Gateway to Elsewhere

by Murray Leinster

  She stamped her foot.

  “I am the personal property of the Queen!” she snapped. “The Queen is a prisoner of the djinn. I cannot be bought or given save of the Queen!”

  “It would be nice,” Tony submitted, “if you could be persuaded.”

  She turned her back on him and started for the door. Tony said: “By the way—when do I start for the djinn king’s court? And you said the safe-conduct includes my attendants. Do I tell Esir and Esim to pack up for a trip?”

  “You do not!” Ghail said shortly. “You will have but one attendant. You will start before nightfall. The djinn will provide mounts and accommodation for you and one other only!”

  “I suppose—”

  “You will go,” Ghail said shortly, “because the djinn king invited you. I go as your pretended slave, but actually to take necessities to our captive Queen.”

  Tony looked at her. He raised his eyebrows.

  “The journey,” said Ghail haughtily, “will be made on the camels of the djinn, which are actually djinn in the form of camels. They travel like the wind. What would be four days’ journey by human travel will be accomplished in no more than three hours.”

  “I was sure,” said Tony in some regret, “that somehow you would manage to make it unsatisfactory. All right! Thank you.”

  * * *

  He watched gloomily as she went out the door. Life, he reflected, had been a great deal more simple when he was a prisoner in a dungeon with a courtyard, instead of a general of armies he hadn’t seen yet and a prince who had to make journeys to the courts of nonhuman entities he hadn’t believed in before yesterday morning. At least, while he was a prisoner, Ghail had been around a lot, in a costume of limited area, and she’d been interested in him, if scornful. Now she seemed scornful of him and not interested. She rather resembled his conscience.

  His conscience said sternly that though an untutored slave girl, reared in a highly unfavorable atmosphere, she at least showed a devotion to duty and a sense of moral values which Tony was not displaying. Only Heaven knew, said Tony’s conscience, what enormities he might commit at any time, now that he had ceased to heed his proper mentor—it was fortunate that this poor slave girl had a sense of duty!

  To this Tony replied that Ghail’s sense of duty had led her to pick out two very attractive slave girls as presents for him, and since he was going off somewhere and didn’t know when he’d be back, he might as well call them in and have some music while he waited.

  He stood up to pull the bell cord.

  Then he saw a stirring down at floor level out of the corner of his eye. He whirled with something like a gasp. After the affair of the dungeon courtyard and the windowsill last night, he was becoming jumpy when bugs and frogs and other small objects moved in his neighborhood.

  Two of the marble tiles of the floor were rising where they joined, as if something swelled beneath them. Tony stared, momentarily paralyzed. A green shoot appeared and grew. Leaves appeared at its tip as he watched. Branches spread out, and more leaves, and then a bud. The bud swelled. It opened into an enormous lush blossom of a violent magenta hue. And then the flower rearranged itself. It became a miniature head—and there was the beaming, sentimental face of Nasim the djinnee, wearing her explicitly minus-I.Q. expression of amiability.

  “Sh-h-h-h!” said the face in the flower, coyly.

  Tony gulped. “I’m sh-sh-h-h-shed,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I’m sorry about Es-Souk,” said the djinnee, beaming. “He’s so jealous! He can’t help it, poor thing! The king has put him in jail and it serves him right!”

  Tony said: “Oh!”

  “I felt that I had to tell you I was sorry,” said the djinnee, almost simpering. “You’re not angry with me?”

  “Oh, no,” said Tony. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “That’s so good of you!” said Nasim. She regarded him with adoring, cowlike eyes from the flower bush. “I’ve been hiding in a crack as a little moth’s egg, waiting to tell you how sorry I am. But there’s been somebody around all the time.”

  “Yes,” said Tony. “There has been.”

  “Would you like me to take the form of a human woman?” asked Nasim hopefully—and giggling—“for a while?”

  “You’d better wear some clo—” began Tony in apprehension. Then he said desperately, “Better not. Somebody might come in.”

  Nasim beamed. “All right. But you’re going to our king’s court. I’ll see you there! I’ll be around!”

