Djinn Rummy

FOUR

Jane looked up.

“Where,” she asked, “have you been?”

“Saving the world,” Kiss replied, materialising just in time to take the weight of the picture Jane was trying to hang straight. “Bit more left, I think.”

Jane stood back, nodded and made the adjustment. “What from?”

“Annihilation by overgrown carnivorous plants, if you must know. Has it occurred to you that this one would look much better over there by the alcove?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Over there,” Kiss repeated, pointing. “And then you could have the one of the three fluffy kittens playing with the ball of wool over there, where nobody would be able to see it, and that’d be verging on the ideal—”

“No,” Jane replied, frowning, “before that.”

“Overgrown carnivorous plants?”

“Mphm. You are just kidding, aren’t you? Only I never seem to know…”

Kiss looked offended. “I am not kidding,” he replied grumpily. “I was just looking out of the window when I saw a disturbing fluctuation in the infra-red, which turned out on closer examination to be an old mate of mine heading into orbit with a small cloth bag stuffed up his shirt…”

“You must have remarkably good eyesight.”

“I have, yes. Anyway, when I caught up with him it turned out the bag was full of nightmare carnivorous plant seeds, and he was just working out where to sow them. Fortunately, the silly sod hadn’t realised that if you try and drop something through the Earth’s atmosphere, it burns up, so as it turns out I needn’t have bothered. All right?”

Jane stared. “Are you serious?” she demanded.

“No,” Kiss said, pointedly not looking at the picture of the three kittens. “Most of the time I’m aggravatingly frivolous. If you mean am I telling the truth, the answer is yes.”

“A friend of yours was trying to destroy the planet?”

“Well, sort of.” Kiss yawned, and stretched. “Actually, he’s just this bloke I’ve known for, oh, donkey’s years; and he wasn’t planning on destroying the Earth, just all non-vegetable life forms. Or at least I assume that was what he had in mind. My split-second spectroscopic analysis of the plant seeds leads me to believe that that would have been the inevitable result. Bloody great primroses,” he added with a grin. “With teeth.”

“Hadn’t you better tell me what’s going on?”

Kiss shook his head. “Tricky,” he said. “You remember what I told you about being limited to the possible? However; to start with the primary question, Is there a God? we really have to address the…”

Jane asked him to be more specific.

“Guesswork, largely,” Kiss replied, materialising an apple and peeling it with his claws. “My guess is that somebody hired my old chum to destroy the human race. Somebody a bit funny in the head, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“This chum of yours—”

“A genie,” Kiss explained. “A Force Twelve, like me. That’s pretty hot stuff, actually, though normally I wouldn’t dream of saying so. We rank equal and above the Nine Dragon Kings, just below the Great Sage, Equal of Heaven. We get fuel allowance but no pension.”

“And this particular…”

“He goes by the name,” Kiss said, straight-faced by sheer effort of will, “of Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation the Ninth, or Philly Nine for short. Remarkable chiefly for how little time he’s had to spend in bottles. He’s a shrewd cookie, Philly Nine, always was. Mad as a hatter, too, of course.”

“I see.” Jane sat down on a desperately fragile Tang-dynasty vase, the molecular structure of which Kiss was able to beef up just in the nick of time. “So he’s dangerous.”

“You might say that,” Kiss responded, spitting out apple pips, “if you were prone to ludicrous understatements. If midwinter at the South Pole is a bit nippy and the Third Reich was, on balance, not a terribly good idea, then yes, Philly Nine is dangerous. Apart from that, a more charming fellow you couldn’t hope to meet. Plays the harpsichord.”

Jane blinked twice in rapid succession. “Oh God,” she said.

“Ah yes,” Kiss replied, “I was just coming on to that. If we posit the existence of an omnipotent supreme being—”

“Will you shut up!” Jane looked around for something solid and reassuring in which she could put her trust. Unfortunately, everything she could see had the disadvantage, as far as she was concerned, of having been materialised or otherwise supplied by a genie. Eventually she found her left shoe, which she had brought with her from the life she’d been leading before all this started to happen. She hugged it to her.

