One Shot
James Blish
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?
On the day that the Polish
freighter Ludmilla laid an egg in New
York harbor, Abner Longmans ‘One-Shot’ Braun was in the city going about his
normal business, which was making another million dollars. As we found out
later, almost nothing else was normal about that particular weekend for Braun.
For one thing, he had brought his family with him—a complete departure from
routine—reflecting the unprecedentedly legitimate nature of the deals he was
trying to make. From every point of view it was a bad weekend for the CIA to
mix into his affairs, but nobody 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 Civilian Intelligence Associates gets to all
its facts backwards, entering the tale at the pay-off, working back to the
hook, and winding up with a sheaf of background facts to feed into the computer
for Next Time. It’s rough on the various people who’ve tried to fictionalize
what we do—particularly for the lazy examples of the breed, who come to us expecting
that their plotting has already been done for them—but it’s inherent in the way
we operate, and there it is.
Certainly nobody at CIA so much
as thought of Braun when the news first came through. Harry Anderton, the
Harbor Defense chief, called us at 0830 Friday to take on the job of
identifying the egg; this was when our records show us officially entering the
affair, but, of course, Anderton had been keeping the wires to Washington steaming
for an hour before that, getting authorization to spend some of his money on us
(our clearance status was then and is now C&R—clean and routine).
I was in the central office when
the call came through, and had some difficulty in making out precisely what
Anderton wanted of us. “Slow down, Colonel Anderton, please,” I begged him. “Two
or three seconds won’t make that much difference. How did you find out about
this egg in the 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 crates in 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 it opens right to Davy Jones. Standard
fitting for ships carrying explosives, radio-actives, 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 egg when the ship came up the river. That
worked fine, but the automatic bulkheads that are supposed to keep the rest of
the ship from being flooded while the cell’s open, didn’t. At least they didn’t
do a thorough job. The Ludmilla began
to list and the captain yelled for help. When the Harbor Patrol found the
dump-cell open, they called us in.”
“I see.” I thought about it a
moment. “In other words, you don’t know whether the Ludmilla really laid an egg or not.”
“That’s what I keep trying to
explain to you, Dr. Harris. We don’t know what she dropped and we haven’t any
way of finding out. It could be a bomb—it could be anything. We’re sweating
everybody on board the ship now, but it’s my guess that none of them know
anything; the whole procedure 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 from your barge to the big board here so we can
direct the work. Better get on over here yourself.”
“Right.” He sounded relieved.
Official people have a lot of confidence in CIA; too much, in my estimation.
Some day the job will come along that we can’t handle, and then Washington will
be kicking itself—or, more likely, some scapegoat—for having failed to develop
a comparable government department.
Not that there was much prospect
of Washington’s doing that. Official thinking had been running in the other
direction for years. The precedent was the Associated Universities organization
which ran Brookhaven; CIA had been started the same way, by a loose corporation
of universities and industries all of which had wanted to own an ULTIMAC and no
one of which had had the money to buy one for itself. The Eisenhower
administration, with its emphasis on private enterprise and concomitant
reluctance to sink federal funds into projects of such size, had turned the two
examples into a nice fat trend, which ULTIMAC herself said wasn’t going to be
reversed within the practicable lifetime of CIA.
***
I buzzed for two staffers, and in
five minutes got Clark Cheyney and Joan Hadamard, CIA’s business manager and
social science division chief respectively. The titles were almost solely for
the benefit of the T/O—that is, Clark and Joan do serve in those capacities,
but said service takes about two per cent of their capacities and their time. I
shot them a couple of sentences of explanation, trusting them to pick up whatever
else they needed from the tape, and checked the line to the divers’ barge.
It was already open; Anderton had
gone to work quickly and with decision once he was sure we were taking on the
major question. The television screen lit, but nothing showed on it but murky
light, striped with streamers of darkness slowly rising and falling. The audio
went cloonck....oing,
oing...bonk...oing...
Underwater noises, 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 in front of your face down here—it’s too
silty. We’ve bumped into a couple of crates, but so far, no egg.”
“Keep trying.”
Cheyney, looking even more like a
bulldog than usual, was setting his stopwatch by one of the eight clocks on
ULTIMAC’s face. “Want me to take the divers?” he said.
