Hour of the Gremlins

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Ah, sure, and so much isn't needful, surely—" began Baneen.

  "PRODUCE IT!"

  "Wait!" Rolf swallowed hard. "You mean there really is—" He put his arms protectively around Mr. Sheperton's neck. "You're not going to sic any dragon on my dog—"

  "Let it come," snarled Mr. Sheperton, raking the ground with his forepaws. "By St. George, I'll meet the creature tooth to tooth and nail to nail!"

  "Shep, be quiet, won't you?" said Rolf desperately. "Lugh—" Lugh was standing with his arms folded, staring at Baneen, who was unhappily making passes in the air with his hands. Around the Hollow, all the other gremlins had fallen silent and were standing, watching. A puff of red smoke billowed up between Baneen's hands, and the little gremlin jumped back.

  Rolf shoved himself hastily in front of Mr. Sheperton, facing the smoke.

  "Wait!" he cried. "If anything happens to Shep I won't lift a hand to help you get your kite—"

  "Too late," said Lugh, grimly.

  The red smoke thinned—revealing not a large and fearsome creature with scales and fiery breath, but a small round table with a green tablecloth and a small white structure, something like a bird house, sitting in the middle of it.

  "What?" said Rolf, staring at it.

  "Baneen!" snapped Lugh commandingly. Baneen gulped and turned toward the little house.

  "Mighty dragon of mighty Gremla!" he piped. "Come forth! Come forth and slay!"

  From the dark doorway of the birdhouse came a small puff of smoke, then nothing for a few seconds, then another puff of smoke. Finally a third puff of smoke appeared with a tiny flicker of yellow flame in the midst of it.

  "Come forth, dragon!" cried Baneen, in a high, desperate voice. "We command you!"

  A tiny green dragon-head poked itself out of the opening, looked around, sighed heavily and withdrew. There was a metallic rattling sound inside the bird house, another sigh, and a small voice squeaked thinly. "Slay! Slay!"

  The dragon came dancing out of the bird house on to the table, a minuscule sword in each of its front paws.

  "Slay! Slay!" it cried, making threatening gestures all around with the swords and puffing out small round puffs of smoke with an occasional flicker of flame in them. "Slay! Slay . . . slay . . . sl . . ."

  The dragon began to pant. The flame disappeared entirely and the puffs of smoke themselves grew thin. The swords it held began to droop.

  " . . . Slay . . ." the dragon wheezed. It looked appealingly at Baneen. "Slay . . . how much . . . longer? I'm . . . slay . . . not as young as I . . . slay . . . used to be, you know. . . ."

  "Enough!" said Lugh abruptly with a wave of his hand. "Back into your house and rest easy. The word of Lugh of the Long Hand is that you won't be called on for at least another ten thousand years."

  "Huff . . . thank you . . . sir . . ." panted the dragon. It withdrew into its house; and house, table and all, disappeared in another puff of green smoke.

  "Back to work, all the rest of you." The other gremlins returned to their activities.

  "Let that settle the matter, then!" snapped Lugh. Lugh stalked off. Rolf, Rita, and Mr. Sheperton were left facing a crestfallen Baneen.

  "Well, well," grumped the dog in a curiously apologetic tone of voice. "Didn't mean to put you on the spot, Baneen, old man. Didn't really believe you had a dragon. Apologies, I'm sure."

  "Ah, now, and that's kind of you, Mr. Sheperton," said Baneen, sadly. "But that great monster Lugh had the right of it. It was me own fault for threatening you with the poor creature. Sure, and my tongue clean ran away with me."

  "Say no more," gruffed Mr. Sheperton.

  "But it was a full-sized dragon, once, indeed it was," said Baneen, looking appealingly at the dog and the two humans alike. "Back on bright and dusty Gremla. The personal dragon of the House of Lugh, full twenty cubits in height and forty-six cubits long. However, it was necessary to shrink it down a bit in order to bring it to this Earth of yours; and as I've mentioned before—the watery place that it is here, not even Lugh could grow the creature back to its proper size again—not that we'd have wanted to risk letting it run around loose and maybe get killed off, like all your native dragons were, back in the days of the knights. Ah, it's cruel they were to the native dragons, your iron ancestors, murdering them on sight; and all in the name of honor and glory."

