“Me,” said Con. “Three earthquakes.”

“See your three earthquakes,” Nick replied, “and raise you one famine.”

“Twist,” said Kiss. “I think it’s a horrible thing to say about anybody.”

“Agreed,” said Con. “Who said it, and what had you in mind by way of reprisals?”

“My fiancée,” Kiss said. “Your go, Nick.”

“Your fiancée?”

“That’s right.”

“See your famine and raise you a pestilence. Since when?”

“Recently,” Kiss answered. “Can we change the subject, guys? I’m trying to enjoy myself.”

“Your pestilence,” said Con, “and raise you one. This is pretty heavy stuff, Kiss. She must be some doll if you’re thinking of packing in the genieing on her account.”

“Repique,” Kiss said (he was banker), “and doubled in Clubs. My clutch, I think.”

“Buggery.”

“That’s forty-six above the line to me,” Kiss went on, jotting down figures on a milk-mat, “and one for his spikes, makes seventy-seven to me and three to play. My deal.”

“I’ve had enough of this game,” said Con. “Let’s play Miserable Families instead.”

So they played Miserable Families; and two hands and a jug of pasteurised later, Kiss was ninety-six ahead and held mortgages on seventy-five per cent of Antarctica, which was where Con lived.

“No thanks,” Con said, when Kiss suggested another hand. “I get the impression your luck’s in tonight.”

“Tell me about it,” replied Kiss gloomily.

“This girlfriend of yours.”

“Fiancée.”

“Quite.” Con paused. Generally speaking, genies don’t kick a fellow when he’s down, just in case he grabs hold of their foot. There are, however, exceptions. “Lucky in cards, unlucky in love, they say.”

“They’re absolutely right.”

Nick grinned. “I take it,” he said, “you’re not overjoyed?”

“It’s that bastard,” Kiss blurted out. No need to say who the bastard was. “He hired Cupid to shoot me. It’s not,” he added dangerously, “funny.”

There was a difference of opinion on that score. When he had regained control of himself, Nick asked why.

“He’s going to destroy the world…”

“Not again.”

“…and he wants me out of the way first. I call it diabolical,” Kiss concluded, draining his glass. “He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Con replied mildly. “All’s fair in—”

“Don’t say it. Not the L word.”

“War,” Con continued. “You’ve got to hand it to Philly, he has brains. And vision. And that indispensable streak of sheer bloody-minded viciousness that you need to get on in this business.”

Kiss frowned. “Well, so have I,” he said. “Trouble is, she won’t let me use it.”

“Bossy cow!”

“Or at least,” Kiss amended lamely, “she wouldn’t like it.

And as things are at the moment…”

Nick winked. “Say no more,” he said. “What you need, I think, is a little help from your friends.”

Kiss looked up. “Really?”

“We might consider it,” Con replied. “Get a mate out of a hole. Can’t watch a good genie go down, and all that.”

Kiss’s frown deepened. “But what can you do?” he asked. “Philly’s a Twelve and you’re both Fives. He’d have you for breakfast.”

Con cleared his throat. “We weren’t thinking of that,” he said. “No, what we had in mind…” He looked at Nick, who nodded. “What we were thinking of was more by way of getting your beloved off your back. Weren’t we?”

“Could be fun,” Nick agreed. “How long have you got?”

Kiss shuddered. “Thirteen days,” he said, “before the papers go through. Any ideas?”

Nick poured the last of the pasteurised into his glass and chuckled. “I expect we’ll think of something,” he said.

Battered Volkswagen camper van speeding across the desert.

The Dragon King was beginning to get on Asaf’s nerves. After a long struggle, he had managed to jury-rig the primitive radio so that it could receive Radio Bazra’s easy listening music channel; but he needn’t have bothered, because he couldn’t hear a thing over the Dragon King’s Mobius-loop renditions of The Wild Colonial Boy. It would have been slightly more bearable if the King had known more than 40 per cent of the words. As if that wasn’t enough, the King had taken his shoes and socks off, and his feet smelt.

“Twas in eighteen hundred and sixty-two,” the King informed him for the seventeenth time that day, “that he started his wild career / Tum tumpty tumpty tumpty tum tee tumpty tumpty fear / He robbed the wealthy squatters and…”

“Do you mind?”

The King looked up. “Yer what, mate?” he enquired.

“Do you mind,” Asaf said, “not singing?”

The King looked hurt. “Sorry, chum,” he said. “Thought a good old sing-song’d help pass the time.”

“You did, did you?”

“No offence, mate.”

“Quite.”

The King turned his head and looked out of the window. “I spy,” he said, “with my little eye, something beginning with S."

“Sand.”

“Too right, sport, good on yer. Your go.”

“No, thank you.”

“Fair enough.” The King sighed and opened a can of beer, which hissed like a bad-tempered snake and sprayed suds all over the place. Asaf wiped his eye.

“That’s another thing,” he growled. “This car smells like a brewery.”

“Glad you like it.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t. Can’t you wait till we stop?”

“Anything you say, boss.” He drained the can and chucked it out of the window. No point, Asaf reflected, in raising the subject of pollution of the environment and the recycling of scrap aluminium. Deaf ears.

“Not much further now, anyway,” the King said, “till we reach the first Adventure.”

Asaf applied the brakes, bringing the van to a sudden halt. “What do you mean,” he asked dangerously, “adventure?”

The King looked at him. “Gee, mate, this is a quest, right? You gotta have a few adventures in a quest. Don’t you worry, though, she’ll be right.”

“Who will?”

“It’ll all go beaut,” the King translated. “No worries on that score. Trust me.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

The next half-hour was relatively painless. True, the King hummed Do You Ever Dream, My Sweetheart in a Dalek-like drone under his breath, but with the radio and the groaning of the suspension over the rocky, potholed road, he was scarcely audible. It could have been worse, Asaf rationalised. It could have been My Way.

“Here we are,” the King said, pointing with his right forefinger into the middle of the trackless waste of their left. “Anywhere here’ll do.”

Asaf sighed and pulled over, leaving the engine running. “Now what?” he said.

The King chuckled. “You’ll like this,” he said. “Right up your alley, this is. Watch.”

A flicker of movement in the far distance caught Asaf’s eye. The King handed him a pair of binoculars, through which he could see a girl on a donkey being hotly pursued by three men on camels. The girl had a good lead on her pursuers, but they were gaining fast.

“The low-down is,” said the King, “the chick is the daughter of some Sultan or other, and the three blokes on the camels are wicked magicians. All clear so far?”

Asaf nodded.

“Well,” the King continued, “she’s running away from them because she’s just stolen the Pearl of Solomon, which gives them sort of magic powers. You go to meet her, she gives you a magic bow and three arrows. You fire the first arrow at the first magician—”

“Excuse me—”

“And,” the King continued, “he turns back into a beetle — that’s what he really is, you see, a beetle — and you tread on him and that’s that. You fire the second arrow—”

“Excuse me—”

“The second arrow at the second magician, and he turns back into a scorpion, which is his true shape, and you drop a rock on him. You shoot the third…”

“Excuse me,” Asaf shouted.

The King looked up. “Sorry, mate, am I going too fast? The first…”

“I won’t do it.”

The King stared at him with a wild surmise. The surmise couldn’t have been wilder if he’d just said that Dennis Lillee was a slow bowler.