While this dosn't actually answer your question about juggling forks, I will say that this is the perfect place to use threads. Whenever you want to return data from a process, a thread makes life easier. You didn't say or show how you were going to return values....I assume through external files? Anyways, here is a simple example using threads. It is simplified purposely for the example, in a real script, you probably would put everything into a hash.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use threads;

my $thr1 = threads->new(\&sub1);
my $thr2 = threads->new(\&sub2);
my $thr3 = threads->new(\&sub3);

my $ReturnData1 = $thr1->join;
print "Thread1 returned @$ReturnData1\n";

my $ReturnData2 = $thr2->join;
print "Thread2 returned @$ReturnData2\n";

my $ReturnData3 = $thr3->join;
print "Thread3 returned @$ReturnData3\n";

print "Press any key to exit\n";
<>;
############################################## 
sub sub1 {
my @values = ('Fifty-six','foo', 1);
  sleep 1;
 return \@values;
}
############################################## 

sub sub2 {
my @values = ('Forty-two','bar', 2);
  sleep 2;
 return \@values;
}
########################################## 
sub sub3 {
my @values = ('Sixty-six','baz', 3);
  sleep 3;
 return \@values;
}

# join() does three things: it waits for a thread to exit, 
# cleans up after it, and returns any data the thread may 
# have produced.
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