by Hank Davis
“Yes, it does,” Renard snapped.
“Very hard,” Jack amended.
“I suppose we could keep it as emergency food rations,” Renard stated.
“Don’t ever say that again.” Jack warned with a growl that he was serious.
“What? It doesn’t talk. That’s your criteria for food, right?”
“Don’t!” Jack barked.
“Hm, both of you are acting weird for something that you just found.” Renard leapt to a slightly lower perch that gave him access to the door. “I’m going to look it up. Find out what it is.”
“It’s a human.” Renard returned to the perch a short period time later. “Judging by the shape of the eyes, the color and straightness of the mane, its breed is most likely East Asian descent. Male of the species.”
“How do you get male?” Jack cocked his head at it.
“It’s wearing fabric clothing. The white isn’t really part of its skin.”
Jack reached out and lifted the front hem. “Oh! Yeah, male.”
“Human are omnivores. They eat everything, including ponies, dogs and cats.”
“Still don’t think he’s dangerous.”
“It will grow,” Renard warned. “It will get bigger just like Alfie. Remember how little he was compared to now?”
“So you’re saying it’s just a baby now?”
Renard breathed out in disgust. “This is going to be like one of those damn baby birds? They always die, you know.”
“If it dies, it dies,” Jack said.
Renard slunk away.
He’d learned the trick to keep baby birds alive the longest was to keep them warm. Last winter while desperately foraging for food to keep Alfie alive, he’d found a big plastic bin labeled Non-structured Carbohydrates. They carefully rationed it out to Alfie all winter as they’d learn that he’d eat himself sick if given a chance. Jack rinsed the bin out and pushed it to the most protected corner of Alfie’s garage. With the stacks of cut hay, the garage was now much warmer than the overlook.
He set up the heat lamp that he used with the baby birds, trying to nail it solid to the wall since so far the baby had upended almost everything in the garage. The hardest part was getting the baby into the bin and asleep.
“Maybe we should take it back,” Alfie whispered when the garage was finally quiet and still.
Jack caught himself growling. “There is no place to take it back to! Don’t you see? The proof is all around us. The birds are how it should be. When we were small and helpless, we should have had someone taking care of us. Someone alive. Someone who loved us enough that they wouldn’t stop caring for us until they knew we could take care of ourselves. But we had machines just like the lawnmowers and the hairdressers. They knew what they were supposed to do and what they weren’t supposed to do. They fed us and kept us warm and cleaned up after us. And like the lawnmower that stops trying to cut the grass at dusk, the machines stopped taking care of us because— because—I don’t know—we’d gotten big enough to fly.”
“Since when can we fly?” Alfie asked.
“It’s a metaphor,” Renard muttered from the doorway. Seeing that the baby was safely asleep, he stalked across the garage, tail twitching with annoyance. “The baby birds leave the nest once they’re ready to fly.”
“Exactly,” Jack said. “I don’t think your milk dispenser dried up and the door broke, I think whatever machines were feeding you decided they weren’t supposed to take care of you anymore.”
Like the baby, Jack had been locked in a kennel with toys and running water but no food. Starving and nearly driven mad by the silence, he’d managed to climb up and use a piece of wire to short the lock to get out of his cage. This baby, though, wasn’t as capable as he had been when he was abandoned by the system.
“It seems to me a stupid way of doing things,” Alfie said. “Even birds know better. They might be stupid as shit, but they take care of their chicks, day and night, until they’re ready to be on their own. This randomly spit out babies and hoping someone takes care of them; sheer stupidity.”
“Whoever came up with the design didn’t think everything through,” Jack said. “Like the forklift starter battery. Obviously they thought the battery wouldn’t go dead because it wouldn’t if someone was using it day in and day out.”
“The designer is an idiot then.” Renard snorted with disgust. “Because only an idiot thinks that things will always work out the way he images. He planed for the good but not the bad, or the horrible nor the utter disasters.”
“Something has gone very wrong. And if we don’t take care of…” Jack paused as he realized that they couldn’t keep calling the baby simply “it.” “If we don’t take care of whatever we name the baby, he will die.”
“So what do we call it?” Alfie asked.
They considered the sleeping baby curled inside the blue food bin.
Renard suddenly snickered.
“What?” Jack and Alfie both asked.
“You put it in a manger?” the cat laughed.
“What’s a manger?” Jack asked.
“Something that holds food for ponies.” Renard glanced up at the heat lamp. “Nice and warm here.” He climbed into the bin to tuck himself against the baby’s back.
“What are you doing?” Jack hissed, not wanting to wake the baby. “You don’t like it.”
“I can’t help myself.” Renard looked away, embarrassed, as he started to purr. “It’s like this is home. This is where I’m meant to be and it kind of pisses me off even as I can’t help wanting it. There’s this little voice that I don’t think is actually mine, whispering how wonderful it would be to both read a book together and then sit discussing the story.”
“We’ll have to name him,” Jack said.
Renard snorted. “His name is Jesus.”
