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. Sh