The Prometheus Project

by Steve White

  "Wouldn't have worn it?" Langston echoed faintly.

  "Get it through your head: we're talking about a civilization as politically sophisticated as it is technologically advanced. They wouldn't have accepted something like the UN—as it is or even as it was intended to be—as a planetary government fit to be a player in their power politics. As it was, the best we could manage was to be accepted as a very minor player. Under the circumstances, it's amazing that we were able to bamboozle them into even that."

  The words "power politics" brought a perplexed look to Langston's face. "Yes, you mentioned something about that before. I don't understand. Surely an advanced civilization must have left primitive attitudes like nationalism and militarism behind and achieved political unity on a basis of peace and equality and social justice! Otherwise, it could never have survived to reach the stars. A civilization that has unleashed atomic energy has only two alternatives: utopia, or extinction!"

  The President studied the ceiling of the Oval Office, with its reproduction of the Presidential seal in low relief. "I've heard that theory."

  "It's not just a 'theory'! It's beyond controversy among enlightened, progressive thinkers!"

  "I don't doubt that for a moment." Forestalling an angry retort, the President leaned forward and spoke with a seriousness which held even Langston's attention. "I've been told, in outline, the political history of the Delkasu, who've set the pattern of galactic civilization, including its geopolitics . . . or 'astropolitics,' I suppose you'd have to call it. Only in outline, you realize; their history is every bit as long and richly complex as ours. You'll get the same kind of overview later.

  "Briefly, though, their history isn't dissimilar to ours, up to a point. Various civilizations arose on Kasava, the Delkasu planet of origin. One of them played an historical role analogous to our own Western civilization; it had a Scientific Revolution and, subsequently, an Industrial Revolution, and therefore came to dominate the planet. Like our Western civilization, it was divided into a number of competing territorial states—not a coincidence, by the way, for in both cases it meant there was no universal state that could stifle innovation to protect the status quo. Those states played the same kind of endemic war-game as Europe did in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, finally graduating to total war.

  "But by that time, one of their nations, called Toranva, had established a clear primus inter pares status among the others. From the way it's been described to me, it was as if. . . . Well, imagine that Britain, instead of losing its American colonies, had succeeded in incorporating them into a kind of imperial federation, resulting in a power base that was in a different league from Spain and France and so on. Toranva led a coalition that won the Delkasu's first total war. But that war, like our World War I, resulted in a totalitarian reaction among the losers. So the coalition had to stay together for a 'cold war' that produced—as ours did—forced-draft technological advancement. Toranva led the way in that, acting as the organizer and informational clearinghouse for R&D. Totanva also assumed the official role of 'protector' of certain particularly threatened states, with no diplomatic euphemisms. War finally broke out, just as the Delkasu were developing atomic energy—in fact, it was the threat of a totalitarian state getting nuclear weapons that brought it on. By the time it was over, the primacy of Toranva had achieved overt recognition in their equivalent of international law.

  "So what the Delkasu took to the stars with them was a kind of political consciousness different from any human culture's. It wasn't a one-state civilization like China, with just the central empire and the barbarians. But neither did it have the Western legal fiction of equal sovereignties, a holdover of the Middle Ages when all kings were social equals regardless of how many or how few troops they could put into the field. Instead, there was generally accepted recognition of one . . . super-sovereignty, I suppose you'd call it. Other nations had certain rights which they were entitled to have respected. But there was no doubt about the hegemony, nor any embarrassment about it.

  "As the Delkasu expansion into interstellar space assumed explosive proportions, this pattern expanded with them. The hegemony of Toranva on the planet Kasava simply extended, to become a 'super-super-sovereignty' among the new nations that were arising among the stars as a result of Delkasu colonization. It worked.

  "And then it had the heart burned out of it by a supernova."