  “I’m sure you will be,” said Tony dismally.

  “I’m watching over you,” said Nasim beatifically. “Since I heard about what Es-Souk tried to do on my account, I made up my mind to watch over you night and day. And I will! Night and day!”

  Tony stared at her, appalled. There was a small noise outside the door. Nasim said sentimentally:

  “I hate to go like this, but somebody’s coming.” She beamed. “I’ll be a little grease spot on the floor. Mind, now,” she added archly, “don’t step on me!”

  The flower and blossom and all the leaves and branches seemed to contract smoothly. Suddenly they were not. The marble floor tiles fell together with a clink.

  A delicate tapping on the door. Esir and Esim poked their heads around the door frame. Their faces were hopeful, and at the same time distressed.

  “Lord!” said Esir plaintively. “We hear that you go on a journey! Do we go too?”

  Tony sighed.

  “I’m afraid not,” he admitted. “Affairs of state, and all that. I’m taking only one attendant, and I’ve not choice of that one.”

  “But, lord,” protested Esim, “we have just been given to you and we do not even know if we please you or not!”

  They came into the room. They were young and shapely. They pleased him very much. They were openly eager for experimental evidence of this fact, and looked at him imploringly.

  I like you both very much,” said Tony. “In fact—” He thought back along a lifetime in New York, spent on subways and in automats and over double-entry ledgers, with only one interlude pounding a typewriter in an army camp. “In fact, I think I could be perfectly happy here in Barkut but for one thing.”

  They said anxiously: “Lord, what is it that keeps you from happiness?”

  Tony sighed deeply. He said in deepest gloom: “Dammit, there’s no privacy!”

  Chapter 9

  The djinn camel was twenty feet tall, and it ambled through the night over the desert with monstrous strides. There were bright stars overhead, and a low-hung moon to cast long shadows; there was a camel-guard of djinns riding other djinn camels on every hand. Altogether the picture was one of barbaric magnificence. Wind swept past the contrivance which did duty as a cabin on the huge ship of the desert. The contrivance reminded Tony forcibly of the inside of a British miniature car, minus the instrument board. But it did not ride so smoothly. The size of the camel did not change the nature of its gait, and it would not be wise to burp while the animal was in motion.

  Tony looked out a window at their escort. Ten-foot djinns on twenty-foot camels. Bearded, mustachioed, tusked and pointed-eared monstrosities, with spears as tall as their camels, with monstrous scimitars as tall as Tony himself, with garments of silk and velvet and garnished with gigantic precious stones which gleamed even in the moonlight. A hundred of them, no less, keeping close formation about the beast on which Tony and Ghail the slave girl rode.

  In the moonlight, the djinn guard looked bored. It probably was boring, Tony reflected abstractedly, to be plodding at a mere forty miles an hour over endless sand, on the back of an acquaintance metamorphosized into a camel who would presently expect you to change places with him. This kind of exchange was taking place with some regularity. At least camels and their riders dropped out of formation and fell behind, and presently new camels and new riders came hurrying up from the rear to resume the place that had been vacated.

  A lurching of the camel threw Ghail against him. S
he was veiled, now, and swathed in all the drapery of a woman dressed for travel or the street. She was singularly remote, too. Back at Barkut’s city gate, she had climbed the ladder to the camel cabin—at the height of a second-story window—with an air of extreme aloofness, ignoring the demoniac djinn guardsmen waiting about. Tony had been unable to match her dignity as he scrambled up and joined her in the small, close coupe. The guard had formed up about them and they had gone sweeping away into the desert darkness, leaving the city’s faint and twinkling light behind. Ghail had spoken no word then, and she did not speak now. The silence was burdensome. A moment later the camel lurched again. Tony was thrown almost into her lap.

  “I’m sorry,” he said politely. “Bad road, this.”

  “There is no road,” said Ghail composedly. “We have reached the foothills of the mountains, and the djinn are not used to walking. They wished to carry us in whirlwinds, but in your name I declined.”

