Published by
Delacone Press

Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
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New York, New York 10103

This work was originally published in Great
Britain by Transworld Publishers Ltd.

Copyright © 1989 by Terry and Lyn Pratchett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

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The trademark Delacorte Press® is registered in the
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Pratchett, Terry.

Diggers / Terry Pratchett.

p.   cm.

Summary: A group of small creatures called
nomes, whose families have lived for generations
hidden in a department store, are forced to flee to a
country quarry, where they struggle against harsh
weather, destructive humans, and dissension
among themselves.
ISBN 0-385-30152-9
[1. Fantasy.] I. Title.
PZ7.P8865Di 1990

[Fic]—dc20                           89-78123
CIP
AC

Manufactured in the United States of America
February 1991
10 987654321
BVG

In the beginning . . .

. . . Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) created the Store.

At least, that was the belief of thousands of
nomes who for many generations* had lived under
the floorboards of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), an old
and respected department store in the middle of
the city.

The Store had become their world. A world with
a roof and walls.

Wind and Rain were ancient legends. So were
Day and Night. Now there were sprinkler systems
and air conditioners, and the nomes' small,
crowded lives ticked to the clock of Opening Time
and Closing Time. The seasons of their year were
January Sales, Spring into Spring Fashions, Sum-
mer Bargains, and Christmas Fayre. Led by the Ab-
bot and priesthood of the Stationer!, they wor-
shipped—in a polite, easygoing sort of way, so as

* Nome generations, that is. Nomes live ten times faster than
humans. To them, ten years is a long lifetime.

TERRY PRATCHETT

not to upset him—Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), who
they believed had created everything, i.e., the Store
and all the contents therein.

Some families of nomes had grown rich and
powerful and took the names—more or less—of the
Store departments they lived under . . . the Del
Icatessen, the Ironmongri, the Haberdasheri.

And into the Store, on the back of a truck, came
the last nomes to live Outside. They knew what
wind and rain were, all right. That's why they
tried to leave them behind.

Among them was Masklin, rat hunter, and
Granny Morkie, and Grimma, although they were
women and didn't really count. And, of course, the
Thing.

No one quite understood the Thing. Masklin's
people had handed it down for centuries; it was
very important, that was all they knew. When it
came near the electricity in the Store it was able to
talk. It said it was a thinking machine from a ship
which, thousands of years before, had brought the
nomes from a far Store, or possibly star. It also said
it could hear electricity talk, and one of the things
the electricity was saying was that the Store would
be demolished in three weeks.

It was Masklin who suggested that the nomes
leave the Store on a truck. He found, oddly
enough, that actually working out how you could
drive a giant truck was the easiest part. The hardest
part was getting people to believe that they could
do it.

•   2   '

DIGGERS

He wasn't the leader. He'd have liked to be a
leader. A leader could stick his chin out and do
brave things. What Masklin had to do was argue
and persuade and, sometimes, lie very slightly. He
found it was often easier to get people to do things
if you let them think it was their idea.

Ideas! That was the tricky bit, all right. And
there were lots of ideas that they needed. They
needed to learn to work together. They needed to
learn to read. They needed to think that female
nomes were, well, nearly as intelligent as males (al-
though everyone knew that really this was ridicu-
lous and that if females were encouraged to think
too much their brains would overheat).

Anyway, it all worked. The truck did leave just
before the Store mysteriously burned down, and
hardly damaging anything very much, it was
driven out into the country.

The nomes found an abandoned quarry tucked
into a hillside, and moved into the ruined build-
ings.

And then they knew everything was going to be
All Right. There was going to be, they'd heard, a
Bright New Dawn.

Whatever that was.

Most nomes had never seen a dawn, bright or
otherwise, and if they had they would have known
that the trouble with bright new dawns is that
they're usually followed by cloudy days. With scat-
tered showers.

Six months passed . . .

•   3   '

TERRY PRATCHETT

*   *

This is the story of the Winter.
This is the story of the Great Battle.
This is the story of the awakening of the Cat, the
Dragon in the Hill, with eyes like great eyes and a
voice like a great voice and teeth like great teeth.
But the story didn't end there.
It didn't start there, either.

The sky blew a gale. The sky blew a fury. The
wind became a wall sweeping across the country, a
giant stamping on the land. Small trees bent, big
trees broke. The last leaves of autumn whirred
through the air like lost bullets.

The garbage dump by the gravel pits was de-
serted. The seagulls that patrolled it had found
shelter somewhere, but it was still full of move-
ment. The wind tore into the heaps as though it
had something particular against old detergent
boxes and leftover shoes. Tin cans rolled into the
ruts and clanked miserably, while lighter bits of
rubbish flew up and joined the riot in the sky.

Still the wind burrowed. Papers rustled for a
while, then got caught and blasted away.

Finally one piece that had been flapping for
hours tears free and flies up into the booming air. It
looks like a large white bird with oblong wings.

Watch it tumble. . . .

It gets caught on a fence, but very briefly. Half of

•   4   '

DIGGERS

it tears off, and now that much lighter, it pinwheels
across the furrows of the field beyond. . . .

It is just gathering speed when a hedge looms up
and snaps it out of the air like a fly.

5

I.    And in that time were Strange

Happenings: the Air moved harshly, the
Warmth of the Sky grew Less, on some
mornings the tops of puddles grew Hard
and Cold.

II.    And the nomes said unto one another,
What is this Thing?

—From the Book of Nome, Quarries I, v. I-II

"Winter," said Masklin firmly. "It's called winter."

Abbott Gurder frowned at him.

"You never said it would be like this," he said.
"It's so cold."

"Call this cold?" said Granny Morkie. "Cold?
This ain't cold. You think this is cold? You wait till
it gets really cold!" She was enjoying this, Masklin
noticed; Granny Morkie always enjoyed doom.
"It'll be really cold then, when it gets cold. You get
real frosts, and water comes down out of the sky in
frozen bits!" She leaned back triumphantly. "What
d'you think of that, then? Eh?"

•   6   '

DIGGERS

"You don't have to use baby talk to us," sighed
Gurder. "We can read, you know. We know what
snow is."

"Yes," said Dorcas. "There used to be cards with
pictures on them, back in the Store. Every time
Christmas Fayre came around. We know about
snow. It's glittery."

"You get robins," agreed Gurder.

"There's, er, actually there's a bit more to it than
that," Masklin began.

Dorcas waved him into silence. "I don't think we
need to worry," he said. "We're well dug in, the
food stores are looking good, and we know where
to go to get more if we need it. Unless anyone's got
anything else to raise, why don't we close the meet-
ing?"

Everything was going well. Or, at least, not very
badly. That sort of thing always worried Masklin.

Oh, there was still plenty of squabbling and
feuds between the various families, but that was
nomish nature for you. That's why they'd set up
the council, which seemed to be working.

Nomes liked arguing. At least the Council of
Drivers meant they could argue without hitting
one another hardly ever.

Funny thing, though. Back in the Store the great
departmental families had run things. But now all
the families were mixed up and, anyway, there
were no departments in a quarry. But by instinct,
almost, nomes liked hierarchies. The world had al-

•   /   •

TERRY PRATCHETT

ways been neatly divided between those who told
people what to do, and those who did it. So, in a
strange way, a new set of leaders was emerging.

The Drivers.

It depended on where you had been during the
Long Drive. If you were one of the ones who had
been in the truck cab, then you were a Driver. Ev-
eryone else was just a Passenger. No one talked
about it much. It wasn't official or anything. It was
just that the bulk of nomekind felt that anyone who
could get the Truck all the way here was the sort of
person who knew what they were doing.

Being a Driver wasn't necessarily much fun.

Last year, before they'd found the Store, Masklin
had to hunt all day. Now he only hunted when he
felt like it; the younger Store nomes liked hunting,
and apparently it wasn't right for a Driver to do it.
And they mined potatoes and there'd been a big
harvest of corn from a nearby field, even after the
machines had been around. Masklin would have
preferred the nomes to grow their own food, but
they didn't seem to have the knack of making seeds
grow in the rock-hard ground of the quarry. But
they were getting fed, that was the main thing.

Around him he could feel thousands of nomes
living their lives. Raising families. Settling down.

He wandered back to his own burrow, down un-
der one of the derelict quarry sheds. After a while
he reached a decision and pulled the Thing out of
its own hole in the wall.

None of its lights was on. They wouldn't do that

•   8   '

DIGGERS

until the Thing was close to electrical wires; then it
would light up and be able to talk. There were
some wires in the quarry, and Dorcas had got them
working. Masklin hadn't taken the Thing to them,
though. The solid black box had a way of talking
that always made him feel unsettled.

He was pretty certain it could hear, though.

"Old Torrit died last week," he said after a while.
"We were a bit sad, but after all, he was very old
and he just died. I mean, nothing ate him first or
ran him over or anything."

Masklin's little tribe had lived in a highway em-
bankment beside rolling countryside which was
full of things that were hungry for fresh nome.
The idea that you could die simply of not being
alive anymore was a new one to them.

"So we buried him up on the edge of the potato
field, too deep for the plow. The Store nomes
haven't got the hang of burial yet, I think. They
think he's going to sprout, or something. I think
they're mixing it up with what you do with seeds.
Of course, they don't know about growing things.
Because of living in the Store, you see. It's all new
to them. They're always complaining about eating
food that comes out of the ground, they think it's
not natural. And they think the rain is a sprinkler
system. I think they think the whole world is just a
bigger Store. Urn."

He stared at the unresponsive cube for a while,
scraping his mind for other things to say.

"Anyway, that means Granny Morkie is the old-

•   9   -

L

TERRY PRATCHETT

est nome," he said eventually. "And that means
she's entitled to a place on the council, even though
she's a woman. Abbot Gurder objected to that, but
we said, all right, you tell her, and he wouldn't, so
she is. Um."

He looked at his fingernails. The Thing had a
way of listening that was quite off-putting.

"Everyone's worried about the winter. Um. But
we've got masses of potatoes stored up, and it's
quite warm down here. The Store nomes have
some funny ideas, though. They said that when it
was Christmas Fayre time in the Store there was
this thing that came called Santer Claws. I just
hope it hasn't followed us, that's all. Um."

He scratched an ear.

"All in all, everything's going right. Um."

He leaned closer.

"You know what that means? If you think every-
thing's going right, something's going wrong that
you haven't heard about yet. That's what I say.
Um."

The black cube managed to look sympathetic.

"Everyone says I worry too much. I don't think
it's possible to worry too much. Um."

He thought some more.

"Um. I think that's about all the news for now."
He lifted the Thing up and put it back in its hole.

He'd wondered whether to tell it about his argu-
ment with Grimma, but that was, well, personal.

It was all that reading books, that was what it
was. He shouldn't have let her learn to read, filling

• 10 -

DIGGERS

her head with stuff she didn't need to know.
Gurder was right, women's brains did overheat.
Grimma's seemed to be boiling hot the whole time,
these days.

He'd gone and said, Look, now everything was
settled down more, it was time they got married
like the Store nomes did, with the Abbot muttering
words and everything.

And she'd said she wasn't sure.

So he'd said, It doesn't work like that, you get
told, you get married, that's how it's done.

And she'd said. Not anymore.

He'd complained to Granny Morkie. You'd have
expected some support there, he thought. She was
a great one for tradition, was Granny. He'd said,
Granny, Grimma isn't doing what I tell her.

And she^d said, Good luck to her, wish I'd
thought of not doin' what I was told when I was a
gel.

Then he'd complained to Gurder, who said, Yes,
it was very wrong, girls should do what they were
instructed. And Masklin had said, Right then, you
tell her. And Gurder had said, Well, er, she's got a
real temper on her, perhaps it would be better to
leave it a bit and these were, after all, changing
times. . . .

Changing times. Well, that was true enough.
Masklin had done most of the changing. He'd had
to make people think in different ways to leave the
Store. Changing was necessary. Change was right.
He was all in favor of change.

• 11 •

TERRY PRATCHETT

What he was dead against was things not staying
the same.

His spear was leaning in the corner. What a pa-
thetic thing it was . . . now. Just a bit of flint held
onto the shaft with a twist of binder twine. They'd
brought saws and things from the Store. They
could use metal these days.

He stared at the spear for some time. Then he
picked it up and went out for a long, serious think
about things and his position in them. Or, as other
people would have put it, a good sulk.

The old quarry was about halfway up the hill-
side. There was a steep turf slope above it, which in
turn became a riot of bramble and hawthorn
thicket. There were fields beyond.

Below the quarry a dirt road wound down
through scrubby hedges and joined the main high-
way. Beyond that there was the railroad, another
name for two long lines of metal on big wooden
blocks. Things like very long trucks went along it
sometimes, all joined together.

The nomes had not got the railroad fully worked
out yet. But it was obviously dangerous, because
they could see a road that crossed it and, whenever
the railroad moving thing was coming, two gates
came down over the road.

The nomes knew what gates were for. You saw
them on fields, to stop things from getting out. It
stood to reason, therefore, that the gates were to

• 12 '

DIGGERS

stop the trains from escaping from their rails and
rushing around the place.

Then there were more fields, some gravel pits—
good for fishing, for the nomes who wanted fish—
and then there was the airport.

Masklin had spent hours in the summer watch-
ing the planes. They drove along the ground, he
noticed, and then went up sharply, like a bird, and
got smaller and smaller and disappeared.

That was the big worry. Masklin sat on his favor-
ite stone, in the rain that was starting to fall, and
started to worry about it. So many things were
worrying him these days he had to stack them up,
but below all of them was this big one.

They should be going where the planes went.
That was what the Thing had told him, when it
was still speaking to him. The nomes had come
from the sky. Up above the sky, in fact, which was
a bit hard to understand, because surely the only
thing there was above the sky was more sky. And
they should go back. It was their . . . something
beginning with D. Density. Their density. Worlds
of their own, they once had. And somehow they'd
got stuck here. But—this was the worrying part—
the ship thing, the airplane that flew through the
really high sky, between the stars, was still up
there somewhere. The first nomes had left it be-
hind when they came down here in a smaller ship,
and the small ship had crashed, and they hadn't
been able to get back.

And he was the only one that knew.

• 13 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

The old Abbot—the one before Gurder—he had
known. Grimma and Dorcas and Gurder all knew
some of it, but they had busy minds and they were
practical people and there was so much to organize
these days.

It was just that everyone was settling down.
We're going to turn this into our little world, just
like in the Store. They thought the roof was the
sky, and we think the sky is the roof.

We'll just stay and . . .

There was a truck coming up the quarry road. It
was such an unusual sight that Masklin realized he
had been watching it for a while without really
seeing it at all.

"There was no one on watch! Why wasn't there
anyone on watch? I said there should always be
someone on watch!"

Half a dozen nomes scurried through the dying
bracken toward the quarry gate.

"It was Sacco's turn," muttered Angalo.

"No it wasn't!" hissed Sacco. "You remember,
yesterday you asked me to swap because—"

"I don't care whose turn it was!" shouted Mas-
klin. "There was no one there! And there should
have been! Right?"

"Sorry, Masklin."

"Yeah. Sorry, Masklin."

They scrambled up a bank and flattened them-
selves behind a tuft of dried grass.

It was a small truck, as far as trucks went. A

• 14 -

DIGGERS

human had already climbed out of it and was doing
something to the gates leading into the quarry.

"It's a Land-Rover," said Angalo smugly. He'd
spent a long time in the Store reading everything
he could about vehicles, before the Long Drive. He
liked them. "It's not really a truck, it's more to
carry humans over—"

"That human is sticking something on the gate,"
said Masklin.

"On our gate," said Sacco disapprovingly.

"Bit odd," said Angalo. The man sleepwalked, in
the slow, ponderous way that humans did, back to
the vehicle. Eventually it backed around and
roared off.

"All the way up here just to stick a bit of paper
on the gate," said Angalo, as the nomes stood up.
"That's humans for you."

Masklin frowned. Humans were big and stupid,
that was true enough, but there was something un-
stoppable about them and they seemed to be con-
trolled by bits of paper. Back in the Store a piece of
paper had said the Store was going to be demol-
ished and, sure enough, it had been demolished.
You couldn't trust humans with bits of paper.

He pointed to the rusty wire netting, an easy
climb for an agile nome.

"Sacco," he said, "you'd better fetch it down."

Miles away, another piece of paper fluttered on
the hedge. Spots of rain pattered across its sun-

• 15 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

bleached words, soaking the paper until it was
heavy and soggy and . . .

... it tore.

It flopped onto the grass, free. A breeze made it
rustle.

