One-Shot - James B. Blish

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
One Shot by James Benjamin Blish. 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? On the

(00:22):
day that the Polish freighter Ludmilla laid an egg in
New York Harbor Abner Longman's 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.

(00:43):
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

(01:07):
better add here that we knew nothing about this until afterward.
From the point of view of the story teller, an
organization like civilian intelligence in associates gets to all its
facts backwards, entering the tale at the payoff, working back
to the hook and winding up with a sheaf of

(01:28):
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

(01:53):
CIA so much as thought of Braun. When the news
first came through, Harry and Erton, the Harbor Defense Chief,
called us at eight thirty Friday, to take on the
job of identifying the egg. This was when our records
show as officially entering the affair, but of course Anderton

(02:15):
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 and 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.

(02:41):
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

(03:02):
of other crates in the dump cell of the hold.
What's a dump cell. It's the 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,

(03:24):
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 cells open didn't. At
least they didn't do a thorough job. The lud Miller

(03:45):
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 lud Miller
really laid an egg or not. That's what I keep
trying to explain to you, doctor Harris. We don't know

(04:07):
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

(04:30):
about the butts 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 sound relieved. Official people have a lot of confidence
in CIA, too much, in my estimation. Some day the

(04:51):
job will come along that we can't handle, and then
Washington will be kicking itself, or, more likely some scapegoat
for having failed to develop a 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.

(05:12):
The president with 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 ALTEMAC, and no one of which had
had the money to buy one for itself. The Eisenhower administration,

(05:36):
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 Altemac
herself said wasn't going to be reversed within the practicable
lifetime of CIA. I buzzed for two staffers, and in

(06:00):
five minutes got Clark Cheney 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,
Clerk and Joan do serve in those capacities, but said
service takes about two percent of their capacities and their time.

(06:25):
I shot them a couple of sentences of explanation, trusting
them to pick up whatever else they needed from the
tape and check the line to the diver's 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

(06:46):
on it but murky light striped with streamers of darkness
slowly rising and falling. The audio went klunk ouing ouing,
bank oung, underwater noises shapeless and characterless. Hello out there
in the harbor. This is c I a Harris calling,

(07:07):
come in, please, Monic here, the audio said, bink owing, owing,
got anything yet not a thing, Doctor Harris. Monic said,
you can't see three inches in front of your face
down here. It's too silty. We've bumped into a couple

(07:28):
of crates, but so far no egg. Keep trying. Cheney,
looking even more like a bulldog than usual, was setting
his stopwatch by one of the eight clocks on Altmac's face.
Want me to take the divers, he said, No, Clark,
not yet. I'd rather have Joan do it for the moment.

(07:50):
I passed the mic to her. You'd better run a
probability series first check. He began feeding tape into the
integrator's what's your angle, Peter the ship? I want to
see how heavily shielded that dumb cell is It isn't
shielded at all, Anderton's voice said behind me, I hadn't

(08:13):
heard him come in, but that doesn't prove anything. The
egg might have carried sufficient shielding in itself, or maybe
the Kamis 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

(08:35):
blood tests, Joan asked Anderton, yes, get the reports through
to me. Then I want white cell counts, differentials, platelet counts.
He metacrit and said, rates on every man. Anderton picked
up the phone, and I took a firm hold on
the door knob hey, Anderden said, putting the phone down again.

(08:59):
Are you going to duck out just like that? Remember,
doctor 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 its not being an egg.
Don't move a man until you get a go ahead
from c I A, I said, For all we know now,

(09:20):
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

(09:42):
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 thenned. Then

(10:04):
he picked up the phone again to order Jones'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

(10:27):
faint trail to Abner Longman's bron 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

(10:49):
racket ridden union now formerly extinct, although any one who
knew these signs could still pick up some traces on
the docks. In those days, bon had been the business
manager of an insurance firm, the sole visible function of
which had been to write policies for the ILA and
its individual dock wallopers. For some reason, he had been

(11:12):
amused by the brash youngster who barged in on him
and demanded the low down, and had shown me considerable
lengths of ropes not normally in view of the public.
Nothing incriminating, but enough to give me a better insight
into how the union operated than I had had any
right to expect, or even suspect. Hence I was surprised

