Warren Murphy - Coin of the Realm

Frustrated, Shane riffled through the mail that had come while he was away. There was a postcard from Glinda. She was shacked up with a rock singer in Rio. He threw the card away. The bank statement said he was overdrawn by nearly six hundred dollars. And the mortgage on the house was due in a few days. Although surrounded by the entire wealth of the vanished Moovian empire, Shane Billiken was flat, dead, sucking-wind broke.

"No problem," he said suddenly snapping his fingers. He grabbed the Yellow Pages and looked up the listing for coin dealers. There was one in Beverly Hills. They'd know how to treat him. He picked out a dozen coins and piled into his Ferrari.

"But you don't understand," Shane was explaining heatedly to the proprietor not twenty minutes later. "These are rare ancient coins. From Mu. Don't tell me you never heard of Mu. It was a great continent that existed before the dawn of time. It sank. But not all of it. A little bit of high ground stuck up. Except that it sank too. Recently. Last week, as a matter of fact. And before it went, I rescued these coins. There aren't any more left. I got them all."

"Sank?" asked the coin dealer.

"Yes!"

"Twice?"

"Yes! That's it. You've seized the concept perfectly. You must be highly evolved to catch on so quickly. Congratulations. Don't ever change."

"But you're willing to sell them to me, instead of to the Smithsonian?"

"The Smithsonian people are nimnoids, and I've got a minor short-term cash-flow thing going on right now. I've got more of these coins. Tons. Otherwise I wouldn't be making you this truly excellent deal. So how much?"

"I see," said the coin dealer. "Tell me something. I thought I recognized you when you walked in. Haven't I seen you on TV?"

"That's right!" Shane Billiken said eagerly.

"On the Donahue show. You're Shane Billiken."

Shane Billiken's hairy chest puffed up. His mood amulet turned from orange to blue.

"That's right."

"The New Age guru?"

"Exactly!" Shane Billiken said. He fairly shouted it.

"The one who's always talking about Atlantis and Nirvana and other mythical places?"

Shane's chest deflated. His face fell. He seemed to shrink.

"That was different. Mu is real. Or it was."

"But it sank."

"Well, yes."

"So there's no proof?"

Shane pounded the glass counter. "The coins! The coiris are your proof. Some of them are thousands of years old. Probably. "

"They look pretty new to me. Besides, why should I believe you now when I didn't believe in your Atlantean high priestess, what was her name again?"

"Princess Shastra," Shane said in an injured tone. "She was my Soul Mate."

"Is that so?" said the coin dealer. "But when I was in high school, she was my classmate. Only then she called herself Glinda Thirp and her tits were real."

Shane Billiken's face slowly turned gray.

"What will you give me for the metal content?" he asked in a small voice.

"Oh, about six cents, depending on weight."

"You robber. These are pure silver. Maybe platinum." The coin dealer shook his head soberly.

"Tin," he said firmly. "Tin? It can't be."

" 'Fraid so."

"Tin," Shane BilIiken said dully. "Tin." Slowly, carefully he swept the coins back into a paper bag. His eyes were wounded. His lips moved soundlessly. His mood medallion slowly turned from blue to black.

He walked out of the coin shop, his tread as heavy as a deep-sea diver's walking in lead boots.

The coin dealer watched him go. He wondered what Shane Billiken meant as he went out the door. He kept muttering one thing over and over:

"Tin. I don't believe it. I shipped tin again."

When Shane Billiken returned home, the unpaid mortgage loomed suddenly larger than a mountain. It was all gone. He had no hope left. He couldn't summon up a positive affirmation to save his life.

He noticed the stack of newspapers that had come while he was away, Woodenly he went through them one by one, page by page.

His eyes bugged behind his sunglasses when he came to the entertainment section of the previous day's paper. The woods were full of Roy Orbison impersonators. There was a Roy Sorbison, a Roy Orb-Son, a Sun-Ray Orison, a Ray-Ban Bisonor and many others. Their similar puffy features, masked by identical sunglasses, stared out at him mockingly. Every ad had "Sold Out" printed over it in funeral-black letters. With a sick clutching in the pit of his stomach, Shane Billiken lifted his thumb and saw that there was even one thief who called himself Roy Orbit Sun. And he was playing in the Hollywood Bowl.

"No! No! No!" Shane Billiken moaned, not noticing that he was making a negative affirmation. He tore through the stack of papers, looking for the item he had for years dreamed of reading, but which he now dreaded. He found it on page one of a week-old paper:

POP BALLADEER ROY ORBISON, DEAD AT 52

The great Orbison had passed away of a massive heart attack a week ago Tuesday; while Shane was at sea.

As he collapsed in his beanbag chair, the terrible irony of it descended on Shane Billiken like an Egyptian curse. His window of opportunity was lost. He couldn't compete with all those other Roy Orbison clones. It was booming industry now.

Desperately Shane closed his eyes. There was one last hope, one last shot to take. He would employ a technique he described in The Elbow of Enlightenment as "Uncreating the Reality."

"It never happened, it never happened," he chanted, mantra-like. "Roy's alive, he really is. I never left home. I never left home. Everything is fine. Everything is cool. Everything is fine. Everything is cool."

Shane's tense expression softened. He felt better already. Meditation had always worked for him. Soon, he would open his eyes and all would be well. Was there anything else he should wish for, he wondered, now that the Wheel of Destiny was under his control. Oh, yes.

"Glinda's back, too," he murmured. "And she's naked. All is well, all is good. There's no place like home. There's no place like home," he added, thinking why not? It had worked for Judy Garland.

But when he opened his eyes, the repeating images of Roy Orbison impersonators stared back at him like a blind army, and Roy the Boy was still dead. He searched the house for Glinda, but she was nowhere to be found, either.

Shane Billiken, high priest of positivity, felt very, very negative.

And so Shane Billiken piled the coins of Moo into the reed boat which he had repaired with Krazy Glue and shoved it into the surf behind his home. He placed his favorite guitar in the bow next to a bottle of gasoline siphoned from his Ferrari. He pushed off.

When the boat was afloat, he clambered aboard. The sun was setting, its twin reflection showed on his RayBans. It was a cool, sweet night. The stars were right.

Shane had done his horoscope. It had assured him that it would be a good night to die. Either that, or he had cancer. It was hard to say. His tears dripped all over the chart, making the ink run.

Shane waited until he was far out to sea before he shook the gasoline all throughout the boat. He poured the remainder over his head. Then he applied flame from his Zippo lighter to the stern. It caught slowly because the boat was already wet.

Then, taking up his guitar, he began to sing what had become the theme song of his life in a pain-choked voice. "It's oooooovvvvvveeeeeerrrrrr," he wailed.

He faced the setting sun, his back to the wavering yellow flames. Shane Billiken was going out like a Viking, a song on his lips. He wondered if he had been a Viking in a past life. Or maybe he would become a Viking in the next. Was it possible to be reincarnated into the past? Shane hadn't studied that, but he hoped all knowledge would soon be revealed to him. He had earned it.

He wondered what was taking the flames so long to reach him. And why did his feet feel so wet? He looked down.