Robert Asprin – Tambu

“Yet you encountered resistance to your offer,” Erickson recalled. “Didn’t that surprise you?”

“Yes and no. We knew from the onset that not everyone would want to contribute. There’s an old medical saying which states ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ The anticipated problem was convincing a healthy patient that he needed an ounce of prevention, however reasonably priced it might be.”

“Perhaps they thought they were being asked to pay for a pound of prevention where an ounce would suffice.”

“I would believe that if they had haggled about the price,” Tambu said pointedly. “However, what we encountered was flat refusal. In essence, the planets wanted to reap the benefits of our work without paying a cent.”

“They did pay reward money when you destroyed the pirate ships,” the reporter reminded him gently.

“The actual fighting was only a fraction of our work,” Tambu argued. “If a pirate chose to run or even avoid a planet completely rather than tangle with our ships, we got nothing even though we had effectively performed a service.”

“But in that situation your ship hadn’t actually done anything,” Erickson countered.

“Are your planetside police paid by the arrest? Part of the value of a uniformed patrolman is as a deterrent. Their job is as much to prevent crimes as it is to solve them.”

“I take it the planets weren’t swayed by your arguments?”

“Some were,” Tambu said, calming slightly. “I tend to overgeneralize when I refer to the planetside resistance. Many planets did subscribe to our service, but there were few enough that in my eyes they had to pay an inflated rate. As such we were continually approaching and reapproaching the other planets to subscribe, in an effort to reduce the costs to the individual planet.”