Gremlins, Go Home!

by Ben Bova

  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 one 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.

  He reached the changeover point and switched to the primary elevator. This slid him downward with the noiselessness of smoothly running electrical equipment; and he had all but forgotten about the guard when it reached bottom and the door opened automatically.

  “Who’s that?” called a voice from the pad just outside. “What’s going on there?”

  A second later the bright beam of a flashlight lanced through the open door of the elevator cage and there was the sound of running footsteps.

  Rolf shrank back into a corner of the elevator, his heart thumping like the heart of a wild rabbit in a trap. If only he knew some gremlin magic—at least enough to make himself invisible. There was no way out but the open doorway of the elevator and the guard was coming straight for it. In a moment he would be discovered; and then…

  The guard burst into the cage, actually running past Rolf.

  “Who’s here?” shouted the guard. “Who—”

  He started to turn around. There was no chance to dodge past him without being seen. In desperation, Rolf stammered out the first thing he could think of.

  “M-May the Great and Thunderous Curse of Gremla fall upon your head!” he stammered out loud.

  “Wha—aaaCHOO!” exploded the guard, turning around. His flashlight wavered from floor to ceiling, out of control, as he burst into a series of gargantuan sneezes. “Who said… ACHooo! Ach—”

  Rolf did not wait to answer him. Slipping past the blinded, sneezing man, he headed out across the pad, and down its slope toward his bicycle as the echos of body-racking sneezes floated after him through the floodlit night.

  After that narrow escape, it was almost nothing to wait for a moment when the guard on Number Twelve Gate had his back turned, and slip past him into the open freedom of the Wildlife Preserve where Shep and Baneen were waiting with the invisibility that would shield him on the road home.

  10

  THE launch was set for ten a.m., Eastern Daylight Time. At seven-thirty that morning, as Rolf and Rita rode their bikes out toward the Preserve, with Mr. Sheperton tagging along beside them, the roads were already crowded with carloads of people who had driven in to watch the Mars rocket’s liftoff.

  In the Indian and Banana rivers, small boats were anchored for the same purpose. And several miles offshore in the deep ocean water, there were even a couple of large cruise ships whose passengers had come to watch the event.

  “At least the poachers won’t cause any trouble,” Rolf shouted to Rita as they pedaled. “Their boat’s still being repaired, thanks to Baneen.”

  “And how are we going to get into the Refuge?” Rita asked him. “There’ll be police and security cars all over the place—it’s closed up tight now.”

  Rolf didn’t answer for a moment. He was busy shifting the rolled-up poster on the handlebars of his bike. The poster was too long to be carried safely on the rattrap behind him.

  “Baneen’s going to meet us halfway there and help us get there,” he said at last.

  “By making us invisible?” asked Rita.

  With a shrug, Rolf answered, “I don’t know. Gremlin magic is pretty strange. Sometimes it works fine, but just when you need it most—”

  A gray sedan with official markings on its side nosed out of the traffic and started coming up toward them on the shoulder of the road. Rolf and Rita pulled their bikes aside. Rolf’s heart was hammering with sudden memories of the night before. Did the guard recognize me after all? But the sedan went right past them; the two officers inside didn’t even flick an eye at him.

  With a loud “Whew!” Rolf started pedaling again.

  “You know,” Rita said, pulling up alongside him, “it’s sort of too bad that the gremlins are going. They’re kind of fun.”

  Rolf blinked at her. He had been thinking about something for a long time now, he realized. Just when it started to bother him, he wasn’t sure. Possibly it was right after the trouble with the bulldozer out at the Hollow when both Lugh and Baneen had admitted that they didn’t like people such as the boat captain who had been bringing people out to the Preserve illegally and polluting the environment. He couldn’t put it into words, but something about the gremlins was nagging at him.

  “You’re right,” he said to Rita. “I don’t know if it’s a good thing that they’re going—”

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Mr. Sheperton growled.

  Rita still looked startled every time she heard Mr. Sheperton speak. She could accept the gremlins, but the dog’s speaking always seemed to surprise her.

  “Now listen Shep… er, Mr. Sheperton,” Rolf said crossly. “I know Baneen and the others can’t always be trusted to tell the exact truth, but eve
n if they haven’t been on Earth for millions of years or whatever it is, they’ve been around here for a long time. I wonder if maybe we don’t need them?”

