One Shot
By James Blish
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About this ebook
James Blish
James Blish (1921–1975) was a novelist whose most popular works include Jack of Eagles and his Cities in Flight series, about people fleeing a declining Earth to seek new homes among the stars. He attended Rutgers University and received a bachelor of arts degree in microbiology before serving as a medical technician in World War II, and was an early member of the Futurians, a group of science fiction writers, fans, editors, and publishers. In 1959, Blish received the Hugo Award for his novel A Case of Conscience. He was also a prolific short fiction writer and a major contributor to the Star Trek saga, rewriting scripts into anthologies and producing original stories and screenplays.
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Book preview
One Shot - James Blish
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