The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

THE NEVER ENDING PENNY by Bernard Wolfe

It is of Interest to note that the calling card of the author of the preceding story reads: “Holley Cantine—Writer ... Agitator . . . Editor . . . Publisher . . . Printer . . . Carpenter & Builder ... Brewer... Trombone & Tuba (funerals a specialty) ... rates on request.” Further investigation by your editor has revealed that Mr. Cantine also lives in a house in the woods which he built himself—for himself, his wife, and child.

Bernard Wolfe’s approach to the Great Deception of the Carbon Copy lies clearly across the nebulous and shifting line that currently divides the possible from the distinctly improbable. His setting, treatment, and outcome all differ radically from Mr. Cantine’s. I cannot vouch for Mr. Wolfe’s experience with demons, imps, or well-dwellers in general, but his Mexican background should be authentic: his eminently readable biography of Leon Trotsky came out of the years he spent in Mexico as Trotsky’s secretary. He is also the author of the memorable s-f novel, “Limbo.”

So it went, peaches all day, complaints all night. “If not too big a work, could you make the voice somewhat softer?” he said to his wife. “I pick the peaches ten large hours today and even my ears fall down from tiredness.”

He refrained from observing that her tongue might soon fall down from its labors.

“Pick the peaches ten years and the house will still be small like no house,” she said. “We are seven, we shall soon be eight, and we continue to live in a house with one room, not a house, a species of shed, and therefore we live like pigs and what do peaches have to do with it?”

He studied their own well-fatted pig that was down at the corner of the property snouting some superior mud from here to there. He refrained from pointing out that this shoat of theirs lived fantastically better than they did, having as many rooms as he had muds, no peaches to pick, no woman to make loud noises in his ears.

“We need at the minimum two rooms more,” she said. “Then our neighbors will see that we are people and not some animals in a barn or a sty.”

He did not draw her attention to the fact that she was making noises better suited to the barn or the sty. He liked Herminia, though she had a tendency to overtalk.

He adjusted his back to a more comfortable position against the adobe wall, wiggled his dusty toes, and considered the sun, which was dropping away behind the mountain like a darkening boil.

“I have explained before and I will explain again,” he said. ‘To build even two small rooms requires many hundreds of adobe bricks. To mix the adobe, shape the bricks, dry the bricks, then further to place the bricks, is an immense labor. I pick the peaches ten hours a day for Mr. Johannsen and this is enough immense labor.”

These words were said with a first-grade teacher’s kind and crisis-easing voice.

“And when you do not pick the peaches for Mr. Johannsen?”

“Then I pick the beef tomatoes for Mr. Predieu and the iceberg lettuces for Mr. Scarpio. When I am not picking other people’s various things it is my taste to sit against the wall and pick my teeth.”

“For that,” she said, “it is first necessary to chew on something.”

“I agree with a whole heart. I will ask only why you bother to make this very true and intelligent observation?”

“Because if you do not build the two needed rooms you will very soon be without the things to chew on. Do I make this plain? Your cook will be home in Durango, where human beings do not live like animals. You can write me a long letter about how you do not pick the teeth any more.”

She went in the house with both hands made into fists, her rounded belly leading the way. Five children’s voices came up in a soprano thunder, asking mama, dear and nice mamacita, for some pieces of crisped tortilla.

Life could be hard in this California. Troubles here had the tendency to grow like peaches and lettuces, in bunches. Though it was to be understood that even the much-accepting Herminia would not wish to bring out still another child in one cramped room. Yet adobe bricks would not grow in bunches, like peaches, lettuces and troubles.

He got to his feet and walked down close by the pig, to the well, to get himself some water. Standing there in his envelope of constant trouble, the tin dipper at his mouth, he said more or less to the pig, “I wish I had the miraculous penny.”

This was what people like him sometimes said when they felt their troubles forming into a sealed envelope, themselves inside.

The pig maneuvered over on his back and flopped his happy feet in the air, perhaps trying to kick the sun.

From the bottom of the well a voice said, “What?”

