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    One-Shot
    One-Shot
    One-Shot
    Ebook42 pages28 minutes

    One-Shot

    By H. R. van Dongen and James Blish

    2.5/5

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateMay 1, 2011
    One-Shot

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    Reviews for One-Shot

    2.5/5

    8 ratings2 reviews

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    • 2/5
      A Polish cargo ship drops potentially dangerous cargo (known as "The Egg") in New York harbor. When the CIA are unable to determine whether it's a bomb or not, they call in a renown gambler to give his best hunch. Dull and implausible nonsense. Nowhere near one of Blish's best.
    • 2/5
      Merely an ok short story. Not all that memorable.

    Book preview

    One-Shot - H. R. van Dongen

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of One-Shot, by James Benjamin Blish

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: One-Shot

    Author: James Benjamin Blish

    Illustrator: van Dongen

    Release Date: October 11, 2007 [EBook #22958]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE-SHOT ***

    Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online

    Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

    ONE-SHOT

    You can do a great deal if you have enough data, and enough time to compute on it, by logical methods. But given the situation that neither data nor time is adequate, and an answer must be produced ... what do you do?

    BY JAMES BLISH

    Illustrated by van Dongen

    On the day that the Polish freighter Ludmilla laid an egg in New York harbor, Abner Longmans (One-Shot) Braun was in the city going about his normal business, which was making another million dollars. As we found out later, almost nothing else was normal about that particular week end for Braun. For one thing, he had brought his family with him—a complete departure from routine—reflecting the unprecedentedly legitimate nature of the deals he was trying to make. From every point of view it was a bad week end for the CIA to mix into his affairs, but nobody had explained that to the master of the Ludmilla.

    I had better add here that we knew nothing about this until afterward; from the point of view of the storyteller, an organization like Civilian Intelligence Associates gets to all its facts backwards, entering the tale at the pay-off, working back to the hook, and winding up with a sheaf of background facts to feed into the computer for Next Time. 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

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