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.
"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."
"You're out of your mind," Anderton said.
A decorous knock spared me the trouble of having to deny, affirm or ignore the judgment. It was Braun; the messenger had been fast, and the gambler hadn't bothered to read what a college student had thought of him fifteen years ago. He came forward and held out his hand, while the others looked him over frankly.