The Poison Oracle

One

1

WITH AS MUCH passion as his tepid nature was ever likely to generate, Wesley Morris stared at Dinah through the observation window. He thought she looked incredibly beautiful, leaning against the heavy wire mesh on the far side, and watching the main group with that air of surprise which Morris knew to mean that she was apprehensive. She looked healthier than most of the others; her coarse black hair had a real sheen to it, and her eyes were bright with vitality.

The others were in a listless mood, though they ought by now to have got over the shock of their arrival; only Murdoch’s baby showed much life, making little exploratory forays away from his mother. Sparrow was gazing with sullen intensity at the air-conditioner; perhaps its thin whine got on his nerves; he couldn’t know how carefully it had been adjusted to produce a temperature and humidity at which he would thrive. The rest merely lolled and slouched. The darkening caused by the one-way glass in the observation window softened the concrete tree-trunks and metal branches, and gave the whole scene the look of a forest glade. Morris was both pleased and disturbed by this illusion of nature.

“Sparrow looks pretty unintelligent,” murmured the Sultan. “

“I don’t know,” said Morris.

“In fact I think he looks decidedly thick. Thicker even than Rowse.”

“You can’t judge them by Dinah—she’s exceptional.”

“So what? If she chooses one of the thick ones . . .”

“It doesn’t work like that. The odds are she’ll be completely promiscuous—she’s just made that way. When she has kids you’ll never know who the fathers were.”

The Sultan knew this perfectly well, but something in his heredity or culture made it hard for him to imagine a set-up in which the males were dominant but did not have exclusive rights to individual females. (Morris had to keep explaining the point to him.)

“Then we ought to start weeding out the thick ones,” he said. Morris recognised in his tone the dangerous moment when a notion was about to harden into a fiat.

“We don’t know which are the thick ones yet,” he protested. “I’ll try to set up a few tests, if I can think of how to do it without mucking up the whole idea. We’ve got plenty of time—Dinah won’t reach puberty for at least a year, so . . .”

“Can’t we speed it up, my dear fellow? Listen, down in the marshes they know a few things that your puritanical scientists have never caught on to. Some of the local aphrodisiacs . . .”

“Certainly not,” snapped Morris.

When the Sultan sighed several hundred-thousand-poundsworth of rubies shifted on his gold-robed chest, and the folds and dewlaps of his large face took up the lines of tragedy. Only the little, hard eyes remained bright. Morris stared sourly at his employer. There were not many amusements in Q’Kut, but the Sultan managed to keep himself happy; and one of his favourite games nowadays seemed to be forcing Morris to draw the line somewhere and then tricking him across it. There’d been the ridiculous business of drugging the white rhino to take shavings off its horn; and rebuilding several cages to make this concrete glade and then filling it with near-wild animals; if he now insisted on doping Dinah’s feed with nameless filth there was only one way of preventing it, and that was for Morris to give up his ten thousand dollars a month and take Dinah back to Bristol. Supposing the Sultan would let him out of the country. Or her.

“Look,” said Morris. “The whole point of this experiment is to simulate natural conditions as nearly as we can. I was against it, as you know, but now we’ve set it up I’m going to do my damnedest to make it work. But who’s going to pay the slightest attention to our results if it comes out that half our apes were high on local dope?”

“I have read that male gorillas have a very low sex-drive,” said the Sultan. His reading was patchy and his memory more so, but a point like that was likely to stick in the mind of a man conscious of the twenty-six children in his women’s quarters, and the unimpeachable impotence of the eunuchs who guarded them.

“Chimpanzees are different,” said Morris.

“I’m glad to hear it. Murdoch’s baby looks quite bright.”

“They usually do.”

“What shall we call him? I am so out of touch.”

“Berlin?” suggested Morris.

“He must be getting on. Isn’t there a psychologist with a name like a Dutchman?”

“Eysenck? He isn’t Oxford. I suppose you could endow a chair for him, but . . .”

“The camera, man!” snapped the Sultan.

Morris pressed the starter button of the fixed camera which covered about two-thirds of the grove, then checked how much film there was left to run; when he looked again through the window he saw that Murdoch’s baby, in one of its forays, had strayed within Dinah’s reach and she had grabbed it. Now she had it face down across her thigh and was beginning to peer and finger among the hairs along its spine. Through the glass they could not hear its little whimpers, but Murdoch’s scream was clear enough as she rose from her torpor and rushed over at Dinah, who with equal speed, still holding the baby, flung herself up the wire mesh and leaped for one of the central trees. Murdoch followed her route and, having both arms free, had almost caught up when Dinah swung to the next tree, dangled for an instant from one of the metal branches, and simply dropped. She fell heavily on Sparrow’s back, let the baby fall and clutched to steady herself at Sparrow’s neck.

Certainly Sparrow was in a nervous state. He shot across the floor just as if he were starting a male chimpanzee’s charging display, but with Dinah still clinging to his back like a rucksack with one strap broken. Murdoch snatched up her baby and rushed with it to the furthest end of the cage, where she stood for a while chattering angrily at the group, until she settled to possessive grooming of the much-groomed infant. Meanwhile Dinah had let go of Sparrow, who, having reached the end of the cage and tried in vain to wrench a metal branch from a concrete tree, came charging straight back at her, swinging his right arm as if he were twirling a club.

