Gateway to Elsewhere

Chapter 13

He went back into the house. His knees felt queer. He fumbled in his pockets. He brought out the lighter, and then brought out one of the small glass phials Ghail had given him in the camel cabin on the way across the desert—one of those containing lasf.

Ghail looked pale, too.

“What are you going to do?” she demanded. Her voice trembled.

“Attend to Es-Souk, I hope,” said Tony, with quite unnatural calm. To the Queen he said: “Your Majesty, if you have any pet djinns around at the moment, you’d better chase them out. I’m opening up a phial of lasf.”

“But—”

“I’ve got an idea.” said Tony. “It doesn’t make sense, but nothing makes much sense any more. I’m going to take advantage of what I think is a generally occurring allergic reaction among djinns.” The words “allergic reaction” had no Arabic equivalent, so he had to use the English ones, and to Ghail and the Queen of Barkut they sounded remarkably learned and mysterious. “And just to make sure, I’d appreciate it enormously if you’d draw me a picture of the leaf of the lasf plant.”

He unscrewed the seal of the cigarette-lighter tank. It was bone-dry of fluid, of course. It hadn’t been filled since Suakim. And while confined in his later cell it had been extremely annoying to have to get a light for an occasional cigarette, rolled from local tobacco, from a brazier kept burning by the guards outside his gate. Now the lighter was a godsend. If he was right about lasf, a cigarette lighter was the ideal weapon in which to use it.

He extracted the stopper of the small glass phial. With not especially steady fingers he poured the liquid into the tank. It soaked up and soaked up. Its odor was noticeable. Presently the wick was moist. He re-sealed the tank and snapped down the lighter’s cover. He re-stoppered the phial and put it away.

“Now I’d like to wash my hands,” he said unhappily, “and—is that the picture of the lasf leaf?”

The Queen had stooped and traced an outline on the clay floor of her dwelling. She said:

“I’m quite sure. Yes.”

Tony stared at it and sighed in enormous relief. Ghail brought a bowl of water. He washed his hands with meticulous care. He dried them on a cloth she handed him.

“If you keep pet djinns around,” he observed, “better burn that cloth. Right away. And I’d empty the water on soft earth and throw more earth on top of it. No use revealing that you’ve got lasf around, until you need it. The faintest whiff would give it away to them.”

Ghail said again:

“But wh-what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to hunt Es-Souk,” said Tony. “I think the djinn king is putting something over on me. I had a fight with Es-Souk in my bedroom in Barkut. He ran away. There’s been talk of atomic bombs and the king thinks I can make them. But he wants to make sure. I’m under safe-conduct, of course, but if a condemned criminal—Es-Souk—breaks loose and kills me, the king can’t be blamed. He’ll apologize all over the place, of course. He’ll probably offer to pay reparations and indemnity, and salute the Barkutian flag, and all that. But I’ll be dead. And the war will go on merrily. You see?”

“But that’s—dishonorable!” protested Ghail.

“Nothing’s dishonorable,” said Tony, gloomily, “unless you can prove it. And you’d never prove that! Just helping hunt for Es-Souk is no good. I’ve got to meet him in single combat, somehow, and whip him again so the king will know I do it without mirrors or outside help. If I do that, maybe we’ll get somewhere.”

He turned to go out the door. Ghail caught at his sleeve.

“P-please!” she said shakily. Her eyes were brimming. Tony saw the Queen regarding them critically. He was embarrassed.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Last—last night—”

Tony sighed deeply.

“Listen,” he said. “If you want to sign a pledge that the lips that touch djinnees, shall never touch yours, you go right ahead! It won’t interfere with my plans in the least. Is that satisfactory?”

“I—don’t understand,” said Ghail faintly.

Tony regarded her in weary gloom.

“Oh, all right!” He spread out his hands, holding the cigarette lighter in one of them. “Maybe you don’t. But I’ll bet Esir and Esim would!”

He went out the door to find Abdul waiting for him expectantly. Behind the door he heard Ghail sob. He marched heavily off toward the palace door, a quarter of a mile away. Abdul followed interestedly. Tony’s conscience spoke to him acidly, mentioning his discourtesy to Ghail and the fact that he hadn’t even said good-by to the Queen of Barkut. He snarled at it, out loud. In consequence he did not hear Ghail say, between weeping and fury:

“The—b-beast! Oh-h-h-h, the beast!”

Nor did he hear the Queen say approvingly:

“I’m sure you’re going to be very happy with him, my dear! You’ll never quite know what he’s going to do next!”

