. Why not us? Anyway," he concluded briskly, "the point is that while there are other races around, the Delkasu are the ones who count. They're the technological pacesetters, and they dominate the biggest interstellar political units. In short, we have to live with them."

  * * *

  Spring had come, and I'd had my glimpse of Mr. Inconnu, before we got the lowdown on the Delkasu. By that time, we'd graduated to being allowed belowg
round.

  I'd more or less gotten used to what was down there—all the alien-tech items that the world wasn't prepared for yet. I could handle most of them. The only part that still bothered me was the almost imperceptible tingle you got when passing through the invisible last line of security. To me, a computer was something that filled a fair-sized room and cost millions of dollars. The idea of self-directed machines you couldn't even see, hovering to form a screen which, if the automated sensors hadn't liked the cut of your jib, would have done things to your cells that I didn't like to think about . . . well, I just wasn't ready for it. Nor for the doors that didn't open but just appeared in what had been a featureless wall. Nor for . . . well, you get the idea.

  The auditorium we filed into was pretty mundane, by comparison. But the seats, instead of being lined up in rows facing a screen, were arranged in stepped concentric semicircles around a kind of pedestal in the center. Off to one side was a pulpitlike platform, occupied by Dr. Fehrenbach and Chloe Bryant. Once we were seated, they wasted no time.

  The holographic images you've probably seen are fuzzy, flickering things. That was what we were expecting. Instead, the being that appeared, life-sized, on the pedestal seemed to be standing there in the alien equivalent of flesh.

  "A typical Delkar, ladies and gentlemen," said Chloe Bryant. "That's the singular form; the plural is 'Delkasu.' He's a male, but the species has less sexual dimorphism than ours."

  None of us really heard her. We were in shock.

  Not that there was anything inherently horrific or terrifying or awesome about the Delkar's appearance. In fact, he was a little guy, slightly less than five feet tall and wiry. He had two arms, and stood erect on and two legs. His skin was a brown-black with coppery red undertones. (I would later learn that there were other color variations, but all were very dark.) There was no trace of hair that I could see. His hands had three fingers and two mutually opposable thumbs, one on each side; they were large for his arms, which were thin but sinewy and, I felt certain, far from weak.

  His head was big in proportion to his body, but not ridiculously so. It was oddly shaped, tapering forward to a kind of pointed snout with a single horizontal nostril over the mouth. (Or at least I assumed it was a nostril . . . correctly, as it turned out.) The eyes dominated the face. They were very large, and of a dark golden color.

  After the initial strangeness had somewhat worn off, I noticed that he was dressed in a sleeveless tunic, and wore something resembling greaves on his legs and slippers on his feet.

  Chloe Bryant gave us a minute or so to recover, then resumed her presentation.

  "You will note that he has binocular vision. That's typical, as is the upright, bilaterally symmetrical form, and the two sexes. The large size of the eyes is partly a result of evolution under a relatively dim sun—"

  "A K type," Dr. Fehrenbach interjected.

  "—but they have no difficulty adapting to our own sunlight. As a species, they are exceptionally adaptable, which is one of the reasons they've played the role they have in galactic history. Another is their aptitude for tool making—notice those hands. They are omnivores, which seems to be typical of intelligent species, but with a strong carnivorous tendency. Likewise typical is the fact that they're warm-blooded . . . not that their 'blood' is the same as ours. Similarly, they're the equivalent of 'mammals' in that the females nurture the young live; but the details are different, as you'd expect of a completely alien evolutionary product.

  "Some people are surprised that he's wearing clothes, having assumed that it must be strictly a human habit. But it makes sense. Once a species becomes toolmakers, they begin to expand beyond their original habitat, as our ancestors expanded beyond Africa. This brings them into environments from which they need artificial protection. Eventually, the culture of clothing takes on a life of its own, transcending utility. Of course, the clothing varies from culture to culture. This is what they generally wear at Farside Base. However, for a full anatomical picture . . ." Chloe touched a button, and the clothes vanished. The Delkar's male equipage differed from humanity's in ways that drew giggles from some of the women in the room. Almost equally obvious were the differences in his skeletal structure.

  I continued to stare at the hologram, and I began to realize that what I was seeing confirmed Chloe's words. The Delkasu were not really all that dissimilar to humans, when you considered that they had begun with an entirely different microorganism in an entirely different tidal pool on an entirely different planet billions of years ago, and had begun to diverge at that point, with each chance outcome representing a new opportunity for strangeness.

  It was as though Chloe had read my mind. "You must remember that in evolution, as in architecture, form follows function. There are lots of unrelated species of fish in Earth's oceans—not to mention the cetaceans, which aren't fish at all—and they're all the same basic shape. That's because they've all evolved to fill similar ecological niches. Well, the same goes for the ecological niche occupied by tool users."

