Murray Leinster - Gateway to Elsewhere

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.

“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?”