By all jungle rights she ought to have cowered out of his way, probably presenting her rump to him. But as the main relationship in her life had been with Morris her experience of male domination had been, to say the least, mild. Besides she always had a tricky temper when you removed from her a toy with which she had not finished playing, and no doubt that was how she thought of Murdoch’s baby; so she stood her ground and hooted back at Sparrow. Morris hardly noticed the glass of the window slide up.

Sparrow halted in the middle of his charge and began to bounce up and down, chattering back. Now both arms were swinging, and Dinah was losing confidence. Suddenly, close at Morris’s ear, there came a sharp whoof, and in the same instant Sparrow made a three-foot leap, straight in the air. When he landed he stood stock still, peering with horror at the shiny dart that now protruded from his right thigh; a wary hand came down and plucked it out. He inspected it with glazing curiosity for several seconds before he crumpled to the floor.

Dinah, still snickering with fury, came forward and pissed on the fallen body, a reaction of a sort that Morris had never seen from her before—nor did he remember reading about it in any of the literature. Rowse, whose lethargy had been partly alleviated by the drama, came slowly over and grunted warningly at Dinah, who this time had the sense to retreat. Rowse pinched Sparrow experimentally three or four times, then returned to the group with the express purpose of dislodging old Cecil from his place against a tree and thus establishing himself as leader of the group. The window slid shut. Morris stopped the camera and turned to the Sultan, who was standing with the squat spring-gun cradled on his arm, waiting smugly for applause. Behind him his enormous black bodyguard, Dyal, grinned with simple pleasure. And behind him the stuffed gorilla they used for target practice grinned too, with simulated fury.

Morris’s fury was real.

“Christ!” he said.

“You must mean ‘Allah!’” said the Sultan.

“I mean,” said Morris slowly, “how the hell do you expect Dinah to integrate naturally with the group if every time there’s any kind of confrontation her opponent collapses at her feet? This experiment is your idea, not mine, so for God’s sake get it into your head that the whole point of putting her down there at all is to let her begin to find her place in the social hierarchy. You want her to mate and have a baby. How’s that going to happen if every time a male looks at her he suddenly falls flat on his face?”

“It was a good shot, don’t you think?” said the Sultan. “He was bouncing up and down, but I got him just in that big vein that runs down inside the thigh. In fact it was a perfectly beautiful shot. He went out like a light, didn’t he?”

“It was a complete fluke,” said Morris.

“Oh, come, these guns aren’t as inaccurate as all that.”

“What’s more, it was high-grade hooliganism. You’re a bloody trigger-happy . . .”

His anger tailed away in the knowledge that it would be an error actually to call the Sultan a wog to his face. His Pacific Majesty got a kick out of a relationship in which Morris was the only man in all Q’Kut who could speak to him without subservience, but he also possessed a generous ration of his race’s cunning for avenging an insult.

“I really must protect my investment,” said the Sultan. “After all, I am paying Dinah ten thousand dollars a month.”

“You are paying me!”

“Of course, of course, my dear fellow. I do apologise. I’m a bloody trigger-happy wog. Hello! What gives?”

From the doors of the zoo a wheezy flute tootled. Dyal made a clucking noise in his throat and strode off down the inspection gallery. The Sultan handed Morris the empty spring-gun, picked up the old one which he used for practice, swung round and fired from the hip at the stuffed gorilla. Instantly the dart (also an old, expended one) was there, glistening in the middle of the bare, heroic chest. The Sultan reloaded and fired again. By the time Dyal returned the gorilla was wearing a precisely spaced row of darts from his windpipe to his midriff, like buttons on a fancy waistcoat. Dyal whispered a few words. The Sultan nodded. Dyal waved to the jet-black eunuch who had appeared by the doors, then strode away to the gorilla to retrieve the darts.

The eunuch beckoned to someone out of sight. After a brief pause a white-robed Arab crawled round the corner on hands and knees. He paused, raised his splendidly bearded head and looked down the vista to where his master stood. Doggedly he lowered his head and crawled forward. Long practice had made him expert in the knack of not kneeling on his beard.

By Morris’s side the spring-gun whoofed. He turned and saw that Dyal was now decorating the gorilla’s chest with a neat row of medals, while the Sultan watched critically. Their backs were towards the crawling man.

“For God’s sake!” whispered Morris.

The Sultan turned and looked unimpressed at the new arrival.

“Can’t you let him off?” whispered Morris. “My nerves won’t stand it! He’ll have a heart attack before he gets here!”

“What will you bet?”

“For Christ’s sake! OK, for Allah’s sake!”

“We’ll make a believer of you yet,” said the Sultan. All the same he called in ultra-gracious tones to let the man know that he was, this once, permitted to approach his sovereign with the gait of a fellow human. The man rose, bowed deeply and came impassively forward. Looking at him Morris was conscious that he had somehow managed to lose yet another minor engagement with his employer. Akuli bin Zair, major domo of the Palace and effectively Prime Minister of Q’Kut, was not exactly an enemy of Morris’s, but he was not the man to appreciate any departure from ancient custom. Although they had never had any conversation apart from the stateliest compliments in classical Arabic, Morris knew bin Zair to be a bigoted opponent of any kind of Westernisation, especially when it took the form of research into the linguistic abilities of unclean beasts. He would certainly not have come to the zoo unless he had important and urgent business to transact, and Morris wanted no part of that. It was clearly time to withdraw.

