“It sounds Japanese.”
“Not so! Honorable Japanese race have acquired accent from gremrins riving amongst them.”
“But…” Rolf was getting totally confused. “I thought gremlins all talked with an Irish accent, and the Irish…”
“Beg to differ…”
There was a sudden pop—about as loud as the pop of a cork from a toy gun—and Baneen suddenly appeared beside them.
“Now, now, Rolf me bucko! This is no time to be bothering with trifles of tongue and tone. There’s too much to be done!”
Rolf blinked at him.
“Rolf Gunnarson,” Baneen went on, without even taking a breath, “may I introduce you to the Great Grand Engineer of All Gremla in Exile—O’Rigami.”
O’Rigami hissed and bowed.
Rolf found himself bowing too, even though he was still sitting on his heels on the sand floor of the Gremlin Hollow.
“A small token of my esteem,” O’Rigami said gently. His right hand flickered out. For one astonished moment, Rolf could have sworn that the hand and the arm to which it was attached stretched several feet across the sand to where the other gremlins were working on the kite. Within an eyeblink, O’Rigami’s hand and arm had returned to normal, but now there was a small square of paper in front of him.
The square of paper seemed to disappear as O’Rigami’s amazing fingers quickly folded it into the shape of a beautiful, tiny swan with outstretched wings. The gremlin held it out in his palm, and the miniature paper swan suddenly fluttered its wings and took off. It flew in a circle around Rolf’s head before coming down to land with the lightest of touches on his shoulder.
“A memento in honor of our meeting,” O’Rigami said, bowing again.
“That’s the neatest thing I ever saw!” Rolf said. He picked the swan from his shoulder and held it in his palm. But it wouldn’t fly again; it simply sat there, lovely but unmoving. “How’d you do it?”
“Now that’s a question would take too long to answer,” said Baneen, at his elbow. “But it’s a great and wonderful art, so it is.”
O’Rigami lifted a hand modestly. “Merely the apprication of sound techniques of construction,” he said, “together with the proper magic formuras.”
“It’s O’Rigami,” said Baneen to Rolf, “who is in charge of constructing the craft which will carry us all safely back to Gremla—with the help of your rocket, of course.”
Rolf turned to stare at the gremlin workmen again. “It looks like a kite…”
“And what else would it be, indeed!” said Baneen. “One of the wondrous, great space-going kites of mighty Gremla, such as have explored the very depths of the universe, sailing before the proud winds of Gremlin magic in free space unhampered by any nasty dampness. In such a kite, that very one there, will we return to Gremla—that is, if all goes well—attached to your rocket.”
He coughed self-consciously.
“But it’s pretty big—I mean,” Rolf tried to think of some way of putting it that wouldn’t hurt their feelings. “I don’t think something that size can be attached to the Mars rocket without making it fly crooked—I mean, even if the launch crew didn’t see it attached to the rocket.”
“Of course, now, they won’t be seeing it,” said Baneen severely. “It’ll be invisible. And as for size, that’s no problem either. Haven’t we O’Rigami himself here to fold it so cleverly it’ll seem to be no larger than your hand?”
“Fold?” Rolf stared from Baneen to O’Rigami, who once again politely hissed and bowed. Suddenly Rolf’s mind made the connection it had been trying to make ever since he had heard Baneen first pronounce the other gremlin’s name. “O’Rigami? Of course! Origami— I knew I’d heard about it in school! It’s the Japanese art of folding paper. You mean he’s learned this Japanese way of folding things so well that he…”
O’Rigami shut his eyes and turned his head away.
“Now, now, now!” cried Baneen, each word a note higher than the one before it. “Watch your tongue, lad, before you stumble upon an insult and break everything! Is it likely that a gremlin would be needing to learn anything from humans like yourself, who’ve merely been around for fifty thousand years or so? And O’Rigami himself a respectable half-million in age and more? It was the humans learned a wee bit of the noble art from O’Rigami, himself, to be sure—not the other way around. Indeed, isn’t it named after him?”
“Well…” said Rolf slowly.
“And is it at all a human name it bears? When did you hear the likes of that from the Japanese islands? O’Rigami— why its ring is as pure Gremlin as that of the name of Lugh or Baneen.”
“Ummm…”
“Tush and tush! Of course not,” said Baneen. “Let’s say no more on the subject. Indeed, it would be a proud human who’d dare to pretend to the beginnings of a skill like that of O’Rigami.”
Baneen hooked a finger in the lowest buttonhole of Rolf’s shirt and led him aside. The gremlin lowered his voice, almost whispering in Rolf’s ear.
“A word to the wise—I’d watch your tongue, lad. There’s nothing our Grand Engineer can’t fold if he wishes. Rub him the wrong way and no telling what he’ll do. How would you like Cape Kennedy folded into a flower pot? Or yourself into a postage stamp?”
Rolf’s eyes widened. But before he could think of an answer, there was a shimmer in the air beside Baneen and the figure of a female gremlin with a pert, but sad, face and dressed in flowing green robes with a band of black around her left arm, took shape beside them.
“Ah, zair you are, Baneen,” she said, in a soft, melancholy voice. “Sorrow and loneliness ’ave overwhelm me, waiteeng for you.”
“Er—to be sure, to be sure,” said Baneen. She tucked his right arm in hers and leaned against him. He looked uncomfortable. “But it’s that terrible busy I’ve been, here, trying to work out a way to aid O’Rigami with the help of this lad, here—a human, you notice.”
“I noteeced,” said the female gremlin, now smiling sadly up at Rolf. “Ow are you, ’uman? I ’ope you ’ave not lost too many loved ones to ze Terror?”
“His name’s Rolf,” said Baneen. “La Demoiselle here, lad, is a countess of fair Gremla. Naturally, the recent Revolution has awakened the deepest sympathies of her blue-green gremlin blood on behalf of those unfortunates of noble extraction—”
“Ah, deeply, deeply,” sighed the Countess. “Seventeen times I ’ave cause ze blade of ze guillotine to stick wiz my gremleenish arts. In ozzer ways, also I ’ave also been useful. But ’ow little can any one person do? I am like ze Scarlet Pimpernel, zat noble Englishman—”
“Hear, hear,” gruffed Shep behind them, obviously deeply moved.
“Ah, you too ’ave felt for these unfortunate ones, ’ave you, dog?” inquired La Demoiselle, turning to speak to Shep. Rolf took advantage of the opportunity to whisper puzzledly to Baneen.
“Is that the French Revolution she’s talking about?” the boy asked. “I thought that all happened a couple of hundred years ago.”
“It did,” whispered back Baneen, producing a small green handkerchief and mopping his brow. “But the gremlinish feelings of such as the Countess, once awakened, do not go back to sleep easily. Let that be a lesson to you, lad—well, I must be going—”
“Ah, no you don’t, naughtee one!” said La Demoiselle, turning back to snatch with both hands at Baneen as he faded out completely. “Oh! ’E ’as gone! Forgeeve me, M’sieu Rolf, but I mus’ go find heem.”
She vanished in her turn.
Rolf looked around him, but saw no one but Shep and O’Rigami nearby to explain matters to him.
“But what do you gremlins want me to do?” he asked O’Rigami.