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 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…