“Jesus?”
“And this shall be a sign unto you.” Renard quoted something. “You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”
Place Your Own Footnotes
Jack is a Jack Russell Terrier. Renard named him.
Jack doesn’t realize his name is a joke.
Renard misread his breed the only time he looked it up.
Instead of Persian, he read it as Parisian. He believes he’s
French, hence his name. He chose the name of a popular
French fairytale character known for being clever.
Unfortunately he did not realize the character was named
for its species, which was “Fox.”
Alfie’s full name is Alfalfa Hay Eater. Renard can be cruel.
He’s always careful, however, only to use it when he’s out of
kicking and biting range.
Alfie is a genetic mishmash that is part Shetland pony
crossed with the Akhal-Teke, a breed of horses from
Turkmenistan. They are famous for the natural metallic
shimmer of their coats.
Renard complained about the frog peeing in his mouth not
only because he found it disgustingly uncivilized but also he’d
had the overwhelming urge to meow “Look I’m a mighty
hunter” until Jack took ownership of the frog’s body.
Let it be noted that all rodents have large gonads in
proportion to their overall body-size.
Ohayougozaimasu is a greeting in Japanese.
Tasukete! Akachan no seigyo ga dame desu! Kite onegaishimasu!
Help! The toddler is out of control. Come!
Birds are swallows, not pigeons, but this doesn’t seem to
eliminate window collisions.
Hoikuen means crèche.
A force field over the barrier only drops to allow
the mice to enter.
Nigeru means “Run away!”
Domo arigatougozaimashita, inu-sama! Kouun! Sayonara!
Notch is saying “Thank you very much, much obliged,
Sir Dog. Good luck. G
oodbye!”
INTRODUCTION
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR JESUS
FREDERIK POHL is known for his sharp cutting satire, and this one, from the mid-1950s, cuts deep. If you think that Christmas has gotten too commercialized, be thankful that things haven’t gone as far as they have in this possible future . . . yet.
While Frederik Pohl didn’t found the world’s first science fiction magazine (probably due to age discrimination, since he was only about six and a half when Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories) he has otherwise been everything and done everything in science fiction: writer, editor, agent, a talk show guest, all of which makes most other sf stars look like dilletantes. Beginning with a poem published in a 1937 Amazing Stories, his phenomenal writing career has produced enough novels, story collections, nonfiction books, and collaborative novels to fill a medium-sized library (his latest novel is All the Lives He Led), and has been honored with four Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, two John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, a U.S. National Book Award, the SFWA Grand Master award for lifetime achievement, and other awards. His celebrated novel Gateway won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell Memorial Award for its year. While editor of Galaxy and If in the 1960s, he received three Hugo Awards for best magazine for If. As befits a legend, he has also been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. And, from the beginning and continuing up to the present, he has been an enthusiastic fan of science fiction. Thank you, sir, for all of it. And you can thank him at his blog at www.thewaythefutureblogs.com.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR JESUS
by Frederik Pohl
IT WAS THE CRAZIEST CHRISTMAS I ever spent. Partly it was Heinemann’s fault—he came up with a new wrinkle in gift-wrapping that looked good but like every other idea that comes out of the front office meant plenty of headaches for the rest of us. But what really messed up Christmas for me was the girl.
Personnel sent her down—after I’d gone up there myself three times and banged my fist on the table. It was the height of the season and when she told me that she had had her application in three weeks before they called her, I excused myself and got Personnel on the store phone from my private office. “Martin here,” I said. “What the devil’s the matter with you people? This girl is the Emporium type if I ever saw one, and you’ve been letting her sit around nearly a month while—”
Crawford, the Personnel head, interrupted me. “Have you talked to her very much?” he wanted to know.
“Well, no. But—”
“Call me back when you do,” he advised, and clicked off.
I went back to the stockroom where she was standing patiently, and looked her over a little thoughtfully. But she looked all right to me. She was blond-haired and blue-eyed and not very big; she had a sweet, slow smile. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she looked like a girl you’d want to know. She wasn’t bold, and she wasn’t too shy; and that’s a perfect description of what we call “The Emporium Type.”
So what in the world was the matter with Personnel?
Her name was Lilymary Hargreave. I put her to work on the giftwrap spraying machine while I got busy with my paper work. I have a hundred forty-one persons in the department and at the height of the Christmas season I could use twice as many. But we do get the work done. For instance, Saul & Capell, the next biggest store in town, has a hundred and sixty in their gift and counseling department, and their sales run easily twenty-five per cent less than ours. And in the four years that I’ve headed the department we’ve yet to fail to get an order delivered when it was promised.
All through that morning I kept getting glimpses of the new girl. She was a quick learner—smart, too smart to be stuck with the sprayer for very long. I needed someone like her around, and right there on the spot I made up my mind that if she was as good as she looked I’d put her in a counseling booth within a week, and the devil with what Personnel thought.
