There was a guard of honor in the anteroom before his suite. Tony went through the motions of inspecting it.
Twelve-foot giants looked down at him through yellow cat’s-eyes with airs of truculence. The commander of the guard grandly asked for the countersign for Tony’s personal guard for the night. Tony thought of Ghail.
“The word,” he said, “is ‘Solitude.’ ”
Then he went to look at his bedroom.
Like the rest of his lodging it was on a scale of lavishness to be found only in three-million-dollar-budget motion pictures. His bed had apparently been carved from a tremendous limpet-shell; the walls were iridescent; the furniture was onyx and gold; his quarters in the palace in Barkut were practically sub-minimal housing by comparison—yet he could not find a thrill in it. Ghail had spoiled everything by that unfortunate comment on the ability of djinns to take any form they wished, including chests of coins and jewels. It spoiled things for him. It spoiled even the effect of the utterly lavish, super-tremendous banquet hall to which he was presently taken for refreshment.
He was very hopeful as the affair began, but he fell into gentle melancholy as the djinns gave him the works. They intended, evidently, to give him the sort of evening that would be a True Believer’s dream. And from their standpoint it was undoubtedly total entertainment without even the sky as a limit. But Tony derived only a morbid pleasure from the anguished moans of his conscience as the floor show progressed. To a citizen of the United States, accustomed to a nineteen-dollar radio for music, TV girl-shows and the Radio City Music Hall as seen from a dollar-forty seat, practically any bathing beach in summer, and an occasional burlesque show over in New Jersey, the thing was pathetic.
A normal male inhabitant of Barkut might have been ravished—in several senses—by the crystal bowl of wine which was big enough for several girls to swim in, and by the girls who did swim in it. But Tony had seen colored movies of an All-American girls’ swimming meet. An unsophisticated Arab might have been enchanted by the djinnees who wore human forms and practically nothing else and who sang lustily and danced enthusiastically for Tony’s benefit. But he had seen precision dancers both in person and on the stage. Also, these djinnees misguidedly strove for beauty after Arab notions, and in consequence were markedly steatopygian, which is to say, bell-bottomed. So that when by djinn standards the performance was at its hottest, Tony was moved to homesickness. There is an art in doing the bumps. There is a definite technique to the striptease. And the djinnees, willing workers as they were, didn’t have it.
Tony’s conscience screamed shrilly at the beginning, when he failed to rise and depart amid blushes. But as he sat, a sad and lonely and a disappointed figure, immune to the lavish immorality of the djinns, his conscience was amazed. It had been prepared for the battle of its existence, and was girded for it. But antibodies to vice had been generated in Tony’s system—so he assured his conscience—by the various forms of entertainment passed by boards of censorship in the United States. He was unaffected by the temptations of the djinns because—via technicolor—he had been tempted by professionals against whom the djinnees simply did not stand up. In fact, Tony assured his conscience regretfully, it seemed that where djinnees were concerned, he simply couldn’t take yes for an answer.
By midnight he was yawning. At half-past midnight he could keep his eyes open only with difficulty. At one he went apologetically, and alone, to bed. His conscience could hardly believe it. And when at last it ventured upon those sternly virtuous commendations which, coming from a good conscience, are supposed to be the most precious things in life, Tony yawned again.
But no conscience is approving for more than the briefest of intervals. Tony’s almost instantly afterward observed that it was outrageous for him to think of sleeping in his clothes! He hadn’t drunk enough for that! He opened boredom-bleared eyes and looked wearily around the magnificence of his sleeping apartment, and regarded the bed which was surely large enough for more than one person. He had had his lesson. He saw nothing but seemingly insensate furniture. But he knew better. Benches might totter and fall at any instant. Floor tiles might crack. And he confessed, to his conscience, what may have been the true reason for his insensibility:
“I just feel,” he said drearily, “that I haven’t any privacy.”
And then he slept.
Came the dawn. And with the dawn came Nasim. It was so early that Tony had barely opened his eyes. He was thinking those more or less gloomy thoughts with which a man customarily greets a new day, when a small whirlwind some three and a half feet high came in through the doorway of his room. Atop it, Nasim’s beaming countenance glowed with excitement. Tony turned over and realized that he had slept fully dressed, including his shoes. He sat up wearily.
“Hello, Nasim. Thanks for the camel ride. That was you, wasn’t it?”
She giggled. “I asked to do it. I said it would be a privilege. It was!” Then she said, “That slave girl doesn’t like you! It’s terrible! A slave girl not liking her master! And you don’t like her either. You said she was intelligent. I’m glad I found out! I was going to make a study of her so I could take her form and fool you some day. It would have been a good joke on you! But now I won’t.”
For some reason, Tony’s hair tended to stand up all over his head. But he yawned.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t, if I were you. It wouldn’t be amusing.” Then he asked, “How’d you get past the guards? Somebody told you the countersign?”
She giggled again. “I was a little centipede running along the floor. They didn’t see me. Anyhow, the king wants me to find out why you were bored last night. Were you”—she sighed and looked at him hopefully—“were you being true to me?”
Tony felt a sort of inward jolt. Nasim, in his mind, was associated with beetles and moth eggs and grease spots. Now centipedes, too.
“I guess that was a sort of—mm—by-product of something else, Nasim,” he said forlornly. “I just didn’t feel romantic last night. That’s all. Did the king say anything else about me?”
“He’s going to execute Es-Souk for trying to kill somebody he’s decided he wants to be friends with,” said Nasim virtuously. “And he wants you to watch. I feel sorry for poor Es-Souk! He couldn’t help being jealous of me! And also the king’s terribly anxious to find out how to make you his friend instead of a general for Barkut.”
“Do you know,” said Tony, “I’d give a lot to know why he’s so anxious!”
Nasim beamed at him; just a plump little whirlwind three and a half feet tall, spinning in the middle of Tony’s bedroom, which itself looked something like the foyer of a super-plushy hotel at thirty-five dollars a day without bath. She looked, Tony reflected dismally, rather cute for a whirlwind. A bit on the chubby side, to be sure, but anybody who cared for whirlwinds would appreciate Nasim. Such a person would be eager to have her for a pet. Still—
“I’m going to whisper in your ear,” said Nasim coyly. “And I’ll have to take human form to get close enough.”
The whirlwind enlarged a little. Tony watched in alarm as a human figure began to show pinkly through the mist which was Nasim as a whirlwind. He grew apprehensive. He called anxiously:
“Clothes, Nasim!”
His cry came almost too late, but not quite. The very last of the mist which was her whirlwind form materialized about her as a Mother Hubbard wrapper of absolute shapelessness. Then she beamed at him breathlessly.