16

Tw®

III.   But there came a Sign, and people said,
What is it that this means?

IV.   And it was not good.

—From the Book of Nome, Signs I, v. III-IV

Gurder shuffled on hands and knees across the pa-
per from the gate.

"Of course I can read it," he said. "I know what
every word means."

"Well, then?" said Masklin.

Gurder looked embarrassed. "It's what every
sentence means that's giving me trouble," he said.
"It says here . . . where was it ... yes, it says
here the quarry is going to be reopened. What does
that mean? It's open already, any fool knows that.
You can see for miles."

The other nomes crowded around. You certainly
could see for miles. That was the terrible part. On
three sides the quarry had decently high cliff walls,
but on the fourth side . . . well, you got into the
habit of not looking in that direction. There was

• 17 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

too much of nothing, which made you feel even
smaller and more vulnerable than you were al-
ready.

Even if the meaning of the paper wasn't clear, it
certainly looked unpleasant.

"The quarry's a hole in the ground," said Dor-
cas. "You can't open a hole unless it's been filled in.
Stands to reason."

"A quarry's a place you get stone from," said
Grimma. "Humans do it. They dig a hole and they
use the stone for making, well, roads and things."

"I expect you read that, did you?" said Gurder
sourly. He suspected Grimma of lack of respect for
authority. It was also incredibly annoying that,
against all the obvious deficiencies of her sex, she
was better at reading than he was.

"I did, actually," said Grimma, tossing her head.

"But, you see," said Masklin patiently, "there
aren't any more stones here, Grimma. That's why
there's a hole."

"Good point," said Gurder, sternly.

"Then he'll make the hole bigger!'" snapped Grimma.
"Look at those cliffs up there"—they obediently
looked—"they're made of stone! Look here"—ev-
ery head swivelled down to where her foot was tap-
ping impatiently at the paper—"it says it's for a
highway extension! He's going to make the quarry
bigger! Our quarry! That's what it says he's going
to do!"

There was a long silence.

Then Dorcas said, "Who is?"

• 18 '

DIGGERS

"Order! He's put his name on it," said Grimma.

"She's right, you know," said Masklin. "Look. It
says: To be reopened, by Order."

The nomes shuffled their feet. Order. It didn't
sound a promising name. Anyone called Order
would probably be capable of anything.

Gurder stood up and brushed the dust off his
robe.

"It's only a piece of paper, when all's said and
done," he said sullenly.

"But the human came up here," said Masklin.
"They've never come up here before."

"Dunno about that," said Dorcas. "I mean, all
the quarry buildings. The old workshops. The
doorways and so on. I mean, they're for humans.
Always worried me, that has. Where humans have
been before, they tend to go again. They're rascals
for that."

There was another crowded silence, the kind
that gets made by lots of people thinking unhappy
thoughts.

"Do you mean," said a nome slowly, "that we've
come all this way, we've worked so hard to make a
place to live in, and now it's going to be taken
away?"

"I don't think we should get too disturbed right
at this—" Gurder began.

"We've got families here," said another nome.
Masklin realized that it was Angalo. He'd been
married in the spring to a young lady from the Del

• 19 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

Icatessen family, and they'd already got a fine pair
of youngsters, two months old and talking already.

"And we were going to have another go at plant-
ing seeds," said another nome. "We've spent ages
clearing that ground behind the big sheds. You
know that."

Gurder raised his hand imploringly.

"We don't know anything," he said. "We mustn't
start getting upset until we've found out what's go-
ing on."

"And then can we get upset?" said another nome
sourly. Masklin recognised Nisodemus, one of the
Stationeri and Gurder's own assistant. He'd never
liked the young nome, and the young nome had
never liked anyone, as far as Masklin could see.
"I've never, um, been happy with the feel of this
place, um, I knew there was going to be trouble—"

"Now, now, Nisodemus," said Gurder. "There's
no cause to go talking like that. We'll have another
meeting of the council," he added. "That's what
we'll do."

The crumpled newspaper lay beside the road.
Occasionally a breeze would blow it randomly
along the verge, while a few inches away, the traffic
thundered past.

A stronger gust hit at the same time as a particu-
larly large truck roared by, dragging a tail of
whirling air. The paper shot up over the road,
spread out like a sail, and rose on the wind.
* « *

• 20 -

DIGGERS

The Quarry Council was in session, in the space
under the floor of the old quarry office.

Other nomes had crowded in and the rest of the
tribe milled around outside.

"Look," said Angalo, "there's a big old barn up
on the hill, the other side of the potato field. It
wouldn't hurt to take some stores up there. Make it
ready, you know. Just in case. Then if anything does
happen, we've got somewhere to go."

"The quarry buildings don't have spaces under
the floors, except in the canteen and the office,"
said Dorcas gloomily. "It's not like the Store.
There aren't many places to hide. We need the
sheds. If humans come here, we'll have to leave."

"So the barn will be a good idea, won't it?" re-
peated Angalo.

"There's a human on a tractor who goes up there
sometimes," said Masklin.

"We could keep out of its way. Anyway," said
Angalo, looking around at the rows of faces,
"maybe the humans will go away again. P'raps
they'll just take their stone and go. And we can
come back. We could send someone to spy on them
every day."

"It seems to me you've been thinking about this
barn for some time," said Dorcas.

"Me and Masklin talked about it one day when
we were hunting up there," said Angalo. "Didn't
we, Masklin?"

"Hmm?" said Masklin, who was staring into
space.

• 21 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"You remember, we went up there and I said,
'That'd be a useful place if ever we needed it,' and
you said 'Yes.' "

"Hmm," said Masklin.

"Yes, but there's this Winter thing coming," said
one of the nomes. "You know. Cold. Glitter on ev-
erythin'."

"Robins," another nome put in.

"Yeah," said the first nome uncertainly. "Them
too. Not a good time to go movin' around, with
robins zoomin' about."

"Nothing wrong with robins," said Granny
Morkie, who had nodded off for a moment. "My
dad used to say there's good eatin' on a robin, if
you catched one." She beamed at them, proudly.

This comment had the same effect on everyone's
train of thought as a brick wall built across the line.
Eventually Gurder said, "I still say we shouldn't
get too excited right at this moment. We should
wait and trust in Arnold Bros. (est. 1905)'s guid-
ance."

There was more silence. Then Angalo said, very
quietly, "Fat lot of good that'll do us."

There was silence again. But this time it was a
thick, heavy silence, and it got thicker and heavier
and more menacing, like a storm cloud building up
over a mountain, until the first flash of lightning
would come as a relief.

It came.

"What did you say?" said Gurder, slowly.

"Only what everyone's been thinking," said

• 22 '

DIGGERS

Angalo. Many of the nomes started to stare at their
feet.

"And what do you mean by that?" said Gurder.

"Where is Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), then?" said
Angalo. "How did he help us get out of the Store?
Exactly, I mean? He didn't, did he?" Angalo shook
a bit, as if even he was terrified to hear himself
talking like this. "We did it. By learning things. We
did it all ourselves. We learned to read books, your
books, and we found things out and we did things
for ourselves."

Gurder jumped to his feet, white with fury. Be-
side him Nisodemus put his hand over his mouth
and looked too shocked to speak.

"Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) goes wherever nomes
go!" he shouted.

Angalo swayed backward, but his father had
been one of the toughest nomes in the Store and he
didn't give in easily.

"You just made that up!" he snorted. "I'm not
saying that there wasn't, well, something in the
Store, but that was the Store and this is here and all
we've got is us\ The trouble is, you Stationer! were
so powerful in the Store and just can't bear to give
it up!"

Now Masklin stood up.
"Just a moment, you two—" he began.
"So that's all it is, is it?" growled Gurder, ignor-
ing him. "That's the Haberdasheri for you! You al-
ways were too proud! Too arrogant for your own
good! Drive a truck a little way and we think we

• 23 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

know it all, do we? Perhaps we're getting what we
deserve, eh?"

"This isn't the time or place for this sort of
thing—" Masklin went on.

"That's just a silly threat! Why can't you accept
it, you old fool, Arnold Bros. doesn't exist! Use the
brains Arnold Bros. gave you, why don't you?"

"If you don't both shut up I'll bang your heads to-
gether!"

That seemed to work.

"Right," said Masklin, in a more normal voice.
"Now, I think it would be a very good idea if ev-
eryone went and got on with—with whatever it is
they were getting on with. Because this is no way
to make complicated decisions. We all need to think
for a while."

The nomes filed out, relieved that it was over.
Masklin could hear them arguing outside.

"Not you two," he warned.

"Now, look—" said Gurder.

"No, you look, the pair of you!" said Masklin,
"Here we are, maybe a big problem looming up,
and you start arguing! You both ought to know bet-
ter! Can't you see you're upsetting people?"

"Well, it's important," muttered Angalo.

"What we should do now," said Masklin sharply, "is
have another look at this barn. Can't say I'm happy
with the idea, but it might be useful to have a
bolthole. Anyway, it'll keep people occupied, and
that'll stop them from worrying. How about it?"

• 24 •

DIGGERS

"I suppose so," said Gurder, with bad grace.

"But—"

"No more buts," said Masklin. "You're acting
like idiots. People look up to the pair of you, so
you'll set an example. Do you hear?"

They glowered at each other, but they both nod-
ded.

"Right, then," said Masklin. "Now, we'll all go
out, and people'll see you've made up, and that'll
stop their fretting. Then we can start planning."

"But Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) is important," said
Gurder.

"I daresay," said Masklin as they came out into
the daylight of the quarry. The wind was dropping
again, leaving the sky a deep cold blue.

"There's no daresay about it," said Gurder.

"Listen," said Masklin, "I don't know whether
Arnold Bros. exists, or was in the Store, or just
lives in our heads or whatever. What I do know is
that he isn't just going to drop out of the sky."

All three of them glanced up when he said this.
The Store nomes shuddered just a bit. It still took a
certain courage to look up at the endless sky when
you've been used to nice friendly floorboards, but
it was traditional, when you referred to Arnold
Bros., to look up. Up was where Management and
Accounts had been, back in the Store.

"Funny you should say that. There's something
up there," said Angalo.

Something white and vaguely rectangular was

• 25 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

drifting gently through the air, and growing big-
ger.

"It's just a bit of paper," said Gurder. "Some-
thing the wind's blown off the dump."

It definitely got a lot bigger, and turned gently in
the air as it tumbled into the quarry.

"I think," said Masklin slowly, as its shadow
raced toward him across the ground, "that we'd
better stand back a bit—"

It dropped on him.

It was, of course, only paper. But nomes are
small and it had fallen quite some way, so the force
was enough to knock him over.

What was more surprising were the words he
saw as he fell backward. They were: Arnold Bros.

26

I.   And they Sought for a Better Sign from
Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), and there was a
Sign;

II.   And some spake up saying. Well, all right,
but it is really nothing but a Coincidence;

III.   But others said, Even a Coincidence can
be a Sign.
—From the Book of Nome, Signs II, v. I-III

Masklin had always kept an open mind on the sub-
ject of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905). After all, the Store
had been pretty impressive, what with the escala-
tors and so on, and if Arnold Bros. (est. 1905)
hadn't created it, who had? After all, that only left
humans. Not that he considered humans were as
stupid as most nomes thought. They might be big
and slow but there was a sort of mindless unstop-
pability about them. They could certainly be
taught to do simple tasks.

On the other hand, the world was miles across
and full of complicated things. It seemed to be ask-

• 27 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

ing a lot of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) to create the
whole thing.

So Masklin had decided not to decide anything
about Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), in the hope that if
there was an Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) and he found
out about Masklin, he wouldn't mind much.

The trouble with having an open mind, of
course, is that people will insist on coming along
and trying to put things in it.

The faded newspaper from the sky had been
carefully spread out on the floor of one of the old
sheds.

It was covered in words. Most of them even Mas-
klin could understand, but even Grimma had to
admit she couldn't guess at what they were sup-
posed to mean when you read them all in one go.
SCHOOL SLAMS SHOCK PROBE, for example, was a mys-
tery. SO Was FURY OVER TAXES REBEL. So WBS PLAY
SUPER BINGO IN YOUR SOARAWAY BLACKBURY EVENING

POST & GAZETTE. But they were mysteries that
would have to wait.

What all eyes were staring at was the quite small
area of words, about nome-sized, under the word
PEOPLE.

"That means people," said Grimma.

"Really?" said Masklin.

"And the lettering underneath it says: 'Fun-lov-
ing, globetrotting millionaire playboy Richard Ar-
nold will be jetting to the Florida sunshine next
week to witness the launch of Arnsat 1, the first
communi"—she hesitated—"cations sat ... ellite

• 28 -

DIGGERS

built by the Arnco Inter . . . national Group.
This leap into the future comes only a few months
after the dest . . . ruction by fire of—"

The nomes, who'd been silently reading along
with her, shivered.

"—Arnold Bros., the store here in Blackbury
which was the first of the Arnold chain and the
basis of the multimillion-pound trad . . . ing
group. It was founded in 1905 by Alderman Frank
W. Arnold and his brother Arthur. Grand . . .
son Richard, 39, who will . . ." Her voice faded to
a whisper.

"Grandson Richard, 39," repeated Gurder, his
face bright with triumph. "What d'you think of
that, eh?"

"What does globe-trotting mean?" said Masklin.

"Well, globe means ball, and trotting is a sort of
slow running," said Grimma. "So he runs slowly
on a ball. Globe-trotting."

"This is a message from Arnold Bros.," said
Gurder ponderously. "It's been sent to us. A mes-
sage."

"A message meant, um, for us!" said Nisodemus,
who was standing just behind Gurder. He held up
his hands. "Yea, all the way from—"

"Yes, yes, Nisodemus," said Gurder. "Do be
quiet, there's a good chap." He gave Masklin an
embarrassed look.

"Doesn't sound very likely, running slowly. I
mean, you'd fall off. If it was a ball, is what I'm
^ying," said Masklin.

• 29 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

They stared at the Picture again. It was made up
of tiny dots. They showed a smiling face. It had
teeth and a beard.

"It stands to reason," said Gurder, more confi-
dently. "Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) has sent Grandson
Richard, 39, to ... to .. ."

"And these two names who founded the Store,"
said Masklin. "I don't understand that. I thought
Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) created the Store."

"Then these two founded it," said Gurder. "That
makes sense. It was a big Store. It'd be easy to find,
even if you weren't looking for it." He looked
slightly uneasy. "Losted and founded," he said, half
to himself. "That makes sense. Yes."

"0-kay," said Dorcas. "So let's just see where
we've got to. The message is, is it, is that Grandson
Richard, 39, is in Florida, wherever that is—"

"Going to be in Florida," said Grimma.

"It's a type of colored juice," volunteered a
nome. "I know, 'cause one day when we went over
to the garbage dump, there was this old carton, and
it said Florida Orange Juice. I read it," he added
proudly.

"Going to be in this orange-colored juice, so I'm
given to understand," said Dorcas doubtfully.
"Running slowly on a ball and jetting, whatever
that is. And liking it, apparently."

The nomes fell silent while they thought about
this.

"Holy utterances are often difficult to under-
stand," said Gurder gravely.

• 30 •

DIGGERS

"This must be a powerful holy one," said Dorcas.

"/think it's just a coincidence," said Angalo loft-
ily. "This is just a story about a human being, like
in some of the books we read."

"And how many humans could even stand on a
ball, let alone run slowly on it?" demanded Gurder.

"All right, " said Angalo, "But what are we going
to do, then?"

Gurder's mouth opened and shut a few times.
"Why, it's obvious," he said uncertainly.

"Tell us, then." said Angalo sourly.

"Well, er. It's, er, obvious. We must go to, er, the
place where the orange juice is . . ."

"Yes?" said Angalo.

"And, er, and find Grandson Richard, 39, which
should be easy, you see, because we've got this pic-
ture." Gurder scratched his chin. "I mean, how
many humans can there be in the world?" he said.
"Not more than a few hundred. And when we've
found him . . ."

"Yes?" said Angalo.

Gurder have him a haughty look. "Remember
the commandment that Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) put
up in the Store," he said. "Did it not say 'If you do
not see what you require, please ask'?"

The nomes nodded. Many of them had seen it.
And the other commandments: "Everything Must
Go," and, by the escalators, "Dogs and Strollers
Must Be Carried." They were the words of Arnold
firos. (est. 1905). You couldn't really argue with

• 31 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

them. . . . But on the other hand, well, that had
been the Store, and this was here.

"And?" said Angalo.

Gurder began to sweat. "Well, er, and then we
ask him to let us be left alone in the quarry."

There was an awkward silence.

