Gremlins, Go Home!

12

For one instant it seemed they were going to smash right into the side of a big mobile home. Then the handlebars twitched by themselves, and suddenly both bikes were weaving in and out among the cars and trailers and campers, zooming along the road at fantastic speed, the wind screeching past so fast that Rolf could scarcely breathe.

Frantic drivers jammed on their brakes. Children and mothers sat staring, pop-eyed, as the two bikes roared past them at the speed of jet planes. Half the time Rolf simply closed his eyes as they scooted between cars, around trucks, and—he swore— over a busload of tourists from Dayton, Ohio.

Baneen had slipped off the handgrip and was flapping in the wind, hanging on with one hand and screaming madly.

“Ouch! Oh! All this—oof!—iron and steel! Ouch! Great Gremla protect me—ouch!”

Behind them the cars they passed set up a honking, like a mechanical chorus of angry machines. They zipped past a checkpoint, and the guard standing beside his gray sedan let the radio microphone drop from his hand as he stared at the two nearly supersonic bikes roaring by. His partner picked up the microphone and started babbling into it.

They passed the entrance to the Space Center so fast that the guards there were knocked down by the blast of wind. They scrambled to their feet and started yelling into their microphones:

“Two bicycles—must be doing five-hundred miles an hour—yeah, yeah, bicycles ! No, I don’t have sunstroke!”

Back at the Manned Launch Center, Rita’s father shook his head at the hastily typed report that had just been handed to him. Security guards were bustling around the room he was in, other men and women were sitting at radio desks and working typewriters.

Mr. Amaro’s eyes widened as he read the report. “Five-hundred miles an hour? Bicycles? Are they all going crazy out there?”

An excited voice came through one of the radio loudspeakers: “I can see ’em! They’re a couple of kids—the bikes are goin’ so fast they’re just a blur. And they’re headin’ straight for the VAB!”

Mr. Amaro crumpled the typewritten sheet in his hand. “Crazy or not, nobody’s getting into the Vehicle Assembly Building without a pass! Come on.”

Meanwhile Rolf and Rita were zooming along, heading for the enormous, massive shape of the VAB, where the rockets are put together before they are taken out to their launch pads.

“Ouch! Oh! Will we never get there?” Baneen was groaning.

“Look!” Rita yelled over the howling wind. “Security cars coming!”

Rolf saw the white cars speeding toward them from both sides of the VAB. “We can’t go around!” he shouted. “They’ve got both sides blocked!”

“Do something!” Rita yelled to Baneen.

“All right—owoo!” cried Baneen. “Straight up, then—ooch, ouch! The whole building’s full of iron, isn’t it?”

They hurtled directly at the straight solid wall of the VAB as if they were going to smash themselves against it. Rolf involuntarily closed his eyes, and the next thing he knew their bikes were racing straight up the wall, defying gravity and going as fast as ever.

Down at the base of the building, Mr. Amaro hopped out of his car before the driver had even brought it to a complete stop. He snapped his head back so fast that his uniform cap fell off.

“I don’t believe it!” he muttered to himself. “I see it, but it’s impossible!”

The two bikes went right up to the top of the wall and disappeared over the edge of the roof.

“It’s like being on top of a mountain,” Rolf yelled as they bounced onto the roof of the VAB. “This is the highest point in all Florida, I bet.”

“It’s nice being away from all those horns and the people yelling,” Rita agreed.

But they only had a moment to enjoy the quiet and the view. With Baneen still ouch ingevery inch of the way, they hurtled straight for the far edge of the roof.

Rolf felt his stomach drop away as his bike—and Rita’s—raced right off the roof and did a “Wheelie” on the back wall of the VAB. They both sailed down the wall with only their rear wheels touching. Rolf squinted downward. There was nothing between his madly pedaling feet and the ground except hundreds of feet of very thin air.

“Don’t look down!” he yelled to Rita, as his hands suddenly went clammy.

“Why not?” Rita hollered back. “It’s fun! Man, is that a long way down!”

Rolf concentrated on keeping his teeth from chattering.

