“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 Spe cial 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 doesn’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?”