New Frontiers

by Ben Bova

  “Yes, but how much—”

  “We spent wisely,” the pope continued, his eyes glowing. “We invested in the future. We started to rebuild the world, and that gained us the gratitude and loyalty of half the world.”

  “What should I invest in now?” Jason asked.

  Michael turned slightly away from him. “There’s a new morality out there, a new world of faith and respect for authority. The world you knew is gone forever, Jace. We’ve ended hunger. We’ve stabilized the world’s population—without artificial birth control.”

  Jason could not help smiling at his brother. “You’re still against contraception.”

  “Some things don’t change. A sin is still a sin.”

  “You thought temporary suicide was a sin,” Jason reminded him.

  “It still is,” said the Pope, utterly serious.

  “But you help people to freeze themselves! You just told me—”

  Michael put a hand on Jason’s shoulder. “Jace, just because those poor frightened souls entrust their money to Holy Mother Church doesn’t mean that they’re not committing a mortal sin when they kill themselves.”

  “But it’s not suicide! I’m here, I’m alive again!”

  “Legally, you’re dead.”

  “But that—” Jason’s breath caught in his throat. He did not like the glitter in Michael’s eye.

  “Holy Mother Church cannot condone suicide, Jace.”

  “But you benefit from it!”

  “God moves in mysterious ways. We use the money that sinners bestow upon us to help make the world a better place. But they are still sinners.”

  A terrible realization was beginning to take shape in Jason’s frightened mind. “How … how many freezees have you revived?” he asked in a trembling voice.

  “You are the first,” his brother answered. “And the last.”

  “But you can’t leave them frozen! You promised to revive them!”

  Pope Michael shook his head slowly, a look on his face more of pity than sorrow. “We promised to revive you, Jace. We made no such promises to the rest of them. We agreed only to look after them and maintain them until they could be cured of whatever it was that killed them.”

  “But that means you’ve got to revive them.”

  A wintry smile touched the corners of the pope’s lips. “No, it does not. The contract is quite specific. Our best lawyers have honed it to perfection. Many of them are Jesuits, you know. The contract gives the Church the authority to decide when to revive them. We keep them frozen.”

  Jason could feel his heart thumping against his ribs. “But why would anybody come to you to be frozen when nobody’s been revived? Don’t they realize—”

  “No, they don’t realize, Jace. That’s the most beautiful part of it. We control the media very thoroughly. And when a person is facing the certainty of death, you would be shocked at how few questions are asked. We offer life after death, just as we always have. They interpret our offer in their own way.”

  Jason sagged against the stone balustrade. “You mean that even with all the advances in medicine you’ve made, they still haven’t gotten wise?”

  “Despite all our medical advances, people still die. And the rich still want to avoid it, if they can. That’s when they run to us.”

  “And you screw them out of their money.”

  Michael’s face hardened. “Jace, the Church has scrupulously kept its end of our bargain with you. We have kept watch over you for more than half a century, and we revived you as soon as your disease became curable, just as I agreed to. But what good does a new life do you when your immortal soul is in danger of damnation?”

  “I didn’t commit suicide,” Jason insisted.

  “What you have done—what all the freezees have done—is considered suicide in every court of the Western world.”

  “The Church controls the courts?”

  “All of them,” Michael replied. He heaved a sad, patient sigh, then said, “Holy Mother Church’s mission is to save souls, not bodies. We’re going to save your soul, Jace. Now.”

  Jason saw that the six Swiss Guards were standing just inside the French windows, waiting for him.

  “You’ve been through it before, Jace,” his brother told him. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  Terrified, Jason shrieked, “You’re going to murder me?”

  “It isn’t murder, Jace. We’re simply going to freeze you again. You’ll go down into the catacombs with all the others.”

  “But I’m cured, dammit! I’m all right now!”

  “It’s for the salvation of your soul, Jace. It’s your penance for committing the sin of suicide.”

  “You’re freezing me so you can keep all my money! You’re keeping all the others frozen so you can keep their money, too!”

