Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction

Copper

63.546

Lucky Penny

Hubert Smucker found it in a bottle shop?one of those funny little stores

that down-and-out losers are always wandering into in fantasy stories

from the 1950s. The kind that wasn't there yesterday and won't be there

tomorrow, but right now will sell you a genuine Leonardo da Vinci oil

painting of a Renaissance prince who looks exactly like you for three

bucks or a love potion that really works in exchange for your soul. Oh,

it was a wonderful place! The shelves were overflowing with magical

parasols, globes of Narnia and Barsoom, unicorn horns, zap guns, old

telephones, parchment scrolls ?

Hubert Smucker flinched away from the shelves, fearful that they would

collapse and fall on him. He was the sort of person whom shelves

collapsed and fell upon. He was the sort of person who gets named Hubert

Smucker. He was a living jinx. He was the unluckiest man in the world.

But he'd read a lot of fantasy stories from the 1950s, so he knew what

he'd stumbled into. And when he saw, sitting right atop the counter

directly in front of the half-slumbering proprietor, a small, bright

copper coin marked "lucky penny," he knew he had to have it.

"Is that really a lucky penny?" he asked.

"Luckiest that ever was," the old man replied.

"How much?"

The old man named a price that made him turn pale. But he paid it,

scooped up the lucky penny, and feeling optimistic about the future for

the very first time in his life, walked out of the shop.

At which very instant, an asteroid smashed down directly on top of him,

vaporizing everything for six blocks around.

When the workers came to clean up the debris, one of them noticed a small

copper coin sitting right in the very center of the wreckage, shiny and

untouched.

"Hey, look at that," he said to his buddy. "This must be the luckiest

penny in the world."