One-Shot | Page 4

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?"
[Illustration]
"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