 What is the narrator's ethnicity?
Every writer must seek his own Flowery Kingdom in imagination's wide demesne, and if that search can begin and end on Earth his problem has been greatly simplified. A one-time Air Force officer, he has turned to fantasy in his lighter moments, to bring us such brightly sparkling little gems as this. But its small, mischievous pilots had a rendezvous with destiny—on Earth. It was in a park near the nuclear propulsion center—a cool, green spot, with the leaves all telling each other to hush, be quiet, and the soft breeze stirring them up again. That morning I had been trying to work out an equation to give the coefficient of discharge for the matter in combustion. You may call it gas, if you wish, for we treated it like gas at the center for convenience—as it came from the rocket tubes in our engine. Without this coefficient to give us control, we would have lacked a workable equation when we set about putting the first moon rocket around those extraordinary engines of ours, which were still in the undeveloped blueprint stage. I had to figure everything into it—diameter of the nozzle, sharpness of the edge, the velocity of approach to the point of discharge, atomic weight and structure— Oh, there is so much of this that if you're not a nuclear engineer yourself it's certain to weary you. Perhaps you had better take my word for it that without this equation—correctly stated, mind you—mankind would be well advised not to make a first trip to the moon. And all this talk of coefficients and equations sits strangely, you might say, upon the tongue of a man named Kevin Francis Houlihan. Not children, but a group of little people, hard at work. I had seen them first as a boy of eight, and then, very briefly again, on my tenth birthday. Or so the legends affirmed, though I've wondered often about the truth of them. "My name's Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans. I am descended from King Niall himself—or so at least my father used to say! Yet without reaching a decision in so many words I knew suddenly that I had to talk to them. Simply because I was so lonely that my mind had become clogged. I knew that if I could just once hear the old tongue again, and talk about the old things, I might be able to think the problem through to a satisfactory conclusion.
 Irish
 Irish  American  Leprechaun  Japanese