Poul Anderson - Margin of Profit

“And it costs three hundred per cent of your profit to outfit a ship—”

“Indeed. But we are only so equipping every fourth ship. That means we operate on a smaller margin, yes, but a little arithmetic should show you we can still scrape by in the black ink.”

“Every fourth—?” Rentharik shook his head, frankly puzzled. “But what will you gain? Out of every four encounters, we will win three.”

“Just so. And by those three victories,, you will capture twelve slaves. The fourth time, we rope in twenty Borthudian spacemen. Naturally, you will never know beforehand which ship is going to be the one that can fight back. You will either have to give up your press gangs or see them whittled away.” Van Rijn rubbed his horny palms together. “So you see, by damn, always I operate on the statistics, and always I load the statistics. My friend, you have had it edgewise.”

Rentharik crouched where he stood and blazed at his captor: “I learned, here, that your union will not travel through the Kossaluth. Do you think reducing the number of impressed men by one fourth will change their minds?”

Van Rijn grinned. “If I know my spacemen—why, of course. Because if you do continue to raid us, you will soon reduce yourselves to so few crews as to be helpless. Then you will have to deal with us, and our terms will include freeing of all the slaves, deconditioning, and good fat indemnities. Any man worth his salt can stand a couple years’ service, even on your moldy rustbuckets, if he knows he will then be freed and paid enough to retire on.”

He cleared his throat, buttered his tone, and went on: “So is it not wise that you make terms at once? We will be very lenient if you do. You will have to release and indemnify all your present captives, and stop raiding, but you can send students to our academies at not much more than the usual fees. We will want a few minor trade concessions as well, of course—”

“And in a hundred years you’ll own us!” It was a snarl.

“If you do not agree, by damn, in three years we will own you. The choice is yours. You must have a continuously expanding supply of spacemen or your economy collapses. You can either let us train them in civilized fashion, and give us a wedge by which we ruin you in three generations, or you can impress them and be ruined inside this decade. Pick your man; we will let him report to your king-pig. And never forget that I, Nicholas van Rijn of the Polesotechnic League, do nothing without very good reason. Even the name of my ship could have warned you.”

“The name—?” whispered Rentharik.

“Mercury,” explained van Rijn, “was the god of commerce, gambling—and thieves.”