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  “Ahhh, it’s all a lotta baloney to pump more money into NASA. You wait, you’ll see. There ain’t no aliens and there never was.”

  “Well, thank you for your opinion,” the interviewer said. She turned slightly and stuck her microphone under the nose of a sweet-faced young woman with startling blue eyes.

  “And do you think the aliens are nothing more than a figment of NASA’s public relations efforts?”

  “Oh no,” the young woman replied, in a soft voice. “No, the aliens are very real.”

  “You believe the government, then.”

  “I know the aliens exist. They took me aboard their spacecraft when I was nine years old.”

  The interviewer closed her eyes and silently counted to ten as the young woman began to explain in intimate detail the medical procedures that the aliens subjected her to.

  “I’m carrying their seed now,” she said, still as sweetly as a mother crooning a lullaby. “My babies will all be half aliens.”

  The interviewer wanted to move on to somebody reasonably sane, but the sweet young woman was gripping her microphone with both hands and would not let go.

  THE CHAIRMAN

  “PEOPLE, IF WE can’t come up with a satisfactory question, the politicians are going to take the matter out of our hands!”

  The meeting hall was nearly half filled, with more men and women arriving every minute. Too many, Madeleine Dubois thought as she stood at the podium with the rest of the committee seated on the stage behind her. Head of the National Science Foundation’s astronomy branch, she had the dubious responsibility of coming up with a recommendation from the American astronomical community for The Question—before noon, Washington time.

  “Are you naïve enough to think for one minute,” challenged a portly, bearded young astronomer, “that the politicians are going to listen to what we say?”

  Dubois had battled her way through glass ceilings in academia and government. She had no illusions, but she recognized an opportunity when she saw one.

  “They’ll have no choice but to accept our recommendation,” she said, with one eye on the news reporters sitting in their own section of the big auditorium. “We represent the only uninterested, unbiased group in the country. We speak for science, for the betterment of the human race. Who else has been actively working to find extraterrestrial intelligence for all these many years?”

  To her credit, Dubois had worked out a protocol with the International Astronomical Union, after two days of frantic, frenzied negotiations. Each member nation’s astronomers would decide on a question, then the Union’s executive committee—of which she was chair this year—would vote on the various suggestions.

  By noon, she told herself, we’ll present The Question we’ve chosen to the leaders of every government on Earth. And to the news media, of course. The politicians will have to accept our choice. There’ll only be about seven hours left before the deadline falls.

  She had tried to keep this meeting as small as possible, yet by the time every committee within the astronomy branch of NSF had been notified, several hundred men and women had hurried to Washington to participate. Each of them had her or his own idea of what The Question should be.

  Dubois knew what she wanted to ask: What was the state of the universe before the Big Bang? She had never been able to accept the concept that all the matter and energy of the universe originated out of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum. Even if that was right, it meant that a vacuum existed before the Big Bang, and where did that come from?

  So patiently, tirelessly, she tried to lead the several hundred astronomers toward a consensus on The Question. Within two hours she gave up trying to get her question accepted; within four hours she was despairing of reaching any agreement at all.

  Brian Martinson sat in a back row of the auditorium, watching his colleagues wrangle like lawyers. No, worse, he thought. They’re behaving like cosmologists!

  An observational astronomer who believed in hard data, Martinson had always considered cosmologists to be theologians of astronomy. They took a pinch of observational data and added tons of speculation, carefully disguised as mathematical formulations. Every time a new observation was made, the cosmologists invented seventeen new explanations for it—most of them contradicting one another.

  He sighed. This is getting us no place. There won’t be an agreement here, any more than there was one in the Oval Office, five days ago. He peered at his wristwatch, then pushed himself out of the chair.

  The man sitting next to him asked, “You’re leaving? Now?”

  “Got to,” Martinson explained over the noise of rancorous shouting. “I’ve got an Air Force jet waiting to take me to Arecibo.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m supposed to be supervising the big dish when we ask The Question.” Martinson looked around at his red-faced, flustered colleagues, then added, “If we ever come to an agreement on what it should be.”

  THE DICTATOR

  “ARECIBO IS ONLY a few hours from here, by jet transport,” the dictator repeated, staring out the ceiling-high windows of his office at the troops assembled on the plaza below. “Our paratroops can get there and seize the radio telescope facility well before eighteen hundred hours.”

  His minister of foreign affairs, a career diplomat who had survived four coups d’etat and two revolutions by the simple expedient of agreeing with whichever clique seized power, cast a dubious eye at his latest Maximum Leader.

  “A military attack on Puerto Rico is an attack on the United States,” he said, as mildly as he could, considering the wretched state of his stomach.

  The dictator turned to glare at him. “So?”

  “The Yankees will not let an attack on their territory go unanswered. They will strike back at us.”

  The dictator toyed with his luxuriant moustache, a maneuver he used whenever he wanted to hide inner misgivings. At last he laughed and said, “What can the gringos do, once I have asked the Question?”

  The foreign minister knew better than to argue. He simply sat in the leather wing chair and stared at the dictator, who looked splendid in his full-dress military uniform with all the medals and the sash of office crossing his proud chest.