When spoken to, Diosdado liked to give straight and full answers. So he explained:

“I was speaking of the penny that never ends, that when it is spent is replaced in the pocket with another penny. It is the poor man’s idea of great wealth, of all the riches of the world, to have a penny in his pocket that always gives birth to another penny—”

The voice said, “If you have to empty out your head every time you’re asked a question, write a book or hire a hall.”

Then Diosdado realized that he was leaning into the well, talking to somebody at the bottom of his well.

A man with a one-room house guards what is his with more spirit than a man who owns international strings of castles.

He leaned over some more and said, “What do you think you’re doing there in my well?”

“I do this without thinking,” the voice said, “because it’s my job and the thing I’m trained to do. These days we all specialize.” “What is that, your job?”

“Listening. You think it’s easy when you mumble?”

“Then you listen to this,” Diosdado said. “This is my well and I want you to get out of it and off my property.”

“This well,” the voice said, “is as much Mr. Bixby’s as it is yours.”

“Who owns a hole is who did the digging. You go back to this liar of a Mr. Bixby of yours and you—”

“Man, will you use your damned head for once? For more than to keep your ears in place? You dug this hole, yes, what belongs to you is the hole. You did not make the water that comes into the hole, I stress this, the water comes down from those San Berdoo mountains, from certain forest lands owned by a certain Mr. George Carol Bixby. Now, will you stop wasting my time and answer one simple question? Did I understand you to say you would like the miraculous penny, the never ending penny?”

“These were my words. It is only an expression—”

“All right.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, all right”

“All right what?”

“All right, you can have the never ending penny. You’ve got it. Spend it in good health.”

Diosdado turned a sympathy-seeking face to the lurching, wallowing pig. “Mister,” he said, “you get down in my well where you have no right to be, a person I have never been introduced to, and you tell me bad jokes. It is impossible to have such an article as the never ending penny. This is only an article people wish for. It is an express—”

“I know what it is without speeches from you,” the voice said. “The self-perpetuating penny, you might say, is my business. If you don’t want it, fine, just say so. If you do, it’s yours. What coins do you have in your pocket?”

Diosdado made another face at the pig, one pleading for the two sane parties left in the world to join against a general madness, and pulled all the coins from his pocket.

“Four pennies, two dimes and a quarter. This is what I have in my pocket and in the world.”

“Fine. Now, put them in your shirt pocket, all but one penny. Put this single penny back in your pants.”

“If it gives you pleasure.”

“Now take the penny out, then feel in the pocket again.”

Diosdado withdrew the penny, placed it in his right hand, reached inside again with his left.

There was another penny in his pocket.

He pulled this one out and explored once more.

There was a third penny.

There was a fourth. There was a fifth.

When there were fifteen or more pennies in the sweaty hand he looked for explanations to the pig, with beggar’s eyes. The pig was busy juggling the sun with his paws. Diosdado began to shiver.

He thought he understood, partly, anyway, the excitement of this moment. Once, when a boy in Durango, while walking down a country road, he had seen a shine in the dust. His foot explored the mystery. The shining objects were bright new centavo pieces. At the sight of these unexpected riches he had felt precisely this kind of throat-tightening and eye-widening heat in a flash flood through his body. For one ballooning, scooping moment Diosdado had thought, what a glory if this place of miracles should turn out to be a well, a cornucopia, a production line of pennies. Can there be too much of a good thing?

Maybe this, the centavo with a big fertility, has always been a general dream of seven-year-olds. Maybe this is why it finally became a saying, an expression. But even, a six-year-old , even one not very bright, knows that the nice idea is finally in the head and not in the world. Some young sense of the true nature of things tells him that the perpetual penny is a pleasant wish, not a reasonable expectation. Dreams, he somehow knows, circle around the impossible.

Now here he was, he, Diosdado, with the dream of dreams in his pocket. He was a small boy again, kicking at the Durango road and finding the road fully co-operative, sensitive to his balloons and scoops of moods, jumping to his large orders.

“If you have the power to give this thing,” he said shakenly into the well, “why do you give it to me, a nobody?”

“For one thing,” the voice said, “you asked for it.”

“It is enough only to ask?”

