"Uh," I said, making a quick mental plane reservation for Rio, "sure, Doll. Sure we will." I broke away right quick after that. There was a problem I wanted to get a little advice on.
What I did get, actually, was a nasty shock.
Back in my apartment—my big, new, plush apartment—I sat down to go over the thing with the Department of the Interior. The enthusiastic response I got surprised me. "Magnificent," was the word. "Superb. Great!"
Well, I thought myself that I had turned in a pretty outstanding performance, but I hadn't expected such applause. "It is a first step, a splendid beginning! A fully equipped, well-armed expedition will have the place settled, under cultivation and reasonably civilized inside of a day or two, your time. It will be simple for them. So much more so than in your case—since we now know precisely what to expect."
I was truly shocked. I felt guilty. "No!" I said. "Oh, no! What a thing to do. You can't!"
"Now, now. Gently," they said. "What, after all, oh Fatherland, might be the perfectly natural consequences of your own act?"
"What? You mean under other—that is——"
"Exactly. You could very well have implanted a new life in her, which is all that we have done. Why should our doing so disturb you?"
Well, it did disturb me. But then, as they pointed out, they could have developed less pleasant methods of spreading colonies. They had merely decided that this approach would be the surest and simplest.
"Well, maybe," I told them, "but it still seems kind of sneaky to me. Besides, if you'd left it to me, I'd certainly never have picked a great big ox like Helga. And now she says she's going to marry me, too!"