  “Yes,” the dictator went on, convincing himself (if not his foreign minister), “it is all so simple. While the scientists and world leaders fumble and agonize over what The Question should be, I—your Maximum Leader—knew instantly what I wanted to ask. I knew it! Without a moment of hesitation.”

  The spacious, high-ceilinged palace room seemed strangely warm to the foreign minister. He pulled the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and mopped his fevered brow.

  “Yes,” the dictator was going on, congratulating himself, “while the philosophers and weaklings try to reach an agreement, I act. I seize the radio telescope and send to the alien visitors The Question. My question!”

  “The man of action always knows what to do,” the foreign minister parroted.

  “Exactly! I knew what The Question should be, what it must be. How can I rule the world? What other question matters?”

  “But to ask it, you must have the Arecibo facility in your grasp.”

  “For only a few hours. Even one single hour will do.”

  “Can your troops operate the radio telescope?”

  A cloud flickered across the dictator’s face, but it passed almost as soon as it appeared.

  “No, of course not,” he replied genially. “They are soldiers, not scientists. But the scientists who make up the staff at Arecibo will operate the radio telescope for us.”

  “You are certain…?”

  “With guns at their heads?” The dictator threw his head back and laughed. “Yes, they will do what they are told. We may have to shoot one or two, to convince the others, but they will do what they are told, never fear.”

  “And afterward? How do the troops get away?”

  The dictator shrugged. “There has not been enough time to plan for
removing them from Arecibo.”

  Eyes widening, stomach clenching, the foreign minister gasped. “You’re going to leave them there?”

  “They are all volunteers.”

  “And when the Yankee Marines arrive? What then?”

  “What difference? By then I will have the answer from the aliens. What are the lives of a handful of martyrs compared to the glory of ruling the entire world?”

  The foreign minister struggled to his feet. “You must forgive me, my leader. My stomach…”

  And he lurched toward the bathroom, hoping he could keep himself from retching until he got to the toilet.

  THE RADIO ASTRONOMER

  AT LEAST THE military was operating efficiently, Brian Martinson thought as he winged at supersonic speed high above the Atlantic. An Air Force sedan had been waiting for him in front of the NSF headquarters; its sergeant driver whisked him quickly through the downtown Washington traffic and out to Andrews Air Force Base, where a sleek swept-wing, twin-jet VIP plane was waiting to fly him to Puerto Rico.

  Looking idly through the small window at his side, his mind filled with conflicting ideas about the aliens and The Question, Martinson realized that he could actually see the Gulf Stream slicing through the colder Atlantic waters, a bright blue ribbon of warmth and life against the steely gray of the ocean.

  Looking out to the flat horizon he could make out the ghost of a quarter Moon hanging in the bright sky. Somewhere beyond the Moon, far, far beyond it, the aliens in their spacecraft were already on their way out of the solar system.

  What do they want of us? Martinson wondered. Why did they bother to make contact with us at all, if all they’re willing to do is answer one damned question? Maybe they’re not such good guys. Maybe this is all a weird plot to get us to tear ourselves apart. One question. Half the world is arguing with the other half over what The Question should be. With only a few hours left, they still haven’t been able to decide.

  Sure, he thought to himself, it could all be a setup. They tell us we can ask one question, knowing that we might end up fighting a goddamned war over what The Question should be. What better way to divide us and then walk in and take over the remains?

  No, a saner voice in his mind answered. That’s paranoid stupidity. Their spacecraft is already zooming out of the solar system, heading high above the ecliptic. They won’t get within a couple of light hours of Earth, for God’s sake. They’re not coming to invade us. By this time tomorrow they’ll be on their way to Epsilon Eridani, near as I can figure their trajectory.

  But what better way to divide us? he repeated silently. They couldn’t have figured out a more diabolical method of driving us all nuts if they tried.

  THE TEENAGERS

  “I THINK IT’S way cool,” said Andy Hitchcock, as he lounged in the shade of the last oak tree left in Oak Park Acres.

  “You mean the aliens?” asked Bob Wolfe, his inseparable buddy.

  “Yeah, sure. Aliens from outer space. Imagine the stuff they must have. Coolisimo, Bobby boy.”

  “I guess.”

  The two teenagers had been riding their bikes through the quiet winding streets of Oak Park Acres most of the morning. They should have been in school, but the thought of another dreary day of classes while there were aliens up in the sky and the TV was full of people arguing about what The Question ought to be—it was too much to expect a guy to sit still in school while all this was going on.

  Andy fished his cell phone from his jeans and thumbed the FM radio app. Didn’t matter which station, they were all broadcasting nothing but news about The Question. Even the hardest rock stations were filled with talk instead of music. Not even bong-bong was going out on the air this morning.

  “… still no official statement from the White House,” an announcer’s deep voice was saying, “where the president is meeting in the Oval Office with the leaders of Congress and his closest advisors—

  Tap. Andy changed the station. “… trading has been suspended for the day here at the stock exchange as all eyes turn skyward—”

  Tap. “… European community voted unanimously to send a note of protest to the United Nations concerning the way in which the General Assembly has failed—”

  Tap. Andy turned the radio off.