“Be seeing you,” he whispered, and withdrew—backwards, because bin Zair’s eyes were on him, and there was no point in offending the old gnome. And anyway it was good practice for court functions.

The palace was a fantasy, so the zoo was a fantasy inside a fantasy. The palace was square in plan—so far, so rational—but each floor was wider than the one below it, so that seen from a distance across the desert dunes the building looked like an inverted ziggurat, a giant’s teetotum perched on its tiny podium, ready to topple at a breath of wind. In fact it was a fantasy of reason. That is to say the architects maintained that its absurd shape was the rational solution to building a palace in the appalling conditions of Q’Kut. It never rained in the Sultanate; the strongest wind of the locality could barely animate an anemometer; the nearest earthquake zone was a thousand miles away; so what could upset the balance? On the other hand, built as it was, each floor gave shade to the one below from the flogging sun, and the roof offered the widest possible expanse to the solar panels that provided much of the energy for the palace’s gadgetry. And supposing the Arabs or the marshmen revolted, there was a remarkably small perimeter to defend at ground level. But despite all these good reasons you had only to look at the thing and see it was absurd.

The spindle of this teetotum was the lift-shaft. If you were a woman or a eunuch you entered at ground-level a lift whose doors opened only into the women’s quarters. If you were a man you used the lift that backed on to this, and could reach any other section of the palace. If you were a white rhino, you used the big bleak service lift, which had doors at either end and so could reach any part of the palace—but the arrival of the current rhino had strained the machinery and it was still waiting repair. There was also a stairway running beside the lifts, but as the architects had lacked the ingenuity to prevent this from passing through the women’s quarters it was barred by locked doors at several points. The zoo occupied a third of the top floor of the palace, so when the men’s lift was out of order Morris could only reach his work from his living-quarters, two floors below, by being blindfolded and led stumbling up several flights by scimitar-toting eunuchs. Luckily this lift was going through a good patch.

The visitor to the zoo came out of the lift into a lobby, on the far side of which were the double doors of the zoo itself. Beyond these a very short passage finished in the inspection gallery, which ran at right-angles to it across the entire width of the palace. This was a straight, tiled passage, as wide as a small lane. Against the wall that held the doors stood cases of zoological specimens, none of any interest whatever, and a few stuffed animals. On the other side the wall was pocked by the regular pattern of the rectangular inspection windows and the knobby excrescences of the fixed cameras. The visitor could watch the animals, unseen by them, through the polarised glass; here he would be standing about eight feet above the floor of the cages. Alternatively he could walk round to where a parallel gallery ran in front of the cages, at their own level. Down there he could be inspected as well as inspect, for the inner wall was the wire-mesh front of the cages; the outer wall was all glass, enabling animals and visitor alike to gaze, if they chose, eighty miles eastward across the glaring sands. At dawn the rising sun shone horizontal into the cages, but within an hour it was hidden by the final brim of the palace roof.

These two galleries were joined at either end by transverse passages, set far enough in from the outer walls to leave space for store-rooms at the southern end, and at the northern one for Morris’s office and surgery. Morris, whom we left reversing along the upper gallery, felt his way round the corner into this northern passage, stopped, muttered under his breath, turned and walked down a short flight of steps into his office. He was still muttering as he reloaded the spring-gun with a fresh dart containing a chimp-size dose of anaesthetic and clicked it into the rack beside the spare gun. He shut the doors of the gun-cupboard, turned right outside his office and walked round into the lower gallery. Going this way he came at once to the front of the chimpanzee glade.

Before Morris’s arrival, eighteen months ago, the zoo had had the highest mortality rate of any in the world; monotonously the smuggled orangs had died, and the target gorilla was only one of a sad series. Typically, the Sultan was not interested in owning small, manageable animals; so there had always been empty cages. The glade had been constructed by amalgamating five of these, with the dens behind them, leaving the concrete tree-trunks to support the roof. Some of the metal branches were supposed to extrude oranges at the touch of a button, but few of these worked; occasionally Morris had crept in, like Santa Claus, in the dead of night and tied bunches of bananas to the lower branches, but the chimpanzees took this phenomenon for granted and were no more interested than when he dumped their fruit on the floor through the usual chute—part of the plan was that they shouldn’t connect humans with food.

Now as he came round the corner he saw that the scene had hardly changed. Sparrow was still inert on the floor; Rowse had succeeded in dislodging Cecil and was now carefully grooming him to show that there was no ill-will; and Dinah was still separated from the rest of the group, but had picked the dart up and was edging her way innocently round the cage with the clear intention of prodding it into Murdoch. But when Morris clicked his fingers for her attention she came rushing to the door, with the dart poised to jab at him. He hoped that this was her experimental urge showing itself, and not malice.

He backed off, extended his right hand palm up and flapped his fingers towards himself several times. He regarded manual sign language as unscientific, but for day-to-day living with a chimpanzee a quick way of saying “Give me that” is essential.

