Murray Leinster - Gateway to Elsewhere

But even then he looked back.

The roc was motionless, as if paralyzed by some awful shock. But the paralysis lasted only for seconds. Suddenly the already huge form expanded still more. It struggled convulsively. It sneezed. In its struggling it had not stayed on an even keel. The sneeze had all the propulsive effect of a high-temperature jet. It kicked the suddenly shapeless object violently higher. It writhed. It struggled again, very horribly. It ceased to be a bird, it was impossible to say what it was! Another convulsion even more violent than the first. The almost amoeboid object shot higher—it had pseudopods now, which appeared at random and flailed aimlessly but with terrific force. A second convulsive sneeze ejected so huge a volume of air with such violence that the djinn was shot up a good five thousand feet.

Es-Souk was maddened, now, with the knowledge of his doom. He went into lunatic gyrations which turned into flight straight upward. But he flew now not by wings or any motion of any members, but by the lightning-swift protrusion of a threadlike pseudopod far ahead and the equally lightning-like flowing of all his substance up to and into it, and the instant repetition of the process.

Even huge as he now was, he rose so swiftly as to dwindle as Tony watched. At ten miles altitude there was a convulsive sidewise jerking of the climbing thing. Another sneeze. He continued to shoot frantically skyward. Twenty miles up… he was probably a quarter-mile across, but he became a speck which could barely be distinguished.

Then he blew up. He must have been fifty miles high, at least. He was in the upper troposphere. And he must have weighed several hundred pounds. Perhaps not all his substance disintegrated. Even human atomic bombs do not detonate with one hundred percent conversion of their mass into free energy. Es-Souk’s efficiency as a bomb was probably less than that of purified U235 or plutonium. But the flare was colossal. There was a sensation of momentary, terrific heat. No sound, of course. The explosion took place where the air was too thin to carry sound. For the same reason there was no concussion wave. But the flash of Es-Souk’s detonation was several times brighter than the sun and a dozen times the sun’s diameter.

Minutes later, Abdul came rather heavily to a landing on the desert. Tony dismounted. Abdul seemed to dissolve suddenly and run together, without any intermediate state, to restore the djinn to his short, swart, human form, with the turban atop his head. He was trembling.

“Lord!” he said in a shaking voice. “I did not know how terrible was your weapon! I did not know that you were so much more powerful than the most powerful of djinns. Indeed, lord, I apologize for regretting that I offered my allegiance. I did not speak too soon, lord! I did not speak soon enough! And by the beard of the Prophet, I swear that you are my king and my ruler for always!”

Tony swallowed. That flare in the midday sky had been unnerving.

“All right, Abdul,” he said. “We’ll let it go at that. You’ve been worried about protection. As far as I can, I’ll give it to you—”

“Protection, lord?” said Abdul, beaming. “It is I who will be begged for protection now! My friends who have seen Es-Souk destroyed will come to me begging me to intercede that you do not destroy them also! You will let me boast before them, lord? After all, I was the chimaera on which you rode when you destroyed Es-Souk in such a manner that no others of the djinn were harmed! I did help you, to the best of my poor ability!”

“Naturally—” began Tony. Then Nasim’s voice came to him.

“You carried him, Abdul,” said Nasim proudly, “which is what a djinn should do for his king. But I played the part of a proper djinnee, too! I held his coat!”

Tony turned to her. He accepted the belted-in-the-back camel’s-hair coat. Then he said politely:

“That was very nice of you, Nasim. I appreciate it a lot. But won’t you please put on some clothes?”

The palace of the djinn king wasn’t what it had been. Not only the djinn officially off-duty, as it were, had attended Tony’s duel with Es-Souk; guardsmen also had quietly transformed themselves from twelve-foot military figures into gazelles, whirlwinds, lions, and other swiftly moving creatures to attend the sporting event. The court, generally, had poured out to see the ruckus. And in addition, various djinn serving as towers, pinnacles, rooms, articles of furniture and virtu, rugs, hangings, plumbing fixtures and structural elements had taken time off from supporting the state and majesty of the king.

Some of them went back to their assigned positions in the structure after it was all over, but some did not. In consequence, from the official lodging of the Queen of Barkut, the all-encircling palace looked ragged. Here an art gallery was exposed to the blazing sunshine. There the more intimate arrangements of the djinn monarch’s seraglio were in plain view. And the dusty, thinly grassed meadow within the palace looked like a country fairground on opening day. Some thousands of djinn milled about, in all the diverse shapes and forms their personal preferences dictated. Some talked. Some argued. A few—even at such a moment—made such romantic overtures to other members of the race of opposite gender as might have been expected. But on the whole, the several-thousand-odd djinn gathered beyond the Queen’s vegetable gardens were there to see Tony.

He made his report to the Queen, drinking coffee in her cottage. Ghail moved about, ostensibly assisting the Queen in serving him, but actually listening avidly and looking at him from time to time with widely varying expressions.

“The devil of it is,” said Tony querulously, “that instead of making me unpopular, killing Es-Souk seems to have made me something of a hero!”

The Queen nodded.

“They’re like children,” she said sagely. “Just like children—or apes. Much like horses, too. Djinns are great fun! They make lovely pets when you understand them!”

Tony’s expression lacked something of full sympathy.

“Somehow,” he admitted, “just personally, you understand, I can’t imagine wanting to pet a quarter-ton of fissionable material, whether it was in the form of a chimaera or a cute little moth’s egg hiding in a crack until the time was ripe for conversation.”

“I still don’t see,” said the Queen, brightly, “just how you set him off—this Es-Souk, that is. Is it a secret of the royal family of your nation?”

Tony shrugged helplessly.

“I didn’t intend to set him off,” he admitted. “I did think I might pin his ears back, and with him, the king’s, but I didn’t anticipate an atomic explosion. But it does make sense, after a fashion. After all, when anything’s put into an atomic pile it becomes radioactive, and a radioactive substance isn’t immune to ordinary chemical effects. It works just like ordinary matter except for its radioactivity. So it’s reasonable enough that perfectly normal, perfectly stable compounds like lasf would act chemically on djinns. The results, though—”

“Chemically?” queried the Queen. Ghail stood still, looking strangely at Tony.

“Of course,” said Tony. “I had you draw me a picture of the lasf -leaf. Remember? And I recognized it. We have that plant in my country. We call it hogweed, or ragweed. It’s a pest to some humans.”

The Queen listened. Tony drank more coffee.

“Ragweed,” he said. “Sneezing. You anoint your weapons with it. The djinns run away. Sometimes they sneeze. And I’d drunk some of the stuff the other day and that night Es-Souk tried to strangle me, and I coughed. And he sneezed. That’s ragweed, all right! The pollen is worst of all. It hits some human people too. You see?”