“Oh, no, oh, no, we can’t go around giving these things out just for the asking. A lot of our countrymen come up north here, you know, many of them have troubles and ask for the repeating penny. We follow them and we listen to them. In my territory, for example, Southern California, I give out two or three of these pennies in a year, an average year. There’s no set quota.”

“People around here call for the miraculous penny all the time, why am I the one to get it, sir?”

‘‘One, you’re a steady worker. Two, you don’t spend all your earnings in the nearby bars. Three, you’re reasonably good to your wife, though you make silent comments at her. Four, you have another child coming and could use the penny, or think you could. Don’t ask for more reasons. Let’s just say I like your curly hair.”

Diosdado scratched his head. Absent-mindedly he pulled two more pennies from the production line in his pocket.

“But, listen, if two or three people around here get the penny each year, how have I never heard about this?”

“News like this doesn’t get around, fellow. The owners of these family-bearing pennies develop a very strong urge not to tell anybody about it. You’ll see.”

Diosdado pulled three more coins from his penny garden of a pocket.

“I’ve got to run now,” the voice said. “Somebody over at the Bixby place is making a racket about wanting the penny. It’s probably nothing, just a false alarm. Most of my calls come from drunken bums in roadside bars who have just run out of tequila and pulque money, but I’ve got to go and see. Oh, one more thing. I have the power to grant you two wishes. Now you have the first.”

“And the second, what is that?”

“You make the wishes, I grant them. Do you expect me to do all the work around here?”

That night Diosdado did not eat his supper. The kids hooted and threw frijoles at each other and he sat there over his food seeing and hearing nothing. The newly, acquired pennies in his pocket were a ton of hotness against his thigh, several times he was on the verge of blurting out to Herminia the incredible thing that had happened but each time his tongue got stiff.

Herminia wanted to know why he did not eat his frijoles. He said he had eaten many peaches this afternoon at Mr. Johannsen’s and was not hungry. With embroidered casualness he announced he was going to cut some kindling and went out.

As soon as he was inside his wood and tool shed he bolted the door and went to work.

Diosdado soon discovered that he could pull pennies from his pocket at the rate of one a second, sixty a minute, three thousand six hundred an hour. This meant he was making thirty-six dollars an hour, roughly what he got for a full week’s work in Mr. Johannsen’s orchards. It was good pay for a job that could be done with one hand, without climbing a ladder.

For one hour he stood drawing out the coppers and dropping them on the dirt floor. His arm was tired, a cylinder of hurt. He thought he might sit down for a time but it was too hard to reach into his pocket from a sitting position. Next he tried taking his pants off and lying down, but it was a strange thing, the penny would not reproduce itself when the pants were not actually on his body. He had to become a rich man standing up. At the end of the second hour he had almost seven thousand pennies on the floor, almost seventy dollars, and his arm was full of fever and gassy beer, there were shooting pains from the wrist to the shoulders. He was getting rich and he was getting lumbago.

He considered how much faster the harvesting of this penny crop would go if he could call in Herminia and the kids to help with the picking. With his whole family working they could go through the night in shifts. But it did not seem right to bring others into the secret, not even his near and dear.

Herminia called to him to bring some wood and he answered that he would be right there.

Now there was a problem. He could not leave a small fortune in pennies lying around in plain sight on the shed floor. He felt it was better if his family did not know about the pennies that grew like toadstools that wish to make headlines.

In the corner there were some coarse burlap bags, left over from last year’s flood season when he had prepared sandbags to build up the banks of the nearby stream. His seven thousand pennies almost filled one bag, which he hid under some odds and ends of lumber.

He went toward the house wondering why it was that he kept looking back. He was about to be the richest man in the world and he looked over his shoulder as though he had something to hide.

During the next days, whenever he had a minute, he went to the shed to pull pennies and fill burlap bags. Before the week was up he had to buy a new supply of bags at the general store, and his arm was so sore that he was not able to pick many peaches for Mr. Johannsen.

Finally he had so many full bags that there was no way to hide them in the shed. Some new thing had to be done with them to keep them out of sight.