  So, I wondered, why did the Delkar look so wrong? In general shape, he was far less unlike a human than was a horse or a dolphin. And nobody thought they looked wrong.

  But they were supposed to look the way they did.

  Maybe intelligent squids like H. G. Wells' Martians would have been easier to take.

  I recalled Dr. Fehrenbach's words. We had to live with the Delkasu. What we thought of their looks meant precisely nothing.

  * * *

  I saw Chloe any number of times during training. I even spoke to her several times. But only once did I speak to her alone.

  It was shortly before I was due to depart from Section One. By that time, I was a regular in the belowground canteen. Dan Buckley had long since departed, and more often than not I ate alone. But one day I noticed Chloe seated at a corner table, likewise eating alone, as she often did. Most of my fellow new arrivals felt inhibited in her presence, for her connection with the Project made her almost the equivalent of hereditary aristocracy. Combined with her slight air of aloofness, it discouraged familiarity.

  Generally, I was no more immune to the feeling than everyone else. Today, though, something made me take my tray over to her table.

  "May I join you, Miss Bryant?"

  She looked up and smiled. She had a nice smile, but it never altogether lost that faint undertone of seriousness. "Of course. Glad for the company. Mr. Devaney, isn't it?"

  "Bob."

  "I'm Chloe. I've seen you around a lot, but I haven't gotten a chance to talk to you at any length. I hear you had a run-in with the Tonkuztra." (She would know about that, I reflected.) "I also understand Mr. Inconnu took a personal interest in bringing you into the Project."

  "So I've been told." Feeling flattered by her interest, I told her the story of my recruitment. "But unlike you," I concluded, "I've never met him."

  "I wouldn't say I 'met' him, really. I think I might have said 'Hello' to him, but he never spoke to me . . . just looked at me." She took on a look of puzzled reminiscence.

  "Anyway," I resumed, "I just wanted to thank you for making so much clear to me about the Project, over the past months. Although . . . there's one thing I still don't understand."

  "What's that?"

  "The name. Why is it called the Prometheus Project?"

  "It's a perfect fit. You see, in Greek mythology—"

  "Yes, I know. Prometheus was the renegade Titan who stole the secret of fire from the gods and gave it to men."

  "Right." She looked at me with mildly surprised interest. "So you can see how appropriate the name is. Mr. Inconnu brought the knowledge that gives humanity a fighting chance to make a place for itself in the galaxy."

  "Yeah, to that extent it does seem appropriate. Only . . . you left out the rest of the story. Zeus was afraid that Prometheus' gift of fire might enable mortals to challenge the gods someday. So he punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountain, where a vulture tore at his guts for centuries."


  "Yes, I remember that." Chloe made a face. "Delightful people, those Greek gods."

  "Yeah, a laugh a minute. But the point is, Mr. Inconnu isn't being punished . . . at least not so you'd notice. Is he?"

  "I see what you mean. And yet . . . I remember Dad telling me once—I must have been about ten at the time—that when the name was proposed, Mr. Inconnu agreed that it was a good fit. According to Dad, he said it with a kind of grim amusement."

  "Hmm . . . I did get a glimpse of him once, here at this station. He does have a god-awful scar on his cheek. And in the picture you showed us, it looked like he'd only recently gotten it. He must have gone through a lot getting away to Earth."

  "True. But I wonder if the punishment he's undergoing is loneliness. After all, he'll never see his own people again."

  "I guess that must be it." But somehow, I felt, there had to be more to it than that.

  "Well," Chloe said, getting to her feet and extending her hand, "I've got to be going. I'm finishing up my stint of lecturing here, and getting back into fieldwork. You're about to leave yourself, aren't you?

  "Yeah." I took her hand. The handshake lingered a few seconds . . . it seemed she was in no great hurry to terminate it. "I've been assigned to Section Two."

  "Really? I'm with Section Five. Maybe you'll get assigned to one of our missions sometime."

  "I'd like that."

  As she departed the canteen, she looked back over her shoulder at me and smiled. "So would I."

  But it was five years before I saw her again.

  Interlude

  President-Elect Harvey Langston stared wide-eyed. "You mean . . . Men in Black?"

  "Actually," said the President with a smile, "the Prometheus Project prefers to avoid that term."

  "But," spluttered Langston, "this whole business about posing as the government of Earth . . . ! Why wasn't the whole thing simply turned over to the United Nations?"

  The President gave him a look of disgusted exasperation. "Even in 1946, when it was still possible to hope that the UN might develop into something worthwhile, that was clearly out of the question for security reasons. Thank God it was, given the squalid farce the UN has, in fact, turned out to be! Besides, the Delkasu wouldn't have worn it."