by Damon Knight
Benjamin MacStiofain sat next to me and grimly devoured a pear. “These Olympics are disgusting,” he muttered. “What’s the use? We come here, we agonize, we break our hearts, then someone wins and everybody forgets about it. I hate it all. This is my last competition.” MacStiofain always said every meet was his last.
“I heard Dankmeyer finished his novella already.”
MacStiofain’s mustache twitched. “Did you have to tell me that?” He got up and wandered away morosely.
Then I saw Lee Huong. She drifted past, dressed in what appeared to be white pajamas. Her small light-brown face was composed; her almond eyes surveyed the room benevolently. It was eerie. This late in the race a writer might be depressed, anxious, fatalistic, or hysterical, but not calm. It had to be a tactic.
She nodded to me, then sat down on the couch. I nodded back. “Is this your first Olympic contest?” she asked.
I said it was.
“It means little.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I replied. “It means nothing … if you’re a loser.” I was being crude. But Lee Huong only smiled as she got up and walked away. Maybe she knew something I didn’t know.
I remembered what Wolowski had said. What if he was right about Huong? If she was the best, it meant that inferior writers defeated her regularly. And if that was true, it might mean that inferior writers beat better ones in all contests. MacStiofain, I recalled uncomfortably, believed that APOLLO picked the winners at random, although the human judges might give you an edge. The Olympic committee had denied this, but we all knew that MacStiofain’s sister had taken a gold in cybernetics. She might have told him something.
I had lost my appetite during these ruminations, so I got up and made a show of leaving, waving to Jules and telling him that I was heading back to work. This obvious maneuver almost always succeeded in making the writers who remained feel guilty. Karath’s classic move, bringing his typewriter to parties and working in the midst of them, was one I greatly admired but could never emulate with conviction.
On my way back, I saw Effie Mae Hublinger sitting on a stone wall with a few spectators. Her game was being just folks, nothin’ special ’bout me, jes’ throwin’ the ol’ words around, but at heart Ah’m jes’ a li’l ol’ socializes Anyone who believed that about a writer deserved to be fooled, or worse yet, put in a story as a character.
The last month was pressurized. Anyone who could spare the time was playing dirty tricks. Wolowski, who admittedly was erudite, lectured to anyone he saw on the subject of our ignorance and lack of real ability. This upset a few writers, but only encouraged Jules, for some strange reason.
MacStiofain finally cracked. In a show of poor sportsmanship, he duked it out with a novelist. The day after that brawl, he was disqualified for taking unauthorized drugs.
They had to drag him away. The robopols put him in a strait-jacket while he screamed that someone had planted the drugs, but we knew that wasn’t true. At any rate, we all calmed down a bit, since a formidable contender was now out of the race.
Lee Huong kept her equilibrium. That drove Effie Mae Hublinger crazy. With a few of her friends, she camped out on Huong’s front step for three days, creating a ruckus. This infantile tactic only lost Hublinger time she could have spent on her own novella.
Someone visited Jules and managed to swipe his medicines, unnoticed by the monitors. Even Jules, angry as he was, had to admire such skill and daring. But it was Dankmeyer who created a classic new ploy. Two weeks before the end of competition he handed in his novella.
Jules, hysterical by then, relayed this news to me. He was having trouble with his ending. He stomped around my workroom, talked himself into utter panic, talked himself out of it, then went back to his house. Even Ansoni had been thrown off balance by that trick. Everyone had always waited for the deadline, revising and polishing. Dankmeyer would be famous. He topped off his stunt with a nervous collapse, which would help with the judges.
The day before the deadline, Rigel Jehan left without finishing his novella and was disqualified. Poor Rigel, I thought, glad he was gone. He could never finish anything during the big contests.
And then the deadline arrived. We handed in our manuscripts and carefully avoided each other while awaiting judgment. I went on a drunk in Rome. I came to in an alley with a large bump on my head, no money, and a hangover. I suppose it’s all grist for the mill.
