Tony was, he admitted regretfully, disappointed. He’d marched to his assigned quarters in the palace between long lines of djinn courtiers, who should have dazzled him with their silks, satins, jewels, and furs. But once a slight noise behind him made him turn his head, and he discovered that the courtiers he had just passed were sneaking away hastily, and he strongly suspected that they were running around ahead of him to assume new forms—including new costumes and jewels—and stand in line again. And, since in assuming a new form they also provided themselves with the costumes and ornaments that went with it, he remained undazzled even by ropes of pearls as big as hen’s eggs, and rubies as big as grapefruit, and so on and on. Jewels of that sort, he was able to remark to his alert and highly suspicious conscience, were in rather bad taste. If you tried to pull one off—though that would be bad taste too—it would be like trying to take away somebody’s nose or ear. The jewels were, in fact, not marketable commodities. They were in effect paste, and therefore showed a lamentable lack of imagination.
His conscience bitterly reminded him of Ghail’s forecasts of libidinous entertainment waiting to refresh him after his journey. Tony brightened. He was more than a little tired, but he had often wondered—as who has not?—whether what the censors cut was one-half so lurid as the stuff they passed.
There was a guard of honor in the anteroom before his suite. Tony went through the motions of inspecting it.
Twelve-foot giants looked down at him through yellow cat’s-eyes with airs of truculence. The commander of the guard grandly asked for the countersign for Tony’s personal guard for the night. Tony thought of Ghail.
“The word,” he said, “is ‘Solitude.’ ”
Then he went to look at his bedroom.
Like the rest of his lodging it was on a scale of lavishness to be found only in three-million-dollar-budget motion pictures. His bed had apparently been carved from a tremendous limpet-shell; the walls were iridescent; the furniture was onyx and gold; his quarters in the palace in Barkut were practically sub-minimal housing by comparison—yet he could not find a thrill in it. Ghail had spoiled everything by that unfortunate comment on the ability of djinns to take any form they wished, including chests of coins and jewels. It spoiled things for him. It spoiled even the effect of the utterly lavish, super-tremendous banquet hall to which he was presently taken for refreshment.
He was very hopeful as the affair began, but he fell into gentle melancholy as the djinns gave him the works. They intended, evidently, to give him the sort of evening that would be a True Believer’s dream. And from their standpoint it was undoubtedly total entertainment without even the sky as a limit. But Tony derived only a morbid pleasure from the anguished moans of his conscience as the floor show progressed. To a citizen of the United States, accustomed to a nineteen-dollar radio for music, TV girl-shows and the Radio City Music Hall as seen from a dollar-forty seat, practically any bathing beach in summer, and an occasional burlesque show over in New Jersey, the thing was pathetic.
A normal male inhabitant of Barkut might have been ravished—in several senses—by the crystal bowl of wine which was big enough for several girls to swim in, and by the girls who did swim in it. But Tony had seen colored movies of an All-American girls’ swimming meet. An unsophisticated Arab might have been enchanted by the djinnees who wore human forms and practically nothing else and who sang lustily and danced enthusiastically for Tony’s benefit. But he had seen precision dancers both in person and on the stage. Also, these djinnees misguidedly strove for beauty after Arab notions, and in consequence were markedly steatopygian, which is to say, bell-bottomed. So that when by djinn standards the performance was at its hottest, Tony was moved to homesickness. There is an art in doing the bumps. There is a definite technique to the striptease. And the djinnees, willing workers as they were, didn’t have it.
Tony’s conscience screamed shrilly at the beginning, when he failed to rise and depart amid blushes. But as he sat, a sad and lonely and a disappointed figure, immune to the lavish immorality of the djinns, his conscience was amazed. It had been prepared for the battle of its existence, and was girded for it. But antibodies to vice had been generated in Tony’s system—so he assured his conscience—by the various forms of entertainment passed by boards of censorship in the United States. He was unaffected by the temptations of the djinns because—via technicolor—he had been tempted by professionals against whom the djinnees simply did not stand up. In fact, Tony assured his conscience regretfully, it seemed that where djinnees were concerned, he simply couldn’t take yes for an answer.