“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.”