The closing ceremonies were held two years after the start of the Games. It took that long for some of the races to be completed. The economists, in gold lam£, sashayed around the arena, drawing a few cheers. The anthropologists topped them, weaving in and out, then dancing a nifty two-step in their robes and feathers. I wore my bronze medal proudly as I strutted with the others, our quill pens held high. There was, after all, no shame in being defeated by Ansoni, although it irked me that Dankmeyer had taken the silver. He had recovered nicely from his nervous breakdown and was casting friendly glances at me with his sensitive brown eyes. I ignored him.
I returned to Karath’s villa after that. He congratulated me but got down to essentials quickly. I had only a couple of months to train for the next Olympic prelims.
Then disaster struck. I had no words left. At first I thought it was only exhaustion. I grew listless. I put the cover over my typewriter, then hid it under my desk, where it reproached me silently. The other trainees whispered about me. I had to face the truth: I had a writer’s block. I might never write again. No one ever discussed writer’s block, considering it indelicate, but I knew others had gone mute.
Karath was kind and sympathetic, although he knew I could not remain at the villa; he had to worry about contagion. He was too courteous to ask me to leave. I left by myself, one cold cloudy morning, not wanting to see the other trainees gloat, and took a shuttle to New Zealand.
Blocked and miserable, I shut myself off from all news. I received a few kind notes, which I did not answer; nothing is worse than the pity of other writers. Yet even in that state I had to view the next Olympics.
Reina Takake took the gold; I found out she had gone back to Karath after I left. I watched her receive it, hating her, hating my former best friend more than I had ever hated anyone.
That did it. Hate and envy always do. Something jogged loose in my brain and I started writing again. Let’s face it, I’m not fit for anything else. I only hope I can be a contender once more.
BRIGHT COINS IN NEVER-ENDING STREAM
A purse that always has one more coin in the bottom of it, no matter how many you take out—that was what Matthew Quoin had been offered in a dubious transaction a long time ago. And how could a man ever lose by such a bargain as that?
R. A. Lafferty
People sometimes became exasperated with Matthew Quoin, that tedious old shuffler. Sometimes? Well, they were exasperated with him almost all the time. It isn’t that people aren’t patient and kind-hearted. All of them in our town are invariably so. But Matthew could sure ruffle a kind-hearted surface.
“Oh, he is so slow about it!” people said of him. That wasn’t true, Matthew’s fingers flew lightning-like when he was involved in a transaction. It was just that so very many movements were required of him to get anything at all transacted.
And then the stories that he told about his past, a very far-distant past according to him, were worn out by repetition.
“Oh, was I ever the cock of the walk!” he would say. “I left a trail of twenty-dollar gold pieces around the world three times, and that was when twenty dollars was still worth something. I always paid everything with twenty-dollar gold pieces, and there was no way that I could ever run out of them. Ten of them, a hundred of them, a thousand of them, I could lay them out whenever they were needed. I had a cruse of oil that would never be empty, as the Bible says. I had a pocketbook that would never be without coin. I was the cock of the walk. Plague take it all, I still am! Has anybody ever seen me without money?”
No, nobody had. It was just that, of l
ate years, it took Matthew’s money so long to add up. And often people had to wait behind him for a long time while he counted it out, and they became sulky and even furious.
When people became weary of listening to Matthew’s stories (and of late years he could feel their weariness for him like a hot blast) he went and talked to the pigeons. They, at least, had manners.
“The bloom is off the plum now,” he would tell those red-footed peckers, “and the roses of life have become a little ratty for me. But I will not run out of coin. I have the promise that I will not. I got that promise as part of a dubious transaction, but the promise has held up now for more years and decades than you would believe. And I will not die till I am death-weary of taking coin out of my pocketbook: I have that promise also. How would I ever be weary of drawing coins out of my pocketbook?
