Gremlins, Go Home!

by Ben Bova

  His father got up a moment later. “See you later, son.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  Tom Gunnarson called to his wife from the front door. She called back from the nursery, told him to try to get home early enough for a good night’s rest. Then he was gone. Rolf sat in the kitchen. Alone, he thought, again. He pushed his chair back from the table and, without a word to his mother, went out the back door.

  He was getting his bike out of the garage, when Rita came up. She was just Rolf’s age—in fact, they had grown up together, but now she looked to him like a stranger.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he answered, busy rolling his bike out.

  “Say, he was neat on television, last night,” she said.

  “Who?” he grunted, without looking at her.

  “Your dad!” she looked surprised. “Didn’t you watch him on TV last night? We saw him on the later news. And they had the same thing on again this morning, on the network show. Everybody in the country must have seen him this morning.”

  “Big deal,” said Rolf.

  “What d’you mean—big deal?” She stared at him.

  “Big deal,” he insisted. “You know what’s important in the world today? Ecology, that’s what. But you think you’d see anyone on the tube because he’s doing work in ecology? But anybody connected with a space launch—that’s neeaat.” He drawled out the last word, sarcastically.

  “Rolf, you—” She almost exploded. He looked at her, then. Rita Amaro was a happy girl, always smiling, her teeth flashing brightly against the dark tan of her skin. Rolf had decided secretly, last term in school after they had more or less gotten out of touch with each other, that she really was a pretty girl. When she grew up, she’d probably be beautiful enough to be a movie star or a stewardess, or something like that—and forget she had ever known anyone like him. Right now she looked ready to lose her temper. But she did not.

  “He’s your father, Rolf!” she said. “I’d think you’d be proud. Man, you’re weird!”

  “He doesn’t know anything about ecology,” muttered Rolf. “What’s more, he doesn’t care. He’s just an engineer.”

  She opened her mouth and this time he did brace himself for an explosion, but instead, she closed her mouth again.

  “Rolf,” she said, almost gently. “You’re… I don’t know what—”

  “Weird,” Rolf got up on his bike and pushed off. “That’s what I am. Weird. And my father’s famous. Big deal!”

  He left her standing in the driveway, looking after him as if she was still half-mad, half-something to which he could not put a name.

  Shep appeared from somewhere as Rolf pedaled down the street toward the center of town, and raced alongside the bike. The morning sun wasn’t too high yet; the day was still cool. A good breeze was blowing. Rolf wanted to get to the hardware store just as they were opening up. But he had to stop at the bank first.

  There was a big cherrypicker crane standing in front of the hardware store, and the hard-hatted electrician up in the cab was yelling down to his assistant on the truck:

  “I tell ya I can’t find nothin’ wrong with it! Whoever called in and said this lamp was out must’ve been kiddin’!”

  “It was the cops called in,” his helper yelled back.

  The electrician shook his head. “Half the burglar alarms in town on the fritz and what’re the fuzz doin’? Sendin’ in phony complaints about street lamps!”

  Rolf tried not to grin as he leaned his bike against the store front and walked in. Shep settled down on his belly beside the bike.

  The pile of material was still on the back counter, beside the cash register. One of the young salesboys had just spotted it, and was standing there looking puzzled.

  Rolf hurried back to him. “Uh, that’s my stuff,” he said. “I was in here yesterday just as they were closing up, and I didn’t have enough money to buy all that stuff, so I asked the man to leave it there so I could pick it up this morning.”

  The salesboy frowned. He looked at the pile of electronic components, then at Rolf, then at the pile again.

  “I was here last night, and I helped clean up after we closed shop. I don’t remember…” Then, with a shrug, he said, “Well, whatever. I’ll ring it up for you.”

  It came to exactly $13.13, which didn’t leave much in Rolf’s savings account.

  Shaking his head unhappily at the thought of how long it had taken him to save that money, Rolf stashed the paper bag on his bike’s rattrap and pushed on for Playalinda Beach.

  “Come on, Shep,” he called. “I want to see what they’re going to do with this stuff.”

  5

  As he pedaled out toward the Playalinda Beach area and the Gremlin Hollow, Rolf heard Shep mumbling under his breath while the dog trotted alongside the bike.

