Kowalski permitted himself a sigh of relief. Just for a moment back there, he’d been worried. “That’s fine,” he said, “If there’s anything you need…”

Philly hesitated. A few atomic bombs might, he felt, come in handy, particularly when it came to apportioning the blame afterwards. On the other hand, he had just been given carte blanche by a mortal — not just any mortal, he added with infinite smugness, but a duly accredited representative of the government of the United States of America — and asking for a fistful of nukes might just lead to awkward questions being asked and tiresome restrictions placed on his mandate. After his carelessness in wiping out the mortals who had given him his original opportunity, which he had then squandered (to his infinite shame), he had managed against all probability to get a chance at getting his own back. Best not to risk blowing it just for a handful of fireworks.

“Thanks for the offer,” he said therefore, “but I should be able to manage. Have a nice day, now.”

He vanished.

Tinkerbell, Grand Khan of the Hammerhead Pansies, lifted its flower and roared.

The echoes died away. Then, from every corner of the Everglades, came answering roars, howls, shrieks and trumpetings. To the east it could make out the long, shrill howl of the primroses, under the command of Feldkommandant Trixie. From the north came the dull thunder of the forget-me-nots, and the laboured snorting of their High Admiral, Zog.

Where the bloody hell, Zog was asking, are we?

Tinkerbell twiddled its stamens in contempt. The forget-me-nots were, after all, an inferior species; and as soon as the job in hand was over, there was a place reserved for them somewhere near the bottom of the compost-heap of Creation. In the meantime, they might still conceivably be useful, if only as green mulch.

High overhead the F-ills continued their futile buzzing like so many demented mayflies; and, for those of them ill-advised enough to fly too low, with approximately the same life expectancy.

With a high wave of its right leaf, Tinkerbell motioned its column to proceed, and the mud churned around their thrashing roots. In the far distance, a reverberating splat! indicated that Zog had just tripped over its own tendrils.

Of all the seeds in Philly Nine’s bag, only thirty-one primroses, twenty-six forget-me-nots and nineteen pansies had made it through the hole in the atmosphere safely to the ground; and at first Tinkerbell had wondered whether the forces at its disposal were going to be sufficient. As time passed, however, and each individual flower had started to grow and put forth flowers, it realised that its fears were unfounded. The three varieties had been designed to take root in the dry, barren dust of the cities. The rich, wet mud of the swamps was a thousand times more nutritious, and the plants had grown accordingly. Mud, however, is all very well, but for high-intensity carnivores it lacks a certain something. They were feeling, to put it mildly, decidedly peckish.

It was, therefore, fortuitous that the United States Third Armored Division should have chosen that moment to attack.

Ah! Seventy-six telepathic vegetable intelligences simultaneously registered a giant surge of relief. Lunch!

The army’s battle plan was simple. Lay down an artillery barrage guaranteed to extinguish every trace of life in a thirty-square-mile area. Then another one. Then one more for luck. Then send in the tanks.

For the next ten hours it was noisy in that part of Florida, and visibility was poor because of the smoke. When the noise had subsided into a deadly silence, and the breeze had cleared away most of the smoke and fumes, there was nothing to be seen except desolation — and seventy-six enormous flowers towering over a nightmare scrapyard of twisted metal.

Better? asked the primroses.

A bit, replied the forget-me-nots, spreading well-fed roots among the debris that had once been a complete armoured division and burping. But you know how it is. You quickly get tired of all this tinned food.

With a sonic boom that shattered windows and played merry hell with television reception all over the state, Philly Nine flew over Miami, heading for the pall of smoke.

Swooping low, he turned a jaunty victory roll over the straggling column of refugees that clogged the interstate highway in both directions for as far as the eye could see. A ragged cheer broke out at ground level. The poor fools! If only they knew.

The wildflowers weren’t hard to find; they were, by now, the tallest things in Florida. Spread out in a loose column, they were lurching at an alarming speed along the deserted tarmac of a ten-lane expressway. Huge lumps of asphalt came away each time their roots moved. Behind them the earth was a glistening muddy brown.

Philly Nine skirted round them in a wide circle, easily evading the outstretched tendrils of the forget-me-nots. As he flew, he hugged himself with joy. This was going to be fun!

He was, however, still in two minds. His original plan had been an unquenchable wave of fire that would shrivel up the flowers and then sweep irresistibly onwards, north-east, until the entire continent was reduced to ash. On mature reflection, however, he couldn’t help feeling that that was a waste of the opportunity of an eternal lifetime. America is, after all, only one continent, surrounded on all sides by oceans. As he studied the column of marauding flora weaving its grim course, he couldn’t help reflecting that this lot would probably be more than capable of having the same net effect if left to their own devices. What he wanted was something a bit more universal in its application; something that wouldn’t grind to a jarring halt as soon as it hit the beaches Philly Nine stopped dead in mid-air and slapped his forehead melodramatically with the heel of his hand. Of course! He’d been looking at this entirely the wrong way round.

He accelerated, heading due north. In a quarter of an hour he was over Alaska; at which point he slowed down, rubbed his hands together to get the circulation going and looked around for something to work with.

At the North Pole he alighted, materialised a roll of extra-strong mints, popped the whole tube into his mouth and chewed hard. Then he took a deep breath, and exhaled.

The ice began to melt.

A word, at this stage, about Insurance.

There are your big insurance companies: the ones who own pretty well everything, who take your money and then make you run round in small, frantic circles whenever you want to claim for burst pipes or a small dent in your offside front wing. Small fry.

There is Lloyds of London: the truly professional outfit who will insure pretty well any risk you choose to name so long as you’re prepared to spend three times the value of whatever it is you’re insuring on premiums. As is well known, Lloyd’s is merely a syndicate of rich individuals who underwrite the risks with their own massive private fortunes. Slightly larger fry, but still pretty microscopic.

What about the real risks; the ones that have to be insured (because the consequences of something going wrong would be so drastic), but which are so colossal that no individual or corporation could possibly provide anything like the resources needed to underwrite them?

(Such risks as the sun failing to rise, summer being cancelled at short notice, gravity going on the blink again, the earth falling off its axis; or, indeed, severe melting of the ice-caps, leading to global flooding?)

To cover these risks there exists a syndicate of individuals who possess not mere wealth, but wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

Wealth beyond the dreams of avarice? Sounds familiar? Suffice it to say that the registered office of this syndicate is a small, verdigrised copper lamp, presently located at the bottom of a locked trunk in an attic somewhere in the suburbs of Aleppo.