“This began a long time ago, you see, when the pigeons were no bigger than the jenny-wrens are now. They had just started to mint the American twenty-dollar gold piece, and I had them in full and never-ending flow. I tell you that a man can make an impression if he has enough gold pieces. Ah, the ladies who were my friends! Lola Montez, Squirrel Alice, Marie Laveau, Sarah Bernhardt, Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And the high ladies were attracted to me for myself as well as for my money. I was the golden cock of the golden walk.
“You ask what happened to those golden days?” Matthew said to the pigeons, who hadn’t asked anything except maybe, “How about springing for another box of Crackerjacks?”
“Oh, the golden days are still with me, though technically they are the copper days now. I was promised eight bright eons of ever-flowing money, and the eighth of the eons could last (along with my life) as long as I wished it to last.
“And, when the first eon of flowing money slipped into the second, it didn’t diminish my fortune much. It was still an unending stream of gold. Now they were five-dollar gold pieces instead of twenty-dollar gold pieces, but when there is no limit to the number of them, what difference does that make? I would take one out of my pocketbook, and immediately there would be another one in it waiting to be taken.”
“I suppose I really had the most fun when I was known as the Silver Dollar Kid,” Matthew Quoin told them. He was talking to squirrels rather than pigeons now, and it was a different day. But one day was very much like another.
“I never cared overly for money. I just don’t want to run out of it. And I have the promise that my pocketbook will always have one more coin in it. I liked the sound of silver dollars on a counter, and I’d ring them down as fast as one a second when I wished to make an impression. And they rang like bells. I was in my pleasant maturity then, and life was good to me. I was a guy they all noticed. They called me ‘Show Boat’ and ‘the Silver Dollar Sport.’ I always tipped a dollar for everything. That was when money was worth ten times what it is now and a dollar was really something. What, squirrels, another sack of peanuts, you say? Sure I can afford it! The girl at the kiosk will be a little impatient with me because it takes me so long to get enough coins out, but we don’t care about that, do we?”
The fact was that Matthew Quoin, though he still commanded a shining and unending stream of money, had a poor and shabby look about him in these days of the eighth eon. As part of an old and dubious transaction, he had the promise that he could live as long as he wished, but that didn’t prevent him from becoming quite old.
He had a grubby little room. He would get up at three o’clock every Friday morning and begin to pull coins one at a time (there was no possible way except one at a time) out of his pocketbook. It was one of those small, three-section, snap-jaw pocketbooks such as men used to carry to keep their coins and bills in. It was old, but it was never-failing.
Matthew would draw the coins out one at a time. He would count them into piles. He would roll them into rolls. And at eight o’clock in the morning, when his weekly rent was due, he would pay it proudly, twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents. So he would be fixed for another week. It took him from three until eight o’clock every Friday morning to do this; but he cat-napped quite a bit during that time. All oldsters cat-nap a lot.
And it didn’t really take him very long (no more than five or six minutes) to draw out enough coins for one of his simple lunch-counter meals. But some people are a little bit testy at having to wait even five or six minutes behind an old man at the cashier’s stand.
“I was known as the Four-Bit Man for a few years, and that was all right,” Matthew Quoin said. “Then I was known as the Two-Bit Man for a few other years, and that was all right too.” This was a different day, and Matthew was talking to a flock of grackle-birds who were committing slaughter on worms, slugs, and other crawlers in the grass of City Park. “It didn’t begin to hurt till I was known as the Dime-a-Time Man,” Matthew said, “and that stuck in the throat of my pride a little bit, although it shouldn’t have. I was still the cock of the grassy walk even though I didn’t have as many hens as I had once. I had good lodgings, and I had plenty to eat and drink. I could buy such clothes as I needed, though it flustered me a bit to make a major purchase. We had come into the era of the hundred-dollar overcoat then, and to draw out one thousand coins, one by one, with people perhaps waiting, can be a nervous thing.