Then Angalo said, "That sounds about the most
half-baked—"

"What does jetting mean?" said Grimma. "Is it
anything to do with jet?"

"A jet is a kind of aircraft," said Angalo, the
transport expert.

"So jetting means to go like an aircraft. Or in an
aircraft?" said Grimma.

Everyone turned to Masklin, whose fascination
with the airport was well known to one and all.

He wasn't there.

Masklin pulled the Thing from its niche in the
wall and padded back out into the open. The Thing
didn't have to be attached to any wires. It was
enough to put it near them.

There was electricity in the old manager's office.
He ran across the empty alley between the tumble-
down buildings and squeezed his way in through a
crack in the sagging door.

Then he placed the box in the middle of the floor |
and waited.

It always took some while for the Thing to wake
up. Its lights flickered at random and it made odd
beeping noises. Masklin supposed it was the ma-

• 32 '

DIGGERS

chine's equivalent of a nome getting up in the
morning.

Eventually it said, "Who is there?"

"It's me," said Masklin, "Masklin. Look, I need
to know what the words 'communications satellite'
mean. I've heard you use the word 'satellite' before.
You said the Moon is one, didn't you?"

"Yes. But communications satellites are artificial
moons. They are used for communications. Communica-
tions means the transferring of information. In this case,
by radio and television."

"What's television?" said Masklin.

"A means of sending pictures through the air."

"Does this happen a lot?"

"All the time."

Masklin made a mental note to look out for any
pictures in the air.

"I see," he lied. "So these satellites—where are
they, exactly?"

"In the sky."

"I don't think I've ever seen one," said Masklin
doubtfully. There was an idea forming in his mind.
He wasn't quite sure yet. Bits and pieces of things
he'd read and heard were coming together. The im-
portant thing was to let them take their own time,
and not frighten them away.

"They are in orbit, many miles up. There are a great
many above this planet, " said the Thing.

"How do you know that?"

"/ can detect them."

"Oh."

• 33 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

Masklin stared at the flickering lights.

"If they are artificial, does that mean they're not
real?" he said.

"They are machines. They are usually built on the
planet and then launched into space."

The idea was nearly there. It was rising like a
bubble.

"Space is where our ship is, you said."

"That is correct."

Masklin felt the idea explode quietly, like a
dandelion. "If we knew where one of these things
was going to be flown into space," he said, speaking
quickly before the words had time to escape, "and
we could sort of hang on to the sides or whatever,
or maybe drive it like the Truck, and we took you
with us, then we could jump off when we got up
there and go and find this ship of ours, couldn't
we?"

The lights on top of the Thing moved oddly, into
patterns Masklin had never seen before. This went
on for quite a while before it spoke again. When it
did, it sounded almost sad.

"Do you know how big space is?" it said.

"No," said Masklin politely. "It's pretty big, is
it?"

"Yes. However, it may be possible for me to detect and
summon the ship if I were taken above the atmosphere.
But do you know what the words 'oxygen supply' mean?"

"No."

" 'Space suit'?"

"No."

• 34 -

DIGGERS

"It is very cold in space."

"Well, couldn't we sort of jump around a bit to
keep warm?" said Masklin desperately.

"/ think you do not appreciate what it is that space
contains."

"What's that, then?"

"Nothing. It contains nothing. And everything. But
there is very little everything and more nothing than you
could imagine."

"It's still worth a try, though, isn't it?"

"What you are proposing is an extremely unwise en-
deavor, " said the Thing.

"Yes, but, you see," said Masklin firmly, "if I
don't try, then it's always going to be like this.
We're always going to escape, and find somewhere
new, and just when we're getting the hang of it all,
we'll have to go again. Sooner or later we must find
somewhere that we can know really belongs to us.
Dorcas is right. Humans get everywhere. Anyway,
you were the one who told me that our home was
... up there somewhere."

"This is not the right time. You are ill-prepared."

Masklin clenched his fists. "I'll never be well pre-
pared! I was born in a hole, Thing! A muddy hole
in the ground! How can I ever be well prepared for
anything? That's what being alive is, Thing! It's
being badly prepared for everything! Because you
only get one chance, Thing! You only get one
chance and then you die and they don't let you go
around again after you've got the hang of it! Do
you understand, Thing! So we'll try it now\ I order

• 35 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

you to help! You're a machine and you must do

what you're told!"

The lights formed a spiral.
"You 're learning fast," said the Thing.

• 36 '

III.   And in a voice like Thunder, the Great
Masklin said unto the Thing, Now is the
Time to go back to our Home in the Sky;

IV.   Or we will Forever be Running from
Place to Place.

V.   But none must know what I intend, or
they will say, Ridiculous, Why go to the
Sky when we Have Problems Right here?

VI.   Because that is how People are.

—From the Book of Nome, Quarries II, v. III-VI

Gurder and Angalo were having a blazing row
when Masklin got back.

He didn't try to interrupt. He just put the Thing
down on the floor and sat down next to it, and
watched them.

Funny how people needed to argue. The whole
secret was not to listen to what the other person
was saying, Masklin had noticed.

Gurder and Angalo had really got the hang of
that. The trouble was that neither of them was en-

• 37 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

tirely certain he was right, and the funny thing was a
that people who weren't entirely certain they were
right always argued much louder than other peo-
ple, as if the main person they were trying to con-
vince was themselves. Gurder was not certain, not
entirely certain, that Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) reallyj
existed, and Angalo wasn't entirely certain that he|
didn't.                                         J

Eventually Angalo noticed Masklin.

"You tell him, Masklin," he said. "He wants to
go and find Grandson Richard, 39!"

"Do you? Where do you think we should look?"
Masklin asked Gurder.

"The airport," said Gurder. "You know that. Jet-
ting. In a jet. That's what he'll do."

"But we know the airport!" said Angalo. "I've
been right up to the fence several times! Humans
go in and out of it all day! Grandson Richard, 39,
looks just like them! He could have gone already.
He could be in the juice by now! You can't believe
words that just drop out of the sky!" He turned to
Masklin again. "Masklin's a steady lad," he said,
"he'll tell you. You tell him, Masklin," he said.
"You listen to him, Gurder. He thinks about
things, Masklin does. At a time like this—"

"Let's go to the airport," said Masklin.

"There," said Angalo, "I told you, Masklin isn't
the kind of nome—what?"

"Let's go to the airport and watch."

Angalo's mouth opened and shut silently.

"But . . . but . . ." he managed.

• 38 -

DIGGERS

"It must be worth a try," said Masklin.

"But it's all just a coincidence!" said Angalo.

Masklin shrugged. "Then we'll come back. I'm
not suggesting we all go. Just a few of us."

"But supposing something happens while we're
gone?"

"It'll happen anyway, then. There's thousands of
us. Getting people to the old barn won't be diffi-
cult, if we need to do it. It's not like the Long
Drive."

Angalo hesitated.

"Then /'// go," he said. "Just to prove to you how
. . . how superstitious you're being."

"Good," said Masklin.

"Provided Gurder comes, of course," Angalo
added.

"What?" said Gurder.

"Well, you are the Abbot," said Angalo sarcasti-
cally. "If we're going to talk to Grandson Richard,
39, then it'd better be you. I mean, he probably
won't want to listen to anyone else."

"Aha!" shouted Gurder. "You think I won't
come! It'd be worth it just to see your face—"

"That's settled, then," said Masklin calmly.
"And now, I think we'd better see about keeping a
special watch on the road. And some teams had
better go to the old barn. And it would be a good
idea to see what people can carry. Just in case, you
know."

39

TERRY PRATCHETT

Grimma was waiting for him outside. She didn't
look happy.

"I know you," she said. "I know the kind of ex-
pression you have when you're getting people to do
things they don't want to do. What are you plan-
ning?"

They strolled into the shadow of a rusting sheet
of corrugated iron. Masklin occasionally squinted
upward. This morning he'd thought the sky was
just a blue thing with clouds. Now it was some-
thing that was full of words and invisible pictures
and machines whizzing around. Why was it that
the more you found out, the less you really knew?

Eventually he said, "I can't tell you. I'm not
quite sure myself."

"It's to do with the Thing, isn't it?"

"Yes. Look, if I'm away for, er, a little bit longer
than—"

She stuck her hands on her hips. "I'm not stupid,
you know," she said. "Orange-colored juice, in-
deed! I've read nearly every book we brought out of
the Store. Florida is a ... a place. Just like the
quarry. Probably even bigger. And it's a long way
away. You have to go across a lot of water to get
there."

"I think it might even be further away than we
came on the Long Drive," said Masklin quietly. "I
know, because one day when we went to look at
the airport I saw water on the other side, by the
road. It looked as though it went on forever."

• 40 '

DIGGERS

"I told you," said Grimma smugly. "It was prob-
ably an ocean."

"There was a sign by it," said Masklin. "Can't
remember everything on it. I'm not as good at the
reading as you. One of the words was . . . res-er-
voir, I think."

"There you are, then."

"But it must be worth a try." Masklin scowled.
"There's only one place where we can ever be safe,
and that's where we belong," he said. "Otherwise
we'll always have to keep running away."

"Well, I don't like it," said Grimma.

"But you said you didn't like running away," said
Masklin. "There isn't an alternative, is there? Let
me just try something. If it doesn't work, then we'll
come back."

"But supposing something goes wrong? Suppos-
ing you don't come back? I'll . . ." Grimma hesi-
tated.

"Yes?" said Masklin hopefully.

"I'll have a terrible job explaining things to peo-
ple," she said firmly. "It's a silly idea. I don't want
to have anything to do with it."

"Oh." Masklin looked disappointed but defiant.
"Well, I'm going to try anyway. Sorry."

41

V.  And he said, What are these frogs of
which you speak?

VI.  And she said, You wouldn't understand.
VII.  And he said, You are right.
—From the Book of Nome, Strange Frogs I, v. V-VII

There was a busy night . . .

It would be a journey of several hours to the
barn. Parties went on to mark the path and gener-
ally prepare the way, besides watching out for
foxes. Not that they were often seen, these days; a
fox might be quite happy to attack a solitary nome,
but thirty well-armed, enthusiastic hunters were a
different proposition, and it would be a very stupid
fox indeed that even showed an interest. The few
that did live near the quarry tended to wander off
hurriedly in the opposite direction whenever they
saw a nome. They'd learned that nomes meant
trouble.

It had been a hard lesson for some of them. Not
long after the nomes moved into the quarry a fox

• 42 '

DIGGERS

was surprised and delighted to come across a cou-
ple of unwary berry gatherers, which it ate. It was
even more surprised that night when two hundred
grim-faced nomes tracked it to its den, lit a fire in
the entrance, and speared it to death when it ran
out, eyes streaming.

There were a lot of animals that would like to
dine off nome, Masklin had said. They'd better
learn: it's us or them. And they'd better learn right
now that it's going to be them. No animal is going
to get a taste for nome. Not anymore.

"Of course it might all be nothing to worry
about," said Angalo nervously, around dawn. "We
might never have to move."

"Just when we were beginning to get settled
down, too," said Dorcas. "Still, I reckon that if we
keep a proper lookout we can have everyone on the
move in five minutes. And we'll start moving some
food stores up there this morning. No harm in that.
Then they'll be there if we need them."

Nomes sometimes went as far as the airport.
There was a garbage dump on the way, which was
a prime source of bits of cloth and wire, and the
flooded gravel pits further on were handy if anyone
had the patience to fish. It was a pleasant enough
day's journey, largely along badger tracks. There
was a main road to be crossed, or rather, to be bur-
rowed under; for some reason pipes had been care-
fully put underneath it just where the track needed
to cross it. Presumably the badgers had done it.
They certainly used it a lot.

• 43 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

Masklin found Grimma in her schoolhole under
one of the old sheds, supervising a class in writing.
She glared at him, told the children to get on with
it—and would Nicco Haberdasheri like to share
the joke with the rest of the class? No? Then he
could jolly well get on with things—and came out
into the passage.

"I've just called to say we're off," said Masklin,
twiddling his hat in his hands. "There's a load of
nomes going over to the dump, so we'll have com-
pany the rest of the way. Er."

"Electricity," said Grimma, vaguely.

"What?"

"There's no electricity at the old barn," said
Grimma. "You remember what that meant? On
moonless nights there was nothing to do but stay in
the burrow. I don't want to go back to that."

"Well, maybe we were better nomes for it,"
mumbled Masklin. "We didn't have all the things
we've got today, but we were—"

"Cold, frightened, ignorant, and hungry!"
snapped Grimma. "You know that. You try telling
Granny Morkie about the Good Old Days and see
what she says."

"We had each other," said Masklin.

Grimma examined her hands.

"We were just the same age and living in the
same hole," she said vaguely. She looked up. "But
it's all different now! There . . . well, there are
the frogs, for one thing."

. 44 .

DIGGERS

Masklin looked blank. And, for once, Grimma
looked unsure.

"I read about them in a book," she said. "There's
this place, you see. Called South America. And
there are these hills where it's hot and rains all the
time, and in the rain forests there are these very
tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees
there are these, like, great big flowers called brome-
liads and water gets into the flowers and makes lit-
tle pools and there's a type of frog that lays eggs in
the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new
frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in
the flowers right at the top of the trees and don't
even know about the ground and the world is full
of things like that and now I know about them and
I'm never ever going to be able to see them, and
then you," she gulped for breath, "want me to come
and live with you in a hole and wash your socks!"

Masklin ran this sentence through his head
again, in case it made any sense when he listened to
it a second time.

"But I don't wear socks," he pointed out.

This was apparently not the right thing to say.
Grimma prodded him in the stomach.

"Masklin," she said, "you're a good nome and
bright enough in your way, but there aren't any
answers up in the sky. You need to have your feet
on the ground, not your head in the air!"

She swept away and shut the door behind her.

Masklin felt his ears growing hot.

• 45 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"I can do both!" Masklin shouted after her. "At
the same time!"

He thought about it and added, "So can every-
one!"

He stamped off along the tunnel. Bright enough
in his way! Gurder was right, universal education
was not a good idea. He'd never understand
women, he thought. Even if he lived to be ten.

Gurder had turned over the leadership of the
Stationer! to Nisodemus. Masklin felt less than
happy about this. It wasn't that Nisodemus was
stupid. Quite the reverse. He was clever in a bub-
bling, sideways way that Masklin distrusted; he al-
ways seemed to be bottling up excitement about
something, and when he spoke the words always
rushed out, with Nisodemus putting "urns" in the
flow of words so that he could catch his breath
without anyone having the chance to interrupt
him. He made Masklin uneasy. He mentioned this
to Gurder.

"Nisodemus might be a bit overenthusiastic,"
said Gurder, "but his heart's in the right place."

"What about his head?"

"Listen," said Gurder. "We know each other well
enough, don't we? We understand one another,
wouldn't you say?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Then I'll let you make the decisions that affect
all nomes' bodies," said Gurder, his voice just one
step away from being threatening, "and you'll let

• 46 '

DIGGERS

me make the decisions that affect all nomes' souls.
Fair enough?"

And so they set off.

The good-byes, the last-minute messages, the or-
ganization, and, because they were nomes, the hun-
dred little arguments, are not important.

They set off.

Life at the quarry began to get back to something
like normal. No more trucks came up to the gate.
Dorcas sent a couple of his more agile young assis-
tant engineers up the wire netting, just in case, to
stuff the rusty padlock full of mud. He also ordered
a team of nomes to twist wire around and around
the gates as well.

"Not that it'd hold them very long," he said.
"Not if they were determined."

The council, or what was left of it now, nodded
wisely, although frankly none of them understood
or cared much about mechanical things.

The truck came back the same afternoon. The
two nomes watching the truck hurried back into
the quarry to report. The driver had fiddled with
the padlock for a while, pulled at the wire, and
then driven off.

"And it said something," said Sacco.

"Yes, it said something. Sacco heard it," said his
partner, Nooty Kiddies-Klothes. She was a plump
young nome who wore trousers and was good at
^gineering and had actually volunteered to be a

. 47 .

TERRY PRATCHETT DIGGERS

guard instead of staying at home learning how to
cook; things were really changing in the quarry.

"I heard it say something," said Sacco helpfully,
in case the point hadn't sunk in.

"That's right," said Nooty. "We both heard it,
didn't we, Sacco?"

