The LONG Question

"We promised you folks something special this week," Larry Lonigan said, his smile glittering under the bright lights of the studio. "And Win-a-Mint always keeps its promises, don't we? So, folks, tonight we're putting up the biggest mint offered yet on this program ... one hundred thousand dollars!"

The applause was deafening.

"Now, then, here's the young man you all remember, the boy who hit the top money on our little group quiz last week, and earned the right to Win-a-Mint! Here he is, Mr. Don Gerson! Come on out, Don!"

Don Gerson was a tall, thin young man with a serious look. He did not wear glasses, but somehow he looked as if he ought to. He walked onto the stage with a kind of forced confidence and shook hands with Lonigan.

"Now, then, Don, we haven't told you very much about what we're going to do for you, have we?" Lonigan asked.

"No, sir."

"So I think it'll be as big a surprise to you as it will to our audience." Lonigan laughed, and looked archly into the cameras. "But first, we'll have to introduce you all over again, for anybody who didn't see the fine show you put up for us last week. How old are you, Don?"

"Twenty-eight."

"And you're not married, are you? Engaged? Do you trust your girl friend not to go out with other fellows if you aren't handy?"

"Well, I don't know ..." Gerson grinned shyly.

"Did you tell her you'd be going away for a little while?" Lonigan asked, winking at the cameras.

"That's what I've been told," Gerson said.

"Uh huh. But we didn't tell you anything else, did we? Did your boss give you a leave of absence?"

"Oh, yes."

"Tell us, Don, what do you do for a living?"

"I'm an accountant."

Lonigan's grin grew wider. "Yes, folks, Don works for the great National American Insurance Company, of which you've all heard. We asked them to let us borrow Don here for two months, and they've been kind enough to agree. Now, working in insurance, Don, I guess you've gotten pretty good at logical predictions, eh? I mean, isn't it part of the insurance business to guess what's likely to happen?"

"I'd say it was." Don Gerson was looking mildly puzzled.

"Well, Don, we've set up a situation where you'll get a chance to guess what's happening next, and if you guess right, even halfway, you'll Win-a-Mint!" Lonigan boomed the last words impressively, and the orchestra blasted the theme chords into his words.

"Here's what we're going to do, Don," Lonigan went on. "You're going to go down to the airport, where we've got a special helicopter waiting. Our copter will take you to the island of Santa Antonia, two hundred miles off the coast. It's a lovely island, Don ... you'll really like it. There's a comfortable little house there, and we've had the place all stocked up for you. There's even a nice big deep-freeze from the Handi-Freezo people, filled right up to the top."

Lonigan paused, to get the effect.

"Of course," he continued, "There isn't anyone else on the island. Nobody at all! And no radio, no newspapers, no way at all to hear from the outside world. Yes sir, Don, you'll be a real Robinson Crusoe. But just think, for two months, you'll get paid your regular salary; we're taking care of that. You can read, fish, think, maybe even write a book if you feel like it. Ever think about writing a book, Don?"

Gerson opened his mouth, but he was apparently too surprised to answer for a moment. Then he shook his head.

"No-o, but maybe, with all that time...."

"Well, Don, you can certainly read, if you feel like it," Lonigan went on. "Because we've put plenty of good, solid books on the island for you. There's fiction, of course, and textbooks on history, and encyclopedias.... Now, what do you think you could do with all that information in those books?"

"Well...."

"I'll tell you what you'd better do, Don." Lonigan's eyes flicked to the studio clock, and his voice speeded up imperceptibly. "Read up, Don boy. Because we're going to bring you into this studio two months from now, when our program resumes in the fall season. And we're going to ask you a dozen questions about things that have been happening in the meantime—people, places, and current events. If you can't answer at least six of those questions right, we'll be awfully sorry!"

The audience roared again.

"But if you can answer them, just six out of the dozen, you'll Win-a-Mint!" Again the theme music. "Now, Don, how about it? Think you can do it?"

"I'll try, sir." Gerson looked a little pale, but resolute.

"All right, folks, give our new Robinson Crusoe a big hand, and be sure you're watching when we bring him back to try to Win-a-Mint!" And the clock blinked a red light. Right on the button, Lonigan thought.

The helicopter droned out over the open sea in the afternoon sun. It was much noisier than the airliner that had been Gerson's only other trip into the upper air, he thought, looking ahead. The island was not yet visible.

"Think you'll win the hundred thousand?" the pilot asked, speaking loudly. He was a young man of Gerson's own age, with a cheerful round face.

"What? Oh ... I certainly hope so." Gerson peered out over the smooth water. "How long a trip is it?"

"Oh, not so long now," the pilot assured him. "Nice little island, too. I wouldn't mind this deal even if I didn't get the money. It's a first class vacation, hey?"