“Sorry, I’m sure. Do you want me to make a start on the conservatory?”

“All this,” Jane mumbled “It is real, isn’t it? I mean…”

Kiss clicked his tongue. “Try banging your head on it if you’re in any doubt. I have to say, I find all this ever so slightly wounding. I mean, I do my level best to make things nice for you, and the first thing I know you’re questioning its very existence. Gift horses’ teeth, in other words.”

“I thought I told you to be quiet.”

“You asked me a question.”

“Did I? Sorry.” Jane closed her eyes and tried to clarify her mind. “Will you help me with this?” she asked.

“Depends,” Kiss replied huffily, “on whether I’m allowed to talk.”

“Oh, stop being aggravating.” Jane took a deep breath. “There I was,” she said, “an ordinary person—”

Kiss cleared his throat. “Jane Wellesley,” he recited. “Age, twenty-eight. Height, five feet one inch. Weight—”

“Thank you, yes. Following a distressing scene with someone I had thought really cared about me—”

“Vince. Vincent Martin Pockle. Age, thirty-one. Height, six feet two inches. Eyes a sort of—”

“Either help,” Jane snapped, “or go and empty the dustbins. Following a distressing scene, I resolved — stupidly, I admit — to kill myself. When I opened the aspirin bottle, out jumped a genie.”

“At your service.”

“Or so it seemed. At any rate, at the time I accepted you at face value, and I’ve been doing so ever since.”

“So I should damned well—”

“Ever since,” Jane went on, “I’ve been ordering you to do seemingly impossible things, and you’ve apparently been doing them. The things you bring appear to be real.”

“You and I are going to fall out in a minute if you carry on with all this seems-to-be stuff,” Kiss growled. “The last person to call me a liar to my face, namely the erstwhile Grand Vizier of Trebizond, spends most of his time these days sitting on a lily-pad going rivet-rivet-rivet and wondering why people don’t bring him things to sign any more. I invite you to think on.”

“And now you tell me,” Jane continued, “that another genie — was he one of the ones we met at that peculiar night club?”

“No.”

“Another genie is planning to destroy the human race, using overgrown carnivorous plants. And it’s not,” Jane added, after glancing at her watch, “April the first. Now then, what the hell am I meant to make of all that?”

Kiss shrugged. “The best you can,” he replied. “It’s called coping. Like I said, some people find it helps to posit the existence of an omnipotent supreme being. I know for a fact He does. Other people,” Kiss added, materialising a decanter and a soda siphon, “get drunk a lot. It all comes down to individual preferences in the long run.”

“Look—”

“As a matter of fact, He’s all right, and so’s the second one, Junior. It’s the Holy Ghost you’ve got to watch out for. Forever walking through walls with its head under its arm, which for someone in its position is taking light-hearted frivolity a bit too far, in my opinion. Still, there it is…”

“Kiss…”

“Not to mention,” the genie continued, “jumping out during séances and banging things on tables. And, of course, trying to exorcise it is an absolute hiding to nothing. Sorry, you were saying?”

“What is going on?”

The genie shrugged. “Can’t rightly say,” he replied. “By the looks of it, some raving nutcase or other’s decided to annihilate his own species. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you get used to it. You get used to pretty well everything eventually.”

“I see.” Jane started to pick at the stitching on her shoe. “Happen a lot, does it?”

“Once every forty years, on average. Usually, though, — it’s just a war. When We get involved, it tends to get a bit heavy. Still, like I told you the other day, for every genie commissioned to destroy the world there’s another told off to save it, so things even out in the long run. Last time I looked, the planet was still here.”

Jane opened her eyes. “I think I’m beginning to see,” she said. “Sort of. Just when this other genie — Pennsylvania something?”

“Philadelphia Machine and Tool. Actually there is a genie called Pennsylvania Farmers’ Bank III — Penny Three — but he’s no bother to anyone.”

