“If I said,” he suggested, floating back to ground level and dunking his brushes in a jam-jar of turps, “that what you’re forcing me to do violates my artistic integrity so much that even looking at it makes me feel like I was walking barefooted over red-hot coals, would it make any difference?”

“No.”

“Fair enough. Now, when you say carpet, obviously what you have in mind is a collection of masterpieces from the golden age of Persian carpet-weaving, featuring works by such immortal masters as—”

“Beige,” Jane interrupted, “so as not to show spilt tea. And it’s got to be hard-wearing, because I don’t want little bits of fluff getting everywhere. Ready?”

Let there be carpet, said Kiss. And there was carpet.

“That’s fine,” Jane said, as the rolls of beige Wilton unfurled of their own accord and slid smoothly into position. “Just what I wanted.” Carpet tacks materialised in a bee-like swarm, buzzed angrily for a moment, and flew with devastating velocity to bury themselves in the floor. “I know it’s not what you’d have liked…” she added, with a hint of remorse.

Kiss looked up from air-traffic-controlling the tacks. “Actually,” he said, “if it was my place we were doing up, it’d be lino. But you said you wanted it to look nice, and I do try to be conscientious. I have trouble, though, with conflicting signals.”

“Nice,” Jane replied, “as in what I think is nice. Sorry if I didn’t make myself clear.”

“Got you,” Kiss muttered. “You may not know much about art but you know what you like. That sort of thing?”

“That’s the general idea.”

Kiss nodded despondently and, out of residual malice, materialised pink curtains, a pile of lacy cushions and a four-foot teddy bear.

“Yes,” Jane said, nodding. “Yes, I like that.”

“Fine. I think I was better off inside the bottle.”

“Maybe you were. Let’s have some lunch, shall we?”

Kiss nodded, and instantaneously there was a table. It was covered with cloth of gold and laden with dishes of honeydew and jugs of milk of paradise. “Or would you,” he asked, “prefer scrambled eggs?”

“No, this looks fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. I like yogurt.”

Conversation was slow over lunch; there was still a thin, oil-like smear of resentment over the surface of Kiss’s mind, and Jane had her head buried in a furniture catalogue. This didn’t do much to improve Kiss’s temper (Formica — anything you like, dear God, but not formica) and, being dutiful, he resolved to snap himself out of it by being affable.

“Funny bit of gossip going the rounds at the moment,” he said. “Apparently, there’s been some bloke going round trying to recruit genies for some job or other.”

“Oh yes?”

Kiss nodded. “Offering good money, apparently. Which shows how much whoever it is knows about genies, if you stop to think.”

“Really.”

“If you think about it, I mean,” Kiss went on, trying hard to maintain the affability level. “I mean, trying to bribe a genie with promises of wealth beyond dreams of avarice is like offering a fish a drink. Still, there’s been a lot of interest.”

“Is that so?” Jane said, her face still obscured by the catalogue. “Well I never.”

Kiss ground his teeth silently. Small-talk, said the training manual, is the mortar that cements together the foundations of the ideal genie/mortal relationship. Talk to your mortal and you will find that empathy inevitably follows. Something told Kiss that whoever wrote that hadn’t been on active service for several thousand years.

“Oh yes,” he ploughed on, “ever such a lot of interest. I’d probably have put in for it myself if I’d been at a loose end. Whatever it is,” he added lamely.

Jane closed the catalogue. “Now then,” she said briskly. “Kitchen worktops.”

The door opened.

Nobody walked through it, and nobody stood in the door-frame. After a moment, it closed itself again. The three people sitting at the table looked at each other.

“Good afternoon.” There was a brief flash of blue light and the genie Philadelphia Machine and Tool Corporation IX materialised in the air, hovering precisely one metre over the table-top. “Sorry if I’m late, but I had a press conference.”

Better known to millions of cinema-goers as the star of A Thousand And One Dalmatians II under the name of Spot (and the corporeal trappings of the cuddliest, most adorable puppy ever) Philly Nine floated gently down and folded his arms. Each of the three members of the interview panel got the impression that he was face to face with the apparition; which wasn’t the most comfortable illusion in the universe, not by some way.

“Um,” said the Chair at last. “Thank you for, er, making the time.”

“No worries,” the genie replied. “The job sounds interesting.”

“Yes.” The Chair tried to keep the hesitation out of her voice. “The pay,” she went on, “is excellent. I expect you want to hear about the money first.”

“Not really,” the genie replied, making his body translucent just to be aggravating. “Let’s see, now, I had one per cent of the gross for making this film I’ve just done, which at last count came to seventy million dollars, but so what? All I have to do to make seventy million dollars — silver dollars, if I want — is whistle. Like me to show you?”

“Yes,” said the Chair, quickly. “I mean,” she added, “if that’s all right with you, of course…”

Suddenly it was snowing banknotes. Thousand-dollar bills. Great big coarse sheets of money, drifting and floating in the air, settling in drifts, skittering in the draught from under the door. You didn’t need to look to know they were genuine. For a while, the three committee members were a blur of fast-moving arms.

The money vanished.

“Easy come,” sneered the genie, “easy go. And you reckoned you were going to pay me.”

“All right,” panted the Chair, catching her breath. “Point taken. You are interested in the job, aren’t you?”

The genie nodded, like a will-o’-the-wisp dangling from the rear-view mirror of Satan’s Cortina. “It sounds like it might be fun,” he said. “From what I’ve heard, that is. Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

The second member of the committee took a deep breath. His right hand was tightly closed around a thousand-dollar bill that had somehow failed to dematerialise, and he wanted to divert the genie’s attention. “Our organisation,” he said, “is a radical group devoted to the cause of ecology. The way we see it, saving the planet is up to us, because nobody else is fit to be trusted with it. OK so far?”

The genie dipped his head.

“As part of our programme,” Number Two went on, “we intend to destroy all cities with a population in excess of one hundred thousand. The reasons…”

With a slight crease of the lips, the genie waved the reasons aside. Number Two swallowed hard, and went on.

“In order to do this in an ecologically friendly way,” he said, finding the words strangely hard to expel from his throat, “we have developed several new strains of… of—”

“Wildflowers,” interrupted the Chair. “Pansies, forget-me-nots, that sort of thing.”

The genie grinned. “I know,” he said. “I’ll admit, I was impressed. For puny, stunted, pig-ignorant mortals, not bad.”

“Well.” The Chair, too, found that her throat was suddenly dry. “We need someone to sow the seeds. From the air.”

“Over all the cities simultaneously,” added Number Three, “so as to create the maximum effect. If all targets are engaged at the same time, they can’t come to each other’s assistance.”

The genie nodded; a token of respect, the gesture implied, from one thoroughly nasty piece of work to another.

All three committee members suddenly began to wish they were somewhere else.

“And you want me,” drawled the genie, “to do this little job for you, is that it?”

The Chair nodded. She had a splitting headache, and she felt sick. “If you’d like to, of course.”