"You go into bottles, speak Arabic, fly and are humanoid in form. I should have guessed your race hours before."
"We are not humanoid. You are djinnoid. We came before you in evolution."
"How do you know?" asked Daley.
"Our legends ... I cannot tell, being no more than six or seven thousand years old myself. But we are told we predate man."
"When were you relegated to this belt?" asked Jerry, who was still a little pale. "You were around in Solomon's time."
"Yes. He caught and trapped most of my race—we are not so numerous as you cursed rabbits—by the same means you used. One great vat he collected, after some years of the bottles, and sealed up a multitude of my folk and cast them off a ship; somehow the currents dragged the box to Atlantis. There my people were freed, and set about to conquer the land. But the Atlanteans captured them after several decades and, having constructed the terrible machine, sent them off to this forsaken hole in space. The cataclysm the machine made—evidently they hadn't been so clever as they thought, may Allah rot their souls!—set off volcanic action, which eventually sank their country. It was never very large, anyway...."
"How do you know this?" asked Pink. He was a bit breathless; at any moment the being might decide to shut up and die. He had to satisfy his curiosity about the space-dwellers.
"I was one who escaped Solomon. I made my way to England after a few centuries of wandering, of being a minor deity here and there, and in England in the late seventeenth century I met a brother. He had been on Atlantis, and hovering above it had seen the exiling of our race and the death of the land. Together we determined to find the machine, repair it if need be, and bring back our people. We thought they were somewhere in the bowels of the earth, or perhaps held invisible in the machine itself.
"We felt we were the last djinn at liberty. We went under the sea—"
"How?" This was Bill Calico, nursing a broken leg on the couch.