The Question

The President of the United States

His nervousness, Martinson realized, had not stemmed from being in the White House. It came from the message he carried. Now that he had played it, and explained it, to the National Security Advisor and her aide, he felt almost at ease as they led him upstairs to the Oval Office.

The President looked smaller than he did on television, but that square-jawed face was recognizable anywhere. And the famous steel-gray eyes, the “laser eyes” that the media made so much of: they seemed to be boring into Martinson, making him feel as if the President was trying to x-ray him.

After Martinson explained the situation once again, though, both he and the President relaxed a bit.

“Then this thing is no threat to us,” said the President.

“No sir, it’s not,” Martinson replied. “It’s an opportunity. You might say it’s a godsend.”

“Let me hear that tape again,” the President said.

Martinson pushed buttons on the recorder. It had not left his hand since he’d first yanked it out of his pocket in the National Security Advisor’s office. His hand had been sweaty then, but now it barely trembled.

“I’m running it back to the start of the English section,” he said as the little machine whirred. “They sent the same message in more than a hundred different languages.”

The whirring stopped and a rich, pleasant baritone voice came from the tape recorder:

“Greeting to the English-speaking people of Earth. We are pleased to find intelligence wherever in the universe it may exist. We have finished our survey of your planetary system and are now leaving for our next destination. As a token of our esteem and good will, we will answer one question from your planet. Ask us anything you wish, and we will answer it to the best and fullest of our ability. But it can be one question only. You have seven of your days to contact us. After local midnight at your Greenwich meridian on the seventh day we will no longer reply to you.”

The click of the tape recorder’s off switch sounded like a rifle shot in the Oval Office.

The President heaved a long sigh. “They must have a sense of humor,” he murmured.

“It’s a hoax,” said the four-star Air Force general sitting to one side of the President’s desk. “Some wise-ass scientists have cooked up this scheme to get more funding for themselves.”

“I resent that,” Martinson said, with a tight smile. “And your own receivers must have picked up the message, it was sent in the broadest spectrum I’ve ever seen. Ask your technical specialists to trace the origin of the message. It came from the alien spacecraft.”

The general made a sour face.

“You’re certain that it’s genuine, then,” said the President.

“Yes, sir, I am,” Martinson replied. “Kind of strange, but genuine.”

“One question,” muttered the President’s science advisor, a man Martinson had once heard lecture at MIT.

“One question. That’s all they’ll answer.”

“But why just one question?” Costanza demanded, her brow furrowed. “What’s the point?”

“I suppose we could ask them why they’ve limited us to one question,” said the science advisor.

“But that would count as our one question, wouldn’t it?” Martinson pointed out.

The President turned to his science advisor. “Phil, how long would it take us to get out there and make physical contact with the alien ship?”

The bald old man shook his head sadly. “We simply don’t have the resources to send a crewed mission in less than a decade. Even an unmanned spacecraft would need two years after launch, more or less, to reach the vicinity of Jupiter.”

“They’d be long gone by then,” said Costanza.

“They’ll be out of the Solar System in a week,” Martinson said.

“One question,” the President repeated.

“What should it be?”

“That’s simple,” said the Air Force general. “Ask them how their propulsion system works. If they can travel interstellar distances their propulsion system must be able to handle incredible energies. Get that and we’ve got the world by the tail!”

“Do you think they’d tell us?”

“They said they’d answer any question we ask.”

“I would be more inclined to ask a more general question,” said the science advisor, “such as how they reconcile quantum dynamics with relativistic gravity.”

“Bullcrap!” the general snapped. “That won’t do us any good.”

“But it would,” the science advisor countered. “If we can reconcile all the forces we will have unraveled the final secrets of physics. Everything else will fall into our laps.”

“Too damned theoretical,” the general insisted. “We’ve got the opportunity to get some hard, practical information and you want them to do your math homework for you.”

The President’s chief of staff, who had been silent up until this moment, said, “Well, what I’d like to know is how we can cure cancer and other diseases.”

“AIDS,” said the President. “If we could get a cure for AIDS during my administration—”

Costanza said, “Maybe the general’s right. Their propulsion system could be adapted to other purposes, I imagine.”

“Like weaponry,” said the science advisor, with obvious distaste.

Martinson listened to them wrangling. His own idea was to ask the aliens about the Big Bang and how old the Universe was.

Their voices rose. Everyone in the Oval Office had his or her own idea of what The Question should be. The argument became heated.

Finally the President hushed them all with a curt gesture. “If the eight people in this room can’t come to an agreement, imagine what Congress is going to do with this problem.”

“You’re going to tell Congress about this?”

“Got to,” the President replied unhappily. “The aliens have sent this message out to every major language group in the world, according to Dr. Martinson. It’s not a secret anymore.”

“Congress.” The general groaned.

“That’s nothing,” said Costanza. “Wait till the United Nations sinks their teeth into this.”