“I would steal it.”
“Ah-ha.”
“I would steal one ejaculation, and then, provided of course that I was successful with my experiments, I would share out that single ejaculation, those five thousand million sperm, among all of my brother’s eighty cows.”
“How would you share it out?” I asked.
“By what I call hypodermic insemination. By injecting the sperm into the cow with a syringe.”
“I suppose that’s possible.”
“Of course it’s possible,” he said. “After all, the male sexual organ is itself really nothing more than a syringe for injecting semen.”
“Steady on,” I said. “Mine’s a bit more than that.”
“I don’t doubt it, Cornelius, I don’t doubt it,” he answered dryly. “But shall we stick to the point?”
“Sorry.”
“So I started experimenting with bulls’ semen.”
I picked up the bottle of port and refilled his glass. I had the feeling now that old Woresley was onto something pretty interesting and I wanted to keep him going.
“I’ve told you,” he said, “that the average bull produces about five cc’s of fluid each time. That’s not much. Even when mixed with glycerol there wouldn’t be enough there for me to start dividing it up into a great many parts and then expect to be able to inject each of those tiny parts into separate cows. So I had to find a dilutant, something to increase the volume.”
“Why not add more glycerol?”
“I tried it. It didn’t work. Altogether too viscous. I won’t bore you with a list of all the curious substances I experimented with. I will simply tell you the one that works. Skimmed milk works. Eighty per cent skimmed milk, ten per cent egg yolk, and ten per cent glycerol. That’s the magic mixture. The sperm love it. You simply mix the whole cocktail thoroughly, and that, as you can see, gave me a practical volume of fluid to experiment with. So for several years, I worked with my brother’s cows, and finally I arrived at the optimum dose.”
“What was it?”
“The optimum dose was no more than twenty million spermatozoa per cow. When I injected that into a cow at the right time, I got eighty per cent pregnancies. And don’t forget, Cornelius,” he went on excitedly, “that each bull’s ejaculation contains five thousand million sperm. Divided up into doses of twenty million, that gives two hundred and fifty separate doses! It was amazing! I was flabbergasted!”
“Does that mean,” I said, “that with just one of my own ejaculations I could make two hundred and fifty women pregnant?”
“You are not a bull, Cornelius, much as you may like to think you are.”
“How many females could one of my ejaculations do?”
“About a hundred. But I am not about to help you.”
By God, I thought, I could knock up about seven hundred women a week at that rate! “Have you actually proved this with your brother’s bull?” I asked.
“Many times,” A. R. Woresley said. “It works. I collect one ejaculation, then I quickly mix it up with skimmed milk, egg yolk, and glycerol, then I measure it into single doses before freezing.”
“What volume of fluid in each dose?” I asked.
“Very small. Just half a cc.”
“Is that all you inject into the cow, just half a cc of fluid?”
“That’s all. But don’t forget there’s twenty million living spermatozoa in that half cc.”
“Ah, yes.”
“I put these little doses separately into small rubber tubes,” he said. “I call them straws. I seal both ends, then I freeze. Just think of it, Cornelius! Two hundred and fifty highly potent straws of spermatozoa from a single ejaculation!”
“I am thinking about it,” I said. “It’s a bloody miracle.”
“And I can store them for as long as I like, deep frozen. All I have to do when a cow starts bulling is take out one straw from the liquid nitrogen flask, thaw it, which doesn’t take a minute, transfer the contents to a syringe, and shoot it into the cow.”
The bottle of port was three-quarters empty now and A. R. Woresley was getting a bit tipsy. I refilled his glass again.
“What about this prize bull you were talking about?” I said.