The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  I spent the next couple of days in a state of shock, digging a mass grave and burying the rest of the band without ceremony. Then I packed a small bundle of provisions, and left. I was perhaps foolish to leave the one place where I was reasonably safe from reprisals, but I couldn’t stand it there any more, and the thought that I could double myself another band and start all over again positively sickened me. I left everything as it was—even abandoning the jeep. I don’t think I had any special motive. I was still pretty dazed.

  The first few miles of my hike, everything looked about the same as it always had, but once I reached the center of the village, I realized that the violence against us had not been an isolated phenomenon. Most of the houses were scarred by gunfire, several had been burned to the ground, and there were no people around at all.

  I continued through the devastated countryside, passing, to my utter astonishment, wrecked army vehicles of various kinds, and numerous corpses, both military and civilian. A good many looked as though they might have been my doubles, and were dressed roughly the same as the four who had visited us, but the majority seemed to be either regular army men or local residents. Obviously a running battle of some proportions had been fought over this terrain, and it seemed incredible that we hadn’t been aware of it. However, our house was isolated, and most of the time we were making so much noise ourselves that we wouldn’t be likely to hear anything else.

  After some days of aimless wandering, I finally encountered a small group of ragged survivors. But they took one look at me, screamed, “There’s another one,” and ran off in terror. Since the next people I met might well be armed, I decided I had better lie low for a while, and holed up in an abandoned house. In the cellar I found a pile of newspapers for the past few months, and to pass the time, began to read through them. They told me all I needed to know about the situation, and confirmed my worst fears. Inasmuch as I am probably the only person in a position to read between the lines, and explain what really happened, I am writing all this down, and plan to double it into millions of copies. It may be too late to save the country, but if not, surely an accurate understanding of the nature of the enemy ought to be more useful than the wild conjectures and speculations I find in the press.

  I won’t bother to reproduce the newspaper’s version of events, since anyone who gets to see this will undoubtedly be already familiar with it, but here, as nearly as I can work it out, is a rough account of my double’s actions to date.

  After his visit to the gun-shop, he appears to have driven to Washington—the dates check to the best of my recollection. Once there, he must have doubled himself a few times, and made his way, armed with pistols, into the visitor’s galleries of the House of Representatives and the Senate. There he did a lot of rapid doubling, and proceeded to clear out both chambers. I guess he sustained heavy casualties from the Secret Service men, but continued to double reinforcements until he was master of the Capitol. He must have been quite an army by the time he moved on the White House and took possession. To judge from the text of the manifesto he issued at this time—”The Bourgeois Government Is No More: The New Regime of Freedom and Plenty Is Now Beginning”—I would surmise that his mind had already begun to deteriorate as the result of excessive doubling.

  During the next week or so, he was occupied pacifying the city of Washington, and trying to establish an emergency distribution system. This was his most benevolent phase; I believe he was completely in good faith when he offered free food and clothing to anyone who came to his distribution centers—it wouldn’t have been any trick at all for him to produce unlimited quantities of merchandise. However, the population of the city didn’t know that, and it is hardly surprising that they suspected a trap, and left the city rather than take a chance on his generosity. This, I am sure, so infuriated him, that his already weakened mind broke down altogether.

  Those congressmen who had escaped the massacre in the Capitol, together with those who had been absent that day, set up a provisional government in Virginia, and launched the army against the usurper—they apparently thought he was an invasion from Russia. I hope they didn’t retaliate on the Russians with atomic weapons as the newspaper suggests they intended to do. This counter-revolutionary attack, as he calls it in his second manifesto, caught him in a grim mood; he doubled himself into a vast horde, which seems to call itself the People’s Volunteers for National Liberation, and fought back furiously.

  To judge by the newspaper reports on the early battles in the campaign, he must have depended entirely on force of numbers to overrun the regular army’s position, and his losses were enormous. Subsequently, having captured, and undoubtedly doubled, heavier weapons, he began to fight more conservatively, but the prodigious amount of doubling that went on during the first few weeks of fighting had presumably reduced his forces to the brutal automatons that wiped out my comrades, and seem to be advancing steadily along the Eastern Seaboard. I don’t know where they are now, the last paper in my collection being several days old.

  This is an army that puts the ancient Mongols to shame. Not only is it able to do without any service of supply; since each man can carry all his own provisions and ammunition, doubling more as needed, but the supply of troops is inexhaustible, as long as just one of them remains alive, and they fight with a blind, savage fanaticism which has lost every trace of the idealism with which he started.

  After reading some of the reports of wanton massacre, I have been strongly tempted to double myself into an army, and go out to try to destroy these monsters, but am deterred by one consideration. What is to prevent me from degenerating into their likeness, if I follow their example? Were not these fiends—and not so very long ago—myself?

