Kiss shook his head. “More important things to do,” he replied wearily. “I mean, she can’t expect me to phone her if I’m fighting for my life against overwhelmingly superior demonic forces, can she?”

Philly rubbed his nose. “I dunno,” he said. “You know her better than I do.”

Kiss thought about it. “Maybe I’d better just give her a quick call,” he said. “I mean, she may have started dinner or something.”

Philly put his head on one side and gave Kiss a thoughtful look. “That’d take priority over mortal combat with the prince of darkness, would it?”

“You haven’t had much to do with women, I can tell.”

“I suffer from that disadvantage, yes.”

“Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.”

Easier said, Kiss discovered, than done. When eventually he found a public telephone (he was in the middle of the Mojave Desert at the time) he discovered that all his loose change had shaken out of his pockets during the fight, and his phonecard was bent and wouldn’t go in the slot.

Easier, he realised, given that I’m capable of travelling at the speed of light, to nip round there in person. He gathered up his component molecules and jumped — There is a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation of how genies manage to transport themselves from one side of the earth to the other apparently instantaneously; it’s something to do with trans-dimensional shift error, and it is in fact wrong. The truth is that genies have this facility simply because Mother Nature knows better than to try and argue with beings who only partially exist and who have all the malevolent persistence and susceptibility to logical argument of the average two-year-old. Let them get on with it, she says; and if they suddenly find themselves stuck in a rift between opposing realities, then ha bloody ha. — and, before the electrical impulses that made up the thought had finished trudging along his central nervous system, he had arrived. He felt in his pocket for his key.

And stopped. And sniffed. Fee-fi-fo-fum, he muttered under his breath, I smell the blood of a Near Easterner somehow connected with fish. Or rather the socks. And the armpits. Not to mention the residual whiff of haddock which is so hard to lose, all the deodorants of Arabia notwithstanding.

Funny, he thought.

He opened the door and strolled in; to find Jane, his betrothed, apparently joined at the lips with a skinny dark-haired bloke in a salt-stained reefer jacket and grubby trainers.

It’s at times like this that instinct takes over. An instinct is, by its very nature, impulsive. Instinct doesn’t stand on one foot in the doorway thinking, “Hey, this really lets me off the hook, you know?” before discreetly tiptoeing away to see if it’s too late to get the deposit back on the wedding cake. Instinct jumps in, boot raised.

Three seconds or so later, therefore, Asaf was lying in a confused huddle in the corner of the room wondering how he had got there and why his ribs hurt so much. Jane was standing up, gesticulating eloquently with her right hand while trying to do her blouse up with her left; and Kiss was leaning on the arm of the sofa, listening to what Jane had to say and thinking, Shit, I think I’ve broken a bone in my toe.

And just what precisely, Jane was asking, did he think he was playing at? And what made him think he had the right-?

“Hold on,” Kiss interrupted. “That bloke there. Are you trying to tell me he was supposed to be doing that?”

It wasn’t a way of putting it that Jane had foreseen, and for a moment it checked the eloquence of her reproaches. “Yes,” she said. “And—”

“This, not to put too fine a point on it, mortal—”

“Here,” broke in Asaf, “who are you calling a mortal?”

“You.”

Asaf fingered his ribs tentatively. “Fair enough,” he said. “Hey, are you another one?”

“Another what?”

“Another bloody genie. Because if you are…”

WHOOSH!

“G’day,” said the Dragon King, materialising next to the standard lamp and knocking over a coffee table. “Perhaps it’d be a good idea if I explained…”

Somebody threw a glass decanter at him. Who it actually was we shall probably never know, but there were three obvious suspects. He ducked, looked round to see where the decanter had met the wall, and winced at the sight of good whisky gone to waste.

“Not you again,” Asaf said. “Not on top of everything else. Haven’t you people got anything better to do?”

Kiss froze. “That reminds me,” he mumbled.

“Shut up!”

Asaf, Kiss and the Dragon King all stopped talking at the same moment. “Thank you,” said Jane. “Now listen.”

They listened.

“First,” she went on, “you with the scales and the beer-belly. I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing in my front room, but if you leave now and never come back I might just be generous and pretend you were never here in the first place.”

“Well, cheerio then,” said the King; and vanished.

“Next,” Jane continued, turning to Kiss, “you. I have had enough of you. First you clutter up my flat with lethal gadgets that fly people half-way across the world; then, when I send for you to come and rescue me, you’re nowhere to be seen; and finally you come bursting in here like the bloody Customs and Excise and beat up my friends. This is your idea of hearing and obeying, is it?”

“But he was—”

“In fact,” Jane ground on, “I’m beginning to get just a little bit sick of the sight of you. In fact, I wish you were back in your damned bottle, where you bel—”

WHOOSH.

“Excuse me,” said Asaf nervously, extracting himself painfully from the corner of the room, “but what the hell happened to him?”

“Who cares?” Jane replied. “Left in a huff, I expect. Now, where were we?”

HELP!

HELP!

HELP! LET ME OUT, YOU IDIOTS, I’VE GOT TO SAVE THE SODDING PLANET!

In an aspirin bottle, no one can hear you scream.

This business with bottles. It has perplexed some of the finest minds in the Universe, almost as much as the perennial enigma of why the cue ball sometimes screws back off the pack for no good reason and goes straight down the centre left-hand pocket.

Some say that bottles are the gateways to other universes (generally small, cramped universes with convex sides, smelling of stale retsina), and that a genie imprisoned in a bottle has stepped sideways into an alternative reality. It’s all, they say, part and parcel of the wish syndrome, whereby each wish calls into being an alternative reality where the wish comes true, however improbable this may be.

Another school of thought holds that a genie embottled is only a tiny part of the totality of that genie. Genies exist simultaneously in innumerable different dimensions, and by bottling one all you do is shove most of him out of this dimension and into the others, leaving only a token presence behind.

The French say that bottling genies is something that should be done at the château of origin, or not at all.

The major petro-chemicals manufacturers say that putting genies in bottles is fine by them, but wouldn’t it make more sense to use plastic non-returnable bottles with screw tops, which means you can keep them longer before they go flat?

Genies take the view that getting put in bottles is just one of those things that happens to a guy at some stage in his life, and if it wasn’t that it’d be something else, and there are probably worse small, confined spaces to pass the odd millennium in, for instance coffins, so why worry? This goes some way to explain why genies have never ruled the Universe.

Force Twelve genies, however, are a cut above the general production-line standard, and therefore can’t afford to be quite so laid back all the time. Some of them have responsibilities — planets to save, and so forth. This means that from time to time they find it hard to be philosophical about the cork going back in. Some Force Twelves, indeed the elite few who have more moral fibre than a square yard of coconut matting, even resent it.