Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

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.