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 dryly. “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 table top. “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 blonde 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 beersmelling yahoo.
“So you don’t believe the aliens actually exist,” replied the blonde 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.