The Prometheus Project Part 8

"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 a.s.signment 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 pa.s.sengers 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 s.p.a.ceflight 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 human 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 misp.r.o.nouncing them . . . including that of the crater named after Korolev, the mastermind of the early Soviet s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce too vast to immediately comprehend. Surely, the mind insisted, the s.p.a.ce vessels that cavern held-most of them far larger than ours-must be toys.

Of all the things I had, over the past five years, seen and heard of, this was the one I still found most difficult to credit. Granted, I knew by now about nanotechnology-a word that hadn't yet been coined. I also knew that the Project hadn't needed to have Farside Base completely up and running in time for the first Delkasu arrivals; the essence of the deception was that Earth had only just precociously discovered the interstellar drive, and was still working on the Lunar installation. Yet, knowing all that, I could only stare around me and wonder at the fact that the Project had been able to make even a convincing start at hollowing out this chasm beneath the Lunar surface in the late 1940s. The sickening moment as I stepped out of the ship's artificial gravity field into the Moon's one-sixth G didn't help my mental equilibrium.

"Bob!" A familiar voice brought me out of my rubbernecking. I swung around to see Dan Buckley approaching across that illimitable floor, moving with the gait of one long accustomed to the local gravity.

"So," he exclaimed as we shook hands, "I understand they've finally succ.u.mbed to a moment of mental weakness and decided to let you out-system."

"Yeah. Some would say it's about time. But what the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

"Haven't you heard? I'm your pilot."

"Oh, G.o.d! I'm doomed!"

Shortly after leaving Section One, I had heard that Dan had been a.s.signed to Section Five as one of their interstellar pilots. I'd been reduced to abject envy, for he had been seeing the unimaginable sights of galactic civilization while I'd been stuck on Earth doing Section Two's scut work. Admittedly, my own little experience on the outskirts of Washington's Chinatown had caused that work to get more interesting, for the Project's security headaches had abruptly expanded to include countering Tonkuztra proxy operations like the one that had almost cut short my promising career. Still, it hadn't been what I'd had in mind . . . until I had finally graduated to escort duty for one of Section Five's diplomatic/ intelligence/general skullduggery missions beyond the Solar System.

"Come on," said Dan, ever the fount of all enlightenment. "Let's get out of this overgrown hangar and into the living areas, where the gravity is Earth-normal. I'll help you get settled in. We've got a briefing at 1900." Farside Station used Earth's Greenwich Mean Time, which the ship's brain had obligingly downloaded to the rather sophisticated device I stubbornly continued to think of as a wrist.w.a.tch. It was now a little after 1700. I'd have time to grab a bite to eat. As for sleep patterns . . . well, I was used to jet lag.

What with one thing and another, it was a couple of minutes after 1900 when Dan and I entered the small briefing room where the head of the mission was to address us. I started to run my eyes over the a.s.sembled group, looking for familiar faces . . . but then I spotted the mission head at the front of the room.

"Oh, s.h.i.t," I breathed.

I hadn't seen Renata Novak for five years, but she hadn't changed. Our eyes met, and while she showed no overt sign of recognition I somehow got the feeling that she remembered me."Well, now that we're all here, we can begin," she said with unsubtle emphasis. She stood up and activated a holographic display. I recognized it immediately, having seen it repeatedly, in various forms,

during training and afterwards.

A myriad of tiny lights streamed in three irregular rivers of tiny gleaming dust motes. Those rivers showed a perceptible curvature . . . for they were spiral arms, and the display encompa.s.sed a good eighth of the galaxy. I knew, with the part of my brain directly behind my forehead, the immensity of what I was seeing depicted. But I also knew I hadn't a prayer of truly grasping it. I'd learned to deal with the problem by not even trying. Instead, I simply thought of it as a form of geography, for all the world as though I was looking at a map of landma.s.ses and seas on Earth.

