Rollback

"That’s what I said!" Sarah replied, sounding pleased to be vindicated. "The instructions for the questionnaire make it quite clear that the thousand responses we send should be produced independently and in private. They say there may be follow-up questions, and any consultation among participants will ruin those. And I suspect they’ve actually got some sort of way of determining if the answers are all from one person, instead of the thousand individuals they’d asked for, or are from a group that collaborated — you know, by some sort of statistical analysis of the answers."

They were doing general cleaning up. With both of them working during the days, housework ended up being a low priority. Don was dusting the mantel. "You know what I’d like?" he said absently, looking at the framed Emily Carr print on the wall there. "One of those big sixty-inch flatscreen TVs. Don’t you think it’d look great right here? I know they cost a fortune right now, but I’m sure they’ll come down in price."

Sarah was gathering up sections of newspaper. "You should live so long."

"Anyway," he continued, "you were saying about the Dracon questionnaire?"

"Yeah. Even if we did want to fake it and have a committee draw up all the answers, for some of the questions we honestly don’t know what the ‘right’ answer is."

He moved on to picking up the used mugs from the coffee table. "Like what?"

"Well, like question thirty-one. You and another person jointly find an object that has no apparent worth, and neither of you desire it. Which of you should keep it?"

Don stopped to ponder, two yellow mugs in his right hand, and one in his left; at sixteen, Carl was learning to drink coffee. "Umm, I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t matter, does it?"

Sarah had finished gathering newspapers, and nipped into the kitchen to dump them in the blue box. "Who knows?" she called out. "There’s obviously some moral point here that the aliens are getting at, but no one I’ve spoken to can see what it is."

He followed her in, rinsed the mugs under the faucet, and then put them in the dishwasher. "Maybe neither of you should take the object. You know, just leave it where you found it."

She nodded. "That would be good, but that’s not one of the allowed answers. The survey is mostly multiple choice, remember."

He was loading a few plates into the dishwasher. "Heck, I don’t know. Um, the other guy should take it — ’cause, um, ’cause that’s me being generous, see?"

"But he doesn’t want it," she said.

"But it might turn out to be valuable someday."

"Or it might turn out to be poisonous, or to belong to somebody else who’ll be angry over it being taken, and who will exact revenge from whoever stole it."

He shook his head, and put an Electrasol tab into the detergent cup. "There just isn’t enough information."

"The aliens think there is, apparently."

He started the dishwasher, and motioned for Sarah to follow him out of the room; the machine was noisy. "Okay," he said, "so you can’t just give the Dracons the answers that’ll make us look good, because you don’t know what those are in all cases."

"Right," said Sarah. "And, anyway, even for those questions we do understand, there’s debate about which answers would make us look good. See, some of our morals are rational, and others are based in emotion — and it’s not clear which ones the aliens would prize most."

"I thought all morals were rational," Don said. He looked around the living room, gauging if anything else needed tending to. "Isn’t that the definition of morality: a rational, reasoned response, instead of a knee-jerk, visceral one?"

"Oh?" she said, straightening the pile of current magazines — Maclean’s, Mix, Discover, The Atlantic Monthly — that lived on the little table between the couch and the La-Z-Boy. "Try this one on for size. It’s a standard puzzle in moral philosophy, a little number called ‘the trolley problem.’ It’s called that because a British philosopher came up with it. Her name, by the way, was Philippa Foot — two fetishes in one, if you stop to think about it. Anyway, she said this: say a streetcar is out of control, rushing along its tracks. And say there are five people stuck on those tracks, unable to get away in time — if the train hits, it’ll kill them all. But you happen to be watching all this from a bridge over the tracks, and on the bridge are the switching controls, including a lever that if you pull it will cause the streetcar to be diverted to another track, off to the left, missing the five people. What do you do?"

"Pull the lever, of course," he said. Deciding there was nothing else that needed doing tonight, he sat down on the couch.

"That’s what almost everyone says," Sarah said, joining him. "Most people feel a moral obligation to intervene in situations where human life is at risk. Oh, but I forgot to tell you one thing. There’s a really big guy stuck on that other track. If you divert the streetcar, he’ll be killed. Now what do you do?"