Tambu

INTERVIEW VI

"I assume the captains approved your plan?" Erickson asked.

"Unanimously. In hindsight, it wasn't surprising. It was either that or disband."

"So you began offering the services of your fleet to the planets on a retainer basis?" the reporter prompted.

"That is correct. And the key word there is 'offered.' When you stop to think about it, it was a good deal for the planets. We had built, armed, and organized the fleet at our own expense. All we were asking them to do was contribute toward maintaining it."

"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."

"That sounds awfully considerate," Erickson observed, not really believing it.

"Only partially," Tambu admitted. "The other side of the coin was that we were afraid if we didn't find a way to spread our fees more, that the subscribing planets would decide they were paying too much and withdraw from our roster."

"While you're speaking candidly," the reporter prodded, "I couldn't help but notice a note of bitterness in your voice when you spoke about the resisting planets. How deep did the emotions run in your fleet over that initial resistance?"

"There were two kinds of bitterness prevalent in the fleet at that time. The first was over the injustice of the refusals. We lost numerous ships in our campaigns against the pirates-ships with friends and comrades on board. It did not sit well with us to be told by the planets that we hadn't really done anything or risked anything. That was a bitterness we had anticipated, and as such kept under control."

"And the other kind?" Erickson urged.

"The other kind was over the method of the refusals. As I mentioned earlier, we hadn't expected all the planets to agree to our proposal. Though we felt our position was reasonable and justified, we held no grudge against an opinion to the contrary. What did surprise us was the venom with which our offer was refused. While most of our crews owned no allegiance or loyalty to the planets, neither did they harbor any ill-will-that is, until they encountered the warm greeting some of the planets had prepared for anyone off a Tambu ship."