  “I suppose,” agreed Tony, “we’d have gotten dizzy.”

  He fell silent again. Another monstrous lurch, and Ghail landed almost exactly on his knee. He helped her back into her own place again and said:

  “Look here! We’d better have some system about this! I know you disapprove of me thoroughly, but in default of safety-belts I’d better put my arm around you.”

  The camel seemed to stumble and Tony grabbed. They were suddenly upright again, and his arm was firmly around her and she made no protest.

  “I don’t disapprove of you especially,” she said with some primness, “but all men are alike.”

  “The observation is remarkably original,” he told her. “I suppose you are also prepared to tell me that I do not respect you?”

  She turned her head. Her lips were close to his ear. She whispered fiercely:

  “The camel is a djinn! It’s listening!”

  “True,” said Tony. “Damn! No privacy even here!”

  He stared gloomily out at the moonlit foothills which now had arisen from the desert and seemed to lead on through deeply shadowed moonlight toward mountains which also were alternately shadowed and shining ahead. He suddenly felt a soft hand groping for his. It pressed his fingers meaningfully. He squeezed back, encouraged beyond expectation. But the hand was snatched away.

  Soft warm breath on his neck. A furious whisper in his ear:

  “I wanted to tell you something! Here is lasf. In tiny glass phials you can break in case of need. Then no djinn will come near you. It is for your protection!”

  Tony put out his hand again. One very small smooth glass object, the size of his thumb or smaller. He put it away. He reached again. Another. A third. He put them in separate pockets to avoid the danger of breaking them against each other. He put his lips to her ear.

  “Thanks. Have you some for yourself?”

  “Of course! And some for the Queen, to protect her when you lead our armies to her rescue—when you are ready to destroy the djinn. Now you had better talk, since you have begun!”

  He leaned back, as well as he could considering the violent and erratic movements of the djinn camel’s gait. He suddenly began to feel better. After all, qualified privacy on a djinn’s back might have its points.

  “Hm…” he said aloud. “In my country the djinn have been subdued so long—they’re kept on reservations—that humans don’t bother about them any more. I’ve even forgotten the stuff one learns about them in first grade at school. It seems extraordinary to me that they can change their size so much. Their shape, yes. In my country even human women can do remarkable things to their shapes with girdles and falsies. You’d hardly believe! And of course they change their coloring. But size, absolute size, no…”

  Ghail stirred uneasily. But she spoke as primly as before.

  “Djinns are elastic,” she said. “With the same amount of substance they can be as large as a whirlwind. Or as small as a grain of sand, though no one could possibly pick them up—for always they weigh the same.”

  “You mean,” asked Tony, with interest, “that a djinn in the shape of a bug or—hm—a moth’s egg, weighs as much as when he or she is a camel and that sort of thing?”

  Ghail caught hold of his right hand, and held it firmly. “That is it, yes,” she said shortly.

  “Then that,” said Tony blithely, “explains why the bench in the courtyard turned over. A djinn beetle was climbing on it. It explains a lot of things.”

  Ghail held his left hand. She ground her teeth. “Thanks,” said Tony. “Since we don’t get thrown around so much this ride is much more fun, isn’t it?”

  Ghail turned her head and whispered in his ear, strangling with fury:

  “As soon as you have destroyed the djinn I am going to kill you!”

  Tony beamed in the darkness inside the small cabin on top of the lurching camel. Ghail held his hands, muttering fiercely. His arm was about her shoulders. The combination made the bumping and swaying and unholy undulations of the beast not at all annoying—to Tony.

  “There’s another thing I’d like to ask about,” he said cheerfully. “When you were teaching me to speak your language, you wore a very sensible hot-weather costume. I mean, there wasn’t too much of it. About like the bathing suits girls wear back at home. And you very properly didn’t seem embarrassed. But that was only when you thought I was a djinn. As soon as you found out I wasn’t, you got all bothered. In fact, you blushed in the most unlikely places… Why?”