  “It’s for their own good,” said Pope Michael. He nodded to the guards, who stepped onto the balcony and took Jason in their grasp.

  “It’s like the goddamned Inquisition!” Jason yelled. “Burning people at the stake to save their souls!”

  “It’s for the best, Jace,” Pope Michael I said as the guards dragged Jason away. “It’s for the good of the world. It’s for the good of the Church, for the good of your immortal soul.”

  Struggling against the guards, Jason pleaded, “How long will you keep me under? When will you revive me again?”

  The Pope shrugged. “Holy Mother Church has lasted more than two thousand years, Jace. But what’s a millennium or two when you’re waiting for the final trump?”

  “Mike!” Jason howled. “For God’s sake!”

  “God’s a lot smarter than both of us,” Michael said grimly. “Trust me.”

  With special thanks to Michael Bienes

  INTRODUCTION TO

  “THE QUESTION”

  One of the new frontiers that we will face—sooner or later—is the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.

  Radio astronomers have been searching for intelligent signals from the stars for more than half a century. Despite a few false alarms, no such signals have been found. Why?

  One possibility is the sheer size of the starry universe. Our Milky Way galaxy alone contains more than a hundred billion stars, and there are billions of galaxies out there. How many of them harbor intelligence and civilizations?

  Another possibility is that we’re using the wrong equipment. To expect alien creatures to be beaming radio signals across the parsecs is probably naïve. If such civilizations exist, they are most likely using very different technologies.

  My own opinion is that alien civilizations are alien. They don’t think the way we do. They have different priorities, different desires, different needs.

  “The Question” is my humble attempt to depict what might happen if and when we do make contact. I was guided by the famous maxim of the twentieth-century English geneticist J. B. S. Haldane: “The universe is not only queerer than we imagine—it is queerer that we can imagine.”

  See what you think.

  THE QUESTION

  As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.

  —NOAM CHOMSKY

  THE DISCOVERER

  NOT MANY MEN choose their honeymoon site for its clear night skies, nor do they leave their beds in the predawn hours to climb up to the roof of their rented cottage. At least Hal Jacobs’s bride understood his strange passion.

  Linda Krauss-Jacobs, like her husband, was an amateur astronomer. In fact, the couple had met at a summer outing of the South Connecticut Astronomical Society. Now, however, she shivered in the moonless dark of the chill New Mexico night as Jacobs wrestled with the small but powerful electronically boosted telescope he was trying to set up on the sloping roof, muttering to himself as he worked in the dark.

  “It’ll be dawn soon,” Linda warned.

  “Yeah,” said Hal. “Then we get back to bed.”

  That thought did not displease Linda. She was not as dedicated a
n astronomer as her husband. Maybe dedicated isn’t the right word, she thought. Fanatic would be more like it. Still, there were three comets in the solar system that bore the Jacobs name, and he was intent on discovering more, honeymoon or not.

  His mutterings and fumblings ceased. Linda knew he had the little telescope working at last.

  “Can I see?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said, without looking up from the tiny display screen. “In a min— Hey! Look at that!”

  Stepping carefully on the rounded roof tiles, he moved over enough so that she could peek over his shoulder at the cold green-tinted screen. A fuzzy blob filled its center.

  “There wasn’t anything like that in that location last night,” Jacobs said, his voice trembling slightly.

  “Is it a comet?” Linda wondered aloud.

  “Got to be,” he said. Then he added, “And a big one, too. Look how bright it is!”

  THE RADIO ASTRONOMER

  “IT’S NOT A comet,” said Ellis de Groot. “That much is definite.”

  He was sitting behind his desk, leaning far back in his comfortable, worn old leather swivel chair, his booted feet resting on the edge of the desk. Yet he looked grim, worried. A dozen photographs of Comet Jacobs-Kawanashi were strewn across the desktop.