  <>

  * * * *

  THE NEVER ENDING PENNY

  by Bernard Wolfe

  It is of Interest to note that the calling card of the author of the preceding story reads: “Holley Cantine—Writer ... Agitator . . . Editor . . . Publisher . . . Printer . . . Carpenter & Builder ... Brewer... Trombone & Tuba (funerals a specialty) ... rates on request.” Further investigation by your editor has revealed that Mr. Cantine also lives in a house in the woods which he built himself—for himself, his wife, and child.

  Bernard Wolfe’s approach to the Great Deception of the Carbon Copy lies clearly across the nebulous and shifting line that currently divides the possible from the distinctly improbable. His setting, treatment, and outcome all differ radically from Mr. Cantine’s. I cannot vouch for Mr. Wolfe’s experience with demons, imps, or well-dwellers in general, but his Mexican background should be authentic: his eminently readable biography of Leon Trotsky came out of the years he spent in Mexico as Trotsky’s secretary. He is also the author of the memorable s-f novel, “Limbo.”

  * * * *

  So it went, peaches all day, complaints all night. “If not too big a work, could you make the voice somewhat softer?” he said to his wife. “I pick the peaches ten large hours today and even my ears fall down from tiredness.”

  He refrained from observing that her tongue might soon fall down from its labors.

  “Pick the peaches ten years and the house will still be small like no house,” she said. “We are seven, we shall soon be eight, and we continue to live in a house with one room, not a house, a species of shed, and therefore we live like pigs and what do peaches have to do with it?”

  He studied their own well-fatted pig that was down at the corner of the property snouting some superior mud from here to there. He refrained from pointing out that this shoat of theirs lived fantastically better than they did, having as many rooms as he had muds, no peaches to pick, no woman to make loud noises in his ears.

  “We need at the minimum two rooms more,” she said. “Then our neighbors will see that we are people and not some animals in a barn or a sty.”

  He did not draw her attention to the fact that she was making noises better suited to the barn or the sty. He liked Herminia, though she had a tenden
cy to overtalk.

  He adjusted his back to a more comfortable position against the adobe wall, wiggled his dusty toes, and considered the sun, which was dropping away behind the mountain like a darkening boil.

  “I have explained before and I will explain again,” he said. ‘To build even two small rooms requires many hundreds of adobe bricks. To mix the adobe, shape the bricks, dry the bricks, then further to place the bricks, is an immense labor. I pick the peaches ten hours a day for Mr. Johannsen and this is enough immense labor.”

  These words were said with a first-grade teacher’s kind and crisis-easing voice.

  “And when you do not pick the peaches for Mr. Johannsen?”

  “Then I pick the beef tomatoes for Mr. Predieu and the iceberg lettuces for Mr. Scarpio. When I am not picking other people’s various things it is my taste to sit against the wall and pick my teeth.”

  “For that,” she said, “it is first necessary to chew on something.”

  “I agree with a whole heart. I will ask only why you bother to make this very true and intelligent observation?”

  “Because if you do not build the two needed rooms you will very soon be without the things to chew on. Do I make this plain? Your cook will be home in Durango, where human beings do not live like animals. You can write me a long letter about how you do not pick the teeth any more.”

  She went in the house with both hands made into fists, her rounded belly leading the way. Five children’s voices came up in a soprano thunder, asking mama, dear and nice mamacita, for some pieces of crisped tortilla.

  Life could be hard in this California. Troubles here had the tendency to grow like peaches and lettuces, in bunches. Though it was to be understood that even the much-accepting Herminia would not wish to bring out still another child in one cramped room. Yet adobe bricks would not grow in bunches, like peaches, lettuces and troubles.

  He got to his feet and walked down close by the pig, to the well, to get himself some water. Standing there in his envelope of constant trouble, the tin dipper at his mouth, he said more or less to the pig, “I wish I had the miraculous penny.”

  This was what people like him sometimes said when they felt their troubles forming into a sealed envelope, themselves inside.

  The pig maneuvered over on his back and flopped his happy feet in the air, perhaps trying to kick the sun.

  From the bottom of the well a voice said, “What?”

  When spoken to, Diosdado liked to give straight and full answers. So he explained:

  “I was speaking of the penny that never ends, that when it is spent is replaced in the pocket with another penny. It is the poor man’s idea of great wealth, of all the riches of the world, to have a penny in his pocket that always gives birth to another penny—”

  The voice said, “If you have to empty out your head every time you’re asked a question, write a book or hire a hall.”

  Then Diosdado realized that he was leaning into the well, talking to somebody at the bottom of his well.

  A man with a one-room house guards what is his with more spirit than a man who owns international strings of castles.

