My Uncle Oswald Read online

  '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 Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. 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!" '

  'We don't have Beethoven's sperm.'

  'There are plenty of others,' I said. 'There are great men in every century, in every decade. It's our job to get them. And listen,' I went on, 'there's one tremendous thing in our favour. You will find that very rich men are nearly always ugly, coarse, ignorant and unpleasant. They are robber bandits, monsters. Just think of the mentality of men who spend their lives amassing million after million - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, Krupp. Those are the old-timers. Today's batch are just as unattractive. Industrialists, war profiteers. All horrible fellows. Invariably, they marry women for their beauty and the women marry them for their money. The beauties have ugly useless children by their ugly grasping husbands. They get to hate their husbands. They get bored. They take up culture. They buy paintings by the Impressionists and go to Wagner concerts. And at that stage, my dear sir, these women are ripe for the picking. So in steps Oswald Cornelius offering to impregnate them with guaranteed genuine Wagner sperm.'

  'Wagner's dead, too.'

  'I am simply trying to show you what our sperm vault will look like in forty years' time if we start it now, in 1919.'

  'Who would we put in it?' A. R. Woresley said.

  'Who would you suggest? Who are the geniuses of today?'

  'Albert Einstein.'

  'Good,' I said. 'Who else?'

  'Sibelius.'

  'Splendid. And what about Rachmaninov?'

  'And Debussy,' he said.

  'Who else?'

  'Sigmund Freud in Vienna.'

  'Is he great?'

  'He's going to be,' A. R. Woresley said. 'He is already world famous in medical circles.'

  'I'll take your word for it. Go on.'

  'Igor Stravinsky,' he said.

  'I didn't know you knew music.'

  'Of course.'

  'I'd like to propose the painter Picasso in Paris,' I said.

  'Is he a genius?'

  'Yes,' I said.

  'Would you accept Henry Ford in America?'

  'Oh, yes,' I said. 'That's a good one. And our own King George the Fifth.'

  'King George the Fifth!' he cried. 'What's he got to do with it?'

  'He's royal blood. Just imagine what some women would pay for a child by the King of England!'

  'You're being ridiculous, Cornelius. You can't go crashing into Buckingham Palace and start asking His Majesty the King if he would be good enough to provide you with an ejaculation of semen.'

  'You wait,' I said. 'You haven't heard the half of it yet. And we won't stop at George the Fifth. We must have a very comprehensive stock indeed of royal sperm. All the Kings in Europe. Let's see. There's Haakon of Norway. There's Gustav of Sweden. Christian of Denmark. Albert of Belgium. Alfonso of Spain. Carol of Romania. Boris of Bulgaria. Victor Emmanuel of Italy.'

  'You're being silly.'

  'No, I'm not. Wealthy Spanish ladies of aristocratic blood would crave for a baby by Alfonso. It'll be the same in every country. The aristocracy worships the monarchy. It is essential that we have a good stock of royal sperm in our vault. And I'll get it. Don't you worry. I'll get it.'

  'It's a hare-brained and impracticable stunt,' A. R. Woresley said. He put a lump of Stilton in his mouth and swilled it round with port. Thus he ruined both the cheese and the wine.

  'I am prepared,' I said slowly, 'to invest every penny of my one hundred thousand pounds into our partnership. That's how hare-brained I think it is.'

  'You're mad.'

  'You'd have told me I was mad if you'd seen me setting off for the Sudan at the age of seventeen in search of Blister Beetle powder. You would, wouldn't you?'

  That pulled him up a little. 'What would you charge for this sperm,' he said.

  'A fortune,' I said. 'Nobody is going to get a baby Einstein cheap. Or a baby Sibelius. Or a baby King Albert of the Belgians. Hey! I've just had a thought. Would a king's baby be in line for the throne?'

  'He'd be a bastard.'

  'He'd be in line for something. Royal bastards always are. We must charge a packet for a king's sperm.'

  'How much would you charge?'

  'I think about twenty thousand pounds a shot. Commoners would be slightly cheaper. We would have a price list and a range of prices. But kings would be the most expensive.'

  'H. G. Wells!' he said suddenly. 'He's around.'

  'Yes. We might put him on the list.'