The door to the small office where the auditions were taking place opened, and a dejected genie slumped out. A voice from inside called out, “Don’t call us, we’ll—” as the door closed again.

Next in line was the Dragon King of the South-East. As the girl with the clipboard took his name and nodded him towards the door, he straightened his hair, shot his cuffs, and took a deep breath.

The Big Time beckoned. He strode through the doorway.

“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this…” he said. The three men behind the desk gave him a look.

“He’s too tall,” said the bald man wearily. “Next.”

Dragon Kings are nothing if not adaptable. In the time it took for his vast brain to formulate the wish, he had reduced himself by twenty per cent.

“Too short,” muttered the skinny man with the glasses. “Goddamn time-wasters.”

The Dragon King cleared his throat. "Scuse me,” he said, “but stature’s not a problem with me. You give me the measurements, I’ll come across with the body.”

“Voice too squeaky,” sniffed the freckled man with the cigar. “OK, Cynthia, let’s see the—”

“The voice needn’t be a problem either,” the Dragon King interrupted, in a pitch that made the foundations of the building quiver. “Just give me a hint, and I can—”

The freckled man looked up for the first time. “Can he dance?” he asked the universe in general.

“Doesn’t look like he can,” replied the bald man, raising his voice over the machine-gun cracking of the King’s heels on the parquet. “Two left feet.”

The King, by now rather flustered, took this for a specification, made the necessary modifications, lost his footing and fell over.

“Next,” said the skinny man. The Dragon King got up and silently left the room.

“Hey, Cynthia,” the bald man called out, “are there many more of these deadbeats out there?”

“Quite a few, Mr Fomaldarsen,” the girl with the clipboard replied.

“Any of them look any good to you?”

“No, Mr Fornaldarsen.”

“OK, send ’em home.” The bald man glanced down. “Except,” he added quickly, “for this one. Recommendation from Zip Kortright.” He checked the name. “Guy by the name of — goddamn stupid names these jerks have — Philadelphia Machinery and Tool Corporation the Ninth. Is he out there?”

“I’ll just check for you, Mr Fornaldarsen.”

The door closed. After a moment, the three men looked at each other.

“Waste of time,” said the freckled man. “Told you it would be.”

“We’ll see this Philadelphia guy,” replied the skinny man. “You never know your luck. Never known Kortright send up a complete turkey.”

The door opened — to be precise, it was virtually blown open by the noise of 1046 genies all protesting at once — and a tall, slim figure walked in, sat in the chair and crossed her legs.

There was silence.

“Hey,” said the bald man, “it’s a girl.”

“Correct,” said Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX. “You see? Putting your lenses in this morning has already paid dividends.”

“What’s Korty thinking of, sending us a girl?” snarled the skinny man. “We don’t need a girl, we need a guy.”

The girl parted her lips and smiled.

“On the other hand,” mumbled the bald man, “have we actually thought this through? I mean, now I think of it I can see where, if we were to make the hero a girl…”

“It’d beef up the middle,” agreed the freckled man. “There’s that goddamn flat spot between the fight with the chainsaws and the bit where he blows up the Golden Gate Bridge. If we made him a girl, we could put in a bit with her and her kids, you know, mom stuff…”

“Like Cagney and Lacey,” agreed the skinny man.

“Excuse me,” said the girl.

The three men looked at her.

“Could one of you gentlemen possibly tell me what the film’s about?”

“Hey,” objected the bald man, “what’s that got to do with you?”

“Well, now,” the girl said, flicking a few microns of cigar ash off her knee, “if I don’t know what the film’s about, how do I know whether I want to be in it?”

There was stunned silence; and the genie, who could after all read minds, watched with amused pleasure as the idea began to take shape in all three brains simultaneously.

She wants to know if it’s the sort of film she’d like to be in.

If we want her, she might not accept.

She must be good.

The bald man cleared his throat. “OK,” he said, “it’s like this. There’s this guy—”

“Or girl,” interrupted the skinny man.

“Or girl, yeah, and she’s got this brother who was killed in Vietnam—”

“Big flashback sequence,” explained the freckled man. “All the footage they couldn’t use in Full Metal Jacket.”

“Only,” the bald man went on, “really he wasn’t, OK, it was just a dream, and in fact he’s hiding out from the Mob—”

“Columbian drug barons.”

“Whatever, and then it turns out that in fact his girl—”

“Her guy—”

“Is working for the CIA, and is actually responsible for a string of serial killings—”

“He turns out,” elucidated the skinny man, “to be a robot, but that’s much later.”

“And then there’s this big fight with chainsaws with this psychotic rogue cop—”

“He’s a robot, too.”

“And then we have the big chase sequence and that’s basically it. That’s it, isn’t it, guys?”

The other two nodded. “Except for the bit where she spends three years working with disadvantaged Puerto Rican kids in the barrios of LA, of course,” the skinny man added. “But that’s really still at the concept stage right now. We’re working on that.”

The girl frowned slightly. “That’s it, is it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” replied the bald man. “Plus, of course, she gets killed in the first ten minutes, so all this is her coming back as a ghost.”

“We’ve already got Connery for God,” added the freckled man. “Him or Streisand. Or both.”

“Both,” interjected the skinny man, “and why not Newman as well? Goddammit, the guy’s meant to be a trinity, why not really go for it?”

The girl considered, and stood up. “No, thank you,” she said. “Good afternoon.”

Kiss winced, and assumed painting position: flat on his back, hovering eighteen inches from the ceiling. Overhead, the greatest artistic masterpiece ever, the fresco God Creating Adam And Eve glowed in a scintillating melange of colour. He soaked a rag in white spirit, and dissolved God.

“Fine,” he snarled. “Why don’t I just wipe the whole damned lot and do the ceiling over in woodchip and white emulsion?”

“I’m the one who’s got to live with it,” Jane replied evenly. “All I said was, would you help me with decorating the new flat. You were the one who thought it’d look nice with paintings…”

“Or perhaps,” Kiss went on, “you’d prefer cuddly rabbits and kittens and adorable little puppy-dogs with ribbons round their necks. If so, just say the word. I mean, your wish is my—”

“If you say that just once more,” Jane told him, “I shall scream.”

Offended, Kiss painted in silence for a while. Under his brush, the splodgy void which had once shown a fierce, jealous, enigmatic God piercing the veil of shadows to lob in the lightning-bolt of Life took form again to reveal the loving, all-compassionate Father of Mankind. Not bad, Kiss had to concede, but the first one was better.

“That’s more like it,” Jane called up. “Much more friendly. The other effort gave me the creeps.”

Gave you the creeps? You silly mare, that was God, it was meant to give you the creeps. I should know, remember. “Oh, good,” Kiss mumbled through the brush gripped between his teeth. “Your last chance for a few pink rabbits,” he added. “Then I’m going to slap on the varnish.”

“No, that’ll do fine.” Jane yawned. “And as soon as you’ve done that, we can choose the carpets.”

“Carpets.” Carpets weren’t what he’d had in mind. What he’d had in mind was eight hundred tons of mirror-polished Carrara marble, whirlpools of dancing white figures that would make you think you were walking on clouds. “Anything you say,” he grunted. Women, he thought.