One-Shot | Page 2

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