Gateway to Elsewhere

Chapter 20

It was late. The royal bridal party had graciously attended the djinn wedding of Nasim and Abdul in the palace outside the city walls. They had returned. Cannon still boomed. There were bonfires in the streets, and dancing, and joy was being expressed in all possible fashions, including the indecorous.

But in the royal palace of Barkut the last chamberlain bowed out, the last slave-in-waiting departed, and Tony closed the door firmly. He said:

“Er—Ghail, did I remember to send word to Esir and Esim that I wouldn’t be home tonight?”

“Whether you did or not,” Ghail told him, “I did!”

He took out his cigarette case. He snapped it open. He began to prowl about the bridal chamber, blowing on the wick. A faint but perceptible aroma of lasf became noticeable. Ghail watched him, uncomprehending and embarrassed.

“Why do you do that, Tony?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s a sort of custom in my country,” said Tony awkwardly. “We don’t use lasf, of course. We use something else. It keeps away flies and mosquitoes. But I’m using this to keep away djinns.”

It was again night. Tony Gregg got out of a taxicab on lower East Broadway, in the Syrian quarter of New York, and paid off the driver. He helped a very pretty girl to the sidewalk and led her into a shishkebab restaurant.

The slick-haired proprietor grinned at him as he came to take his order.

“I remember you!” he said. “Mr. Emurian wanted to buy that gold piece you had! He offered you two thousan’ bucks. Ain’t that right?”

“That’s right,” said Tony. “Have you seen him lately?”

“Oh, sure,” said the proprietor. “He comes in most every night… hey! Here he comes now!”

The girl with Tony had listened, frowning in attention to the difficult English words. She looked up sharply as the bald-headed man with the impeccably tailored clothes entered. He spoke pleasantly to the proprietor, glanced at Tony, and then came quickly to his table.

“Good evening!” he said warmly, twinkling through his eyeglasses. “I have hoped to find you again! I cabled my friend in Ispahan, and he is willing to pay you three thousand dollars for your coin!”

Tony reached in his pocket. He put down two gold pieces.

“Here are two of them,” he said. “Send them to your friend as gifts. I had rather hoped to see you again, too.” He slipped into the Arabic he had learned from Ghail. “This is my wife.” To Ghail he explained, “This is Mr. Emurian. You have heard me speak of him.”

“Oh, yes!” said Ghail. She smiled sweetly. “Tony is so grateful to you. And I also.”

“Yes,” said Tony. “I went to Barkut, you see. Met my wife there. In a sense, all due to you. And she wanted to see my world, so we came back here. I’ve a rather interesting business proposition for you. I’d like to have your friend make some contact with us in Barkut and establish a branch of his business there. It would be useful to have a regular commercial contact with this world and with the United States.”

The bald-headed Mr. Emurian sat down slowly, his face a study.

“You say that you went to Barkut?”

“Oh, yes,” said Tony briskly. “Hm… maybe I’d better sketch it out.”

He gave the spectacled man a brief, hasty, and necessarily improbable account of what had happened to him since their last meeting in this same restaurant.

“The djinns,” he concluded, “have some bad qualities, but their main trouble was that they could be anything they wanted, so they never learned how to make anything. I came back to get designs and pictures of all sorts of stuff. Not only statues and fashions and architecture—though I want those—but industrial products, and”—he paused—“the machines that make them. After all, a djinn can turn himself into a drill press as well as a beetle or a whirlwind, once he knows what a drill press is like. As a drill press he can turn out all sorts of stuff—including another drill press. And that manner of working would be congenial to them, too. They’ll like being pieces of machinery and turning out things the humans can’t make and are delighted to buy from them. Barkut ought to become a rather thriving industrial community before long.”

Mr. Emurian simply stared, batting his eyes slowly from time to time.

“I’d like to have your friend set up a branch of his business in Barkut,” said Tony earnestly. “And—well—I’d like a great deal to get an agent here in the United States, forwarding samples of new products, technical magazines, and above all pictures of everything under the sun. You could get them to Ispahan to be brought into Barkut by whatever route your friend discovers—if you’d take the agency. Could I interest you?”

Mr. Emurian said: “Yes. Indeed you interest me. Oh, indeed yes!”

“You work out the details,” said Tony. “I’m staying at the Waldorf with my wife. I brought back quite a sum in gold, and can arrange for you to draw on it. You make your plans and get your friend to arrange to get in touch with me when he finds a way to Barkut. I’ll have him watched for there, and he can locate me easily enough!”

“Indeed he can!” said Ghail proudly. “My husband is His Most Illustrious Majesty, the Great in Single Combat, the Destroyer of Evil, the Protector of the Poor, the Nobly Forgiving and Compassionate, the King of Djinns and Men, Tony Gregg.”

“Yes,” said Tony abstractedly, “he can find me.”

Mr. Emurian turned over the two golden coins Tony had put on the table. And suddenly his fingers trembled a little. On one side was an inscription in conventionalized Arabic script. It said that the coin was a ten-dirhim piece of Barkut. The other side showed a rather elaborate throne. But it was not empty. It was occupied by two people. One—the girl—was in some native dress of considerable grandeur, and Mr. Emurian looked twice at her. The dark-eyed, proudly smiling girl beside Tony in the shishkebab restaurant had plainly been the model for that figure. But he looked three times, and four, and five, at the male figure on the coin. That half of the design was a young man in a soft hat and a belted-in-the-back topcoat, with undoubtedly highly polished brown shoes. It was, in fact, Tony Gregg.

“I—will be most happy to be your American agent,” said Mr. Emurian. “Er—Your Majesty!”

It was later. Much later. Tony was in his pajamas in their hotel suite.

“It’s funny,” said Tony thoughtfully, as Ghail looked out a window at the lighted ways and skyscrapers of New York. “It’s funny that my conscience doesn’t seem to bother me any more. You remember I told you about it?”

He was sipping a final highball. Ghail stared almost affrightedly at the incredible panorama before her—a city ten miles long, with millions of bright lights, with mechanisms moving swiftly along its streets, with moving electric signs everywhere and even floating overhead to the sound of motors.

“I know, Tony,” said Ghail, not turning around.

“Maybe it’s dead,” said Tony humorously. “It used to bother me a lot.”

Then his conscience spoke. Startlingly. It said smugly that it was very well satisfied with Tony, and that he could be sure that his contentment was the result of its approval. He was very normally married, he was so far reasonably faithful to his wife—though he had turned around twice, today, to look at nylon-stockinged legs—and he had become a thriving young executive.

Tony denied it indignantly. But he was! said his conscience complacently. He was the executive head of the joint kingdom of djinns and men of Barkut, and he was arranging for the gradual introduction of an American standard of civilization. Eventually there would be electric refrigerators, nylon stockings, fertilizer, radio, and bubble gum in Barkut. It would be the result of Tony’s executive action. And he was young. So he was a young executive. So his conscience was pleased with him, and he should feel the greatest happiness possible to man, because of his conscience’s approval. “Not dead,” said Tony grimly, “but merely sleeping.”

Ghail turned from the window.

“Tony,” she said, just a little bit unhappy, “I’m homesick! This world of yours is so big! So tremendous! There are so many people! I will stay here if you wish it—”

“I think,” said Tony, “we can start back day after tomorrow. All right?”

She smiled at him, warmly. He put down his glass and stood up. He put his arms around her.

“But there’s one thing,” he observed comfortably, “that you can’t beat this world for! Ten million people all around you may be daunting, but there’s one thing we’ve got here that we can never be sure of in Barkut! Here, my dear, we’ve got privacy!”

He reached up and turned off the light.