CHAPTER XIX

Thought came to him before feeling. Pink lay in a hazy world of shifting ideas, of coagulating and disintegrating forms of cerebration. He was not wholly unaware of what had happened, but his groping mind was more concerned with piecing together certain facts and fancies, reaching conclusions he felt were of the first importance. If his body were in danger, it must help itself, for Pink had other fish to fry.

As he sank into thick-witted stupor, then fought up to the light of reason, feeling his mind ebb and flow with ideas and mad conjectures, it came to him that he knew the truth of the giants, and had not stated it to himself before in so many words. He had deliberately shied away from it, in fact, for it stank of fantasy, of crack-brained superstition and imbecilic fairy tales....

Admit it, he told himself, giggling in the far reaches of his brain. Admit it. You know about these critters, Pink.

Yes. I know about them. They are the djinn.

The djinn that Solomon ruled, conquered, and put down. The enormous entities of Arabian Nights tales, whose habits and character and shrewd-canny-gullible ways of thinking were all set down in the books and marveled at by people even yet, hundreds and hundreds of years after they had been written. Marveled, sure, but marveled only at the imaginations that had produced them. And it wasn't imagination at all. It was the real actual goddam solid thing.

The djinn had been at once a triumph and a sad mistake of nature. They were the ultimate in physical perfection, needing nothing, living perfectly independently, huge and strong and yet able to assume the tiniest proportions when needed. Wounds were nothing, for their makeup was such that their molecules compressed away from weapons, to ooze back into place when danger was past. They controlled the forces of the atom, at least to the extent of ability to freeze protons, and probably they could do many more stunts in that line.

All their powers, being far in advance of man's, had been misunderstood and misinterpreted in the old days. So when a djinni let his atoms flow into the most convenient shape for getting into bottles for alcohol or for passing an obstruction he didn't care to demolish, it seemed to men that he turned into a cloud of smoke. Hadn't Pink used that simile to himself?

The fact that they could levitate, probably by control of the force of gravity, and fly through the thin upper air, by some process Pink only dimly understood, was certainly enough to stamp them as minor gods in Arabia and all the other countries they had infested.

Sure, they were a triumph of nature; but also a colossal failure. For they were, despite their scientific powers, too stupid for pity, too insensitive for compassion, and too egocentric for tolerance. Their nature was that of the most depraved human being. Consequently they'd been beaten. In spite of their terrific strength, they'd been beaten by puny, unscientific, bumbling man.

How?

Well, Solomon had known about the lead. He'd sealed them in copper bottles with stoppers of lead, and Pink would bet a buck those bottles had been lead-lined, too. Solomon hadn't gone far enough, of course; he'd thrown the bottles into the sea, and sometimes they'd washed up and been opened. For bait, he must have used alcohol, too, since it was the Achilles heel of the djinn.

Had he nailed the entire breed of djinn in his lifetime? It seemed likely, for the legends stopped soon afterwards, didn't they? Pink wasn't sure. Anyway, there sure as hell weren't any djinn on Earth today.

How had they gotten out here, all the way to Star System Ninety? That was beyond conjecture. How come the first brute he had contacted, old Ynohp the phony Martian, spoke a kind of messed-up Shakespearian lingo? God only knew.

Now he'd discovered them, anyway, and they wanted to go back to Earth. If they got hold of the _Elephant's Child_, they might do it. He couldn't let them succeed ... but then the crew was going to blow up the ship in two hours.

Two hours!

Pinkham's mind beat wildly at the prison of lethargy and dimmed consciousness. How long had he lain here? Where _was_ he lying? Did the giants, the djinn, have him? And Circe?

Circe. Making the most intense and painful effort of his life, Pink dragged his eyes open and tried to sit up. He had to find Circe.

He saw nothing, and there was a weight on him that held him flat on his back. Either his lamp was broken, or he was blind.

Sensibly, though it cost him untold hell to be sensible, Pink lay quietly until he felt all his faculties under control. Then he made an abrupt and violent attempt to sit up. Whatever it was that was holding him down rolled off. He managed to get to his knees, one hand on the rock beneath him, and then arms were thrown around him and a body pressed against his.

The horror of absolute blackness and the unknown predicament he was in proved just a little too much for him. Captain Pinkham gave a loud, long scream of fear.