"And what was it?" said Dorcas encouragingly. I|
don't really deserve this sort of thing, he thought. |
Not at my time of life. I'd rather be in my work-|
shop, trying to get this radio business sorted out. |

"It said," Sacco took a deep breath, his eyes1
bulged, and he attempted the foghorn mooing that
was human sound, " 'Bbbllllooooooooddddyyy ;

kkiiiddddddssss!'"                               \

Dorcas looked at the others.                    ;

"Anyone got any ideas?" he said. "It almost s
seems to mean something, doesn't it? I tell you, if
only we could understand them—"              ;

"This must have been one of the stupid ones,"
said Nooty. "It was trying to get in!"             j

"Then it'll come back," said Dorcas gloomily. He |
shook his head.                                'i

"All right, you two," he said. "Well done. Get
back on watch. Thank you."

He watched them go off hand in hand, and then
he wandered away across the quarry, heading for j
the old manager's office.

I've seen Christmas Fayre come around six times,
he thought. That's six whatd'youcall'ems, years.
And almost one more, I think, although it's hard to j
be sure out here. No one puts up any signs to say

• 48 '

what's happening, the heating just gets turned
down. Seven years old. Just about the time when a
nome ought to be taking it easy. And I'm out here,
where there aren't any proper walls to the world,
and the water goes cold and hard as glass some
mornings, and the ventilation and heating systems
are quite shockingly out of control. Of course—he
pulled himself together a bit—as a scientist I find
all these phenomena extremely interesting. It
would just be nicer to find them extremely interest-
ing from somewhere nice and snug, inside.

Ah, inside. That was the place to be. Most of the
older nomes suffered from the fear of the Outside,
but no one liked to talk about it much. It wasn't too
bad in the quarry, with its great walls of rock. If
you didn't look up too much, or look toward the
fourth side with its terribly huge views across the
countryside, you could almost believe you were
back in the Store. Even so, most of the older nomes
preferred to stay in the sheds, or in the cozy gloom
under the floorboards. That way you avoided this
horrible exposed feeling, the dreadful sensation that
the sky was watching you.

The children seemed to quite like the Outside,
though. They weren't really used to anything else.
They could just about remember the Store, but it
didn't mean much to them. They belonged Out-
side. They were used to it. And the young men
^o went out hunting and gathering . . . well,
young men liked to show how brave they were,

• 49 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

didn't they? Especially in front of other young"
men. And young women,                      i

Of course, Dorcas thought, as a scientist and ra- '
tional-thinking nome I know we weren't really in-
tended to live under floorboards the whole time. i
It's just that, as a nome who is probably seven years
old and feeling a bit creaky, I've got to admit I'd
find it sort of comforting to have a few of the good
old signs around the place. "Amazing Reductions,"
perhaps, or just a little sign saying, "Mammoth
Sales Start Tomorrow." It wouldn't hurt, and I'm
sure I'd feel happier. Which is of course totally ri-
diculous, when you look at it rationally.

It'd just be like Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), he
thought sadly. I'm pretty sure he doesn't exist in
the way I was taught he does, when I was young.
But when you saw things like "If you do not see
what you require, please ask" on the walls, you felt
that everything was somehow all right.

He thought: These are very wrong thoughts for
a rational thinking nome.

There was a crack in the woodwork by the door
of the manager's office. Dorcas slipped into the fa-
miliar gloom under the floor and padded along un-
til he found the switch.

He was rather proud of this idea. There was a
big red bell on the outside wall of the office, pre-
sumably so that humans could hear the telephone
ring when the quarry was noisy. Dorcas had
changed the wiring so that he could make it ringj
whenever he liked.

• 50 •

DIGGERS

He pressed the switch.

Nomes came running from all corners of the
quarry. Dorcas waited as the underfloor space filled
up, and then dragged up an empty matchbox to
stand on.

"The human has been back," he announced. "It
didn't get in, but it'll keep trying."

"What about your wire?" said one of the nomes.

"I'm afraid there are such things as wire cut-
ters."

"So much for your theory about, um, humans
being intelligent. A intelligent human would know
enough not to go, um, where it wasn't wanted,"
said Nisodemus sourly.

Dorcas liked to see eagerness in a young nome,
but Nisodemus vibrated with a peculiarly hungry
kind of eagerness that was unpleasant to see. He
gave him as sharp a look as he dared.

"Humans out here might be different from the
ones in the Store," he snapped. "Anyway—"

"Order must have sent it," said Nisodemus. "It's
a judgment, um, on us!"

"None of that. It's just a human," said Dorcas.
Nisodemus glared at him as he went on, "Now, we
really should be sending some of the women and
children to the—"

There was the sound of running feet outside and
the gate guards piled in through the crack.

"It's back! It's back!" panted Sacco. "The hu-
man's back!"

• 51 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

DIGGERS

"All right, all right," said Dorcas. "Don't worry
about it, it can't—"

"No! No! No!" yelled Sacco, jumping up and
down. "It's got a pair of cutter things! It's cut the
wire and the chain that holds the gates shut and
it—"

They didn't hear the rest of it.

They didn't need to.

The sound of an engine coming closer said it all.

It grew so loud that the shed shook, and then it
stopped suddenly, leaving a nasty kind of silence
that was worse than the noise. There was the
crump of a metal door slamming. Then the rattle
and squeak of the shed door.

Then footsteps. The boards overhead buckled
and dropped little clouds of dust as the great
thumping steps wandered around the office.

The nomes stood in absolute silence. They
moved nothing except their eyes, but they moved in
perfect time to the footsteps, marking the position,
flicking backward and forward as the human
crossed the room above. A baby started to whim-
per.

There was some clicking, and then the muffled
sound of a human voice making its usual incompre-
hensible noises. This went on for some time.

Then the footsteps left the office again. The
nomes could hear them crunching around outside,
and then more noises. Nasty, clinking metal noises.

A small nome said, "Mom, I want to go, Mom—"

"Shh!"

• 52 '

"I really mean it, Mom!"

"Will you be quiet!"

All the nomes stood stock-still as the noises went
on around them. Well, nearly all. One small nome
hopped from one foot to the other, going very red
in the face.

Eventually the noise stopped. There was the
thunk of a truck door closing, the growl of its en-
gine, and the motor noise died away.

Dorcas said, very quietly, "I think perhaps we
can relax now."

Hundreds of nomes breathed a sigh of relief.

"Mow/"

"Yes, all right, off you go."

And after the sigh of relief, the outbreak of bab-
ble. One voice rose above the rest.

"It was never like this in the Store!" said
Nisodemus, climbing onto half a brick. "I ask you,
fellow nomes, is this what we were led, um, to ex-
pect?"

There was a mumbled chorus of "nos" and "yes-
ses" as Nisodemus went on. "A year ago we were
safe in the Store. Do you remember what it was
like at Christmas Fayre? Do you remember what it
was like in the Food Hall? Anyone remember, um,
roast beef and turkey?"

There were one or two embarrassed cheers.
Nisodemus looked triumphant. "And here we are
at the same time of year—well, they tell us it's the
^me time of year," he said sarcastically, "and what
^'re expected to eat are knobbly things actually

• 53 •

'Mi

TERRY PRATCHETT

grown in dirt\ Um. And the meat isn't proper meat
at all, it's just dead animals cut up! Actual dead
animals, actually cut up! Is this what you want
your, um, children to get used to? Digging up their
food? And now they tell us we might even have to
go to some barn that hasn't got proper floorboards
for us to live under as Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) in-
tended. Where next? we ask ourselves. Out in a
field somewhere? Um. And do you know what is
the worst thing about all of this? I'll tell you." He
pointed a finger at Dorcas. "The people who seem
to be giving us all the orders now are the very peo-
ple who, um, got us into this trouble in the first
place!"

"Now, just you hold on—" Dorcas began.

"You all know I'm right!" shouted Nisodemus.
"Think about it, nomes! Why in the name of Ar-
nold Bros. (est. 1905) did we have to leave the
Store?"

There were a few more vague cheers and several
arguments broke out among the audience.

"Don't be stupid," said Dorcas. "The Store was
going to be demolished!"

"We don't know that!" shouted Nisodemus.

"Of course we do!" roared Dorcas. "Masklin and
Gurder saw—"

"And where are they now, eh?'1'1

"They've gone to ... well, they've gone
to ..." Dorcas began. He wasn't much good at
this, he knew. Why did it have to be him? He pre-

• 54 '

DIGGERS

ferred messing around with wires and bolts and
things. Bolts didn't keep shouting at you.

"Yes, they've gone!" Nisodemus lowered his
voice to a sort of angry hiss. "Think about it, you
nomes! Use your, um, brains! In the Store we knew
where we were, things worked, everything was ex-
actly as Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) decreed. And sud-
denly we're out here. Remember how you used to
despise Outsiders? Well, the Outsiders are us! Um.
And now it's all panic again, and it always will be
—until we mend our ways and Arnold Bros. (est.
1905) graciously allows us back into the Store as
better, wiser nomes!"

"Let's just get this clear," said a nome. "Are you
saying that the Abbot lied to us?"

"I'm not saying anything like that," said
Nisodemus, sniffing. "I'm just presenting you with
the facts. Um. That's all I'm doing."

"But . . . but . . . but the Abbot has gone to
get help," said a lady nome uncertainly. "And . . .
and . . . after all, I'm sure the Store was demol-
ished. I mean, we wouldn't have gone to all this
trouble otherwise, would we? Er." She looked des-
perate.

"I know this, though," said the nome beside her,
"Say what you like, but I don't fancy this old barn
everyone's talking about. There's not even any
electric there."

"Yes, and it's in the middle of"—another nome
"egan, and then lowered his voice—"you know.
Things. You know what I'm talking about."

• 55 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Yeah," said an elderly nome. '''Things. I've seen
'em. My lad took me blackberryin' a month or two
back, up above the quarry, and I seen 'em."

"I don't mind seeing them a long way off," said
the worried lady nome. "It's the thought of being
in the middle of them that makes me come over all
shaky."

They don't even like to say the words open fields,
thought Dorcas. I know how they feel.

"It's snug enough here, I'll grant you," said the
first nome. "But all this stuff you get outside, what
d'you call it, begins with an N—"

"Nature?" said Dorcas weakly. Nisodemus was
smiling madly, his eyes sparkling.

"That's right," said the nome. "Well, it's not nat-
ural. And there's a sight too much of it. 'S not like a
proper world at all. You've only got to look at it.
The floor's all rough, 'n' it should be flat. There's
hardly any walls. All them little starry lights that
come out at night, well, they're not much help, are
they? And now these humans go where they please,
there's no proper regulations like there was in the
Store."

"That's why Arnold Bros. established the Store
in 1905," said Nisodemus. "A proper place for, urn,
nomes to live."

Dorcas gently grabbed Sacco's ear and pulled the
young nome toward him.

"Do you know where Grimma is?" he whis-
pered.

"Isn't she here?"

• 56 -

DIGGERS

"I'm quite sure she isn't," said Dorcas. "She'd
have had something very sharp to say by now if she
was. She may have stayed in the schoolhole with
the children when the bell went off. It's just as

well."
Nisodemus has something on his mind, he

thought. I'm not certain what it is, but it smells

bad.

And it got worse as the day wore on, especially
since it began to rain. A nasty, freezing sort of rain.
Sleet, according to Granny Morkie. It was soggy,
not really water but not quite ice. Rain with bones.

Somehow it seemed to find its way into places
where ordinary rain hadn't managed to get. Dorcas
organized younger nomes to dig drainage trenches
and rigged up a few of the big lightbulbs for heat.
The older nomes sat hunched around them, sneez-
ing and grumbling.

Granny Morkie did her best to cheer them up.
Dorcas began to really wish the old woman
wouldn't do that.

"This ain't nothing," she said. "I remember the
Great Flood. Made our hole cave right in, we was
cold and drenched for days!" She cackled and
rocked backward and forward. "Liked drownded
rats, we was! Not a dry stitch on, you know, and no
fire for a week. Talk about laugh!"

The Store nomes stared at her, and shivered.
And you don't want to go worrying about
Grossing them open fields," she went on, conversa-

• 57 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

tionally. "Nine times out o' ten you don't get et by
anything."

"Oh, dear," said a lady nome, faintly.

"Yes, I've been out in fields hundreds o' times.
It's a doddle if you stay close to the hedge and keep
your eyes open, you hardly ever have to run very
much," said Granny.

No one's temper was improved when they;

learned that the Land-Rover had parked right on
the patch of ground they were going to plant
things in. The nomes had spent ages during the
summer hacking the hard ground into something
resembling soil. They'd even planted seeds, which
hadn't grown. Now there were two great ruts in it,
and a new padlock and chain on the gate.

The sleet was already filling the ruts. Oil had
leaked in and formed a rainbow sheen on the sur^
face.

And all the time Nisodemus was reminding peo-
ple how much better it had been in the Store. They
didn't really need much persuading. After all, it
had been better. Much better.

I mean, thought Dorcas, we can keep warm and
there's plenty of food, although there is a limit to
the number of ways you can cook rabbit and pota-
toes. The trouble is, Masklin thought that once we
got outside the Store we'd all be digging and build-
ing and hunting and facing the future with strong
chins and bright smiles. Some of the youngsters are
doing well enough, I'll grant you. But us old 'uns
are too set in our ways. It's all right for me, I liN

• 58 '

DIGGERS

tinkering with things, I can be useful, but the rest
of them, well ... all they've really got to occupy
themselves is grumbling, and they've become really

good at that.

I wonder what Nisodemus's game is? He's too
keen, if you ask me.

I wish Masklin would come back.

Even young Gurder wasn't too bad.

It's been three days now.

At a time like this, he knew he'd feel better if he
went and looked at the Cat.

59

I.   For in the hill was a Beast, from the days
when the World was made.

II.   But it was old and broken and dying.

III.   And the mark of its name was on it.

IV.   And the mark was the mark of the Cat.

—From the Book of Nome, Cat I, v. I-IV

The Cat.

The Cat was his. His little secret. His big secret,
really. No one else knew about the Cat, not even
Dorcas's assistants.

He'd been pottering around in the big old half-
ruined sheds on the other side of the quarry, one
day back in the summer. He hadn't really got any
aim in mind, except perhaps the possibility of find-
ing a useful bit of wire or something.

So he'd rummaged around in the shadows,
straightened up, glanced above him and there the Cat
was.

With its mouth open.

' 60 '

DIGGERS

It had been a terrible few seconds until Dorcas's
eyes adjusted to the distance.

After that he'd spent a lot of time with the Cat,
poking around, finding out about him. Or it. The
Cat was too big to be a him or a her, it had to be an
it. A terrible it, perhaps, and old and wounded, like
a dragon that had come here for one last final sleep.
Or perhaps it was like one of those big animals
Grimma had showed him in a book once. Diner
soars.

Dorcas had never seen a cat before, but he'd
heard from Masklin that they were dangerous, and
Dorcas wasn't about to argue.

But this cat was kind of peaceful to have around.
It didn't grumble, and it didn't keep on asking Dor-
cas why he hadn't got around to inventing radio
yet. Dorcas had spent many a peaceful hour getting
to know the Cat. It was someone to talk to. It was
the best kind of person to talk to, in fact, because
you didn't have to listen back at it.

Dorcas shook his head. There was no time for
that sort of thing now. Everything was going
wrong.

Instead, he went to find Grimma. She seemed to
have her head screwed on right, even if she was a
girl.

The schoolhole was under the floor of the old
shed with CANTEEN on the door. It was Grimma's
personal world. She'd invented schools for chil-
dren, on the idea that since reading and writing

• 61 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

were quite difficult it was best to get them over
with early,                                     i

The library was also kept there.

In those last hectic hours the nomes had man-
aged to rescue about thirty books from the Store.
Some were very useful—Gardening All the Year
Round was well thumbed, and Dorcas knew Essen-
tial Theory for the Amateur Engineer almost by heart
—but some were, well, difficult, and not opened
much.

Grimma was standing in front of one of these
when he wandered in. She was biting her thumb,
which she always did when she was concentrating.

He had to admire the way she read. Not only
was Grimma the best reader among the nomes, she
also had an amazing ability to understand what she
was reading.

"Nisodemus is causing trouble," he said, sitting
down on a bench.

"I know," said Grimma vaguely. "I've heard."
She grabbed the edge of the page in both hands,
and turned it over with a grunt of effort.

"I don't know what he's got to gain," said Dor-
cas.

"Power," said Grimma. "We've got a power vac-
uum, you see."

"I don't think we have," said Dorcas uncertainly.
"I've never seen one here. There were plenty in the
store. 'Ninety-Nine Ninety-Five with Range of At-
tachments for Around-the-House Cleanliness,' " he
added, remembering with a sigh the familiar signs.

• 62 '

DIGGERS

"No, it's not a thing like that," said Grimma,
"It's what you get when no one's in charge. I've
been reading about them."

