Murray Leinster - Gateway to Elsewhere

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.

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.

They were material. Grossly material. They knew only what they saw, felt, smelled, and heard. They were limited to the senses humans had. Tony had referred to the glass phials in his pocket. Abdul plainly knew nothing about them and could not mystically determine their contents, or he would have been scared to death. They contained lasf. So it was not impossible to keep a secret from a djinn. It was not impossible to fool them. It might not be impossible to bluff them.

These were encouraging thoughts. Djinns were creatures, and therefore had limitations. They changed massive architectural features of the djinn king’s palace overnight, but they could not—it was a reasonable inference—change the form of a human artifact. Therefore it was probable that the things they could change were of the same kind of matter as themselves.

Tony’s guide opened a door. It should have given upon a passageway of snowy white. Its walls should have been of ivory, perhaps mastodon tusks, most intricately carved in not very original designs. Instead, beyond the door Tony found a corridor which was an unusually lavish aquarium. It had walls of crystal with unlikely tropical fish swimming behind them. The fish wore golden collars and were equipped with pearl-studded underwater castles to suffer ennui in.

Which was a clue. It occurred to Tony that he had not yet seen one trace of a civilization which could be termed djinnian, as opposed to human. Everything he had seen was merely an elaboration, a magnification, an over-lavish complication, of the designs and possessions of men. Humans wore clothes, so the djinn wore garments made after human patterns only more lavish and improbable. Humans had palaces, so the djinn king had a palace which out-palaced anything mere humans could contrive. But the riches of the djinn were unstable, their lavishness had no meaning, and they had no originality at all. In his home world, Tony reflected, djinns would only really fit in Hollywood.

He cheered up enormously. In his pocket he had three phials of lasf. If his opinion was correct, the palace was constructed of the same material as the dragon in the narrow pass, the two colossi before that, and the row of giants on the final lap to the palace gateway. If he uncorked one of the phials, it was probable that the walls about him would begin to sneeze and flee away in the form of whirlwinds—one whirlwind for each unit of the edifice. The djinn palace had an exact analogy in the living structures of the army ants of Central America, which cling together to form a shelter and a palace—complete with roof, walls, floors, and passageways—for the army-ant queen whenever she feels in the mood to lay some eggs. But the djinn were not sexless like the army ants. Nasim’s romantic impulses seemed proof enough of that. And besides—well—the djinnees who had danced for him last night had displayed an enthusiasm which simply wasn’t all synthetic. They had something more than a theoretic knowledge of what it was all about. What they had lacked was art.

It was with an increasing feeling of competence, then, that Tony strode off to answer Ghail’s summons. He began to anticipate his audience with the king of the djinn with less aversion. And somehow, the atomic-bomb aspect of the djinn tended to fade away. Ghail had never mentioned anything of the kind. Humans, apparently, did not know that djinn were fissionable. So it was unlikely that they could be set off by accident. But it was still hard to imagine getting romantic with an atomic bomb, even if it wasn’t fused.