“Presumably. You can’t remember pressing anything marked FIRE, can you?”
“Just my bloody luck,” grumbled the Controller. “We start World War Three, and I miss it. That’s a real bummer, that is. It would have been something to tell my grandchildr…”
He tailed off as the inherent contradiction hit him. The other inhabitants of the bunker shrugged.
“Never mind,” said the wireless operator. “We’ve got plenty more where that one came from. Now, try and remember what it was that you did, exactly.”
“More wine,” breathed the carpet heavily. “Go on, let’s finish off the bottle.”
The atomic bomb shook its warhead. Nuclear weapons aren’t accustomed to intoxicating liquor, and it was starting to see double. All it wanted right now was to go home and sleep it off.
“A brandy, then? Coffee? We could go back to my place and have a coffee.”
It occurred to the bomb that if it showed up back at the silo with its exhaust residues smelling of drink, it would have some explaining to do. It nodded, and lurched against the table for support. Suddenly it didn’t feel too well.
“Waiter,” said the carpet, “the bill, please.”
The waiter was there instantly, assuring the carpet that this one was on the house, and could it please take its friend somewhere else quickly, because…
The bomb hiccupped. Geiger counters on three continents danced a tarantella. The waiter threw himself under the table and started to pray.
Cautiously, the bomb got up and promptly fell over. Fortunately for generations of cartographers yet unborn, it fell into the carpet, which lifted gracefully into the air and flew away.
Justin chose that particular moment to wake up.
He opened his eyes. Next to him, he noticed, there was a big black cylindrical thing, like a cross between a sea-lion and a fire extinguisher. There was stencilled writing on its side: THIS WAY UP and HANDLE LIKE EGGS and DANGER! The casing was warm.
The shop! He remembered about the shop. He glanced at his watch; Uncle would be home by now, and he’d be absolutely livid. He had to get back to the shop as quickly as possible.
“Excuse me,” he said.
The carpet frowned at him; that is to say, some of the more intricate woven motifs seemed to crowd more closely together.
“Not now,” it hissed. “Can’t you see I’ve got company?”
“We’ve got to get back to the shop,” Julian said. “Now.”
“That’s all right,” the carpet replied in a loud whisper. “That’s exactly where we’re going right now. Be there in about five minutes.”
Julian breathed a sigh of relief and snuggled up closer to the warm flank of the ICBM, which had started to tick.
“That’s all right, then,” he said.
TWELVE
Never in the history of superhuman conflict have two Force Twelves ever tried to fight it out to the bitter end.
Generally speaking, they’ve got more sense. They know that it’s next best thing to impossible — nothing is definitively impossible in an infinite Universe, but there’s such a thing as so nearly completely impossible that even an insurance company would bet on it never happening — for either participant to kill the other, or even put him out of action for more than a minute or so. It’s a simple fact that, in this dimension at least, genies can’t be killed or injured, although they can of course do a hell of a lot of damage to anything else in the vicinity. Think of a bar-room brawl in a John Wayne Western, and you get the general idea.
They can, however, feel pain; and so they do their level best to avoid fighting each other in any meaningful sense. A direct hit from a mountain hurts, and is best avoided for that very reason.
The battle between Kiss and Philly Nine was, therefore, something rather special; and when word reached the back bar of Saheed’s, there was a sudden and undignified scramble for the exit. This was going to be something to see.
“GO ON, YOU BLOODY FAIRY, RIP HIS EARS OFF!” shouted a small Force Two, who had climbed a lamppost to get a better view.
“Which one are you cheering for?” asked a colleague.
The Force Two shrugged.
“Both of them,” he replied. “I mean, it’s bound to be a draw, so… COME ON, PUT THE BOOT IN! STOP FARTING AROUND AND BREAK SOMETHING!”
“But if neither of them’s going to win, what’s the point in cheering at all?”
The Force Two shrugged. “It’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” he replied. “CALL THAT A RABBIT PUNCH? MY GRANNY HITS HARDER THAN THAT.”
“As I recall,” commented the other genie, “your granny was Cyclone Mavis. Wasn’t she the one that pulled that coral island off Sumatra right up by the roots and plonked it down again fifty miles to the east?”
“So I’m being factually correct. Where’s the harm in that?”
Half an hour later, the two combatants paused for a breather.
“It’s only a small point,” panted Kiss, picking shards of splintered basalt out of his knees, “but what are we going to do about paying for the breakages?”
“Split ’em between us, I suppose,” Philly replied, lifting a small Alp off his ankle and discarding it. “That’s probably simpler than trying to keep tabs as we go along.”
“Fair enough,” Kiss replied. “Otherwise it’d be like trying to, work out the bill in a restaurant. You know, who had what, I thought it was you that ordered the extra nan bread, that sort of thing.”
“Ready for some more?”
“Yeah, go on.”
“Or do you want to phone whatsername? She’s probably wondering where you’ve got to.”
Kiss shook his head. “More important things to do,” he replied wearily. “I mean, she can’t expect me to phone her if I’m fighting for my life against overwhelmingly superior demonic forces, can she?”
Philly rubbed his nose. “I dunno,” he said. “You know her better than I do.”
Kiss thought about it. “Maybe I’d better just give her a quick call,” he said. “I mean, she may have started dinner or something.”
Philly put his head on one side and gave Kiss a thoughtful look. “That’d take priority over mortal combat with the prince of darkness, would it?”
“You haven’t had much to do with women, I can tell.”
“I suffer from that disadvantage, yes.”
“Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.”
Easier said, Kiss discovered, than done. When eventually he found a public telephone (he was in the middle of the Mojave Desert at the time) he discovered that all his loose change had shaken out of his pockets during the fight, and his phonecard was bent and wouldn’t go in the slot.
Easier, he realised, given that I’m capable of travelling at the speed of light, to nip round there in person. He gathered up his component molecules and jumped — There is a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation of how genies manage to transport themselves from one side of the earth to the other apparently instantaneously; it’s something to do with trans-dimensional shift error, and it is in fact wrong. The truth is that genies have this facility simply because Mother Nature knows better than to try and argue with beings who only partially exist and who have all the malevolent persistence and susceptibility to logical argument of the average two-year-old. Let them get on with it, she says; and if they suddenly find themselves stuck in a rift between opposing realities, then ha bloody ha. — and, before the electrical impulses that made up the thought had finished trudging along his central nervous system, he had arrived. He felt in his pocket for his key.
And stopped. And sniffed. Fee-fi-fo-fum, he muttered under his breath, I smell the blood of a Near Easterner somehow connected with fish. Or rather the socks. And the armpits. Not to mention the residual whiff of haddock which is so hard to lose, all the deodorants of Arabia notwithstanding.
Funny, he thought.
He opened the door and strolled in; to find Jane, his betrothed, apparently joined at the lips with a skinny dark-haired bloke in a salt-stained reefer jacket and grubby trainers.