They got to the ground and scooted off again, just as a couple of security cars pulled around the corner of the building.

“Whew,” said Baneen, pulling himself back up to a sitting position. “At least we’re away from that nasty iron for a moment or two.”

Rolf glanced at his wristwatch. Two minutes to go before liftoff.

They were heading straight for the giant rocket and its launch stand, with a half dozen white security cars trailing along behind them, sirens blaring distantly. But now Rolf saw that between them and the launch stand were more cars, and hundreds of people sitting in the press stands.

“How can we get around them?” he asked Baneen.

“Not around,” puffed Baneen. “Over.” Then the gremlin asked in a lower, sadder tone, “By the way, lad, that launching stand and the great tall tower—they’re made of iron, aren’t they?”

“Steel,” said Rolf.

Baneen’s eyes rolled up and the corners of his mouth dropped. “Ah, well—up and away!”

The bicycles soared into the air for a short distance, then bounced back to the ground. Another hop, longer this time, took them over a row of parked cars. Baneen winced and fidgeted. Then they bounded over a startled group of photographers, who jumped and shouted, and knocked over each others’ tripods in their surprise.

Bouncing, they reached the press stands where the reporters and photographers were eagerly watching the final moments of countdown. They soared over the watchers, who yelled and ducked as the bikes cleared their heads by inches.

They bounced down on the apron of ground between the viewing stand and the canal of water that ran between the launch stand and the VAB.

“Water!” screeched Baneen. “Merciful Gremla!”

The canal was about two hundred yards across, and deep, as Rolf knew. And they were hurtling for it too fast to swerve aside.

“Up and over!” shouted Baneen, his voice quavering.

The two bicycles soared up like gliders and rose over the canal. Baneen put a hand over his eyes while he wailed, “Water… oo!”

Rolf also closed his eyes. He didn’t mind flying in a plane, but in a bicycle… !

He felt his bike touch down again, but on something that wasn’t quite solid ground. Opening his eyes, Rolf saw that they were pedaling up a wire, with Rita’s bike right in front of him. Like circus acrobats, they raced up the steeply angled wire.

Pushing down a lump in his throat, Rolf shouted ahead to Rita, “This is the escape wire—the astronauts use this to slide down from the spacecraft in case something goes wrong right before the rocket ignites.”

Rita half-turned in her seat to look at him over her shoulder. “I know. Isn’t it fun?” She was grinning broadly.

Fun! Rolf felt paralyzed as they raced up the slim strand of wire, and she thought it was fun. She’s got more faith in gremlin magic than I have!

Meanwhile, more than a dozen white security cars had pulled up to a screaming halt beside the launch pad.

Half a dozen guards ran over to Mr. Amaro’s car. He jumped out and started shouting to them:

“Well, where are they? Have you seen them?”

“No, sir. Can’t find them anywhere!” None of the men was looking high enough to see the two bicycles zooming up the escape wire. The bikes were just a blur anyway; they were going so fast.

“Well, spread out,” Mr. Amaro ordered. “They must have sneaked in among the crowd someplace.”

One of the guards, his face sweaty and worried-looking, asked, “Sir, should we ask Mission Control to put a hold on the countdown? Those kids might be anyplace—”

“No,” Mr. Amaro said. “They’ve got awfully fast motorbikes, I’ll admit. But they’d have to be able to fly to get across the canal and into the launch area itself. There’s no chance of that.”

“Right,” the other guard agreed.

Up, up and up the two bikes raced while Baneen shuddered and moaned. “Iron and steel, iron and steel. Ooohhh.”

Finally they thumped to a stop, and Rolf saw that they were now on the same platform he had come to the night before, in the elevator. The spacecraft was standing at one end of the platform, smooth and white. The space kite itself was hanging from the spacecraft’s outer skin, looking tiny and barely visible—but at the same time, Rolf thought it looked big as a jetliner. He could see thousands of gremlins jostling around inside the kite, flickering in and out of visibility like a set of winking Christmas lights.

Somewhere a loudspeaker was saying, “Thirty seconds and counting… The launch tower is now starting to roll away from the rocket vehicle and spacecraft.”