  They were cycling past a car that had all its windows open as it inched along in the heavy traffic. A small boy’s high-pitched voice piped, “He’s talkin’ to his doggy, Mommy. Look, he’s talkin’ to his doggy.”

  “Yes, dear,” answered a woman’s voice, absently. “Isn’t that nice of him?”

  “Need gremlins?” Rita asked as they continued along the jam-packed road. “But all they do is cause trouble. I thought they admitted that themselves.”

  “That’s what Baneen says,” Rolf admitted. “But I wonder how much of that is just showoff stuff—”

  “Like diving off a high board?” Mr. Sheperton suggested drily.

  “Man, can’t you say anything pleasant anymore?” Rolf snapped.

  “Gremlins can’t be trusted,” Mr. Sheperton insisted. “We need them like a flea needs flea powder. Look at what they’ve done to you: turned you into a thief, almost, and gotten you to sneak into the launch pad. Why, if you’d been caught—”

  “Well I wasn’t,” said Rolf. “Not because you helped, either!”

  Rita tried to nip the argument by getting back to the original subject. “If we need the gremlins the way you said we did, they must know about it, with their ability to see the future and all. So why are they leaving?”

  “That’s what I’d like to find out,” said Rolf. “The real reason they’re going. I’ve got the feeling that they’ve told me already, but in a very sneaky, roundabout, gremlinish sort of way. Some of the things that Lugh and Baneen had said… I can’t seem to put my finger on exactly what it is. If I knew what it was that was really making them go, maybe I could talk them out of it.”

  “Talk a gremlin out of anything,” muttered Mr. Sheperton, from beside Rolf’s bike. “That’s like talking the moon out of the sky. They’re too much the experts at talking people into things, to be talked themselves. If you want to convince a gremlin of something, you’ve got to show him proof that is proof!”

  Rolf just shook his head, feeling very confused.

  “Ah, now, here we are, and a grand and lovely morning to you all,” said Baneen’s voice.

  Rolf looked down and saw the gremlin perched on his handlebar again. This time he noticed that Baneen was sitting on the plastic handgrip of the handlebar, not on the steel itself.

  “Fear not, lad,” Baneen winked up at him. “None of the folks in their fume-making cars going by can see or hear me. Any more than they can hear Mr. Sheperton’s grumpy old voice.”

  Shep growled at him.

  “How long have you been there?” Rolf asked.

  Baneen had turned to make horrible faces at the people in the cars they were passing. He waggled his big pointed ears, crossed his eyes, stretched out his mouth by pulling at its corners with his green fingers, and stuck out his tongue. No one noticed him at all, but several people began sneezing as they passed.

  “How long have you been listening to us?” Rolf demanded.

  “Why, I came as quickly as I could, overloaded as I am with duties, this glorious morn of our departure,” said Baneen. “But it’s true that I arrived just this moment past. Why do you ask, lad?”

  “I just wondered,” said Rolf.

  “How are you going to get us past the patrols that are keeping people out of the Preserve?” Rita asked.

  “Ah, surely that’s no trouble at all,” said Baneen smilingly. “Just turn in here…”

  They nosed their bikes off the shoulder of the road and onto the hard-packed sand. Mr. Sheperton followed them.

  “And a tiny bit o’ gremlin dust…” Baneen flung something invisible up out of his hand. The world seemed to turn into a milky white mist for a moment.

  “And here we are!” Baneen said as the mist cleared.

  They were indeed at the Gremlin Hollow, Rolf saw.

  But things were different. For once, the hurry and scurry were missing. Little flickers and glimpses of gremlins moving about, as usual, but they seemed to be dragging along like deep-sea divers trudging on the bottom of the ocean. The glimpses Rolf caught of their small pointy faces showed them all to be wearing unusually sober, saddened expressions.

  The only two completely visible were O’Rigami, who looked as imperturbable as ever, and Lugh, who stood scowling at things in general—even more blackly than usual.

  Rolf got off his bike and handed the poster to O’Rigami. It was so big it nearly knocked the gremlin over.

  “Ahh, many thanks,” said O’Rigami, staggering slightly under the poster’s weight. He bowed politely, then turned and gave the poster a flick of his hands. It floated out in midair, unrolled, and spread itself neatly on the sandy floor of the Hollow.

  “Very fine,” O’Rigami said. “Not precisery what we need, but crose enough.”

  He clapped his hands together.

  “Gremrin weavers, front and center!”

