“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 country, 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 offing 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.”

“Whom would we put in it?” A. R. Woresley said.

“Whom would you suggest? Who are the geniuses of today?”

“Albert Einstein.”

“Good,” I said. “Who else?”

“Sibelius.”

“Splendid. And what about Rachmaninoff?”

“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 Rumania. 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 asked.

“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 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.”

A. R. Woresley leaned back in his chair and sipped his port. “Assuming,” he said, “just assuming we did have this remarkable sperm vault, who would go out and find the rich women buyers?”

“I would.”

“And who would inseminate them?”

“I would.”

“You don’t know how to do it.”

“I could soon learn. It might be rather fun.”

“There is a flaw in this scheme of yours,” A. R. Woresley said. “A serious flaw.”

“What is it?”

“The really valuable sperm is not Einstein’s or Stravinsky’s. It’s Einstein’s father’s. Or Stravinsky’s father’s. Those are the men who actually sired the geniuses.”

“Agreed,” I said. “But by the time a man becomes a recognized genius, his father is dead.”

“So your scheme is fraudulent.”

“We’re out to make money,” I said, “not to breed geniuses. These women aren’t going to want Sibelius’s father’s sperm anyway. What they’ll be after is a nice hot injection of twenty million living spermatozoa from the great man himself.”

A. R. Woresley had his awful pipe going now and clouds of smoke enveloped his head. “I will admit,” he said, “yes, I am prepared to grant you that you could find wealthy female buyers for the sperm of geniuses and royalty. But your entire bizarre scheme is unfortunately doomed to failure for the simple reason that you will be unable to obtain your supplies of sperm. You don’t seriously believe that great men and kings will be prepared to go through the . . . the extremely embarrassing motions of producing an ejaculation of sperm for some totally unknown young man.”

“That’s not the way I’ll do it.”

“How will you do it?”

“The way I’ll do it, not a single one of them will be able to resist becoming a donor.”

“Rubbish. I’d resist it.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” I put a thin slice of apple in my mouth and ate it. I raised the glass of port to my nose. It had a bouquet of mushrooms. I took a sip and rolled it on my tongue. The flavour filled my mouth. It reminded me of pot-pourri. For a few moments I was captivated by the loveliness of the wine I was tasting. And what a remarkable follow-through it had after the swallow. The flavour lingered in the back of the nose for a long time. “Give me three days,” I said, “and I guarantee that I’ll have in my possession one complete and genuine ejaculation of your own sperm together with a statement signed by you certifying it is yours.”

“Don’t be so foolish, Cornelius. You can’t make me do something I don’t want to do.”