No! He hadn’t wished for anything important yet! No one was going to take it from him without a struggle.
He forced himself to keep his eyes open as he stabbed the white-hot button with a rigid forefinger.
A thin, shabbily dressed old man appeared, holding something that looked like a gaily coloured Easter egg. He threw it down. The egg burst and an orange smoke billowed out and was sucked into the infinitesimal Utilizer. A great billow of smoke went up, almost choking Collins. Then the Utilizer’s shape started to form again. Soon, it was normal size and apparently undamaged. The old man nodded curtly.
“We’re not fancy,” he said, “but we’re reliable.” He nodded again and disappeared.
Collins thought he could hear a distant shout of anger.
Shakily, he sat down on the floor in front of the machine. His hand was throbbing painfully.
“Fix me up,” he muttered through dry lips, and punched the button with his good hand.
The Utilizer hummed louder for a moment, then was silent. The pain left his scorched finger and, looking down, Collins saw that there was no sign of a burn—not even scar tissue to mark where it had been.
Collins poured himself a long shot of brandy and went directly to bed. That night, he dreamed he was being chased by a gigantic letter A, but he didn’t remember it in the morning.
Within a week, Collins found that building his mansion in the woods had been precisely the wrong thing to do. He had to hire a platoon of guards to keep away sightseers, and hunters insisted on camping in his formal gardens.