One-Shot

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  ONE-SHOT

  _You can do a great deal if you have enough data, and enough time to compute on it, by logical methods. But given the situation that neither data nor time is adequate, and an answer must be produced ... what do you do?_

  BY JAMES BLISH

  Illustrated by van Dongen

  On the day that the Polish freighter _Ludmilla_ laid an egg in New Yorkharbor, Abner Longmans ("One-Shot") Braun was in the city going abouthis normal business, which was making another million dollars. As wefound out later, almost nothing else was normal about that particularweek end for Braun. For one thing, he had brought his family with him--acomplete departure from routine--reflecting the unprecedentedlylegitimate nature of the deals he was trying to make. From every pointof view it was a bad week end for the CIA to mix into his affairs, butnobody had explained that to the master of the _Ludmilla_.

  I had better add here that we knew nothing about this until afterward;from the point of view of the storyteller, an organization like CivilianIntelligence Associates gets to all its facts backwards, entering thetale at the pay-off, working back to the hook, and winding up with asheaf of background facts to feed into the computer for Next Time. It'srough on the various people who've tried to fictionalize what wedo--particularly for the lazy examples of the breed, who come to usexpecting that their plotting has already been done for them--but it'sinherent in the way we operate, and there it is.

  Certainly nobody at CIA so much as thought of Braun when the news firstcame through. Harry Anderton, the Harbor Defense chief, called us at0830 Friday to take on the job of identifying the egg; this was when ourrecords show us officially entering the affair, but, of course, Andertonhad been keeping the wires to Washington steaming for an hour beforethat, getting authorization to spend some of his money on us (ourclearance status was then and is now C&R--clean and routine).

  I was in the central office when the call came through, and had somedifficulty in making out precisely what Anderton wanted of us. "Slowdown, Colonel Anderton, please," I begged him. "Two or three secondswon't make that much difference. How did you find out about this egg inthe first place?"

  "The automatic compartment bulkheads on the _Ludmilla_ were defective,"he said. "It seems that this egg was buried among a lot of other cratesin the dump-cell of the hold--"

  "What's a dump cell?"

  "It's a sea lock for getting rid of dangerous cargo. The bottom of itopens right to Davy Jones. Standard fitting for ships carryingexplosives, radioactives, anything that might act up unexpectedly."

  "All right," I said. "Go ahead."

  "Well, there was a timer on the dump-cell floor, set to drop the eggwhen the ship came up the river. That worked fine, but the automaticbulkheads that are supposed to keep the rest of the ship from beingflooded while the cell's open, didn't. At least they didn't do athorough job. The _Ludmilla_ began to list and the captain yelled forhelp. When the Harbor Patrol found the dump-cell open, they called usin."

  "I see." I thought about it a moment. "In other words, you don't knowwhether the _Ludmilla_ really laid an egg or not."

  "That's what I keep trying to explain to you, Dr. Harris. We don't knowwhat she dropped and we haven't any way of finding out. It could be abomb--it could be anything. We're sweating everybody on board the shipnow, but it's my guess that none of them know anything; the wholeprocedure was designed to be automatic."

  "All right, we'll take it," I said. "You've got divers down?"

  "Sure, but--"

  "We'll worry about the buts from here on. Get us a direct line fromyour barge to the big board here so we can direct the work. Better geton over here yourself."

  "Right." He sounded relieved. Official people have a lot of confidencein CIA; too much, in my estimation. Some day the job will come alongthat we can't handle, and then Washington will be kicking itself--or,more likely, some scapegoat--for having failed to develop a comparablegovernment department.

  Not that there was much prospect of Washington's doing that. Officialthinking had been running in the other direction for years. Theprecedent was the Associated Universities organization which ranBrookhaven; CIA had been started the same way, by a loose corporation ofuniversities and industries all of which had wanted to own an ULTIMACand no one of which had had the money to buy one for itself. TheEisenhower administration, with its emphasis on private enterprise andconcomitant reluctance to sink federal funds into projects of such size,had turned the two examples into a nice fat trend, which ULTIMAC herselfsaid wasn't going to be reversed within the practicable lifetime of CIA.

  * * * * *

  I buzzed for two staffers, and in five minutes got Clark Cheyney andJoan Hadamard, CIA's business manager and social science division chiefrespectively. The titles were almost solely for the benefit of theT/O--that is, Clark and Joan do serve in those capacities, but saidservice takes about two per cent of their capacities and their time. Ishot them a couple of sentences of explanation, trusting them to pick upwhatever else they needed from the tape, and checked the line to thedivers' barge.

  It was already open; Anderton had gone to work quickly and with decisiononce he was sure we were taking on the major question. The televisionscreen lit, but nothing showed on it but murky light, striped withstreamers of darkness slowly rising and falling. The audio went_cloonck_ ... _oing_, _oing_ ... _bonk_ ... _oing_ ... Underwaternoises, shapeless and characterless.

  "Hello, out there in the harbor. This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in,please."

  "Monig here," the audio said. _Boink_ ... _oing_, _oing_ ...

  "Got anything yet?"

  "Not a thing, Dr. Harris," Monig said. "You can't see three inches infront of your face down here--it's too silty. We've bumped into a coupleof crates, but so far, no egg."

  "Keep trying."

  Cheyney, looking even more like a bulldog than usual, was setting hisstopwatch by one of the eight clocks on ULTIMAC's face. "Want me to takethe divers?" he said.

  "No, Clark, not yet. I'd rather have Joan do it for the moment." Ipassed the mike to her. "You'd better run a probability series first."

  "Check." He began feeding tape into the integrator's mouth. "What's yourangle, Peter?"

  "The ship. I want to see how heavily shielded that dump-cell is."

  "It isn't shielded at all," Anderton's voice said behind me. I hadn'theard him come in. "But that doesn't prove anything. The egg might havecarried sufficient shielding in itself. Or maybe the Commies didn't carewhether the crew was exposed or not. Or maybe there isn't any egg."

  "All that's possible," I admitted. "But I want to see it, anyhow."

  "Have you taken blood tests?" Joan asked Anderton.

  "Yes."

  "Get the reports through to me, then. I want white-cell counts,differentials, platelet counts, hematocrit and sed rates on every man."

  Anderton picked up the phone and I took a firm hold on the doorknob.

  "Hey," Anderton said, putting the phone down again. "Are you going toduck out just like that? Remember, Dr. Harris, we've got to evacuate thecity first of all! No matter whether it's a real egg or not--we can'ttake the chance on it's _not_ being an egg!"

  "Don't move a man until you get a go-ahead from CIA," I said. "For allwe know now, evacuating the city may be just what the enemy wants us todo--so they can grab it unharmed. Or they may want to start a panic forsome other reason, any one of fifty possible reasons."

  "You can't take such a gamble," he said grimly. "There are eight and ahalf million lives riding on it. I can't let you do it."

  "You passed your authority to us when you hired us," I pointed out. "Ifyou want to evacuate without our O.K., you'll hav
e to fire us first.It'll take another hour to get that cleared from Washington--so youmight as well give us the hour."

  He stared at me for a moment, his lips thinned. Then he picked up thephone again to order Joan's blood count, and I got out the door, fast.

  * * * * *

  A reasonable man would have said that I found nothing useful on the_Ludmilla_, except negative information. But the fact is that anything Ifound would have been a surprise to me; I went down looking forsurprises. I found