“I think,” said Imperial Unit Fund Managers IV, a big, slow genie, “that at some stage we have to tie shoes to a car.”

Awds shook his head. “You’re wrong there,” he said. “It’s horses you tie shoes to. Cars have tyres.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Damned odd, the whole thing,” mused Stan One. “Anyone know why he’s doing it?”

There was a general shaking of heads. “For charity?” suggested the Dragon King of the South-East. “One of these sponsored things?”

Impy Four shook his head. “Can’t see how it’d work,” he replied.

“Well,” replied the Dragon King, “he’s becoming a mortal, right? So he gets people to sponsor him, so much a year, to see how long he’ll live. So suppose we sponsor him, oh, five gold dirhams a year, and he lives say twenty years…”

“That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?”

The Dragon King shrugged. “People do weird things for charity,” he said. “I heard once where this bloke allowed himself to be chained in the stocks and have wet sponges thrown at him.”

Awds shook his head. “I don’t think it’s that,” he said. “I think it’s more cherchez la femme.”

“Find the lady? You mean like a card game?”

“And anyway,” interrupted a slender Force Six, “from what you say, all you have to do to find mortal females is look in the nearest Victoria sponge. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

“I think,” said Awds, “he’s in love.”

A long, difficult silence.

“Just say that again, will you?” asked Stan One, slowly.

“I think he’s in love,” Awds repeated, red to the tips of his ears. “Just a rumour, of course. No idea where I heard it.”

“With a mortal?”

Awds nodded.

“A female mortal?”

“It’s only what I’ve heard.”

Another long silence.

“Well,” said the Dragon King briskly, “if he’s doing it for charity, then I reckon I’m good for ten dirhams a year. Any takers?”

Jane frowned.

“The first one again,” she commanded, “but without the sequins.”

There was a voiceless sigh, and out of nothingness appeared a dress. It was long, white and shimmering. Twenty thousand tiny white flowers sparkled on the sleeves. So light and insubstantial was the material that a gnat sneezing in the jungles of Ecuador set the hems dancing. It hung in the air, full of some sort of nothing that accentuated its breathtakingly graceful lines. Jane thought.

“All right,” she said. “Let me see number three just one more time.”

“Sign here.”

Philly Nine took the clipboard, squiggled with the pen, and handed them back.

Sulphur, he thought. Nice, inanimate, noiseless sulphur. Ninety-nine-point-eight-nine per cent pure. Easiest thing in the world, a plague of sulphur.

“Just stack it neatly over there,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

The delivery man nodded, and started shouting directions to his colleagues. The long queue of lorries started to move.

"Scuse my asking,” went on the delivery man, “but that’s a lot of sulphur you got there.”

Philly Nine looked up from the bill of lading. “Sorry?” he said.

“That’s an awful lot of sulphur you got there, mate,” the delivery man went on. “You want to watch yourself.”

Philly Nine favoured him with an icy grin. “I know what I’m doing,” he said. “Believe me.”

“OK,” replied the delivery man, as the genie stalked away and broke open a crate. “So long as you realise that this stuffs highly…”

Philly Nine wasn’t listening. To distribute sulphur in plague form: first, grind it up into a fine powder. Use this to salt rain-clouds all over the Earth’s atmosphere. The sulphur will dissolve in the rain-water, forming (with the help of a little elementary chemistry) H₂S0₄, otherwise known as sulphuric acid. He chuckled, took a long drag on the butt of his cigar and threw it aside.

There was a flash — “…inflammable.”

Kiss lay on his back, stared at the ceiling, and screamed. And woke up.

Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don’t usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there’s nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.

There are, however, exceptions. Kiss reached out for something to wipe his forehead with, and breathed in deeply.

He’d dreamed that he could no longer fly; that all his strength and power had deserted him and that one day, not too far in the future, he was going to die. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was going to have to spend what little time he had doing something futile, degrading and incredibly boring — the term his dream had used was a full-time job — just to earn a little money, money well within the dreams of avarice, simply to keep himself alive. And on top of that, what little time he had left over wasn’t going to be spent in the back bar of Saheed’s, playing pool, because his wife got upset if he kept going out in the evenings.

Weird dream. Talk about morbid…

His eyes shot wide open, and then closed again.

There must be some way out of this.

There were times, even now, when Vince felt just a little bit wistful about splitting up with Jane. Sure, she was difficult, querulous and, not to put too fine a point on it, on the chubby side of plump. And she had moods. And she didn’t like Indian food or the right music. And her voice, when you got to know it well, had that tiny edge to it that eventually had roughly the same effect as a dentist’s drill on an unanaesthetised tooth; on the other hand—

Lucky escape, Vince congratulated himself. Lucky escape.

Not, he realised as he switched out his bedside light and set his mind adrift for the night, like Sharon. True, Sharon had just enough brain to make up a smear on a microscope slide, but there were compensations. Sharon was what one might have expected to result if Pygmalion had been a photographer working on Pirelli calendars rather than a sculptor. He grinned at the darkness, and slipped away into sleep.

And dreamed a very peculiar dream.

He dreamed that he was asleep; and over his bed stood a huge, monstrous shape, towering above him like Nelson’s Column, all gleaming muscles, fiery red eyes and big canine teeth. And it seemed as if the vision spoke to him, saying

Listen, sunshine. Jane loves you and you love her. If you know what’s good for you, that is. Get my drift?

And in his dream he had cried out and tried to wriggle away; but the monstrous vision had grabbed him round the throat with a huge, clawed hand, and had said — Now you may be thinking, all that’s over, I don’t want to risk another broken heart. Well, there’s other bits that can get broken too, take my word for it, not to mention tied in knots and yanked out by the roots. So you can either listen to the promptings of your secret heart, or you can spend the rest of your life drinking all your meals through a straw. Think on.

And then he’d woken up.

“AAAAAA!” he’d started to say; but before he could develop this line of argument the dream had stuffed a pair of socks into his mouth, lifted him up by the lapels of his pyjama jacket and held him about an inch from the tip of its huge, flaring nose.

“Not,” the dream went on, “that I’m trying to influence you in any way. Heaven forbid. Just ask yourself one question. Is this Sharon the sort of girl who’d stick by you, come what may? Would she always be there to plump up the pillows, change the bedpans, maybe wheel you down the street as far as the library once a week? You reckon she is? Well, very soon you may well be ideally placed to find out. Sleep tight, punk.”

Then he fell, landing in an awkward heap on the mattress, and the dream turned out just to have been a dream after all. After three-quarters of an hour, he’d stopped shaking enough to switch out the light and—