  “What’s the matter now?” Rolf asked.

  “Your manners,” answered Mr. Sheperton. “An absolute disgrace. The way you treated that girl…”

  “Who? Rita?”

  “You know very well that I mean Rita. You were shockingly rude to her.”

  Rolf felt a twinge of guilt, but he said nothing. With a shake of his head, he said, “Ahh… who cares?”

  “You should,” Mr. Sheperton replied. “And you do, I know. You can’t hide your feelings from me, Rolf. You like her very much. She’s the one you were showing off for when you took that fall off the high board—”

  Rolf’s bad leg ached suddenly at the memory of it. “I wasn’t showing off!” he growled. But both he and the dog knew he didn’t mean it.

  Mr. Sheperton kept grumbling as Rolf pedaled along the highway.

  “Uh, Shep—I mean, Mr. Sheperton,” Rolf said after a few minutes of hard pumping up a small rise in the road. “Don’t say anything to the gremlins about me and Rita, will you? They don’t have to know that she was even around when I hurt my leg.”

  Shep snorted. “It’s a bit late to keep the matter secret, with that trickster Baneen riding around on your handlebars all this time.”

  “Baneen? Handlebars?” Rolf blinked.

  Something like a small noiseless explosion popped in front of him and Baneen was suddenly smiling up at him. Just as Shep had said, the gremlin was perched on the right handlebar of Rolf’s bike.

  “Well, well, well, well!” cried Baneen cheerfully. “And a beautiful day it is, to be sure. Ah now, and why would you be wanting to keep the fact of your friendship with such a fine young lady a secret, lad?”

  “Never mind,” snapped Rolf, recovering from his surprise. “What about you? Where did you come from? And how come you’re here, anyway?”

  “Why it’s pure chance, pure chance—and just a mite of worry mixed in,” said Baneen. “We gremlins having the second sight and all, it was a bit of a blow to me when I chanced to look in on you this morning and found you hadn’t got the wee things we asked you to pick up for us. Ah, what will we do now, poor, helpless gremlins that we are—I asked myself? Lugh must hear of this, I said; and I went to find him. But before I did indeed find him, I changed my mind. It’s a terrible thing, the wrath of mighty Lugh—”

  “Poor, helpless gremlin that he is, of course,” sneered Shep.

  “Ah, don’t be twisting my words now, don’t,” said Baneen. “I thought of the wrath of Lugh and I thought of the lad, here, and I thought it would do no harm to speak to Rolf first. So I made a small spell in a twinkling to bring me to you—and here now, I find you have the little things after all.”

  “That’s right,” said Rolf. “They’re on the back of my bike, there.”

  “So indeed I see,” said Baneen, casting a bright inquisitive glance past Rolf’s elbow to the brown paper bag pinned in the bike’s rattrap. He switched his gaze to the scrub grass and bushes beside the road. “You can turn off here, lad.”

  “Here?” Rolf asked, surprised. He looked and saw a trail he didn’t recognize snaking away through the brush.

  “It’s a bit of a shortcut we’ve fixe
d up to our Hollow,” said Baneen.

  Rolf turned down the trail, which turned and twisted in strange ways. In seconds, it seemed, he was completely out of sight of the road they had just left.

  “How far—” he started to ask.

  “Not far, not far at all!” said the gremlin. “In just a second now, we’ll be there. Once again it’s yourself who’ll be setting eyes on the high mysteries and secret workings of us gremlin-folk, that none but you know about. And it’s certain sure that I am that none but you does know; because a fine lad such as yourself wouldn’t have told anybody about us, would you now?” His voice and eyes suddenly seemed sharpened all together. “Not even that fine young lady you were talking with less than an hour ago?”

  “Rita? Why would I—” Rolf broke off suddenly, stopping his bike and putting his feet down on the sandy soil. For they had come suddenly upon the lip of the Gremlin Hollow. Down below, he could see hordes of gremlins hard at work stretching out the large kite-shape of O’Rigami’s. The Grand Engineer stood patiently off to one side, watching the work. Further away, Lugh was busily directing still more gremlins who carried, dragged, and tugged strangely shaped chests and boxes across the sand. A few gremlins were floating a foot or so off the ground, guiding green-colored crates that floated alongside them.

