“Thank you, sir. Not to mention that it finally got rid of Hasenpfeffer.”
“Not to mention that you did it with one of my girls.”
“Oooh! Territoriality raises its ugly little head! What’s it to be next, Ian? Putting your private brand on each chick in your household? Tell me, do you plan on burning a big ‘I-bar-M’ unto all their trim little left buttocks? Or do you figure on getting creative about it? Like maybe hitting a belly button here and a right tit there?”
“Knock it off! You know damn well that I’d never do any such thing! But we never agreed to go communal with our lady friends, and to just take one without permission is damned arrogant behavior.”
“I had the girl’s permission, or at least her tacit consent, since she was as enthusiastic about the whole thing as I was. What? Are you her father? Her brother? Her husband? Her owner, maybe? Whatever you are, you just sat there while the two of us got carried away a little. If you had a complaint, you should have aired it before the act took place!”
“Maybe so, but I still think that you owe me one.”
“No, you owe me one. I transferred Ming Po over to you, and you never returned the favor.”
“Would you take that maid in trade? She hasn’t come up on my schedule yet, and now I don’t think that I’d feel right about taking her.”
“Fine. She’s a good woman. But you’re sure getting uppity in your old age. Remember those forty women you took home after the party? A third of them were from my staff, and an equal number came from Hasenpfeffer’s. Did either of us complain about that? A few hundred of the girls went home with other guys after that party, and certainly no one objected to that! In fact, I have yet to meet a woman on this island who was either underaged, half-witted, or a virgin. These are all mature, experienced women who are in full command of their own lives. For some strange, yet to be explained reason, they all seem to want to enjoy our succulent bodies, in just exactly the same way that the all women back home didn’t. It always has been the women who do the choosing, not us men. You’re enough of a historian to know that! We couldn’t do any getting when they weren’t doing any giving, and now that they are, I say that we should take all we can get. Personally, I intend to continue doing just what I have been doing all along, and if that bothers you, tough!”
“Oh, just forget it.”
“The hell I will.” The waitress came back precisely on cue, the way everything happened around the island. “Mona, my fine girl, I think that you are not sufficiently appreciated around here, so if you’re willing, how about coming to work for me? You could report to Barb as soon as you got through here. Does that sound good to you?”
“Why, yes, Tom! That’s wonderful!”
“Good.” Turning back to Ian, I said, “Now we can forget it.”
I slapped Mona on the butt as she left, and said to Ian, “So. Do you want to talk about what’s really bugging you?”
“No, Tom. Not just yet.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Amoebas and Our Factory
I said, “Did you ever think about an amoeba?”
“Rarely. In fact, I’ve been known to go whole weeks at a time without doing such a thing, even after breakfast.”
“Then consider that when times are good, an amoeba duplicates itself, reproduces by fission, about once every half an hour.”
“And two little amoebas wiggle off. So?”
“Well, would you consider that act of fission to be the death of the animal?”
“Certainly not,” Ian said.
“Then one can reasonably say that every amoeba now on earth has been around since the very first single-celled animal came into existence, perhaps a billion or more years ago. They are immortal.”
“I suppose that that would follow, yes. Interesting.”
“Now consider the fact that the total number of amoebas on earth doesn’t change much. That there were about as many of them a half an hour ago as there are now. Therefore, on the average, one amoeba must die for each one that is created by fission. Think about what it must be like to be such an animal. There you are, billions of years old, knowing for the entire time that there is a fifty-fifty chance that you will be dead in the next half an hour,” I said.
“Well, fortunately, as far as we know, they don’t know, think, or remember anything, which together makes worrying pretty much impossible.”
“True. But if they could, each and every one of the zillions of amoebas in the world would be perfectly justified in thinking of himself as being a fantastically lucky individual, having won that fifty-fifty bet with death almost every single half hour for billions of years.”
“I see what you mean, Tom. Each one has seen—what?—maybe ten to the fifteenth of its clones die, while it has kept on living! Every one of them is so improbable that it couldn’t possibly happen, yet there they all are in uncountable numbers, immortals waiting to die at any instant. Remarkable. Does this little parable of yours have any point?”
“No, but it sure makes you think, doesn’t it? So what do you want to do today?”
“I don’t know, except let’s not try to be amoebas,” Ian said. “I think that we have just about exhausted all of the possibilities before us. Nothing comes to mind. Can you think of anything interesting?”
“Well, okay, look. Neither one of us has ever tried anything really kinky. Now, I’ll bet that if we looked for it, this palace of yours will turn out to have a dungeon, complete with cages full of nearly naked slave girls in leather, eager to taste our whips and nipple clamps, or perhaps your personal branding iron.”
“You know, Tom, I think that you are probably right. I mean, I truly believe that our ladies really would volunteer for that sort of thing, if we asked them to do it. But the question is, would you actually ask them to do such a thing?”
“Well, no, I couldn’t. Look, I wasn’t being serious. The truth is, I feel very protective toward these girls. I don’t think that I could hurt one of them if my life depended on it. But I at least I came up with something original. Now it’s your turn to think up something for us to do today.”
“Yeah. Well, we could always go flying again. We’re still a long way from earning our pilots’ licenses.”
“True, but somehow, I don’t feel like flying today. How about if we get some horses and ride down to the factory area? We could nose around there for a while, and maybe find something interesting.”
“I think that’s a dull, stupid idea, Tom, but it’s the best one I’ve heard today, so let’s act on it.”
We walked out of Ian’s Taj Mahal, to find two dozen of our ladies mounted and waiting for us, along with the two oversized horses we would ride, Diablo and Trigger. All the girls were in jodhpurs, riding boots, and nothing from the waist up except for some oversized sombreros.
As we mounted up, I said, “Ian, have you noticed that our staffs have been wearing less and less lately? I haven’t asked them to do that. Is it your doing?”
“Not guilty. Ming Po, why are all of you wearing just jodhpurs?”
“It is vera painful to ride horse with no long pants on, Ian,” she said in her best try at a Chinese accent.
“You know what I mean. Why are all of you women topless?”
“It is what we wished to not wear.”
“Okay, then why did you wish to not wear shirts, or tops, or whatever you call what you’re not wearing?”
“It is not me, of course, for I have receive far more than I deserve, but many other have notice that the less clothes a woman wear, the more likely she is to be noticed by two of you men.”
“There you go, Tom. It’s all just part of our infinite local sex appeal.” Ian turned back to Ming Po, and said, “If you don’t feel the need for attracting me any further, why are your breasts as bare as every one else’s?”
“Because when everyone does something, then it is the fashion. A woman must be in fashion, yes?”
Ian looked confused, trying to absorb that one.
I could see that he didn’t want to say anything, so I said, “It’s passing strange, ladies, but I for one will happily suspend my disbelief in the apparent universe, in return for the ample services rendered.”
There was no point in having Ian be the only one who was confused.