He tapped Cassandra lightly on the arm. “Ready for action? We’re changing plans. Hasan’s discovered Megan’s missing. We can’t risk the possibility that he’ll stop the auction. When the Old Man hangs up the receiver, Hugo, that’s your signal. The plan starts right then.”
Cassandra grinned and reached for her knives. The Amazon never looked happier. She loved impossible odds.
“The dog can’t talk, you idiots!” Hasan screamed into the phone. His white features were bloodred. If the Old Man of the Mountain wasn’t immortal, he would have died centuries ago from high blood pressure. Even his eyes were tinged with crimson. “Awaken the incompetents in the guard room. Set their feet on fire if necessary. Call me when you have some explanations!”
Hasan slammed down the receiver. Instantly, Jack’s left shoulder went numb. Hugo had launched himself at the vial. Everyone’s gaze was fixed on the Old Man of the Mountain as he stormed back to his throne. Thus, only Jack saw the raven materialize as if out of nowhere directly on top of the plague vial. But the bird didn’t remain unnoticed long.
“Hey, stupid,” cawed Hugo, flapping his black wings in the Afreet’s face. “I’ve got your dumb vial. And you can’t catch me.”
“Stop it!” shrieked Hasan. “Save the virus.”
No one saw the race. Both supernatural entities moved at speeds faster than the eye could follow. In a larger room, they would have broken the sound barrier.
In the space of a heartbeat, Hugo rocketed across the room to Jack’s mysterious bottle. The Afreet, a red blur, was less than a microsecond behind. But that barely measurable tick of the clock was all the time the raven required. It dropped the vial into the mouth of the light blue container and then vanished through the chamber wall. With an odd popping noise, the tiny vessel tumbled into the heart of the twisted glass figure.
The genie didn’t hesitate. It never disobeyed direct commands. The raven wasn’t important. The virus was what mattered. Air whooshed as the neon red figure shrank into a swirling red cloud. With the same popping noise, the Afreet followed the vial into the bottle.
Immediately, the entire container glowed bright crimson. It rattled violently for a few seconds then stopped. Fritz Grondark built bottles to last for an eternity. It became even more difficult to look at without getting a headache. The genie did not reappear. Nor did the vial.
“That’s that,” said Jack, cheerfully, after trying fruitlessly to stare into the mouth of the container. He knew better but couldn’t resist the temptation of attempting the impossible. “Scratch one Afreet and one plague virus. They’re prisoners of the fourth dimension.”
“Explain yourself, mortal,” demanded Hasan al-Sabbah angrily. The Old Man of the Mountain glared at Jack from the safety of his obsidian throne. Behind him stood the Crouching One, and behind them both were Loki and his front giants. Boris Bronsky sat balanced on the edge of the small table where Karsnov’s manuscript, momentarily forgotten, resided. “What nonsense are you babbling?”
Jack smiled at Cassandra. The Amazon smiled in return. She was the reason the others maintained their distance from Jack and the blue bottle. The Amazon gripped a knife in her right hand and a handful of throwing stars in her left. Stuck point first in the floor at her feet were her other knife and a half dozen poison darts.
Cassandra was ready, willing, and anxious for a melee. None of the immortals she faced appeared anxious to challenge her.
“It’s a Klein bottle,” declared Jack, dipping his head as a signal to Boris Bronsky. The Russian nodded in response. “Supposedly, it can’t exist in our physical universe. But, then, neither can immortal demigods, genies, and sphinxes. So I asked a few friends with magical powers to see if they could construct one. And they did.”
Faced with a puzzle they did not understand, the supernaturals acted exactly as Jack expected. Like legendary rogues and villains throughout history, they stopped reacting to the situation and instead started asking questions. They couldn’t do anything else. It was part of their basic nature.
“What is a Klein bottle?” asked Hasan al-Sabbah. “And why, since it is not capped by the seal of Solomon the Wise, hasn’t my Afreet emerged from inside it?”
“A Klein bottle is the three-dimensional equivalent of a Mobius strip,” explained Jack, slipping into his graduate student lecturer mode. “It’s a bottle with only one surface—the inside and outside form one continuous plane. It doesn’t require a cap because the contents are within and without at the same time.”
“Impossible,” declared the Old Man of the Mountain. “That makes no sense. Everything has two sides.”
“Really?” replied Jack, “What about a Mobius strip? Surely, you’ve seen one. Take an ordinary strip of paper. Give it a half twist then connect the ends to form a closed ring. It becomes a surface with only one side. If you take a paintbrush to it, you can paint both sides on the strip without ever lifting the bristles from the paper. Though it appears to have two sides, it verifiably has only one. An ant crawling along the strip will never come to the end.”
Al-Sabbah grimaced in mental pain. Jack recognized the expression. He had seen it for years on the faces of countless students. The Old Man of the Mountain had gone into math shock. “What about this magic bottle?” he demanded. “How can a container have no inside?”
“Raise the concept of a Mobius strip one dimension,” said Jack. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Boris Bronsky casually lean over and pick up Karsnov’s manuscript. No one noticed. Their attention was fixed on Jack, the blue bottle, and his explanation.
“Take a thick glass tube, open at both ends,” said Jack, repeating the instructions he gave Fritz Grondark. “Stretch one end into the neck. The other open end is the base. Twist the neck in a semicircle and pass it through the fourth dimension, thus making no hole, into the side of the tube. Connect the open mouth to the open base and you have a Klein bottle. As it utilizes a curve transversing the fourth dimension and we live in a three-dimensional world, it’s impossible to visualize. Which is why staring at the bottle gives you a headache. Our minds can’t cope with curves outside the universe.”
“You speak gibberish,” said the Old Man of the Mountain. “I hate mathematics. I’ve always hated mathematics. This must be a trick. Genie, return to me. Now. I command it.”
Other than the bottle glowing brighter red, nothing happened. Jack shook his head. “Sorry. He can’t do a thing. There’s no exit from a Klein bottle.”
“But there’s no seal,” said Hasan angrily.
“This bottle doesn’t need a plug,” said Jack. “When the genie chased the vial into the Klein bottle, he pushed himself into a four-dimensional curve. The Afreet is inside and outside the container at the same time. The entrance and exit form a continuous loop. Departing and returning are synonymous. He finds himself coming and going at the identical instant. When he leaves, he enters and vice versa. Like the ant on a Möbius strip, the genie can never find an exit. The bottle is a topological nightmare. And he’s trapped by it.”
“Destroy the bottle,” whispered the Crouching One. “Shatter it to a thousand pieces. That will free your servant.”
Jack shook his head, grinning. Behind his spellbound audience, Boris Bronsky had retreated to the elevator. The Russian held a Zippo lighter in one hand and was carefully incinerating Karsnov’s manuscript a few pages at a time.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” said Jack. “If you slice a Möbius strip along the center, it forms one long two-sided loop. But if you cut it a third of the distance from the edge, the scissor makes two complete trips around the strip in one continuous trip. The results are two strips intertwined—a two-sided hoop and a new Möbius strip.