One-Shot

One-Shot, by James Benjamin
Blish

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Title: One-Shot
Author: James Benjamin Blish
Illustrator: van Dongen
Release Date: October 11, 2007 [EBook #22958]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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[Illustration]

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 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 week end 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 week end 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, 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 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