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  “Bullcrap!” the general snapped. “That won’t do us any good.”

  “But it would,” the science advisor countered. “If we can reconcile all the forces we will have unraveled the final secrets of physics. Everything else will fall into our laps.”

  “Too damned theoretical,” the general insisted. “We’ve got the opportunity to get some hard, practical information and you want them to do your math homework for you.”

  The president’s chief of staff, who had been silent up until this moment, said, “Well, what I’d like to know is how we can cure cancer and other diseases.”

  “AIDS,” said the president. “If we could get a cure for AIDS during my administration…”

  Costanza said, “Maybe the general’s right. Their propulsion system could be adapted to other purposes, I imagine.”

  “Like weaponry,” said the science advisor, with obvious distaste.

  Martinson listened to them wrangling. His own idea was to ask the aliens about the Big Bang and how old the universe was.

  Their voices rose. Everyone in the Oval Office had his or her own idea of what “the Question” should be. The argument became heated.

  Finally the president hushed them all with a curt gesture. “If the eight people in this room can’t come to an agreement, imagine what the Congress is going to do with this problem.”

  “You’re going to tell Congress about this?”

  “Got to,” the president replied unhappily. “The aliens have sent this message out to every major language group in the world, according to Dr. Martinson. It’s not a secret anymore.”

  “Congress.” The general groaned.

  “That’s nothing,” said Costanza. “Wait till the United Nations sinks its teeth into this.”

  THE SECRETARY GENERAL

  TWO WARS, A spreading famine in central Africa, a new El Niño event turning half the world’s weather crazy, and now this—aliens from outer space. The secretary general sank deep into her favorite couch and wished she were back in Argentina, in the simple Andean village where she had been born. All she had to worry about then was getting good grades in school and fending off the boys who wanted to seduce her.

  She had spent the morning with the COPUOS executive committee and had listened with all her attention to their explanation of the enigmatic alien visitation. It sounded almost like a joke, a prank that some very bright students might try to pull—until the committee members began to fight over what The Question should be. Grown men and women, screaming at each other like street urchins!

  Now the delegation from the Pan-Asian Coalition sat before her, arrayed like a score of round-faced Buddhas in Western business suits. Most of them wore dark gray; the younger members dared to dress in dark blue.

  The secretary general was famous—perhaps notorious—for her preference for the bright, bold colors of her Andean heritage. Her frock was dramatic red and gold, the colors of a mountain sunset.

  The chairman of the group, who was Chinese, was saying, “Inasmuch as PAC represents the majority of the world population—”

  “Nearly four billion people,” added the Vietnamese delegate, sitting to the right of the chairman. He was the youngest man in the group, slim and wiry and eager, his spiky unruly hair still dark and thick.

  The chairman nodded slightly, his only concession to his colleague’s interruption, then continued, “It is only fair and democratic that our organization should decide what The Question will be.”

  More than four billion people, the secretary general thought, yet not one woman has been granted a place on your committee. She knew it rankled these men that they had to deal with her. She saw how displeased they were that her office bore so few trappings of hierarchical power: no desk, no long conference table, only a comfortable scattering of small couches and armchairs. The walls, of course, were electronic. Virtually any data stored in any computer in the world could be displayed at the touch of a finger.

  The chairman had finished his little statement and laced his fingers together over the dark gray vest stretched across his ample stomach. It is time for me to reply, the secretary general realized.

  She took a sip from the crystal tumbler on the teak table beside her couch. She did not especially like the taste of carbonated water, but it was best to stay away from alcohol during these meetings.

  “I recognize that the member nations of the Pan-Asian Coalition hold the preponderance of the world’s population,” she said, stalling for time while she tried to think of the properly diplomatic phrasing, “but the decision as to what The Question shall be must be shared by all the world’s peoples.”

  “The decision must be made by vote in the General Assembly,” the chairman insisted quietly. “That is the only fair and democratic way to make the choice.”

  “And we have only five more days to decide,” added the Vietnamese delegate.

  The secretary general said, “We have made some progress. The International Astronomical Union has decided that The Question will be sent from the radio telescope in Puerto Rico—”

  “Arecibo,” the Vietnamese amended impatiently.

  “Yes, thank you,” murmured the secretary general. “Arecibo. The astronomers have sent a message to the aliens that we have chosen the Arecibo radio telescope to ask The Question and any other transmission from any other facility should be ignored.”

  “Thus the Americans have taken effective control of the situation,” said the chairman, in the calm low voice of a man who has learned to control his inner rage.

  “Not at all,” the secretary general replied. “Arecibo is an international facility; astronomers from all over the world work there.”

  “Under Yankee supervision.”

  “The International Astronomical Union—”

  “Which is dominated by Americans and Europeans,” shouted one of the other delegates.

  “We will not tolerate their monopoly power politics!”

  “Asia must make the decision!”

  Stunned by the sudden vehemence of her visitors, the secretary general said, “A moment ago you wanted the General Assembly to vote on the decision.”