Dinah took hold of the door with both feet and one hand and rattled it hard. Morris made the give-me sign again. Dinah stopped shaking the door and hung considering. She obviously wanted to be let out of the cage, but realised that the dart held better bargaining power than that; she might even guess he was going to let her out anyway, so giving him the dart for nothing would be a waste. At any rate she smacked her huge lips together several times, returned the give-me sign, then stuck the fingers of one hand in her mouth: “Food.”

With a sigh Morris knelt by the door, unslung his satchel and spilt the coloured chips of plastic into its lid. Dinah panted with pleasure and squatted down inside the bars to join the game. Morris sorted deftly through the pile, chose the counters he needed and poked them through the door to form a line just in front of her.

large blue triangle: first conditional

white square: Dinah

yellow circle with hole: give

yellow square: thing with no name

blue square: (to) Morris

small blue triangle: second conditional

blue square: Morris

yellow circle with hole: give

green/blue striped square: banana

white square: (to) Dinah

Dinah peered at the symbols as though she were much more short-sighted than in fact she was, sniffing along the line of them in a rhythmic quick-time. She laid the dart down on the yellow square to confirm its identity, but kept a firm hold on it while she did so. (Morris had never cheated her in her life, and could hardly imagine circumstances in which he might be forced to do so, but the possibility seemed to remain vivid in her mind.) She chattered thoughtfully to herself for a few seconds, then made the give-me sign and gestured towards the satchel. Eagerly she picked out the blue/white striped square that meant grapes, then hunted fastidiously until she found the little black triangle they used for the connective conjunction. She added them right at the end of the line and studied her revised message; clearly she realised there was something wrong with it, but it took her some time to discover what, twelve symbols being near the limit of sentence-length she could cope with. At last she moved the second white square to the end of the sentence.

Immediately Morris snatched up a red circle, larger than most of the others, and slapped it down on the floor.

red circle: negative

He was shocked. A banana and grapes! Her victory over Sparrow had given her inflated ideas.

She lurched away from the door and chattered up and down the wire mesh. The other chimpanzees eyed her sidelong, like xenophobic villagers watching one of their girls flirting with a passing hiker. On her second return to the door she sulkily removed the green/blue square and the black triangle. Morris considered a moment: to give in would be a depraving act, but it would stem from the Sultan’s trigger-finger, an organ beyond anyone’s control; and anyway the Sultan was paying for the grapes, at around three pounds a bunch. He found a green circle and replied.

green circle: positive

He fished back through the bars all the counters except the second, third and fourth of his original sentence; obediently Dinah passed him the dart. As soon as the door was open she snatched at his hand and smacking her lips tried to drag him along the corridor. The other chimps, stirred by her food-noises, came ambling over; Morris only freed himself just in time to prevent the crowd of them bundling out into the corridor. Rowse picked up the yellow circle with the hole in it and bit it in two, but after a couple of chews spat out the gnawed fragments and handed the other half to Cecil to try. Morris retrieved the other two symbols and closed his satchel.

As soon as he was on his feet Dinah made a leap for his shoulders. He hitched his arm contentedly under her buttocks, adjusted himself to her weight and walked on down the corridor; by going the long way round he could cast an eye over the rest of the zoo, and also avoid passing the Sultan and bin Zair. The polar bear was swimming, huge in its tiny pool; he paused and watched it with vague guilt; but for him it would have died months ago, and though he did not believe that its soul would have gone to roam the dazzling ice-floes east-north-east of the Pearly Gates, he did feel that it would be better for such a creature not to exist than to be cramped in this mean, expensive prison. Only the Sultan would then have imported another polar bear. He was proud of owning the one that held the world record for nearness to the goddam equator.

Dinah still had the memory of grapes on her mind’s tongue, so Morris walked on when she hooted in his ear to remind him. There were several things that combined to console him for the complex indignities of Q’Kut—the ten thousand dollars a month, the Sultan’s erratic friendship, the excitingly strange and wonderful language of the marshmen, the absence of serious personal relationships and responsibilities—but Dinah was more important than any of these things. He was glad that the gradual process of integration into the society of the new chimps didn’t seem to be spoiling her relationship with him.

As he waited for the lift that would take him two floors down to his own living quarters he realised that it would have been a bitter blow if she had preferred Sparrow’s company.

2

Dinah ate her grapes with slow, concentrating enjoyment, perched up in her nest and peering at each one like a jeweller inspecting an emerald for flaws. Prince Hadiq, accompanied by the usual weedy Somali slave carrying the Batman comics, arrived for his English lesson before she had finished. He looked at her for some seconds while he fought with words.

“I am . . . want . . . the grapes . . . above,” he muttered.

“I would like some grapes too, please,” corrected Morris. He tried to sound patient, but his residual bad temper over the shooting of Sparrow came clearly through.

The Prince pouted. His fine but childish features became set as he started on the construction of another sentence. Morris found the process agonising to watch. He could never achieve imaginative sympathy with anyone, even a clever child like this, who could not pick up a language in a few weeks, so he swung away and looked through the window as though he was interested in the unappealing view.

There was only one hill in that part of Q’Kut, not counting dunes. The palace stood on its summit, ninety feet above the dead levels where the marshes seemed to bounce and heave in the glaring noonday heat. In the foreground the new concrete of the airstrip blazed like a white-hot ingot, painful to look at despite the double layer of tinted glass. But everything else that Morris could see was coloured the same sulky khaki and wavered before his eyes as the heated air rose in different columns above reed-bed and mud-bank and water-course and lagoon. Q’Kut was one of those places where you expected to see further by night than by day; when the heat-haze condensed into dew Morris could usually make out the black line of the hill ranges, ninety miles away on the borders of the tiny sultanate, but now he couldn’t even see the nearest stand of giant pig-reed three miles beyond the air-strip.

