Harvey Langston's eyes were like saucers. "Are you saying the identity of this traitor is known?"
"Yes. It's been known since 1968 or '69. It turned out to be someone nobody would ever have suspected in a million years. Came as quite a shock to a lot of people in the Project, I'm told." The President looked thoughtful. "I've often wondered what the motive could have been. I sometimes think it must have been like that guy Hanson who was spying for the Russians in the 1990s. He wasn't like that slime mold Aldrich Ames a few years earlier, who was in it purely for the money. No, he did it for peanuts. Nor was he a fanatical Communist ideologue like the Rosenbergs; he was a very conservative Catholic, and anyway he went on working for the Russians after they'd given the Soviet regime the bum's rush. Instead, by all accounts it was pure game-playing on his part. He was a social zero who was driven to prove he was cleverer than everyone else. Maybe the traitor within the Project who let the secret slip to the Tonkuztra was like that: stringing them along, never telling them everything. But that's all just speculation on my part. No one really knows."
"Why not? If this individual was caught back in the late 1960s—"
"Not 'caught.' Just identified, and never found."
"But . . . that means this traitor could have been taken away by the, uh, Tonkuztra, and told them more. Or, perhaps, been made to tell them more." Langston spoke hesitantly, for he knew nothing about intelligence work, and was incapable of learning because no one ever learns a subject to whose very existence he is philosophically opposed. His campaign promise to abolish the CIA had been heartfelt, even though Sal DiAngelo and Sidney Goldman had taken pains to reassure everyone that Congress would never really let him get away with it.
"True," the President allowed. "Then again, the traitor might also be dead. To this day, the Project doesn't know how much of the truth has been compromised. So it's proceeded on the assumption that there have been no further leaks . . . and so far, that assumption seems to have panned out. There has been no change in Earth's diplomatic status, and no apparent change in the attitude of the various Delkasu governmental and corporate pooh-bahs. This, in spite of the fact that the whole thing occurred at a moment when the secret was uniquely vulnerable."
"What do you mean?"
"The first Apollo landing was in 1969. Remember what I was saying earlier about the problem of concealing Farside Base from the human race's official space-exploration programs? Well, it worked both ways. Those space programs had to be concealed from the Delkasu, who thought we'd left such fantastically outmoded stuff behind. The Project has always used the excuse of traffic control to make damned sure no galactic ships have been arriving or departing at the right time to observe any howling anachronisms. But if the Tonkuztra or anybody else had been casting a suspicious eye on Earth around that time, the Apollo landing would have stood out like a Spanish galleon in what was supposed to be a modern naval base.
"In short, the deception seems to be holding up. The Project isn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth by questioning it. Instead, they've pushed ahead with the other half of their mission."
"You mean the introduction of galactic technology?"
"Right. In fact, they've accelerated it as much as they dare, taking advantage of what seems to be a reprieve as long as it lasts. They've tried to soften the societal impact as much as possible by releasing concepts into the culture before the actual 'invention' of the technologies. For example, ever since shortly before the turn of the century the neural-net computer has been something 'everybody knows' is just around the corner. Well, it's about to become reality. Unfortunately, there's really no way to prepare people for the revolution in theoretical physics that's coming in a few years. But the average person won't even be aware of it until later, when the practical applications begin to appear. And the Project has been taking steps, for decades now, to get notions like reactionless drives and artificial gravity firmly established in the popular consciousness. By now, they're part of the generic 'special effects' visualization of the future, and never mind that physicists say they're impossible." The President chuckled evilly. "Those Hollywood sleaze-buckets have no conception of how they've been subtly manipulated."
Langston sought to catch up. "So . . . the Prometheus Project has proceeded since 1969 as though nothing had happened?"
"Pretty much. Of course . . . you have to wonder what's been going on since then, out there in the galaxy, in places we don't even know about. . . ."