The three streams of light were, from top to bottom, the Sagittarius, Orion and Perseus arms. "Top" and "bottom" were arbitrary, the former being defined by the center of the galaxy, which lay outside the scope of the display. The topmost stream was the widest and densest, for the Sagittarius Arm was one of the two princ.i.p.al ones of the galaxy, curving from the galactic core in a complete half circle before fraying out into the darkness of the great void. It also had the distinction of holding the home system of the Delkasu. By comparison, the Orion and Perseus arms were minor ones-"shingles' was the term the astronomers sometimes used. And the Orion Arm had only one, very tiny distinction: an ordinary star,

shown as a tiny green dot, around which orbited a thoroughly unimportant planet called Earth.

I reminded myself that the distinction between the spiral arms and the s.p.a.ces between them was not as sharp as that between land and sea. Contrary to what some people imagine, those interst.i.tial s.p.a.ces are not empty rifts devoid of stars. Indeed, the density of stars per cubic light-year is only ten percent greater inside the spiral arms than outside them. It is only the short-lived giant stars, and the interstellar medium

out of which they coalesce, that are concentrated in the arms, illuminating them and creating a contrast that is more apparent than real.Thus endeth Professor Bob's astronomy lecture, cribbed from memories of Dr. Fehrenbach's real ones.

Bear with me, because this stuff is necessary to an understanding of everything that happened afterwards. You see, even that ten percent difference had been enough to make the spiral arms the line of least resistance-or, more accurately, the line of greatest opportunity-for Delkasu expansion. Starting near the upper right-hand corner of this display, near the Carina Nebula, they had spread along their own arm in both directions for many centuries before seriously venturing into the Orion Arm and the Perseus Arm beyond it. That venture had started from the newly settled regions of the Sagittarius Arm to the left (as we were seeing it), with their tradition of pioneering, and had worked its way slowly from left to right along the lesser arms. Thus the "geography" of the galaxy had imposed a certain shape on the developing galactic civilization.

And on top of that shape, centuries of politics and war had overlaid yet another pattern. That pattern showed in volumes of softly glowing color within the display, marking the boundaries of the grand interstellar empires.

Novak pointed a pencil-like implement, and a white dot appeared on an oblong region of yellow in the middle of that stretch of the Sagittarius Arm shown in the display, not far (Ha!) from Earth. "Or mission," she began crisply, "is here, to the Antyova system, in the Selangava Empire."

I ran over in my mind what I'd learned of Delkasu history. Which wasn't much, really. Given the unthinkable vastness and complexity of their domains, I doubt if there was anyone-much less any human-whose mind could hold it all. But we in the Project tried to follow the main lines of development.

About a century ago, a military genius named Sakandri had arisen among the Delkasu. A large empire-really large, even on their standards-had blossomed into existence with a suddenness that had sent shock waves across the spiral arms. For a moment, it had seemed that the civilization-wide hegemony that was their long-lost political ideal was finally at hand. But only for a moment. The empire had overreached itself to death in a remarkably short time. Sakandri's lieutenants had divided it up before his corpse had gotten cold. The only lasting result had been a slew of successor-states which altered the configurations of the traditional power game without changing its rules. Of these, the largest was Selangava.

"Selangava," Novak continued, "has problems. In fact, you might say that as the princ.i.p.al heir of Sakandri's empire it has inherited the lion's share of the problems he would have had to face if he'd lived longer-notably the Agardir.

"You'll learn more about the Agardir later, on the voyage out. Not that we humans have all that much data about them; acquiring more is one of our mission's objectives. We do know that they are a race that had achieved interplanetary travel in their home system before the Delkasu arrived. By a fortunate set of circ.u.mstances, they were able to get galactic-level technology from Delkasu renegades, and adopt it

before they could be overwhelmed. Fortunate, that is, for them; not so fortunate for everyone else. They're an oddity: a toolmaking race descended from pure carnivores . . . specifically, pouncers. Their outlook on life-and other life-forms-is what you might expect. And they're embittered about the 'head start' that enabled the Delkasu to fill up so much of the galaxy. It's motivated them into a forced-draft expansion. And they're pressing hard on Selangava, within whose volume of s.p.a.ce they live. It's not exactly what Selangava needs right now, on top of its rivalries with other Delkasu powers.