And the tower was beginning a slow, grinding, growling motion.

“Lugh, ye great hulking heap of princely magic!” Baneen cried out, hopping on the steel platform as if it were covered with hot coals. “Come… oooch!… quick. There’s grand news!”

“Twenty seconds and counting…”

Lugh appeared at the edge of the kite, as if he were standing on a wing of it. “What is it now, trickster? Are you staying with the humans, after all?”

“Listen—ouch!—quick, Lugh me darling. There’s no need to leave Earth. None at all. For any of us!”

Before Lugh could reply, though, Rolf broke in, “Where’s Shep—Mr. Sheperton?”

“Ten seconds, nine,…”

“The dog?” Lugh scowled. “Tried to rip our kite off the rocket, he did. I cooled him off. Down there!”

Lugh pointed, turned his back and walked off toward the edge of the platform. Rolf stared down in the direction the other had indicated and saw Mr. Sheperton paddling weakly in a large pond of water.

That’s the water that feeds into the exhaust cooling sprays! Rolf realized. In a few seconds the pumps will suck Shep down and then fire him right into the hot exhaust gases when the rocket takes off!

“Nine, eight…”

“Stop the launch!” Rolf yelled. Desperately, he looked about him. Lugh still stood with his back turned. Then a glitter caught Rolf’s eye. The Great Corkscrew of Gremla was taking form beside him. He glanced at it, and saw standing behind it O’Rigami, La Demoiselle, and O’Kkane Baro, along with other gremlins whose names he did not know. The voice of Baneen whispered in his ear.

“Pull it out, lad—quickly. We’ll help!”

Already, O’Rigami and the others were disappearing into the glitter of the case of the Great Corkscrew. Frantically, Rolf took hold and pulled. There was a moment when nothing happened and then suddenly the Great Corkscrew slid easily from its case and the brilliant light flashing from it glittered all around. Lugh spun about.

“Stop the launch!” shouted Rolf, holding the Corkscrew aloft and waving it at the gremlin prince.

“Five… four…” boomed the loudspeaker. Lugh stood, staring.

Rolf could not wait any longer for Lugh to act. He threw the Corkscrew aside, and dived for the hook at the end of the escape wire. In an eyeblink he was sliding madly back down the wire, racing toward the ground and the water at the edge of the launch pad, nothing between him and a five-hundred-foot fall except the strength of his fingers as they clutched the hook of the handgrip.

The loudspeaker droned. “Two, one… zero…”

Rolf’s feet touched the ground and he ran pell-mell to the edge of the tank and without an instant’s hesitation, dived in. Mr. Sheperton was still struggling in the water as if some invisible force were binding his legs.

“Shep, Shep—I’m here! I’ll save you!” Rolf yelled as he swam toward the dog.

“Too late…” gargled Mr. Sheperton, weakly, and his head sank beneath the surface of the water.

In the Launch Control room—a place filled with technicians and engineers sitting at row after row of control consoles—Mr. Gunnarson snapped a ballpoint pen in half and threw the pieces on the floor beside his desk.

“No ignition! The rockets didn’t light off!”

A half dozen men huddled around him.

“Must be the firing sequencer.”

“Or the main squib.”

“Or a pump failure.”

Mr. Gunnarson wanted to slam the desk with both his fists. Instead, he swallowed hard and said as calmly as he could.

“Are there any malfunction lights showing on the consoles?”

“No, everything’s green.”

He took a deep breath. “All right. Set the countdown sequencer back to T minus two minutes and go through it again. Maybe we’ve just got a loose connection. Tell the astronauts that we’re recycling to T minus two—and counting!”

“Right!” The men scurried back to their consoles.

Mr. Amaro appeared at Mr. Gunnarson’s elbow. “There’s been some funny kind of disturbance around the pad—a couple of kids on motorcycles…”

“Not now!” Mr. Gunnarson snapped. “We’ve got a bird loaded and ready to go. Like a live bomb out there!”

One instant Rolf was diving under the water to grab at Shep’s sinking form, and the next instant he was standing in the middle of the Gremlin Hollow, dripping wet, with Shep beside him.

