CHAPTER XXIV

The djinni on the floor said, "I concede this battle to you, Captain. I have seen the ending on the screen. But there are others out there, on Oasis and in the void. We'll win to Earth some day in spite of this victory."

Pink, snugly ensconced in a foam-chair with his sprained ankle propped up, his surviving officers seated around him, and Circe on the arm of the deep chair, took another drink of lemonade. He made a face, almost asked for brandy, and remembered. He said, "Maybe the same way you came to these asteroids?"

"No, not that. That way went only in one direction, through the fourth dimension, I think. The people of the continent you call Atlantis built that way for our use, though much against our desire; and the machine they made was so fearful that its use sank their whole land into the sea. They were a great, scientific people, and we have not their skill."

"Atlantis too," Jerry said. "Now we've heard everything, all but the Little People and Pan."

The djinni did not seem to hear him. Its eyes, like dead coals now in the yellow face, rested on Pink. "It was clever of you to recognize us from history."

"You go into bottles, speak Arabic, fly and are humanoid in form. I should have guessed your race hours before."

"We are not humanoid. You are djinnoid. We came before you in evolution."

"How do you know?" asked Daley.

"Our legends ... I cannot tell, being no more than six or seven thousand years old myself. But we are told we predate man."

"When were you relegated to this belt?" asked Jerry, who was still a little pale. "You were around in Solomon's time."

"Yes. He caught and trapped most of my race--we are not so numerous as you cursed rabbits--by the same means you used. One great vat he collected, after some years of the bottles, and sealed up a multitude of my folk and cast them off a ship; somehow the currents dragged the box to Atlantis. There my people were freed, and set about to conquer the land. But the Atlanteans captured them after several decades and, having constructed the terrible machine, sent them off to this forsaken hole in space. The cataclysm the machine made--evidently they hadn't been so clever as they thought, may Allah rot their souls!--set off volcanic action, which eventually sank their country. It was never very large, anyway...."

"How do you know this?" asked Pink. He was a bit breathless; at any moment the being might decide to shut up and die. He had to satisfy his curiosity about the space-dwellers.

"I was one who escaped Solomon. I made my way to England after a few centuries of wandering, of being a minor deity here and there, and in England in the late seventeenth century I met a brother. He had been on Atlantis, and hovering above it had seen the exiling of our race and the death of the land. Together we determined to find the machine, repair it if need be, and bring back our people. We thought they were somewhere in the bowels of the earth, or perhaps held invisible in the machine itself.

"We felt we were the last djinn at liberty. We went under the sea--"

"How?" This was Bill Calico, nursing a broken leg on the couch.

"We are oblivious to our surrounding elements, so long as they are not too dense for us to penetrate. After a year or two we found the machine. It was partially destroyed, but so simple that we easily repaired it. We could not see how it could make our race vanish, but as we are indestructible except by lead, and the Atlanteans did not know of that metal, we knew that they had vanished rather than died. When we had the machine fixed, I volunteered to try it out and see what happened. He was to reverse it and draw me back shortly."

* * * * *

The monstrous thing sighed. "It was too complex for us. First I found myself floating a mile or so off Oasis, and then my friend joined me. His adjustments had failed. The cursed machine had relegated us both."

"God bless Atlantis," murmured Circe.

"I presume you are taking the bottles and the great vat of lead back to Earth?" it queried slyly.

"Not on your life," said Daley. "As soon as we're out of System Ninety, we'll drop 'em into the void. Your damn tribe will be marooned properly this time."

"But they are alive in those prisons!" it shouted, its eyes momentarily reddening again. "Such compression is most irksome to them, and they must constantly shift about to keep clear of the lead in the stoppers. It's inhuman!"

"You're right," said Pink grimly. "It's djinnlike."

"How did you learn English?" asked Jerry suddenly. "Modern English, I mean."

"You forget; when you brought me aboard, in the guise of a Martian, you handed me a lingoalter. It was simple to speak the English of the 17th century into it and listen as modern speech came out."

"That's another thing. That Martian suit--how'd you get it?"

"They had come this far. We found the suit, with its occupant long turned to dust. We kept it for such emergencies. When the space ships foundered nearby a few years ago, we refrained from molesting this woman, thinking that she might some day be a fine decoy."

"You watched me in the suit," said Circe.

"We did. We had not seen a human in a long time." The djinni paused, then said, "The Martians had space travel when Earthmen were barbarians. They came to Terra, and we, sensing danger in them, drove them out. We saw to it that the Martians would tell tales of the horrors of Earth life, and never come back."

"By God," said Pink, "that's why they never colonized Earth, though they had spaceships! It's one of the biggest problems we've known."

"Then I've solved it for you. Will you do me a favor in return?"

"What?"

"Have you any lead left?"

"A little."

"Then lay it on my chest, and give me a quick death."

"Get it," Pink said to Daley. The lieutenant started a protest. Pink said, "My Lord, can't we afford to be merciful now? After all that slaughter?" And Daley went to find the lead.

Circe said, "Why do you want to go to Earth so badly? What's there that you want? You're such an independent form of life...."

"Atmosphere," said the djinni.

"But you don't breathe!"

"We do, however, talk; and we cannot hear each other in a vacuum. We wanted to find Earth again and know the pleasure of communication. On Oasis we had to talk with our hands." It groaned, grotesquely human in its agony. "Can you imagine living for centuries without the joy of conversation?" it asked pitifully.

Circe shook her head. "I don't much blame you," she said in a small voice.

Daley came back. He handed a small rough bar of lead to Pink. The Captain's mind seethed with questions he longed to ask; but the reaction of the battle was settling in with vengeance, and he could not see this great paralyzed brute live on because of his own more or less idle curiosity. He bent forward from the chair. "Sorry," he said, and dropped the bar onto its chest.

"Wait!" said Jerry. "How did you know how to spell _phony_?"

The djinni made a small hissing noise that had something in it of contentment. Its eyes turned jetty, and they knew it was dead.

"It died happy," said Daley to the slim O. O. "It knew it was leaving us a problem that we'd never solve. What a--what a malicious character it was!"

"Poor devil," said Circe. "No conversation for five hundred years!"