It took Mr Swindall twenty-seven minutes to describe the procedure.
“It’s as simple as that,” he concluded. “And if you run into any problems along the way, just give me a shout and I’ll put you back on the right lines. Now, where were we? Oh, yes. For a mere thirty per cent commission, I can put you on to some very nice unit trusts which ought…”
“The forms, please.”
“You don’t want to hear about the breathtaking new equities portfolio we’re putting together for a select few specially favoured clients?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Mr Swindall frowned. “Oh well, sod you, then. The receptionist will give you the final bill on your way out.”
Organising a plague of locusts, even if you’re a Force Twelve genie, is several light years away from a doddle, as anyone who’s ever organised anything will readily appreciate.
First, catch your locusts. Actually producing nine hundred million locusts wasn’t a problem. Let there be locusts! And there were locusts.
A plague of locusts. The phrase trips easily off the tongue. But consider this. The average locust needs a certain amount of food each day, or it dies. Nine hundred million locusts, gathered together in one spot awaiting distribution in plague form, need nine hundred million times that amount. Neglect to provide nine hundred million packed lunches, and before very long you’ll have a plague of nine hundred million dead locusts; untidy, but no real long-term threat to humanity.
Another point to bear in mind is that locusts are in practice nothing more than the sports model of the basic production grasshopper; and grasshoppers hop. Up to six feet, when the mood takes them. Trying to keep nine hundred million of the little tinkers together long enough to organise properly structured devastation parties is, in consequence, not a job for the faint-hearted. Furthermore, they chirp. They stridulate. The sound they produce is extremely similar in pitch, frequency and tone to the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. Nine hundred million locusts stridulating simultaneously takes noise pollution into a whole new dimension.
Half an hour into the plague, Philly Nine was beginning to wish he’d gone with the flow and specified a plague of frogs instead.
The final straw was the huge flock of ibises which suddenly appeared, hovering in the air just out of genie stone-throwing range and darting in whenever Philly’s back was turned to gorge themselves on the biggest free lunch in ibis history. The few who overdid it to such an extent that they were unable to get off the ground again met with appropriate retribution; but there were plenty more where they came from.
Three hours into the plague, with nothing achieved except a massive feed bill, a net loss from starvation, desertion and enemy action of about seventeen million locusts and a lot of very happy ibises, Philly Nine sat down, put his head in his hands and began to whimper.
The locusts, who had finished off the latest consignment of rice (sacks included) and were beginning to feel peckish again, ate his shoes.
“Excuse me.”
Philly Nine looked up. Hovering above his head was a helicopter, out of whose window hung a man with a clipboard and a megaphone.
“Excuse me,” the man yelled above the roar of the engine and the chirping of the locusts, “but are these insects yours?”
Philly nodded. By now they’d finished off his socks and were working their way up his trousers.
“Then I’m very sorry,” the man went on, “but I’m going to have to ask you to move them. They’re causing an environmental hazard, you see, and we can’t have that. There’s regulations about this sort of thing.”
Philly Nine laughed bitterly. “Move them,” he said. “Right. Where would you suggest I move them to?”
“Not my problem,” the man replied. “But while we’re on the subject, I take it you do have a permit for livestock transportation?”
“What?”
“A permit,” the man said. “Transportation of livestock without a permit is a very serious offence.”
“No, I haven’t,” Philly growled. “What precisely are you going to do about it?”
The man shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but if you haven’t got a permit, then I can’t allow you to move these insects. They aren’t going anywhere until I see a Form 95, properly endorsed by the Department of Transport…”
“But you told me yourself to get them shifted.”
“Agreed,” the man said, nodding. “But not without a permit.”
“All right,” Philly snarled, just managing to stay calm. “So what do you suggest I do?”
“Not my problem. You could try getting a permit.”
“How do I do that?”
The man sighed. “You can’t,” he said. “Sorry. In order to apply for a permit, you have to give twenty-eight days’ notice in writing to the Inspector of Livestock Transportation, and like I just said, you haven’t got twenty-eight days because you’ve got to remove them immediately on environmental grounds. Bit of a grey area in the regulations, I’m afraid. Oh, and by the way—”
“Yes?”
The man pointed with his clipboard towards the ibises, which had settled down en bloc in the middle of the swarm and were munching a broad swathe through it with impressive speed. “You’re not allowed to do that, I’m afraid.”
“Do what?”
“Do or permit to be done anything which tends to prejudice the well-being of an endangered or protected species. If any of those ibises dies from over-feeding, I’m afraid it’ll be your head on the block.”
“I see.”
“So I suggest you move them on. Although,” the man continued, “disturbing the habitat of an endangered or protected species is also forbidden, and the expression habitat does include any well-established feeding-ground—”
Philly slowly got to his feet. “All right,” he said, “it’s a fair cop. Looks like you’re going to have to impound my locusts.” He grinned. “No hard feelings,” he added. “I know you guys have a job to do. OK, they’re all yours.”
The man in the helicopter shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “but we can’t do that. Regulations state that we can’t accept surrender of property from members of the public without an authorisation from the Secretary of State, and to get an authorisation we’d need to give twenty-eight days’ notice…”
“Fine.” Philly’s mental computer fixed on the helicopter, estimating its airspeed and mass, and calculating the necessary trajectory a good gob and spit would need to follow in order to hit the man square in the eye. “So what are you going to do?”
The man frowned. “I hate to have to do this,” he said, “but if you won’t co-operate, you leave us no choice. All right, Wayne, over to you.”
Wayne? Who’s Wayne? Philly Nine looked sharply round, just in time to see a tall figure in overalls standing over him with an empty milk-bottle in his hand. He tried to dodge, but he slipped on a wedge of squashed locusts, lost his footing and staggered backwards into the bottle. A cork appeared, blotting out the light from what had suddenly become a very small, cramped universe.
“Twenty-eight days,” said a small voice, very far away. “For contempt. When you get out, we’ll also be filing a civil suit for public nuisance and forty-six breaches of the planning regulations. Sorry.”
Nine hours later, the locusts ceased to be a problem. Starvation, ibises and a freak virus which spread like wildfire had accounted for them all; all except the one which had hopped into the milk bottle just before the cork was inserted. Twenty-eight days turned out to be a very long time.
Genies can do, and have done, pretty well everything; but one field of endeavour in which they have little experience, for obvious reasons, is organising stag nights.
Call to mind the old adage about not being able to organise a highly convivial party in a brewery. Focus on that thought.