"Steve White - The Prometheus Project" - читать интересную книгу автора (White Steve)

"I think," said the President gravely, "you're now ready to look at these and not automatically dismiss
them as fakes." He slid a sheaf of photos across the desk. "You'll note," he commented as he put the
preserved animal away, "that not all evolutionary pathways are as divergent from ours as this
guy'sтАФespecially the ones that culminate in tool-using races. The way it's been explained to me, a
bilaterally symmetrical vertebrateтАФthat's usтАФis a better arrangement for an active animal than a radially
symmetrical one like his. It helps to have a definite front end."
Langston wasn't listening. Nor was his mind processing everything he was seeing. The various beings in
the photos were too foreign to his accustomed world to fully register. But they had a certain indefinable
quality of reality which he could now recognize, having seen the animal from the plastic case. And they
had another quality: a sheer, skin-crawling wrongness far beyond the adolescent imaginings of
Hollywood special effects. Oddly, this was most true of the ones that came closest to the human form.
"Do I now have your undivided attention?" the President asked.
Langston looked up from the photos and managed to nod.
"Shortly after the end of World War II," the President began, "the United States government was
contacted by a manтАФyes, man, human but of unknown origin. He called himself 'Mr. Inconnu,' thus
demonstrating that his originality had limits. He brought incontrovertible proofs that he was for real,
stuff that made it impossible to dismiss him as a nut-case. He also brought news the human race
wasn'tтАФand still isn'tтАФready to handle."
Langston found his voice. "You mean the fact that there really is, uh, life in outer space?"
"Not just that. The galaxy isn't merely inhabited; it is taken! There are mighty civilizations out there.
They have all the prime real estate already nailed down. They have no interest in technologically
backward, politically fragmented worlds except as pawns in the power-games they play. And at the time
Mr. Inconnu arrived they were just about to uncover one more such world: ours.
"It was necessaryтАФurgently soтАФto do two things. First of all, we had to bluff the aliens into thinking
Earth had a central political authority and was technologically advanced enough to rate at least a certain
perfunctory diplomatic courtesy. Secondly, we had to begin living up to the second half of that bluff,
and bring Earth up to speed as quickly as it could possibly be done. Mr. Inconnu provided the means to
commence the crash course."
"You mean . . . the kind of things you've shown me?" Langston gave a headshake of bewilderment. "But
if, as you say, we've known about this technology since the late 1940s, then why isn't it commonly
known? You yourself just said it's still beyond our horizons."
"It couldn't be released all at once. It is a sociological truism, worked out by cultures older than ours,
that a society simply can't survive the abrupt, wholesale introduction of technology more than one level

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 - Prologue

above its own. God knows there've been plenty of examples in our own post-Columbus history! Mr.
Inconnu's stuff has had to be doled out gradually, to avoid causing cultural and social collapse.
Although," the President added with a grim smile, "I sometimes think it hasn't been avoided by a whole
hell of a lot! Have you ever read much classic science fiction?"
Langston shook his head emphatically. The stuff was just so politically incorrect.
"Those writers foresaw the things that lay within the potential of their early-to-mid twentieth-century
world: nuclear weapons, spaceflight with chemical rockets, and so forth . . . including 'electronic brains.'
But not one of them ever foresaw the culture of ubiquitous information access that arose by the end of
the century: practically every middle-class person with a computer on his or her desk at work, and
another one at home." The President paused significantly. "The transistor, you see, was one of the first
of Mr. Inconnu's revelations to be released, in 1948. Once society had had enough timeтАФbarelyтАФto
absorb that, the silicon chip followed. Society managed to adjust. The side effects and by-products, such
as the rise of an objectionable computer-geek subculture, weren't quite fatal. But the point is that if the