"I'm in charge, aren't I?" said Dorcas plaintively.

"No," said Grimma. "Because no one really lis-
tens to you."

"Oh. Thank you very much."

"It's not your fault. People like Masklin and An-
galo and Gurder can make people listen to them,
but you don't seem to keep their attention."

"Oh."

"But you can make nuts and bolts listen to you.
Not everyone can do that."

Dorcas thought about this. He would never have
put it like that himself. Was it a compliment? He
decided it probably was.

"When people are faced with lots of troubles and
they don't know what to do, there's always some-
one ready to say anything, just to get some power,"
said Grimma.

"Never mind. When the others get back I'm sure
they'll sort it all out," said Dorcas, more cheerfully
than he felt.

"Yes, they'll . . ." Grimma began, and then
stopped. After a while Dorcas realized that her
shoulders were shaking.

"Is there anything the matter?" he said.

"It's been more than three whole days!" sobbed
Grimma. "No one's ever been away that long be-
fore! Something must have happened to them!"

'Er," said Dorcas. "Well, they were going to look

• 63 •

TERRY PRATCHETT

for Grandson Richard, 39, and we can't be sure
that—"

"And I was so nasty to him before he went! I told
him about the frogs and all he could think of was
socks!"

Dorcas couldn't quite see how frogs had got in-
volved. When he sat and talked to the Cat, frogs
were never dragged into the conversation.

"Er?" he said.

Grimma, in between sobs, told him about the
frogs.

"And I'm sure he didn't even begin to under-
stand what I meant," she mumbled. "And you
won't either."

"Oh, I don't know," said Dorcas. "You mean that
the world was once so simple, and suddenly it's full
of amazingly interesting things that you'll never
ever get to the end of as long as you live. Like biol-
ogy. Or climatology. I mean, before all you Outsid-
ers came, I was just tinkering with things and I
really didn't know anything about the world."

He stared at his feet. "I'm still very ignorant," he
said, "but at least I'm ignorant about really impor-
tant things. Like what the sun is, and why it rains.
That's what you're talking about."

She sniffed, and smiled a bit, but not too much
because if there is one thing worse than someone
who doesn't understand you it's someone who un-
derstands perfectly, before you've had a chance to
have a good pout about not being understood.

"The thing is, " she said, "that he still thinks I'm

• 64 '

DIGGERS

the person he used to know when we all lived in
the old hole in the bank. You know, running
around. Cooking things. Bandaging up people
when they'd been hur-hur-hur—"

"Now then, now then," said Dorcas. He was al-
ways at a loss when people acted like this. When
machines went funny you just oiled them or prod-
ded them or, if nothing else worked, hit them with
a hammer. Nomes didn't respond well to this treat-
ment.

"Supposing he never comes back?" she said, dab-
bing at her eyes.

"Of course he'll come back," said Dorcas reassur-
ingly. "What could have happened to him, after
all?"

"He could have been eaten or run over or trod-
den on or blown away or fallen down a hole or
trapped," said Grimma.

"Er, yes," said Dorcas. "Apart from that, I
meant."

"But I shall pull myself together," said Grimma,
sticking out her chin. "When he does come back, he
won't be able to say, 'Oh, I see everything's gone to
pieces while I've been away.' "

"Jolly good," said Dorcas. "That's the spirit.
Keep yourself occupied, that's what I always say.
What's the book called?"

"It's A Treasury of Proverbs and Quotations," said
Grimma.

"Oh. Anything useful in it?"

"That," said Grimma distantly, "depends."

• 65 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Oh. What's proverbs mean?"

"Not sure. Some of them don't make much sense.
Do you know, humans think the world was made
by a sort of big human?"

"No! Are you sure?"

"It took a week."

"I expect it had some help, then," said Dorcas.
"You know. With the heavy stuff." Dorcas thought
of the Cat. You could do a lot in a week, with the
Cat helping.

"No. All by itself, apparently."

"Hmm." Dorcas considered this. Certainly bits
of the world were rough, and things like grass
seemed simple enough. But from what he'd heard
it all broke down every year and had to be started
up again in the spring, and ... "I don't know,"
he said. "Only humans could believe something
like that. I think you'd need more than one week.
There's a good few months work, if I'm any
judge."

Grimma turned the page. "Masklin used to be-
lieve—I mean, Masklin believes—that humans are
much brighter than we think." She looked thought-
ful. "I really wish we could study them properly,"
she said. "I'm sure we could learn a—"

For the second time, the alarm bell rang out
across the quarry.

This time, the hand on the switch belonged to
Nisodemus.

66

II. And Nisodemus said, You are betrayed,
People of the Store;

III. Falsely you were led into This Outside of
Rain and Cold and Humans and Order,
and Yet it Will become Worse;

IV. For there will be Sleet and Snow, and
Hunger in the Land;

V. And there will come Robins;

VI. Urn.

VII. Yet those that brought you here, where
are they Now?

VIII. They said. We go to seek Grandson

Richard, 39, but tribulation abounds on
every side and no help comes. You are
betrayed into the hands of Winter.

IX. It is time to put aside things of the

Outside.
—From the Book of Nome, Complaints, v. II-IX

"Yes. Well. That's hard to do, isn't it?" said a nome
uneasily. "I mean, we are Outside."
'But I have a plan, " said Nisodemus.

• 67 -

TEKBY PRATCHETT

"Ah," said the nomes, in unison. Plans were the
thing. Plans were what was needed. You knew
where you were, with a plan.

Grimma and Dorcas, almost the last to arrive,
sidled their way into the crowd. The old engineer
was going to push his way to the front, but
Grimma restrained him.

"Look at the others up there," she whispered.

There were quite a few nomes behind
Nisodemus. Many of them Dorcas recognized as
Stationeri, but there were a few others from some
of the great departmental families. They weren't
looking at Nisodemus as he spoke, but at the
crowd. Their eyes flickered back and forth, as
though they were searching for something.

"I don't like the look of this," said Grimma qui-
etly. "The big families never used to get on too |
well with the Stationeri, so why are they up there

3"

now.'

"Grubby pieces of work, some of them," said
Dorcas.

Some of the Stationeri had been particularly up-
set about common, everyday nomes learning to
read. They said it gave people ideas, Dorcas gath- |
ered, which were not a good thing unless they were j
the right kind of ideas. And some of the great fami- |
lies hadn't been too happy about nomes being able |j
to go where they pleased, without having to ask ||
permission.                                    i|

They're all up there, he thought—the nomes j

• 68 '

DIGGERS

who haven't done so well since the Drive. They all

lost a little power.

Nisodemus was explaining his plan.
As he listened, Dorcas's mouth slowly dropped

open.

It was magnificent in its way, that plan. It was
like a machine where every single part was per-
fectly made, but had been put together by a one-
handed nome in the dark. It was crammed full of
good ideas which you couldn't sensibly argue with,
but they had been turned upside down. The trou-
ble was, they were still ones you couldn't sensibly
argue with, because the basically good idea was still
in there somewhere.

Nisodemus wanted to rebuild the Store.

The nomes stood in horrified admiration as the
Stationeri explained that, yes, Abbot Gurder bad
been right, when they left the Store they had taken
Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) with them inside their heads.
And, if they could show him that they really cared
about the Store, he would come out again and put a
stop to all these problems and reestablish the Store
here, in this green unpleasant land.

That was how it all arrived in Dorcas's head,
anyway. He'd long ago decided that if you spent all
your time listening to what people actually said
you'd never have time to work out what they
meant.

But it wouldn't mean building the whole Store,
^id Nisodemus, his eyes shining like two bright
black marbles. They could change the quarry in

• 69 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

other ways. Go back to living in proper Depart-
ments instead of any old how all over the place. Put
up some signs. Get back to the Good Old Ways.
Make Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) feel at home. Build
the Store inside their heads.

Nomes didn't often go mad. Dorcas vaguely re-
called an elderly nome who had once decided that
he was a teapot, but he'd changed his mind after a
few days.

Nisodemus, though, had definitely been getting
too much fresh air.

It was obvious that one or two other nomes
thought so too.

"I don't quite see," said one of them, "how Ar-
nold Bros. (est. 1905) is going to stop these humans.
No offense meant."

"Did humans interfere with us when we were in
the Store?" demanded Nisodemus.

"Well, no, because—"

"Then trust in Arnold Bros. (est. 1905)!"

"But that didn't keep the Store from being de-
molished, did it?" said a voice. "When it came to it,
you all trusted Masklin and Gurder and the Truck.
And yourselves! Nisodemus is always telling you
how clever you are. Try and be clever, then!"

Dorcas realised it was Grimma. He'd never seen
anyone so angry.

She pushed her way through the apprehensive
nomes until she was face to face or at least, since he
was standing on something and she wasn't, face to

• 70 '

DIGGERS

chest. Nisodemus was one of those people who
liked standing on things.

"What will actually happen, then?" she shouted.
"When you've built the Store, what will happen?
Humans came into the Store, you know!"

Nisodemus's mouth opened and shut for a while.
Then he said, "But they obeyed the regulations!
Yes! Um! That's what they did! And things were
better then!"

She glared at him.

"You don't really think people are going to ac-
cept that, do you?" she said.

There was silence.

"You've got to admit," said an elderly nome, very
slowly, "things were better then."

The nomes shuffled their feet.

That was all you could hear.

Just people, shuffling their feet.

"They just accepted it!" said Grimma, "Just like
that! No one's bothered about the council anymore!
They just do what he tells them! Even Granny
Morkie's no help! She just sits around with all the
old people, talking! I told her she should help me,
and all she said was that she's too old to worry
about young fools like Nisodemus! She says, in ten
years' time who'll care?"

Now she was in Dorcas's workspace under a
bench in the old quarry garage. My little sanctu-
"y, he always called it. My little nook. Bits of wire

• 71 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

and tin were scattered everywhere. The wall was
covered with scrawls done with a bit of pencil lead.

Dorcas sat and twirled a bit of wire aimlessly.

"You're being hard on people," he said quietly.
"You shouldn't yell at them like that. They've been
through a lot. They get all confused if you shout at
them. The council was all right for when times
were good . . ." He shrugged. "And without Mas-
klin and Gurder and Angalo, well, it hardly seems
worthwhile."

"But after all that's happened!" She waved her
arms. "To act so stupidly, just because he's offered
them—"

"A bit of comfort," said Dorcas. He shook his
head. You couldn't explain things like this to peo-
ple like Grimma. Nice girl, bright head on her, but
she kept thinking that everyone else was as passion-
ate about things as she was. All people really
wanted, Dorcas considered, was to be left alone.
The world was quite difficult enough as it was
without people going around trying to make it bet-
ter all the time.

Masklin had understood that. He knew the way
to make people do what you wanted was to make
them think it was their idea. If there was one thing
that got right up a nome's nose, it was people say-
ing to them, "Here is a really sensible idea—what
are you, too stupid to understand?"

It wasn't that people were stupid. It was just that
people were people.

• 72 -

DIGGERS

"Come on," he said wearily. "Let's go and see
how the signs are getting on."

The whole of the floor of one of the big sheds
had been turned over to the making of the signs.
Or rather, the Signs. Another thing Nisodemus
was good at was giving words capital letters. You
could hear him doing it.

Dorcas had to admit that the Signs were a pretty
good idea, though. He felt guilty about thinking

this.

He'd thought that when Nisodemus had sum-
moned him and asked if there was any paint in the
quarry, only now the quarry was being called the
New Store.

"Urn," Dorcas had said, "There are some old
paint cans, white and red, mainly, under one of the
benches. We might be able to lever the tops off."

"Then do it. It is very important. Um. We must
make Signs," said the Stationer!.

"Signs. Right," said Dorcas. "Cheer the place up
a bit, you mean?"

"No!"

"Sorry, sorry, I just thought—"

"Signs for the gate!"

Dorcas scratched his chin. "The gate?" he said.

"Humans obey Signs," said Nisodemus, calming
down. "We know that. Did they not obey the Signs
in the Store?"

"Most of 'em," agreed Dorcas. "Dogs and Stroll-
ers Must Be Carried" had always puzzled him. Lots
of humans didn't carry either.

• 73 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Signs  make  humans  do  things,"  said
Nisodemus, "Or stop doing things. So get to work
good Dorcas. Signs. Um. Signs that say 'No.' "

Dorcas had given this a lot of thought as teams of
nomes sweated to pry open the lids of the paint-
streaked cans. They still had the High Way Code
from the Truck, and there were plenty of signs in
there. And he could remember some of the signs
from the Store.

Then there was a stroke of luck. Normally the
nomes stayed at floor level, but Dorcas had taken to
sending his young assistants onto the big desk in
the quarry manager's office occasionally, where
there were useful scraps of paper. Now he needed
to work out what the signs should say.
Sacco and Nooty came back with the news.
They'd found more signs. Old ones. A great big
grubby notice pinned to the wall, covered with
signs.

"Masses of them," Sacco said, coming back out of
breath. "And you know what, sir? You know what?
I read what it said on the notice and it said, 'Health
and Safety at Work,' it said, 'Obey These Signs,' it
said, and it said, 'They Are There for Your Protec-
tion.' "

"That's what it said?" said Dorcas.

" 'For Your Protection,' " Sacco repeated.

"Can you get it down?"

"There's a coathook next to it," said Nooty en-
thusiastically. "I bet we could sling a hook up and
then pull it over toward the window, and then—'

. 74 .

DIGGERS

"Yes, yes, you're good at that sort of thing," said
Dorcas. Nooty could climb like a squirrel. "I ex-
pect Nisodemus will be very pleased," he added.

Nisodemus was, especially with the piece that
said "For Your Protection." It showed, he said,
that, urn, Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) was on their side.

Every bit of board and rusty sheet of metal had
to be pressed into service. The nomes went at it
cheerfully enough, though, happy to be doing
something. Next morning the sun rose to see a va-
riety of Signs hanging, not always squarely, on the
battered quarry gate.

They had been very thorough. The Signs said:

NO ETNRY. EXIT THIS WAY. DAGNER——HARD HAT AREA.
BLASTIGN IN PROGRES. ALL TRUCKS REPORT TO WIEGH-IN
STATION. SLIPERY WHEN WET. THIS REGESTIR CLOSED.
ELEVOTAR OUT FO ORDER. BEWARE OF FLALING ROCKS.
ROAD FLOOODED.

And one that Dorcas had found in a book and
was rather proud of: UNEXPLODED BOM.

Just to be on the safe side, though, and without
telling Nisodemus, he found some more chain and,
in one of the greasy old toolboxes in the Cat's shed,
a padlock nearly as big as he was. It took four
nomes to carry it.

The chain was massive. Some of the nomes
found Dorcas painstakingly levering it along across
the quarry floor, one link at a time. He didn't seem
to want to tell them where he'd found it.

75

TERRY PRATCHETT

The truck turned up around noon. The nomes
waiting in the hedge by the side of the truck, saw
the driver get out, look at the signs, and . . .

No, that wasn't right. Humans couldn't do that
sort of thing. It couldn't be true. But twenty
nomes, peering out from the undergrowth, saw it
happen.

The human disobeyed the signs.

Not only that, it pulled some of them off the gate
and threw them away.

They watched in astonishment. Even UNEX-
PLODED BOM was whirled into the bushes, nearly
knocking young Sacco from his perch.

The new chain, though, caused the human a few
problems. It rattled the chain once or twice, peered
in through the wire mesh of the gate, stamped
around for a bit, and then drove off.

The nomes in the bushes cheered, but not too
happily.

If humans weren't going to do what was ex-
pected of them, nothing was right in the world.

"I reckon that's it," said Dorcas when they got
back. "I don't like the idea any more than anyone
else, but we've got to move. I know humans. That
chain won't stop them if they really want to get
in."

"I absolutely forbid anyone to leave!" said
Nisodemus.

"But you see, metal can be cut through—" Dor-
cas began in a reasonable tone of voice.

• 76 '

DIGGERS

"Silence!" shouted Nisodemus. "It's your fault,
you old fool! Um! You put the chain on the gate!"
"Well, you see, it was to stop the—pardon?" said

Dorcas.

"If you hadn 't put the chain on the gate, the signs
would have stopped the human," said Nisodemus.
"But you can't expect Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) to
help us if we show we don't trust him!"

"Um," said Dorcas. What he was thinking was:

Mad. A mad nome. A dangerously mad nome.
We're not talking about teapots here. He backed
out of Nisodemus's presence and was glad to get
out into the bitingly cold air.

Everything's going wrong, he thought. I was left
in charge, and now it's all going wrong, we haven't
got any proper plans, Masklin hasn't come back,
and it's all going wrong.

