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 filling 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 theworld, 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 called 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.”
“I didn’t know you could talk that well,” marveled Mrs. McCardle.
The Toddler said modestly: “I’ve been with the P.Q.P. from the very beginning, ma’am; I’m a veteran Toddler operator, I may say, working out of Room 4567 of the Empire State. And the improved model I’m working through has reduced the breakdown time an average thirty-five percent. I foresee a time, ma’am, when we experienced operators and ever-improved models will do the job in one day!”
The voice
was fanatical.
Mrs. McCardle turned around in sudden vague apprehension. George had left for his D-Bal shot.
(“And thus we see,” said the professor to the seminar, “the genius of the insidious Dr. Wang in full flower.” He snapped off the chronoscope. “The first boatloads of Chinese landed in California three generations—or should I say non-generations?—later, unopposed by the scanty, elderly population.” He groomed his mandarin mustache and looked out for a moment over the great rice paddies of Central Park. It was spring; blue-clad women stooped patiently over the brown water, and the tender, bright-green shoots were just beginning to appear.
(The seminar students bowed and left for their next lecture, “The Hound Dog as Symbol of Juvenile Aggression in Ancient American Folk Song.” It was all that remained of the reign of King Purvis I.)
NOW INHALE
Eric Frank Russell
For our second off-world excursion—see “Mating Call” for the first—we take you to the planet of Gombar, about which it can only be said that the planet itself was less unappetizing than the Gombarians. However, thanks to the fact that Our Hero, Wayne Taylor, knows a smattering of Eastern lore, has a handy way with games, and possesses the ability of a Stoic to resist boredom and panic, everything comes out all right in the end.
They generally do, when Eric Russell pits one or more of his space-scout types against the myriad nasties of deep space with which he has dealt during his almost thirty years of writing science fiction. Indeed, Russell is one of England’s most honored pre-war gifts to the American s.f. field, having published his first story here back in 1937.
HIS LEG IRONS CLANKED AND HIS WRIST CHAINS jingled as they led him into the room. The bonds on his ankles compelled him to move at an awkward shuffle and the guards delighted in urging him onward faster than he could go. Somebody pointed to a chair facing the long table. Somebody else shoved him into it with such force that he lost balance and sat down hard.
The black brush of his hair jerked as his scalp twitched and that was his only visible reaction. Then he gazed across the desk with light gray eyes so pale that the pupils seemed set in ice. The look in them was neither friendly nor hostile, submissive nor angry; it was just impassively and impartially cold, cold.
On the other side of the desk seven Gombarians surveyed him with various expressions: triumph, disdain, satisfaction, boredom, curiosity, glee and arrogance. They were a humanoid bunch in the same sense that gorillas are humanoid. At that point the resemblance ended.
“Now,” began the one in the middle, making every third syllable a grunt, “your name is Wayne Taylor?”
No answer.
“You have come from a planet called Terra?”
No response.
“Let us not waste any more time, Palamin suggested the one on the left. “If he will not talk by invitation, let him talk by compulsion.”
“You are right, Eckster.” Putting a hand under the desk Palamin came up with a hammer. It had a pear-shaped head with flattened base. “How would you like every bone in your hands cracked finger by finger, joint by joint?”
“I wouldn’t,” admitted Wayne Taylor.
“A very sensible reply,” approved Palamin. He placed the hammer in the middle of the desk, positioning it significantly. “Already many days have been spent teaching you our language. By this time a child could have learned it sufficiently well to understand and answer questions.” He favored the prisoner with a hard stare. “You have pretended to be abnormally slow to learn. But you can deceive us no longer. You will now provide all the information for which we ask.”
“Willingly or unwillingly,” put in Eckster, licking thin lips, “but you’ll provide it anyway.”
“Correct,” agreed Palamin. “Let us start all over again and see if we can avoid painful scenes. Your name is Wayne Taylor and you come from a planet called Terra?”
“I admitted that much when I was captured.”
“I know. But you were not fluent at that time and we want no misunderstandings. Why did you land on Gombar?”
“I’ve told my tutor at least twenty times that I did it involuntarily. It was an emergency landing. My ship was disabled.”
“Then why did you blow it up? Why did you not make open contact with us and invite us to repair it for you?”
“No Terran vessel must be allowed to fall intact into hostile hands,” said Taylor flatly.
“Hostile?” Palamin tried to assume a look of pained surprise but his face wasn’t made for it. “Since you Terrans know nothing whatever about us what right have you to consider us hostile?”
