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.”
“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.
<
~ * ~
BERNIE THE FAUST
BY WILLIAM TENN
London-born William Tenn says, “I went to several colleges, but never got within any measurable distance of a degree. The only things I didn’t study at all were literature and writing— because I considered them, like courses in breathing and eating, superfluous.” His books include “The Human Angle” and “Of All Possible Worlds.” In the opinion of The New York Herald Tribune, “Tenn easily outstrips the best of most science-fiction writers on the counts of imagination, wit, charm and nicety of both writing and thinking.” The tall Tenn tale that follows is not a fantasy, despite the word “Faust” in the title and the Mephistophelean behavior of the unsavory antagonist. It is out-and-out science fiction. And fine, tart, pointed science fiction, too.
~ * ~
That’s what Ricardo calls me. I don’t know what I am.
Here I am. I’m sitting in my little nine-by-six office. I’m reading notices of Government-surplus sales. I’m trying to decide where lies a possible buck and where lies nothing but more headaches.
So the office door opens. This little guy with a dirty face, wearing a very dirty, very wrinkled Palm Beach suit, he walks into my office, and he coughs a bit and he says:
“Would you be interested in buying a twenty for a five?”
That was it. I mean, that’s all I had to go on.
I looked him over and I said, “Wha-at?”
He shuffled his feet and coughed some more. “A twenty,” he mumbled. “A twenty for a five.”
I made him drop his eyes and stare at his shoes. They were lousy, cracked shoes, lousy and dirty like the rest of him. Every once in a while, his left shoulder hitched up in a kind of tic. “I give you twenty,” he explained to his shoes, “and I buy a five from you with it. I wind up with five, you wind up with twenty.”
“How did you get into the building?”
“I just came in,” he said, a little mixed up.
“You just came in.” I put a nasty, mimicking note in my voice. “Now you just go right back downstairs and come the hell out. There’s a sign in the lobby—NO BEGGARS ALLOWED.”
“I’m not begging.” He tugged at the bottom of his jacket. It was like a guy trying to straighten out his slept-in pajamas. “I want to sell you something. A twenty for a five. I give you—”
“You want me to call a cop?”
He looked very scared. “No. Why should you call a cop? I haven’t done anything to make you call a cop!”
“I’ll call a cop in just a second. I’m giving you fair warning. I just phone down to the lobby and they’ll have a cop up here fast. They don’t want beggars in this building. This is a building for business.”
He rubbed his hand against his face, taking a little dirt off, then he rubbed the hand against the lapel of his jacket and left the dirt there. “No deal?” he asked. “A twenty for a five? You buy and sell things. What’s the matter with my deal?”
I picked up the phone.
“All right,” he said, holding up the streaky palm of his hand. “I’ll go. I’ll go.”
“You better. And shut the door behind you.”
“Just in case you change your mind.” He reached into his dirty, wrinkled pants pocket and pulled out a card. “You can get in touch with me here. Almost any time during the day.”
“Blow,” I told him.
He reached over, dropped the card on my desk, on top of all the surplus notices, coughed once or twice, looked at me to see if maybe I was biting. No? No. He trudged out.
I picked the card up between the nails of my thumb and forefinger and started to drop it into the wastebasket.
Then I stopped. A card. It was just so damned out of the ordinary—a slob like that with a card. A card, yet.
For that matter, the whole play was out of the ordinary. I began to be a little sorry I hadn’t let him run through the whole thing. After all, what was he trying to do but give me an offbeat sales pitch? I can always use an offbeat sales pitch. I work out of a small office, I buy and sell, but half my stock is good ideas. I’ll use ideas, even from a bum.
The card was clean and white, except where the smudge from his fingers made a brown blot. Written across it in a kind of ornate handwriting were the words Mr. Ogo Eksar. Under that was the name and the telephone number of a hotel in the Times Square area, not far from my office.
I knew that hotel: not expensive, but not a fleabag either— somewhere just under the middle line.
There was a room number in one corner of the card. I stared at it and I felt kind of funny. I really didn’t know.
Although, come to think of it, why couldn’t a panhandler be registered at a hotel? “Don’t be a snob, Bernie,” I told myself.
Twenty for five. What kind of panhandling pitch would follow it? I couldn’t get it out of my mind!
There was only one thing to do. Ask somebody about it. Ricardo? A big college professor, after all. One of my best contacts.
He’d thrown a lot my way—a tip on the college building program that was worth a painless fifteen hundred, an office-equipment disposal from the United Nations, stuff like that. And any time I had any questions that needed a college education, he was on tap. All for the couple, three hundred, he got out of me in commissions.
I looked at my watch. Ricardo would be in his office now, marking papers or whatever it is he does there. I dialed his number.
“Ogo Eksar?” he repeated after me. “Sounds like a Finnish name. Or maybe Estonian. From the eastern Baltic, I’d say.”
“Forget that part,” I said. “This is all I care about.” And I told him about the twenty-for-five offer.
He laughed. “That thing again!”
“Some old hustle that the Greeks pulled on the Egyptians?”
“No. Something the Americans pulled. And not a con game. During the Depression, a New York newspaper sen
t a reporter around the city with a twenty-dollar bill which he offered to sell for exactly one dollar. There were no takers. The point being that even with people out of work and on the verge of starvation, they were so intent on not being suckers that they turned down an easy profit of nineteen-hundred percent.”
“Twenty for one? This was twenty for five.”
“Oh, well, you know, Bernie, inflation,” he said, laughing again. “And these days it’s more likely to be a television show.”
“Television? You should have seen the way the guy was dressed!”
“Just an extra, logical touch to make people refuse to take the offer seriously. University research people operate much the same way. A few years back, a group of sociologists began an investigation of the public’s reaction to sidewalk solicitors in charity drives. You know, those people who jingle little boxes on street corners: HELP THE TWO-HEADED CHILDREN, RELIEF FOR FLOOD-RAVAGED ATLANTIS? Well, they dressed up some of their students—”
The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 11