by William Tenn
Thursday’s child works hard for a living,
Friday’s child is full of woe,
Saturday’s child has far to go,
But the child that is born on the Sabbath-day
Is brave and bonny, and good and gay.
Wednesday looked up and shook the tears from her eyes. “But I don’t understand,” she muttered in confusion. “That’s not like the one I read.”
He squatted beside her and explained patiently. “The one you read had two lines transposed, right? Wednesday’s and Thursday’s child had the lines that Friday’s and Saturday’s child have in this version and vice versa. Well, it’s an old Devonshire poem originally, and no one knows for sure which version is right. I looked it up, especially for you. I just wanted to show you how silly you were, basing your entire attitude toward life on a couple of verses which could be read either way, not to mention the fact that they were written several centuries before anyone thought of naming you Wednesday.”
She threw her arms around him and held on tightly.
“Oh, Fabian, darling! Don’t be angry with me. It’s just that I’m so—frightened!”
Jim Rudd was a little concerned, too. “Oh, I’m pretty sure it will be all right, but I wish you’d waited until I had time to familiarize myself a bit more with the patient. The only thing, Fabe, I’ll have to call in a first-rate obstetrician. I’d never dream of handling this myself. I can make him keep it quiet, about Wednesday and all that. But the moment she enters the delivery room, all bets are off. Too many odd things about her—they’re bound to be noticed by some nurse, at least.”
“Do the best you can,” Fabian told him. “I don’t want my wife involved in garish publicity, if it can be helped. But if it can’t be—well, it’s about time Wednesday learned to live in the real world.”
The gestation period went along pretty well, with not much more than fairly usual complications. The obstetrical specialist Jim Rudd had suggested was as intrigued as anyone else by Wednesday’s oddities, but he told them that the pregnancy was following a monotonously normal course and that the fetus seemed to be developing satisfactorily and completely on schedule.
Wednesday became fairly cheerful again. Outside of her minor fears, Fabian reflected, she was an eminently satisfactory and useful wife. She didn’t exactly shine at the parties where they mingled with other married couples from Slaughter, Stark and Slingsby, but she never committed a major faux pas either. She was, in fact, rather well liked, and, as she obeyed him faithfully in every particular, he had no cause at all for complaint.
He spent his days at the office handling the dry, minuscule details of paper work and personnel administration more efficiently than ever before, and his night and weekends with a person he had every reason to believe was the most different woman on the face of the Earth. He was very well satisfied.
Near the end of her term, Wednesday did beg for permission to visit Dr. Lorington just once. Fabian had to refuse, regretfully but firmly.
“It’s not that I mind his not sending us a congratulatory telegram or wedding gift, Wednesday. I really don’t mind that at all. I’m not the kind of man to hold a grudge. But you’re in good shape now. You’re over most of your silly fears. Lorington would just make them come alive again.”
And she continued to do what he said. Without argument, without complaint. She was really quite a good wife. Fabian looked forward to the baby eagerly.
One day, he received a telephone call at the office from the hospital. Wednesday had gone into labor while visiting the obstetrician. She’d been rushed to the hospital and given birth shortly after arrival to a baby girl. Both mother and child were doing well.
Fabian broke out the box of cigars he’d been saving for this occasion. He passed them around the office and received the felicitations of everybody up to and including Mr. Slaughter, Mr. Stark and both Mr. Slingsbys. Then he took off for the hospital.
From the moment he arrived in the Maternity Pavilion, he knew that something was wrong. It was the way people looked at him, then looked quickly away. He heard a nurse saying behind him: “That must be the father.” His lips went tight and dry.
They took him in to see his wife. Wednesday lay on her side, her knees drawn up against her abdomen. She was breathing hard, but seemed to be unconscious. Something about her position made him feel acutely uncomfortable, but he couldn’t decide exactly what it was.
“I thought this was going to be the natural childbirth method,” he said. “She told me she didn’t think you’d have to use anesthesia.”