“This Philadelphia person,” Jane continued coldly, “is going to wipe out the human race, you suddenly pop up and stop him doing it. That’s why all this is happening. And I’m…”

She stopped. She felt cold. In her anxiety, she broke the heel off her shoe.

“Look.” Kiss frowned, summoning up soft, heavenly music in the far distance. “Nice try, but it doesn’t quite work like that. Things aren’t all neatly ordained and settled the way you seem to think — unless, of course, you posit the existence of a…”

“But it makes sense,” Jane protested. “Someone wants the world destroyed. I want it saved.”

Kiss clapped his hands. “Ah,” he said, “now we seem to be getting somewhere. That sounded remarkably like a Wish to me.”

“Did it?”

Kiss nodded. “I reckon so. You Wish the world to be saved. I take it,” he added, “that you do?”

“I suppose so.”

“Give me strength!” Kiss took a deep breath. “Either you do or you don’t, it’s not exactly a grey area. Toss a coin if you think it’ll help you decide.”

Jane shook her head. “Of course I want the world saved,” she said. “Or at least, I suppose I do. The last thing I can remember before all this was wishing it would all go away.”

“That’s just typical sloppy mortal thinking,” Kiss replied crossly. “This is what comes of giving your lot free will without making you send in the ten coupons from the special offer box-lids first. You mortals,” Kiss went on, with a slight nuance of self-righteousness in his voice, “think that just because you come to an end, the world comes to an end too. Well, I’m an immortal and I’m here to tell you it doesn’t. If you ask me, they should print Please Leave The World As You Would Wish To Find It in big letters on the inside of wombs and coffins, and then there’d be no excuse for all this messing about. I’m sorry,” he said, calming down, “but there are some things I feel strongly about. Well, stronglyish, anyway.”

“Sorry,” Jane said meekly. “I’m not really used to all this yet.”

“That’s all right,” the genie replied, turning the music up a very little. “Look, take it from me, you want the world saved.”

“Right.”

“Save the world,” Kiss continued, “and you get merit in Heaven.”

“If we posit its existence, of course.”

Kiss sighed. “Everyone’s a comedian,” he grumbled. “Look—”

“Save ten worlds and you get a free alarm clock radio—”

“That,” snapped the genie, “will do. It’s quite simple, as far as I’m concerned. The human race is the measure of everything that’s prosaic and mundane. If there weren’t any humans, there’d be no point being a genie, because there wouldn’t be anyone to be bigger and stronger and cleverer than. So, as a favour to me, I suggest you Wish the human race saved. OK?”

Jane squinted into the middle distance, trying to see what the world would look like if she wasn’t there. She couldn’t.

“Put like that,” she said, “how can I refuse? But hang on,” she added. “I thought you said all the nasty plant seeds had got burned up. Doesn’t that mean—”

Kiss grinned unpleasantly. “It means,” he said, “that my old mate Philly Nine has failed. If he’d succeeded, the human race would have been annihilated. Since he’s failed, with all the loss of face that entails…” The genie laughed without humour. “That means,” he went on, “he’s honour bound to get even. Which means,” he concluded, materialising a paint roller and a five-gallon tin of pink emulsion, “you lot really are in trouble. Are you absolutely dead set on having pink, by the way? It’ll make the whole room look as if it’s been whitewashed with taramasalata.”

Jane considered for a moment and then nodded. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Definitely pink.”

According to the ancient proverb, the worst words a general can ever utter are, “I never expected that.”

In consequence, the military pride themselves on having anticipated every possible contingency. There are huge underground bunkers beneath the floor of the Arizona Desert staffed by teams of dedicated men and women whose sole purpose in life is to dream up the Weirdest Possible scenario, and make plans to meet it.

Some of these scenarii are very weird indeed.

