“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.”

“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?”