“You are give me better honour unless I tell my father will make you flodge,” said the prince all in one squeaky breath.

“Flogged,” corrected Morris automatically. But he had seen the child’s reflection in the tinted glass, and the misery of pride made inadequate. Morris hated that sort of thing, hated being exposed to it. And the prince would never have allowed him to see it direct. Really, it wasn’t a bad shot at a very complex conditional sentence—passion finds its own expression. Morris turned with a sigh, put the palms of his hands together, lowered his head respectfully and spoke in formal Arabic.

“Serene rivulet of the fountain of power and wisdom, it is many years since thy father honoured me with the undeserved gift of his friendship. No man knows the heart of another, but I have learnt some of thy father’s ways. If thou wast to go to him complaining of my insolence, he would not satisfy thee, but he would invent some subtle manner whereby thy complaint could be used to diminish both thee and me. Is it not written ‘Ask not of the King that which the King cannot give, for thereby is his glory the less.’? Therefore let us come to an agreement. When we speak in Arabic we will conduct ourselves in the manner of Arabs, among whom thou art a prince, and so shall I treat thee. But when in obedience to thy father’s command we speak English, we will conduct ourselves in the manner of the English, from whom Allah has withheld the comprehension of honour.”

“Their mothers are she-asses.”

“In many cases thy observation is just. But when thy father speaks with me in English he condescends to answer bray with bray.”

“Why may the ape feast on grapes when they are denied to a prince?”

Morris picked up the satchel.

“Dinah will get you some grapes if you ask her,” he said slowly in English.

“Yes, yes,” said the prince, suddenly thrilled. He was both jealous of and fascinated by Dinah. Morris sorted the necessary symbols on to the coffee-table.

“What they mean?” said the prince.

“What do they mean?”

“What do they mean?”

“Good. You can say the words as we put them down.”

white crescent: please

white square: Dinah

yellow circle with hole: give

blue/white square: grapes

black square: (to) person other than Morris or Dinah

“The prince must say please to the ape?”

“Well . . .” said Morris, then shrugged. It was a nice point. Neither Dinah nor the symbol language was covered by the new agreement.

“OK, OK,” said the prince charmingly. Morris clicked his fingers for Dinah’s attention and she climbed carefully down from her nest on top of the wardrobe, dangling from her left paw the forlorn skeleton of her bunch of grapes. The Prince arranged the symbols in a very precise line.

The coffee-table was just the right height for Dinah to read from when she was on all fours, and she did so with her usual quick sniffing sound, as though she somehow smelt the meaning. The message puzzled her. She read it three times, then with a dubious gesture offered the grape-skeleton to the prince, who backed away as if it were something the Koran declared unclean. Morris sorted through the satchel again and made a second message.

yellow square: thing with no name

red circle with hole: negative verb

blue/white square: grapes

Dinah sniffed at the symbols, laid the grape-skeleton down on the yellow square and sniffed at the symbols again. She chattered a little to herself as she re-read the first message, then moved resolutely towards the kitchen door, where she stopped and glanced at Morris over her shoulder. He made a “Go” gesture to her.

The buzzer sounded as soon as she broke the beam to the photo-electric cell. The prince laughed. She looked back and Morris made the “Go” gesture again. With a nervous leap she was gone

“She is not take?” asked the prince.

“No, she will not take anything. But please will you give her a few of the grapes when she comes back?”

“I give,” asserted the prince, “. . . a few.”

Morris smiled. The boy was his father’s son, in his quick calculation of the possible profits of generosity. Dinah emerged with the stalk of a bunch of grapes clenched in her fist and offered them to Morris, who had the negative red circle ready and showed it to her. She sniffed again at the message on the coffee-table, frowning; then, with the same hesitation and doubt she often showed in the early stages of learning a new skill, she offered them to the prince. He carefully broke off a twig of grapes and handed them to her. She smacked her lips and leaped for her nest with them.

Morris got up and stopped the buzzer. For a moment he thought there was something wrong with his ears, but the prince, too, was frowning and staring at the ceiling.

“Aeroplane!” he said, first in Arabic and then in English. “Big!” he added after a few seconds.

Morris nodded. Q’Kut was not on any conceivable route from anywhere to anywhere. The air-strip’s only users were the Sultan’s executive jet and the old Dakota that flew in such luxuries as grapes and apes. The sweating Italians who manned the oil-derricks, up in the hills on the far side of the marshes, had their own strip, but by the sound of it this plane was aiming to land here. Already the prince was crouched against the window, craning for a sight of it.

“Lo!” he squeaked in Arabic. “See! See! See!” he added in English.

Morris strolled over, uneasy, but could see nothing because of the overhang of the floor above. He knelt to bring himself to the prince’s level and immediately saw the big red and blue plane whining away with flaps down and black smoke streaking from its four jets. The prince bounced with the thrill of it.

“Am coming!” he squeaked.

“It is coming. I hope to God not. The strip’s too short.”