Witness, to name but a few, the elite Special Boot Squadron (the task-force poised to counter an attempt by a hostile power to subvert democracy by gluing the soles of everybody’s shoes to the floor while they sleep); the Royal Cleanjackets (the crack special force permanently on yellow alert for the day when alien commandos infiltrate all the major dry-cleaning chains across the Free World); not to mention Operation Dessert Storm (the fast response unit designed to deal out instantaneous retribution in the event of low-level bombing of non-military targets with custard).

The heavy burden of co-ordinating these various forces lay, at the time in question, on the broad shoulders of Major-General Vivian Kowalski: officer commanding, Camp Nemo. When the day arrived that was to be remembered ever after as the Pearl Harbor of weirdness, Kowalski had just returned from a tour of inspection of the Heliotrope Berets (the hair-trigger-trained haute couture force whose centre of operations is a tastefully decorated concrete bunker directly under the Givenchy salon, Paris). As a result he was feeling rather jaded.

It was good, he decided, to be back.

Returning to his spartan quarters, he removed the HB uniform he had worn for the tour (sage cotton jacquard battledress by Saint Laurent, worn over Dior raspberry silk chemise with matching culottes), lay down on his bunk and covered his face with his hands. It had been a long, hard day.

The telephone rang. The red telephone.

In an instant Kowalski was on his feet, dragging on his discarded uniform and gunbelt. Twenty minutes later, his helicopter landed on the White House lawn.

“Hi there, Kowalski,” the President greeted him, yelling to make himself heard over the roar of the chopper engines. “Excuse my asking, but why are you wearing a dress?”

In clipped, concise military language Kowalski explained, and they went inside. In the relative peace of the Oval Office, the President explained. He didn’t mince his words.

When he’d finished, Kowalski read back his notes and chewed his lip.

“Gee, Mr President,” he said. “We never expected anything like that. Who do you think’s responsible?”

The President shrugged. “No idea,” he replied. “Does it matter? The important thing is, what do we do? I assume you guys have something up your sleeves out there in the desert that’ll zap these mothers into the middle of…”

He tailed off. Kowalski was shaking his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “I guess we overlooked that possibility. You gotta admit,” he went on, countering the implied criticism in the Chiefs eyes, “giant self-propelled carnivorous wildflowers terrorising Florida has got to be one of the longest shots of all. Besides,” he went on, “since you saw fit to trim the budget…”

“OK.” The President made a small gesture with his hands, guillotining the recriminations stage of the conference. “So tell me, Viv. What have we got?”

Kowalski scowled and scratched his head. “Assuming,” he said, “that saturation bombing with all known weedkillers — you’ve tried that, yes, of course.” He grinned. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to let us work on that one for a while,” he said.

“But you do have a solution?”

“No,” Kowalski admitted, “but I know somebody who might.”

The main reason why the world is still here is that genies have little or no initiative.

Command them to do something and they obey. It’s not unknown for them sometimes to interpret their instructions with a degree of latitude — for example, if their instructions can be interpreted, however loosely, as a mandate to destroy the human race, and they happen to be psychotic Force Twelves with a personal grudge against mankind in general. Under such circumstances, they spring into action with all the vigour and energy of a supercharged volcano.

But without some tiny speck of mortal authority around which to build their pearls of malevolence, even the nastiest genies can do nothing. And, fortunately enough, mortals unhinged enough to give them that authority, are few and far between.

In the most secret bunker of all, half a mile under the bleakest spot in all New Mexico, there is a door.

A big, thick steel door with a combination lock. For the unimaginative there is also a notice, in huge red letters, saying “DO NOT ENTER”.

Open the door and you find a flight of steps, going down. Just when exhaustion and the disorienting effect of the darkness and the smell of must and stagnant water is about to get too much for you, the steps end and there is another door. It, too, is big, thick and made of steel. There is a notice, in big red letters, saying “AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY”.

Open that door and you find yourself in a small room, the size of the average hotel fitted wardrobe. The room is empty, apart from a chunky steel safe.

Inside the safe is a bottle.

WHOOSH!