“We didn’t use anesthesia,” the obstetrician told him. “Now let’s go to your child, Mr. Balik.”
He let them fit a mask across his face and lead him to the glass-enclosed room where the new-born infants lay in their tiny beds. He moved slowly, unwillingly, a shrieking song of incomprehensible disaster building up slowly in his head.
A nurse picked a baby out of a bed that was off in a corner away from the others. As Fabian stumbled closer, he observed with a mad surge of relief that the child looked normal. There was no visible blemish or deformity. Wednesday’s daughter would not be a freak.
But the infant stretched its arms out to him. “Oh, Fabian, darling,” it lisped through toothless gums in a voice that was all too terrifyingly familiar. “Oh, Fabian, darling, the strangest, most unbelievable thing has happened!”
Afterword
“Child’s Play” was written in 1946, and for a long time was almost too popular. In the Sam and Bella Spewack play Boy Meets Girl, there’s a movie producer who keeps asking a songwriter to write him another “Night and Day.” The writer comes up with song after song, and of each one the producer says, “It’s good, but it’s not another ‘Night and Day’ ” Finally, the songwriter plays a song that knocks the producer out. “What do you call that one?” he asks excitedly. “Night and Day,” says the songwriter.
That’s how I came to feel about “Child’s Play”: for years after I wrote it, editors would look at any new story by me and say, “It’s good, but you know, it’s not another ‘Child’s Play.’ ” At last, in desperation, I sat down to write another “Child’s Play.” I called it “Wednesday’s Child.”
All right. That’s not quite true. At least it’s not the whole truth.
First, Sturgeon warned me not to write a sequel. Especially not a sequel to “Child’s Play.” He felt that one of the worst stories he had ever written was “Butyl and the Breather,” a sequel to his first science-fiction story, “Ether Breather,” and something John Campbell of Astounding had urged him to do. “Sequels,” Ted said, “are pulling on an emptied teat.”
But, I told him, I didn’t want to write a sequel; I just wanted to pick up a provocative little character from “Child’s Play” and examine what could have happened to her.
Ted shook his head ominously. “It’s a sequel,” he said. “And there’ll be no real milk there.”
That’s first. Then, second, I had long been fascinated by Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s last speech to the court that sentenced him to be executed. He spoke of a future in which our time would be “but a dim rememoring [sic] of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man.”
I wanted to examine—in a story—such a wolf, particularly something I had seen much of, a man who was wolf to a woman.
Then there’s third. I have always had an almost irrational hatred of people in Personnel. I will not go into the whys of it here. I’m not sure the reasons are at all valid. But I do hate them.
And there’s a fourth and possibly a fifth. But I finally wrote the story. And it was bounced. My God, how it was bounced!
John Campbell, who had been begging me for something for Astounding, handed it back with the comment, “I don’t think I’ve ever disliked—plain disliked—a story more than this one.”
Horace Gold of Galaxy, for whom I’d been doing most of my work recently, said with a grimace, “No, Phil, not at all. You’ve finally achieved it: Not just downbeat, bu
t downbeat squared.”
And the next editor sent it back with a note that simply said, “Ptooey.” I had never gotten a rejection note like that before. I thought to myself: “I’m on to something really big here!”
It was finally purchased by Leo Margulies for Fantastic Universe at one-half cent a word, payable on publication. His editor, Frank Belknap Long, told me he felt the purchase was a mistake. “But Leo wanted your name in the book,” he said.
And that might be all that could be said of a story of which I am quite fond, but for one more thing.
A boyish-looking fellow came up to me at a party, someone I had never seen before. “Hey, Phil,” he said, “I understand you’ve just sold a piece to Fantastic Universe.”
“I have,” I told him, “but I’ve not yet been paid for it.”
“That’s neither here nor there,” he said. “The point is, I’ve just sold my first professional story to the same magazine. So—let’s fight it out on the pages of Fantastic Universe, and may the best man win.”
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
“I’m Harlan Ellison,” he said.
Written 1952 / Published 1955
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