New Frontiers (15 page)

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.”

“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?”