  Baneen sighed heavily. Rolf found himself sighing right along with the small gremlin. A few dragons, still alive, could have made modern life much more interesting.

  9

  "What was it Baneen and the other gremlin—" began Rita as they were cycling home.

  "O'Rigami," said Rolf. "He's the Grand Engineer."

  "Oh?" Rita said. "What were he and Baneen talking to you about just before we left?"

  "The blueprints," said Rolf, still deep in his own thoughts. "I don't know why they can't steal their own blueprints instead of leaving it up to me for everything."

  "They want you to steal a blueprint?" cried Rita. "A blueprint of what?"

  "Of the spacecraft's life-support system," Rolf answered. "I told them I couldn't. Even if I could get into Dad's office and even if the blueprints were there for me to find, I wouldn't recognize which one was the right one even if I saw it. I'm going to get them a poster, instead."

  "A poster?"

  "Sure," Rolf glanced at her as he pedaled. "You remember that wall-poster I got out at the Cape Kennedy Visitor's Center last May? The one with the chart on the back of what the spacecraft controls look like."

  "But that's not the same thing as a blueprint," Rita said.

  "I know, but for gremlins it doesn't make much difference, I guess." Rolf thought back to the way O'Rigami had explained it all to him. "It's only necessary for O'Rigami to touch the Speciar Virtue—"

  "The what?" asked Rita.

  "The Speciar Virtue . . ."

  "You sound like you've got a Japanese accent."

  "It's a gremlin accent," said Rolf, gloomily. "One of them, anyway. I meant the Special Virtue of an object. O'Rigami says that all he needs to do is touch the Special Virtue of the spacecraft to the Magical Device—the space kite, that is. I'm just hoping that there's the right Special Virtue in my poster." He shook his head. "Gremlin magic doesn't work the way our science does."

  Rita said, "I don't understand it."

  "Neither do I," admitted Rolf. "Anyway, I hope the poster works as well as the blueprints for O'Rigami. But that's the easy part. It's getting up on the launch tower that worries me. I've got to do that tonight."

  Mr. Sheperton, who had been trotting along between the two bikes, muttered, "Tomfoolery, all this gremlin nonsense."

  Rolf frowned at the dog, then looked back at Rita. "That's why you've got to help me."

  "Me?"

  "Well," said Rolf. "I can't get into the Space Center and up to the launch tower all by myself. Your dad checks the men on the gates every night. If you went there because you wanted to talk to him, I was thinking maybe you could keep his attention while I sneaked in—"

  "Rolf!" Rita was clearly upset. "I couldn't do that."

  "Then we're done for."

  "Not we. You," said Rita, a little coldly.

  "I mean all of us, the gremlins, the space program, everything."

  Rita stared at him again. He could feel her eyes searching through him as he pedaled straight down the road, toward the setting sun.

  "Why do you say the space program and . . . everything?" she asked at last.

  "Because," he said, looking at her again, "I think Lugh can really keep the rocket from going up, if he wants to. Dad's always talking about the millions of parts in every rocket and how each one has to work just right. If Lugh can stop just a few of them, important ones, from working, nothing would happen. Or the whole rocket might blow up!"

  "He wouldn't do that! Would he?"

  Rolf shrugged. "He's got some temper. I saw him demolish a bulldozer—zowie! Just like that."

  Rita nodded her head. "If the rocket d
oesn't go up—or blows up—that would cause trouble for the whole space program, all right."

  "You know it," said Rolf.

  "I . . . well, what good is it going to do, your getting up in the launch tower?"

  "I've got to attach the kite onto the spacecraft," Rolf said.

  Rita said nothing for a long moment.

  "I don't know . . ." she said. "Why did you start out helping them, in the first place?"

  She stared penetratingly at him. He rode along for a few seconds, scowling at the road.

  "Baneen told me I could have a Great Wish—the same sort of thing I guess you get if you pull their Corkscrew out of its case. I asked them to clean up all the pollution and make the ecology safe and he gave me the word of Baneen they would, just as soon as I'd helped them."

