He stood up again, and then sat down. Giant ants. Yes. Perhaps.

Giant ants, he wrote. What causes giant ants? And whose fault would it be?

Pay dirt. Ideas started to flood into his mind like water through a breached sea-wall, and he scribbled furiously. So furiously in fact, that it was half an hour before he realised he was writing on his best white linen tablecloth.

Giant ants. Yes. Yes indeed.

What do you call it when a genie has a really good idea?

Genius.

It was late. Even Saheed’s, which is never empty, was down to its last hard core of residual customers; a few sad types sitting at tables, two more playing the fruit machine, and one very sad customer with his foot on the brass rail.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” murmured the barman.

Kiss scowled at him. “Not yet,” he grunted, and pushed his empty glass back across the counter. “Yogurt. Neat. No fruit.”

The barman shrugged. He was, of course, only doing his job, and it was none of his business; but the idea of a Force Twelve wandering about with an attitude problem and five quarts of natural yogurt under his belt wasn’t an attractive one. He filled the glass and shoved it back.

Time, he said to himself, to start a conversation. More goddamn unpaid social work.

“What’s up, mac?” he enquired softly. He assessed the symptoms; it wasn’t difficult. “Trouble with your girl?”

Kiss nodded.

“You could say that,” he replied.

The barman nodded sympathetically. “Found herself another guy, huh?”

“No.”

“I see. Just plain not interested, you mean?”

“Far from it,” Kiss sighed. “That’s the problem.”

Well, thought the barman, it takes all sorts. “You mean,” he said, “you can see it’s all over between you, but you can’t figure out how to tell her? That’s tough.”

“No,” Kiss yawned, “it’s not that. We’re in love. Head over heels in bloody love.” He snarled. “Made in heaven, you could say.”

“Ah.” The barman shrugged. “But there’s some reason why you can’t get together, is that it?”

Kiss lifted his head and looked at him. “What is this,” he asked, “some sort of blasted sociological survey?”

“Just passing the time, mac. Talking of which…”

“Put another one in there,” Kiss said. “With a cream chaser.”

“You’re the boss, mac.”

“And stop calling me mac.”

“You got it, chief.”

There was a frantic chiming from the direction of the fruit machine and suddenly the floor was covered in oranges and lemons, tumbling out of the pay-out slot and rolling around on the floor. One came to rest beside Kiss’s heel. He stood on it.

“I mean,” he said suddenly, in the general direction of the barman, “it’s not my fault, is it? I never asked to be the one to save the world.”

“Yeah,” said the barman. “Have you seen what time it is, by the way?”

“I don’t give…” Kiss leaned over, picked up an orange and squashed it into pulp between his thumb and middle finger. “I don’t give that for the world. None of my damn business.”

“You said it, chief.”

“But it’s my damn responsibility!” Kiss scowled horribly, and then looked down at his hand. “Hey, have you got a towel or something?”

“Just a second.”

“So why,” Kiss continued, wiping his hands, “does it have to be me? Go on, you tell me, it’s your stinking planet. Why me?”

The barman shrugged. “Somebody’s got to do it?” he suggested.

Kiss shook his head. “Not good enough,” he said. “I’m a genie, right? We’re…” He closed his eyes, fumbling through a fog of draught yogurt for the right words. “Free spirits,” he said. “No. Loose cannons. We do our own thing. That’s unless somebody gets us by the balls and makes us do theirs. But that,” he concluded defiantly, “goes with the territory. We can handle that.”

“Glad to hear it, buddy.”

In the background there was a dull squelch, as the fruit machine tried unsuccessfully to pay out a grapefruit through a four-inch slot. Kiss sighed.

“You don’t want to hear all this, do you?” he asked.

The barman looked at him with old, warm eyes. “I can take it,” he said, “I’ve heard worse.”

Kiss nodded. “You must have heard it all,” he said.

“Maybe.” The barman picked up a glass and polished it. “But maybe I wasn’t listening.”

Somewhere in Kiss’s brain, the dinar dropped. “You’re a genie?” he asked softly.

“You bet, squire.”

“What Force?”

The barman shrugged, breathed on the rim of the glass in his hands and eased away a mark. “Twelve,” he replied.

“Twelve?” Kiss looked at him. “Then what the blazes are you doing in a dump like this?”

The barman looked back, and his eyes were like the view through the wrong end of the binoculars. “Hey,” he said. “You know how it is when you’re bound by some curse to a bottle?”

Kiss nodded.

“Well, then.” The barman half-turned and with an eloquent but economical gesture he indicated the shelves behind him. “Me,” he said, “I got lots of bottles.”

“Gawd!”

“It’s not the way I’d have liked things to pan out,” the barman agreed. “But you find yourself in a situation, what can you do? Me, I serve drinks to people. That’s from six pee-em to maybe four-thirty ay-em. The rest of the time…”

Kiss leaned forward. “Yes?”

“The rest of the time’s my own,” the barman replied. “Same again, is it?”

On his way home, Kiss turned out the cupboard under the stairs of his mind and found it to be mainly full of junk. There he found the ironing-board of duty, the broken torch of hope, the unwanted Christmas presents of obscure function that represent the random operations of fate, the dustpan of experience, the stepladder of aspiration, the hoover of despair; there also he found the raffia-covered Chianti-bottle table-lamp of love, which had seemed such a good idea at the time, which promised to cast light where before there was darkness and which now got under his feet whenever he wanted to get out the ironing-board. Its shade was as pink as ever, but its bulb had gone.

Not, Kiss hastened to add, my fault. I’m the goddamn victim; and she is as well, of course, but she’s not expected to give up being a Force Twelve genie. His thoughts returned to the genie behind the bar at Saheed’s; another Force Twelve fallen on hard times. They could form a support group; well, not a group. The best they could do with the manpower available would be a very short, truncated heap.

I’ve got to get myself out of this. But how?

The inside of an ink-bottle turned out to be remarkably spacious, all things considered.

Admittedly, you have to sit with your knees round your ears and your arms behind your back; and it doesn’t do to sneeze violently for fear of knocking yourself silly on the walls. The fact remains; getting six foot of retired fisherman inside three inches of bottle without pruning off several indispensable components is some achievement. Try it and see.

“Let me OUT!”

Some people, it seems, are never satisfied. There are successful young executives in the centre of Tokyo who pay good money for not much more lebensraum, and are glad to get it.

“Are you deaf or something? Let me OUT!”

Asaf paused to catch his breath. Yelling at the top of one’s voice in a confined space is physically demanding and, besides, it didn’t seem to be working.

If I were a baby bird, he said to himself, and if this was an eggshell, I could peck my way out.

Ah, but it isn’t. And you’re not.

It would be overstating the case to say that Asaf stiffened, because after nine hours in the bottle he was pretty conclusively stiff already; but he went through the motions.

There is someone, he said to himself, in here with me.

Hope he’s as uncomfortable as I am.

Not really. You get used to it after a while.

This time, Asaf felt a definite twitch in his sphincter.