This was, however, one of the few times when Tony himself did know what he was going to do. He was angry. He grew angrier. The whole affair was simply too pat. It was too perfectly coincidental. It was exactly the sort of thing that the heads of nations in his own world—the heads of some nations, at any rate—had pulled off too many times. Tony had not yet met the djinn king, but he felt that he was being manipulated with the sort of smug clumsiness characteristic of power politicians. The djinn king in all his official acts was ineffably virtuous and chivalrous. He’d invited Tony to visit him under safe-conduct, he’d provided him with a guard, with entertainment, he’d paid him extravagant honors—and he was arranging for him to be assassinated by someone whom he could afterward execute with every expression of horror for his crime.

“He’s a damned—he’s a damned totalitarian,” Tony growled.

He stamped into the palace, too angry to be scared any longer. There is a certain indignation of the naive and the imaginative which practical men and politicians never understand. The innocent common citizen who believes in hair tonics and television commercials and the capitalist system, believes most firmly of all that justice and decency are going to triumph. He will endure with infinite patience as long as that belief is not challenged. But let him see injustice fortifying itself for a permanent reign; let him see deceit become frankly self-confident; then he explodes! More tyrants and dictators have been overthrown for trying to make their regimes permanent than for all their crimes. In all that had gone before, Tony had been less active than acted-upon. But now he was furious.

He found the fifteen-foot captain of his personal guard of honor. He said harshly to that cat-eyed giant:

“Captain! You will take a message immediately to your king! Say to him that as his guest, I request a favor of the highest importance! I wish a proclamation to be made everywhere within the palace saying that I, your king’s guest, have been insulted by one Es-Souk, who after attempting to assassinate me while I slept, fled in terror when I grappled with him. The proclamation is to say that I had intended to ask the king to pardon him so that he could accept my challenge, and that now I have demanded of the king that I still be allowed to do battle with Es-Souk unless he is afraid to fight me. The king, therefore, grants safe-conduct to Es-Souk to an appointed place of single combat, and that the king commands his presence there because of the disgrace to all the djinn folk if one of them is too much of a coward to fight a single man. And you will tell the king that if Es-Souk is afraid to fight me—as I believe—then I demand that some other djinn take his place unless all djinns are afraid of me!”

The guard-captain towered over Tony, more than twice his height. For the honorable post of official guardian of the king’s guest’s safety, he had chosen a form neatly combining impressiveness and ferocity. He looked remarkably like an oversized black leopard walking on his hind legs and wearing a green-and-gold velvet uniform. Now his cat-eyes glared down into Tony’s. But Tony, staring up, stared him down.

“Incidentally,” snarled Tony, “you can tell the king that I’m quite aware that I’m being insulting, and that nobody will blame him if I get killed in single combat of this sort!”

“Lord,” purred the djinn captain of the guard, “I shall give the king your message.”

He saluted and walked with feline grace toward the nearest doorway. There, however, he was momentarily stalled, because some other djinn assigned to being a part of the palace had grown bored with the design of his part of the structure, and had changed the door sizes. The captain of the guard had to stoop and crawl through a doorway to go on his errand.

Tony paced up and down, growing angrier by the second. He had never fancied himself as a fighting man, and he did not fancy himself as one now. He simply felt the consuming fury of a man who feels that somebody is trying to make a sucker out of him. He fairly steamed with fury.

His valet, Abdul, watched him with wide eyes. He saw Tony muttering to himself, white with the anger which filled him. He said unhappily:

“Lord—”

Tony whirled on him.

“What is it?” he demanded savagely.

“You are very angry,” said Abdul. “And—lord, created beings do not grow angry when they are afraid. You are not afraid.”

“Is that all?” demanded Tony.

Abdul squirmed as if embarrassed. As if embarrassed, too, his whole body rippled in the beginning of a transformation into something else. He repressed it and returned to the appearance of a short, stout, swaggering djinn with a turban. But he was not swaggering now.

“It appears, lord,” he said apologetically, “that you know you can destroy Es-Souk, or whatever other champion appears to do battle with you.”

Tony glared at him. He thought he could, but he was not sure. His line of reasoning was tenuous, but he believed it enough, certainly, to risk his life on it. Yet he could not have managed that belief, at all, without his hot anger at the clumsily smart trick the djinn king had so obviously contrived. It was not fair. It was too smart. And it was complacent. The complacency may have been the most enraging part of the whole thing.

“I am quite willing,” said Tony, strangling with fury, “to take on the whole damned djinn nation, beginning now, and including your fellow-djinns who happen to be the floors and walls of this room!”

Abdul said tentatively:

“Lord, we djinn are the most powerful of created beings. Therefore we can only have as our ruler the most powerful of created beings. Any less—any whom we could destroy—it would be beneath our dignity to obey.”

Tony turned his back. He paced up and down. There was a pause. Then:

“I take a great risk,” said Abdul plaintively. “Lord, will you permit me to obey you?”

“No!” snapped Tony. “Go to the devil! Get out!”

Abdul sighed. Mournfully, but elegantly, he turned into a large mass of black, inky liquid which sank in funeral fashion to the floor and flowed toward the doorway. But it did not open the door—it went out through the crack underneath. Tony was alone.

