us officially entering the affair, but, of course, Anderton
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&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. "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 of other crates
in the dump-cell of the hold--"

"What's a dump cell?"

"It's a 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. "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 cell's open, didn't. At least they didn't do a
thorough job. The _Ludmilla_ 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 _Ludmilla_ really laid an egg or not."

"That's what I keep trying to explain to you, Dr. Harris. We don't know
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 about the buts 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 sounded relieved. Official people have a lot of confidence
in CIA; too much, in my estimation. Some day the 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