  "Supernova?" Langston blinked. The word had a dimly familiar sound. He'd once taken an astronomy course in college because it had seemed the easiest way to meet the science requirement for graduation—a requirement to which he objected on ideological grounds. He glanced out the windows behind the President's desk. It was a clear late-autumn evening, and the first stars were beginning to come out. "Uh . . . you mean the sun of the Delkasu home system blew up?"

  "No. Main-sequence stars—the kind of stars that can have habitable planets—don't go that route. But some of the more massive stars do. One of those was only about four light-years from Kasava—a little less than the distance between us and Alpha Centauri, the nearest star. It blew, a little over a thousand years ago . . . although it will be thousands of years yet before the light reaches us. The wave front of the blast had almost reached Kasava before they became aware of it, leaving them little time to prepare. Not that they could have done all that much if they had been given time."

  "But," wondered Langston, "what harm could it do across such a distance?"

  "Plenty. Like electromagnetic pulse, for openers. What do you think would happen to our civilization if all the power grids were wrecked, all the telecommunications networks scrubbed, all the computer databases wiped clean? And that would just start the dominoes falling. Even then, Delkasu technology was at least a century ahead of where we are now. So they were even more dependent on electronics than we are, and hence more vulnerable. Primitive subsistence farmers would have come through better. But even the subsistence farmers wouldn't have been spared the radioactive fallout to follow. Ecological catastrophe followed the collapse of civilization.

  "They got as much of the population and as many cultural treasures as possible off Kasava in the limited time they had. Afterwards, of course, no spacecraft were able to operate in the system—at least not with the technology they had at the time. Kasava had to be left to die. Later, as they improved their shielding techniques and the wave front passed on and dissipated, they returned. Subsequently, Kasava has been resettled, and much has been done to help the savages descended from the survivors: reeducation, and repair to genetic damage. But Kasava will never be more than a shadow of its former self, insignificant save in the realm of sentiment.

  "So ever since then, the Delkasu have been in what they consider a state of political limbo. The hegemony is gone. Instead, there are a bunch of interstellar successor-states, all of which agree that the hegemony ought to be reestablished . . . but each state thinks it ought to be the one to do the reestablishing. It's been a snake pit for centuries, and it's only getting worse. You see, the Delkasu states are increasingly jostled by non-Delkasu races which have adopted Delkasu technology and become players in the game. Hence, more snakes in the snake pit."

  "And," Langston queried, "they consider us one of those 'players'?"

  "Not a significant one," the President told him firmly. "You must be absolutely clear on that. Think some Third World microstate. In reality, of course, we're not even that, on their standards. If they knew the truth, our status would—if we were extremely lucky—be that of a protected hunter-gatherer tribe of the upper Amazon or New Guinea. But the Prometheus Project managed to convince the first Delkasu explorers—who arrived just a few years after Mr. Inconnu's arrival—that Earth had gotten organized in what they considered an appropriate way under an American hegemony, and was just barely advanced enough in a technological sense to have stumbled onto the secret of interstellar travel. By their own lights, this meant we were entitled to the equivalent of diplomatic recognition, including an agreemen
t to respect our funny insistence that all contacts be handled through the 'treaty port' on the back side of the Moon."

  "That's something I still don't understand. How has this 'Farside Base' been kept concealed from our lunar orbiters? Yes, I know," Langston partially answered his own question, "you've told me about this invisibility technology. But with interstellar spacecraft coming and going from it . . . ?"

  "Very fortuitously, the interstellar drive produces few if any by-products which are detectable by means generally available on this planet. And the Project's own Earth-to-Moon craft are, of course, as undetectable as galactic-level technology can make them. But the real answer to your question is that we have, in effect, abandoned the Moon since the 1970s." The President cocked his head. "Have you ever wondered why that happened?"

  "Well," Langston huffed, "of course we abandoned such an obscene waste of money! With so many problems here on Earth crying our for socially useful spending, how could we possibly afford space exploration?"