“No, Clark, not yet. I’d rather
have Joan do it for the moment.” I passed the mike to her. “You’d better run a
probability series first.”
“Check.” He began feeding tape
into the integrator’s mouth. “What’s your angle, 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’t heard him come in. “But that doesn’t
prove anything. The egg might have carried sufficient shielding in itself. Or
maybe the Commies didn’t care whether 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 to duck out just like that? Remember, Dr.
Harris, we’ve got to evacuate the city first of all! No matter whether it’s a
real egg or not—we can’t take 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 all we know now, evacuating the city may be
just what the enemy wants us to do—so they can grab it unharmed. Or they may
want to start a panic for some other reason, any one of fifty possible reasons.”
“You can’t take such a gamble,”
he said grimly. “There are eight and a half 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. “If you want to evacuate without our O.K.,
you’ll have to fire us first. It’ll take another hour to get that cleared from
Washington—so you might as well give us the hour.”
He stared at me for a moment, his
lips thinned. Then he picked up the phone 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 I found would have
been a surprise to me; I went down looking for surprises. I found nothing but a
faint trail to Abner Longmans Braun, most of which was fifteen years cold.
There’d been a time when I’d
known Braun, briefly and to no profit to either of us. As an undergraduate
majoring in social sciences, I’d taken on a term paper on the old International
Longshoreman’s Association, a racket-ridden union now formally extinct—although
anyone who knew the signs could still pick up some traces on the docks. In
those days, Braun had been the business manager of an insurance firm, the sole
visible function of which had been to write policies for the ILA and its individual
dock-wallopers. For some reason, he had been amused by the brash youngster who’d
barged in on him and demanded the lowdown, and had shown me considerable
lengths of ropes not normally in view of the public—nothing incriminating, but
enough to give me a better insight into how the union operated than I had had
any right to expect—or even suspect.
Hence I was surprised to hear
somebody on the docks remark that Braun was in the city over the week end. It
would never have occurred to me that he still interested himself in the waterfront,
for he’d gone respectable with a vengeance. He was still a professional
gambler, and according to what he had told the Congressional Investigating
Committee last year, took in thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year at it, but
his gambles were no longer concentrated on horses, the numbers, or shady insurance
deals. Nowadays what he did was called investment—mostly in real estate;
realtors knew him well as the man who had almost
bought the Empire State Building. (The almost
in the equation stands for the moment when the shoestring broke.)
Joan had been following his
career, too, not because she had ever met him, but because for her he was a
type study in the evolution of what she called ‘the extra-legal ego.’
“With personalities like that, respectability
is a disease,” she told me. “There’s always an almost-open conflict between the
desire to be powerful and the desire to be accepted; your ordinary criminal is
a moral imbecile, but people like Braun are damned with a conscience, and
sooner or later they crack trying to appease it.”
“I’d sooner try to crack a Timken
bearing,” I said. “Braun’s ten-point steel all the way through.”
“Don’t you believe it. The
symptoms are showing all over him. Now he’s backing Broadway plays, sponsoring
beginning actresses, joining playwrights’ groups—he’s the only member of Buskin
and Brush who’s never written a play, acted in one, or so much as pulled the
rope to raise the curtain.”
“That’s investment,” I said. “That’s
his business.”
“Peter, you’re only looking at
the surface. His real investments almost never fail. But the plays he backs always do. They have to; he’s sinking
money in them to appease his conscience, and if they were to succeed it would
double his guilt instead of salving it. It’s the same way with the young
actresses. He’s not sexually interested in them—his type never is, because
living a rigidly orthodox family life is part of the effort towards
respectability. He’s backing them to ‘pay his debt to society’—in other words,
they’re talismans to keep him out of jail.”
“It doesn’t seem like a very
satisfactory substitute.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Joan had
said. “The next thing he’ll do is go in for direct public service—giving money
to hospitals or something like that. You watch.”
She had been right; within the
year, Braun had announced the founding of an association for clearing the
Detroit slum area where he had been born—the plainest kind of symbolic suicide:
Let’s not have any more Abner Longmans
Brauns born down here. It depressed me to see it happen, for next on Joan’s
agenda for Braun was an entry into politics as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer
twenty years too late. Since I’m mildly liberal myself when I’m off duty, I
hated to think what Braun’s career might tell me about my own motives, if I’d
let it.