  The chairman allowed a fleeting expression of chagrin to break his normally impassive features. “We took the liberty of polling the members of the General Assembly yesterday.”

  “Very informally,” added the Vietnamese delegate hastily. “Nothing binding, of course.”

  “Of course,” said the secretary general, surprised that her snoops had not reported this move to her.

  “The result was far from satisfactory,” the chairman admitted. “We received more than two hundred different questions.”

  “It appears extremely doubtful,” said the Japanese member of the delegation, “that the General Assembly could agree on one single question within the remaining allowed time.”

  “Then how do you propose to resolve the matter?” the secretary general asked.

  They all looked to the chairman, even the Vietnamese delegate.

  He cleared his throat, then answered, “We propose to decide what The Question will be within our own group, and then ask the General Assembly to ratify our decision.”

  “A simple yes or no vote,” said the Vietnamese delegate. “No thought required.”

  “I see,” said the secretary general. “That might work, although if the General Assembly voted against your proposal—

  “That will not come to pass,” the chairman assured her. “The nations we represent will carry the vote.”

  “Your nations have the largest population,” the secretary general cautioned, “but not the largest number of representatives in the Assembly, where it is one vote to each nation.”

  “The Africans will vote with us.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “If they want continued aid from us, they will.”

  The secretary general wondered if some of the nations of Africa might not want to ask the aliens how they could make themselves self-sufficient
, but she kept that thought to herself. Instead she asked, “Have you settled on the question you wish to ask?”

  The chairman’s left cheek ticked once. “Not yet,” he answered. “We are still discussing the matter.”

  “How close to a decision are you?”

  A gloomy silence filled the room.

  At last the young Vietnamese delegate burst out, “They want to ask how they can live forever! What nonsense! The Question should be, How can we control our population growth?”

  “We know how to control population growth,” the Japanese delegate snarled. “That is not a fit question to ask the aliens.”

  “But our known methods are not working!” the Vietnamese man insisted. “We must learn how we can make people want to control their birth numbers.”

  “Better to ask how we can learn to control impetuous young men who show no respect for their elders,” snapped one of the grayest delegates.

  The secretary general watched in growing dismay as the delegates quarreled and growled at each other. Their voices rose to shouts, then screams. When they began attacking each other in a frenzy of martial arts violence, the secretary general called for security, then hid behind her couch.

  THE MEDIA MOGUL

  “THIS IS THE greatest story since Moses parted the Red Sea!” Tad Trumble enthused. “I want our full resources behind it.”

  “Right, chief,” said the seventeen executive vice presidents arrayed down the long conference table.

  “I mean our full resources,” Trumble said, pacing energetically along the length of the table. He wore his yachting costume: navy blue double-breasted blazer over white duck slacks, colorful ascot, and off-white shirt. He was a big man, tall and rangy, with a vigorous moustache and handsome wavy hair—both dyed to a youthful dark brown.

  “I mean,” he went on, clapping his big hands together hard enough to make the vice presidents jump, “I want to interview those aliens personally.”

  “You?” the most senior of the veeps exclaimed. “Yourself?”

  “Danged right! Get them onscreen.”

  “But they haven’t replied to any of our messages, chief,” said the brightest of the female vice presidents. In truth, she was brighter than all the males, too.

  “Not one peep out of them since they said they’d answer The Question,” added the man closest to her.

  Trumble frowned like a little boy who hadn’t received quite what he’d wanted from Santa Claus. “Then we’ll just have to send somebody out to their spacecraft and bang on their door until they open up.”

  “We can’t do that,” said one of the younger, less experienced toadies.

  Whirling on the hapless young man, Trumble snapped, “Why the frick not?”

  “W-well, we’d need a rocket and astronauts and—”

  “My aerospace division has all that crap. I’ll tell ’em to send one of our anchormen up there.”

  “In four days, chief?”

  “Sure, why not? We’re not the freakin’ government, we can do things fast!”

  “But the safety factor…”

  Trumble shrugged. “If the rocket blows up it’ll make a great story. So we lose an anchorman, so what? Make a martyr outta him. Blame the aliens.”

  It took nearly an hour for the accumulated vice presidents to gently, subtly talk their boss out of the space mission idea.

  “Okay, then,” Trumble said, still pacing, his enthusiasm hardly dented, “how about this? We sponsor a contest to decide what The Question should be!”

  “That’s great!” came the immediate choral reply.

  “Awesome.”

  “Fabulous.”

  “Inspired.”

  “Danged right,” Trumble admitted modestly. “Ask people all over the country—all over the freakin’ world—what they think The Question should be. Nobody’ll watch anything but our channels!”

  Another round of congratulations surged down the table.

  “But get one thing straight,” Trumble said, his face suddenly very serious. He had managed to pace himself back to his own chair at the head of the table.

  Gripping the back of the empty chair with both white-knuckled hands, he said, “I win the contest. Understand? No matter how many people respond, I’m the one who makes up The Question. Got that?”

