ONE-SHOT
You can do a great deal ifyou have enough data, andenough time to compute on it,by logical methods. But giventhe situation that neither datanor time is adequate, and ananswer must be produced ...what do you do?
BY JAMES BLISH
Illustrated by van Dongen
On the day that the Polish freighterLudmilla laid an egg in NewYork harbor, Abner Longmans("One-Shot") Braun was in the citygoing about his normal business,which was making another milliondollars. As we found out later, almostnothing else was normal aboutthat particular week end for Braun.For one thing, he had brought hisfamily with him—a complete departurefrom routine—reflecting the unprecedentedlylegitimate nature ofthe deals he was trying to make.From every point of view it was abad week end for the CIA to mixinto his affairs, but nobody had explainedthat to the master of theLudmilla.
I had better add here that weknew nothing about this until afterward;from the point of view of thestoryteller, an organization like CivilianIntelligence Associates gets toall its facts backwards, entering thetale at the pay-off, working back tothe hook, and winding up with asheaf of background facts to feedinto the computer for Next Time. It'srough on the various people who'vetried to fictionalize what we do—particularlyfor the lazy examples ofthe breed, who come to us expectingthat their plotting has already beendone for them—but it's inherent inthe way we operate, and there it is.
Certainly nobody at CIA so muchas thought of Braun when the newsfirst came through. Harry Anderton,the Harbor Defense chief, called usat 0830 Friday to take on the job ofidentifying the egg; this was whenour records show us officially enteringthe affair, but, of course, Andertonhad been keeping the wires toWashington steaming for an hour beforethat, getting authorization tospend some of his money on us (ourclearance status was then and is nowC&R—clean and routine).
I was in the central office whenthe call came through, and had somedifficulty in making out preciselywhat Anderton wanted of us. "Slowdown, Colonel Anderton, please," Ibegged him. "Two or three secondswon't make that much difference.How did you find out about this eggin the first place?"
"The automatic compartment bulkheadson the Ludmilla were defective,"he said. "It seems that thisegg was buried among a lot of othercrates in the dump-cell of thehold—"
"What's a dump cell?"
"It's a sea lock for getting rid ofdangerous cargo. The bottom of itopens right to Davy Jones. Standardfitting for ships carrying explosives,radioactives, anything that might actup unexpectedly."
"All right," I said. "Go ahead."
"Well, there was a timer on thedump-cell floor, set to drop the eggwhen the ship came up the river.That worked fine, but the automaticbulkheads that are supposed to keepthe rest of the ship from being floodedwhile the cell's open, didn't. Atleast they didn't do a thorough job.The Ludmilla began to list and thecaptain yelled for help. When theHarbor Patrol found the dump-cellopen, they called us in."
"I see." I thought about it a moment."In other words, you don'tknow whether the Ludmilla reallylaid an egg or not."
"That's what I keep trying to explainto you, Dr. Harris. We don'tknow what she dropped and wehaven't any way of finding out. Itcould be a bomb—it could be anything.We're sweating everybody onboard the ship now, but it's my guesstha