Kowalski reared back, banged his head on the door and sat down hard. Suddenly the room was full of genie.

“Hello,” said Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX, grinning unpleasantly. “Your wish is my command. What’s it to be?”

Slowly, his eyes not leaving the apparition that surrounded him, Kowalski levered himself up off the floor with all the agility of a dropped fried egg climbing back into a frying pan. “Hi,” he replied. “Are you the genie?”

Philly Nine gave him a look.

“Yeah,” Kowalski said, “I guess you must be. I’m—”

“I know who you are,” Philly Nine replied. “What can I do for you? To hear,” he added, with a chuckle that belonged to some private joke Kowalski didn’t even want even to understand, “is to obey. Shoot.”

The soldier explained; and as he did so the genie nodded sympathetically. The expression in his fiery red eyes didn’t for one instant betray the savage triumph pumping through his heart.

Had it ever occurred to Kowalski to wonder, he asked himself, why a genie should have volunteered to be indentured to a bottle? Why, when all other genies in the history of Creation would do anything — anything at all — to avoid it, Philly Nine (a Force Twelve, no less) had deliberately and at his own request allowed himself to be bound to serve whoever removed the lid of this nasty, smelly glass container? Did the words ulterior motive have no place at all in this man’s vocabulary?

“I see,” he said, when Kowalski had finished speaking. “Nasty business. I take it,” he went on, choosing his words with the skill of a lawyer on a fraud charge, “you want me to do something about it?”

Kowalski nodded. “Positive,” he said.

“And may I take it,” the genie purred, “that I have a certain degree of discretion in how I go about this? So long as I get the job done, of course?”

“Naturally,” the soldier said. “This thing has sure got us licked. Anything you can do—”

“Oh, I can think of a few ideas,” the genie said. Being a Force Twelve, one of the seven most powerful non-divine beings ever to pass through the Earth’s atmosphere, he was just about able to keep a straight face. “A few tricks up my sleeve, that sort of thing. When would you like me to start?”

“Immediately,” Kowalski replied. “If that’s OK with you.”

A wide, slow smile crept like the first spill of lava from the cracks of Vesuvius across Philly Nine’s large, handsome face. “No problem,” he said. “You just leave everything to me, and we’ll see what can be done.”

Kowalski permitted himself a sigh of relief. Just for a moment back there, he’d been worried. “That’s fine,” he said, “If there’s anything you need…”

Philly hesitated. A few atomic bombs might, he felt, come in handy, particularly when it came to apportioning the blame afterwards. On the other hand, he had just been given carte blanche by a mortal — not just any mortal, he added with infinite smugness, but a duly accredited representative of the government of the United States of America — and asking for a fistful of nukes might just lead to awkward questions being asked and tiresome restrictions placed on his mandate. After his carelessness in wiping out the mortals who had given him his original opportunity, which he had then squandered (to his infinite shame), he had managed against all probability to get a chance at getting his own back. Best not to risk blowing it just for a handful of fireworks.

“Thanks for the offer,” he said therefore, “but I should be able to manage. Have a nice day, now.”

He vanished.

Tinkerbell, Grand Khan of the Hammerhead Pansies, lifted its flower and roared.

The echoes died away. Then, from every corner of the Everglades, came answering roars, howls, shrieks and trumpetings. To the east it could make out the long, shrill howl of the primroses, under the command of Feldkommandant Trixie. From the north came the dull thunder of the forget-me-nots, and the laboured snorting of their High Admiral, Zog.

Where the bloody hell, Zog was asking, are we?

Tinkerbell twiddled its stamens in contempt. The forget-me-nots were, after all, an inferior species; and as soon as the job in hand was over, there was a place reserved for them somewhere near the bottom of the compost-heap of Creation. In the meantime, they might still conceivably be useful, if only as green mulch.

High overhead the F-ills continued their futile buzzing like so many demented mayflies; and, for those of them ill-advised enough to fly too low, with approximately the same life expectancy.