  “How can you be so sure?” asked Brian Martinson, who sat in front of the desk, his eyes on the computer-enhanced photos. Martinson was still young, but he was already balding and his once-trim waistline had expanded from too many hours spent at consoles and in classrooms and not enough fresh air and exercise. Even so, his mind was sharp and quick; he had been the best astronomy student de Groot had ever had. He now ran the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia.

  De Groot was old enough to be Martinson’s father, gray and balding, his face lined from years of squinting at telescope images and wheedling university officials and politicians for enough funding to continue searching the universe. He wore a rumpled open-necked plaid shirt and Levis so faded and shabby that they were the envy of the university’s entire student body.

  He swung his legs off the desk and leaned forward, toward the younger man. Tapping a forefinger on one of the photos, he lowered his voice to a whisper:

  “Only nine people in the whole country know about this. We haven’t released this information to the media yet, or even put it on the Net…” He paused dramatically.

  “What is it?” Martinson asked, leaning forward himself.

  “This so-called comet has taken up an orbit around Jupiter.”

  Martinson’s jaw dropped open.

  “It’s not a natural event,” de Groot went on. “We got a couple of NASA people to analyze the orbital mechanics. The thing was on a hyperbolic trajectory through the solar system. It applied thrust, altered its trajectory, and established a highly eccentric orbit around Jupiter. Over the course of the past three days it has circularized that orbit.”

  “It’s intelligent,” Martinson said, his voice hollow with awe.

  “Got to be,” agreed de Groot. “That’s why we want you to try to establish radio contact with it.”

  THE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR

  BRIAN MARTINSON FELT out of place in this basement office. He had gone through four separate security checkpoints to get into the stuffy little underground room, including a massive Marine Corps sergeant in full-dress uniform with a huge gun holstered at his hip, impassive and unshakable as a robot. But what really bothered him was the thought that the president of the United States was just upstairs from here, in the Oval Office.

  The woman who glared at him from across her desk looked tough enough to lead a regiment of Marines into battle—which she had done, earlier in her career. Now Jo Costanza had even weightier responsibilities.

  “You’re saying that this is a spacecraft, piloted by intelligent alien creatures?” she asked. Her voice was diamond hard. The business suit she wore was a no-nonsense navy blue, her only jewelry a bronze Marine Corps eagle, globe, and anchor on its lapel.

  “It’s a spacecraft,” said Martinson. “Whether it’s crewed or not we simply don’t know.”

  “It’s made no reply to your messages?”

  “No, but—”

  “Who authorized you to send messages to it?” snapped the third person in the office, a bland-looking guy with thinning slicked-back sandy hair and rimless eyeglasses that made him look owlish. He was wearing a light-gray silk suit with a striped red and gray tie.

  Martinson had put on the only suit he possessed for this meeting, the one he saved for international symposia; it was a conservative dark blue, badly wrinkled, and tight around the middle. Clearing his throat nervously, he replied, “Dr. Ogilvy authorized trying to make contact. He’s head of the radio astronomy section of the National Science Foundation. That’s where our funding comes from, and—”

  “They went by protocol,” Costanza said, making it sound as if she wished otherwise.

  “But this is a national security matter,” snapped the anonymous man.

  “This is a global security matter,” Martinson said.

  Costanza and the other man stared at him.

  “The spacecraft broke out of Jupiter’s orbit this morning,” Martinson told them.

  “It’s heading here!” Costanza said in a breathless whisper.

  “No,” said Martinson. “It’s heading out of the solar system.”

  Before they could sigh with relief, he added, “But it’s sent us a message.”

  “I thought you said it made no reply!”

  “It hasn’t replied to our messages,” Martinson said wearily. “But it’s sent a message of its own.”

  He pulled his digital recorder out of his jacket pocket.

  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 were 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 message 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.

  “It’s searching for the start of the English section,” he said as the little machine clicked and chirped. “They sent the same message in more than a hundred different languages.”

  The chirping stopped and a rich, pleasant baritone voice came from the digital recorder:

  “Greetings 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 digital 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 wiseass 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.”