Tony was relieved. He had only one full phial of lasf, and he was highly doubtful that he could duplicate his trick of the fight with Es-Souk. Certainly he couldn’t handle half a dozen djinns with one improvised bomb, and if they attacked with any resolution at all…
The air grew thin as the chimaera climbed. Tony found himself panting for breath.
“Easy, Abdul!” he gasped. “No higher! This is enough!”
The chimaera leveled off. Tony’s heart pounded horribly because of the lack of oxygen at this height. He felt dizzy. He sucked in great gulps of the unsatisfying thin stuff. Then he heard Abdul saying appreciatively:
“Pardon, Majesty! I had forgotten that even you will not wish to be too close to your enemies when they explode!”
Chapter 18
Tony could not answer. The way to live at great heights is not to exert yourself and to breathe fast and deep. He busied himself with getting his breath. Presently he felt a little better. A little, not much. The horizon had broadened for hundreds of miles, it seemed. He saw the halted djinn caravan far below. It looked like a short length of string on a sand-colored blanket. But overhead, the climbing, writhing djinns—the ex-king and those who still obeyed him—were such tiny motes that, strain his eyes as he would, he lost them.
He understood. Not only was his own weapon mysterious to the djinn, so that even Abdul expected him to strike down the fugitives from afar, but there was an even more rational reason for this long climb. Es-Souk, exploding at a fifty-mile altitude, had dimmed the sun and given off a momentarily intolerable heat. If the former king believed that the human-made apparatus Tony had seen would detonate his rebellious subjects at a distance, he must expect a much more terrible cataclysm below. He would get as far away as possible, though he had still to remain in atmosphere for support.
The chimaera soared in huge, easy circles. Abdul said inquiringly:
“Majesty? They have not exploded.”
“I—can’t see them,” said Tony absurdly.
He clung to his saddle, panting. Staying up here was a bluff, while he clung to two possible hopes. Perhaps the djinn king could not make the ancient weapon work—that was Tony’s first hope. If nothing happened at all, he would go on down and explain that he had made the former king powerless, and now spared his life. The second hope was fainter. The instrument had bewildered its possessor. The king actually hadn’t known which end was which. And Tony had told him quite truthfully, as far as television was concerned, that one looked in the large end of such tubes as the conical glass object he saw. Now, gasping for breath, he hoped very fervently that his advice would be taken, and that it would be bad. He recalled very vaguely that a television tube works because it shoots a beam of electrons from the small end against the large end. If the antique instrument worked in anything like the same fashion, whatever detonated djinns would come out of the large end, too. And if the djinn king happened to be looking into that end when he turned on the instrument…
Very high and far away, it seemed that the heavens burst. One splash of awful flame flashed into being, not directly overhead but near the horizon. The fugitives had not only put themselves as high as possible—a hundred miles perhaps—but had gone other hundreds of miles to one side so that as much sheer distance as they could manage would lie between them and the inferno they expected to create.
The first flash only dwindled when there was a second, and then two more, and then three. They went off soundlessly, but like firecrackers set off by the same fuse. And very high up indeed, in the icy chill of the heights, Tony found himself unbearably hot. Six or seven djinns breaking down in atomic explosions, even at two or three hundred miles distance, make for high-temperature effects. And Tony knew, then, that the apparatus which would destroy djinns had been blown to atoms along with the atoms it had blown up. The djinn king had, after all, been looking into the muzzle of an atomic gun when he pulled its trigger to destroy his subjects.
Abdul said happily:
“You found them, Majesty! Now none will question your right to reign!”
Without orders, he began a swift, slanting descent. In the thicker air, Tony’s feelings of weakness ceased. But something else occurred to him. He reflected gloomily that nothing ever happens just right. No achievement is completely satisfying. Each one creates new worries and new troubles.
At five thousand feet, Abdul said:
“Majesty!”
“What?” asked Tony.
“You will marry the Queen of Barkut?” asked Abdul. “It seems the logical thing to do. May I begin to make plans for the wedding, Majesty?”
“Marry the Queen?” Tony shook his head. His new apprehensions hit him hard. “No! I’m not thinking of the Queen when I worry about what the gamma rays from those explosions may have done to me! Not a bit of it! I’m thinking of somebody else entirely!”
Chapter 19
The arrival of the djinn caravan created terror in Barkut. Practically the whole djinn nation—Tony learned that he had something over a hundred thousand subjects—came steaming out of the vastness which was the desert. The whirlwind scouts were sighted from the city walls. The aircraft curtain of rocs was sighted at the same time. When the caravan deployed before the city walls, fires of sulphurous material burned on the battlements, the city’s last supply of lasf had been served out, and the people of Barkut were prepared to defend themselves to the last drop of ragweed solution.
There were the same people who only one day before had fired off cannon and danced in the streets to celebrate the defeat of a single djinn in Tony’s bedroom. Now, prepared for destruction, when they learned that the djinns came not for conquest but as a guard of honor for the returned Queen of Barkut, that the Lord Toni who had gone away with only one slave girl for company had returned as King of the Djinns, there was no possible way to express their enthusiasm.
Abdul, bustling about, supervised the instant erection of a palace for Tony’s lodging. It was simple enough, of course. He had merely to sketch the outline of a modest little overnight hut of some two hundred and forty rooms with floors of alternating gold and ivory squares, windows of sapphire and emerald and ruby, and a roof of jade and silver bearing fountains that sprayed milk, wine, honey, and diamond dust. Some three hundred djinns apportioned the structure among themselves, transformed themselves into the necessary sections and decorations, and the thing was done. It was waiting for Tony when he came back from his visit to the city of Barkut.
“Majesty!” said Abdul happily. “We were worried that you might not be adequately served in Barkut. You should at least have let a few hundred of your servants go before you with golden basins filled with jewels and the like.”
“I am,” said Tony, “a person of simple tastes. I came back mainly to give orders for tight discipline in the djinn camp tonight. I don’t want anybody sneaking into the human town. No matter how innocently, no matter how inconspicuously! Nobody is to wander in as a little centipede. Nobody is to be a little beetle or a fly or a grease spot or a moth’s egg. The human city is off-limits! Understand?”