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together on top of the poster as it lay face up. Something like the rippling
of heat waves flowed across the poster from one end to the other, then slowly
settled down and ceased.
"Excerrent!" said O'Rigami, to the almost-invisible gremlin workers. "Now,
take firm grip."
There was evidently a good deal of effort involved in this part of the job,
for a double line of gremlins flickered into visibility at both the top and
bottom edges of the poster. Their tongues were clenched between their
lime-colored teeth, feet planted wide, and their cheeks puffed out with effort
as they clutched grimly onto something that was a good eight inches above the
poster itself.
"Ready?" asked O'Rigami.
The half-visible little figures braced themselves. Suddenly, one of them at
the far bottom corner of the poster lost his footing and fell. Like dominoes,
the whole line along the bottom of the poster went down.
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"Take care! Take care!" cried O'Rigami. "Take grip once more."
The line along the bottom of the poster formed up again.
"Now," shouted O'Rigami, "three times as I count. Ready?One!"
Both lines of half-visible gremlins raised and lowered their arms. Something
misty a sheet of mistiness formed between them, above the poster at the level
where their hands were clenched.
"Two!"cried O'Rigami.
Their arms moved up and down again, accompanied by a chorus of tiny grunts
and wheezes. Rolf suddenly realized that what they were doing was like what he
and his friends used to do down at the beach, when they were shaking the sand
off a blanket. Except that this "blanket" was a thin film of mistiness, and
there was no sand on it.
"Three!"roared O'Rigami, jumping clear off the ground with his hands raised
over his head.
The gremlins holding whatever-it-was flapped it once more, mightily, and fell
over backward, becoming visible as they lay about looking exhausted. What they
had held had also become completely visible now it was like a thin blue veil
of finest silk, shot with white. It floated downward and settled exactly on
top of the poster.
O'Rigami hissed with satisfaction, stepping forward to the very edge of the
veil-like object.
"Why," exclaimed Rita, "itis a blueprint!"
In fact, what lay on the ground now, although it seemed to be made out of
exquisitely fine silk, looked exactly like a very complicated technical
blueprint.
"Of course," O'Rigami said to Rita. "What did you expect, a beach branket?"
"But how could you get that from the poster?" Rolf asked, staring at the
blueprint.
"Now, now, lad," said Baneen abruptly. "It's as simple as enchanting a
princess. The poster was made up from designs of the actual spacecraft, was it
not? And since the spacecraft itself was constructed from blueprints, must it
not be that the form of the blueprints was living in the design of the
spacecraft, and the form of the spacecraft was living in the design of the
poster? Like equals like, as one of those Greek geometers used to say. Sure
and it was only the skill of the gremlin weavers it took to extract the design
and make it visible."
"Oh," said Rolf, his head buzzing.
He would have said more, but now O'Rigami had just produced a small bagful of
the transistors and other little items Rolf had gotten from the hardware
store.
"Now," said the Grand Engineer, "we add the connectors, correctry magicked,
to the brueprint, thereby energizing it and "
He tossed the handful of small electronics components into the air. They
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floated out over the blueprint, descended to it, and disappeared. All but one
tiny piece of red wire, which stood at one end and scurried in circles about
the blueprint. O'Rigami pointed a finger and stamped his foot, the wire
hopped, scooted to its proper position, and vanished with a smallpoof.
"Connection is estabrished," continued O'Rigami. "Now we attach the activated
brueprints to both the human spacecraft and the space kite."
He clapped his hands. The blueprint disappeared, leaving only the poster
below it, untouched. O'Rigami turned to Lugh and bowed.
"Ready to board," he announced.
Lugh was scowling worse than ever. The look on his face would have stopped a
charging bull elephant in full stride. The only good thing about it was that
it did not seem to be directed at anyone in particular.
"Ready is it?" snarled Lugh. "All right then, what are the lot of you waiting
for? Get on board and shake the garbage and asphalt of this miserable world
from our gremlin boots!"
There was a sort of uneasy waveriness in the air of the Hollow and suddenly
gremlins became visible, hundreds of them, thousands of them, all looking
unhappy.
"What are you waiting for?" roared Lugh. "Did we or did we not give them
their chance nearly two thousand years ago? BOARD!"
And like tiny lights going out all around Rolf, Mr. Sheperton and Rita, the
hordes of gremlins began to disappear, leaving the Hollow empty with a strange
and aching loneliness that Rolf could actually feel. It was a feeling such as
he had never imagined before. Suddenly Lugh's last few words made sense to
him, and he understood why the gremlins were really leaving Earth and why it
was up to him to stop them.
"Wait!" he cried.
But all the gremlins in the Hollow were gone now except Lugh, O'Rigami and
Baneen. Even as he shouted, O'Rigami gave the two humans and the dog a polite
bow and disappeared. Lugh winked out almost the same instant, and Baneen
thinned to transparency, flickering like a candle flame that was dying.
11
"Wait, Baneen!" Rolf shouted again, desperately.
For a second, it seemed that Baneen was almost gone. Then he grew solid
again.
"Forgive me, lad," he said softly, "but I can't wait. It's time for us all to
be going now, and they're waiting for me aboard the space kite. Farewell . .
." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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