 What is Houlihan's relationship with the little people?
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. houlihan's equation by ... 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. 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. And I had become convinced they could never be seen here in America. "Come along now, people!" said this crotchety one, looking straight at me. Or so the legends affirmed, though I've wondered often about the truth of them. "My name's Houlihan of the Roscommon Houlihans. Yet without reaching a decision in so many words I knew suddenly that I had to talk to them. So I stepped back to the tiny spaceship, and this time I struck it a resounding blow with my fist. "And mine's Houlihan, as I've told you. "Mr. Houlihan," said Keech, drawing a kind of peppered dignity up about himself, "in such matters I am never fully convinced.
 He has some kind of historical relationship with them but it's not clear what
 He has some kind of historical relationship with them but it's not clear what  He has seen them once before and is suspicious of what they're taking from the area  He is a little person himself and is glad to finally find his own people  He believes in all fantastical creatures so he is an honorary member of their group