My Uncle Oswald(32)

A. R. Woresbey said nothing. He was not looking at all well.

“‘Finest rum I ever tasted,’ one of the sailors was heard to remark afterwards. Now what shall we have for dessert?”

“No dessert,” A. R. Woresley said.

I ordered the best bottle of port in the house and some Stilton cheese. There was absolute silence between us as we waited for the port to be decanted. It was a Cockburn and a good one, though I’ve forgotten the year.

The port was served and the splendid crumbly green Stilton was on our plates. “Now,” I said, “let me tell you how I am going to make you a million pounds.”

He was watchful and a shade truculent now, but he was not aggressive. He was definitely softened up.





9





“You ARE virtually broke,” I said. “You have crippling mortgage interests to pay. You have a meagre salary from the university. You have no savings. You live, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, on slops.”

“We live very well.”

“No, you don’t. And you never will, unless you let me help you.”

“So what is your plan?”

“You, sir,” I said, “have made a great scientific discovery. There’s no doubt about that.”

“You agree it’s important?” he said, perking up.

“Very important. But if you publish your findings, just look what will happen. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry all over the world will steal your process for their own use. You won’t be able to stop them. It’s been the same all through the history of science. Look at pasteurization. Pasteur published. Everyone stole his process. And where did that leave old Pasteur?”

“He became a famous man,” A. R. Woresley said.

“If that’s all you want to be, then by all means go ahead and publish. I shall retire gracefully from the scene.”

“With your scheme,” A. R. Woresley said, “would I ever be able to publish?”

“Of course. As soon as you’ve got the million in your pocket.”

“How long would that be?”

“I don’t know. I’d say five or ten years at the most. After that, you would be free to become famous.”

“Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s hear about this brilliant scheme.”

The port was very good. The Stilton was good, too, but I only nibbled it to clear my palate. I called for an apple. A hard apple, thinly sliced, is the best partner for port.

“I propose that we deal only with human spermatozoa,” I said. “I propose that we select only the truly great and famous men alive in the world today and that we establish a sperm vault for these men. We will store two hundred and fifty straws of sperm from each man.”

“What is the point of that?” A. R. Woresley said.

“Go back just sixty years,” I said, “to around 1860, and pretend that you and I were living then and that we had the knowledge and the ability to store sperm indefinitely. So which living geniuses, in 1860, would you have chosen as donors?”

“Dickens,” he said.

“Go on.”

“And Ruskin . . . and Mark Twain.”

“And Brahms,” I said, “and Wagner and Tschaikovsky and Dvorák. The list is very long. Authentic geniuses every one of them. Go back further in the century, if you like, to Balzac, to Beethoven, to Napoleon, to Goya, to Chopin. Wouldn’t it be exciting if we had in our liquid nitrogen bank a couple of hundred straws of the living sperm of Beethoven?”

“What would you do with them?”

“Sell them, of course.”

“To whom?”

“To women. To very rich women who wanted babies by one of the greatest geniuses of all time.”

“Now wait a minute, Cornelius. Women, rich or not, aren’t going to allow themselves to be inseminated with the sperm of some long dead stranger just because he was a genius.”

“That’s what you think. Listen, I could take you to any Beethoven concert you like and I’d guarantee to find half a dozen females there who’d give almost anything to have a baby today by the great man.”

“You mean spinsters?”

“No. Married women.”

“What would their husbands say?”

“Their husbands wouldn’t know. Only the mother would know that she was pregnant by Beethoven.”

“That’s knavery, Cornelius.”

“Can’t you see her,” I said, “this rich unhappy woman who is married to some incredibly ugly, coarse, ignorant, unpleasant industrialist from Birmingham, and all at once she has something to live for. As she goes strolling through the beautifully kept garden of her husband’s enormous country house, she is humming the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica and thinking to herself, ‘My God, isn’t it wonderful! I am pregnant by the man who wrote that music a hundred years ago!’”