"I guess it is," Gerson said. "Kind of lonesome, though."

"Well, if they'd sent a girl too, you might not want to come back," the pilot grinned. "Anyway, think about all that money. That'll keep you from feeling too lonesome."

Gerson smiled back at him.

"I sure could do a lot with it," he said.

"I remember getting stuck up at Thule Two, up in the Arctic, when I was flying commercial last year," the pilot said. "Nobody there but a radio man and another pilot. Too cold to go outside, even. That's what I'd call lonesome."

On the horizon, a blue-green ridge began to lift above the water line.

"There it is," said the pilot. "Be there in another five minutes."

The copter landed on a long, smooth beach, with a picture postcard ocean lapping at the white sand. The pilot showed Don around the place with an almost proprietorial pride, pointing out the various conveniences, and giving advice.

"The house is a real doll," he told Don. "Never lived in. A rich fella owned the place, and was going to use it for vacations, but he never got around to it. Incidentally, it'll be for sale when the stunt's over. Whopping price, too, I'll bet."

There was hot and cold running water, an electrical system powered by a gas engine, furniture, even a pair of swimming trunks hanging in a closet with other clothes.

"There's a laugh," the pilot observed, pointing to the trunks. "You won't need them."

"Well, if I go swimming ..." Don said.

"The swimming's fine, but you won't have any company to worry about what you wear," the pilot said. Don had never been entirely alone in his life; it took him a moment to grasp this small detail in the picture of his immediate future.

"Oh," he said, doubtfully. "Well, you know there's seaweed and all that...."

As a matter of fact, there was very little seaweed. The water was warm, and the days that followed were cloudless perfection; the nights were cool, and there was always a steady sea-breeze.

At first, for a few days, Don Gerson found himself moving in a pattern which resembled his normal life very closely. He awoke at seven; in fact, on the first morning, he found himself compelled to rise at once and dress. That first morning, he had an odd, lost feeling; there was no office to go to, no schedule of work to follow, no fixed orbit.

He began the first day by shaving and cooking himself what, for him, was a large breakfast. He thought about going for a swim, but remembered the rule he had been given once, about not swimming for two hours after eating.

The clothes that hung in the closets were not what he would have selected himself, but they were comfortable, and they fitted. He dressed in slacks and an open-necked shirt; then proceeded to investigate the library.

For a few days his pattern was like that of this first day. He read the back-number piles of news magazines, the books analyzing current politics and history; he ate at regular intervals, and twice he went swimming for short periods. On both occasions he wore the trunks, and the second swim was very short. He came out of the water feeling as if, as he said to himself, "there wasn't anything to it." In his life, swimming alone had never seemed to happen.

Don hardly noticed the pattern beginning to fray apart. On the fifth day he overslept, and did not get up until nearly eleven. That night he felt wakeful, and at midnight, he ate sardines and beans. He left the cans on the kitchen table, and did not drop them into the pit behind the house as he had been doing.

The next morning he did not rise till noon. In fact, he did not even wind the alarm clock. It ran down the same day, and he tried to guess at the time when he set it.

There was a typewriter, and a stack of paper. Don began to set down his general view of the way that events would be happening in the outside world, trying to anticipate every possible question. He assumed, to begin with, that the questions would not be too obscure; but that left a large area of possibilities, anyway.

Each day he wrote for several hours, and read for several more. Sometimes he would get too interested in some line of reading that would take him into areas which, he felt, would not be likely to enter the questions. At first he pulled himself out of those lines with an abrupt snapping shut of the offending book. But for three days he got farther and farther afield on a line that began with a book on a recent archaeological expedition and led him through a file of National Geographics, clear back to the article on Ancient Egypt in the encyclopedia. From that point he found it harder and harder to guess at the possible line that the questions might take, and he wrote on in any direction his fancy took.

If the questions dealt with the elections, he wrote, the first possible ones might be on the names of the candidates. Also, the platforms and general tendencies. Now, the possible Democratic party candidates are....

And again, There might be another change in Soviet politics, but in the articles in Time and in The Reporter the writers say that the present group is likely to continue in power for at least a while. However, if he should ask about something which sounds as if it went in that direction, I could assume that the present premier might die; he's old, and can't live much longer.

Don had always been a baseball fan, and his opinions in that area were firmly rooted in both his own past and in the thick file of sports pages of newspapers. The Dodgers will probably win the pennant, and the Giants will probably sell their pitcher Joe Kenner. In boxing....

He was fairly certain about the outcome of various sports events. But when it came to science, he discovered whole worlds of which he had only heard vaguely before. There were things which he understood only with difficulty, and he began to realize, with a sense of shock, how inadequate his school "science" classes had been. But he didn't worry; he could easily predict that this class of question would have to do either with something medical or something about atomics. He found a great deal of already predicted material in both those fields; every magazine had a doctor writing about which disease would be conquered next, and how soon; and a number of articles gave details on how soon atomic power plants would be running, and what kinds of bombs would be tested next.