The store was packed with last-minute shoppers. I suppose I’m sentimental, but I love to watch the thousands of people bustling in and out, with all the displays going at once, and the lights on the trees, and the loudspeakers playing White Christmas and The Eighth Candle and Jingle Bells and all the other traditional old favorites. Christmas is more than a mere selling season of the year to me; it means something.
The girl called me over near closing time. She looked distressed and with some reason. There was a dolly filled with gift-wrapped packages, and a man from Shipping looking annoyed. She said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Martin, but I seem to have done something wrong.”
The Shipping man snorted. “Look for yourself, Mr. Martin,” he said, handing me one of the packages.
I looked. It was wrong, all right. Heinemann’s new wrinkle that year was a special attached gift card—a simple Yule scene and the printed message:
The price varied with the item, of course. Heinemann’s idea was for the customer to fill it out and mail it, ahead of time, to the person it was intended for. That way, the person who got it would know just about how much he ought to spend on a present for the first person. It was smart, I admit, and maybe the smartest thing about it was rounding the price off to the nearest fifty cents instead of giving it exactly. Heinemann said it was bad-mannered to be too precise—and the way the customers were going for the idea, it had to be right.
But the trouble was that the gift-wrapping machines were geared to only a plain card; it was necessary for the operator to put the price in by hand.
I said, “That’s all right, Joe; I’ll take care of it.” As Joe went satisfled back to Shipping, I told the girl: “It’s my fault. I should have explained to you, but I guess I’ve just been a little too rushed.”
She looked downcast. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Nothing to be sorry about.” I showed her the routing slip attached to each one, which the Shipping Department kept for its records once the package was on its way. “All we have to do is go through these; the price is on every one. We’ll just fill out the cards and get them out. I guess—” I looked at my watch—“I guess you’ll be a little late tonight, but I’ll see that you get overtime and dinner money for it. It wasn’t your mistake, after all.”
She said hesitantly, “Mr. Martin, couldn’t it—well, can I let it go for tonight? It isn’t that I mind working, but I keep house for my father and if I don’t get there on time he just won’t remember to eat dinner. Please?”
I suppose I frowned a little, because her expression was a little worried. But, after all, it was her first day. I said, “Miss Hargreave, don’t give it a thought. I’ll take care of it.”
The way I took care of it, it turned out, was to do it myself; it was late when I got through, and I ate quickly and went home to bed. But I didn’t mind, for oh! the sweetness of the smile she gave me as she left.
I looked forward to the next morning, because I was looking forward to seeing Lilymary Hargreave again. But my luck was out—for she was.
My number-two man, Johnny Furness, reported that she hadn’t phoned either. I called Personnel to get her phone number, but they didn’t have it; I got the address, but the phone company had no phone listed under her name. So I stewed around until the coffee break, and then I put my hat on and headed out of the store. It wasn’t merely that I was interested in seeing her, I told myself; she was just too good a worker to get off on the wrong foot this way, and it was only simple justice for me to go to her home and set her straight.
Her house was in a nondescript neighborhood—not too good, not too bad. A gang of kids were playing under a fire hydrant at the corner—but, on the other hand, the houses were neat and nearly new. Middle-class, you’d have to say.
I found the address, and knocked on the door of a second-floor apartment.
It was opened by a tall, leathery man of fifty or so—Lilymary’s father, I judged. “Good morning,” I said. “Is Miss Hargreave at home?”
He smiled; his teeth were bright in a very sun-bronzed face. “Which one?”
“B
lond girl, medium height, blue eyes. Is there more than one?”
“There are four. But you mean Lilymary; won’t you come in?”
I followed him, and a six-year-old edition of Lilymary took my hat and gravely hung it on a rack made of bamboo pegs. The leathery man said, “I’m Morton Hargreave, Lily’s father. She’s in the kitchen.”
“George Martin,” I said. He nodded and left me, for the kitchen, I presumed. I sat down on an old-fashioned studio couch in the living room, and the six-year-old sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair across from me, making sure I didn’t pocket any of the souvenirs on the mantel. The room was full of curiosities—what looked like a cloth of beaten bark hanging on one wall, with a throwing-spear slung over the cloth. Everything looked vaguely South-Seas, though I am no expert.
The six-year-old said seriously, “This is the man, Lilymary,” and I got up.
“Good morning,” said Lilymary Hargreave, with a smudge of flour and an expression of concern on her face.
I said, floundering, “I, uh, noticed you hadn’t come in and, well, since you were new to the Emporium, I thought—”
“I am sorry, Mr. Martin,” she said. “Didn’t Personnel tell you about Sundays?”
“What about Sundays?”
“I must have my Sundays off,” she explained. “Mr. Crawford said it was very unusual, but I really can’t accept the job any other way.”
“Sundays off?” I repeated. “But—but, Miss Hargreave, don’t you see what that does to my schedule? Sunday’s our busiest day! The Emporium isn’t a rich man’s shop; our customers work during the week. If we aren’t staffed to serve them when they can come in, we just aren’t doing the job they expect of us!”