Declare

many ways they are a more primitive sort of life, more crude. Their thoughts are kinetic macroscopic events, wind and fire and sandstorms, gross and literal. What the djinn imagine is done: for them to imagine it is to have done it, and for them to be reminded of it is for them to do it again. Their thoughts are things , things in motion , and their memories are literal things too, preserved for potential reference—wedding rings and gold teeth looted from graves, and bones in the sand, and scorch-marks on floors, all ready to spring into renewed activity again at a reminder. To impose—”
    He jumped in his chair then, for he had clearly heard a British man’s voice shout, “Shut her up!”
    It must have come from the beach outside, and Mammalian was simply waiting for him to go on.
    Hale wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve again. “To impose a memory-shape onto their physical makeup is to forcibly impose an experience—which, in the case of a Shihab meteorite’s imprint, is death.”
    Mammalian’s eyes were wide, and he was shaking his head mournfully. “In 1948 your people brought a big chunk of meteoric iron to the mountain and set it high in the Ahora Gorge, with explo-sives under it. The meteorite is still on the slope there now, rusting—though as soon as we finish talking here I will radio instructions that it be retrieved and ground to dust. Where did you get it, and how do you know it has killed a djinn?”
    Ground to dust , thought Hale dully. This is all part of your plan , Jimmie?—that we lose the meteorite that poor Salim bin Jalawi and I worked so hard to find, worked so hard to retrieve—
    “We got it,” he said, “at the site of an ancient city that had been wiped out by a meteor strike—it’s mentioned in the Koran—south of the well at Um al-Hadid in the Rub’ al-Khali desert—the A’adite city of Wabar.”
    As he began to tell Mammalian the story, and the reels of wire hissed slowly between the recorder’s spools, Hale did finally relax; the meteorite was gone, Elena was gone, and perhaps if he told his own story with objective, emptying thoroughness, drinking as much as possible as he told it, he might at least for a while lose the unwelcome burden of his own identity.
    The Volkov documents had been the initial clue.
    It had been late in 1947 when Hale concluded from them that the Soviets had in 1945 intended to mobilize a covert expedition to Mount Ararat; and when he had made some inquiries with the Ankara SIS station and Broadway in London, and then traveled out to the Hejaz to talk with the reclusive old fire-worshippers in the mountains, he concluded uneasily that the Soviets had not yet done it, but intended to start very soon. Overflight photographs indicated that big new hangars and pools and railway yards were being constructed at the secret research stations in Soviet Armenia, just on the other side of the Aras River from Ararat; and Hale was told by the Bedu who roamed the Hassa desert west of Kuwait that all over the Arabian peninsula sandstorms were lately calling urgently to each other across the wastes, and that hatif voices from the darkness were keeping Bedu up praying loudly all night, and that the roaring of the djinn who were confined to desolate pools could be heard for miles over the sands.
    The most-secret agency of the Soviets was planning to go again to the Ahora Gorge on Ararat, for the first time since 1883— perhaps to fetch out another of the creatures, perhaps to establish some diplomatic alliance with the whole tribe. Perhaps both.
    Hale had come up with the plan to cart a genuine Shihab mete-orite way up into the Ahora Gorge on Mount Ararat, and use ankhs to summon the djinn down to the stone, and then explode it in their midst. It would be an SOE operation rather than an SIS one—and since the SOE no longer officially existed, the only person whose clearance he needed was Theodora’s. The decipher-yourself code message okaying the plan arrived at Hale’s CRPO office in the Al-Kuwait British Embassy less than an hour after he had telegraphed the proposal.
    And so the twenty-five-year-old Captain Hale of the Combined Research Planning Office had set about finding a Shihab meteorite.
    He learned that there was a covert traffic in the objects in the black-magic Al-Sahr shops down by the Ahmadi docks south of town, but the stones offered for sale in those furtive establishments had no real provenances and were often simply smoked sandstone