  “Those fartbrains still haven’t figured out what The Question will be,” Bob said, with the calm assurance that anyone older than he himself shouldn’t really have the awesome power of making decisions, anyway.

  “They better decide soon,” Andy said, peering at his wristwatch. “There’s only a few hours left.”

  “They’ll come up with something.”

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  Both boys were silent for a while, sprawled out on the grass beneath the tree, their bikes resting against its trunk.

  “Man, I know what I’d ask those aliens,” Bob said at last.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “How can I ace the SATs? That’s what I’d ask.”

  Andy thought a moment, then nodded. “Good thing you’re not in charge, pal.”

  THE RADIO ASTRONOMER

  BRIAN MARTINSON HAD never seen an astronomical facility so filled with tension.

  Radio telescope observatories usually looked like the basement of an electronics hobby shop, crammed with humming consoles and jury-rigged wiring, smelling of fried circuit boards and stale pizza, music blaring from computer CD slots—anything from heavy metal to Mahler symphonies.

  Today was different. People were still dressed in their usual tropical casual style: their cutoffs and sandals made Martinson feel stuffy in the suit he’d worn for the meeting in Washington. But the Arecibo facility was deathly quiet except for the ever-present buzz of the equipment. Everyone looked terribly uptight, pale, nervous.

  After a routine tour of the facility, Martinson settled into the director’s office, where he could look out the window at the huge metal-mesh–covered dish carved into the lush green hillside. Above the thousand-foot-wide reflector dangled the actual antenna, with its exquisitely tuned maser cooled down and ready to go.

  The director herself sat at her desk, fidgeting nervously with the desktop computer, busying herself with it for the last few hours to the deadline. She was an older woman, streaks of gray in her buzz-cut hair, bone thin, dressed in a faded pair of cutoff jeans and a T-shirt that hung limply from her narrow shoulders. Martinson wondered how she could keep from shivering in the icy blast coming from the air-conditioning vents.

  There were three separate telephone consoles on the desk: one was a direct line to the White House, one a special link to the UN secretary general’s office in New York. Martinson had asked the woman in charge of communications to keep a third line open for Madeleine Dubois, who—for all he knew—was still trying to bring order out of the chaotic meeting at NSF headquarters.

  He looked at his wristwatch. Four p.m. We’ve got three hours to go. Midnight Greenwich time is seven p.m. here. Three hours.

  He felt hungry. A bad sign. Whenever he was really wired tight, he got the nibbles. His weight problem had started during the final exams of his senior undergrad year and had continued right through graduate school and his postdoc. He kept expecting things to settle down, but the higher he went in the astronomical community the more responsibility he shouldered. And the more pressure he felt, the more he felt the urge to munch.

  What do I do if the White House tells me one thing and the UN something else? he wondered. No, that won’t happen. They’ll work it out between them. Dubois will present the IAU’s recommendation to the president and the secretary general at the same time.

  Across the desk, the director tapped frenetically on her keyboard. What could she be doing? Martinson wondered. Busywork, came his answer. Keeping her fingers moving; it’s better than gnawing your nails.

  He turned his squeaking plastic chair to look out the window again. Gazing out at the lush tropical forest beyond the rim of the telescope dish, he tried to calm the rising tension in his own gu
t. The phone will ring any second now, he told himself. They’ll give you The Question and you send it out to the aliens and that’ll be that.

  What if you don’t like their choice? Martinson asked himself. Doesn’t matter. When the White House talks, you listen. The only possible problem would be if Washington and the UN aren’t in synch.

  The late afternoon calm was shattered by the roar of planes, several of them, flying low. Big planes, from the sound of it. Martinson felt the floor tremble beneath his feet.

  The director looked up from her display screen, an angry scowl on her face. “What kind of brain-dead jerks are flying over us? This airspace is restricted!”

  Martinson saw the planes: big lumbering four-engined jobs, six of them in two neat V’s.

  “Goddamned news media,” the director grumbled.

  “Six planes?” Martinson countered. “I don’t think so. They looked like military jets.”

  “Didn’t see any Air Force stars on ’em.”

  “They went by so fast…”

  His words died in his throat. Through the window he saw dozens of parachutes dotting the soft blue sky, drifting slowly, gracefully to the ground.

  “What the hell?” the director growled.

  His heart clutching in his chest, Martinson feared that he knew what was happening.

  “Do you have a pair of binoculars handy?” he croaked, surprised at how dry his throat was.

  The director wordlessly opened a drawer in her desk, reached in, and handed Martinson a heavy leather case. With fumbling hands he opened it and pulled out a big black set of binoculars.

  “Good way to check out the antenna without leaving my office,” she explained, tight-lipped.

  Martinson put the lenses to his eyes and adjusted the focus. His hands were shaking so badly now that he had to lean his forearms against the windowsill.

  The parachutists came into view. They wore camouflage military uniforms. He could see assault rifles and other weapons slung over their shoulders.

  “Parachute troops,” he whispered.