With a high wave of its right leaf, Tinkerbell motioned its column to proceed, and the mud churned around their thrashing roots. In the far distance, a reverberating splat! indicated that Zog had just tripped over its own tendrils.

Of all the seeds in Philly Nine’s bag, only thirty-one primroses, twenty-six forget-me-nots and nineteen pansies had made it through the hole in the atmosphere safely to the ground; and at first Tinkerbell had wondered whether the forces at its disposal were going to be sufficient. As time passed, however, and each individual flower had started to grow and put forth flowers, it realised that its fears were unfounded. The three varieties had been designed to take root in the dry, barren dust of the cities. The rich, wet mud of the swamps was a thousand times more nutritious, and the plants had grown accordingly. Mud, however, is all very well, but for high-intensity carnivores it lacks a certain something. They were feeling, to put it mildly, decidedly peckish.

It was, therefore, fortuitous that the United States Third Armored Division should have chosen that moment to attack.

Ah! Seventy-six telepathic vegetable intelligences simultaneously registered a giant surge of relief. Lunch!

The army’s battle plan was simple. Lay down an artillery barrage guaranteed to extinguish every trace of life in a thirty-square-mile area. Then another one. Then one more for luck. Then send in the tanks.

For the next ten hours it was noisy in that part of Florida, and visibility was poor because of the smoke. When the noise had subsided into a deadly silence, and the breeze had cleared away most of the smoke and fumes, there was nothing to be seen except desolation — and seventy-six enormous flowers towering over a nightmare scrapyard of twisted metal.

Better? asked the primroses.

A bit, replied the forget-me-nots, spreading well-fed roots among the debris that had once been a complete armoured division and burping. But you know how it is. You quickly get tired of all this tinned food.

With a sonic boom that shattered windows and played merry hell with television reception all over the state, Philly Nine flew over Miami, heading for the pall of smoke.

Swooping low, he turned a jaunty victory roll over the straggling column of refugees that clogged the interstate highway in both directions for as far as the eye could see. A ragged cheer broke out at ground level. The poor fools! If only they knew.

The wildflowers weren’t hard to find; they were, by now, the tallest things in Florida. Spread out in a loose column, they were lurching at an alarming speed along the deserted tarmac of a ten-lane expressway. Huge lumps of asphalt came away each time their roots moved. Behind them the earth was a glistening muddy brown.

Philly Nine skirted round them in a wide circle, easily evading the outstretched tendrils of the forget-me-nots. As he flew, he hugged himself with joy. This was going to be fun!

He was, however, still in two minds. His original plan had been an unquenchable wave of fire that would shrivel up the flowers and then sweep irresistibly onwards, north-east, until the entire continent was reduced to ash. On mature reflection, however, he couldn’t help feeling that that was a waste of the opportunity of an eternal lifetime. America is, after all, only one continent, surrounded on all sides by oceans. As he studied the column of marauding flora weaving its grim course, he couldn’t help reflecting that this lot would probably be more than capable of having the same net effect if left to their own devices. What he wanted was something a bit more universal in its application; something that wouldn’t grind to a jarring halt as soon as it hit the beaches Philly Nine stopped dead in mid-air and slapped his forehead melodramatically with the heel of his hand. Of course! He’d been looking at this entirely the wrong way round.

He accelerated, heading due north. In a quarter of an hour he was over Alaska; at which point he slowed down, rubbed his hands together to get the circulation going and looked around for something to work with.

At the North Pole he alighted, materialised a roll of extra-strong mints, popped the whole tube into his mouth and chewed hard. Then he took a deep breath, and exhaled.

The ice began to melt.

A word, at this stage, about Insurance.

There are your big insurance companies: the ones who own pretty well everything, who take your money and then make you run round in small, frantic circles whenever you want to claim for burst pipes or a small dent in your offside front wing. Small fry.