He began to discuss the matter with himself:

“What are pennies for, exactly? For spending, this is certain, yet I do not consider the possibility. Why not? Well, the first thing is, there is no way to spend ten thousand pennies, then ten times ten thousand, and so on. If I ordered adobe bricks from the brickyard and offered the man bags of pennies for them he would say, where did you get all these pennies, Diosdado? Could I answer that I got them from my left pocket, boss? He would get suspicious and tell the chief of police about it, or the tax collector, or both. Pennies can be deposited in the bank of course, just like dollars. Yet peach pickers do not usually have money of any type to place in the bank. The president of the bank would think the matter over and report it to the tax collector, or the chief of police, or both. There is but one way. I must hide these bags from all eyes. From my wife and my children, them especially. I did not know what a trouble it can be to have money. Surely it is not robbery if I take pennies from my own left pocket, so why do I feel like a robber and keep looking over my shoulder?”

So he did not spend the pennies. Neither did he tell his wife about them. He hit on a way to hide the bags. He ordered a quantity of planks from the lumberyard and these he placed firmly in the ground in upright pairs, exactly along the lines where the walls for the extra rooms would eventually have to go. Between each pair of planks, using them for supports, he piled a vertical row of his plump bags, exactly as he had piled them to make a new bank for the flooding stream. Each bag contained ten thousand pennies, one hundred dollars’ worth of pennies. The piles formed continuous walls, they looked exactly like walls.

Herminia watched with narrowing eyes.

“You wanted more rooms?” he said to her. “How can I make rooms if I do not first make walls?”

“I tell all the neighbors you are a good husband,” she said, “but now I see you want to kill your whole family. What way is this to build walls without adobe? Make walls of sand and when the bags rot away in the weather the walls will fall down on our heads and we will be killed and buried in the same time. True, this way we save burial expenses. We have to cut down somewhere.”

“This is a new procedure of making the bricks,” he said, hating himself. “First, a special sand is put in the bags, second, they are permitted to shape and harden in the sun. It is a totally new process, woman. It was invented by the authorities on such things in the U.S.A. Department of Agriculture, Adobe Brick Division. Those of the government know the wall business better than you.”

He wanted to kick and punch himself when he saw the full trust and respect in her eyes. But at least the pennies would be safe in this homemade bank. Because of the protecting planks the children could not feel around with their fingers to find out that these walls were filled with a sunshiny sand of dreams and sayings.

But the chief of police did take notice. He saw the walls going up and he drove in to have a look.

“Pretty big house you’re putting up there,” he said. “Where’d you get the money for the materials? Come on, Diosdado, come clean, you rob a bank some place?”

Diosdado said he seldom had the occasion, let alone the constitution, even to go in a bank, let alone rob it, the funds came from picking the good peach crop.

But the chiefs words were a worry.

The tax collector came by too.

“You’re turning the place into a regular mansion,” he said with too much arithmetic in his eyes. “A four-star palace. You must have had a peachy year, ha, ha, to afford improvements like these.” There were dollar signs in his eyes as he drove away.

This was another worry.

By now the walls, the deceitful walls, were up ten feet or more. Diosdado took a pencil and paper and did some figuring. According to his count he had piled up two thousand bags, which came to twenty thousand dollars’ worth of pennies. He was a man worth twenty thousand dollars and he did not have the cash to go in the store to buy a side of bacon or a new kitchen table, let alone more burlap bags. Added to this, the chief of police and the tax collector had their mathematical eyes on him.

If no more bags would fit into the walls, any he filled from now on would have to be hidden in another way. There was no other way. Besides, Diosdado was beginning to wonder if there was any sense to piling up more pennies in secret. To collect bigger and bigger moneys and be further and further away from the possibility of spending them, to do all this heavy work and have no pay from it, nothing but some false wails put up with backbreaking labor, more labor by far than it would have taken to make true and useful adobe walls, that is, walls about which a man would not have to tell rotten lies to his trusting wife, this did not seem reasonable. His arm was very tired. It hung limp at his side, a tube of misery. He was now the slowest picker in Mr. Johannsen’s orchards.

He decided that, for the time being, he would not collect any more pennies.

Easier said than done. How do you go about throwing away a breeding penny like this? A damned rabbit of a penny? Several times, in disgust, he tried to fling it from him. Each time, its twin brother turned up cozily in his pocket.

