Gateway to Elsewhere

“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.