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Blessed Event

Name: Blessed Event
Author: Henry Farrell

by Henry Farrell

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Humour Novels Fantasy fiction Parent and child Angels Babies

Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #66244.

The opening · free to read

By Charles F. Myers

He was the millionth quadrillionth baby to be born on Earth. Naturally the event had to be celebrated. And it was--in a devastating manner!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy February 1954 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Ginny stood anxiously in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on the hem of her apron.

"You shouldn't upset the boy by yelling at him, Lester," she said. "I know you're worried, but...."

"He upsets me, doesn't he?" Lester said defensively. He sat in the lounge chair by the window, and the light from the reading lamp, slanting across his face, sketched in the lines of consternation with dark shadows. "Just look at that class paper!" he exploded. "'Excellent,' it says. That's four 'excellents' already this month!"

"I know," Ginny said quietly. "I saw it when he brought it home this afternoon." Her blue eyes misted. "He was awfully proud."

"The worst comment he's ever had was a 'very good,'" Lester said heedlessly. "If only he'd get a 'poor' once in a while--or even a 'rotten.' But that's too much to hope for."

"Maybe it's not really as bad as it seems," Ginny said hopefully. "He said himself that he's weak in spelling."

"Not weak enough for comfort," Lester said. "That little head of his is just crammed with brains. Sometimes I look at it and all I can think of is a stuffed bell pepper!" Suddenly his grey eyes came alight with inspiration. "Maybe if we cut down on his food--They say in those ads that if a child is properly undernourished he begins to get sluggish and...."

"Lester!" Ginny said, thoroughly shocked. "Of all things!"

For a moment they were silent, not quite looking at each other.

"Where did he go?" Ginny asked finally.

"Into his room," Lester sighed. "To study, no doubt."

Ginny nodded and moved toward the entrance to the hall. "I'd better see if he's all right," she said. "You really shouldn't have yelled at him."

Lester watched broodingly as she left the room. For a moment his gaze remained darkly fixed, then moved back and down to the toes of his shoes. He sighed again, and the lines of worry, as though of sheer exhaustion, relaxed.

In repose, Lester's face, an average specimen in the galloping run of the world's faces, was not unpleasant. It was a face that had been come by honestly, if not spectacularly, in the thirty-one years of its existence. In total, Lester was a tolerable young man, though one had the feeling that if he played tennis and wore tennis shorts--neither of which he did--he would prove a bit knobby in the knee and bowed in the leg.

As for Ginny, she was the completely average companion piece to Lester's average man. Her hair was honey-colored, her features were regular and her figure, though a trifle fleshier than the dented-fender types photographed for the magazines, was highly desirable. Together, Lester and Ginny were, in all but one respect, very nearly indistinguishable from the millions of other like couples who predominately inhabit the nation. The single thing that set them apart from the mob was a marked tendency to shatter like a couple of dropped crystal goblets at the sight of an 'excellent' on their male child's class papers.

This oddness, this single curious distinction, however, was no indication of mere capriciousness. The root of the trouble was firmly set in reality, and if its subsequent fruit appeared somewhat eccentric it was probably because those forces which had dropped the original seed into the soil of Lester and Ginny's young lives had not made themselves and their motives clearly understood. It is not, after all, uncommon for the human animal to fear that which it cannot understand, and so it was with Lester and Ginny.

It all started on the night that young Freddie was born. Preparations for the little newcomer's arrival (though it was not known then whether it was to be Frederick or Frederica) had gone apace for several months, and the doctor and the hospital had been engaged well in advance. Ginny, according to custom, had been assiduously showered by her friends with every gadget and garment that any manufacturer, domestic or foreign, had ever rendered in pink and/or blue. The stage was set, swept and lighted. The curtain rose.

It was exactly one minute past three A.M. when Lester raced for the front door, fell over the overnight bag which had been placed strategically in the path, picked himself up and hurried outside to back the Chevy coupe out of the garage and up to the porch. Leaping out, he hurried back into the house to help Ginny to the car and nearly collided with her in the doorway.

"It's all right, Gin!" he said excitedly. "It's all going to be all right!"

"I know, dear," Ginny said uncertainly and, picking up the felled bag, carried it swiftly past him to the car. "Don't forget to lock the door."

"Now, don't worry, honey," Lester said as he climbed into the car beside her, "just don't think about it." He started the engine and began backing toward the street. "Just think how nice it's going to be to have a baby all our own."

Ginny put a hand to his sleeve. "I love you, Lester," she murmured, and let it go at that.

It was approximately at this point in the proceedings that certain celestial complications began to set in. As Lester and Ginny sped toward the hospital, their heads filled with the approaching disaster of parenthood, they were totally unaware of a distant moiling and broiling in the night-darkened heavens above them. Humanly earthbound as they were, their thinking was characteristically horizontal. It would never in a million years have occurred to them that their real trouble lay, not ahead of them, but above them.

High in those dim and timeless reaches of space without measure where the fate of mortal man is weighed and judged according to the individual, a storm of unique and dismaying design was at the moment of its inception. Like many another event of eventual magnitude it began with deceptive insignificance. It was merely that Mac, that kindly and somewhat addled angel, in tallying the lists on the tabulation sheets, had come on the knowledge that the very next baby, the one due for the four A.M. shipment, would be the million quadrillionth baby born on Earth since the beginning of the human race. It was a fact from which Mac seemed to derive a certain surprised pleasure. Brushing aside an intervening cloud vapor, he turned to Haywood Veere, his heavenly coworker, and grinned importantly.

"Right on the nose, Haywood!" he announced loudly. "The million quadrillionth baby. What do you think of that?" He twitched his wings happily. "Makes you feel kind of important, don't it?"

Haywood remained studiously bent over his dispatch sheets. "I fail to see why," he said with characteristic dryness. "We can hardly look on the event as any sort of personal accomplishment. It took all of humanity all this while to bring it about."

"But I'm the one that marked it down," Mac said. "And it's you who's makin' out the papers on him. Probably nobody knows about it except us."

"It's probably just as well," Haywood murmured.

"But it's kind of like an anniversary," Mac insisted. "Don't you see?" A grin of reminiscence came over his homely face. "Besides, I done my part, I guess, when I was a mortal. I had a couple of kids--even if they did both wind up in the pokey."

At this Haywood glanced up from the cloud bank upon which were spread the papers. He turned around slowly, holding his wings back with one hand so that they would not get smudged with ink. He regarded Mac reflectively.

"I suppose that's true," he said. "If you want to look at it that way we can all take a bit of the credit. Even I can."

Mac's eyes widened with surprise. "But you was never married," he said. "If you had kids then they was...."

"I didn't," Haywood put in quickly. "But it still works out. If you hadn't fathered your children and I hadn't--refrained, so to speak, this particular baby wouldn't be the million quadrillionth baby at all. It's curious the way it all works out."

"Sure it is!" Mac said triumphantly. "You see, it's like I said, a sort of millstone!"

"Mile stone," Haywood corrected absently. "I suppose you could regard the little chap as a sort of anniversary baby at that."

"You're darned right!" Mac nodded emphatically. "It's like we ought to do something about it--to kind of celebrate--like when a show house has fifty thousand customers and the fifty thousandth guy gets a free ticket or a smoke stand with a naked lady on top."

"But that's all in the line of advertising," Haywood said primly. "Crass commercialism."

"And what's wrong with advertising about babies?" Mac asked. "Babies are the best darned product in the world. It's about time something was done to stimulate trade, I guess."

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