If humans come into the quarry, they'll find us.

Something cold landed on his head. He brushed
at it irritably.

I'll have a word with some of the younger
nomes, he thought. Maybe going to the barn wasn't
such a bad idea. We could keep our eyes shut on the
way. Or something.

Something else, cold and soft, settled on his neck.

Oh, why are people so complicated?

He looked up and realized that he couldn't see
Ae other side of the quarry. The air was full of
white specks, and more appeared as he watched.

He watched it in horror.

It was snowing.

• 77 '

VII. And Grimma said, We have two choices.

VIII. We can run, or we can hide.

IX. And they said, Which shall we do?

X. She said. We shall Fight.
—From the Book of Nome, Quarries III, v. VII-X

It wasn't much of a snowfall, just one of those m
nippy little sprinklings that come early in the win-1|
ter to make it absolutely clear that it is, well, the||
winter. That's what Granny Morkie said.        |

She'd never been very interested in the council|
anyway. She liked to spend her time with the otherj
old people, exchanging grumbles and, as she put it,^
cheerin' them up and takin' them out o' them-|
selves.                                        ;

She strutted around in the snow as if it belonged!
to her.                                        ^

The old-Store nomes watched her in horrified si-i

lence.

" 'Course, this is nothing to some of 'em," she
said. "I mind we've had snow so deep we couldn't

• 78 '

DIGGERS

walk around in it, we had to dig tunnels! Talk
about laugh!"

"Er madam," said a very old nome, gravely,
"Does it always drop out of the sky like this?"

" 'Course! Sometimes it gets blown along by the
wind. You get great big piles!"

"We thought it—you see, on the cards—that is, in
the Store—well, we thought it just sort of appeared
on things," said the old nome. "In a rather jolly and
festive way," he added, looking embarrassed.

They watched it pile up. Over the quarry the
clouds hung like overstuffed mattresses.

"At least it means we won't have to go to that
horrid barn place," said a nome.

"That's right," said Granny Morkie. "You could
catch your death, going out in this." She looked
cheerful.

The old nomes grumbled among themselves, and
scanned the sky anxiously for the first signs of rob-
ins or reindeer.

The snow closed the quarry in. You couldn't see
out across the fields.

Dorcas sat in his workshop and stared at the
snow piling up against the dirty window, giving
the shed a dull gray light.

"Well," he said quietly, "we wanted to be shut
away. And now we are. We can't run away, and we

Gan t hide. We ought to have gone when Masklin

left."

He heard footsteps behind him. It was Grimma.
• 79 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

She spent a long time near the gate these days, but
the snow had driven her indoors at last.

"He wouldn't be able to come," she said. "Not in
the snow."

"Yeah. Right," said Dorcas uncertainly.

"It's been eight days now."

"Yes. Quite a long time."

"What were you saying when I came in?" she
said.

"I was just talking to myself. Does this snow
stuff stay for a long time?"

"Granny says it does, sometimes. Weeks and
weeks, she says."

"Oh."

"When the humans come back, they'll be here
for good," said Grimma.

"Yes," said Dorcas sadly. "Yes, I think you're
right."

"How many of us would be able to ... you
know ... go on living here?"

"A couple of dozen, perhaps. If they don't eat
much, and lie low during the day. There's no Food
Hall, you see." He sighed. "And there won't be
much hunting. Not with humans around the
quarry the whole time. All the game up in the
thickets will run away."                      '

"But there's thousands of us!"

Dorcas shrugged.

"It's hard enough for me to walk through this
snow," he said. "There's hundreds of older nomes
who'll never do it. And young ones, come to that.

• 80 •

DIGGERS

"So we've got to stay, just as Nisodemus wants,"

said Grimma.
"Yes. Stay and hope. Perhaps the snow will be

We could make a run for the thickets or

something," he said vaguely.
"We could stay and fight," said Grimma.
Dorcas growled. "Oh, that's easy. We fight all the

time. Bicker, bicker, bicker. That's nomish nature

for you."

"I mean, fight the humans. Fight for the quarry."

There was a long pause.

Then Dorcas said, "What, us? Fight humans'?"

"Yes."

"But they're bumansV

"Yes."

"But they're so much bigger than we are!" said
Dorcas desperately.

"Then they'll make better targets," said
Grimma, her eyes alight. "And we're faster than
them, and smarter than them, and we know they
exist and we have," she added, "the element of sur-
prise."

"The what?" said Dorcas, totally lost.

"The element of surprise. They don't know
we're here," she explained.

He gave her a sidelong glance.

"You've been reading strange books again," he
said.

"Well, it's better than sitting around wringing
°ur hands and saying, 'Oh dear, oh dear, the hu-
"lans are coming and we shall all be squashed.' "

• 81 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"That's all very well," said Dorcas. "But what
are you suggesting? Bashing them over the head
would be really tricky, take it from me."

"Not their heads," said Grimma.

Dorcas stared at her. Fight humans? It was such
a novel idea it was hard to get your mind around it.

But . . . well, there was that book, wasn't there?
The one Masklin had found in the Store, the one
that had given him the idea for driving the truck.
What was it? Gulliver's Travels? And there'd been
this picture of a human lying down, with what
looked like nomes tying it up with hundreds of
ropes. Not even the oldest nomes could remember
it ever happening; it must have been a long time
ago.

A snag struck him.

"Hang on a minute," he said. "If we start fight-
ing humans . . ." His voice trailed off.

"Yes?" said Grimma impatiently.

"They'll start fighting us, won't they? I know
they're not very bright, but it'll dawn on them that
something's happening and they'll fight back. Re-
taliation, that's called."

"That's right," said Grimma. "And that's why
it's vitally important we retaliate right at the start."

Dorcas thought about this. It seemed a logical

idea.

"But only in self-defense," he said. "Only in sel^j
defense. Even with humans. I don't want there to
be any unnecessary suffering."

"I suppose so," she said.

• 82 '

DIGGERS

"You really think we could fight humans?"

"Oh, yes."

"So . . . how?"

Grimma bit her lip. "Hmm," she said, "Young
Sacco and his friends. Can you trust them?"

"They're keen lads. And lasses, one or two of
them." He smiled. "Always ready for something
new."

"Right. Then we shall need some nails . . ."

"You've really been thinking hard, haven't you?"
said Dorcas. He was almost in awe. Grimma was
often bad tempered. He thought perhaps it was be-
cause her mind worked very fast, sometimes, and
she was impatient with people who weren't keep-
ing up. But now she was furious. You could begin
to feel sorry for any humans who got in her way.

"I've been doing a lot of reading," she said.

"Er, yes. Yes, I can see," said Dorcas. "But, er, I
wonder if it wouldn't be more sensible to—"

"We're not going to run away again," she said
flatly. "We shall fight them on the tracks. We shall
fight them at the gates. We shall fight them in the
quarry. And we shall never surrender."

"What does 'surrender' mean?" said Dorcas, des-
perately.

"We don't know the meaning of surrender," said
Grimma.
"Well, / don't," said Dorcas.
Grimma leaned against the wall.
'Do you want to hear something strange?" she

• 83 •

TERRY PRATCHETT

Dorcas thought about it.

"I don't mind," he said.

"There's books about us."

"Like Gulliver, you mean?"

"No. That was about a human. About us, I mean.
Ordinary-size people, like us. But wearing all green
suits and with little knobbly stalks on their heads.
Sometimes humans put out bowls of milk for us
and we do all the housework for them. And we
have wings, like bees. That's what gets put in books
about us. They call us pixies. It's in a book called
Fairy Tales for Little Folk.'"

"I don't think the wings would work," said Dor-
cas doubtfully. "I don't think you could get the lift-
ing power."

"And they think we live in mushrooms,"
Grimma finished.

"Hmm? Doesn't sound very practical to me,"
said Dorcas.

"And they think we repair shoes."

"That's a bit more like it," said Dorcas. "Good
solid work."

"And the book said we paint the flowers to make
them pretty colors," said Grimma.             I

Dorcas thought about this.

"Nah," he said eventually. "I've looked at the
colors on flowers. They're definitely built-in."

"We're real," said Grimma. "We do real things.
So why do you think that sort of thing goes in
books?"

"Search me," said Dorcas. "I only read manuals.

• 84 '

DIGGERS

It's not a proper book, I've always said, unless it's
got lists and line drawings in it."

"If ever humans do catch us, that's what we'll
become," said Grimma. "Sweet little people, paint-
ing flowers. They won't let us be anything else.
They'll turn us into little people." She sighed. "Do
you ever get the feeling you'll never know any-
thing you ought to know?"

"Oh, yes. All the time."

Grimma frowned.

"/ know one thing," she said. "When Masklin
comes back, he's going to have somewhere to come
back to."

"Oh," said Dorcas.

"Oh," he repeated. "Oh. I see."

It was bitterly cold in the Cat's lair. Other nomes
never came in, because it was drafty and stank.
That suited Dorcas fine.

He padded across the floor and went under the
huge tarpaulin where the Cat lived. It took quite a
long time to climb up to his preferred perch on the
monster, even using the bits of wood and string
he'd painstakingly tied to him . . . it.

He sat down and waited until he got his breath
back.

"I only want to help people," he said quietly.
Like giving them things like electricity and mak-
'"g their lives better. But they never say thank you,
y°u know. They wanted me to paint signs, so I
Painted signs. Now Grimma wants to fight hu-

• 85 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

mans. She's got lots of ideas out of books. I know
she's doing it to help forget about Masklin but no
good will come of it, you mark my words. But if I
don't help, things will only get worse. I don't want
anybody to get hurt. People like us can't be repaired
as easily as people like you."

He drummed his heels on the Cat's—what would
it be?—the Cat's neck, probably.

"It's all right for you," he said. "Sleeping quietly
here all the time. Having a nice rest ..."

He stared at the Cat for a long while.

Then, very quietly, he said, "I wonder . . . ?"

Five long minutes went past. Dorcas appeared
and reappeared among the complicated shadows,
muttering to himself, saying things like, "That's
dead, that's no good, we need a new battery," and
"Seems okay, nothing that a good clean couldn't
put right," and "Hmm, not much in your
tank . . ."

Finally he walked out from under the dusty tarp
and rubbed his hands together.

Everyone has a purpose in life, he thought. It's
what keeps them going.

Nisodemus wants things to be as they were.
Grimma wants Masklin back. And Masklin . . •
no one knows exactly what it is that Masklin
wants, except that it's very big.

But they all have this purpose. If you have a pur-
pose in life, you can feel six inches tall.

And now I've found one.

Wow.

• 86 '

DIGGERS

The human came back later and it did not come
alone. There was the Land-Rover and a much
larger truck, with the words Blackbury Stone and
Gravel Inc. painted on the side. Its tires turned the
thin coating of snow into glistening mud.

It iolted up the dirt road, slowed down as it came
out into the open area in front of the quarry gates,
and stopped.

It wasn't a very good stop. The back of the vehi-
cle swung around and nearly hit the hedge. The
engine coughed into silence.

There was the sound of hissing. And, very
slowly, the truck sank.

Two humans got out. They walked around the
truck, looking at each tire in turn.

"They're only flat at the bottom," whispered
Grimma, in their hiding place in the bushes.

"Don't worry about it," hissed Dorcas. "The
thing about tires is, the flat bit always sinks to the
bottom. Amazing what you can do with a few nails,
isn't it?"

The smaller truck stopped behind the first one.
Two humans got out of that, too, and joined the
others. One of them was holding the longest pair of
pliers Dorcas had ever seen. While the rest of the
humans bent down by one of the flat tires it
strolled up to the gate, fiddled the teeth of the pli-
^s onto the padlock, and squeezed.

It was an effort, even for a human. But there was
a snap loud enough to be heard even in the bushes,

• 87 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

and then a long drawn-out clinking noise as the
chain fell away.

Dorcas groaned. He'd had great hopes for that
chain. It was the Cat's; at least, it was in a big yel-
low box bolted to part of the Cat, so presumably it
had belonged to the Cat. But it had been the pad-
lock that had broken, not the chain. Dorcas felt
oddly proud about that.

"I don't understand it," Grimma muttered.
"They can see they're not wanted, so why are they
so stupid?"

"It's not as if there aren't masses of stone
around," agreed Sacco.

The human pulled at the gate and swung it
enough to allow itself inside.

"It's going to the manager's office," said Sacco.
"It's going to make noises in the telephone."

"No, it's not," Dorcas prophesied.

"But it will be ringing up Order," said Sacco.
"It'll be saying, in Human, I mean, it'll be saying,
Some of Our Wheels Have Gone Flat."

"No," said Dorcas, "It'll be saying, Why Doesn't
the Telephone Work?"

"Why doesn't the telephone work?" said Nooty.

"Because I know which wires to cut," said Dor-
cas. "Look, it's coming back out."

They watched it walk around the sheds. The
snow had covered the nomes' sad attempts at culti-
vation. There were plenty of nome tracks, though,
like little bird trails in the snow. The human didn't

• 88 •

DIGGERS

notice them. Humans hardly ever noticed any-
thing.
"Trip wires," said Grimma.

"What?" said Dorcas,

"Trip wires. We should put trip wires down.
The bigger they are," said Grimma, "the harder

they fall."

"Not on us, I hope," said Dorcas.

"No. We could put more nails down," said
Grimma.

"Good grief."

The humans clustered around the stricken truck.
Then they appeared to reach a decision and walked
back to the Land-Rover. They got in. It couldn't go
forward, but reversed slowly down the dirt road,
turned around in a field gateway, and headed back
to the main road. The big truck was left alone.

Dorcas breathed out.

"I was afraid one of them would stay," he said.

"They'll come back," said Grimma. "You've al-
ways said it. Humans'll come back and mend the
wheels or whatever it is they do."

"Then we'd better get on with it," said Dorcas.
"Come on, everybody."

He stood up and trotted toward the road. To Sac-
co's surprise, Dorcas was whistling under his
breath.

"Now, the important thing is to make sure they
Gan't move it," he said as they ran to keep up. "If
Aey can't move it, it means it stays blocking the

• 89 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

dirt road. And if it stays blocking the dirt road,
they can't get any more machines in."

"Good thinking," said Grimma, in a slightly puz-
zled voice.

"We must immobilize it," said Dorcas. "We'll
take out the battery first. No electricity, no go."

"Right," said Sacco.

"It's a big square thing," said Sacco, "It'll need
eight of you at least. Don't drop it, whatever you
do."

"Why not?" said Grimma. "We want to smash it,
don't we?"

"Er. Er. Er," said Dorcas urgently, like a motor
trying to get started. "No, because, because it could
be dangerous. Yes. Dangerous. Yes. Because, be-
cause, because of the acid and whatnot. You must
take it out very carefully, and I'll find somewhere
safe to put it. Yes. Very safe. Off you go now. Two
men to a wrench."

They trotted off.

"What else can we do?" said Grimma.

"We'd better drain the gas out," said Dorcas
firmly as they walked under the shadow of the
truck. It was much smaller than the one that had
brought them out of the Store, but still quite big
enough. He wandered around until he was under
the enormous swelling bulk of the gas tank.

Four of the young nomes had dragged an empty
can out of the bushes. Dorcas called them over and
pointed to the tank above them.

"There must be a nut on there somewhere," he

• 90 -

DIGGERS

said. "It'll be to let the stuff out. Get a wrench
around it. Make sure the can's underneath it first!"

They nodded enthusiastically and got to work.
Nomes are good climbers and remarkably strong
for their size.

"And try not to spill any, please!" Dorcas
shouted up after them.

"I don't see why that matters," said Grimma, be-
hind him. "All we want to do is get it out of the
truck. Where it goes doesn't matter, does it?"

She gave him another thoughtful look. Dorcas
blinked back at her, his mind racing.

"Ah," he said. "Ah. Ah. Because. Becausebe-
causebecause. Ah. Because it's dangerous stuff. We
don't want it polluting things, do we? Best to put it
carefully in a can and—"

"Keep it safe?" said Grimma suspiciously.

"Right! Right," said Dorcas, who was starting to
sweat. "Good idea. Now let's just go over
here ..." He led Grimma away.

There was sudden rush of air and a thump from
right behind them. The truck's battery landed
where they had been standing.

"Sorry, Dorcas," Sacco called down. "It was a lot
heavier than we thought. It got away from us."

"You idiots!" Grimma shouted.

"Yes, you idiots!" shouted Dorcas. "You might
have damaged it! Just you come down here right
now and get it into the hedge, quickly!"

