Lord, thought Gary, what a place to get stuck.
Outside the ship, equipped with a kit of tools, he crawled into the take-off tubes, took off the plates that housed the warming assembly and pried into their innards.
An hour later he had finished. He crawled out, grimed and smudged with carbon.
"Nothing wrong," he told Caroline. "No reason why they shouldn't work.”
He tried again and they didn't work.
He checked the feed line and the wiring. He ripped off the control panel and went over it, wire by wire, relay by relay, tube by tube. There was nothing wrong. But still it wouldn't work.
"The goblins," Caroline guessed.
He agreed. "It must be the goblins. There is nothing else to think.”
But how, he asked himself, could such simple-minded things turn an almost foolproof, letter-perfect spaceship into a heap of junk?