It was after a hard day of screaming at Blount, and being screamed back at, that George dragged his carcass off the Long Island Rail Road and into the family car. "Hi, dear," he said to Mrs. McCardle, erstwhile tigress-Diana, and off they drove, and so far it seemed like the waning of another ordinary day. But in the car Mrs. McCardle said thoughtfully: "George…"
She told him what was on her mind, and he refrained from striking her in the face because they were in rather tricky traffic and she was driving.
She wanted a child.
It was necessary to have a child, she said. Inexorable logic dictated it. For one thing, it was absurd for just the two of them to live in a great barn of a six-room house.
For another thing, she needed a child to fulfill her womanhood. For a third, the brains and beauty of the Moone-McCardle strains should not die out; it was their duty to posterity.
(The students in Columbia's Chronoscope History Seminar 201 retched as one man at the words.)
For a fourth, everybody was having children.
George thought he had her there, but no. The statement was perfectly correct if for "everybody" you substituted "Mrs. Jacques Truro," their next-door neighbor.
By the time they reached their great six-room barn of a place she was consolidating her victory with a rapid drumfire of simple declarative sentences which ended with "Don't you?" and "Won't we?" and "Isn't it?" to which George, hanging onto the ropes, groggily replied: "We'll see… we'll see… we'll see…"
A wounded thing inside him was soundlessly screaming: youth! joy! freedom! gone beyond recall, slain by wedlock, coffined by a mortgage, now to be entombed beneath a reeking Everest of diapers!
"I believe I'd like a drink before dinner," he said. "Had quite a time with Blount today," he said as the Martini curled quietly in his stomach. He was pretending nothing very bad had happened. "Kept talking about his integrity. Writers! They'll never learn… Tigress? Are you with me?"
His wife noticed a slight complaining note in his voice, so she threw herself on the floor, began to kick and scream, went on to hold her breath until her face turned blue, and finished by letting George know that she had abandoned her Career to assuage his bachelor misery, moved out to this dreary wasteland to satisfy his whim, and just once in her life requested some infinitesimal consideration in return for her ghastly drudgery and scrimping.
George, who was a kind and gentle person except with writers, dried her tears and apologized for his brutality. They would have a child, he said contritely. "Though," he added. "I hear there are some complications about it these days."
"For Motherhood," said Mrs. McCardle, getting off the floor, "no complications are too great." She stood profiled like a statue against their picture window, with its view of the picture window of the house across the street.
The next day George asked around at his office.
None of the younger men, married since the P. Q. P. went into effect, seemed to have had children.
A few of them cheerily admitted they had not had children and were not going to have children, for they had volunteered for D-Bal shots, thus doing away with a running minor expense and, more importantly, ensuring a certain peace of mind and unbroken continuity during tender moments.
"Ugh," thought George.
(The Columbia University professor explained to his students "]t is clearly in George's interest to go to the clinic for a painless, effective D-Bal shot and thus resolve his problem, but he does not go,. he shudders at the thought. We cannot know what fear of amputation stemming from some early traumatic experience thus prevents him from action, but deep-rooted psychological reasons explain his behavior, we can't be certain." The class bent over the chronoscope.)
And some of George's co-workers slunk away and would not submit to questioning. Young MacBirney, normally open and incisive, muttered vaguely and passed his hand across his brow when George asked him how one went about having a baby-red-tape-wise, that is.
It was Blount, come in for his afternoon screaming match, who spilled the vengeful beans. "You and your wife just phone P. Q. P. for an appointment," he told George with a straight face. "They'll issue you everything you need." George in his innocence thanked him, and Blount turned away and grinned the twisted, sly grin of an author.
A glad female voice answered the phone on behalf of the P.Q.P. It assured George that he and Mrs. McCardle need only drop in any time at the Empire State Building and they'd be well on their way to parenthood.
The next day Mr. and Mrs. McCardle dropped in at the Empire State Building. A receptionist in the lobby was buffing her nails under a huge portrait of His Majesty. A beautifully lettered sign displayed the words with which His Majesty had decreed that P. Q. P. be enacted: "Ow Racken Theah's a Raht Smaht Ah-dee, Boys."
"Where do we sign up, please?" asked George.
The receptionist pawed uncertainly through her desk. "I know there's some kind of book," she said as she rummaged, but she did not find it. "Well, it doesn't matter. They'll give you everything you need in Room 100."
"Will I sign up there?" asked George nervously, conditioned by a lifetime of red tape and uncomfortable without it.
"No," said the receptionist.
"But for the tests-"
"There aren't any tests."
"Then the interviews, the deep probing of our physical and psychological fitness for parenthood, our heredity-"
"No interviews."
"But the evaluation of our financial and moral standing without which no permission can be-"
"No evaluation. Just Room 100." She resumed buffing her nails.
In Room 100 a cheerful woman took a Toddler out of a cabinet, punched the non-reversible activating button between its shoulderblades, and handed it to Mrs. McCardle with a cheery: "It's all yours, madame. Return with it in three months and, depending on its condition, you will, or will not, be issued a breeding permit. Simple, isn't it?"
"The little darling!" gurgled Mrs. McCardle, looking down into the Toddler's pretty face.
It spit in her eye, punched her in the nose and sprang a leak.
"Gracious!" said the cheerful woman. "Get it out of our nice clean office, i/you please."
"How do you work it?" yelled Mrs. McCardle, juggling the Toddler like a hot potato. "How do you turn it off?"
"Oh, you can't turn if off," said the woman." And you'd better not swing it like that. Rough handling goes down on the tapes inside it and we read them in three months and now if you please, you're getting our nice office all wet-"
She shepherded them out.
"Do something, George!" yelled Mrs. McCardle. George took the Toddler. It stopped leaking and began a ripsaw scream that made the lighting fixtures tremble.
"Give the poor thing to me!" Mrs. McCardle shouted. "You're hurting it holding it like that-"
She took the Toddler back. It stopped screaming and resumed leaking.
It quieted down in the car. The sudden thought seized them both-too quiet? Their heads crashed together as they bent simultaneously over the glassy-eyed little object. It laughed delightedly and waved its chubby fists.
"Clumsy oaf!" snapped Mrs. McCardle, rubbing her head.
"Sorry, dear," said George. "But at least we must have got a good mark out of it on the tapes. I suppose it scores us good when it laughs."
Her eyes narrowed. "Probably," she said. "George, do you think if you fell heavily on the sidewalk-?"
"No," said George convulsively. Mrs. McCardle looked at him for a moment and held her peace.
("Note, young gentlemen," said the history professor, "the turning point, the seed of rebellion." They noted.)