“What the—”

Shep shook himself, and a shower of water sprayed from his soaked fur. “Hey, wait, cut it out!” Rolf yelled, trying to protect himself with his hands.

He rubbed the water from his eyes and felt the hot Florida sun baking him dry. Then the air of the Hollow shimmered and Rita appeared, holding both their bicycles, looking rather surprised and troubled.

“Rolf, you’re all right!”

“Yeah, sure… but…”

Suddenly the air about them was filled with fireflies, thousands of dancing lights that spun around their heads and settled to the ground. Wherever one of the sparkling lights touched down, it turned into a gremlin. And now the gremlins were laughing and dancing lightly, grabbing each other and whirling around, arm in arm. Baneen was dancing with La Demoiselle. O’Rigami was twirling with O’Kkane Baro.

Lugh appeared, and he was neither laughing nor dancing. Rolf had never seen the gremlin leader look more grim or more terrible. At the sight of their prince, the other gremlins stopped dancing and their laughter faded into silence.

“So!” said Lugh, looking up at Rolf and at the same time seeming to tower mountainously over him. “You’d trick a gremlin would you—you’d try to pull the wool over the eyes of Lugh of the Long Hand? Well, it’s a short delay you’ll find you’ll have gained, in a moment—and a long time of sorrow to repent interfering with our departure! So, you bid me stop the launch by virtue of the Great Wish gained when you drew our Corkscrew from its case, did you? I suppose you’ll not be shy about drawing the Corkscrew forth once more, just to show me while my eyes are on you, how the strength to do so is in you, and you alone?”

“I…”

“Ah, now, Lugh!” chattered Baneen, appearing beside Rolf with O’Rigami and the rest. “Sure, and it’s a terrible hard thing to do, drawing the Great Corkscrew from its holding place. You wouldn’t be requiring the lad to do it more than once, and that second time right on the heels of his first mighty effort. How much better to admit ourselves beaten—”

“SILENCE!” roared Lugh. Silence fell over the Hollow. “BOY, LET ME SEE YOU DRAW THE CORKSCREW FORTH!”

The Great Corkscrew, once more in its case, winked into existence in front of Rolf. Half-paralyzed by Lugh’s voice, he reached out and took hold of it, pulling at it. And then, a strange thing began to happen…

In front of Rolf’s eyes… in front of Lugh, himself… first Baneen, and then, one by one, O’Rigami, La Demoiselle, and O’Kkane Baro, along with other nameless gremlins, began once more to disappear into the glare and glitter of the case… and the Corkscrew once more came forth in Rolf’s hand.

Lugh stared. For a second his jaw worked, but no sound came out. Then, incredulously, he spoke.

“What… what is this? MUTINY?”

Baneen and the others reappeared.

“Ah, Lugh, darling!” cried the little gremlin. “Sure, and we’d never go against your wishes, ordinarily. But it’s fond of this world we are, to be sure, after all these thousands of years, and—”

“Silence!” thundered Lugh. “What kind of gremlins are you?”

“We are ze good gremlins!” cried La Demoiselle. “Eet ees because we are true gremlins zat we fight to stay on ze Earth!”

“FIGHT?” roared Lugh. “Well the lot of you know that it’s myself alone—” he shook one knobby fist, “is more than a match for all of you put together. What, must I take you all up under my arm and carry you back to Gremla by force? If so be it, I will—”

He began to roll up his sleeves.

“Wait!” shouted Rolf. Lugh paused and looked at him. “Wait,” Rolf said again, more quietly. “This is my fault, but somebody’s got to tell you you’re wrong—”

“Silence, human!” rumbled Lugh ominously, continuing to roll up his sleeves.

“I’m not going to be silent,” said Rolf. “You’re just like I was—”

Lugh paused in rolling his sleeves, and stared at Rolf in astonishment.

“I?” he said. “Lugh of the Long Hand, like a mere human-lad?”

