I called headquarters and sent a messenger to my apartment to look for one of those long-dusty blue folders with the legal-length 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; his whole posture telegraphed his controlled helplessness. Cheyney 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 & Manhattan stopped; their rumbling course through their tubes would have blanked out any possible echo-pip from the egg. "Wild goose chase?" Joan 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?" [Illustration] "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 gambler on a job like this? He'll just get in the way." I looked toward the television screen, which now showed an amorphous 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 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?" Cheyney consulted the stopwatch. "Deadline in twenty-nine minutes," he said. "All right, let's use those minutes. I'm beginning to see this thing a little clearer. Joan, what we've got here is a one-shot gamble; right?" "In effect," 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 '52? They scrabbled for them 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 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, 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.