  "Did you ask for his gremlinish word?" Rita asked.

  Rolf shook his head.

  "I didn't know about gremlinish words then," he said. "I suppose I should have."

  "You'd better now."

  "I guess. Only . . ." he hesitated. "You know, the more I think of it, the more I think the gremlins just can't do it. Maybe I should have suspected when Baneen agreed just like that."

  "Can't do it?" She was watching him as they rode along.

  "Not really," he growled. "How can they? Cleaning up all the pollution in the world is too big a job, for one thing. And even if they could clean it up, how could they protect the environment from now on without staying on the job to protect it? In fact, if they could do all that, how come they haven't done it before on their own?"

  He shook his head.

  "No," he said, "the more I think of it, the only way anything that big can be done would be with all humans and all gremlins working together."

  "Then that's what you want to ask for," said Rita.

  "How can I?" he said. "I can't make them promise to stay here as the price for my helping them get away. They can't do both things at the same time."

  "Rolf," she said suddenly and energetically, "you don't make any sense at all! If this is the way you feel, how come you're helping them leave at all?"

  He shrugged.

  "I guess . . ." he said, slowly, "I guess it's because I suppose they've got a right to go home—just like the animals here in the Preserve have got a right to live without being hunted and the brown pelicans have got a right not to have the shells of their eggs weakened by DDT pollution."

  They rode along in silence for a little while.

  "It's all right," said Rita after a while. "I'll help you."

  Rolf lifted his head.

  "Great," he said.

  "Terrible!" groused Mr. Sheperton.

  At seven-thirty that night, Rolf and Shep, stood just outside the Gate Number Twelve of the Space Center. Rolf straddled his bike as Baneen floated a few feet off the ground beside him. They were all invisible—even Rolf's bike.

  " . . . and what I don't see," Rolf was saying to Baneen, "is why you can't keep me invisible once I'm past the gate. If you'd just go in with me."

  "Lad, lad," said Baneen sadly, "sure, and how am I to explain to you the terrible mysteries and such of gremlin magic, the same which has taken millions of years for gremlins to develop and you'd want an answer to every question about it that comes to mind!"

  "Terrible . . ." muttered Shep, trailing off to something too low to be understood.

  "As a matter of fact," said Baneen, "there's a metal cable underneath the road at the gate, with enough iron to keep a gremlin out. For a gremlin to cross cold iron is sort of like a human getting an electric shock. It's terribly hurtful."

  "You could go around the gate," said Rolf.

  "Well, now, there's bits and things of iron—or steel, if you will have it—all over the Space Center, no telling when a gremlin might run into it; and it's all most uncomfortable. Which is why, eager as we all are to see the fair, cloudless skies of Gremla, once more, it's been decided we wait safely in our Hollow until launch time and then magic ourselves directly to the safety of the space kite you'll have fixed to the rocket by then. . . ."

  He broke off abruptly. Rita had just come riding down the road out of the darkness into the lights of the gate and dismounted to speak to the gate guard.

  "Hi, Tom." Her voice came clearly to their ears from less than thirty feet away. "Has my dad been by yet?"

  "Not yet, Rita," the guard said. "What is it?"

  "Oh, nothing—I just wanted to ask him about having one of my girl friends stay over next weekend. Her folks are going out of town. . . ." Rita chattered on.

  "What a fine lass she is, to be sure," said Baneen, fondly.

  "Indeed she is!" snapped Shep. "No thanks to corrupting gremlin influences!"

  "Now, is that a nice thing to say—" Baneen broke off again. A white Space Center security car was wheeling up to the inside of the gate. It stopped and Rita's father got out.

  "Rita!" he said. "What are you doing here?"

  He walked over to the gate, toward the guard and his daughter.

  "Dad, Mom said to ask you," Rita said, energetically. "You know Ginny Magruder? Well, her folks are going over to New Orleans for three days, for a wedding of her cousin, and Ginny doesn't want to go, because it'll be nothing but older people and she doesn't like those cousins, anyway. So I said, why not come and spend the weekend with me; and she was really happy—you should have seen her. So, she said she'd have to ask her own folks, and she did and they said yes—"

  "Off you go, lad!" hissed Baneen. "Now, whilst they're both still listening to her. The dog and I will meet you back here in an hour and a half."