But the wings tilted sharply. Now the plane was curving towards the south, showing all its upper half to the glare of the sun; the curve tightened and the gap between the machine and the marshes grew less and less. Now, by sleight-of-air, the plane seemed to vanish for several seconds as it pointed straight towards the palace; and now it was a slant dark line in the wavering sky, jerking among the erratic thermals. At last the pilot levelled for the runway.

“Christ!” said Morris, “he’ll never make it! Those things need thousands of feet!”

Burnt rubber smoked behind the braking wheels. Some of the tyres seemed to be tearing themselves into strips. The huge plane hurtled down the concrete towards the dunes, bucketing as the pilot fought to hold it steady. A wing tip almost touched the ground. The plane slewed, still doing about eighty mph. When it was sideways on half the undercarriage collapsed, but the machine went sliding along the concrete. The blind, tiny panes of the flight deck smashed all together, blasted out by an inexplicable small explosion. The prince squealed. Morris shut his eyes, though he knew flames would be invisible in that sunlight.

The telephone rang.

Morris opened his eyes again and stared at the scene. The plane lay still, thirty yards from the end of the runway, with its tail towards the dunes and its near wing resting on the concrete. Still no flames. The symbol of the rising sun stared from the tall tail fin. The telephone was still ringing, so he picked it up.

“Morris, old fellow?”

“Yes, it’s me. What the hell was all that about?”

“A slight emergency. I need your help. Would you be kind enough to go down to the runway and greet any survivors?”

“Survivors?”

“Some buffoon was sitting in the cockpit with a live grenade in his hand, but it looks as if he dropped it in the landing. There ought to be somebody alive in the cabin, though, so I’d be terribly grateful if you . . .”

“Me?”

“Pick up a walkie-talkie as you go and tune in on channel A. We had radio contact with them, but its gone dead. The thing is, old fellow, that this is one of those hijack jobs—Palestinians, but they made a mess of it.”

“I’m a zoo-keeper, dammit!”

“By this word we, Pacific Sultan of Q’Kut, Lord of the Marshlands, etc, etc, appoint our trusty and well-beloved companion Wesley Naboth Morris to the office and privileges of Foreign Minister of Q’Kut, for such period as shall please us. Thanks be to Allah!”

“Balls.”

“Look, Morris, I need you. It’s got to be someone who speaks Japanese, for a start. And someone I can trust, to go on with. You won’t need to take any decisions—I’ll be on Channel A.”

“Something’s happening.”

The emergency door at the root of the tilted wing opened, and a figure walked precariously out and down the slope.

“There are survivors, you see,” said the Sultan softly. “Carry on, Morris—Dyal and I will have you covered from here. Don’t get out of sight.”

“Oh, all right,” said Morris.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to walk. Before the radio went dead they said just one man, on foot, to meet them.”

“What! In this sun!”

“Take a brolly-man. He won’t count.”

“Oh, all right! ”

Morris snapped the phone down. He found it hard to compose himself enough to explain in courteous Arabic to the prince that their lesson must be postponed. Before he had finished that Dinah chattered nervously at him from her nest, and he realised that he hadn’t time to dispose of her. He’d have to take her along. He clicked, and she came rushing over. Thoughtlessly, as if for reassurance in this daunting and unwelcome task, he took her hand and led her out.

3

Sweat streamed in prickling rivulets all down Morris’s skin. He walked slowly, to lessen the risk of heat-stroke and allow for the pace of the brolly-man behind him. His sunglasses were not quite big enough to eliminate all the glare from the side. He felt a fool, and frightened.

“Testing, testing, one two three four,” he said.

“My dear fellow, I know you can count,” hissed the expensive gadget in his shirt pocket. “I’ve got her bang in my sights. By Jove, that’s what I call a figure!”

The walkie-talkie smacked its metal lips. Warily Morris peered across the concrete furnace—he still had a hundred yards to go. He wished that the hijackers had allowed him to come in a car—the bullet-proof one would have done fine. The girl posed on the wing had a nasty-looking gun at her hip, which distracted Morris’s attention from what the Sultan considered her finer points. She was dark-haired and brown-skinned, slim in her blouse and jeans. Visor-like sunglasses hid her eyes, but her nose had a hawkish look. Her stance was tired but confident, quite different from the deflated exhaustion of the dozen people who stood grouped before her on the concrete, covered by her gun.

Dinah whimpered and tugged at Morris’s hand to be carried. It was too hot for that—but then he realised how the concrete must be burning her feet and picked her up. She clung to his side, shading her eyes against the glare.

“Stop,” called the girl in Arabic. “That is near enough.”

She had the words right, but her accent was appalling. She called again as Morris came on and waved the gun his way. Then she tried French, which she spoke even worse. Morris became more confident as he approached. It was too hot to shout over distances.

“I insist that you stop,” she said suddenly in perfectly good English, clipped and officer-like.

Morris walked on until he was about ten feet from the wing-tip, where he and the girl and her captives formed the points of an equilateral triangle. He took the sweat-towel which the brolly-man carried, folded it and put it on the ground in the shade of the brolly. Thankfully he dumped Dinah on it, then turned and bowed to the captives.

“His Pacific Majesty the Sultan of Q’Kut conveys his greetings,” he said in Japanese. “He is honoured to receive you in Q’Kut.”