There is Lloyds of London: the truly professional outfit who will insure pretty well any risk you choose to name so long as you’re prepared to spend three times the value of whatever it is you’re insuring on premiums. As is well known, Lloyd’s is merely a syndicate of rich individuals who underwrite the risks with their own massive private fortunes. Slightly larger fry, but still pretty microscopic.

What about the real risks; the ones that have to be insured (because the consequences of something going wrong would be so drastic), but which are so colossal that no individual or corporation could possibly provide anything like the resources needed to underwrite them?

(Such risks as the sun failing to rise, summer being cancelled at short notice, gravity going on the blink again, the earth falling off its axis; or, indeed, severe melting of the ice-caps, leading to global flooding?)

To cover these risks there exists a syndicate of individuals who possess not mere wealth, but wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice? Sounds familiar? Suffice it to say that the registered office of this syndicate is a small, verdigrised copper lamp, presently located at the bottom of a locked trunk in an attic somewhere in the suburbs of Aleppo.

For the record, nobody has yet been able to work out exactly what Avarice dreams about, on the rare occasions when it sleeps. It all depends, the experts say, on how late it stayed up the night before, how comfortable the mattress is, and whether it ate a substantial amount of cheese immediately before going to bed.

One of the many advantages that genies have over mere mortals is that they need no sleep. This is one of the few things that makes it possible for a genie to wait on a human being hand, foot and finger without something inside its head snapping. Eventually the mortal will go to sleep, giving the genie eight or so clear hours in which to recuperate and catch up on its social life.

Kiss had got into the habit of spending these few precious hours each day down at the gym, working out. When genies work out, by the way, they don’t bother with weights, rowing machines and permanently stationary bicycles. What they exercise is their true potential.

When his bleeper went, therefore, Kiss was in the middle of a simulated battle with thirty thousand blood-crazed snow-dragons. To make it interesting, and spin the exercise out for more than six minutes, he had both arms and one leg tied behind his back, and he was blindfolded and chained to the wall. This made it difficult for him to reach the telephone.

“Yes,” he snapped into the receiver, deflecting a ravening hologram with his toes as he did so. “What is it now?”

“I think you should get back here as quick as you can,” said Jane’s voice at the end of the line. “Something rather serious has cropped up.”

“Really?” Kiss tried to keep the weary scorn out of his voice, but not very hard. “Let me guess. Your eyebrow pencil’s broken and you want me to sharpen it. There’s a very small spider in the bath. You can’t find the top of the ketchup bottle…”

“The ice-caps have melted and nine-tenths of the Earth’s surface is under water. Can you spare a few minutes, or shall I try to find an emergency plumber?”

“I’m on — get off me, you stupid bird — no, not you. I’m on my way.”

Grunting something under his breath about one damn thing after another, he shook himself free of his adamantine chains, swatted the remaining six thousand dragons with the back of his hand and pulled on his trousers over his leotards.

“Don’t switch anything off,” he called out to the attendant. “This won’t take a minute.”

I don’t know, he muttered as he raced across the night sky.

Never a moment’s peace, he complained, as he grabbed a mop and a bucket out of the empty air.

It’s not much to ask, an hour or so at the end of the day just to unwind a bit and relax, he said to himself, as he stopped off at the South Pole to fill the bucket with ice. But no, apparently not. A genie’s work is never done.

He sighed, shrugged his shoulders and pulled out a handful of small hairs from the back of his neck.

Kiss, save the world. Kiss, thwart the diabolical plans of that crazed megalomaniac wizard over there. Kiss, empty the ashtrays and do the washing-up. I dunno. Women!

He rolled the hairs between his palms, spat on them and threw them up into the air. For a moment they hung between the earth and the stars; then they fell and, as they did so, changed into so many full-sized replicas of himself, each with a mop and a bucket of ice. Each replica pulled out a handful of its own hair and repeated the process.

“Ready?” asked the original Kiss. The replicas nodded.

“What did your last servant die of?” they chorused. “That’s enough out of you lot. Get to it!”

