Murray Leinster - Gateway to Elsewhere

His conscience was strickenly silent. But Ghail knitted her brows and stamped her bare feet and snapped a number of Arabic words she had never taught Tony. They crackled. They sparked. They seemed to have blue fire around the edges.

“The misbegotten!” she cried furiously: “The accursed of Allah! From his own mouth came the proof that he lied! And we saw it not! He was the djinn! He has made mock of the wisdom of men! How he will laugh, and all his fellows!”

She turned upon Tony. “And you—you are as stupid as the djinn! Why did you never ask about your camels?” She paused suspiciously. “But—were they camels? Perhaps they also were djinn! Perhaps it is all a trick! You may be another djinn! This might be—”

Tony threw up his hands. “In my world,” he said helplessly, “ djinn are fables.”

“Your world?” snapped the girl. “How many worlds did Allah make? And if djinn are fables, why is the throne of Barkut empty?”

“On the coins?” asked Tony as helplessly as before.

She stamped her foot once more. “On the coins and in the palace! What sort of fool are you? You say you are human? Will you drink of the lasf plant?”

She fairly blazed scorn at him; scorn and vexation and at least the beginning of bewilderment. Tony tried to placate her.

“If lasf is not something spelled backwards with added vitamins, and if other humans drink it, I have no objection at all!”

She jumped to her feet and hurried to the barred gateway of the courtyard adjoining his cell. She spoke imperiously through the bars. Even a slave girl can be imperious to other slaves, on occasion. And there was always somebody passing that barred gateway, with full freedom to look in. Tony had chafed at the fact—and been reproached by his conscience for chafing—when Ghail first began her daily lessons in Arabic. Lately he had become resigned. But he still wished stubbornly that things were different.

She came back with a polished brass goblet containing a liquid. She tasted it carefully, as if its contents might be doubtful, and then offered it to Tony.

“This is lasf,” she said sternly. “It is poisonous to the djinns. If you drink, it will be of your own will.”

Tony drank it. From the expression on her face, it seemed to be an action of extraordinary importance. He was tempted to make a flourish, but made a face instead. It was not wholly bad. It had a faintly reminiscent flavor, as of something he had drunk before. It tasted a little like some of the herb teas his maiden aunt had dosed him with as a child. From experience he knew that the flavor would last. He would keep tasting it all day, and it ought to be good for something or other, but he could not guess what.

He handed back the goblet.

“I wouldn’t say,” he remarked, “that it would be a popular soft drink back home, but I have tasted some almost as bad.”

The girl Ghail stared at him in seeming stupefaction. Then, as he regarded her expectantly, she suddenly began to flush. The red came into her cheeks and spread to her temples, and then ran down her throat. He followed its further spread with interest. When it had reached her legs she abruptly ran to the gate and hammered on it, crying out fiercely. Soldiers with whiskers and flintlock muskets appeared instantly, as if they had been kept posted out of sight for an emergency which could only be created by Tony Gregg. They let her out, scowling at him.

He sat down and breathed deeply, staring at the stone wall of his dungeon-courtyard. She’d believed him a djinn, eh? Djinns were creatures of Arabian mythology. They were able to take any form, and sometimes were doomed to obey the commands of anybody possessing a talisman such as a magic ring or lamp. At other times they could scare the pants off of even a True Believer not so equipped. They kidnapped princesses, whom the heroes of the Arabian Nights unfailingly rescued, and they fought wars among themselves, and they were not quite the same as efreets, who were always repulsive, while djinns might take the form of very personable humans. They were also not quite so dreadful as ghuls —from which the English word “ghoul” is derived—who lived on human flesh.

There was a wooden bench against the wall, at which Tony stared abstractedly. He became aware that it was oscillating vaguely. It thumped this way, and that, and just as the oddity of its behavior really caught his attention, the bench fell over. It tumbled sidewise with a heavy “bump” to the hard-baked clay floor.

Tony looked startled. Then he got up and went over to the bench. At a moment when djinns were recently made plausible, erratic behavior of furniture suggesting ghosts was practically prosaic. He examined the overturned object. There was a minor quivering of the wood as he touched it. It felt almost alive.

He heaved it up, so completely off base mentally that he acted in a perfectly normal manner. He was actually too dazed to do anything else. The quivering of the bench stopped. He saw a bug on the hard-baked clay—a beetle, lying on its back and wriggling its legs frantically. It was pressed solidly into the clay, as if the full weight of the bench had thrust it down without crushing it. It was a trivial matter. An absurd matter. It was insane to bother about a bug on the ground.

But as he looked down at the wriggling black thing, its outlines misted. A little dustiness appeared in mid-air, down by the floor. Then Tony Gregg’s hair stood up straight on end, so abruptly that it seemed that each separate hair should have cracked like a whiplash. He backed away, goggling.

And a tiny whirlwind appeared, and rose until it was his own height or maybe a little more, and then an amiable but unintelligent female face appeared at the top of it. The face was two feet wide from ear to ear. It was a bovine, contentedly moronic face with no claim whatever to beauty. It beamed at him and said:

“Sh-h-h-h-h!”

Tony said:

“Huh?”

“There is danger for me here,” said the female face, beaming. “I have hidden here for days. I was”—it giggled—“that beetle under the bench. Before that I was a fly on the wall. My name is Nasim. Please do not tell that I am here!”

Tony gulped. He clenched his hands and stared at the swirl of dust on the courtyard floor. It tapered down practically to a point where he had seen the bug pressed in the clay, but at his own shoulder height it was almost a yard across, like an elongated, unsubstantial top which swayed back and forth above its point of support.

“You are—” Tony gulped. “A —djinn?”

“I am a djinnee ,” said the beaming face coyly. Tony gulped again.

“Oh…”

The face regarded him sentimentally. It sighed gustily.

“Do I frighten you in this shape?” it asked, even more coyly than before. “Would you like to see me in human form?”

Tony made an inarticulate noise. The face atop the whirlwind giggled. The mist thickened. Substance seemed to flow upward into it from the ground. A human form appeared in increasing substantiality in the mist. The round face shrank and appeared in more normal size and proportion on the materializing human figure. Tony’s mouth dropped open. He abruptly ceased to disbelieve in the existence of djinns. He was prepared to concede also the existence of efreets, ghuls, leprechauns, ha’nts, Big Chief Bowlegs, the spirit control, and practically anything anybody cared to mention. Because from the small whirlwind a convincingly human female form had condensed.

The pink-skinned, rather pudgy, quite unclothed figure cast a look of arch coyness upon Tony.