"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 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.