James Blish

“ 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. ”

“ Braun. If a real bomb-drop ever comes, we're going to have to have you here, as an active part of our investigation. Your intuition for the one-shot gamble was the one thing that bailed us out this time. Next time it may save eight million lives."
There was quite a long silence. All of us, Anderton included, watched Braun intently, but his impassive face failed to show any trace of how his thoughts were running.
When he did speak at last, what he said must have seemed insanely irrelevant to Anderton, and maybe to Cheyney too. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ It's rough on the various people who've tried to fictionalize what we do—particularly for the lazy examples of the breed, who come to us expecting that their plotting has already been done for them—but it's inherent in the way we operate, and there it is.
Certainly nobody at CIA so much as thought of Braun when the news first came through. Harry Anderton, the Harbor Defense chief, called us at 0830 Friday to take on the job of identifying the egg ”

“ Anderton demanded. "And what's this deadline stuff, anyhow?"
"The cap's off," Monig reported. "We're getting plenty of radiation now. Just a minute— Yeah. Dr. Hadamard, it's a bomb, all right. But it hasn't got a fuse. Now how could they have made a fool mistake like that?"
"In other words, it's a dud," Joan said. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”