"This, of course, is what puts us in a good position. Selangava needs all the allies it can get . . . even us. Specifically, they have economic interests here in the Orion Arm, and we're in a position to improve their logistics by allowing them additional resource extraction rights in this system."

We all nodded. Nanotechnological industrial processes couldn't change atomic structure; if you wanted the molecular a.s.semblers to make you something out of certain elements, you needed to supply them with those elements. The right to mine for rare minerals in the Solar System's asteroids and satellites was the only thing Earth-meaning the Prometheus Project, without Earth's knowledge-had to offer the galactic powers, aside from a sideline specialty trade in cultural curios.

Looked at objectively, it might have seemed d.a.m.ned peculiar, if not ludicrous, on two levels. First of all, why didn't galactic-level civilization simply trans.m.u.te rock into rare elements, rather than mining them? The answer was that trans.m.u.tation involved processes so expensive that it was more cost-effective to mine the stuff in low-gravity environments-especially if those environments were in the regions of s.p.a.ce where the stuff was needed, thus saving transportation costs from the few industrial powerhouses where "economies of scale" made trans.m.u.tation a practical proposition.

That left the second seeming paradox: why did societies with such power need our permission? Why not just move in and take whatever they d.a.m.ned well wanted? Earth wouldn't have had a prayer in h.e.l.l of stopping them-not even Earth as they believed it to be, much less Earth as it was.

But this was the whole point of the diplomatic recognition of Earth's existence that the Prometheus Project had finagled. The Delkasu had an elaborate system of interstellar common law, developed over the centuries and formalized since Sakandri's time, which n.o.body could get away with blatantly disregarding-the other Delkasu powers wouldn't have stood for it. One of that system's cornerstones was the principle that a race which was recognized as sovereign (that's not really the right word, but it comes closer than anything in the human legal vocabulary) held t.i.tle to all natural resources within its own planetary system and any others it brought under the mantle of its sovereignty by colonization. It was a reflection of the Delkasu political philosophy: some polities were more equal than others, but the less equal ones had certain clearly defined rights.

"The Section Five delegation of which I am the head," Novak continued, "will be conducting negotiations with certain industrial concerns in Selangava, with a view to giving them a vested interest in the Solar System's integrity and thus making them natural allies of ours. That's or mission's overt purpose-which, as usual, isn't the only purpose. We're going to be covertly angling for new contacts. Meanwhile, our Section Four personnel"-she inclined her heads toward the intelligence types-"will be seeking new insights into state-of-the-art technology, and also gathering all accessible information about Selangava. I expect all personnel to give them every a.s.sistance. Remember, there is no such thing as useless knowledge! In particular, we need to expand our woefully inadequate data about the Agardir, about whose very existence we only recently became aware.

"At the same time we are trying to repair our own ignorance of the galaxy, we must also take all steps to preserve inviolate the galaxy's ignorance of us. This should go without saying. Since the early days of the Project, it has been established operational doctrine that whenever we venture out-system, security considerations are paramount. I emphasize it now because of the Tonkuztra matter, of which we are all painfully aware. We must a.s.sume that the Tonkuztra are active in Selangava, as they seem to permeate Delkasu-settled s.p.a.ce. It is therefore possible that the same 'family' that has gained an inkling of the true state of affairs on Earth may be operating there. If so, we are going to be in a vulnerable position. Our Section Two representative will have a heavy responsibility." Novak gave me a look that settled the question of whether she remembered me. "It is-perhaps-fortunate that he has been well acquainted with the Tonkuztra threat since its inception. Indeed, he was directly involved in the very incident that made us aware of it." Her expression suggested that I was somehow responsible for the whole problem. I met it with a smile I hoped was as irritatingly bland as I intended.