  He leaned over some more and said, “What do you think you’re doing there in my well?”

  “I do this without thinking,” the voice said, “because it’s my job and the thing I’m trained to do. These days we all specialize.” “What is that, your job?”

  “Listening. You think it’s easy when you mumble?”

  “Then you listen to this,” Diosdado said. “This is my well and I want you to get out of it and off my property.”

  “This well,” the voice said, “is as much Mr. Bixby’s as it is yours.”

  “Who owns a hole is who did the digging. You go back to this liar of a Mr. Bixby of yours and you—”

  “Man, will you use your damned head for once? For more than to keep your ears in place? You dug this hole, yes, what belongs to you is the hole. You did not make the water that comes into the hole, I stress this, the water comes down from those San Berdoo mountains, from certain forest lands owned by a certain Mr. George Carol Bixby. Now, will you stop wasting my time and answer one simple question? Did I understand you to say you would like the miraculous penny, the never ending penny?”

  “These were my words. It is only an expression—”

  “All right.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, all right”

  “All right what?”

  “All right, you can have the never ending penny. You’ve got it. Spend it in good health.”

  Diosdado turned a sympathy-seeking face to the lurching, wallowing pig. “Mister,” he said, “you get down in my well where you have no right to be, a person I have never been introduced to, and you tell me bad jokes. It is impossible to have such an article as the never ending penny. This is only an article people wish for. It is an express—”

  “I know what it is without speeches from you,” the voice said. “The self-perpetuating penny, you might say, is my business. If you don’t want it, fine, just say so. If you do, it’s yours. What coins do you have in your pocket?”

  Diosdado made another face at the pig, one pleading for the two sane parties left in the world to join against a general madness, and pulled all the coins from his pocket.

  “Four pennies, two dimes and a quarter. This is what I have in my pocket and in the world.”

  “Fine. Now, put them in your shirt pocket, all but one penny. Put this single penny back in your pants.”

  “If it gives you pleasure.”

  “Now take the penny out, then feel in the pocket again.”

  Diosdado withdrew the penny, placed it in his right hand, reached inside again with his left.

  There was another penny in his pocket.

  He pulled this one out and explored once more.

  There was a third penny.

  There was a fourth. There was a fifth.

  * * * *

  When there were fifteen or more pennies in the sweaty hand he looked for explanations to the pig, with beggar’s eyes. The pig was busy juggling the sun with his paws. Diosdado began to shiver.

  He thought he understood, partly, anyway, the excitement of this moment. Once, when a boy in Durango, while walking down a country road, he had seen a shine in the dust. His foot explored the mystery. The shining objects were bright new centavo pieces. At the sight of these unexpected riches he had felt precisely this kind of throat-tightening and eye-widening heat in a flash flood through his body. For one ballooning, scooping moment Diosdado had thought, what a glory if this place of miracles should turn out to be a well, a cornucopia, a production line of pennies. Can there be too much of a good thing?

  Maybe this, the centavo with a big fertility, has always been a general dream of seven-year-olds. Maybe this is why it finally became a saying, an expression. But even, a six-year-old , even one not very bright, knows that the nice idea is finally in the head and not in the world. Some young sense of the true nature of things tells him that the perpetual penny is a pleasant wish, not a reasonable expectation. Dreams, he somehow knows, circle around the impossible.

  Now here he was, he, Diosdado, with the dream of dreams in his pocket. He was a small boy again, kicking at the Durango road and finding the road fully co-operative, sensitive to his balloons and scoops of moods, jumping to his large orders.

  “If you have the power to give this thing,” he said shakenly into the well, “why do you give it to me, a nobody?”

  “For one thing,” the voice said, “you asked for it.”

  “It is enough only to ask?”

  “Oh, no, oh, no, we can’t go around giving these things out just for the asking. A lot of our countrymen come up north here, you know, many of them have troubles and ask for the repeating penny. We follow them and we listen to them. In my territory, for example, Southern California, I give out two or three of these pennies in a year, an average year. There’s no set quota.”

  “People arou
nd here call for the miraculous penny all the time, why am I the one to get it, sir?”

  ‘‘One, you’re a steady worker. Two, you don’t spend all your earnings in the nearby bars. Three, you’re reasonably good to your wife, though you make silent comments at her. Four, you have another child coming and could use the penny, or think you could. Don’t ask for more reasons. Let’s just say I like your curly hair.”

  Diosdado scratched his head. Absent-mindedly he pulled two more pennies from the production line in his pocket.

  “But, listen, if two or three people around here get the penny each year, how have I never heard about this?”

  “News like this doesn’t get around, fellow. The owners of these family-bearing pennies develop a very strong urge not to tell anybody about it. You’ll see.”