“That’s right,” said Rolf, determined now to get the words said, no matter how Lugh would react to them. “I kept trying to make my parents be the way I wanted them, in spite of the fact that they had other responsibilities. And you’ve been trying to turn Earth into another Gremla—into Gremla all over again, with the drawing of the Great Corkscrew and someone being king, and all that—and now that it hasn’t worked, you’re going to run away, back to Gremla and Hamrod the Heartless. Even Hamrod’s better than admitting you were wrong!”

Lugh’s ears rotated slowly, twice.

“Do I hear what I think I hear?” he muttered. “A human, saying such to me ?”

“It’s time somebody said it to you!” Rolf shouted. “None of the other gremlins want to go back to Hamrod. They’ve come to love Earth—and so have you, only you won’t admit it! If you’d admit it to yourself, you’d be willing to work with humans, even if none of them has a big enough soul to draw the Great Corkscrew from its case without help, any more than there’s any gremlin who can. Can you pull the Great Corkscrew loose by yourself? Of course not! So what makes you the one to decide whether all the gremlins on Earth have to go back to Gremla?”

Lugh began to swell… his actual body began to enlarge until he seemed to be growing to twice his normal size. As for his aura, that large impression that hovered over him at all times, it grew and grew until it seemed as large as a mountain. He spoke—and his voice was so deep that it seemed to come from the bowels of the earth and shake the very Hollow around them like an earthquake.

“L I G H T N I N G!” said Lugh, in that awful voice.

Suddenly the sky was black with clouds over their heads. A roll of thunder rumbled, echoing the sound of Lugh’s voice and a jagged spear of lightning shot down from the clouds and was caught, still jagged and so bright none of them could look at it, in Lugh’s right hand.

He poised the shaft of lightning, aiming it toward Rolf.

“B O Y!” he said. “A D M I T Y O U L I E!”

Wincing away from the blinding glare of the lightning shaft burning in Lugh’s hand, Rolf shook his head stubbornly.

“No!” he cried. “I’m right! You’re the one who’s wrong!”

For a moment there was a terrible hush in the Hollow. Lugh stood still. Then he lifted his arm.

Suddenly the lightning shaft flew from his hand back up to the clouds. The clouds themselves rolled up and disappeared. Bright sunshine poured down again on them all; and a great sigh of relief went up from thousands of gremlin throats.

“Ah, sure, your honor!” piped the voice of Baneen. “And wasn’t it yourself said that if you could find a human who cared more for another creature than himself, you’d give that human the Great Wish? And haven’t we here a lad who today risked everything, his own life included, for that of his faithful dog—and sure, if a dog’s not a creature now, what is?”

Lugh stared fiercely at Baneen, and then at Rolf, and then off into the distance.

“Quick, lad!” whispered Baneen in Rolf’s ear. “Make your wish— now!”

“I wish,” said Rolf, rapidly, “that gremlins would work with humans from now on to clean up the world and keep it clean and safe!”

“There, Lugh, darling!” cried Baneen, dancing in front of the gremlin prince. “It was yourself heard his wish. Do you grant it, now?”

Lugh glared at Baneen and turned to glare again at Rolf.

“Harrumph!” he growled, deep in his throat. “Rahumpf! HAHR-rumphff… all right!”

He turned and stalked off. The gremlins in the Hollow burst into wild cheering.

Abruptly, the ground shook. The air vibrated as if some giant’s breath were roaring across the world. And off in the distance, as wave after wave of thunder rolled across the Hollow, they all saw the Mars rocket lifting up, up, climbing straight into the cloudless blue sky on a tongue of sheer flame.

“A beautifur feat of engineering,” Rolf heard O’Rigami say.

The Mars rocket climbed higher, the roar of its mighty engines diminished. It became a distant speck, then a bright, fast-moving star shining in the morning sky. Then it got so far away that none of them could see it any longer.

Rolf felt as if he wanted to cheer, but it was all too magnificent and overpowering for something as small as one human voice. But it really did not matter. The gremlins were all cheering, for him. Rita was trying to hug him. The gremlins nearby were trying to hug him. Mr. Sheperton was standing on his hind legs, trying to lick Rolf’s face. It was all sort of a wonderful mess.