The captives stiffened with surprise and hope. Several of them returned his bow. He turned to the girl.

“Is anybody injured?” he said in English.

“No,” she snapped. “Who are you? What powers do you have?”

“My name is Doctor Wesley Morris, and I am Foreign Minister of Q’Kut. I am also in radio contact with His Majesty.”

“Fine,” she said. “You can tell his nibs I . . . we want a new plane, with a pilot, and food and drink. We demand these things in the name of Arab solidarity, for the liberation of Palestine.”

Morris muttered into the walkie-talkie.

“Yes, yes,” answered the Sultan. “A pilot? See if you can find out what happened to the other one. And there ought to be three guerrillas.”

“Get on with it,” snapped the girl.

“Listen, Morris,” said the walkie-talkie, “I’ll have to back these goons up to keep my Arabs quiet, though privately I say pooh to Palestine. But the oil company is run by a rabid bunch of absentee Zionists. I want no part of any of this. They only landed here because some idiots at Karachi tried to shoot their tyres out and got a fuel pipe as well.”

“Get on with it,” said the girl again. “Or I’ll shoot that chimp to show I mean business.”

“His majesty is an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause,” said Morris, “but regrets that he has no plane or pilot available.”

“He can have one flown in,” said the girl. “We’ll get back into the plane and wait—I don’t think it’s going to catch fire after all.”

“In that case you will all die of heat-stroke,” said Morris.

“Don’t give me that,” said the girl. “Come on you lot.”

“This is a comparatively cool day,” said Morris. “To-morrow will probably be twenty degrees hotter.”

He turned to the captives and asked in Japanese whether any of them knew whether the air-conditioning was still working. There was a mutter among the group. A square, blue-suited businessman moved to one side and allowed Morris to see that there were two diminutive air hostesses standing among the men, limp little rag dolls in pretty kimonos.

“We think the air-conditioning is now broken,” said one of them. “We think also the pilots and two of the attackers are dead. One attacker was holding a grenade with the pin drawn, on the flight deck, when we landed, and there was a big explosion before the aeroplane stopped.”

The she-guerrilla’s gun was now wavering vaguely from the captives to Morris and back again. Morris translated quietly into the walkie-talkie and listened to the reply.

“Christ,” he whispered, “that’s a hell of a risk. Are you sure . . .”

“Quite sure, old fellow. I’m enjoying myself.”

Morris licked his lips.

“His Majesty requests you to stand quite still,” he said to the girl. “He is about to shoot out the window by your left hip—for God’s sake don’t move.”

Her mouth opened. None of them heard the crack of the rifle, only the snap and tinkle when the bullet hit the thick glass. The group on the concrete gasped and closed up, but one of the men clapped his hands. Dinah copied him vigorously.

“You see,” said Morris. “I believe your companions are dead, and two first-class shots have you in their sights. Would you please put that gun down?”

She moved a long, fine finger to touch the bullet hole, as if to make sure it was not a trick one from a joke-shop.

“I must point out,” said Morris, “that even by Arab standards Q’Kutis put a low value on human life.”

Suddenly she crouched, put the gun on the wing beside her and covered her eyes with the inside of her wrists. The man in the blue suit stole quietly forward, reached up and took the gun, but she stayed motionless, stuck in her foetal huddle. The walkie-talkie laughed.

“Stow it,” muttered Morris angrily. “And send us a few cars out, mate, and someone to take charge of the girl. You’re not appointing me chief of police.”

“My dear fellow, you’ve done it beautifully. One of those air hostesses doesn’t look a bad bit of skirt either.”

Morris clicked the gadget off. An absolute monarch has many powers, but he can’t gloat at you if you’re out of earshot. Then he walked across to the passengers, leaving the patient brolly-man to shade Dinah.

“His Majesty is delighted to announce that you are now safe,” he said. “He will be sending some cars to take you to the palace, but there will be a few minutes’ wait. I suggest you move into the shade of the aeroplane.”

The man in the blue suit handed him the gun, which he took unwillingly. Dinah started begging to play with it as soon as he reached the shade of the brolly. He switched the walkie-talkie on again.

“How does the safety-catch on this bloody thing work?” he said.

“Ah, you’re back in circulation, old fellow. What model is it?”

“Don’t ask me.”

“Try pointing it at the sand-dune and pulling the trigger. Hold it firm, though.”

Morris did as he was told. Nothing happened.

“Safety-catch on, then,” said the Sultan. “Now listen, Morris. I’m sending Dyal out with the cars—he’ll take charge of the girl. He’s bringing robes and veils for the women—he’ll be there in a couple of minutes. You’ve just got time to go and see whether there’s anyone alive in the plane. OK?”

“I suppose so.”

With extreme reluctance Morris moved towards the wing. Dinah whimpered at him and he turned. More for reassurance in his grisly task than anything else he handed the gun to the brolly-man and allowed Dinah to climb into his arms. As they went up the wing the girl didn’t move.

Inside the plane the plush tunnel reeked of sweat and hot plastic and something else—fear, Morris thought. Animals can smell fear, old wives say. Dinah was certainly very clinging, and it took him some time to persuade her to let go of him and settle into one of the seats. He showed her the tilt button and left her trying to make it produce bananas.