  Everything in the Hollow was noise and bustle, a thousand tiny voices chattering and screeching at once. And, as usual, the gremlin magic was playing tricks with Rolf’s vision. The kite once again looked as big as a jetliner, while the Hollow itself seemed no more than thirty or forty feet across.

  Rolf started to pick up the sentence where he had left it, but before he could get out another word, Shep set up a furious barking.

  “What’s that? Stop! Stop immediately, do you hear me! Turn that thing round and get it out of here…”

  Rolf and Baneen turned together to look, because Shep was facing away from the Hollow, in the direction of the beach.

  “Great Gremla protect us!” yelped Baneen. “It’s a monster, headed right this way to destroy us all!”

  “It’s a bulldozer,” Rolf yelled.

  The machine was indeed roaring in their direction. It topped the rise that separated the Hollow from sight of the beach, and bore straight down toward the Hollow itself.

  “Hey, it’s going to tear up the kite!” Rolf cried.

  “Stop! Stop, I say!” barked Mr. Sheperton.

  But the bulldozer came right on.

  “It’s no good! It’s no good!” cried Baneen, hopping madly on Rolf’s handlebars. “Sure and we’re all invisible here within the magic wards about this place. We’re going to be scooped up like peas on a spade and drowned in the sand!”

  6

  The bulldozer roared and clattered like an angry demon with a hide of yellow steel. Instead of breathing fire, though, it puffed dirty black smoke into the clear sky.

  It bore straight down on the Gremlin Hollow, pushing a huge pile of sand ahead of it on its wide ugly blade. Gremlins were dashing everywhere, screaming in terror and rage. O’Rigami was madly trying to fold up his kite before the ’dozer’s treads ground it to shreds. Baneen huffed and puffed and made wild motions with his magical hands. The bulldozer didn’t even slow down, although the driver sneezed once.

  Rolf saw the great machine boring straight at him, like a moving mountain of sand threatening to bury him.

  Mr. Sheperton barked furiously. Baneen fluttered up into the air, screeching, “It’s no good, no good at all! He can’t see us or hear us!”

  And then Lugh’s giant voice roared out, “WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE DUSTY SKIES OF GREMLA IS GOING ON HERE?”

  Before anyone could utter another word, Lugh looked up at the approaching bulldozer.

  His brows pulled down into a terrible scowl. His cheeks puffed out and his nostrils flared dangerously.

  “A great ugly mechanical monster, is it? Well, we’ll just see about that.”

  The bulldozer had just reached the edge of the Hollow, still pushing sand ahead of it. Some of the sand was already spilling into the Hollow and pouring over some of the gremlins who were shrieking and scattering every which way. O’Rigami’s hands were flying faster than the eye could follow, folding up the precious kite. Rolf stood straddling his bike, with Baneen floating up at about his eye level and Mr. Sheperton growling and tense beside him.

  Lugh thrust out his jaw and eyed the machine angrily. Fists planted dangerously on his hips, he strode off to one side of the oncoming monster, fury and vengeance in every stiff-legged, four-inch-long step.

  “What’s he going to do?” Rolf wondered.

  “Not…” Baneen started, then pressed both his fists into his mouth and stared at Lugh, goggle-eyed. He zipped downward and touched his feet to the sandy ground.

  Lugh thrust out his right arm and pointed at the yellow bulldozer. His voice became mighty and terrible:

  “MAY THE GREAT AND THUNDEROUS CURSE OF GREMLA FALL UPON YOUR HEAD!”

  Baneen fainted.

  Mr. Sheperton snorted, almost like a sneeze.

  Rolf hiccupped.

  And the bulldozer slowed. Its roar became a rumble, then a squeak. The smoke-belching exhaust stack seemed to tremble, then shot a sheet of blue flame fifty feet into the sky. Both treads of the bulldozer snapped, and all the wheels fell off.

  The driver yelled something wild and leaped from his seat as if his pants were on fire. He dived headfirst into the sand. The bulldozer’s engine dissolved in a huge cloud of smoke. The metal sides of the machine fell away and turned to rust as they hit the ground. The whole machine seemed to crumble, like a balloon when the air goes out of it.