(11:36):
to hear somebody on the dock's remark that Braun was
in the city over the weekend. It would never have
occurred to me that he still interested himself in the waterfront,
for he had gone respectable with a vengeance. He was
still a professional gambler, and, according to what he had
told the Congressional Investigating Committee last year, took in thirty

(11:58):
to fifty thousand dollars a year at it. But his
gambles were no longer concentrated on horses, the numbers, or
shady insurance deals. Nowadays what he did was called investment,
mostly in real estate. Wheeltors knew him well as the
man who had almost bought the Empire State Building. The

(12:19):
almost in the equation stands for the moment when the
shoe string broke. Joan had been following his career too,
not because she had ever met him, but because for her,
he was a type study in the evolution of what
she called the extra legal ego. With personalities like that,

(12:41):
respectability is a disease, she told me. There's always an
almost open conflict between the desire to be powerful and
the desire to be accepted. Your ordinary criminal is a
moral imbecile, But people like Braun are damned with conscience,
and sooner or later they crack trying to appease it.

(13:03):
I'd sooner try to crack a Timkin bearing, I said,
bronze ten points still all the way through, don't you
believe it. The symptoms are showing all over him. Now.
He's backing Broadway plays, sponsoring beginning actresses, joining playwrights groups.
He's the only member of Buskin and Brush who's never

(13:24):
written a play, acted in one, or so much as
pulled the rope to raise the curtain. That's investment, I said,
that's his business, Peter. You're only looking at the surface.
His real investments almost never fail, but the plays he
backs always do. They have to. He's sinking money in

(13:47):
them to appease his conscience, and if they were to succeed,
it would double his guilt instead of solving it. It's
the same way with the young actresses. He's not sexually
interested in them. His type never is, because living a
rigidly orthodox family life is part of the effort towards respectability.

(14:08):
He's backing them to pay his debt to society. In
other words, they're talismans to keep him out of jail.
It doesn't seem like a very satisfactory substitute. Of course
it isn't. Jon had said. The next thing he'll do
is go in for direct public service, giving money to
hospitals or something like that. You watch. She had been right.

(14:33):
Within the year, Braun had announced the founding of an
association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had
been born. The plainest kind of symbolic suicide. Let's not
have any more Abner Longman's bronze born down here. It
depressed me to see it happen. For next on Jones's

(14:54):
agenda for Braun was an entry into politics as a
fighting liberal, a new dealer twenty years too late. Since
I'm mildly liberal myself. When I'm off duty. I hated
to think what Broun's career might tell me about my
own motives if I'd let it, all of which had
nothing to do with why I was prowling around the Ludmilla,

(15:17):
Or did it. I kept remembering Anderton's challenge, you can't
take such a gamble. There are eight and a half
million lives writing on it. That put it up into
Bron's normal operating area. All right, the connection was still hazy,
but on the grounds that any link might be useful,
I phoned him. He remembered me instantly late most uneducated,

(15:41):
power driven men, he had a memory as good as
any machines. You never did send me that paper. You
was gone, arte, he said. His voice seemed absolutely unchanged,
although he was in his seventies. Now, you promised you would.
Kids don't keep their pre promises as well as they should,

(16:02):
I said, But I've still got copies, and I'll see
to it that you get one this time. Right now.
I need another favor, something right up your alley. C
I a business. Yes, I didn't know you knew I
was with C. I a braun chuckled. I still know

(16:22):
a thing or two, he said, what's the angle that
I can't tell you over the phone, but it's the
biggest gamble there ever 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

(16:44):
going to be in town long. You 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, mister Braun. I called

(17:08):
headquarters and sent a messenger to my apartment to look
for one of those long, dusty blue folders with the
legal lengthed 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.

(17:31):
His whole posture telegraphed his controlled happiness. Cheney 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
and Manhattan stopped their rumbling course through their tubes would
have blanked out any possible echo pip from the egg

(17:55):
wild Goose, Chase Jones 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? 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

(18:18):
gambler on a job like this. He'll just get in
the way. I looked toward the television screen, which now
showed an emphorous 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

(18:41):
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? Cheney consulted the
Stopwatch deadline in twenty nine minutes, he said, all right,
let's use those men. I'm beginning to see this thing

(19:01):
a lot clearer. Joan, what we've got here? Is a
one shot gamble, right in effact, 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 fifty two. They scrabbled for them

(19:24):
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

(19:47):
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, Clerk, I thought, not
on a one shot gamble of this kind. The laws
of chance are no good at all. For that matter,

(20:10):
the so called E s P 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 it 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

(20:32):
look at that lump on the screen and play a hunch.
You're out of your mind, Anderton said, A ducorous knock
spared me the trouble of having to deny a firm
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.