***
All of which had nothing to do
with why I was prowling around the Ludmilla—or
did it? I kept remembering Anderton’s challenge: “You can’t take such a gamble.
There are eight and a half million lives riding on it—” That put it up into
Braun’s normal operating area, all right. The connection was still hazy, but on
the grounds that any link might be useful, I phoned him.
He remembered me instantly; like
most uneducated, power-driven men, he had a memory as good as any machine’s.
“You never did send me that paper
you was going to write,” he said. His voice seemed absolutely unchanged,
although he was in his seventies now. “You promised you would.”
“Kids don’t keep their promises
as well as they should,” I said. “But I’ve still got copies and I’ll see to it
that you get one, this time. Right now I need another favor—something right up
your alley.”
“CIA business?”
“Yes. I didn’t know you knew I
was with CIA.”
Braun chuckled. “I still know a
thing or two,” he said. “What’s the angle?”
“That I can’t tell you over the
phone. But it’s the biggest gamble there ever was, and I think we need an
expert. Can you come down to CIA’s central headquarters right away?”
“Yeah, if it’s that big. If it
ain’t, I got lots of business here, Andy. And I ain’t going to be in town long.
You’re sure it’s top stuff?”
“My word on it.”
He was silent a moment. Then he
said, “Andy, send me your paper.”
“The paper? Sure, but—” Then I
got it. I’d given him my word. “You’ll get it,” I said. “Thanks, Mr. Braun.”
I called headquarters and sent a
messenger to my apartment to look for one of those long-dusty blue folders with
the legal-length sheets inside them, with orders to scorch it over to Braun
without stopping to breathe more than once. Then I went back myself.
The atmosphere had changed.
Anderton was sitting by the big desk, clenching his fists and sweating; his
whole posture telegraphed his controlled helplessness. Cheyney was bent over a
seismograph, echo-sounding for the egg through the river bottom. If that even
had a prayer of working, I knew, he’d have had the trains of the Hudson & Manhattan
stopped; their rumbling course through their tubes would have blanked out any
possible echo-pip from the egg.
“Wild goose chase?” Joan said,
scanning my face.
“Not quite. I’ve got something,
if I can just figure out what it is. Remember One-Shot Braun?”
“Yes. What’s he got to do with
it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “But I want to
bring him in. I don’t think we’ll lick this project before deadline without
him.”
“What good is a professional
gambler on a job like this? He’ll just get in the way.”
I looked toward the television
screen, which now showed an amorphous black mass, jutting up from a foundation
of even deeper black. “Is that operation getting you anywhere?”
“Nothing’s gotten us anywhere,”
Anderton interjected harshly. “We don’t even know if that’s the egg—the whole
area is littered with crates. Harris, you’ve got to let me get that alert out!”
“Clark, how’s the time going?”
Cheyney consulted the stopwatch. “Deadline
in twenty-nine minutes,” he said.
“All right, let’s use those
minutes. I’m beginning to see this thing a little clearer. Joan, what we’ve got
here is a one-shot gamble; right?”
“In effect,” she said cautiously.
“And it’s my guess that we’re
never going to get the answer by diving for it—not in time, anyhow. Remember
when the Navy lost a barge-load of shells in the harbor, back in ‘52? They
scrabbled for them for a year and never pulled up a one; they finally had to
warn the public that if it found anything funny-looking along the shore it
shouldn’t bang said object, or shake it either. We’re better equipped than the
Navy was then—but we’re working against a deadline.”
“If you’d admitted that earlier,”
Anderton said hoarsely. “We’d have half a million people out of the city by
now. Maybe even a million.”
“We haven’t given up yet,
colonel. The point is this, Joan: what we need is an inspired guess. Get
anything from the prob series, Clark? I thought not. On a one-shot gamble of
this kind, the ‘laws’ of chance are no good at all. For that matter, the
so-called ESP experiments showed us long ago that even the way we construct
random tables is full of holes—and that a man with a feeling for the essence of
a gamble can make a monkey out of chance almost at will. And if there ever was such a
man, Braun is it. That’s why I asked him to come down here. I want him to look
at that lump on the screen and—play a hunch.”
“You’re out of your mind,”
Anderton said.