He might have damaged us\" said Grimma.
Yes. Yes. Yes, that's what I meant, of course,"

• 91 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

said Dorcas vaguely. "You wouldn't mind organiz-
ing them a bit, would you? They're good boys, but
always a little too enthusiastic, if you know what I
mean."

He wandered off into the shadow, his head tilted
backward.

"Well!" said Grimma. She looked around at
Sacco and his friends, who were sheepishly climb-
ing down again.

"Don't just stand there," she said. "Get it into
the hedge. Hasn't Dorcas told you about using
levers? Very important things. It's amazing what
you can do with levers. We used them a lot on the
Long Drive ..."

Her voice trailed off. She turned and looked at
the distant figure of Dorcas and her eyes narrowed.^

The cunning old devil is up to something, shej
thought.

"Oh, just get on with it," she said, and ran after
Dorcas.

He was standing under the truck's engine, star-
ing up intently into the masses of rusting
pipework. As she came up she distinctly heard him
say, "Now, what else do we need?"

"What do you mean, need?" said Grimma qui-
etly.

"Oh, to help the Ca—" Dorcas stopped, and
turned around slowly. "I mean, what else do we
need to do to make the thing totally immobile," he
said stonily. "That was what I meant."

• 92 -

DIGGERS

"You're not planning to drive this truck, are
you?" said Grimma.

"Don't be silly. Where'd we go? It'd never get
across the fields to the barn."

"Well. All right, then."

"I just want to have a look around it. Time spent
collecting knowledge is never wasted," said Dorcas
primly. He stepped out into the light on the other
side of the truck and looked up.

"Well, well," he said.

"What is it?"

"They left the door open. I suppose they thought
it was all right because they'd be coming back."

Grimma followed his gaze. The truck's door was
slightly ajar.

Dorcas looked around at the hedge behind them.

"Help me find a big enough stick," he said. "I
reckon we could climb up there and have a look
around."

"A look around? What do you expect to find?"

"You never know till you've looked," said Dorcas
philosophically. He peered back underneath the
truck.

"How are you all doing under there? We need a
hand here."

Sacco staggered up. "We managed to get the bat-
tery thing behind the hedge," he said, "and the
can's nearly full. Smells horrible. There's still lots
coming out."

"Can you get the screw back in?"
"Nooty tried and she got all covered in yuk."

• 93 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Let it go on the road, then," said Dorcas.

"Hang on, you said that would be dangerous,"
said Grimma. "It's dangerous until you've filled the
can up, is it, and then not dangerous at all?"

"Look, you wanted me to stop the truck and I've
stopped the truck," said Dorcas. "So just shut up,
will you?"

Grimma looked at him in horror.

"What did you say?" she said.

Dorcas swallowed. Oh, well. If you were going
to get shouted at, you might as well get your mon-
ey's worth.

"I said just shut up," he said quietly. "I don't
want to be rude, but you do go on at people. I'm
sorry, but that's how it is. I'm helping you. I'm not
asking you to help me, but at least you can let me
get on with things instead of badgering me the
whole time. And you never say please or thank
you, either. People are a little like machines," he
added solemnly, while her face went redder, "and
words like please and thank you are just like grease.
They make them work better. Is that all right?" He
turned to the boys, who were looking embarrassed.

"Find a stick long enough to reach up to the
cab," he said. "Please."

They fell over themselves to obey.

94

HI.   The younger nomes spoke, saying, Would
that we were the nomes our fathers were,
to ride upon the Truck, and what was it
like.

IV.   And Dorcas said, It was scary.

V.   That was what it was like.

—From the Book of Nome, Strange Frogs II, v. III-V

It was pretty much like the cab of the truck that
had brought them from the Store. It brought back
old memories.

"Wow!" said Sacco, "And we all drove one of
these?"

"Seven hundred of us," said Dorcas proudly.
"Your dad was one of them. You were in the back
with your mothers. All you lads were."

"I'm not a lad," said Nooty.

"Sorry," said Dorcas. "Slip of the tongue. In my
day girls stayed at home most of the time. Not that
I've got anything at all against them getting out
Bnd about a bit now," he added hurriedly, not

• 95 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

wanting another Grimma on his hands. "I'm not
against that at all."

"I wish I'd been older on the Drive," said Nooty.
"It must have been amazing."

"It terrified the life out of me," said Dorcas.

The others wandered around the cab like tourists
in a cathedral, gawking. Nooty tried to press a
pedal.

"Amazing," she said, under her breath.

"Sacco, you get up there and take those keys
out," said Dorcas. "The rest of you, no lollygag-
ging. Those humans could be back anytime. Nooty,
stop making those brrrm-brrrm noises. I'm sure
nice girls shouldn't make those kind of noises," he
added lamely.

Sacco swarmed up the steering wheel post and
wrestled the keys out of the ignition while the rest
of the boys poked around in the cab.

Grimma wasn't with them. She hadn't wanted to
come up into the cab. She'd gone very quiet, in
fact. She'd stayed down in the dirt road with a sul-
len look on her face.

But it had needed saying, Dorcas told himself.

He looked around the cab. Let's see, he thought
. . . we've got the battery, we've got the fuel, was
there anything else the Cat needs?

"Come on, everyone," he called, "Let's be getting
out of here. Nooty, stop trying to move things all
the time. It'd take all of you to shift the gear lever.
Come on, before the humans come back."

• 96 •

DIGGERS

He made his way to the door and heard a click
behind him.

"I said come on— What do you think you 're doing?"
The young nomes stared at him, wide-eyed.
"We're seeing if we can move the gear lever, Dor-
cas " said Nooty, "If you press this knob you

n

can—
"Don't press the knob! Don't press the knob!"

The first inkling Grimma had that something
was going wrong was a nasty little crunching
sound and a change in the light.

The truck was moving. Not very fast, because
the two front tires were flat. But the dirt road was
steep. It was moving all right, and just because it
had started off slowly didn't mean there wasn't
something huge and unstoppable about it.

She stared at it in horror.

The dirt road ran between high banks all the
way down to the big highway—and the railroad.

"/ said don't press it! Did I say press it? I said don't
press it!"

The terrified nomes stared it him, their open
mouths a row of Os.

"It's not the gear lever! It's the hand brake, you idiots!"

Now they could all hear the crunching noise and
feel the slight vibration.

Er," said Sacco, his voice shaking, "What's a
^nd brake, Dorcas?"

• 97 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"It keeps it stopped on hills and things! Don't
just stand there! Help me push it back up!"

The cab was, very gently, beginning to sway
from side to side. The truck was definitely moving.
The hand brake wasn't. Dorcas heaved on it until
blue and purple spots flashed in front of his eyes.

"I just gave the knob on the end a push!" Nooty
babbled. "I only wanted to see what it did!"

"Yes, yes, all right . . ." Dorcas stared around.
What he needed was a lever. What he needed was
about fifty nomes. What he needed most of all was
not to be here.

He staggered across the bouncing floor to the
doorway and cautiously peered out. The hedge was
moving past quite gently, as if it wasn't in a partic-
ular hurry to get anywhere, but the surface of the
road already had a blurred look.

We could probably jump, he thought. And if
we're lucky, we won't break anything. If we're
even luckier, we'll avoid the wheels. How lucky do
I feel, right at this minute?

Not very.

Sacco joined him.

"Perhaps if we took a good running jump—" he
began.

There was a thump as the truck hit the bank,
heeled over, and then bounced back onto the road.

The nomes struggled to their feet.

"On the other hand, perhaps not a good idea,"
said Sacco. "What shall we do now, Dorcas?"

"Just hang on," said Dorcas. "I think the banks

• 98 '

DIGGERS

will keep it on the road and I suppose it'll just roll
to a halt eventually." He sat down suddenly as the
truck bounced off the bank again. "You wanted to
know what a truck ride was like. Well, now you
know."

There was another thump. The branch of a tree
caught the door, swung it open and then, with a
terrible metallic noise, ripped it off.

"Was it like this?" shouted Nooty, above the
noise. To Dorcas's amazement, now that the imme-
diate danger was over, she seemed to be quite en-
joying it. We're bringing up new nomes, he
thought. They're not so scared of things as we
were. They know about a bigger world.

He coughed.

"Well, apart from its being in the dark and we
could see where we were going, yes," he said. "I
think we all ought to hang on to something. Just in
case it gets bumpy."

The truck rolled down the dirt road and onto the
highway. A car skidded into the hedge to avoid it;

another truck managed to stop at the end of four
long streaks of scorched rubber.

None of the nomes in the cab noticed this at the
time. All they felt was another thump as the truck
bounced gently over the far side of the highway

snd down the dirt road that ran toward the rail-
road.

Where, with red lights flashing, the barriers
^ere coming down.

• 99 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

Sacco peered out of the stricken doorway.

"We've just crossed over a paved road," he said.

"Ah," said Dorcas.

"I just saw a car run into the back of another car
and a truck ended up going sideways," Sacco went
on.

"Ah. Lucky we got over, then," said Dorcas.
"There's some dangerous drivers around."

The gritty sound of the flat tires rolling over
gravel gradually slowed down. There was the snap
of something breaking behind the truck, a couple
of bumps, and then another thump that brought
them to a halt.

And a low, booming noise.

Nomes hear things differently from humans, and
the shrill clanging of the crossing warning alarms
sounded, to them, like the doleful tolling of an an-
cient bell.

"We've stopped," said Dorcas. He thought, We
could have pressed the brake pedal. We could have
looked for something to press it with and pressed
it. I must be getting too old. Oh, well. "Come on,
no hanging around. We can jump out. You young-
sters can, anyway."

"Why? What are you going to do?" said Sacco.

"I'm going to wait until you've all jumped out,
and then I'm going to tell you to catch me," said
Dorcas pleasantly. "I'm not as young as I was.
Now, off you go."

They got down awkwardly, hanging on to the

- 100 '

DIGGERS

edge of the running board and dropping onto the

road.

Dorcas lowered himself gingerly onto the run-
ning board and sat with his legs dangling over the

drop.

It looked a long way down.

Below him, Nooty prodded Sacco respectfully
on the arm.

"Er. Sacco," she said, nervously.

"What is it?"

"Look at that metal rail thing over there."

"Well, what about it?"

"There's another one over there," said Nooty,
pointing.

"Yes, I can see," said Sacco testily. "What about
them? They're not doing anything."

"We're right in between them," said Nooty. "I
just thought I should, you know, point it out. And
there's that bell thing ringing."

"Yes, I can hear it," said Sacco irritably. "I wish
it would stop."

"I just wondered why it was."

Sacco shrugged. "Who knows why anything hap-
pens?" he said. "Come on, Dorcas. Please. We
haven't got all day."

"I'm just composing myself," said Dorcas qui-
etly.

Nooty wandered miserably away from the group
and looked down at one of the rails. It was bright
^d shiny.

And it seemed to be singing.

• 101 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

She bent closer. Yes, it was definitely making a
faint humming sound. Which was odd. Bits of
metal didn't normally make any noise at all. Not by
themselves, anyway.

As she stared at the truck stuck between the
flashing lights and the shiny rails, the world seem
to change slightly and a horrible idea formed in her
head.

"Sacco!" she quavered. "Sacco, we're right on the
railroad line, Sacco!"

Something a long way off made a deep, mournful
noise.

Whoo-oooo . . .

From the gateway of the quarry Grimma had a
good view of the land all the way to the airport.
She saw the train, and the truck.

The train had seen the truck too. It suddenly
started to make the long drawn-out screaming
noise of metal in distress.

By the time it actually hit the thing, it seemed to
be going quite slowly. It even managed to stay on
the rails.

Pieces of truck spun away in every direction, like
fireworks.

102

I.    Nisodemus said unto them, Do you doubt
that I can stop the power of Order?

II.    And they said, Um . . .

—From the Book of Nome, Chases I, v. I-II

Other nomes came running across the quarry floor,
with Nisodemus in the lead, and piled up in a
crowd around the gate.

"What happened? What happened?"

"I saw everything," said a middle-aged nome, "I
was on watch, and I saw Dorcas and some of the
boys go into the truck. And then it rolled away
down the hill and then it went over the highway
and then it stopped right on the railroad tracks and
then . . . and then ..."

"I forbade all meddling with these infernal ma-
chines," said Nisodemus. "And I said we were to
^op, um, putting people on watch, didn't I? The
watch Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) maintains should be
enough for humble nomes!"

"Yes . . . well . . . Dorcas said he thought it

• 103 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

wouldn't do any harm if we gave him a hand, sort
of thing," said the nome nervously. "And he
said—"

"I gave orders\" screamed Nisodemus. "You will
all obey me! Did I not stop the truck by the power
of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905)?"

"No," said Grimma quietly. "No, you didn't.
Dorcas did. He put nails down in the road."

There was a huge, horrified silence. In the mid-
dle of it Nisodemus went slowly white with rage.

"Liar!" he shouted.

"No," said Grimma, meekly. "He really did. He
really did all sorts of things to help us, and we
never said 'please' or 'thank you' and now he's
dead."

There were sirens along the road below and a lot
of excitement around the stationary train. Red and
blue lights flashed.

The nomes shifted uneasily. One of them said,
"He's not really dead, though, is he? Not really. I
expect he jumped out at the last minute. A clever
person like him."

Grimma looked helplessly at the crowd. She saw
Nooty's parents in the crowd. They were a quiet,
patient couple. She'd hardly ever spoken to them.
Now their faces were gray and lined with worry.
She gave in.

"Yes," she said. "Perhaps they got out."

"Must have," muttered another nome, trying to
look cheerful. "Dorcas isn't the type to go around
dying all the time. Not when we need him."

• 104 '

DIGGERS

Grimma nodded.

"And now," she went on, "I think even humans
will be wondering what's happening here. They'll
soon work out where the truck came from and
they'll be coming up here and I think they might
be very angry."

But Nisodemus licked his lips and said, "We
won't be afraid. We will confront them and defy
them. Um. We will treat them with scorn. We don't
need Dorcas, we need nothing except faith in Ar-
nold Bros. (est. 1905). Nails, indeed!"

"If you start out now," said Grimma, "you
should all be able to get to the barn, even through
what's left of the snow. I don't think the quarry
will be a safe place soon."

There was something about the way she said it
that made people nervous. Normally Grimma
shouted or argued, but this time she spoke quite
calmly. It wasn't like her at all.

"Go on," she said. "You'll have to start now.
You'll have to take as much food and stuff as possi-
ble. Go on."

"No!" shouted Nisodemus. "No one is to move!
Do you think Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) will let you
down? Um, I will protect you from the humans!"

Down below, a car with flashing lights on top of
11 pulled away from the excitement around the
train, crossed the main highway, and headed
slowly up the dirt road.

I will call upon the power of Arnold Bros. (est.
^05) to smite the humans!" shouted Nisodemus.

• 105 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

The nomes looked unhappy. Arnold Bros. (est.
1905) had never smitten anyone in the Store. He'd
just founded it, and seen to it that nomes lived com-
fortable and not very strenuous lives in it, and
apart from putting the signs on the walls hadn't
really interfered very much. Now, suddenly, he
was going around being angry and upset all the
time, and smiting people. It was very bewildering.

"I will stand here and defy the dreadful minions
of Order!" Nisodemus yelled. "I will teach them a
lesson they won't forget."

The rest of the nomes said nothing. If
Nisodemus wanted to stand in front of the truck,
then that was all right by them.

"We will all defy them!" he added.

"Er . . . what?" said a nome.

"Brothers, let us stand here resolute and show
Order that we are united in opposition! Um. If you
truly believe in Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), no harm
will come to you!"

The flashing light was well up the road now-j
Soon it would be crossing the wide patch in front|
of the gates, where the great chain hung uselesslyrj
from the broken padlock.                      |

Grimma opened her mouth to say: Don't be stu-|j
pid, you idiots. Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) doesn't;

want you to stand in front of cars. I've seen what|
happens to nomes who stand in front of cars. Yourj
relatives have to bury you in an envelope,       i

She was about to say all that, and decided not to.

• 106 -

DIGGERS

For months and months people had been telling
nomes what to do. Perhaps it was time to stop.

She saw a number of worried faces in the crowd
turn toward her, and someone said, "What shall we

do, Grimma?"

"Yeah," said another nome, "She's a Driver, they
always know what to do."

She smiled at them. It wasn't a very happy smile.

"Do whatever you think best," she said.

There was a chorus of indrawn breaths.

"Well, yeah," said a nome, "but, well, Nisodemus
says we can stop this thing just by believing we
can. Is that true, or what?"

"I don't know," said Grimma. "You might be
able to. I know I can't."

She turned and walked off quickly toward the
sheds.