  She said through clenched teeth:

  “Djinns are not human. I would not be embarrassed before a cat, either. Or a slave. But a man, yes!”

  “Yet Esir and Esim—”

  “They would have been embarrassed too, before they were given to you and were your slaves.” Her voice quivered with fury. “I am dressed as I am because I travel with you.”

  Then she hissed into his ear:

  “When this is over I will see that you are boiled in oil! You will be fed to dogs! You will be torn into little pieces—”

  Tony’s ear tingled pleasantly. He continued to beam in the darkness as the twenty-foot camel which was actually a djinn went swaying and lurching through the night.

  It had been two hours’ journey across the desert proper—a caravan might make forty miles a day if pressed, but this camel made that much in an hour—and it was another hour before the djinn king’s court appeared to be nearing. The evidence of approach was fairly obvious. The troop of djinn guards approached a narrow pass between precipitous cliffs. It was guarded by two colossal shapes with flaming eyes. They stood forty feet high, in gleaming armor, and they carried battle-axes whose blades were more than a man-height wide, with shafts the size of palm trees. They challenged in voices like thunder. The cavalcade halted. A guttural voice gave a countersign. The gigantic guards drew back. Tony watched with interest.

  “Very impressive,” he said judicially. “But actually, you tell me these are simply djinn who have extended themselves—decompressed themselves, you might say—to reach those rather excessive dimensions. At that size they’re not much more substantial than so much fog, are they? How can they handle such axes?”

  “The axes,” said Ghail shortly, “are a part of themselves. Djinns can take the appearance of a chest of coins or jewels, which seem like many objects. But to pull away one coin or jewel would be to pull away a part of the djinn. You could not. The axes are a part of their form. So are their garments and the ornaments they wear.”

  “Hm,” said Tony, “I see.”

  The cavalcade went on. The pass through the mountains grew more narrow and more straight. The cliffs above it grew steeper, until the giant camels with their giant riders rode in utter darkness with only a ribbon of star-studded sky above them. Then the pass turned, and widened a little and narrowed again. The entrance to the farther and still narrower part of the pass was completely closed by something only bright starlight enabled Tony to believe he saw. It was the head of a dragon with closed eyes, seemingly dozing. It completely filled the pass. Great
nostrils the size of subway tunnels gave out leisurely puffs of smoke the size of subway trains.

  The caravan moved up to it and halted. The leader of the guard bellowed. The great eyes of the dragon’s head opened. Each was as large—so Tony estimated—as one of Macy’s plate-glass windows. They looked balefully down at the djinn trooper.

  He bellowed again. The nostrils puffed. Then the gigantic mouth opened. It looked rather like the raising of a drawbridge for the passage of a tow of coal barges. It gaped wide. Flames played luridly, far down the exposed throat.

  The caravan moved smartly into the wide-held jaws. It went comfortably down into the flame-lined maw—

  And suddenly the low-hanging moon shone brightly on a wide valley with the palace of the djinn king in the distance. It was huge. It was ablaze with lights. And the passageway to it was lined with giants whose feet, only, were visible. Legs thicker than the thickest tree trunks rose overhead. Bellies protruded rather like fleshy stratocumuli, hundreds of feet above the camels of the caravan. The heads of the giants were invisible. Tony felt very small. To reassure himself he said amiably to Ghail:

  “It must be a fairly calm night. If not, expanded as they are, even a light breeze would make these giants wobble all over the place like captive balloons.”

  Ghail put Tony’s right hand firmly in front of him. She released it. She took his left arm and removed it firmly from her shoulders.

  “We are almost there,” she said shortly. “You will ask that I be taken to our Queen in her prison, that she may have the solace of a human woman to weep with her in her captivity.”

  There was sudden uneasiness, even anxiety, in her voice. In fact, it wavered a little. And Tony knew why she was frightened. She traveled as his slave. Here, among the djinn—

  “I’ll do that,” he told her almost remorsefully. “I’ve been pretty much of a beast, haven’t I? But I’ll see that you’re toddled off to your Queen while I see the king and listen to his offers of bribes.”