He began truly to hate this penny. He had not had a good night’s sleep for weeks, even before the visits from the township officials. He had the stronger and stronger feeling that, ever since he had begun to collect the pennies, he had been involved in something criminal, something absolutely against the law. He was looking over his shoulder all the time now. His neck was getting as stiff as his arm.

He consulted with himself once more:

“I see why I have broken no law, yet feel like the Number One on the wished-for list of the FBI. I begin to see. This is not my money, though it happens to be in my pocket. It is not money at all, though it looks and feels like true money. The difficulty is that if you are given the magic of the seven-year-old you must begin to think and act like a seven-year-old in order to enjoy the gift. Why do I not speak to my wife any more? Because my pennies are the only thing I can speak of and they are the one thing I must not speak of. Why can’t I tell Herminia about the pennies? Not because of the danger she might talk. Not that so much, though she is a champion talker. Chiefly because if I spoke of this magic she would see the seven-year-old in my eyes again, and this is not for a woman to see in a more so than not grown man. Why do I feel I am breaking the law? Because the first law is to act your age, which in my case is thirty-nine and not seven. This calamity of a penny cuts many inches off my height and how tall is a man to begin with? Besides, my arm hurts all the time. I must get rid of this affliction and plague of a penny.”

But how lose a penny that won’t get lost?

Standing by the well, speaking more or less to the upside-down pig as it pranced pointlessly, he said, “I certainly wish I’d never heard of this miserable penny.”

From deep in the well there was a sound like the rush of wind. After a few seconds the voice said as though, from far off, “I’ll be right there.”

Diosdado waited. Pretty soon the voice came through stronger, though panting a little, saying, “Sorry to keep you waiting but those drunken bums over at the Bixby place keep running out of drinking money and yelling for the penny. Well. You were saying?”

“I have a worry,” Diosdado said. “It seems to me there is something illegal about this magic penny.”

There was silence for a while. Then the voice said with some irritation, “Look, up there you make laws, down here we make pennies. It’s a division of labor. Don’t tell me your troubles, I’ve got enough of my own.”

“But I have to live with the law,” Diosdado said, “and this penny is clearly against the law. I will tell you my thinking. There are only so many pennies in the country, an amount fixed by the government people. Therefore, if you put a large number of them in my pocket you must be taking them out of somebody else’s pocket. If you are a true magician why do you have to be a thief? More, you must be robbing the poor, because it is chiefly the poor who save pennies. I have no use for the whole system.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said?” the voice came back. “We don’t steal the pennies, we make them.”

“Then you are counterfeiters. Isn’t this a violation of the law, to counterfeit?”

“I don’t have to sit here and take your insults,” the voice said. “These pennies are most emphatically not counterfeits. We follow the specifications of the mint people of the U.S. Treasury in making these pennies, so-and-so much copper, such-and-such percentages of other metals, everything down to the last decimal point. We use no inferior materials, each penny we give you is a perfect coin of the realm. There’s not a bad penny in the lot.”

“All the same, all the same. There are supposed to be a certain number of pennies and no more. It’s not right for me to have the power to add a million or a billion billion billion, this could upset all figures and banks. It must be against the law for a peach picker to have the-strength to overthrow the whole money system and also the government.”

“You didn’t call me over here to discuss the monetary system. What’s really on your mind, man?”

“I don’t want this penny.”

“All right.”

“What?”

“I said all right. Throw it down here.”

Diosdado drew the coin from his pocket, breathed deeply, and dropped it down the well. Time passed. There was a sound, not of splashing, rather of a big and drawn-out yawn, accompanied by a flatted whistling. He thought he heard the ringing of a cash register from far away.

He reached into his left pocket. It was filled with a glorious emptiness. He felt a weight of some long tons of lifting from his shoulders.

“This is the second wish?” he said.

“Precisely,” the voice said.

“Those who make the first, they always make the second?”

“Most always. As soon as they find out they can’t spend these pennies, keep watching over their shoulders, stop talking to their wives, get funny looks from the tax collector, and so on.”

“Nobody ever keeps the penny?”