  In less than a minute there was nothing left except a badly frightened driver and a mess of steaming, rusting machinery that was fast disappearing into the sand.

  Lugh nodded his head once, the way a man does when he knows he’s finished a task and done it well.

  “Be that a lesson to all of you,” he said firmly, “gremlin, man and beast alike. Lugh of the Long Hand is not to be pushed about.”

  Rolf simply stared. The bulldozer was completely gone now, hardly even a wisp of steam left to mark where it once stood. The driver was sitting on the sand, looking as if he didn’t believe any of this, even though he had seen it. He was a young man, Rolf saw, with long black hair and a sun-bronzed skin. He kept shaking his head and staring at the spot where the bulldozer had been.

  While Rolf watched, Baneen stirred himself and climbed weakly to his feet, using Rolf’s leg for support. “I was afraid Lugh would invoke the Great Curse. It’s a wonder it didn’t bury us all with its terrible magic.”

  Another man was running up to the bulldozer driver. He was older, black skin shining with perspiration where his shirt was open and showing his chest.

  “Hey, Charlie, what did you stop for? Where’s the ’dozer?”

  Charlie extended a shaking arm and pointed. “It… it was right there…” His voice was trembling.

  “Was?” The black man took a quick look around. “Where is it now?”

  “Gone. Dissolved. Fell apart and rusted away—just like that.” Charlie tried to snap his fingers, but it didn’t work.

  The black man stooped down and picked up a tiny fragment of rusted yellow-painted metal. “Rusted out?” His voice had suddenly gone high-pitched with shock. “A whole ’dozer don’t rust out, not all at once.”

  “Thi-this one did!”

  Charlie stared at his partner, then reached down and yanked him up onto his feet. “Come on, friend. You been out in the sun too long. We better get out of here before the ranger patrol flies past.”

  As the two men disappeared back over the rise, Lugh bellowed to the other gremlins, “Well, what are you standing there for, with your mouths hanging open? Back to work, all of you, before I turn you into toadstools.”

  Gremlins seemed to sprout out of the sand everywhere and hustled about busily. O’Rigami began to unfold his kite once more, just as calmly as if nothing had ever
disturbed him.

  “Lugh, me princely protector,” Baneen called out, “You wouldn’t be wanting that great heap of sand to stay there, would you now?”

  “Well said. Get rid of it, trickster. And the beast’s tracks, too.”

  Baneen smiled happily and danced a small circle around himself. “Ah yes, we wouldn’t want them that near us, again, would we? Even to cover their own tracks.”

  Rolf looked up and saw the pile of sand growing dim and shimmering in the heat from the blazing sun. Before he could blink three times, the little mountain had completely disappeared. And so had the tracks of the bulldozer’s caterpillar treads.

  “Won’t they wonder how their tracks vanished?” Rolf asked.

  “Ah, no, lad,” Baneen answered lightly. “Men never question their good luck. It’s only the bad luck they wonder about.”

  “Maybe you ought to leave the tracks, though,” said Rolf. “So I’ve got something to show to the authorities when I report this.”

  “Report? Report, lad? Sure, and there’s nothing to report,” said Baneen, hastily. “Their murderous machine’s nothing but a pile of rust now, and the villains themselves have gone. Or, indeed, maybe they were no villains at all, but a couple of humans from the ranger station down the beach a ways, just doing their jobs.”

  Mr. Sheperton growled, swinging his head about so that he and Baneen stood nose to nose, almost touching.

  “Why were they so anxious to get away before the next patrol plane came over, then, might I ask?”

  “That’s right,” said Rolf.

  “Hmm, they did say something like that, didn’t they?” Baneen cocked his head to one side, as if thinking. “Scalawags! To think they’d push sand into our Hollow, our one little wee spot on the whole face of this vast and watery… But come, come, there’s wisdom in letting well enough alone. They’re gone now.”

  “But you can’t let them get away with doing something like that, here in the very heart of the Wildlife Preserve,” said Rolf. “I’ve just got to report them. What if they come back?”