'Disciples' by Gardner Dozois

'Disciples' by Gardner Dozois
from Penthouse, December 1981

Gardner Dozois (1947 - 2018) mainly published shorter fiction over the course of his career. In my experience his pieces written during the New Wave era were among the better such entries seeing print in digests and anthologies. Some of his stories were understated and humanistic, such as 'Strangers', while others, such as 'Flash Point', presented a much more acidic analysis of man and his actions.

I get the impression that 'Disciples' first was submitted to Omni before subsequently being forwarded to Penthouse. It got a nice treatment in the December 1981 issue of Penthouse, underscoring the role the 'slick' magazines played in sustaining science fiction in the print media during the 70s and 80s.

'Disciples' is brief, only a little over three printed pages in length, but it's well-plotted and well-written. The story is set in wintertime New York City in the early 1980s, with the city in all its shabby, scabby glory. The protagonist is a professional panhandler, and quintessential New York character, named Nicky the Horse. Nicky has little regard for the other denizens of the gray and gritty streets that are his enterprise:

........Occasionally a group of med students would go by or a girl with a dog or a couple of Society Hill faggots in bell-bottom trousers and expensive turtlenecks, and Nicky would call out, "Jesus loves you, man," usually to no more response than a nervous sideways glance. One faggot smirked knowingly at him, and a collegiate-jock type got a laugh out of his buddies by shouting back, "You bet your ass he does, honey." A small, intense-looking woman with short-cropped hair gave him the finger. Another diesel dyke, Nicky though resignedly. "Jesus loves you, man," he called after her, but she didn't look back.

As the panhandling day wears on, Nicky has an unexpected encounter with hot dog vendor Saul Edelman. Saul, it seems, knows something the goyim do not. And Nicky confronts a dilemma: what if you learned the Rapture was coming..........but it's a Jewish rapture ?!

In my opinion, 'Disciples' is one of the best sci-fi short stories of the 1980s. It's available in the 1994 Ace Books anthology of Dozois's short stories, 'Geodesic Dreams'.