“You… you really want Rolf to attach this… kite thing… to the Mars rocket?”
“Exactly!” Baneen smiled at her. “What a clever lass she is! Sure, and you’ve caught on right away, my dear.”
“I’ll be in charge of the final countdown,” Rolf said. “I’ll have to delay the launch six minutes from its scheduled liftoff time. Right, Baneen?”
“That’s what O’Rigami figures—although frankly I’ve no head for numbers and I can’t be sure if six minutes is the right amount. But what difference, six minutes or sixty? The rocket won’t go until you give the word, Rolf, me bucko.”
Rita seemed aghast. “Rolf, you could foul up the whole launching!”
“Ah, no,” Baneen assured her. “Just a wee delay and a slight detour. No problem at all.”
She shook her head. “This could be really serious.”
“I’m going to do it,” Rolf said quietly. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her about the Great Wish the gremlins had promised him. Then he remembered that she had always admired his father—who obviously had no concern for ecology.
“There’s nothing to it, I tell you,” Baneen repeated. “Why, with gremlin magic at work, we could put everyone in the launch center to sleep for a fortnight—ah, but we don’t want to do that, desperate though we are.”
“They’ve got to get off our planet and back to Gremla,” said Rolf. “And I’m going to help them.”
“I don’t understand why…”
“Well, lass, you see now, it’s Lugh—big, blustering oaf that he is. A terrible-tempered gremlin. Terrible temper.” Baneen shuddered. “He’s a gremlin prince, you know. But our king, Hamrod the Heartless, was always playing tricks on Lugh. Loved to see the great burly Lugh of the Long Hand turn red with frustration and anger. So it was that Lugh stole the Great Corkscrew of Gremla, took himself and his entire household—all of us—and in one great magic huff-and-puff brought us all to Earth, these thousands of years ago.”
Rolf and Rita listened, fascinated.
“Well, once safely here on this awful watery planet, Lugh found out two things. One, there were plenty of oafish humans about, to serve as the butt of his jokes. No longer was Lugh at the mercy of Hamrod; now he had humans at his mercy. The tables were turned, so to speak.
“But the second thing he found out that here on this watery place, gremlin magic is pitifully weak—water ruins magic, don’t you know—so our tricks amount to mere pranks. Watered down, they are.”
“Like wiping out a bulldozer?” Rolf asked.
“Aye, the Great Curse. Pitiful, wasn’t it? Why, on safe, dusty Gremla when the Great Curse is invoked, forty comets explode and the stars dance for a month. But here…” Baneen’s voice dropped to a melancholy whisper, “well, about all we can do is play little pranks. Stopping clocks and making machines behave poorly, suchlike. Not even Lugh’s great magic can get all of us at once more than ten feet off the ground. That’s why we need your mighty rocket to help us get back to Gremla.”
Rita asked, “But why does Lugh want to return to Gremla if your king is so nasty to him?”
“Ah, there’s the nub of it all,” Baneen said, dabbing at the corner of one eye with his eyebrow. “A clever girl you are, Miss Rita. You see, underneath all of Lugh’s bad temper and bluster, beats a heart of fairy gold. He knows how miserable all we gremlins have been here on dripping old Earth, and he’s willing to sacrifice himself to save all of us. I doubt that we could last another few hundred years here on Earth, with all this water about. Doubt it strongly, that I do.”
“I don’t know…” Rita said uncertainly.
“Ah, but I do know what Lugh will do if he can’t get human help for our return to Gremla,” Baneen said, with a shudder in his voice. “It’ll be terrible. He’ll use every grain of gremlin magic to make life as miserable as possible for you humans. Many’s the time I’ve heard him mutter,” and Baneen’s voice took on some of the deep roughness of Lugh’s, “If we can’t use that rocket to get us back to Gremla, the humans will never get to use it to take themselves to Mars.”
It was Rolf’s turn to be shocked. “You never told me that! You mean if we don’t help you…”
“Lugh will keep the rocket from flying off,” Baneen finished for him. “And it’s himself has got the power to do it. That great rocket will just sit there and grow moss on it before Lugh lets it go.”
8
“I wish you’d stay close to home today,” Mrs. Gunnarson said to Rolf as he ate breakfast. His father hadn’t come home at all. He was staying at the Space Center for the final thirty-six hours of countdown.
“Aw, Mom,” Rolf said, between spoonfuls of cereal, “There’s nothing to do around here. All the other guys’ll bug me about Dad being on TV and being Launch Director…”
His mother looked at him penetratingly.
“Is that what they do?” she asked. “ ‘Bug’ you?”
Rolf stared down at the cereal.
“You don’t know what it’s like, when your father’s…” he muttered, letting the sentence trail off.
“You really should learn to get along with the other boys,” she said. “For that matter, you should learn to get along better with your father.”
“He doesn’t need me,” mumbled Rolf under his breath to the cereal.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Rolf pushed away from the kitchen table and then got up. “I’m going down to the Wildlife Preserve. Can you fix me a couple of sandwiches?”
“Just a moment,” said his mother. He stood still, unwillingly. “Your father is worn out right now with his work—just as I’m worn out with the baby. But you’re big enough to take a little of the family responsibility on your own shoulders, for a short while anyway. The launch will be over soon and your father did say he might have a pleasant surprise for us all then. Surely you can take care of a few things, including yourself, until that time comes.”
“Well, sure,” growled Rolf.
“All right, then. You can begin by making your own sandwiches and clean up the breakfast table.” With that, Mrs. Gunnarson walked out of the kitchen.
Rolf cleared the table and put the dishes in the washer. Then he made up four sandwiches, took a plastic bottle of orange juice, and stuffed them all into the little knapsack on the back of his bike’s seat. He whistled for Mr. Sheperton and pedaled down the street to Rita’s house. She was already sitting on the shady porch in front of the old house.
“Want to meet Lugh?” Rolf asked her, straddling his bike at the base of the front steps.
Rita’s eyes widened. “Could I?”
“Sure.”
She leaped off her chair and ran into the house. In two minutes flat she was out again, holding a little lunchkit in one hand.
Together they biked down toward Playalinda Beach, with Mr. Sheperton gallumphing alongside them and the sea breeze pushing fluffy white clouds across the bright blue sky. It was like old times, before the launch and the gremlins made Rolf’s life so complicated.
Except that Mr. Sheperton didn’t say a word to Rolf all the way down toward the beach. He didn’t even bark. And he stayed alongside Rita’s bike, on the side away from Rolf.
He’s sore at me, Rolf realized.
“That time you hurt your leg diving off the high board,” Rita called to him, raising her voice enough to be heard over the whistling wind, “why did you try that dive? You’d never been off the high board before.”
Rolf shrugged. “I had to show people. The other guys were calling me chicken…”
“No they weren’t,” Rita said. “I was there and I heard them. There was a lot of horsing around going on, but nobody called you chicken.”