's doing that. Official
thinking had been running in the other direction for years. The
precedent was 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 ULTIMAC
and no one of which had had the money to buy one for itself. The
Eisenhower administration, 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 ULTIMAC herself
said wasn't going to be reversed within the practicable lifetime of CIA.

* * * * *

I buzzed for two staffers, and in five minutes got Clark Cheyney 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, Clark and Joan do serve in those capacities, but said
service takes about two per cent of their capacities and their time. I
shot them a couple of sentences of explanation, trusting them to pick up
whatever else they needed from the tape, and checked the line to the
divers' 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 on it but murky light, striped with
streamers of darkness slowly rising and falling. The audio went
_cloonck_ ... _oing_, _oing_ ... _bonk_ ... _oing_ ... Underwater
noises, shapeless and characterless.

"Hello, out there in the harbor. This is CIA, Harris calling. Come in,
please."

"Monig here," the audio said. _Boink_ ... _oing_, _oing_ ...

"Got anything yet?"

"Not a thing, Dr. Harris," Monig said. "You can't see three inches in
front of your face down here--it's too silty. We've bumped into a couple
of crates, but so far, no egg."

"Keep trying."

Cheyney, looking even more like a bulldog than usual, was setting his
stopwatch by one of the eight clocks on ULTIMAC's face. "Want me to take
the divers?" he said.

"No, Clark, not yet. I'd rather have Joan do it for the moment." I
passed the mike to her. "You'd better run a probability series first."

"Check." He began feeding tape into the integrator's mouth. "What's your
angle, Peter?"

"The ship. I want to see how heavily shielded that dump-cell is."

"It isn't shielded at all," Anderton's voice said be