“I always forget, don’t I?”
Even in human form, Nasim was chubby. Her eyes were not the elongated animal eyes of male djinns, though, and apparently she had remembered with some care not to have her ears pointed. But Nasim, naturally, could not imagine an expression which was not intellectually kaput. She came coyly and sat down on the bed close to Tony. The bed yielded surprisingly under her weight, which gave Tony something to think about.
“I’m going to whisper,” she said archly. She bent close—
Ghail, whispering in his ear on camel-back last night, had provided a very pleasant sensation; but somehow Nasim was different.
“The king wants you for a friend because of the way your nation destroys cities in war,” she whispered. “In just a bit of a second, in flames hotter than the hottest fire.” She drew back and beamed at him. “Now, isn’t that nice of me?” she demanded aloud. “Listen again!”
She bent over. Tony listened, trying to think what meaning atomic bombs could possibly have to a king of the djinn.
“When Es-Souk is executed, it will be like that,” the coy voice whispered. “They’ll explode poor Es-Souk, and he will be just a terrible explosion hotter than the hottest flame. And I told the king that you told the slave girl your country keeps djinn on reservations. So the king knows that your country must explode djinns to destroy your enemies’ cities, and he’s afraid you’ll tell the people of Barkut how to do it too.”
Tony’s flesh crawled. It was not altogether the discovery that when a djinn was executed he exploded. Any creature which could change its size from that of a grain of sand to a whirlwind… such a creature could not be ordinary matter. Not flesh and blood with sex-hormones and mineral salts to taste. It would have to be something different. A mixture of loosely knit neutrons and electrons and positrons and so on—Tony’s knowledge of nuclear physics came from the Sunday supplements—and even that was startling enough, but not horrifying. The thing that made Tony’s flesh crawl was that every djinn and djinnee must be in effect an atomic bomb. Which could be set off. They’d avoid it if possible, of course. The djinn king was scared to death of the bare idea. But no human could feel comfortable sitting on a large bed with an atomic bomb next to him. Especially, perhaps, when the bomb was wearing nothing but a Mother Hubbard wrapper and felt romantic.
Tony got up hastily. Nasim looked reproachfully at him.
“That’s not nice!” she pouted. “I tell you nice things and you jump up! Now you sit right back down here and whisper something nice to me!”
Tony shivered. He racked his brains for a suitable thing to say which would be romantic enough and yet not commit him. He bent over.
“You know other djinns are listening.” he said, dry-throated. “So, of course…” Then he swallowed and went on: “I’m going to ask the king for Es-Souk’s life. I don’t want him to die on my account. I”—he gulped audibly—“I can fight my own battles.” Against atomic bombs, too! his conscience added acidly.
Nasim looked at him in disappointment. “I suppose that’s noble of you,” she said plaintively, “but it isn’t very romantic! You aren’t nice to me! You get angry when I forget about wearing clothes, and—”
“I said only last night that you were a pearl among camels, didn’t I?” demanded Tony harassedly. “After all, you don’t want to rouse the beast in me, do you?”
She giggled, and he added desperately: “—In public?”
“Well…” she said forgivingly, “I hadn’t thought of that. I understand now. I’ll think of something. And I guess I’ll go now.”
She got up and trailed toward the door, a dumpy, rotund little figure in a wrapper that dragged lopsidedly on the floor behind her. At the door she stopped and giggled again.
“You saying something about a beast just reminded me,” she said brightly. “That slave girl you brought with you sent a message. She said that if you can spare time from your beastly amusements, the Queen of Barkut wants to talk to you.”
Tony tensed all over.
“How the hell do I ring for somebody to guide me around this place?” he demanded feverishly. “She and Ghail are waiting!”
“Anybody’ll show you,” said Nasim. “Just ask your servants.”
“I haven’t any servants,” said Tony agitatedly. “Only those guards outside.”
“Oh, yes, you’ve got servants,” Nasim insisted. “The king told them not to intrude on you but to be on hand if you wanted them. I’m sure he appointed a friend of mine to be your valet. Abdul! Abdul! Where are you?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Tony saw an infinitesimal stirring up near the ceiling. He spun to face it. A cockroach—quite a large cockroach—appeared on top of the drapes by a window. It waggled its feelers at them.
“Hello, Abdul!” said Nasim. “The great prince who is the king’s guest wants to see the Queen of Barkut in her dungeon. Will you take him there?”
A sudden, geyserlike stream of water spouted out from where the cockroach stood. Hard and powerful, like a three-inch jet from a fire hose. It arched across the room, hit the farther side and splashed loudly, ran down the wall to the floor, and there suddenly jetted upward again in a waterspout which, in turn, solidified into a swaggering short stout djinn with a purple turban.
He bowed to the ground before Tony.
“This way, lord,” he said profoundly, “to the Queen of Barkut.”
Glassy-eyed, Tony followed him out of the door.
Chapter 11
He followed the djinn Abdul out the door. Then he stared. There had been a vast anteroom before his suite. He had gone through the motions of inspecting his guard of honor in it. Now there was an enormous swimming pool in its place, with beyond it a luxuriant jungle of hot-house trees. Tony examined it with startled attention.
“It seems to me that this was a little bit different, last night,” he observed.
“Aye, lord,” said the djinn solemnly.
He led the way along the swimming pool’s rim. Tony followed. He was worried about the message from Ghail, of course. The night he had just spent had been even aggressively innocent, but somehow he felt that Ghail was not likely to believe it. Her request for him to come to the Queen was not phrased in a way to indicate great confidence in him. But there was not much that he could do about it.
“Interior decoration among the djinn,” said Tony, frowning, “is evidently not static art. Things change over-night, eh?”
“Aye, lord. And oftener,” said Abdul solemnly. “We djinn have much trouble with boredom. We are the most powerful of created things. There is nothing that we can desire that we cannot have. So we suffer from tedium. Someone grew bored with the anteroom and changed the design.”
Tony raised his eyebrows. “I have a glass phial in my pocket,” he observed. “Can you change the design of that?”
“It is a human object, lord,” said Abdul with an air of contempt.
Tony grinned. During the night—during his sleep—his conscience had reached some highly moral conclusions which he was inclined to accept. One was that djinn were different in kind from humans, but they were not for that reason akin to the angels. Tony went right along with this decision, recalling the floor show of the night before. More, they were but matter, said his conscience firmly—unstable matter, perhaps, with probably some Uranium 235 somewhere in their constitutions, and in the United States the Atomic Energy Commission would take action against them on the ground of national security. But they were not spirits.