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

“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.”