On the Gremlins

The Gremlins have suffered particularly from descriptions composed at the convenience of their employers. Railway directors describe them as indefatigable; householders as unaccountable; manufacturers as naturally suited to machinery. Each proposition becomes less impressive when one discovers what its author wished a Gremlin to do without additional payment. A general account must begin with the body: the adult stands approximately three feet high, ordinarily lives some fifty years, and maintains a rapid expenditure of food and bodily energy. The most consequential distinction, however, concerns the circumstances in which it enters society. Among the other Principal Peoples, the household commonly connects bodily descent with instruction; among Gremlins, these functions are so thoroughly separated that our customary questions about family frequently assume a household the Gremlin never had.

A female deposits a clutch of approximately twenty leathery eggs and departs. The hatchlings emerge sighted and capable of immediate locomotion; their dispersal is vigorous, frequently violent, and singularly discouraging to anyone who supposes that infancy must advertise itself by helplessness. I have seen an attendant bitten while attempting to restore two hatchlings to the same basket. He called their behaviour unnatural, although he had just received unusually direct evidence of its nature. Mobility does not imply mature judgement, and possession of serviceable eyes tells us little about what their owner understands. The hatchling can escape a hand long before it can recognise the danger of a railway cutting. Language and customary conduct are subsequently acquired from the surrounding community. A Gremlin’s accent consequently affords evidence of upbringing; it affords none concerning the whereabouts of its mother.

This arrangement makes the clutch an exceedingly poor measure of population increase. Twenty eggs are neither twenty surviving adults nor twenty future parents. The annual Human birth rate, approximately twenty-six per thousand, already exceeds the Dwarven rate by more than twofold; the lower Aesir and Elven rates accompany much longer lives. To place a Gremlin clutch beside these figures and announce a coming inundation is an arithmetical performance which ought to disqualify its author from keeping poultry. We require the number of laying females, the proportion of eggs that hatch, survival after dispersal and the frequency of successful reproduction. Our returns are weakest precisely where the young are most easily missed. I rejected the Royal Census Office’s first estimate on these grounds. Its superintendent replied that no better figures existed. I agreed, and asked why his department had printed worse ones.

Gremlin aversion to prolonged close company with other Gremlins, relieved during the annual mating season, further complicates enumeration. They establish neither national homelands nor the urban quarters by which officials conveniently count other peoples. Yet a Gremlin may remain attached for years to a household, workshop or ship whose other inhabitants are Human, Dwarven or Elven. The preference concerns the company being kept; its exact physiological cause remains unknown. It also varies in strength between individuals. At the Cawley locomotive works I proposed lodging six Gremlin apprentices together, believing that familiar speech would ease their arrival. The forewoman, a Dwarf with thirty years’ experience, advised separate lodgings. I explained the advantages of my arrangement at sufficient length to make it especially instructive when the apprentices took two doors off their hinges to make separate ways in and out. We dispersed the apprentices among willing households, and attendance improved within a week. The forewoman accepted my apology with a brevity I have since attempted, without much success, to imitate.

Their rapid metabolism is apparent in frequent feeding and in the difficulty of sustaining exertion when meals are withheld. Small stature alone does not explain every observed difference: comparisons must allow for bodily mass, temperature and occupation. My measurements nevertheless show a higher expenditure per unit weight than in the Human and Dwarven subjects examined under similar conditions. Gremlins also sleep in several short periods. A superintendent who counts only the longest interval may sincerely believe that his mechanic scarcely sleeps; sincerity does nothing to repair the omitted observations. At Cawley I required a full day’s record before permitting the phrase “exceptional endurance” into my report. The mechanic in question had been sleeping behind a disused condenser. Once regular intervals and food were provided, his errors declined. His supposed endurance had concealed a tolerable workman being made into an exhausted one.

The celebrated ear deserves more careful treatment than it generally receives. Many Gremlins distinguish machines by their sound, including individual engines of the same manufacture. I tested one fitter, Tobin, behind a screen, with the order of the engines changed by an assistant. He identified seven of eight correctly and objected that the eighth had acquired a replacement bearing since he last heard it. Inspection supported him. This establishes a remarkable acquired discrimination in Tobin, though it leaves open how much belongs to Gremlin auditory physiology and how much to attention, practice and interest. A Human miller performed creditably in a comparable trial upon millstones; an Elven lecturer who had confidently pronounced the task impossible declined to participate. I have retained his objection in my notes, where it usefully illustrates the difference between an experiment and a declaration.

There is similarly no evidence that dishonesty constitutes a Gremlin bodily characteristic. Workshop accusations commonly become less secure when one asks who witnessed the taking, who owned the disputed implement and whether wages had actually been paid. Individual Gremlins lie, steal and behave abominably, as do individuals capable of delivering university lectures; such conduct requires examination on its own evidence. Their aptitude for certain industrial occupations has also encouraged the claim that they were manufactured, though no maker, process or reproducible mark of manufacture has been demonstrated. The allegation chiefly rests upon finding them useful, a circumstance which must give every competent apprentice cause for uneasiness.

We therefore understand Gremlins best by following the consequences of their observed development. Early dispersal carries them into communities unrelated by descent; instruction there produces local speech and loyalties; adult preferences distribute them through those communities in ways our household registers handle badly. The origin of the whole arrangement, and its possible relationship to the reproductive histories of other sapient peoples, remain unsettled; I do not know how it arose. Further observation should include the places where hatchlings actually survive and the people who teach them, whose knowledge has received less scholarly attention than several ingenious theories deserving substantially less.