“I began to see that there was an element of humor in that dubious transaction that I had made so many years ago, and that part of the joke was on me. Oh, I had won every point of argument when we had made that deal. The pocketbook was calfskin, triple-stitched, and with German silver snat-latch. It was absolutely guaranteed never to be clear empty of coin, and it should last forever. Each coin appeared in the very bottom of the pocket-book, that’s true, and the contrivance was rather deep and with a narrow mouth, so it did take several seconds to fish each dime out. But it was a good bargain that I made, and all parties still abide by it. The Dime-a-Time years weren’t bad.
“Nor were the nickel years really. There is nothing wrong with nickels. Dammit, the nickel is the backbone of commerce! It was in the nickel years that I began to get rheumatism in my fingers, and that slowed me down. But it had nothing to do with the bargain, which was still a good one.”
When the penny years rolled around, Matthew Quoin was quite old. Likely he was not as old as he claimed to be, but he was the oldest and stringiest cock around.
“But it’s all as bright as one of my new pennies,” he said to a multitude of army caterpillars that was destroying the fine grass in City Park. “And this is the eighth and final eon of the ever-flowing money, and it will go on forever for me unless I tell it to stop. Why should I tell it to stop? The flow of money from my pocketbook is as vital to me as the flow of blood through my veins. And the denomination cannot be diminished further. There is no smaller coin than the copper penny.”
It didn’t go all that bright and shining with Matthew Quoin in the penny years, though. The rheumatism had bitten deeper into his hands and fingers, and now his lightning fingers were slow lightning indeed. The “time is money” saying applied to Matthew more explicitly than it had ever applied to anyone else, and there were quite a few slownesses conspiring to eat up his valuable time.
And every time that prices went up, by the same degree was he driven down. After five years in the penny eon he was driven down plenty.
“If it takes me five hours just to draw out and count the money for my week’s rent, then things are coming to an intolerable stage with me,” he said. “Something is going to have to give.”
Something gave.
The government decreed that, due to the general inflation of the economy and the near-worthlessness of the one-cent piece, or penny, that coin would no longer be minted. And, after a cutoff date in the near future, it would no longer be legal tender either.
“What will I do now?” Matthew Quoin asked himself.
He went to talk to the people at the Elite Metal Salvage Company, Scavenger Department.
“How much a pound will you give me for copper pennies?” he asked.
/> “Two cents a pound,” the man said. “There hasn’t been very much copper in copper pennies for years and years.”
“There is in these,” Matthew said. “They follow the specifications of the earliest minting.” He showed several of them to the man.
“Amazing, amazing!” the man said. “They’re almost pure copper. Five cents a pound.”
“I don’t know whether I can live on that or not,” Matthew Quoin said, “but I’ve no choice except to try.”
Matthew Quoin changed his life style a bit. He gave up his lodging room. He slept in a seldom-flooded storm sewer instead. But it was still a hard go.
A nickel a pound! Do you know how many pennies, pulled out rheumatically one by one, it takes to make a pound? Do you know how many nickels it takes now just to get a cup of coffee and an apple fritter for breakfast? Matthew Quoin had started at three-thirty that morning. It would be ten o’clock before he had enough to take to the Elite Metal Salvage Company to sell for legal tender. It would be ten-thirty before he had his scanty breakfast. And then back to the old penny-fishing again. His fingers were scabbed and bleeding. It would be almost midnight before he had enough (yes, the Elite Metal Salvage Company did do business at night; that’s when they did a lot of their purchasing of stolen metal) to trade in for supper money. And that would represent only one hamburger with everything on it, and one small glass of spitzo. But Matthew would never be clear broke. He was still cock of the walk.
“Now here is where it gets rough,” Matthew Quoin said. “Suppose that I give up and am not able to live on the bright flow of coins, and I die (for I cannot die until I do give up); suppose that I die, then I will have lost the dubious transaction that I made so long ago. I’ll have been outsmarted on the deal, and I cannot have that. That fellow bragged that he’d never lost on a transaction of this sort, and he rubbed it in with a smirk. We’ll just see about that. I’ve not given up yet, though I do need one more small morsel of food if I’m to live through the day. Do you yourself ever get discouraged, robin?”