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.

"We are oblivious to our surrounding elements, so long as they are not
too dense for us to penetrate. After a year or two we found the
machine. It was partially destroyed, but so simple that we easily
repaired it. We could not see how it could make our race vanish, but as
we are indestructible except by lead, and the Atlanteans did not know of
that metal, we knew that they had vanished rather than died. When we had
the machine fixed, I volunteered to try it out and see what happened. He
was to reverse it and draw me back shortly."

* * * * *

The monstrous thing sighed. "It was too complex for us. First I found
myself floating a mile or so