***
A decorous knock spared me the
trouble of having to deny, affirm or ignore the judgment. It was Braun; the
messenger had been fast, and the gambler hadn’t bothered to read what a college
student had thought of him fifteen years ago. He came forward and held out his
hand, while the others looked him over frankly.
He was impressive, all right. It
would have been hard for a stranger to believe that he was aiming at
respectability; to the eye, he was already there. He was tall and spare, and
walked perfectly erect, not without spring despite his age. His clothing was as
far from that of a gambler as you could have taken it by design: a black
double-breasted suit with a thin vertical stripe, a gray silk tie with a pearl
stickpin just barely large enough to be visible at all, a black Homburg; all
perfectly fitted, all worn with proper casualness—one might almost say a formal
casualness. It was only when he opened his mouth that One-Shot Braun was in the
suit with him.
“I come over as soon as your
runner got to me,” he said. “What’s the pitch, Andy?”
“Mr. Braun, this is Joan
Hadamard, Clark Cheyney, Colonel Anderton. I’ll be quick because we need speed
now. A Polish ship has dropped something out in the harbor. We don’t know what
it is. It may be a hell-bomb, or it may be just somebody’s old laundry.
Obviously we’ve got to find out which—and we want you to tell us.”
Braun’s aristocratic eyebrows
went up. “Me? Hell, Andy, I don’t know nothing about things like that. I’m
surprised with you. I thought CIA had all the brains it needed—ain’t you got
machines to tell you answers like that?”
I pointed silently to Joan, who
had gone back to work the moment the introductions were over. She was still on
the mike to the divers. She was saying: “What does it look like?”
“It’s just a lump of something,
Dr. Hadamard. Can’t even tell its shape—it’s buried too deeply in the mud.” Cloonk...Oing, oing...
“Try the Geiger.”
“We did. Nothing but background.”
“Scintillation counter?”
“Nothing, Dr. Hadamard. Could be
it’s shielded.”
“Let us do the guessing, Monig.
All right, maybe it’s got a clockwork fuse that didn’t break with the impact.
Or a gyroscopic fuse. Stick a stethoscope on it and see if you pick up a
ticking or anything that sounds like a motor running.”
***
There was a lag and I turned back
to Braun. “As you can see, we’re stymied. This is a long shot, Mr. Braun. One
throw of the dice—one show-down hand. We’ve got to have an expert call it for
us—somebody with a record of hits on long shots. That’s why I called you.”
“It’s no good,” he said. He took
off the Homburg, took his handkerchief from his breast pocket, and wiped the
hatband. “I can’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“It ain’t my kind of thing,” he said. “Look, I never in my life run odds on
anything that made any difference. But this makes a difference. If I guess
wrong—”
“Then we’re all dead ducks. But
why should you guess wrong? Your hunches have been working for sixty years now.”
Braun wiped his face. “No. You
don’t get it. I wish you’d listen to me. Look, my wife and my kids are in the
city. It ain’t only my life, it’s theirs, too. That’s what I care about. That’s
why it’s no good. On things that matter to me, my hunches don’t work.”
I was stunned, and so, I could
see, were Joan and Cheyney. I suppose I should have guessed it, but it had
never occurred to me.
“Ten minutes,” Cheyney said.
I looked up at Braun. He was
frightened, and again I was surprised without having any right to be. I tried
to keep at least my voice calm.
“Please try it anyhow, Mr. Braun—as
a favor. It’s already too late to do it any other way. And if you guess wrong,
the outcome won’t be any worse than if you don’t try at all.”
“My kids,” he whispered. I don’t
think he knew that he was speaking aloud. I waited.
Then his eyes seemed to come back
to the present. “All right,” he said. “I told you the truth, Andy. Remember
that. So—is it a bomb or ain’t it? That’s what’s up for grabs, right?”
I nodded. He closed his eyes. An
unexpected stab of pure fright went down my back. Without the eyes, Braun’s
face was a death mask.
The water sounds and the irregular
ticking of a Geiger counter seemed to spring out from the audio speaker, four
times as loud as before. I could even hear the pen of the seismograph
scribbling away, until I looked at the instrument and saw that Clark had
stopped it, probably long ago.
Droplets of sweat began to form
along Braun’s forehead and his upper lip. The handkerchief remained crushed in
his hand.