  "Don't know why I couldn't—" Shep began to grumble.

  "No. Stay," said Rolf. He did not want to worry about anyone but himself on a trip like this. He hopped on his bike; and then remembered something.

  He turned to Baneen.

  "I don't have the space kite yet—"

  "Go, lad! Go!" whispered Baneen, giving his bike a shove, that—light as it was—started the wheels rolling, so that Rolf's feet went automatically to the pedals.

  "Look in your hip pocket when you get to the rocket!" he heard Baneen whisper behind him. Then he was past the gate and suddenly visible.

  But the backs of both the guard and Rita's father were to him. Furiously, he began to pedal off down the road toward the tall, spotlighted shape of the distant rocket, illuminated according to custom, this night before the launch.

  Gate Twelve was the closest of all the entrances to the Space Center to the launch pad of the rocket. But it was still several miles away; and it took Rolf some twenty minutes of hard pedaling to reach it. As he came close to the floodlighted area, he slowed down and finally stopped, just outside the lights that were making the pad and the rocket itself almost daylight-bright. He hid his bike in the brush just off the road and moved slowly up behind one of the lights in the darkest shadow behind it. Hidden in that shadow, he studied the launch area for evidence of guards.

  There had to be guards, he thought—and there were. After some minutes of watching he located two of them: one, sitting in one of the white, security sedans and another making a regular round of the pad and the rocket, up along the top of the launch pad itself. As he watched, the security sedan started up and drove off, taking one of the guards away.

  The other guard was now around the far side of the launch pad, as out of sight of Rolf, as Rolf was out of his sight. Rolf stepped forward into the light and began the long climb up the ramp that led to the launch pad.

  It was too far up the ramp to run. Rolf went as fast as the slope would let him, however, and reached the top of the pad without being seen. Being his father's son, he had absorbed enough knowledge about launchings to find his way to the primary service elevator without trouble. The primary elevator was a cage of metal bars, close-set enough so as to shield out most of the light from the floodlights without. Rolf dared not turn on the ceiling light of the elevator, which he knew was there. He groped his way to the control panel in o
ne wall, pressed the up button and the cage rose.

  He rode the elevator to the transfer point—about seventy-five feet above the surface of the pad—then left it for the narrow walkway that took him across to the secondary elevator of the launching tower. This other elevator was a more open cage, and he was able to see the pad below him as he rose. As he looked down, he saw the foreshortened figure of the first guard come back up on the level surface of the pad and look around.

  Rolf gulped, but there was not time to think about the guard now. He rode the elevator to its top level, got out and crossed another narrow catwalk that led him directly to the spacecraft itself, sitting on top of the three tall sections that were the fuel-laden stages of the rocket.

  He reached the spacecraft and put a hand on its smooth metal side. It's beautiful, he thought. Like a work of art. Now for the gremlin space kite. He reached into his hip pocket.

  For a moment he thought there was nothing there, and his breath stopped in his chest. Then he felt a small papery object, and he brought it out. In the light from below, he looked at it. It was the space kite, all right, but no bigger now than the paper swan O'Rigami had folded for him when he first met the gremlin Grand Engineer.

  Hardly believing that this could in fact be the kite he had seen earlier, he reached up and pressed it against the outer skin of the spacecraft.

  There was something like a soundless poof. The tiny shape began to swell with rapidly increasing speed. In a moment it was as big as Rolf's hand, as big as a basketball, as big as . . .

  The panic that had erupted in Rolf as the object suddenly began to grow in size and conspicuousness, suddenly began to die down. For the first time he noticed that as the kite got bigger, it was also getting filmier and filmier, until he could begin to see right through it . . . indeed, until it finally faded away into invisibility. Rolf stood gazing at last at a spacecraft that looked as if it had nothing attached to it at all.

  So that was the secret of the space kite! He might have known the gremlins would have figured out some way to keep their space vehicle from being noticed by the human astronauts that would be boarding the metal spacecraft in the morning. He turned without wasting any more time, and hurried back to the secondary elevator to start his ride down again.