Don's choice of accountancy had been motivated by a liking for logic and orderliness; he began to find a fascination in the logic and orderliness of science. His picture of a scientist had been vague at best, a picture formed from newspaper photos of Einstein, with his white hair blowing, and of movie scientists, bending over strange machines and creating monsters.

At one point Don found the history and viewpoints of science drawing him into reading that could not possibly be used in the questioning. Reluctantly, and resolving to go back to that area, he moved on.

The oil workers union has a contract which runs out next month, he wrote, and they have always had a strike at this point in their last few years. If they do strike, there will probably be a temporary shortage of fuel and gasoline. This might be the right answer if the question is, What strike is affecting the country most now?

Back into politics once more, Don began to extend his guessing, as he read further.

The UN investigation of the situation in South Africa will be resumed, and the South African delegation will withdraw again. It looks as if there is a very good chance of native rebellions in French North Africa, so that a question which pointed to Africa might deal with either situation.

After a while, Don had worked around to the Far East, and became more and more interested. His orderly habits led him into a pattern in which he organized the most likely events into a future history which covered, in detail, the things that would happen in the whole world, to a point that went into the next few years. In fact, he noticed abruptly, the vista ahead had grown brightly clear, and was still extending. He told himself that when he returned, he would continue to write his history of the future.

Just for fun, though, he said to himself. Nobody would be really interested in such a thing except himself, and he was no writer. But it looked as if he might have found a real hobby, Don told himself. Why, he didn't even miss television.

The thought of television reminded him of the money, and the questions. The air and an occasional swim, and the food, had all combined to give him a feeling of health and relaxation. He felt supremely confident; he knew he could cope with the questions. And the time must be growing short. The plane should be arriving any day.

Don suddenly realized that he had stopped shaving some time before, and that he had fallen into the habit of not wearing a shirt. He shaved, and discovered that he had only two clean shirts left. He also discovered that the freezer was nearly empty, but he remembered seeing a number of plants growing near the house; if the freezer should run out before the plane arrived, he could grow something, he thought.

But the freezer did not run out of supplies. Instead, the generator stopped. It was out of gas.

Draining the last of the melted ice from the box, Don suddenly became aware of a simple fact. There should have been enough gas. The tank had been quite full enough to last more than the two months. He suddenly realized that he had completely lost count of days, and that the plane might be overdue by as much as a week or two.

Feeling a slight panic, he began to check back through his daily stacks of writing. He found that he had done an average of eight pages every day, which gave him a means of counting back. But it was only a rough estimate, since there had been off days.

Still, the count came out to at least three months. The plane was very definitely overdue.

In the middle of the third year, he completed a radio receiver, made from wire stripped from the useless generator and using the crystal receiver principle. It had a pinpoint balanced on an old razor blade. There had been a description of the method of making such a receiver in a mechanics magazine, and Don had done it carefully. It took him a long time, because he did not find the job very interesting except when he was tired of reading and writing. Also, he had spent a long time extracting the blank leaves from all of the books so that he would have plenty of writing paper.

The receiver seemed to be a workable design. However, all he could hear was a steady crackle and hiss, and, during storms, the sounds made by distant lightning.

Things went well, otherwise. His garden grew with a minimum of attention; he had learned the easiest methods of fishing, and he could not have named a single thing that he did not have that he would want.

The history grew longer. It was bound, volume by volume, in covers removed from books that were then piled carefully away. Don had found a way to bleach out the pages of printed matter, but there were only a few books that he could bring himself to turn into writing paper in this manner. In his notes, he used the term "palimpsest"; he knew what it meant by now.

2234. The last queen of England, not possessing any political power, was nevertheless regarded with great respect by the people of Britain, and her death at an advanced age was the occasion for great public mourning. However, since she had left no direct descendant, her entombment in the rebuilt Westminster Abbey marked the final end of the monarchy, even as a symbol.

The year 2234 also marked the first serious attempt to cross interstellar space, in a giant ship which was built to house a large colony of travelers for a long time.

Among the books published in 2234 were new works by the famous historian and scholar Nosreg, and his contemporary Songre. "The Tragedy of Man" by the playwright Gresno played to great audiences over the Solar Television Network....

Thoughtfully, Don pulled at his graying beard. He was considering the plays of Gresno, and feeling, very mildly, a longing to see them. But, he reminded himself, it would be a long time before Gresno would even be born. Meanwhile, the afternoon sun was warm against his back, here on the porch, and he still had a great deal of white paper. He took up the sea-gull quill and began to write once more.