The McCardles and the Toddler drove off down Sunrise Highway, which was lined with filling stations; since their '98 Landcruiser made only two miles to the gallon, it was not long before they had to stop at one.
The Toddler began its ripsaw shriek when they stopped. A hollow-eyed attendant shambled over and peered into the car. "Just get it?" he asked apathetically.
"Yes," said Mrs. McCardle, frantically trying to joggle the Toddler, to change it, to burp it, to do anything that would end the soul-splitting noise.
"Half pint of white 90-octane gas it what it needs," mumbled the attendant. "Few drops of SAE 40 oil. Got one myself. Two weeks to go. I'll never make it. I'll crack. I'll-I'll…" He tottered off and returned with the gasoline in a nursing bottle, the oil in an eye-dropper.
The Toddler grabbed the bottle and began to gulp the gas down contentedly.
"Where do you put the oil?" asked Mrs. McCardle.
He showed her.
"Oh," she said.
"Fill her up," said George. "The car, I mean. I… ah… I'm going to wash my hands, dear."
He cornered the attendant by the cash register. "Look," he said. "What, ah, would happen if you just let it run out of gas? The Toddler, I mean?"
The man looked at him and put a compassionate hand on his shoulder. "It would scream, buddy," he said. "The main motors run off an atomic battery. The gas engine's just for a sideshow and for having breakdowns."
"Breakdowns? Oh, my God! How do you fix a breakdown?"
"The best way you can," the man said. "And buddy, when you burp it, watch out for the fumes. I've seen some ugly explosions…"
They stopped at five more filing stations along the way when the Toddler wanted gas.
"It'll be better-behaved when it's used to the house," said Mrs. McCardle apprehensively as she carried it over the threshold.
"Put it down and let's see what happens," said George.
The Toddler toddled happily to the coffee table, picked up a large bronze ashtray, moved to the picture window and heaved the ashtray through it. It gurgled happily at the crash.
"You little-!" George roared, making for the Toddler with his hands clawed before him.
"George!" Mrs. McCardle screamed, snatching the Toddler away. "It's only a machine!"
The machine began to shriek.
They tried gasoline, oil, wiping with a clean lint-free rag, putting it down, picking it up and finally banging their heads together. It continued to scream until it was ready to stop screaming, and then it stopped and gave them an enchanting grin.
"Time to put it to-away for the night?" asked George.
It permitted itself to be put away for the night.
From his pillow George said later: "Think we did pretty well today. Three months? Pah!"
Mrs. McCardle said: "You were wonderful, George."
He knew that tone. "My Tigress," he said.
Ten minutes later, at the most inconvenient time in the world, bar none, the Toddler began its ripsaw screaming.
Cursing, they went to find out what it wanted. They found out. What it wanted was to laugh in their faces.
(The professor explained: "Indubitably, sadism is at work here, but harnessed in the service of humanity. Better a brutal and concentrated attack such as we have been witnessing than long-drawn-out torments." The class nodded respectfully.)
Mr. and Mrs. McCardle managed to pull themselves together for another try, and there was an exact repeat. Apparently the Toddler sensed something in the air.
"Three months," said George, with haunted eyes.
"You'll live," his wife snapped.
"May I ask just what kind of a crack that was supposed to be?"
"If the shoe fits, my good man-"
So a fine sex quarrel ended the day.
Within a week the house looked as if it had been liberated by a Mississippi National Guard division. George had lost ten pounds because he couldn't digest anything, not even if he seasoned his food with powdered Equanil instead of salt. Mrs. McCardle had gained fifteen pounds by nervous gobbling during the moments when the Toddler left her unoccupied. The picture window was boarded up. On George's salary, and with glaziers' wages what they were, he couldn't have it replaced twice a day.
Not unnaturally, he met his next-door neighbor, Jacques Truro, in a bar.
Truro was rye and soda, he was dry martini; otherwise they were identical.
"It's the little whimper first that gets me, when you know the big screaming's going to come next. I could jump out of my skin when I hear that whimper."
"Yeah. The waiting. Sometimes one second, sometimes five. I count."
"I forced myself to stop. I was throwing up."
"Yeah. Me too. And nervous diarrhea?"
"All the time. Between me and that goddam thing the house is awash. Cheers." They drank and shared hollow laughter.
"My stamp collection. Down the toilet."
"My fishing pole. Three clean breaks and peanut butter in the reel."
"One thing I'll never understand, Truro. What decided you two to have a baby?"
"Wait a minute, McCardle," Truro said. "Marguerite told me that you were going to have one, so she had to have one-"
They looked at each other in shared horror.
"Suckered," said McCardle in an awed voice.
"Women," breathed Truro.
They drank a grim toast and went home.
"It's beginning to talk," Mrs. McCardle said listlessly, sprawled in a chair, her hand in a box of chocolates. "Called me 'old pig-face' this afternoon." She did look somewhat piggish with fifteen superfluous pounds.
George put down his briefcase. It was loaded with work from the office which these days he was unable to get through in time. He had finally got the revised court-martial scene from Blount, and would now have to transmute it into readable prose, emending the author's stupid lapses of logic, illiterate blunders of language and raspingly ugly style.
"I'll wash up," he said.
"Don't use the toilet. Stopped up again."
"Bad?"
"He said he'd come back in the morning with an eight-man crew. Something about jacking up a corner of the house."
The Toddler toddled in with a bottle of bleach, made for the briefcase, and emptied the bleach into it before the exhausted man or woman could comprehend what was going on, let alone do anything about it.
George incredulously spread the pages of the court-martial scene on the gouged and battered coffee table. His eyes bulged as he watched the thousands of typed words vanishing before his eyes, turning pale and then white as the paper.
Blount kept no carbons. Keeping carbons caned for a minimal quantity of prudence and brains, but Blount was an author and so he kept no carbons. The court-martial scene, the product of six months' screaming, was gone.
The Toddler laughed gleefully.
George clenched his fists, closed his eyes and tried to ignore the roaring in his ears.
The Toddler began a whining chant:
"Da-dy's an au-thor!
Da-dy's an au-thor!"
"That did it!" George shrieked. He stalked to the door and flung it open.
"Where are you going?" Mrs. McCardle quavered.
"To the first doctor's office I find," said her husband in sudden icy calm. "There I will request a shot of D-Bal. When I have had a D-Bal shot, a breeding permit will be of no use whatever to us. Since a breeding permit will be useless, we need not qualify for one by being tortured for another eleven weeks by that obscene little monster, which we shall return to P. Q. P. in the morning. And unless it behaves, it will be returned in a basket, for them to reassemble at their leisure."
"I'm so glad," his wife sighed.
The Toddler said: "May I congratulate you on your decision. By voluntarily surrendering your right to breed, you are patriotically reducing the population pressure, a problem of great concern to His Majesty. We of the P. Q. P. wish to point out that your decision has been arrived at not through coercion but through education; i.e., by presenting you in the form of a Toddler with some of the arguments against parenthood."