(20:54):
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

(21:19):
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 stickpen just barely large enough to be visible at all,
A black homburg all perfectly fitted, all worn with proper casualness,

(21:40):
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 you run agot to me, he said, what's the pitch, Andy,
mister Braun. This is Joan Hatimart, Clerk cheneyone Anderton. I'll

(22:01):
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.
Broun's aristocratic eyebrows went up. Me Al, Andy, I don't

(22:26):
know nothing about things like that. I'm surprised with you.
I thought c i A 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 in
the mic to the diver's She was saying, what does
it look like? It's just a lump of something, Doctor Hatimard,

(22:50):
can't even tell its shape is buried too deeply in
the mud. Plunk owing owing, try the Geiger. We did
nothing but background scintillation, counter nothing, Doctor Hottimart, could be
its shielded. Let us do the guessing monic, all right,

(23:11):
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, mister Braun. One
throw of the dice, one show down hand. We've got

(23:35):
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 hat band. I can't do it. Why not?
It ain't my kind of thing, he said. Look, I

(23:58):
never in my life run odds on it 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.

(24:18):
I wish you'd listened 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 Cheney. I suppose I should have

(24:40):
guessed it, but it had never occurred to me ten minutes,
Chaney 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, mister Braun, as a favor. It's ready
too late to do it any other way. And if

(25:02):
you guess wrong, the outcome won't be any worse than
if you don't try it. 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,

(25:23):
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, Bron's face was a death mask.
The water sounds and the irregular ticking of a Geiger

(25:45):
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

(26:08):
his hand, Anderton said, of all the full hush, Jen
said quietly, slowly, Braun opened his eyes. All right, he said,
you guys wanted it this way. I say it's a bomb.
He stared at us for a moment more, and then

(26:29):
all at once, the timkin bearing burst words poured out
of it. Now, you guys, do something, Do your job
like I did mine. Get my wife and kids out
of there, empty the city, Do something, do something. Anderton
was already grabbing for the phone. You're right, mister Braun,
if it isn't already too late? Cheney shot out a

(26:53):
hand and caught Anderton's telephone arm by the wrist. Wait
a minute, he said, What do you mean, Wait a minute?
Haven't you already shot enough time? Janey did not let go. Instead,
he looked inquiringly at Joan and said, one minute, Joan,
you might as well go ahead. She nodded and spoke

(27:14):
into the mic. Monig, unscrew the cap. Unscrew the cap,
The audio squawked. But doctor Hatimart, 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? Andwerton demanded,
and what's this deadline stuff? Anyhow, the CAP's off, Monig reported,

(27:38):
we're getting plenty of radiation now just a minute, Yeah,
doctor Hatimart, it's a bomb, all right, but it hasn't
got a fuse. Now, how could they have made a
full mistake like that? In other words, it's a dud,
Joan said, that's right, a dud. Now. At last, Braun

(28:02):
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

(28:25):
a real drop. Ederton said, are you trying to say
that c I a stage 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 men in Gadina that they
were going to do it, and that the bomb would

(28:47):
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
indeedail after it was dropped here. So we had our
people in Gadeena diffuse the thing after it was put
on board the ship, but otherwise leave it entirely alone. Actually,

(29:13):
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

(29:35):
were open, I could see that it was directed at me.
If this was the old days, he said in a nice,
cold voice, I might have made the Kano'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, mister Braun. Obviously, in

(29:56):
a real drop, we wouldn't have had all the time
in the world figure out what kind of 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.

(30:18):
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 and admission that our usual

(30:41):
methods didn't come through for us. In time, and that
means that you were the only person who did come through.
Mister Brown, 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.

(31:02):
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

(31:24):
irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe to Cheney 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

(31:44):
the sigh of a man at peace with himself. End
of One Shot by James Benjamin Blish