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

“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.

In just one year’s time, the change in the climate of our thinking in a “breakthrough” area is staggering. A year ago (while the public-at-large was still goggling at the official use of the word “Astronaut,” applied to the seven men selected for Project Mercury training), a select group of scientists embarked on a systematic search of space for radio signals indicating the existence of other Intelligent life In the universe. They called their project, charmingly If self-consciously, “Ozma”) and Harvard’s eminent Dr. Shapley (who was, you must understand, a guiding spirit in the venture) referred to it as “high-class science fiction.” The astronomers could no more help believing what half a dozen converging lines of research had already indicated than they could stop feeling slightly silly about believing it.

Two days ago, as I write this, the country’s most staid newspapers headlined stories of the discovery of lifelike hydrocarbons in a sliver of meteorite: “Evidence of Life Beyond Earth Reported Found,” and “Wax a Clue to Life in Outer Space—Trees, Plants, Even Men May Be Behind Meteorites.”

We—and the pronoun becomes daily more Inclusive, less exclusive—have begun to believe we are really not alone in the world. With this awareness comes (as for the babe in the process of distinguishing self from others) the first acute sense of need for a working system of communication.

After a couple of weeks Nan began to understand him a little. Nan was the third oldest Maxill girl. The wild one, they called her in Henryton, not forgetting they had said the same of Gladys and later Muriel; Gladys now high in the Eastern Star, and Muriel, married to Henryton’s leading hardware and furniture dealer—Muriel, mother of the sweetest twins in Evarts County. But they said it of Nan with more assurance.