Anderton said, “Of all the fool—”
“Hush!” Joan said quietly.
***
Slowly, Braun opened his eyes. “All
right,” he said. “You guys wanted it this way. I say it’s a bomb.” He stared at us for a moment more—and then, all
at once, the Timken bearing burst. Words poured out of it. “Now you guys do
something, do your job like I did mine. Get my wife and kids out of there—empty
the city—do something, do something.”
Anderton was already grabbing for
the phone. “You’re right, Mr. Braun. If it isn’t already too late—”
Cheyney shot out a hand and
caught Anderton’s telephone arm by the wrist.
“Wait a minute,” he said.
“What d’you mean, ‘wait a minute’?
Haven’t you already shot enough time?”
Cheyney did not let go; instead,
he looked inquiringly at Joan and said, “One minute, Joan. You might as well go
ahead.”
She nodded and spoke into the
mike. “Monig, unscrew the cap.”
“Unscrew the cap?” the audio
squawked. “But Dr. Hadamard, if that sets it off—”
“It won’t go off. That’s the one
thing you can be sure it won’t do.”
“What is this?” Anderton
demanded. “And what’s this deadline stuff, anyhow?”
“The cap’s off,” Monig reported. “We’re
getting plenty of radiation now. Just a minute—yeah. Dr. Hadamard, it’s a bomb,
all right. But it hasn’t got a fuse. Now how could they have made a fool
mistake like that?”
“In other words, it’s a dud,”
Joan said.
“That’s right, a dud.”
Now, at last, Braun wiped his
face, which was quite gray. “I told you the truth,” he said grimly. “My hunches
don’t work on stuff like this.”
“But they do,” I said. “I’m sorry
we put you through the wringer—and you too, colonel—but we couldn’t let an
opportunity like this slip. It was too good a chance for us to test how our
facilities would stand up in a real bomb-drop.”
“A real drop?” Anderton said. “Are
you trying to say that CIA staged this? You ought to be shot, the whole pack of
you!”
“No, not exactly,” I said. “The
enemy’s responsible for the drop, all right. We got word last month from our
man in Gdynia that they were going to do it, and that the bomb would be on
board the Ludmilla. As I say, it was
too good an opportunity to miss. We wanted to find out just how long it would
take us to figure out the nature of the bomb—which we didn’t know in detail—after
it was dropped here. So we had our people in Gdynia defuse the thing after it
was put on board the ship, but otherwise leave it entirely alone. Actually, you see, your hunch
was right on the button as far as it went. We didn’t ask you whether or not
that object was a live bomb. We asked whether it was a bomb or not. You said it
was, and you were right.”
The expression on Braun’s face
was exactly like the one he had worn while he had been searching for his
decision—except that, since his eyes were open, I could see that it was
directed at me. “If this was the old days,” he said in an ice-cold voice. “I
might of made the colonel’s idea come true. I don’t go for tricks like this,
Andy.”
“It was more than a trick,” Clark
put in. “You’ll remember we had a deadline on the test, Mr. Braun. Obviously,
in a real drop we wouldn’t have all the time in the world to figure out what
kind of a thing had been dropped. If we had still failed to establish that when
the deadline ran out, we would have had to allow evacuation of the city, with
all the attendant risk that that was exactly what the enemy wanted us to do.”
“So?”
“So we failed the test,” I said. “At
one minute short of the deadline, Joan had the divers unscrew the cap. In a
real drop that would have resulted in a detonation, if the bomb was real; we’d
never risk it. That we did do it in the test was a concession of failure—an
admission that our usual methods didn’t come through for us in time. “And that
means that you were the only person who did come through, Mr. Braun. If a real
bomb-drop ever comes, we’re going to have to have you here, as an active part
of our investigation. Your intuition for the one-shot gamble was the one thing
that bailed us out this time. Next time it may save eight million lives.”
There was quite a long silence.
All of us, Anderton included, watched Braun intently, but his impassive face
failed to show any trace of how his thoughts were running.
When he did speak at last, what
he said must have seemed insanely irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe to Cheyney
too. And perhaps it meant nothing more to Joan than the final clinical note in
a case history.
“It’s funny,” he said, “I was
thinking of running for Congress next year from my district. But maybe this is
more important.”
It was, I believe, the sigh of a
man at peace with himself.
End
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