Mr. Sheperton snorted.
“—the goodness of our hearts, I was saying,” Baneen went on blandly, “about to help this lad in his troubles. What more likely, I can see you’re thinking, than he’d wish to do us a small favor in return? Sure, and it’d be no more than a second’s effort for a bright lad such as himself who’s not bothered by cold iron and all the hard things men put about to bar out the likes of us.”
“Ah. Hmm…” Lugh turned back to scowl thoughtfully at Rolf.
“Come, Lugh!” cried Baneen. “Surely you’ve got a smile for the young man, after your fearsome looks of a moment ago.”
“A… smile…” muttered Lugh. He made an effort to smile at Rolf. It was about as effective as if a bulldog had tried to simper.
Mr. Sheperton either cleared his throat or growled. It was hard to tell which. “ ’Ware the gremlin bearing promises,” he muttered. “If the Trojans had listened to that advice, they’d have never let that horse inside their gates…”
“Just a minute,” Rolf said. He sat up and crossed his legs. He was feeling braver now than he had a few minutes before. Not because of Lugh’s smile—a tiger would not have felt much braver after having been smiled at by Lugh—but because something Baneen had said was ringing in his ears. Baneen had hinted that there was something that he, Rolf, could do that not all the gremlins with their obviously magical powers, could do. Rolf wanted to learn just what it was.
“Go on, Baneen,” he said. “The least I can do is listen.”
“Said the fly to the spider,” growled Mr. Sheperton.
“Now, now, it’s no spider I am at all!” Baneen snapped. “A wee wisp of a gremlin, that’s all, far from the golden sands and stinging winds of my native home, helpless on a stranger shore. And so are we all, young Rolf. Indeed, all the gremlins in exile on watery Earth now cast themselves on your mercy. Only you, Rolf Gunnarson, whose name shall ring down the halls of human and gremlin history (if you so choose) can change the course of fate for men and gremlins and bring us safely back to Gremla.”
Rolf’s ears grew uncomfortably warm. The little man’s grandiloquent words were a bit hard to take. He did not appear to be deliberately making fun of Rolf, but Rolf had become sensitive these last couple of years to what people said to him.
“That’s a lot for some stranger to be doing for you, isn’t it?” Rolf asked. “After all, I never even heard of your Gremla. In fact, dressed the way you are and everything you two look to me more like—what’s the word for them?—leprechauns.”
“Well, well, no doubt we do. But what’s the matter to that?” said Baneen. “What’s in a name? Sure, and if some people want to call us leprechauns, there’s no harm done.”
“You mean you really are gremlins, but you were just being called leprechauns?” demanded Rolf. “But how come then you speak with an Irish accent?”
“Irish accent, indeed!” cried Baneen. “Why, it’s a pure and natural gremlin accent you’re hearing from hundreds of thousands of years before Ireland rose from the sea. Is it our fault now that the Irish, folk with the fine, musical ear that they have, happened to pick it up from us? In truth, there’s no such thing as an Irish accent—it’s a gremlin accent you’re hearing from them and us alike.”
“Likely story!” grumphed Mr. Sheperton. “Rolf—”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Rolf, quickly before the dog could get started again. “Baneen, you were saying you need help? What is it? What could I do for you?”
“Ah, it’s free us from this prison world, you can,” Baneen answered. “Set us on our way to home. Oh, to see fair Gremla just once again before… before…”
He broke down and apparently was unable to go on.
“Why, the dissembling jackanapes!” sputtered Mr. Sheperton. “Rolf, don’t be misled and befooled. Like all gremlins, he’s immortal. He could spend the next million years here and still go back to his Gremla, fresh as a daisy.”
“That’s right, now!” said Baneen, weeping openly now and wiping his eyes with his bushy eyebrows. “Reproach me with it, that I’m not mortal. Does that mean that I’ve no feelings?”
“You hear that, Shep?” said Rolf, embarrassed.
“As long as we’re speaking to each other,” the dog replied, with great dignity, “I’d prefer that you addressed me by my proper name: Mr. Sheperton.”
But Rolf was already saying, “Go on, Baneen. Pay no attention to him. What can I do for you? Anything reasonable I’ll be glad to do. Do you need something special so you can get back to Gremla?”
“Well now,” said Baneen, suddenly dry-eyed again. “It’s a mere handful of something or other we’re after needing. Indeed, I don’t even know the names of the little things, myself. But I can take you to one who does. The Grand Engineer he is, for our return to Gremla. His name’s O’Rigami.”
“O’Rigami?” echoed RoIf. The sound of the name was oddly familiar.
“Indeed, that’s his very self,” Baneen said. “He’s that busy a man he can’t be coming here to meet you. But if you’ll permit me to weave a wee bit of a spell so’s you can enter our Gremlin Hollow…”
Baneen’s fingers were already making strange fluttering passes in the air. Mr. Sheperton began something that might have been the growl of a warning, but it was cut off almost immediately.
Rolf found himself wrapped in a pale yellow glow, like a faintly luminous fog, and gently lifted to his feet by unseen hands. He walked—without consciously directing his feet—further down the path where he had fallen. The ground seemed to go down and down; the wind from the nearby ocean was absolutely still and silent. But all around him, just beyond the fringes of his fog-shrouded vision, Rolf could hear tiny buzzings and murmurings, and an occasionally high-pitched squeaky laugh.
Then the fog seemed to lift a bit, and he saw at his feet another gremlin. He was sitting cross-legged on the sand, head bent over his work. His hands were moving rapidly.
Rolf got down on his knees to see what the gremlin was doing. His tiny fingers were moving with furious speed. But as far as Rolf could see there was nothing in the gremlin’s hands. Nothing at all.
The gremlin looked up and saw Rolf watching him. He bowed his head deeply. “Ah, sssooo!” he hissed.
Rolf blinked. This gremlin was as small as Baneen, and even slimmer. He wore a white smock over his green suit and his fingers were extraordinarily long, delicate and supple. They kept moving incredibly fast.
The fog was lifting even more, and beyond the busy gremlin Rolf could see dozens of others swarming about an object that looked—no, it couldn’t be. But it was. A kite. A huge paper kite.
Something was happening to Rolf’s sense of vision, as far as its real size went. Rolf’s eyes and his mind were battling over how large the kite really was. To his eyes, it looked like a regular kite, the kind Rolf himself flew at the beach, but Rolf’s mind kept insisting that the kite was as big as a jet airliner. And indeed, there seemed to be room enough on it for hundreds of gremlins. Maybe thousands. Or even more.
He shook his head, as if to clear it.
“Wercome to my modest assembry center,” said the white-smocked gremlin.
“Eh… hello,” Rolf stammered. “You’re a gremlin too?”
“Of course! Born and bred on Gremra five-point-three thousands of centuries ago. That is, Earth centuries, of course. The year of Gremra is much different from your own.”
“Oh… yeah.” Rolf felt a bit dazed. “But… it’s just that—uh—you don’t seem to talk with the right accent…”
“Hai!” The little gremlin jumped to his feet. “My humbre accent is that of true gremrin attempting to speak your ranguage.”