“Excuse me.”

“Yes?”

“Can you see a ticket on it anywhere? It should say 2354/A67/74Y”

“Ah.” Jane examined the carpet. “Doesn’t seem to be.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Oh.” The young man winced, as if the book in his hand was red-hot. “I’d better just look, I suppose,” he muttered, and crossed the floor towards her. “Maybe it’s on the back of something. There should be one somewhere,” he added poignantly.

They were both standing on the carpet. “Can I help?” Jane asked.

“It’s all right, really, I can manage.”

“What does it say in the book?”

“It’s a…” The young man squinted. “Sorry, I can’t quite pronounce it. Bokhara something or other.”

“And that’s what you think this is?”

“I think so. Mind you, I’m really not an expert. If you wouldn’t mind waiting till Uncle gets back, I’m sure he’d be able to…”

Oh no, thought Jane, I wasn’t born yesterday. This is one of those traps, like the Flying Dutchman or the Lorelei. You promise to wait ten minutes, and five hundred years later you’re still there, and everybody you ever knew on the outside has died. “Here,” Jane said, press-ganging the first words ill-advised enough to come near her, “I’ve got a book here, let’s see if there’s a picture we can identify it from.” She opened Kiss’s book, and as she was rather preoccupied she failed to notice the slight hum, or the pale blue glow from the endpapers.

God, she thought. I wish I was out of here.

The voice was inside her, tiny, clear and sharp. She was sure she’d heard it. Oh wonderful, now I’m going potty. If ever I get out of this alive, it’s going to be wall-to-wall limo for ever and ever.

I wish, she added in mental parenthesis, Kiss was here.

“Did you say…”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing.”

Definitely, Jane said to herself, I want to be out of here. Immediately.

WHOOSH!

“Good on yer, mate,” said the Dragon King of the SouthEast, emerging from behind a pile of coiled-up rope.

“Look…”

“Like a rat,” the Dragon King continued, “up a drain. No worries. Like they say out Paramatta way: you can take the bloke out of the bottle, but you can’t take the bottle out of the bloke.”

This remark was so puzzling that Asaf dismissed his daydream of making the King swallow his own tail, and he sat down on a barrel. “Where the hell am I?” he asked.

“On the high seas, me old mate,” the King replied. “On your way to seek fame, fortune, and the sheila with the big—”

“Please be more specific.”

The King smiled; that is to say, the corners of his jaws lifted, and his bright, small blue eyes sparkled even more than usual. “We’re on a ship,” he said.

“I had in fact come to that conclusion already. What bloody ship, and why?”

The King chuckled. “Because,” he replied, “you’d get pretty flamin’ wet trying to cross the old surf without one. Eh?”

Asaf sighed. It wasn’t, he said to himself, fair; not on him, and not on everybody else. Why should the rest of the world be deprived of their ration of idiots just so that he could have an embarrassing profusion?

“Where,” he asked, “are we going?”

“Pommieland,” the King said. “The old country. Gee, you’ll love it there, mate. It’s really beaut, trust me.”

“England?”

“That’s the ticket.”

Asaf frowned. “But that’s crazy.”

“That’s where she lives, chum. The jam tart with the…”

“Fine.” Asaf drew in a deep breath and counted up to ten. “And this ship…”

“Hitched a lift with an old cobber of mine, actually,” said the King. “A really bonzer old bastard, do anything for you. Knows these seas like the back of his hand.”

Something horrible seemed to slide down the back of Asaf’s neck, only on the inside. “Please,” he said, raising a hand feebly, “reassure me. Tell me we haven’t hitched a lift with Sinbad the Sailor.”

“You know Simbo?”

“Heard of him,” Asaf muttered. “But—”

“Simbo and me,” the King went on, “we go way back. Me and old Simbo…”

Asaf lay back on the deck and covered his face with the edge of a redundant sail. “I think I’d like to go to sleep now,” he said. “And if I don’t wake up, never mind.”

“But—”

“Look!” Asaf sat bolt upright, and stabbed the King in the left pectoral with his forefinger. The scales, he noticed in passing, were harder than his fingernail. “This time last week,” he said, “I was content. Not happy, but content. I had a sleazy little hovel with a hole in the roof, my own poxy little business that wasn’t going anywhere, fish three times a day, some grubby old clothes, several people I hadn’t borrowed money off yet. I was content. And then you turn up, with your bloody three wishes—”

“Steady on, mate…”

“I will not steady on!” Asaf shouted. “Take me home again, now. And that’s a wish.”

The King sighed, filling the hold with damp green steam. “I know what it is,” he said, “you’re hungry. A bit of good honest tucker inside you and you’ll be as right as—”

“NOW!”

“Sorry.”

“What?”

“No can do,” replied the King awkwardly. “It’s a bit late for all that now, mate. You should have thought about it before you came.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Asaf growled. “You got me here, you get me out. And while we’re on the subject, what the fuck was all that stuff with that damn bottle?”

“How about,” said the King — he was disappearing, fading into the pale sunlight that streaked down into the hold through an unfastened hatch — “a nice egg and tomato sarny? Or I can do you pilchards.”

“But…”

The King had gone, leaving behind him a few airborne sparkles and a memory of the word “sarny”. Overhead, the unsecured hatch slammed shut, and Asaf heard the sound of bolts shooting home. He sat for a moment, speechless with rage and confusion. Then he shrugged, folded the corner of sail into a pillow and lay down.

“I hate pilchards!” he shouted, and closed his eyes.

And here’s the latest, warbled the television, on the nuclear tests story. And we’re taking you live to our man on Pineapple Atoll. Danny, can you hear me?

Philly Nine grinned, propped his feet on the footstool and used the handset to turn up the volume.

Loud and clear, Bob, chirruped the reporter, who had replaced the studio set on the screen. Behind him there was a view of blue skies and coconut palms. And the latest seems to be that we now have confirmation of the existence of the giant ants. The giant ants have, in fact, been sighted. By me. I saw them.

The reporter seized up and stood, gazing into the camera lens. After a gentle prompt from the studio, he continued.

So far, he said, we’ve sighted sixteen of the giant ants. They’re big, like twenty fret tall at the shoulder, and they’re making a real mess of the landscape, I can tell you. Also, attempts to deal with them by way of aerial dusting with ant powder and dive-bomb attacks with kettles of boiling water have proved basically futile. A spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund who chained himself to the leg of one ant in protest against these culling attempts has been eaten, but otherwise there are no reports of casualties.

It was the studio’s turn to say something, but nothing was said. The reporter, by now smiling disconcertingly, continued.

More importantly, the diplomatic exchanges over how these ants came to mutate so drastically is really beginning to hot up. I think all the superpowers are now in agreement that the mutation was caused by clandestine nuclear weapons tests, although I should add that there haven’t been any seismic readings to confirm this theory. Where everyone seems to disagree is over who actually did the test. In fact, everybody is accusing everybody else, and the situation really is beginning to get a bit fraught. In fact, we could be looking at the end of the multilateral disarmament initiative here, so for anybody out there with a redundant coal-cellar, the message is, start taking bookings now, because…