Jane looked around and noticed, as if for the first time, that she was sitting between the wings of a dragon thousands of feet above the surface of the earth. “Gosh, yes,” she said. “Let’s do that right away.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“Well, go on, then. It’s your stupid dragon.”

“Sorry, yes. Now then, I wish—”

As he said the words, he chanced to look up; and the terms of his wish changed slightly. In its amended form, which he didn’t actually vocalise, it consisted of, I wish the other genie, the one who got hit by the electric shock and jumped up miles into the air, wasn’t coming back.

Unfortunately, as the Dragon King hastened to point out to him, that one was asking a bit too much.

“Here, bomb,” Kiss called. “Here, nice bomb. Bommybommybommybommy.”

No reply. And no sign of the poxy thing, as far as the eye (even his) could see. How do you attract bombs, exactly? Bomb-nip? Raffle an empty uranium canister?

“Oo vewwy naughty bomb,” He experimented. “Oo come here this minute, or else no…”

He paused. What do bombs like best?

He squirmed. No prizes for guessing what bombs like best.

“If you don’t come here this very minute,” he essayed, “the nasty Peace Movement will get you.”

Of course, he rationalised as he swung low over San Francisco, it might just be that he was looking in the wrong place. But he didn’t think so, somehow; he could smell bomb — a strong, not very pleasant smell drifting back from the possible future — and it was definitely coming from this direction.

“Come out with your fins up,” he shouted (but it turned into a whimper somewhere between his larynx and the atmosphere). “I have this planet surrounded.”

He heard a click. It was a tiny sound, no louder than, say, a safety-catch being thumbed forward or a life-support machine being switched off. But he heard it, because it was the sound he’d been listening for.

“Now then,” he wailed, “there’s no need to take that attitude.”

Think, you fool, think. Somewhere out there is a bomb, armed and dangerous — a small, functional intelligence, probably scared and confused, trying to know what’s the right thing to do.

Get real, Kiss told himself, this is a fucking bomb we’re talking about here. Bombs aren’t like that. When was the last time you heard of a three-hundred-megaton warhead being talked down off a twelfth-storey parapet by highly trained social workers?

There it was, a little high-pitched whining of artificial brainwaves, like a gnat in a sandstorm. And what was it saying?

It was saying, No thing personal.

Swearing under his breath, Kiss did a back somersault that would have ripped the wings off even the latest generation of jet fighter and doubled back, head, down, in the direction of Oakland.

Thirty seconds, and counting.

“You’re too late,” Jane said, arms folded, face a study in defiant satisfaction. “He’s gone to catch the bomb, and he’ll defuse it. You’ve—”

“Did you just hear something?” Philly interrupted.

“No. What?”

“Sounded to me like a faint click.”

“That’ll be Kiss,” said Jane, smugly, “defusing the bomb.”

Nine seconds, and counting.

Mortals, who tend to think of their lives as the shortest distance between the two points Birth and Death, have a bad attitude towards Time. They accuse it of being inflexible, doctrinaire, officious. In the collective imagination of the human race, Time wears a peaked cap and carries a thick wad of parking tickets.

This is unfair. Time does, in fact, have a considerable degree of discretion. True, it rarely exercises it in favour of mortals (because of their bad attitude), but even so, most of us will have experienced moments when Time has seemed to slow down or stop altogether. The tragedy is that in those moments we’re usually sailing through the air, staring at an oncoming car on our side of the road, or realising with a feeling of sick horror that the sound of key in lock means that our spouse has come home earlier than anticipated. We therefore lack the leisure and the objectivity to give Time its due.

Nine seconds and counting. Kiss, being a genie (and having done Time an enormous favour years ago in a rather shabby incident involving yogurt, rubber tubing and a goat) kept his head and called in, so to speak, his marker.

Sniff, sniff, sniff. The smell of bomb was overpowering, but still he couldn’t see the bloody…

Gotcha! Big steel tube, leaning nonchalantly against a row of other steel tubes, which Kiss identified as liquid nitrogen canisters propped up against the wall of some factory or other. He braked sharply, leaving pale grey skidmarks on the sky, and swooped down.

The bomb saw him and flinched.

“There, there,” he said, “it’s all right, I’m not going to hurt you.”

That, replied the bomb, must be the stupidest remark I’ve ever heard.

Kiss blinked, and then realised that what he was hearing was his own brain’s instantaneous translation of the subtext of the bomb’s computer intelligence’s extraneous drive-chatter; the equivalent of the dead-cat-dragged-over-velvet noise you get when you switch on the tape deck to full volume with a blank tape in it. Gosh, he said to himself, I’m so much cleverer than I ever realised.

“OK,” he replied, “point taken, let’s approach this from a different angle. What harm have we ever done you?”

I’m sorry?

“Us. Sentient life forms. What harm have we ever—”

Let me see. You made me, for a start; that involved being hacked out of the living rock and run through heavy rollers and then heated in a blast furnace until I melted and then poured into a mould like I was jelly or something and then shoved through more rollers and then punched full of sodding great rivets and drilled full of holes with a drill that makes your dentists” drills seem like feather dusters and then packed full of horrible ticklish uranium and shoved down a long, dark tube in a submarine hundreds of feet under the sea and then shot out again, which feels like being farted out of God’s arse, let me add, and a fat lot you care about my vertigo and then…

This, Kiss realised, is starting to get a bit counterproductive. “Fine,” he said, “you’ve got real grievances, I admit, but is this really the best way to settle them? I mean, really?”

The bomb’s sensors treated him to a withering stare. I’m a bomb, for fuck’s sake, this is what I’m supposed to do. Why don’t you creeps make up your damn minds?

“Ah,” Kiss replied quickly. “The I-was-only-obeying-orders defence. That won’t wash, you know.”

So what? I’m about to be blown into my constituent atoms, right? And you’re suggesting that something bad might happen to me afterwards? Grow up.

Eight seconds and counting. More like seven and four-fifths. Fortunately, Kiss’s pores didn’t have enough time to start sweating, or he’d have been drenched.

“How would you feel,” he asked, “about bribery?”

There was a tiny flicker of interest in the readout patterns. How do you mean, bribery?

“We pay you, anything you like, if you don’t blow up. How does that grab you?”

Like I said, I’m a bomb. What the hell is there that I could possibly want?

Kiss turned up the gain in his brain. “I’m sure we could think of something,” he said. “Anything you like, anything at all. A velvet-lined silo. Raspberry-flavoured rocket fuel. A nice little land-mine to cuddle up to in the evenings?”

What’s raspberry?

“You see?” Kiss shouted, waving his arms. “A whole Universe packed with scintillatingly thrilling sensations, and you haven’t experienced any of them. You haven’t lived. But think how different it could all be, if you’d only—”

Of course I haven’t lived, I’m a bomb. And how the blazes am I supposed to experience all these wonderful sensations of yours? All I’m built to do is fly and go bang.