He followed the djinn Abdul out the door. Then he stared. There had been a vast anteroom before his suite. He had gone through the motions of inspecting his guard of honor in it. Now there was an enormous swimming pool in its place, with beyond it a luxuriant jungle of hot-house trees. Tony examined it with startled attention.
“It seems to me that this was a little bit different, last night,” he observed.
“Aye, lord,” said the djinn solemnly.
He led the way along the swimming pool’s rim. Tony followed. He was worried about the message from Ghail, of course. The night he had just spent had been even aggressively innocent, but somehow he felt that Ghail was not likely to believe it. Her request for him to come to the Queen was not phrased in a way to indicate great confidence in him. But there was not much that he could do about it.
“Interior decoration among the djinn,” said Tony, frowning, “is evidently not static art. Things change over-night, eh?”
“Aye, lord. And oftener,” said Abdul solemnly. “We djinn have much trouble with boredom. We are the most powerful of created things. There is nothing that we can desire that we cannot have. So we suffer from tedium. Someone grew bored with the anteroom and changed the design.”
Tony raised his eyebrows. “I have a glass phial in my pocket,” he observed. “Can you change the design of that?”
“It is a human object, lord,” said Abdul with an air of contempt.
Tony grinned. During the night—during his sleep—his conscience had reached some highly moral conclusions which he was inclined to accept. One was that djinn were different in kind from humans, but they were not for that reason akin to the angels. Tony went right along with this decision, recalling the floor show of the night before. More, they were but matter, said his conscience firmly—unstable matter, perhaps, with probably some Uranium 235 somewhere in their constitutions, and in the United States the Atomic Energy Commission would take action against them on the ground of national security. But they were not spirits.
They were material. Grossly material. They knew only what they saw, felt, smelled, and heard. They were limited to the senses humans had. Tony had referred to the glass phials in his pocket. Abdul plainly knew nothing about them and could not mystically determine their contents, or he would have been scared to death. They contained lasf. So it was not impossible to keep a secret from a djinn. It was not impossible to fool them. It might not be impossible to bluff them.