  The President gave him a look of sardonic amusement. "Yeah. How could we possibly afford the one thing the US government has done in the last half century that's actually shown a profit? It may interest you to know that the line you're parroting is one that the Prometheus Project itself insinuated into the popular consciousness, with the eager but unwitting help of the self-styled intellectual elite. A damned shame. But it had to be done."

  "What are you talking about?" Langston's anger waxed along with his bewilderment.

  "Kennedy had to make his famous commitment to reaching the Moon—it was a matter of national prestige, after the Soviet Union had gotten into orbit first. But even as he was doing it, he knew nothing could be allowed to come of it. So the subtle undermining of the whole enterprise began immediately. Even at the time, some people realized that the Apollo crash program wasn't the right way to go about it. A more systematic approach—not putting men on the lunar surface quite so soon, but laying a solid foundation for future development—would have made better sense. But that was the whole point: to discredit it, make it look like just a ridiculously expensive stunt." The President gave a sad chuckle. "Ordering those guys to jump around in low gravity and swing a golf club and otherwise act silly was a master stroke!" The chuckle departed, leaving the sadness. "Yes . . . it was too bad. In fact, it had some unfortunate cultural side effects by seeming to confirm what the twerps of that era were saying about the 'establishment.' But it was necessary."

  "Why?"

  "Haven't you been listening to anything?" The President got his irritation under control and spoke levelly. "If we were swarming over the Moon right now—as, rationally, we ought to be—there'd be no way Farside Base's existence could be concealed. The whole secret would be blown, with the consequences I've tried to make clear to you."

  "But from what you've been telling me, it's already been 'blown,' as you put it. This, uh, Tonkuztra . . ." Langston struggled to collect his thoughts. Organized crime, like international great-power rivalries, had no place in his picture of what an advanced society was supposed to be like. "According to you, they've known the truth about Earth for almost half a century now! Why bother trying to continue the deception?"

  "Because as far as we know, the secret's still good as far as the larger galactic society is concerned," the President explained. "You must understand that the Delkasu word 'Tonkuztra' refers to a criminal . . . subculture, I suppose you'd call it. Not to any centralized organization. It's divided into a multitude of outfits, originally based on blood ties and to some extent still so based. There's no capo di tutti capi. All these families, as we might as well call them, hate each other almost as much as they do the law enforcement authorities.

  "So while it's true that one Tonkuztra family apparently learned that something was not quite right about Earth, they weren't about to let it become general knowledge. That would have let their rivals in on it!

  "Besides, as far as we can figure it, even that one family doesn't have the whole story. It seems that the traitor was feeding them the information in the form of hints . . . one of them at a time.

  "So the Project has continued with its work as though the secret is still intact. That assumption actually holds, as far as the official diplomatic contacts are concerned. But the knowledge that there are, somewhere, entities with an inkling of the truth is something that the Project has to live with.

  "In particular, it's complicated the lives of Section Two. Starting in 1963, their job acquired a whole new dimension: combating any further Tonkuztra operations on Earth, through human proxies. Also, it hasn't made their job of riding shotgun for Section Five diplomatic missions any easier. It didn't get easier even after they found out who the traitor was. . . ."

  Part Two:

  1968

  Chapter Five

  My first trip to the Moon settled one question I'd been wondering about: how the Prometheus Project had been sending its people to and from Farside Base all those years without anybody noticing.

  Yes, I knew about the invisibility technology, and I was sure that spoofing radar was no problem. But you must remember that my formative years belonged to the late forties and early fifties. When I imagined going to the Moon, I visualized something like a king-sized German V-2 rocket with portholes, shaking the earth and bruising the eardrums as it rose straight up on a pillar of fire, bulling its way past gravity by sheer, wasteful brute force. (Which, as it turned out, was pretty much the way Project Apollo was in the process of doing it.)

