hind me. I hadn't
heard him come in. "But that doesn't prove anything. The egg might have
carried sufficient shielding in itself. Or maybe the Commies 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 blood tests?" Joan asked Anderton.

"Yes."

"Get the reports through to me, then. I want white-cell counts,
differentials, platelet counts, hematocrit and sed rates on every man."

Anderton picked up the phone and I took a firm hold on the doorknob.

"Hey," Anderton said, putting the phone down again. "Are you going to
duck out just like that? Remember, Dr. 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 it's _not_ being an egg!"

"Don't move a man until you get a go-ahead from CIA," I said. "For all
we know now, 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 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 thinned. Then he picked up the
phone again to order Joan'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 faint trail to Abner Longmans Braun,
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
racket-ridden union now formally extinct--although anyone who knew the
signs could still pick up some traces on the docks. In those days, Braun
had been the business manager of an insurance firm, the sole visible
function of which had been to write policies for the IL