“Oh, come on,” Kiss replied wearily. “We’ve been here already, remember? Beating the shit out of each other with mountains, chasing about across the sky, all that crap. I’m really not in the mood.”

“Tough,” replied Philly Nine. “Because I am.”

Kiss frowned. “You are, are you?”

Philly nodded. “Because,” he amplified, “you’re starting to get on my nerves. Nothing personal, you understand.”

With exaggerated effort, Kiss stood up. “Has it occurred to you,” he said, “that since we’re both Force Twelve genies, there’s absolutely no way either of us can beat the other?”

“Yes. I don’t care.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

Kiss scratched his head. “You wouldn’t prefer to settle this by reference to some sort of game of chance, thereby introducing a potentially decisive random element?”

“Not really. Two reasons. One, you’d cheat. Two, I want to bash your head in, and drawing lots would deprive me of the opportunity.”

“I wouldn’t cheat.”

“Says you.”

“When have I ever cheated at anything?”

“Hah! Can you spare half an hour?”

“I resent that.”

“You were supposed to.”

The light bulb beloved of cartoonists lit up in Kiss’s head. “It’s no good trying to provoke me,” he said. “Sticks and stones may break my bones…”

“Good, I’d like to try that.”

“You know what your trouble is, Philly? You’re unregenerate.”

“That’s probably the nicest thing anybody’s ever said about me.”

“It needn’t be drawing lots, you know. We could try cutting a pack of cards, or throwing dice. Or snakes and ladders. Best of five games. Wouldn’t that be more fun than scurrying round trying to nut each other with granite outcrops?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

Kiss grinned. Blessed, he’d read on the back of a cornflake packet once, are the peacemakers, and he’d done his best. That, he felt, qualified him for the moral high ground; and the nice thing about the moral high ground was being able to chuck rocks off it on to the heads of the unregenerate bastards down below.

“In that case…” he said.

“You’re not going to believe it,” muttered a technician in Bunker A, “but one of our missiles has gone off.”

“What?” The Controller swivelled round in his chair. “And I missed it?”

“Presumably. You can’t remember pressing anything marked FIRE, can you?”

“Just my bloody luck,” grumbled the Controller. “We start World War Three, and I miss it. That’s a real bummer, that is. It would have been something to tell my grandchildr…”

He tailed off as the inherent contradiction hit him. The other inhabitants of the bunker shrugged.

“Never mind,” said the wireless operator. “We’ve got plenty more where that one came from. Now, try and remember what it was that you did, exactly.”

“More wine,” breathed the carpet heavily. “Go on, let’s finish off the bottle.”

The atomic bomb shook its warhead. Nuclear weapons aren’t accustomed to intoxicating liquor, and it was starting to see double. All it wanted right now was to go home and sleep it off.

“A brandy, then? Coffee? We could go back to my place and have a coffee.”

It occurred to the bomb that if it showed up back at the silo with its exhaust residues smelling of drink, it would have some explaining to do. It nodded, and lurched against the table for support. Suddenly it didn’t feel too well.

“Waiter,” said the carpet, “the bill, please.”

The waiter was there instantly, assuring the carpet that this one was on the house, and could it please take its friend somewhere else quickly, because…

The bomb hiccupped. Geiger counters on three continents danced a tarantella. The waiter threw himself under the table and started to pray.

Cautiously, the bomb got up and promptly fell over. Fortunately for generations of cartographers yet unborn, it fell into the carpet, which lifted gracefully into the air and flew away.

Justin chose that particular moment to wake up.

He opened his eyes. Next to him, he noticed, there was a big black cylindrical thing, like a cross between a sea-lion and a fire extinguisher. There was stencilled writing on its side: THIS WAY UP and HANDLE LIKE EGGS and DANGER! The casing was warm.

The shop! He remembered about the shop. He glanced at his watch; Uncle would be home by now, and he’d be absolutely livid. He had to get back to the shop as quickly as possible.

“Excuse me,” he said.

The carpet frowned at him; that is to say, some of the more intricate woven motifs seemed to crowd more closely together.

“Not now,” it hissed. “Can’t you see I’ve got company?”

“We’ve got to get back to the shop,” Julian said. “Now.”

“That’s all right,” the carpet replied in a loud whisper. “That’s exactly where we’re going right now. Be there in about five minutes.”

Julian breathed a sigh of relief and snuggled up closer to the warm flank of the ICBM, which had started to tick.

“That’s all right, then,” he said.

Never in the history of superhuman conflict have two Force Twelves ever tried to fight it out to the bitter end.

Generally speaking, they’ve got more sense. They know that it’s next best thing to impossible — nothing is definitively impossible in an infinite Universe, but there’s such a thing as so nearly completely impossible that even an insurance company would bet on it never happening — for either participant to kill the other, or even put him out of action for more than a minute or so. It’s a simple fact that, in this dimension at least, genies can’t be killed or injured, although they can of course do a hell of a lot of damage to anything else in the vicinity. Think of a bar-room brawl in a John Wayne Western, and you get the general idea.

They can, however, feel pain; and so they do their level best to avoid fighting each other in any meaningful sense. A direct hit from a mountain hurts, and is best avoided for that very reason.

The battle between Kiss and Philly Nine was, therefore, something rather special; and when word reached the back bar of Saheed’s, there was a sudden and undignified scramble for the exit. This was going to be something to see.

“GO ON, YOU BLOODY FAIRY, RIP HIS EARS OFF!” shouted a small Force Two, who had climbed a lamppost to get a better view.

“Which one are you cheering for?” asked a colleague.

The Force Two shrugged.

“Both of them,” he replied. “I mean, it’s bound to be a draw, so… COME ON, PUT THE BOOT IN! STOP FARTING AROUND AND BREAK SOMETHING!”

“But if neither of them’s going to win, what’s the point in cheering at all?”

The Force Two shrugged. “It’s a poor heart that never rejoices,” he replied. “CALL THAT A RABBIT PUNCH? MY GRANNY HITS HARDER THAN THAT.”

“As I recall,” commented the other genie, “your granny was Cyclone Mavis. Wasn’t she the one that pulled that coral island off Sumatra right up by the roots and plonked it down again fifty miles to the east?”

“So I’m being factually correct. Where’s the harm in that?”

Half an hour later, the two combatants paused for a breather.

“It’s only a small point,” panted Kiss, picking shards of splintered basalt out of his knees, “but what are we going to do about paying for the breakages?”

“Split ’em between us, I suppose,” Philly replied, lifting a small Alp off his ankle and discarding it. “That’s probably simpler than trying to keep tabs as we go along.”

“Fair enough,” Kiss replied. “Otherwise it’d be like trying to, work out the bill in a restaurant. You know, who had what, I thought it was you that ordered the extra nan bread, that sort of thing.”

“Ready for some more?”

“Yeah, go on.”

“Or do you want to phone whatsername? She’s probably wondering where you’ve got to.”