  In fact, though, from the standpoint of the Delkasu and the other galactic races, these methods were so primitive as to be barely imaginable. Indeed, one of Section Five's problems was making sure none of the alien visitors to Farside Base ever noticed any of Earth's official Lunar probes. Fortunately, the problem was a minor one; the probes were few, as were the aliens present in the Solar System at any given time, and anyway they simply weren't looking for such things.

  Now I understood why they weren't, as I departed for my first assignment beyond the atmosphere.

  The craft I rode was rendered invisible and undetectable by galactic technology. But that was a matter of routine precaution, and hardly even necessary. It was no larger than the fuselage of a small airliner, and it belched no flames as it ascended in almost total silence from the well-concealed base in the Montana Rockies. The impellers that drove it converted the angular momentum of the spinning electrons in the atoms of their core elements directly into linear momentum.

  Hey, don't look at me! I'm just telling you what I was told. I don't understand what it means, or how it's done, any more than you do. All I know is that I sat in a cabin with a few other passengers, looking at a screen marked "view-aft," and watched the landscape fade into a curved blueness, varied by pale buff desert and swirled with cloud patterns. At some indefinable but unmistakable point, it stopped being "down" and started being "away," a blue sphere amid the starfields. And there was no sensation of motion.

  That was another thing about the propulsion. A compensating field automatically canceled the tremendous accelerations that would otherwise have reduced us passengers to a substance resembling chunky salsa covering the aft bulkhead. Another application of the same technology produced an artificial gravitational field that held us to the deck at our usual weight.

  It all bore no resemblance to spaceflight as the world behind us knew it. Rather, it was like sitting in a plain but perfectly comfortable room on that world, watching a film of a planet receding at a breathtaking rate. It made it hard for me to feel the proper awe at what was happening to me. It was too effortless, the way I was being whisked to what had always seemed the just barely attainable goal of the ultimate human endeavor.

  The thought of that goal made me look in the "view-forward" screen. The Moon was growing at the same immoderate rate at which the Earth was shrinking in the view-aft.

  It was only a quarter Moon . . . as viewed from Earth. As we curved around behind it, the face that had been hidden from hu
man eyes until the past few years began to reveal itself.

  People often call that face the "dark side of the Moon," but that's a complete misnomer. It's just as likely to be illuminated by the Sun as is the side that permanently faces Earth. This became obvious to us as the great globe of Earth—four times the diameter that the Moon shows to earthbound humanity—dipped below the stark Lunar horizon. The Sea of Moscow and all those Russian-named craters fled below us, illuminated in harsh, airless clarity.

  The first Prometheus Project people who had come here over two decades earlier on the wings of Mr. Inconnu's secrets must have been a pretty prosaic lot; they didn't give any fanciful names to the surface features that they were the first humans in all history to behold. So when the Soviets had sent the first Lunar orbiter and exercised their right to name their discoveries, the Project had adopted those names, generally mispronouncing them . . . including that of the crater named after Korolev, the mastermind of the early Soviet space effort.

  It was that crater toward which we now descended.

  The Project knew as well as everyone else when any of Earth's publicly known space probes could be expected to swing behind the Moon. So there was no need to continuously expend the energy to keep the great opening at the base of Korolev's ringwall concealed. Besides, approaching alien visitors might have wondered why such concealment was considered necessary. We passengers therefore watched the entrance grow in the viewscreen as our craft slowed and descended.

  From a distance, it looked like a vast cave mouth, the home of some ogre out of myth. Then, as the ship's finely balanced propulsive forces brought us slowly through it, the smooth regularity of its interior became apparent. A tunnel that could have accommodated an aircraft carrier slanted gently downward, illuminated by our ship's running lights and the glow of the rectangular opening at its far end. We drifted toward that glow, so as to pass through the invisible force-screen that held atmosphere within it but offered only gentle resistance to a slow-moving solid object. We felt a slight vibration as the ship crossed over into atmosphere, and emerged into a harshly illuminated empty space too vast to immediately comprehend. Surely, the mind insisted, the space vessels that cavern held—most of them far larger than ours—must be toys.