“I always forget, don’t I?”
Even in human form, Nasim was chubby. Her eyes were not the elongated animal eyes of male djinns, though, and apparently she had remembered with some care not to have her ears pointed. But Nasim, naturally, could not imagine an expression which was not intellectually kaput. She came coyly and sat down on the bed close to Tony. The bed yielded surprisingly under her weight, which gave Tony something to think about.
“I’m going to whisper,” she said archly. She bent close—
Ghail, whispering in his ear on camel-back last night, had provided a very pleasant sensation; but somehow Nasim was different.
“The king wants you for a friend because of the way your nation destroys cities in war,” she whispered. “In just a bit of a second, in flames hotter than the hottest fire.” She drew back and beamed at him. “Now, isn’t that nice of me?” she demanded aloud. “Listen again!”
She bent over. Tony listened, trying to think what meaning atomic bombs could possibly have to a king of the djinn.
“When Es-Souk is executed, it will be like that,” the coy voice whispered. “They’ll explode poor Es-Souk, and he will be just a terrible explosion hotter than the hottest flame. And I told the king that you told the slave girl your country keeps djinn on reservations. So the king knows that your country must explode djinns to destroy your enemies’ cities, and he’s afraid you’ll tell the people of Barkut how to do it too.”
Tony’s flesh crawled. It was not altogether the discovery that when a djinn was executed he exploded. Any creature which could change its size from that of a grain of sand to a whirlwind… such a creature could not be ordinary matter. Not flesh and blood with sex-hormones and mineral salts to taste. It would have to be something different. A mixture of loosely knit neutrons and electrons and positrons and so on—Tony’s knowledge of nuclear physics came from the Sunday supplements—and even that was startling enough, but not horrifying. The thing that made Tony’s flesh crawl was that every djinn and djinnee must be in effect an atomic bomb. Which could be set off. They’d avoid it if possible, of course. The djinn king was scared to death of the bare idea. But no human could feel comfortable sitting on a large bed with an atomic bomb next to him. Especially, perhaps, when the bomb was wearing nothing but a Mother Hubbard wrapper and felt romantic.
Tony got up hastily. Nasim looked reproachfully at him.
“That’s not nice!” she pouted. “I tell you nice things and you jump up! Now you sit right back down here and whisper something nice to me!”