In the Oval Office, Kowalski and the President faced each other over the big desk.

“To begin with, Viv,” said the President, “I was worried. For a moment there, I was beginning to think you’d maybe overreacted.”

Kowalski squirmed slightly, but not enough for the President to notice. “You did say—” he began.

“Sure.” The President smiled. “I should have had more faith in you and your guys. But next time—”

“I surely hope there won’t be a next time,” Kowalski said, with conviction.

“Me too,” agreed the President. “Still, it won’t have done the polls any harm. Nothing the voters like more, when the chips are down, than a little display of All-American true grit. And the way your guys handled the evacuations was first class.”

Kowalski nodded. What the President didn’t know, and with luck would never find out, was that the really big emergencies were the easy ones. For a really big emergency, like evacuating America, all he had to do was phone the insurance people and let them handle it. Which they had done.

“And the, uh, mopping-up operations afterwards,” the President continued. “I guess I take my hat off to you there, Viv.”

Kowalski’s eyes narrowed. “You aren’t wearing a hat, Mr President.”

“I was speaking figuratively, Viv.”

“Ah.” Kowalski left the semi-smug expression on his face, but inside he was still confused. The insurance people hadn’t said anything about mopping up the floods. Leave it, they’d said, it’ll go down of its own accord in a year or two. If it’s still bad in eighteen months, send out a dove.

So who had done the business with the mops and the dry ice? He wished he knew.

Of course! How could he have been so stupid? The genie, of course, Philly whatever-his-name-was. Who else could it have been?

“No problem,” he said. “We’ve got guys on the payroll for every contingency, Mr President, like I keep saying.”

“That’s good to know, Viv.” The President smiled. “Just like magic, huh?”

“There you go again,” replied Kowalski uncomfortably. “You and your figurative speaking.”

Philly Nine sat on the peak of Everest and counted up to ten.

Don’t get mad, he told himself, get even.

You bastards are going to pay for this.

As for the details — well, they’d look after themselves. They always did. Sooner or later some other idiot of a human being would give him an opening, and he’d be back. What was forty years or so to an immortal?

Provided, of course, that no interfering little toe rag of a Force Twelve saw fit to stick his oar in, saving the planet with a twitch of his little finger before zooming away into the sunset. Some people, he reflected bitterly, don’t know the meaning of the word solidarity.

Yes, indeed. He broke off the summit of the mountain, brushed it clear of flags and ate it. Kiss would have to go, or he might as well stay in bed.

But how? Force Twelves can’t just be brushed lightly aside. Or even heavily aside, or aside with overwhelming force. It would be like trying to knock down a pterodactyl with a fly-swatter.

There are, however, ways and means. And of all the ways of killing a cat, Philly Nine reflected, drowning it in cream sure takes some beating.

There is a child.

His father was a brutal, sadistic bully; his mother a nymphomaniac married to a man (not the child’s father) many years older than herself, and crippled into the bargain.

Left to his own devices for most of his formative years, the child developed serious personality disorders at a very early age. By the time he turned thirteen, he was effectively past hope of cure.

Partly it was heredity, partly it was environment; partly, it was the child’s own basically vicious and perverted nature, which nobody ever took the slightest trouble to correct.

By the time he turned thirteen, the boy had developed a morbid fixation with shooting people. Because of his unusually privileged position, he’s able to indulge this ghastly obsession with total impunity.

Look at him. Fourteen years old, dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear, with a Stallonesque headband and pimples. He’s lying on his bed reading Soldier of Fortune magazine, and beside him on the duvet lies a state-of-the-art Macmillan sniper’s rifle, with a Bausch & Lomb 21X scope and integral flash suppressor. When he gets bored with doing nothing, he’ll go out into the street and start using it.

There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Nothing at all.

Despite the fact that this murderous infant ruins the lives of countless innocent people every day of the week, the authorities are powerless to act. They simply accept the situation and look the other way.

Because the child is a Force Thirteen genie — the only one — and his name is Cupid.