"Unscrew the cap?" the audio squawked. "But Dr. Hadamard, if that sets
it off--"
"It won't go off. That's the one thing you can be sure it won't do."
"What is this?" Anderton demanded. "And what's this deadline stuff,
anyhow?"
"The cap's off," Monig reported. "We're getting plenty of radiation now.
Just a minute-- Yeah. Dr. Hadamard, it's a bomb, all right. But it
hasn't got a fuse. Now how could they have made a fool mistake like
that?"
"In other words, it's a dud," Joan said.
"That's right, a dud."
Now, at last, Braun wiped his face, which was quite gray. "I told you
the truth," he said grimly. "My hunches don't work on stuff like this."
"But they do," I said. "I'm sorry we put you through the wringer--and
you too, colonel--but we couldn't let an opportunity like this slip. It
was too good a chance for us to test how our facilities would stand up
in a real bomb-drop."
"A real drop?" Anderton said. "Are you trying to say that CIA staged
this? You ought to be shot, the whole pack of you!"
"No, not exactly," I said. "The enemy's responsible for the drop, all
right. We got word last month from our man in Gdynia that they were
going to do it, and that the bomb would be on board the _Ludmilla_. As I
say, it was too good an opportunity to miss. We wanted to find out just
how long it would take us to figure out the nature of the bomb--which we
didn't know in detail--after it was dropped here. So we had our people
in Gdynia defuse the thing after it was put on board the ship, but
otherwise leave it entirely alone.
"Actually, you see, your hunch was right on the button as far as it
went. We didn't ask you whether or not that object was a live bomb. We
asked whether it was a bomb or not. You said it was, and you were
right."
The expression on Braun's face was exactly like the one he had worn
while he had been searching for his decision--except that, since his
eyes were open, I could see that it was directed at me. "If this was the
old days," he said in an ice-cold voice, "I might of made the colonel's
idea come true. I don't go for tricks like this, Andy."
"It was more than a trick," Clark put in. "You'll remember we had a
deadline on the test, Mr. Braun. Obviously, in a real drop we wouldn't
have all the time in the world to figure out what kind of a thing had
been dropped. If we had still failed to establish that when the deadline
ran out, we would have had to allow evacuation of the city, with all the
attendant risk that that was exactly what the enemy wanted us to do."
"So?"
"So we failed the test," I said. "At one minute short of the deadline,
Joan had the divers unscrew the cap. In a real drop that would have
resulted in a detonation, if the bomb was real; we'd never risk it. That
we did do it in the test was a concession of failure--an admission that
our usual methods didn't come through for us in time.
"And that means that you were the only person who did come through, Mr.
Braun. If a real bomb-drop ever comes, we're going to have to have you
here, as an active part of our investigation. Your intuition for the
one-shot gamble was the one thing that bailed us out this time. Next
time it may save eight million lives."
There was quite a long silence. All of us, Anderton included, watched
Braun intently, but his impassive face failed to show any trace of how
his thoughts were running.
When he did speak at last, what he said must have seemed insanely
irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe to Cheyney too. And perhaps it meant
nothing more to Joan than the final clinical note in a case history.
"It's funny," he said, "I was thinking of running for Congress next year
from my district. But maybe this is more important."
It was, I believe, the sigh of a man at peace with himself.