Fear, he thought as he hesitated by the door on to the flight deck. You’d be able to set up an experiment to check whether the old wives’ tale is true—group of animals with strong sense of smell—raccoons?—sever olfactory nerve of half of them—find human volunteers to be frightened—how? How? Why by putting them one side of a metal door, tell them that there may be an armed man, wounded, dangerous, on the other side, and then telling them to open the door—which, they would note, was out of shape and torn in a couple of places by fragments of grenade casing.

There wasn’t a sound in the plane except for Dinah fidgeting with the unproductive button. Morris found it hard to turn the door-handle, slippery with the sweat from his own palm. When he pushed, something resisted on the far side. He pushed harder and the thing gave, reluctantly. New smells came through the crack, a warm, wet odour mixed with the stink of something burnt; but nothing moved. He put his shoulder to the door and felt the resistance slither away. He looked in, swallowing hard to keep the vomit down, and stared at the mess of blood-spattered instruments and broken glass and shabby leather and smashed men. One, two, three, four, five—five heads, anyway, though one had no face—and two of the wrenched torsos wore khaki shirts.

He pulled the door shut and stood gulping.

Behind him Dinah chattered suddenly, and he turned. She was crouched in the luggage rack, trying to take a picture of him with a miniature camera she had found.

“Morris?” said the walkie-talkie.

“I’m OK. There are five dead men on the flight deck. Two of them aren’t wearing the airline uniform.”

“Splendid, perfectly splendid. The cars are almost there, so you’d better come out. You don’t sound too good.”

“I’m OK, I tell you.”

Morris clicked for Dinah’s attention but she snuggled away from him on a nest of coats, hugging the camera to her crotch. He clicked again, making her twist her head to look sulkily back at him. He spread his hands, palm up, making a slight pushing gesture towards her: the I-give sign. Her expression changed to one of farcical surprise as she stared to and fro between him and her new toy, as though thinking it might be booby-trapped; then she catapulted off the rack into his arms.

Out in the furnace air he saw five of the Cadillacs sliding across the runway. He stood on the wing and gestured at them with his free arm, making four of them circle round to the nose of the plane while the fifth stopped beside the brolly-man. In the group beneath the fuselage one of the passengers was now lying supine on the concrete with a stewardess kneeling beside him and loosening his collar. Morris went hurriedly down the wing, but when he put Dinah back on her towel she scampered straight across the concrete, opened the front passenger door of the nearest car and jumped inside.

“There’s a stretcher in one of those cars,” said the walkie-talkie. “I meant it for the bodies, but you might as well use it for that bloke.”

Morris organised a couple of the chatterbox drivers to cope with the patient, a wizened little Japanese still stertorously breathing. Then he called to Dyal who came striding over, huge and seeming blacker than ever in the hateful sun. Morris took two of the robes from his arm and turned to the air hostesses.

“The Sultan is most honoured by your presence,” he said in Japanese, “and has already expressed to me his admiration of your beauty. So it is with double regret that he requests you to veil yourselves, according to the custom of the country.”

Through all the weariness and disintegration their trained smiles flicked alight, like a cuckoo clock striking in a bomb-smashed house. They even started to giggle as they swathed each other in the robes. Morris walked across with Dyal to the girl on the wing. Her pose was of such abject defeat that he spoke to her apologetically.

“We’re going now,” he said. “We’ll send out men to bring in the bodies of your friends.”

She didn’t move.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to wear a veil till you’re in the women’s quarters,” he went on, a bit despairingly now. But she looked up and reached down her hand for the robes. Below the sunglasses her cheeks were smeared with tears. She rose to her feet, towering above him, and tossed the robe away with an arrogant gesture

“I’m not wearing that gear,” She declaimed. “That’s one of the things it’s all about. You can shoot me first.”

From the way she spoke there might have been a vast audience gathered on the air-strip, listening to this declaration of a basic human liberty. At any rate she spoke loud enough for the walkie-talkie to pick her words up.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” said the Sultan. “The two male goons arrive dead, and the female one’s first act is to flout local Arab feelings. You may tell her that I have no intention of making her a martyr to fashion.”

But the girl was already stalking down the wing towards the Cadillac, as though it had been ordered for her by some millionaire admirer. She was a bit nonplussed to find Dinah already occupying the front seat.

Morris watched her out of the corner of his eye as the car slid towards the palace. His own nerves were completely shredded, but the other two seemed quite cool, although Dyal’s finger was on the trigger of his gun and its muzzle no more than six inches from her left breast. She seemed to relax and soften in the lovely air-conditioning, lolling against the golden silk upholstery. When she spoke her tone was adjusted to polite party conversation.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “but if you’re Foreign Minister, who’s that? First Secretary?”

She pointed at Dinah, who was playing with the radio controls. “Well, as a matter of fact I’m the zoo-keeper too,” muttered Morris.

“That proves it,” she said. She made an elegant little gesture towards the startling shape of the palace, outlined on its hill against the ferocious sky.

“I’d already decided that whoever built that place must be absolutely giddy bonkers.”

Morris was so surprised by the phrase that he turned and stared straight at her. She returned his stare, lowering her sun-glasses to do so.

Her eyes, still a bit swollen with weeping, were a pale, pale northern blue. He was too startled to speak, but his mouth twitched as though it were trying to find sentences of its own.