"Stand firm," commanded Nisodemus. He
hadn't been listening to the worried discussions be-
hind him.

" 'Do whatever you think best,' " muttered a
nome. "What sort of help is that?"

They stood in their hundreds, watching the car
wind closer. Nisodemus stood slightly ahead of the
crowd, holding his hands in the air.

The only sound was the crunch of tires on
gravel.

If a bird looked down on the quarry in the next
^w seconds, it would have been amazed.

"ell, probably it wouldn't. Birds are somewhat

• 107 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

stupid creatures and have a hard enough job even
coming to terms with the ordinary, let alone the
extraordinary. But if it had been an unusually in-
telligent bird—an escaped myna bird, perhaps, or a
parrot that had been blown several thousand miles
off course by very strong winds—it would have
thought:

Oh. There is a wide hole in the hill, with little
old rusty sheds in it, and a fence in front of it.

And there is a car with lights on the top of it just
going through a gate in the fence.

And there are little black dots on the ground
ahead of it. One dot standing very still, right in the
path of the thing, and the others, the others . . .

Breaking away and running. Running for their
lives.

They never did find Nisodemus again, even
though a party of strong-stomached nomes went
back much later and searched through the ruts and
the mud.

So a rumor grew up that perhaps, at the last min-
ute, he had jumped up and caught hold of part of
the car and had clambered onto it somehow. And
then he'd waited there, too ashamed to face other
nomes, until the car went back to wherever it came
from, and had got off, and was living out the rest of
his life quietly and without any fuss. He had been a
good nome in his way, they said. Whatever else you
might say about him, he believed in things and he
did what he thought was proper, so it was only

• 108 '

DIGGERS

right that he'd been spared and was still out there
in the world, somewhere.

This was what they told one another, and what
they wrote down in the Book of Nome.

What nomes might have thought in those private
moments before they went to sleep . . . well, that
was private.

Humans clomped slowly around the train and
what remained of the truck. Lots of other vehicles
had turned up at what was, for humans, great
speed. Many of them had lights on top.

The nomes had learned to be worried by things
with flashing lights on top.

The Land-Rover belonging to the quarrymen
was there as well. One of the quarrymen was point-
ing to the wrecked truck and shouting at the oth-
ers. It had opened the smashed engine compart-
ment, and was pointing to where the battery
wasn't.

Beside the railroad the breeze rustled the long
grass. And some of the long grass rustled without
any wind at all.

Dorcas had been right. Where humans went
once, they went again. The quarry belonged to
them. Three trucks were parked outside the sheds
snd humans were everywhere. Some were repair-
'ng the fence. Some were taking boxes and drums
°ff trucks. One was even in the manager's office,
Leaning up.

• 109 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

The nomes crouched where they could, listening
fearfully to the sounds above them. There weren't
many hiding places for two thousand nomes, small
though they were.

It was a very long day. In the shadows under
some of the sheds, in the darkness behind crates, in
some cases even on the dusty rafters under the tin
roofs, the nomes passed it as best they could.

There were escapes so narrow a postcard
couldn't have got through them. Old Munby Con-
fectioner! and most of his family were left blinking
in the light when a human moved the beat-up old
box they were cowering behind. Only a quick dash
to the shelter of a stack of cans saved them. And, of
course, the fact that humans never really looked
hard at what they were doing.

That wasn't the worst part, though.

The worst part was much worse.

The nomes sat in the noisy darkness, not daring
even to speak, and felt their world vanishing. Not
because the humans hated nomes. Because they didn 't
notice them.

There was Dorcas's electricity, for example.
He'd spent a long time twisting bits of wire to-
gether and finding a safe way to steal electricity
from the fusebox. A human pulled the wire bits out
without thinking, fiddled inside with a screw-
driver, and then put up a new box with a lock on it.

The Store nomes needed electricity. They
couldn't remember a time when they had been

110

DIGGERS

without it. It was a natural thing, like air. And now
theirs was a world of endless darkness.

And still the terror went on. The rough floor-
boards shook overhead, raining dust and splinters.
Metal drums boomed like thunder. There was the
continual sound of hammering. The humans were
back, and they meant to stay.

They did go eventually, though. When the day-
light drained from the winter sky, like steel grow-
ing cold, some of the humans got into their vehicles
and drove off down the dirt road.

They did one puzzling thing before they left.
Nomes had to scramble over one another to get out
of the way when one of the floorboards in the man-
ager's office was pulled up. A huge hand reached
down and put a little tray on the packed earth un-
der the floor. Then the darkness came back as the
board was replaced.

The nomes sat in the gloom and wondered why
on earth the humans, after a day like this, were
giving them food.

The tray was piled with flour. It wasn't much,
compared to Store food, but to nomes who had
spent all day hungry and miserable it smelled good.

A couple of younger ones crawled closer. It had
the most tantalizing smell.

One of them took a handful of the stuff.

"Don't eat it!"

Grimma pushed her way through the packed
bodies.

"ut it smells so—" one of the nomes warbled.

111

TEBBY PRATCHETT               a

"Have you ever smelled anything like it before?"
she said.

"Well, no—"

"So you don't know it's good to eat, do you? Lis-
ten. I know about stuff like this. Where we—where
I used to live, in the hole . . . there was a place
along the highway where humans came to eat, and
sometimes we'd find stuff like this among the trash
at the back. It kills you if you eat it!"

The nomes looked at the innocent little tray.
Food that killed you? That didn't make sense.

"I remember there was some canned meat we
had once in the Store," said an elderly nome.
"Gave us all a nasty upset, I remember." He gave
Grimma a hopeful look.

She shook her head. "This isn't like that," she
said. "We used to find dead rats near it. They didn't
die in a very nice way," she added, shuddering at
the memory.

"Oh."

The nomes stared at the tray again. And there
was a thump from overhead.

There was still a human in the quarry.

It was sitting in the old swivel chair in the man-
ager's office, reading a paper.

From a knothole near the floor the nomes
watched carefully. There were huge boots, great
sweeps of trouser, a mountain range of jacket and,
far above, the distant gleam of electric light on a
bald head.

• 112 '

DIGGERS

After a long while the human put the paper
down and reached over to the desk by its side. The
watching nomes gazed at a pack of sandwiches big-
ger than they were, and a Thermos flask that
steamed when it was opened and filled the shed
with the smell of soup.

They climbed back down and reported to
Grimma. She was sitting by the food tray, and had
ordered six of the older and more sensible nomes to
stand guard around it to keep children away.

"It's not doing anything," she was told. "It's just
sitting there. We saw it look out of the window
once or twice."

"Then it'll be here all night," said Grimma. "I
expect the humans are wondering who's causing all
this trouble."

"What shall we dor'

Grimma sat with her chin on her hands.

"There's those big old tumbledown sheds across
the quarry," she said at last. "We could go there."

"Dorcas said—Dorcas used to say it was very
dangerous in the old sheds," said a nome cau-
tiously. "Because of all the old metal and stuff-
Very dangerous, he said."

"More dangerous than here?" said Grimma, with
Just a trace of her old sarcasm.

"You've got a point."

"Please, ma'am."

It was one of the younger female nomes. They
"eld Grimma in awe because of the way she
Touted at the men and read better than anyone.

• 113 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

This one held a baby in her arms, and kept curtsy-
ing every time she finished a sentence.

"What it is, Sorrit?" said Grimma.

"Please, ma'am, some of the children are very
hungry, ma'am. There isn't anything wholesome to
eat down here, you see." She gave Grimma a plead-
ing look.

Grimma nodded. The stores were under the
other sheds, what was left of them. The main po-
tato store had been found by some of the humans,
which was perhaps why the poison had been put
down. Anyway, they couldn't light a fire and there
was no meat. No one had been doing any proper
hunting for days, because Arnold Bros. (est. 1905)
would provide, according to Nisodemus.

"As soon as it gets light I think all the hunters
we can spare should go out," said Grimma.

They considered this. The dawn was a long way
away. To a nome, a night was as long as three
whole days.

"There's plenty of snow," said a nome. "That
means we've got water."

"We might be able to manage without food, but
the children won't," said Grimma.

"And the old people too," said a nome. "It's go-
ing to freeze again tonight. We haven't got the elec-
tric and we can't light a fire outside."

They sat staring glumly at the dirt.

What Grimma was thinking was: They're not
bickering. They're not grumbling. Things are so

• 114 '

DIGGERS

serious they're actually not arguing and blaming

each other.

"All right," she said. "And what do you all think
we should do?"

• 115 '

I.   We will come out of the woodwork.

II.   We will come out of the floor.
III.   They will wish they had never seen us.

—From the Book of Nome, Humans I, v. I-III

The human lowered its newspaper and listened.

There was a rustling in the walls. There was a
scratching under the floor.

Its eyes swivelled to the table beside it.

A group of small creatures were dragging its
packet of sandwiches across the tabletop. It
blinked.

Then it roared and tried to stand up, and it
wasn't until it was nearly upright that it found that
its feet were tied very firmly to the legs of its chair.

It crashed forward. A crowd of tiny creatures,
moving so fast that it could hardly see them,
charged out from under the table and wrapped a
length of old electrical wire around its outflung
arms. Within seconds it was trussed awkwardly>
but very firmly, between the furniture.

• 116 '

DIGGERS

They saw its great eyes roll. It opened its mouth
and mooed at them. Teeth like yellow plates
clashed at them.

The wire held.

The sandwiches turned out to be cheese and
pickle and the Thermos, once they got the top off,
was full of coffee. "Store food," said one nome to
another. "Good Store food, like we used to know."

They poured into the room from every crack and
mousehole. There was an electric fire by the table
and they sat in solemn rows in front of its glowing
red bar or wandered around the crowded office.

"We done it," they said, "Just like that Gullible
Travels. The bigger they come, the harder they
fall!"

There was a school of thought that said they
should kill the human, whose mad eyes followed
them around the floor. This was when they found
the box.

It was on one of the shelves. It was yellow. It had
a picture of a very unhappy-looking rat on the
front. It had the word Scramoff in big red lettering
too. On the back . . .

Grimma's forehead wrinkled as she tried to read
the smaller words on the back.

"It says, They Take a Bite, but They Don't
Come Back for More!' " she said. "And apparently
11 contains polydichloromethylinlon-4, whatever
Aat is. 'Clears Outhouses of Troublesome . . .'"
She paused.

• 117 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Troublesome what?" said the listening nomes.
"Troublesome what?"

Grimma lowered her voice.

"It says, 'Clears Outhouses of Troublesome Ver-
min in a Trice!' " she said. "It's poison. It's the stuff
they put under the floor."

The silence that followed this was black with
rage. The nomes had raised quite a lot of children
in the quarry. They had very firm views about poi-
son.

"We should make the human eat it," said one of
them. "Fill up its mouth with Polypuththeketlon
or whatever it is. Troublesome vermin."

"I think they think we're rats," said Grimma.

"And that would be all right, would it?" said a
nome with withering sarcasm. "Rats are okay.
We've never had any trouble with rats. No call to
go around giving them poisoned food."

In fact, the nomes got on rather well with the
local rats, probably because their leader was Bobo,
who had been a pet of Angalo's when they lived in
the Store. The two species treated each other with
the distant friendliness of creatures who could, at a
pinch, eat one another but had decided not to.

"Yeah, the rats'd thank us for getting rid of a
human," he went on.

"No," said Grimma. "No. I don't think we
should do that. Dorcas always said that they'reg
nearly as intelligent as we are. You can't go aroundj
poisoning intelligent creatures."

"They tried!"

• 118 '

DIGGERS

"They're not nomes. They don't know how to
behave," said Grimma. "Anyway, be sensible.
More humans will come along in the morning. If
they find a dead human, there'll be a lot of trou-
ble."

That was a point. But they had shown them-
selves to a human. No nome could remember its
ever being done before. They'd had to do it, or
starve and freeze, but there was no knowing where
it would end. How it would end was a bit more
certain. It would probably end badly.

"Go and put it somewhere where the rats can't
get it," said Grimma.

"I reckon we should just give it a taste—" said
the nome.

"No! Just take the stuff away. We'll stay here the
rest of the night and then move out before it's
light."

"Well, all right. If you say so. I just hope we're
not sorry about it later, that's all." The nomes car-
ried the dreadful box away.

Grimma wandered over to where the human lay.
It was well trussed up by now, and couldn't move a
finger. It looked just like the picture of Gullible or
whoever he was, except the nomes had got hold of
what the nomes in those days had never heard of,
which was lots of electrical wire. It was a lot
tougher than rope. And they were a lot angrier.
Gullible hadn't been driving a great big truck
^ound the place and putting down rat poison.

1 hcy'd gone through its pockets and piled up the

• 119 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

contents in a heap. There'd been a big square of
white cloth among them, which a group of nomes
had managed to tie around the human's mouth af-
ter its mooing got on everyone's nerves.

Now they stood around eating pieces of bread
and cheese and pickle and watching the human's
eyes.

Humans can't understand nomes. Their voices
are too fast and too high, like a bat squeak. It was
probably just as well.

"7 say we should find something sharp and stick
it into it," said a nome. "In all the soft parts."

"There's things we could do with matches," said
Granny Morkie, to Grimma's surprise.

"And nails," said a middle-aged nome.

The human growled behind its gag and strained
at the wires.

"We could pull all its hair out," said Granny
Morkie. "And then we could—"

"Do it, then," said Grimma, coming up behind
them.

They turned.

"What?"

"Do it, if you want to," said Grimma. "There it
is, right in front of you. Do what you like."

"What, we?" Granny Morkie nome drew back. "I
didn't . . . not me. I didn't mean me. I meant . • •
well, us. Nomekind."

"There you are, then," said Grimma. "And
nomekind is only nomes. Besides, it's wrong to
hurt prisoners. I read it in a book. It's called the

• 120 -

DIGGERS

Geneva Convention. When you've got people at
your mercy, you shouldn't hurt them."

"Seems like the ideal time to me," said a nome.
"Hit them when they can't hit back, that's what I
sav. Anyway, it's not as if humans are the same as
real people." But he shuffled backward anyway.

"Funny, though, when you see their faces close
up," said Granny Morkie, putting her head to one
side. "They look a lot like us. Only bigger."

One of the nomes peered into the human's
frightened eyes.

"Hasn't it got a hairy nose?" he said. "And ears

too."

"Like a cow," said Granny.

"You could almost feel sorry for them, with great
big noses like that."

Grimma peered into the human's eyes. I wonder,
she thought. They're bigger than us, so there must
be room for brains. And they've got great big eyes.
Surely they must have seen us once? Masklin said
we've been here for thousands of years. In all that
time, humans must have seen us.

They must have known we were real people. But
in their minds they turned us into pixies. Perhaps
they didn't want to have to share the world.

The human was definitely looking at her.

Could we share? she thought. They live in a big,
l°ng, slow world and we live in a small, short, fast
""e, and we can't understand each other. They
can't even see us unless we stand still as I'm stand-

• 121 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

ing now. We move too quickly for them. They
don't think we exist.

She stared up into the big frightened eyes.

We've never tried to—what was the word—com-
municate with them before. Not properly. Not as
though they were real people, thinking real
thoughts. How can we tell them we're really real
and really here?

But perhaps when you're lying down on the
floor and tied up by little people you can hardly see
and don't believe in, that's not the best time to start
communicating. Perhaps we should try it another
time. Not signs, not shouting, just trying to get
them to understand us.

Wouldn't it be amazing if we could? They could
do the big slow jobs for us, and we could do—oh,
little fast things. Fiddly things that those great fin-
gers can't do ... but not paint flowers or mend
their shoes.

"Grimma? You ought to see this, Grimma," said
a voice behind her.

The nomes were clustered around a white heap
on the floor.

Oh, yes. The human had been looking at one of
those big sheets of paper.

The nomes had spread it out flat on the floor. It
looked a lot like the first one they'd seen, except
this one was called READ IT FIRST IN YOUR SOARAWAY

BLACKBURY EVENING POST AND GAZETTE. It had more

of the great blocky writing, some of the letters
nearly as big as a nome's head.

• 122 '                       3

DIGGERS

Griinma shook her own head as she tried to make
sense of it. She could understand the books quite
well, she considered, but the papers seemed to use a
different language. It was full of probes and shocks
and fuzzy pictures of smiling humans shaking
hands with other humans (ELKS RAISE £455 FOR HOS-
PITAL APPEAL). It wasn't difficult to work out what
each word meant, but when they were put together
they either didn't mean anything at all or some-
thing quite unbelievable (civic CENTER TAX BATTLE).

"No, this is the bit," said one of the nomes. "This
page here. