Djinn Rummy

SIX

Would you like,” Jane asked, “a cup of tea?”

Kiss nodded, unable to speak. Genies, of course, can’t stomach tea. The tannin does something drastic to the inexplicable tangle of chemical reactions that makes up their digestion. He grinned awkwardly.

“I brought you some feathers,” he mumbled, and thrust the bundle at her. She simpered.

“Gosh,” she said. “Aren’t they pretty? Let me put them in some water.”

She grabbed the feathers and fled into the kitchen, leaving Kiss to speculate as to what in hell’s name was going on.

Heatstroke? He hadn’t been anywhere hot. Malaria? Genies don’t get malaria. A recent sharp bang on the head? No. Then what…?

Eliminate the impossible — “Impossible!” he said aloud. — and whatever remains, however improbable — “No way,” he muttered. “Biological impossibility.” — must be the truth.

“Shit!” he said.

And yet. Weirder things have been known. It’s a fact that human beings (and genies count as human for this purpose) can get attached to almost anything, with the possible exception of Death and lawyers. And there was something indescribably charming about the way the corners of her mouth puckered up when she smiled.

“Oh, for crying out loud!” the genie exclaimed. And then the truth hit him. He peered down at his chest and saw, on the left side, a small round hole in his shirt. A few minutes later and it wouldn’t have been there; the holes Cupid makes in cloth heal themselves in about a quarter of an hour, on average.

The bastard, Kiss said to himself. The absolute bastard.

But what could he do about it? Well, he could try changing himself into a woman — a piece of cake for a Force Twelve — but he had the feeling that that wouldn’t make things better in the slightest degree; in fact, it would complicate matters horrendously. The same was true of turning into a cat, an ant or a three-legged stool.

He could get hold of that bloody aggravating child and twist his head off. That would make him feel better, for a while; but he knew perfectly well that even Cupid was incapable of undoing the damage. All he could realistically hope for was that with the passage of time the wound would heal of its own accord. But how long? With mortals, he knew, the process usually took somewhere between three and sixty years, and he didn’t have that much time. Marriage, of course, was a recognised form of accelerating the process, but even so—

And why? The question flared in his mind like an explosion in a fuel dump. What possible reason could Cupid have for a stunt like this?

He could think of a reason. Cold sweat began to seep through his pores.

The door opened and Jane sidled through, holding a teacup and a large cut-glass vase full of soggy-looking phoenix feathers.

“There,” she said, “don’t they look nice?”

Kiss nodded dumbly. He had been an observer of human behaviour long enough to know perfectly well what came next; that excruciatingly embarrassing hour or so that you always get when two people realise that they’re in love, but both of them would rather be buried alive in a pit full of quicklime than raise the topic in conversation. There would also be much staring at shoelaces, averting of eyes, feelings of nausea and meaningless small talk marinaded in sublimated soppiness.

“It was really kind of you to get them for me,” Jane was saying. “It’s something I’ve always wanted, a vase full of feathers. I think I’ll put it here, where I can look at it when I’m sitting on the sofa.”

Jesus wept, Kiss thought, if only you could hear yourself! “I’m glad you like them,” he heard himself reply. “It was no bother, really.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

First, Kiss’s subconscious was saying, we’ll take the little bastard’s rifle and wrap it round his neck and then shove it right up his…

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

There are rules, very strict rules, about when a genie may or may not read the mind of a mortal to whom he is indentured. Kiss broke them all. It was some small comfort to him to find that Jane’s innermost thoughts were along more or less the same lines as his. What on earth is going on? he noticed with approval. It can’t really be, surely, he was pleased to see. What, him? he read, with somewhat mixed feelings. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it was, he couldn’t help feeling, just a trifle too emphatic. Without realising he was doing it, he made a few subliminal alterations to his bone structure and general physique.

Look, screamed his soul, this is ludicrous. Why don’t you just tell her what’s really happened, and find some way of sorting it out?

His consciousness turned to his soul and told it to get lost.

Yes, but—

Don’t you understand plain Arabic? Bugger off. Can’t you see the lady and I don’t want to be interrupted?

“More tea?”

“Yes, please.” You idiot, can’t you see what’s happening? Are you just going to stand there and let them…? Hey, there’s no need to get violent, I was just going anyway…

“Would you like a biscuit?”

“No, no, I’m fine, thanks.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure, thanks all the same.”

“It’d be no trouble at all.”

“No, really, I’m fine.”

As he spoke, Kiss marvelled at the moral fibre of the human race. A lesser species, faced with all this mucking about as an integral part of the procreative process, would have died out thousands of years ago. Salmon baffling their way up waterfalls were quitters in comparison.

“Was it cold out?”

“Sorry?”

“I said, was it cold out? The weather.”

“No, it was fine. A bit nippy actually up the Himalayas themselves, but otherwise very, um, clement. For the time of year.”

“They must be very interesting,” Jane croaked. “The Himalayas, I mean.”

“Yes, very.”

“And you had no trouble finding the phoenix?” Jane went on. It was painfully obvious that she was suffering too, but there was nothing at all he could do about it. He was having to call upon hidden resources of superhuman power just to stop himself from standing there with his mouth open like the rear doors of a cross-Channel ferry.

“No, it was easy enough. I just looked for some rocks with lots of white splashes and bits eaten out of them.”

“Ah. Right.”

Inside his heart, the bullet began to decompose. Cupid’s bullets do that; the outer jacket, which is pressure-formed out of 99 per cent pure embarrassment, is soluble in sentiment and dissolves, leaving the bullet’s core: 185 grains of cold-swaged slush. Any minute now, Kiss knew, he’d be staring at the carpet and muttering that there was something he’d been meaning to say to her for some time.

“Jane.”

“Yes?”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for some time.”

“Me too.”

“Sorry. Fire away.”

“No, no, you first.”

Thanks a heap. “It’s like, well—”

“Yes?”

He took a deep breath and said it. While he was saying it, the small part of him that was still functioning normally, albeit on emergency back-up systems and with a chair wedged behind the door in case the build-up of pink slop outside tried to force its way in, was working feverishly on the original very-good-question, Why?

Why should Philly Nine go to all the trouble and expense of hiring the ultimate hit-man, breaking all the rules in the Genies’ Code of Conduct (it was cold comfort, but as soon as the Committee got to hear of this, Philly Nine was going to be spending a very long time in a confined space looking at green, curved, opaque walls) just to get his own back? Genies don’t…

…Feelings that are, well, stronger than just ordinary friendship and, well, I guess that what Pm trying to say is…)

Genies don’t conduct their feuds like that; they hit each other with solid objects, sometimes even mountains and small asteroids, and pelt each other with lightning and divert major rivers down the backs of each others’ necks, but at least they’re open about it. And, once the air had been cleared and the damage to the Earth’s surface has been made good and the mountains put back in their proper place, they forget all about it and carry on, as if nothing had happened. This sort of thing—

(…and I was sort of hoping that if you somehow might find you feel sort of the same way about me then we might sort of…)

And then the penny dropped. The shock was so great that for a few moments Kiss was suddenly taken stone-cold sober, and he stopped in mid-sentence and stared.

“The bastard!” he said. “The complete and utter bastard!”

Jane looked up sharply. “I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry.” The tide of slush, temporarily checked, started to flow again. “I was miles away. As I was saying…”

Let’s do everyone a favour and fade out on Kiss for the moment

(…Make me the happiest man, well, genie, in the whole wide world…)

And just consider the situation, calmly and without getting carried away. Ready? Good.

What do you get if you cross a genie with a human being? Answer, you don’t, because you can’t. It’s a simple matter of chemistry; or physics; or, when you come right down to it, mythology.

Genies do not, of course, exist. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. There are, as should be now be only too obvious, rather more of them than the universe can comfortably accommodate. Any cosmos that contains fragile, breakable things, such as planets, is better off with a ratio of as near to zero genies per cubic kilometre as possible.

Genies exist at a tangent to reality. They intrude into the continuum we inhabit, in much the same way as an iceberg intrudes into a major shipping lane. Only a tiny proportion of the huge complex of forces that go to make up a genie is ever present on this side of the thin blue line at any given time. Of the genie known as Kiss, for example, 87 per cent is sprawled across the Past and the Future like a cat sitting on the Sunday paper.

Let your imagination do its worst, and then you will agree that any sort of lasting relationship between a genie and a human being is out of the question. And if that wasn’t bad enough, please also bear in mind that regardless of the physical shape it chooses to adopt, a genie always weighs a minimum of 72 tons and has a normal skin temperature of 700 degrees Celsius. It takes as much effort for a genie just to shake hands with a human without crushing him to pulp or shrivelling him up into ash as it would have to expend on juggling with the Pyrenees while standing on one leg on the head of a pin. And relationships are hard enough as it is without any added complications.

There is, however, an escape clause. It’s totally irreversible and unbearably romantic, and its consequences to the genie are so horrendous that it has never been used; but it does exist.

A genie can become a human.

Think about it. Never to be able to fly again; never to uproot mountains or conjure up storms, change shape, travel through time, work magic. To forswear eternal life, and accept the inevitably of old age and death. To throw away divinity and embrace mortality, and all for love.

A hiding to nothing, in fact.

But the option exists; and it’s a basic rule of life in an infinite universe that if something is possible, no matter how dangerous, unpleasant or downright idiotic it might be, sooner or later some fool will do it. Because it’s there.

Or because they have no choice.

While we’re on the subject of genies, consider this. Given that genies are by temperament cruel, arbitrary, uncaring, destructive and deeply interested in wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, isn’t it inevitable that at least some of them should end up in the legal profession?

The offices of Messrs Fretten and Swindall are on the fifth floor of a large Chianti bottle with a hole drilled in the side and a bulb stuck in the neck, somewhere in the fashionable suburbs of Baghdad. This is no dog-and-stick operation over a chemist’s shop in the High Street; even the receptionist is a Force Nine genie, with the power to harness the winds, raise the dead from their graves and convince callers that Mr Fretten really is on the other line and will call them back as soon as he’s free.

(A staggering achievement, considering that Mr Fretten has been imprisoned in an empty gin bottle on a back shelf of the golf-club bar ever since Jesus Christ was a teenager; but there it is. There are at least two callers who have been holding for six hundred years.)

Hoping very much that wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice meant just that, Kiss made an appointment and took a strong easterly trade wind to Baghdad. Having given his coat to the receptionist, handed over a bottomless purse by way of a payment on account and read the March 1453 edition of the National Geographic from cover to cover, he was ushered into Mr Swindall’s office and permitted to sit down.

“It’s like this,” he said. He explained.

“You’re stuffed,” said Mr Swindall, a big, fat bald Force Twelve with six chins. “Completely shafted. He’s got you on the sharp end of a very long pointy stick and there’s bog all you can do about it. Forty thousand years in a Tizer bottle will seem like paradise compared to what you’re about to go through.”

“Oh.”

Mr Swindall grinned. “As neat a piece of buggeration as I’ve ever been privileged to hear about,” he went on. “You’ve got to hand it to this friend of yours, he really knows how to insert the red-hot poker. If he came in here tomorrow I’d offer him a job like a shot.”

“I see.” Kiss frowned. “I thought you’re supposed to be on my side,” he said.

Mr Swindall nodded. “Oh, I am,” he said. “One hundred and twelve per cent. But face facts, you’re dead in the water this time. Won’t do yourself any favours by burying your head in the sand.” Mr Swindall rubbed his hands together. “Now then, first things first. You’d better make a will.”

“Had I?”

“Absolutely.” The lawyer nodded, setting his chins swinging. “After all, now that you’re going to snuff it — pretty damn soon by our standards — it’s imperative that you set your affairs in order. In fact, you’re going to need some pretty high-level tax planning advice while you’re at it, because there’ll be none of this beyond-the-dreams-of-avarice stuff once you’re one of Them.” A slight cloud of worry crossed Mr Swindall’s shiny face. “You did pay in advance, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all right, then. Next you’ll be needing somewhere to live, so I’ll just give you a copy of our house buyer’s special offer package; and it’ll be some time before you get used to not being invulnerable any more, so we’ll put your name down for a couple of personal injury actions in advance. It’s a good scheme, this one; it means you can start paying for the lawyers’ fees before you have the accident. Ah, yes,” said Mr Swindall, rubbing his hands together and grinning like a hyena, “we’ll be able to provide you with a full range of legal services before you’re very much older, you mark my words.”

“I see. Thank you very much.”

“Don’t mention it. Oh yes, and of course there’ll be the divorce as well…”

“The div…”

Mr Swindall smiled sadly. “You don’t think it’ll last, do you? Be realistic, please. Ninety-nine-point-seven per cent of marriages between supernaturals and mortals don’t last out the year, so if I were you I’d put a deposit down now while you’ve still got a few bob in your pocket. Much easier that way.”

Kiss raised his hand. “Just a minute,” he said. “Before we get completely carried away…”

“We are also,” Mr Swindall interrupted quickly, “authorised by the Divine Law Society to conduct investment business, so if you’ll just fill in this simple questionnaire…”

“Before,” Kiss insisted, “we get completely carried away, what’s the procedure for doing this…?”

“The renunciation of eternal life?” Mr Swindall opened a drawer and pulled out a thick sheaf of forms. “Piece of cake. You just fill these out, in quadruplicate, and take them with the prescribed fee to the offices of the Supreme Court between 9.15 and 9.25 on the first Wednesday in any month, and six months later you’ll have to attend a short hearing in front of the District Seraph…”

It took Mr Swindall twenty-seven minutes to describe the procedure.

“It’s as simple as that,” he concluded. “And if you run into any problems along the way, just give me a shout and I’ll put you back on the right lines. Now, where were we? Oh, yes. For a mere thirty per cent commission, I can put you on to some very nice unit trusts which ought…”

“The forms, please.”

“You don’t want to hear about the breathtaking new equities portfolio we’re putting together for a select few specially favoured clients?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Mr Swindall frowned. “Oh well, sod you, then. The receptionist will give you the final bill on your way out.”

Organising a plague of locusts, even if you’re a Force Twelve genie, is several light years away from a doddle, as anyone who’s ever organised anything will readily appreciate.

First, catch your locusts. Actually producing nine hundred million locusts wasn’t a problem. Let there be locusts! And there were locusts.

A plague of locusts. The phrase trips easily off the tongue. But consider this. The average locust needs a certain amount of food each day, or it dies. Nine hundred million locusts, gathered together in one spot awaiting distribution in plague form, need nine hundred million times that amount. Neglect to provide nine hundred million packed lunches, and before very long you’ll have a plague of nine hundred million dead locusts; untidy, but no real long-term threat to humanity.

Another point to bear in mind is that locusts are in practice nothing more than the sports model of the basic production grasshopper; and grasshoppers hop. Up to six feet, when the mood takes them. Trying to keep nine hundred million of the little tinkers together long enough to organise properly structured devastation parties is, in consequence, not a job for the faint-hearted. Furthermore, they chirp. They stridulate. The sound they produce is extremely similar in pitch, frequency and tone to the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. Nine hundred million locusts stridulating simultaneously takes noise pollution into a whole new dimension.

Half an hour into the plague, Philly Nine was beginning to wish he’d gone with the flow and specified a plague of frogs instead.

The final straw was the huge flock of ibises which suddenly appeared, hovering in the air just out of genie stone-throwing range and darting in whenever Philly’s back was turned to gorge themselves on the biggest free lunch in ibis history. The few who overdid it to such an extent that they were unable to get off the ground again met with appropriate retribution; but there were plenty more where they came from.

Three hours into the plague, with nothing achieved except a massive feed bill, a net loss from starvation, desertion and enemy action of about seventeen million locusts and a lot of very happy ibises, Philly Nine sat down, put his head in his hands and began to whimper.

The locusts, who had finished off the latest consignment of rice (sacks included) and were beginning to feel peckish again, ate his shoes.

“Excuse me.”

Philly Nine looked up. Hovering above his head was a helicopter, out of whose window hung a man with a clipboard and a megaphone.

“Excuse me,” the man yelled above the roar of the engine and the chirping of the locusts, “but are these insects yours?”

Philly nodded. By now they’d finished off his socks and were working their way up his trousers.

“Then I’m very sorry,” the man went on, “but I’m going to have to ask you to move them. They’re causing an environmental hazard, you see, and we can’t have that. There’s regulations about this sort of thing.”

Philly Nine laughed bitterly. “Move them,” he said. “Right. Where would you suggest I move them to?”

“Not my problem,” the man replied. “But while we’re on the subject, I take it you do have a permit for livestock transportation?”

“What?”

“A permit,” the man said. “Transportation of livestock without a permit is a very serious offence.”

“No, I haven’t,” Philly growled. “What precisely are you going to do about it?”

The man shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but if you haven’t got a permit, then I can’t allow you to move these insects. They aren’t going anywhere until I see a Form 95, properly endorsed by the Department of Transport…”

“But you told me yourself to get them shifted.”

“Agreed,” the man said, nodding. “But not without a permit.”

“All right,” Philly snarled, just managing to stay calm. “So what do you suggest I do?”

“Not my problem. You could try getting a permit.”

“How do I do that?”

The man sighed. “You can’t,” he said. “Sorry. In order to apply for a permit, you have to give twenty-eight days’ notice in writing to the Inspector of Livestock Transportation, and like I just said, you haven’t got twenty-eight days because you’ve got to remove them immediately on environmental grounds. Bit of a grey area in the regulations, I’m afraid. Oh, and by the way—”

“Yes?”

The man pointed with his clipboard towards the ibises, which had settled down en bloc in the middle of the swarm and were munching a broad swathe through it with impressive speed. “You’re not allowed to do that, I’m afraid.”

“Do what?”

“Do or permit to be done anything which tends to prejudice the well-being of an endangered or protected species. If any of those ibises dies from over-feeding, I’m afraid it’ll be your head on the block.”

“I see.”

“So I suggest you move them on. Although,” the man continued, “disturbing the habitat of an endangered or protected species is also forbidden, and the expression habitat does include any well-established feeding-ground—”

Philly slowly got to his feet. “All right,” he said, “it’s a fair cop. Looks like you’re going to have to impound my locusts.” He grinned. “No hard feelings,” he added. “I know you guys have a job to do. OK, they’re all yours.”

The man in the helicopter shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “but we can’t do that. Regulations state that we can’t accept surrender of property from members of the public without an authorisation from the Secretary of State, and to get an authorisation we’d need to give twenty-eight days’ notice…”

“Fine.” Philly’s mental computer fixed on the helicopter, estimating its airspeed and mass, and calculating the necessary trajectory a good gob and spit would need to follow in order to hit the man square in the eye. “So what are you going to do?”

The man frowned. “I hate to have to do this,” he said, “but if you won’t co-operate, you leave us no choice. All right, Wayne, over to you.”

Wayne? Who’s Wayne? Philly Nine looked sharply round, just in time to see a tall figure in overalls standing over him with an empty milk-bottle in his hand. He tried to dodge, but he slipped on a wedge of squashed locusts, lost his footing and staggered backwards into the bottle. A cork appeared, blotting out the light from what had suddenly become a very small, cramped universe.

“Twenty-eight days,” said a small voice, very far away. “For contempt. When you get out, we’ll also be filing a civil suit for public nuisance and forty-six breaches of the planning regulations. Sorry.”

Nine hours later, the locusts ceased to be a problem. Starvation, ibises and a freak virus which spread like wildfire had accounted for them all; all except the one which had hopped into the milk bottle just before the cork was inserted. Twenty-eight days turned out to be a very long time.

Genies can do, and have done, pretty well everything; but one field of endeavour in which they have little experience, for obvious reasons, is organising stag nights.

Call to mind the old adage about not being able to organise a highly convivial party in a brewery. Focus on that thought.

“We ought,” insisted Acme Waste Disposal Services III, a small Force Two, “to have a strip-a-gram.” He scratched his head. “It’s traditional,” he added, “I think.”

The other members of the Committee shrugged and waved to the bartender for more goat’s milk. These were uncharted waters.

“What’s that?” asked Nordic Oil IX.

Awds Three frowned. “What I’ve heard is,” he said, “you hire this female mortal to come along and take her clothes off.”

“Why?”

“And then she sings a song or recites a poem or something.”

“No wealth-beyond-the-dreams or anything?” Awds Three shook his head. “Nope,” he replied. “Off with the undies, do the song, say the poem, and that’s it.”

“How very peculiar.”

“And sometimes,” Awds added, wishing he hadn’t raised the subject, “they jump out of cakes.”

“Get away!”

“So I’ve heard,” the genie mumbled. “Never seen it myself, but…”

There was a puzzled silence.

“Let’s just go over this one more time,” said a thoughtful genie by the name of Standard Conglomerates the First. “There’s this female mortal imprisoned in a cake, and…”

“Not imprisoned, exactly…”

“…and she jumps out and doesn’t grant three wishes…”

“As I understand it. Like I said, this is all strictly hearsay…”

“…festoons the floor with her dirty laundry…”

“Hey, we don’t have to do her laundry for her, do we, because I’ve got sensitive skin…”

“…sings a song and goes away again. For which,” he added, “she expects to be paid money. And this,” he concluded, “is fun.”

“Male bonding,” suggested Nordic Oil.

“I think that’s extra.”

Stan One drew a deep breath. “I think we’ll pigeonhole that one for the time being, people. Which leaves us with excessive drinking…”

“Well, that oughtn’t to be a problem, provided they skim the cream off first…”

“Excessive drinking,” Stan One continued, “singing raucous songs and being sick in people’s window-boxes in the early hours of the morning.” He paused. “It’s all a bit jejune, isn’t it?”

“What sort of cake, exactly?”

“That’s what mortals do,” Awds replied defensively. “Don’t blame me, I’m only repeating what I’ve heard.”

Stan One shrugged. “If he’s dead set on becoming a mortal, I suppose that’s what he’s got to learn to expect.” He took a long pull at his goat’s milk and spat out a tiny knob of rennet. “The sooner he starts, I guess, the sooner he’ll get used to it.” He grimaced; not entirely because of the rennet.

“Because if it’s one of those creamy ones with jam in the middle, she won’t half be sticky and yeeuk by the time she’s jumped up through the middle of it. Bits of glacé cherry in the hair, all that sort of—”

“I think,” said Imperial Unit Fund Managers IV, a big, slow genie, “that at some stage we have to tie shoes to a car.”

Awds shook his head. “You’re wrong there,” he said. “It’s horses you tie shoes to. Cars have tyres.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Damned odd, the whole thing,” mused Stan One. “Anyone know why he’s doing it?”

There was a general shaking of heads. “For charity?” suggested the Dragon King of the South-East. “One of these sponsored things?”

Impy Four shook his head. “Can’t see how it’d work,” he replied.

“Well,” replied the Dragon King, “he’s becoming a mortal, right? So he gets people to sponsor him, so much a year, to see how long he’ll live. So suppose we sponsor him, oh, five gold dirhams a year, and he lives say twenty years…”

“That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”

The Dragon King shrugged. “People do weird things for charity,” he said. “I heard once where this bloke allowed himself to be chained in the stocks and have wet sponges thrown at him.”

Awds shook his head. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said. “I think it’s more cherchez la femme.”

“Find the lady? You mean like a card game?”

“And anyway,” interrupted a slender Force Six, “from what you say, all you have to do to find mortal females is look in the nearest Victoria sponge. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

“I think,” said Awds, “he’s in love.”

A long, difficult silence.

“Just say that again, will you?” asked Stan One, slowly.

“I think he’s in love,” Awds repeated, red to the tips of his ears. “Just a rumour, of course. No idea where I heard it.”

“With a mortal?”

Awds nodded.

“A female mortal?”

“It’s only what I’ve heard.”

Another long silence.

“Well,” said the Dragon King briskly, “if he’s doing it for charity, then I reckon I’m good for ten dirhams a year. Any takers?”

Jane frowned.

“The first one again,” she commanded, “but without the sequins.”

There was a voiceless sigh, and out of nothingness appeared a dress. It was long, white and shimmering. Twenty thousand tiny white flowers sparkled on the sleeves. So light and insubstantial was the material that a gnat sneezing in the jungles of Ecuador set the hems dancing. It hung in the air, full of some sort of nothing that accentuated its breathtakingly graceful lines. Jane thought.

“All right,” she said. “Let me see number three just one more time.”

“Sign here.”

Philly Nine took the clipboard, squiggled with the pen, and handed them back.

Sulphur, he thought. Nice, inanimate, noiseless sulphur. Ninety-nine-point-eight-nine per cent pure. Easiest thing in the world, a plague of sulphur.

“Just stack it neatly over there,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

The delivery man nodded, and started shouting directions to his colleagues. The long queue of lorries started to move.

"Scuse my asking,” went on the delivery man, “but that’s a lot of sulphur you got there.”

Philly Nine looked up from the bill of lading. “Sorry?” he said.

“That’s an awful lot of sulphur you got there, mate,” the delivery man went on. “You want to watch yourself.”

Philly Nine favoured him with an icy grin. “I know what I’m doing,” he said. “Believe me.”

“OK,” replied the delivery man, as the genie stalked away and broke open a crate. “So long as you realise that this stuffs highly…”

Philly Nine wasn’t listening. To distribute sulphur in plague form: first, grind it up into a fine powder. Use this to salt rain-clouds all over the Earth’s atmosphere. The sulphur will dissolve in the rain-water, forming (with the help of a little elementary chemistry) H₂S0₄, otherwise known as sulphuric acid. He chuckled, took a long drag on the butt of his cigar and threw it aside.

There was a flash — “…inflammable.”