To Prime the Pump - A. Bertram Chandler [50]
"But it could have been," said Grimes. "That is, if your theory is correct."
"How, sir?"
"You, even you, have had criminals. I have seen pictures from the Monitor's memory bank. These criminals, I am informed, were arrested and sent into exile, although it was hinted that they would not live to make planet fall on another world. If, Mr. Lobenga, these men had been executed on El Dorado, surely your pump would have been primed."
"Do you think that we have not thought of that?" asked Lobenga. "There are two valid reasons why this has never been done. To begin with, we have always taken great pains to impress upon the Monitor the sanctity of the lives of all members of the El Dorado Corporation, and have always striven to maintain the Master/Servant relationship, with ourselves, of course, as the Masters. Secondly, if you were going to top up a reservoir of any kind, would you use polluted fluids?"
"Our own souls were dipped out of dirty buckets," chuckled the Duchess of Leckhampton. "Marlene's not the only one here with a murky family past."
"But we have evolved," Lobenga explained patiently.
"Hah! "exploded the old lady sardonically.
"Then," said Grimes, "there is another solution."
"You are a veritable mine of information, John," the Princess told him.
"I was taught," he said, "that spacemanship is only applied commonsense. And commonsense can be applied to more things than the handling of ships. All right. We know that women who had conceived before coming to El Dorado bore their children here. We have reason to believe that Captain de Messigny has fathered children on other worlds. Then why, why, WHY shouldn't all of you who feel the urge to parenthood do your breeding off-planet?"
"Because," said Lobenga sombrely, "we have too much to lose. Because we are cowards. Because we are like the rich men mentioned, time after time in the Christian Bible, who would not give up their worldly possessions for an assured place in the Kingdom of Heaven. There is always risk involved in travelling off-planet. On El Dorado the Monitor protects us from all possible harm. On other worlds we are liable to death from disease, accident, premeditated violence. Oh, there have been couples who have taken the risk. None of them have returned. The Bernsteins both' drowned in a boating accident on Atlantia. Dom Pedro da Silva and his wife, he was executed on Waverley for the murder of her lover. She committed suicide. I could go on. It seems that a malign fate pursues us once we lift beyond the limits of our own atmosphere . . ." He paused. "It seems that all the risks that we avoid by living here accumulate, as it were, and once we are away from the protection of the Monitor topple, and crush us beneath their weight."
"Captain de Messigny is still with you," observed Grimes.
"Yes," said the Comte coldly. "I am still around. But before I became a member of the Corporation I led an adventurous life. And, furthermore, I could never remain planetbound for long. That would kill me, Monitor or no Monitor. But even I am reluctant to leave the safety of my ship in strange ports and, furthermore, do all my entertaining on board."
"Yet another solution," put forward Grimes happily. "Build a passenger vessel, with accommodation for fifty or a hundred couples. Make a landing on a world with a well-topped-up reservoir and then breed like rabbits."
"And do you think that we haven't tried it?" the Comte asked. "The ship was half-way back to El Dorado when, inexplicably, her micro-pile went critical. I need not tell you that there were no survivors."
"So," asked Grimes, "where does the white goat come into it? Where do I come in?"
"We are a moral people," said Lobenga
The Duchess snorted.
"We are a moral people," he stated firmly. "It would have been relatively easy for us to have arranged an accident that would have destroyed your Aries