It was a cogent question.

"And what a cogent question that is, my dear."

"A very cogent question."

"Why do we not bring in this M. Rudolfi and put to him some cogent questions?"

Then he asked a few cogent questions.

One of them, an enormous redhead named Charlie Fitzpatrick, asked the cogent question: "Whose?"

"People are asking more cogent questions, and they're observing behavior that begins to be amenable to the ideas of chaotic dynamics."

After the glad-handing of the bureaucrats, the political smiles directed at the technicians, the cogent but not too probing questions asked of the theoreticians, and the backslapping of the cosmonauts in training, came Mars's real work.

A cogent question, ma'am.

"A cogent question."