  All seventeen heads nodded in unison.

  THE POPE

  “IT IS NOT a problem of knowledge,” said Cardinal Horvath, his voice a sibilant whisper, “but rather a problem of morality.”

  The pope knew that Horvath used that whisper to get attention. Each of the twenty-six cardinals in his audience chamber leaned forward on his chair to hear the Hungarian prelate.

  “Morality?” asked the pope. He had been advised by his staff to wear formal robes for this meeting. Instead, he had chosen to present himself to his inner circle of advisors in a simple white linen suit. The cardinals were all arrayed in their finest, from scarlet skullcaps to Gucci shoes.

  “Morality,” Horvath repeated. “Is this alien spaceship sent to us by God or by the devil?”

  The pope glanced around the gleaming ebony table. His cardinals were clearly uneasy with Horvath’s question. They believed in Satan, of course, but it was more of a theoretical belief, a matter of catechistic foundations that were best left underground and out of sight in this modern age. In a generation raised on Star Trek, the idea that aliens from outer space might be sent by the devil seemed medieval, ridiculous.

  And yet …

  “These alien creatures,” Horvath asked, “why do they not show themselves to us? Why do they offer to answer one question and only one?”

  Cardinal O’Shea nodded. He was a big man, with a heavy, beefy face and flaming red hair that was almost matched by his bulbous imbiber’s nose.

  “You notice, don’t you,” O’Shea said in his sweet clear tenor voice, “that all the national governments are arguing about which question to ask. And what are they suggesting for The Question? How can they get more power, more wealth, more comfort and ease from the knowledge of these aliens.”

  “Several suggestions involve curing desperate diseases,” commented Cardinal Ngono drily. “If the aliens can give us a cure for AIDS or Ebola, I would say they are doing God’s work.”

  “By their fruits you shall know them,” the pope murmured.

  “That is exactly the point,” Horvath said, tapping his fingers on the gleaming tabletop. “Why do they insist on answering only one question? Does that bring out the best in our souls, or the worst?”

  Before they could discuss the cardinal’s question, the pope said, “We have been asked by the International Astronomical Union’s Catholic members to contribute our considered opinion to their deliberations. How should we respond?”

  “There are only three days left,” Cardinal Sarducci pointed out.

  “How should we respond?” the pope repeated.

  “Ignore the aliens,” Horvath hissed. “They are the work of the devil, sent to tempt us.”

  “What evidence do you have of that?” Ngono asked pointedly.

  Horvath stared at the African for a long moment. At last he said, “When God sent His Redeemer to mankind, He did not send aliens in a spaceship. He sent the Son of Man, who was also the Son of God.”

  “That was a long time ago,” came a faint voice from the far end of the table.

  “Yes,” O’Shea agreed. “In today’s world Jesus would be ignored … or locked up as a panhandler.”

  Horvath sputtered.

  “If God wanted to get our attention,” Ngono said, “this alien spacecraft has certainly accomplished that.”

  “Let us assume, then,” said the pope, “that we are agreed to offer some response to the astronomers’ request. What should we tell them?”

  Horvath shook his head and folded his arms across his chest in stubborn silence.

  “Are you asking, Your Holiness, if we should frame The Question for them?”

  The pope shrugged slightly. “I am
certain they would like to have our suggestion for what The Question should be.”

  “How can we live in peace?”

  “How can we live without disease?” Ngono suggested.

  “How can we end world hunger?”

  Horvath slapped both hands palm down on the table. “You all miss the point. The Question should be—must be!—how can we bring all of God’s people into the One True Church?”

  Most of the cardinals groaned.

  “That would set the ecumenical movement back to the Middle Ages!”

  “It would divide the world into warring camps!”

  “Not if the aliens are truly sent by God,” Horvath insisted. “But if they are the devil’s minions, then of course they will cause us grief.”

  The pope sagged back in his chair. Horvath is an atavism, a walking fossil, but he has a valid point, the pope said to himself. It’s almost laughable. We can test whether or not the aliens are sent by God by taking a chance on fanning the flames of division and hatred that will destroy us all.

  He felt tired, drained—and more than a little afraid. Perhaps Horvath is right and these aliens are a test.

  One question. He knew what he would ask, if the decision were entirely his own. And the knowledge frightened him. Deep in his soul, for the first time since he’d been a teenager, the pope knew that he wanted to ask if God really existed.

  THE MAN IN THE STREET

  “I THINK IT’S all a trick,” said Jake Belasco, smirking into the TV camera. “There ain’t no aliens and there never was.”

  The blond interviewer had gathered enough of a crowd around her and her cameraman that she was glad the station had sent a couple of uniformed security lugs along. The shopping mall was fairly busy at this time of the afternoon and the crowd was building up fast. Too bad the first “man in the street” she picked to interview turned out to be this beer-smelling yahoo.

  “So you don’t believe the aliens actually exist,” replied the interviewer, struggling to keep her smile in place. “But the government seems to be taking the alien spacecraft seriously.”