“I wasn’t kissed on arrival,” Taylor retorted. “I was shot at coming down. I was shot at getting away. I was hunted across twenty miles of land, grabbed and beaten up.”
“Our soldiers do their duty,” observed Palamin virtuously.
“I’d be dead by now if they were not the lousiest marksmen this side of Cygni.”
“And what is Cygni?”
“A star.”
“Who are you to criticize our soldiers?” interjected Eckster, glowering.
“A Terran,” informed Taylor as if that were more than enough.
“That means nothing to me,” Eckster gave back with open contempt.
“It will.”
Palamin took over again. “If friendly contact were wanted the Terran authorities would send a large ship with an official deputation on board, wouldn’t they?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t risk big boats and important people without knowing what sort of a reception they’re likely to get.”
“And who digs up that information?”
“Space scouts.”
“Ah!” Palamin gazed around with the pride of a pygmy who has trapped an elephant “So at last you admit that you are a spy?”
“I am a spy only in the estimation of the hostile.”
“On the contrary,” broke in a heavily jowled specimen seated on the right, “you are whatever we say you are—because we say it.”
“Have it your own way,” conceded Taylor.
“We intend to.”
“You can be sure of that, my dear Borkor,” soothed Palamin. He returned attention to the prisoner. “How many Terrans are there in existence?”
“About twelve thousand millions.”
“He is lying,” exclaimed Borkor, hungrily eying the hammer.
“One planet could not support such a number,” Eckster contributed.
“They are scattered over a hundred planets,” said Taylor.
“He is still lying,” Borkor maintained.
Waving them down, Palamin asked, “And how many ships have they got?”
“I regret that mere space scouts are not entrusted with fleet statistics,” replied Taylor coolly. “I can tell you only that I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“You must have some idea.”
“If you want guesses, you can have them for what they are worth.”
“Then make a guess.”
“One million.”
“Nonsense!” declared Palamin. “Utterly absurd!”
“All right. One thousand. Or any other number you consider reasonable.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” Borkor complained. Palamin said to the others, “What do you expect? If we were to send a spy to Terra, would we fill him up with top-secret information to give the enemy when caught? Or would we tell him just enough and only enough to enable him to carry out his task? The ideal spy is a shrewd ignoramus, able to take all, unable to give anything.”
“The ideal spy wouldn’t be trapped in the first place,” commented Eckster maliciously.
“Thank you for those kind words,” Taylor chipped in. “If I had come here as a spy, you’d have seen nothing of my ship much less me.”
“Well, exactly where were you heading for when forced to land on Gombar?” invited Palamin.
“For the next system beyond.”
> “Ignoring this one?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I go where I’m told.”
“Your story is weak and implausible.” Palamin lay back and eyed him judicially. “It is not credible that a space explorer should bypass one system in favor of another that is farther away.”
“I was aiming for a binary said to have at least forty planets,” said Taylor. “This system had only three. Doubtless it was considered relatively unimportant.”
“What, with us inhabiting all three worlds?”
“How were we to know that? Nobody has been this way before.”
“They know it now,” put in Eckster, managing to make it sound sinister.
“This one knows it,” Palamin corrected. “The others do not. And the longer they don’t, the better for us. When another life form starts poking its snout into our system, we need time to muster our strength.”
This brought a murmur of general agreement.
“It’s your state of mind,” offered Taylor.
“What d’you mean?”
“You’re taking it for granted that a meeting must lead to a clash and in turn to a war.”
“We’d be prize fools to assume anything else and let ourselves be caught unprepared,” Palamin pointed out.
Taylor sighed. “To date we have established ourselves on a hundred planets without a single fight. The reason: we don’t go where we’re not wanted.”
“I can imagine that,” Palamin gave back sarcastically. “Someone tells you to beat it and you obligingly beat it It’s contrary to instinct.”
“Your instinct,” said Taylor. “We see no sense in wasting time and money fighting when we can spend both exploring and exploiting.”
“Meaning that your space fleets include no warships?”
“Of course we have warships.”
“Many?”
“Enough to cope.”
“Pacifists armed to the teeth,” said Palamin to the others. He registered a knowing smile.
“Liars are always inconsistent,” pronounced Eckster with an air of authority. He fixed a stony gaze upon the prisoner. “If you are so careful to avoid trouble, why do you need warships?”
“Because we have no guarantee that the entire cosmos shares our policy of live and let live.”
13 Above the Night Page 12