He clung to his saddle, panting. Staying up here was a bluff, while he clung to two possible hopes. Perhaps the djinn king could not make the ancient weapon work—that was Tony’s first hope. If nothing happened at all, he would go on down and explain that he had made the former king powerless, and now spared his life. The second hope was fainter. The instrument had bewildered its possessor. The king actually hadn’t known which end was which. And Tony had told him quite truthfully, as far as television was concerned, that one looked in the large end of such tubes as the conical glass object he saw. Now, gasping for breath, he hoped very fervently that his advice would be taken, and that it would be bad. He recalled very vaguely that a television tube works because it shoots a beam of electrons from the small end against the large end. If the antique instrument worked in anything like the same fashion, whatever detonated djinns would come out of the large end, too. And if the djinn king happened to be looking into that end when he turned on the instrument…
Very high and far away, it seemed that the heavens burst. One splash of awful flame flashed into being, not directly overhead but near the horizon. The fugitives had not only put themselves as high as possible—a hundred miles perhaps—but had gone other hundreds of miles to one side so that as much sheer distance as they could manage would lie between them and the inferno they expected to create.
The first flash only dwindled when there was a second, and then two more, and then three. They went off soundlessly, but like firecrackers set off by the same fuse. And very high up indeed, in the icy chill of the heights, Tony found himself unbearably hot. Six or seven djinns breaking down in atomic explosions, even at two or three hundred miles distance, make for high-temperature effects. And Tony knew, then, that the apparatus which would destroy djinns had been blown to atoms along with the atoms it had blown up. The djinn king had, after all, been looking into the muzzle of an atomic gun when he pulled its trigger to destroy his subjects.
Abdul said happily:
“You found them, Majesty! Now none will question your right to reign!”
Without orders, he began a swift, slanting descent. In the thicker air, Tony’s feelings of weakness ceased. But something else occurred to him. He reflected gloomily that nothing ever happens just right. No achievement is completely satisfying. Each one creates new worries and new troubles.
At five thousand feet, Abdul said:
“Majesty!”
“What?” asked Tony.
“You will marry the Queen of Barkut?” asked Abdul. “It seems the logical thing to do. May I begin to make plans for the wedding, Majesty?”