“How it is in other territories I don’t know, but since I’ve been on the job here there was only one man who didn’t try to give it back. He was a gardener and tree pruner over to La Jolla. Know what happened to him? Interesting case, I wrote it up for our records. He went around telling everybody in town he had a nice mamma penny that kept making little baby pennies. This is not the kind of talk people wish to hear from a grown man, an experienced gardener and tree pruner. They did not wait to see the breeding penny demonstrated, they quick locked him up in a hospital for people who make wild talk. Naturally, I had to step in. We couldn’t sit back and let this man build big piles of pennies all over the hospital just to show off, this sort of thing has a tendency to make people gossip and turn their attention from business. We don’t have the authority to take the penny back unless its owner so requests, but in emergencies we can change the never ending penny into a never ending something else. What I changed this penny into was a Life Saver, wild cherry flavor. Now this man was going around the hospital telling all the doctors what he had in his pocket was not a mama penny but a mama Life Saver, wild cherry flavor. You can understand that this just made the doctors more sure they had done right in locking him up. What did this man begin to do with his self-replenishing Life Saver? Nobody would look at it. For lack of anything better, he began to eat the Life Savers.. He ate and ate, and always had one more. So far as I know he’s still eating away, all day long and far into the night, and I can tell you he’s getting pretty damn sick of wild cherry. He was originally a bitsy fellow, one hundred twenty in his stocking feet, and they tell me he just passed two hundred and is still going strong. Good-by, friend. Maybe you’ve learned something from this. You can get too much of a good thing. But don’t write the experience off as a total loss. You’ve got something to show for it. Just take a good look around. Good-by now, and don’t take any wooden—sorry. Got to rush. Those drunks over at Bixby’s are making a racket again. By, by.”

Diosdado looked around his property. He saw a well, a shed, a hut, a mud hollow, a self-inebriated pig, in that order—nothing new. What did that voice mean, he, Diosdado, had something to show for it? All he had for it was an arm that was a hose made from end to end of major ache, and this was not to be shown.

But then he saw something that had not been there before the trouble-making penny. Attached to the original hut were two unusually large, very luxurious rooms, or almost rooms. Add ceilings and finish the walls properly and nobody could take them for anything but rooms. They were most emphatically not banks, because though moneys had been deposited in them these moneys were not for withdrawing. The walls could certainly be finished in the right manner. There would be no withdrawals from this gone-out-of-business bank.

Herminia came over to him from the hut and he put his arm around her, saying:

“Woman, you talk too much, but from time to time you say something. It is true, without adobe those walls do not work. Whatever the Agriculture Department says, those bags of sand will rot in the weather and make troubles. I will put plenty of adobe over the walls, on both sides, also, I will add ceilings, and you will have the two largest rooms on this side of the San Berdoos. Then my cook will not go back to Durango and I will always have something to chew on before I pick my teeth, yes?”

“Agreed,” Herminia said. “This is a business deal not to be turned down,” and she put one arm around his waist, then the other.

For over a week Diosdado picked no peaches. He worked around the clock, placing boards to make a roof, mixing adobe and plastering it over the bags and their wooden supports. Finally the walls, and also the roof, were covered with solid, substantial, homey-looking adobe. No rains could get in here, and no tax collectors.

The afternoon Diosdado finished his labors he walked over to the well with Herminia and turned to take a good look at the finished structure. It was a real house, a good house, the best-looking house in the valley.

“This is a house that could not be paid for in pennies,” he said, half into the well, half toward the wallowing pig, very little for Herminia’s ear.

With her tendency to comment on everything, Herminia said, “There is not enough money in all the world, pennies or dollars, to pay for this house,” and put her arm around his waist.

He patted her promise-leavened belly and looked down into the valley toward the other huts and cabins nestled here and there. He thought about a hundred-twenty-pound man getting to be two hundred on one Life Saver, wild cherry flavor, and shivered. He wondered how many other homes in this valley had twenty-thousand-dollar walls, but he was afraid to speculate about this too much.

Down in the mud hollow the pig rolled on his back like a vacationing millionaire, trying, for lack of anything better to do, to punt away the molten centavo of a sun.