  There was a sort of semivisible scurry around and above the laid-out paper. Squinting at the scene, Rolf found it reminded him of how things look to someone driving through a fog—you sort of sense something is out there before you really see it.

  It was impossible for any human eye to see exactly what was going on, but Rolf thought he could make out that something rather invisible was being put together on top of the poster as it lay face up. Something like the rippling of heat waves flowed across the poster from one end to the other, then slowly settled down and ceased.

  “Excerrent!” said O’Rigami, to the almost-invisible gremlin workers. “Now, take firm grip.”

  There was evidently a good deal of effort involved in this part of the job, for a double line of gremlins flickered into visibility at both the top and bottom edges of the poster. Their tongues were clenched between their lime-colored teeth, feet planted wide, and their cheeks puffed out with effort as they clutched grimly onto something that was a good eight inches above the poster itself.

  “Ready?” asked O’Rigami.

  The half-visible little figures braced themselves. Suddenly, one of them at the far bottom corner of the poster lost his footing and fell. Like dominoes, the whole line along the bottom of the poster went down.

  “Take care! Take care!” cried O’Rigami. “Take grip once more.”

  The line along the bottom of the poster formed up again.

  “Now,” shouted O’Rigami, “three times—as I count. Ready? One!”

  Both lines of half-visible gremlins raised and lowered their arms. Something misty—a sheet of mistiness—formed between them, above the poster at the level where their hands were clenched.

  “Two!” cried O’Rigami.

  Their arms moved up and down again, accompanied by a chorus of tiny grunts and wheezes. Rolf suddenly realized that what they were doing was like what he and his friends used to do down at the beach, when they were shaking the sand off a blanket. Except that this “blanket” was a thin film of mistiness, and there was no sand on it.

  “Three!” roared O’Rigami, jumping clear off the ground with his hands raised over his head.

  The gremlins holding whatever-it-was flapped it once more, mightily, and fell over backward, becoming visible as they lay about looking exhausted. What they had held had also become completely visible now—it was like a thin blue veil of finest silk, shot with white. It floated downward and settled exactly on top of the poster.

  O’Rigami hissed with satisfaction, stepping forward to the very edge of the veil-like object.

  “Why,” exclaimed Rita, “it is a blueprint!”

  In fact, what lay on the ground now, although it seemed to be made out of exquisitely fine silk, looked exactly like a very complicated technical blueprint.

  “Of course,” O’Rigami said to Rita. “What did you expect, a beach branket?”

  “But how could you get that from the poster?” Rolf asked, staring at the blueprint.

  “Now, now, lad
,” said Baneen abruptly. “It’s as simple as enchanting a princess. The poster was made up from designs of the actual spacecraft, was it not? And since the spacecraft itself was constructed from blueprints, must it not be that the form of the blueprints was living in the design of the spacecraft, and the form of the spacecraft was living in the design of the poster? Like equals like, as one of those Greek geometers used to say. Sure and it was only the skill of the gremlin weavers it took to extract the design and make it visible.”

  “Oh,” said Rolf, his head buzzing.

  He would have said more, but now O’Rigami had just produced a small bagful of the transistors and other little items Rolf had gotten from the hardware store.

  “Now,” said the Grand Engineer, “we add the connectors, correctry magicked, to the brueprint, thereby energizing it and—”

  He tossed the handful of small electronics components into the air. They floated out over the blueprint, descended to it, and disappeared. All but one tiny piece of red wire, which stood at one end and scurried in circles about the blueprint. O’Rigami pointed a finger and stamped his foot, the wire hopped, scooted to its proper position, and vanished with a small poof.

  “Connection is estabrished,” continued O’Rigami. “Now we attach the activated brueprints to both the human spacecraft and the space kite.”

  He clapped his hands. The blueprint disappeared, leaving only the poster below it, untouched. O’Rigami turned to Lugh and bowed.

  “Ready to board,” he announced.

  Lugh was scowling worse than ever. The look on his face would have stopped a charging bull elephant in full stride. The only good thing about it was that it did not seem to be directed at anyone in particular.

  “Ready is it?” snarled Lugh. “All right then, what are the lot of you waiting for? Get on board and shake the garbage and asphalt of this miserable world from our gremlin boots!”

  There was a sort of uneasy waveriness in the air of the Hollow and suddenly gremlins became visible, hundreds of them, thousands of them, all looking unhappy.

  “What are you waiting for?” roared Lugh. “Did we or did we not give them their chance nearly two thousand years ago? BOARD!”