He looked at the cigarette lighter in his hand. He touched his three separate pockets where phials of lasf—one almost empty, now—reposed. He reflected with savage satisfaction that it was not likely that he could be killed without some mangling, and that at least one of the bottles of lasf was practically sure to be smashed. And Tony’s information on lasf was confined to about three sentences from Ghail, and one experience. And the picture of the leaf the Queen had drawn. That was all he knew. But he could extend his knowledge of a common phenomenon in the United States and guess that the Barkutian use of lasf was woefully inefficient. With a cigarette lighter he could do better.

The door opened again. The commander of the guard of honor was back. He saluted profoundly.

“Lord,” he purred. “The king has made the proclamation you requested. He has appointed a place for the combat. He has given Es-Souk safe-conduct, and Es-Souk has appeared from hiding in the form of a rug on the audience-chamber floor and prepares himself for battle.”

“Very well,” snapped Tony, “I’ll go there at once. If he isn’t afraid, he’ll follow immediately.”

The djinn captain saluted again, with enormous formality, and withdrew for the second time.

Something stirred on the floor. A cockroach waggled its feelers imploringly, turned into an explosively expanding mistiness, and condensed again as Abdul.

“Lord!” said the stout djinn imploringly. “Hear me but a moment! The walls of this palace hear and report to the king! I asked to obey you. The king will know. If you do not accept me and protect me, I am lost!”

Tony shrugged.

“Unless,” he said skeptically, “this is more of your king’s conniving!”

“I swear by the beard of the Prophet!” panted Abdul. “Truly, lord, I can be most useful! Protect me, lord, and you will have the fleetest horse, the swiftest hound… I will carry you to the place of combat! I will bring you the fairest women! I will steal chickens—”

“Hm…” said Tony. “I suspect I did talk too fast. Where is this place of combat, anyhow?”

“I know, lord! I will take you there—”

“Then,” said Tony, “let’s get started.”

“This way, lord!” panted Abdul. “I beg you, lord, protect me until we are free of the palace—and after. Indeed I spoke too soon. Here—the window, lord…”

He raised the window. With an imploring gesture for Tony to follow, he jumped out. Tony walked to the window and looked out. There was no sign whatever of Abdul—but a wide stairway led to the ground from the windowsill. Tony swung up and tested it with his foot. It held. He went down. Instantly he touched the earth, the stairway collapsed into a cloud of dust which coalesced and was Abdul again. He wrung his hands.

“I should have waited,” he said miserably. “Indeed, the king will call me a traitor. But if you are truly the most powerful—I am your steed, lord!”

He was. There was a rippling, a shifting, a bewildering alteration of plane surfaces and colors, and he was a highly suitable horse, fully saddled and caparisoned. The horse came trotting to Tony’s side and waited for him to mount. He put his foot on the stirrup and heaved his leg over.

“Okay so far,” he said grimly. “Full speed ahead.”

The horse—Abdul—broke into a headlong run which was convincingly like real panic. It headed away from the palace at a pace even the djinn camels of the trip across the desert could not have bettered.

And, as a matter of fact, the appearance of things was enough to justify some apprehension. Word of the approaching duel to the death had evidently spread. Out of the gateway of the palace the djinns poured. They wore every one of the eccentric shapes Tony had noted in the line of courtiers welcoming him the night before. There were still some wearing the shapes of human women—those who had danced for him the night before. And as they poured out of the palace, the djinns whose shapes were adapted for speed retained them, while others dissolved into forms capable of more miles per hour. The whole assemblage looked like a glorified zoo in flight toward one distant spot. Even the palace began to come apart and join the rush. Item after item of its structure vanished from its place, swelled into a tall and somehow ghostlike whirlwind, and swept away in eager competition for good seats at the spectacle.

When the horse stopped, Tony swung out of the saddle, and the short, fat djinn of the turban reappeared. He was utterly doleful.

“Lord,” he said bitterly, “my life is in your hands! If you do not win this battle, the king will surely execute me in Es-Souk’s stead! I beg you to conquer in this battle!”

Tony wetted his finger to gauge the direction of the wind. He made sure of his handkerchief. He stooped and picked up a pair of medium-sized stones and slipped them in his pocket. Then he waited.

He was in a huge, natural amphitheatre some four miles long by two wide. Its floor was practically desert sand. All about, on the mountainsides, were perched the djinn. The foremost rows were dots, but successive rearward rows were larger to get better views, until at the very back tall whirlwinds spun eagerly, reaching ever higher for full vision of what was to come.

The last arrivals settled into place. The entire djinn nation watched. Abdul despairingly shivered, and turned himself into a small stone, indistinguishable from any other. Tony waited in the center of the vast open space. And waited.

And waited.