"And now," Novak resumed after a chilly pause, "I call your attention to the timetable for our journey-a not inconsiderable one even by Delkasu standards. Fortunately, we have a short time before departure, so I have scheduled a series of briefings on-"

I stopped hearing her. For I had resumed my interrupted survey of the group, and had spotted a head of light brown hair that I hadn't seen in five years.

* * * What with one thing and another, it wasn't until shortly before departure that I was able to speak to Chloe in private. And it was a purely accidental meeting, in the observation dome.

Practically all of Farside Base was subsurface. That was only prudent, on a world with no atmosphere for the meteoric trash of s.p.a.ce to burn up in from friction. Also, it simplified the problem of keeping the installation pressurized; zillions of tons of rock spring few leaks. And, finally, it rendered the vast facility invisible to the primitive but perfectly functional s.p.a.ce probes from the unsuspecting world on the other side of the Moon.

Still, humans have a psychological need to view the outside scenery from time to time. Even more to the point, the Delkasu share this need and therefore expected Farside Base to have facilities for a.s.suaging it. In fact, the lack of such facilities would have seemed awfully peculiar to them.

So the designers had compromised with a dome of transparent nanoplastic in the center of Korolev, accessible by grav-driven elevator from the base below. It was, of course, rendered invisible every time a s.p.a.ce probe from Earth was overhead. My Section Two colleagues were responsible for that. They were also responsible for somehow arranging that no extraterrestrials were in the dome at those times, to see the stars take on the kind of blurriness I'd seen from inside an invisibility field in an alley in Washington, and wonder why. I imagined they probably drank a lot.

One of those extraterrestrials was there when I emerged from the elevator for my first visit to the dome. I almost didn't notice him (I a.s.sume it was a "him") at first, because the spectacle took my breath away. Around the dome, at all points of the nearby Lunar horizon, was the jagged ringwall of Korolev. Overhead stretched an infinity of black velvet, thick with more stars than were ever visible from the bottom of Earth's atmosphere, even on a clear and moonless night in the desert or on the ocean. For an instant I felt the onset of vertigo, as if I was about to fall off the Moon, and go on falling forever. The one-sixth weight-this was outside the living areas' artificial gravity field-didn't help. So a moment or three pa.s.sed before I saw the dark, lithe creature in utilitarian gray clothing, walking across the dome's floor with a gait that was not precisely the same as a man's. As he approached, heading for the elevator, I looked into the large dark gold eyes of the first alien I'd seen in the flesh.I'm sure I stared like an idiot. The Delkar probably recognized me as a yokel just off the boat from Earth. In fact, thinking back, I know he did. But at that time I still hadn't developed the ability to read his race's facial expressions-which was just as well. As he pa.s.sed me, he raised one of his remarkable and rather disturbing hands in what looked like a gesture of stately but casual greeting. I chose to take it that way, and waved nervously back. Then he was gone, and I was left standing immobilized by a mixture of fascination and revulsion and other emotions less easily defined.

"They have that effect on everybody, at first."

My head jerked up at the sound of the remembered husky contralto. "Oh, hi, Miss Bryant," I managed.

"At least I a.s.sume it's still 'Miss Bryant.' You may not remember me, but-"

"Of course I remember you. Bob Devaney, right? And yes, it's still 'Miss Bryant.' But for heaven's sake, call me 'Chloe.' You're our Section Two watchdog, right?"

"Right. This will to be my first time out-system. I imagine it must be old hat for you."

"It never gets to be old hat." For an instant, the seriousness I remembered, so seemingly incongruous in

her, was back. But then she smiled. "Anyway, Selangava will be a first for me. For any of us, in fact."

"Yeah, so I understand." Without even realizing I was doing it, I spoke more to myself than to her. "Not

just another star, but another spiral arm . . ." I caught myself, and met her eyes. She was giving me an odd look."That's right. The magnitudes involved . . . Well, it's too much to grasp. It doesn't mean anything." She shook herself. "Anyway, that was why I came up here. It's probably the last chance I'll get before

departure. I wanted a last look at the Moon."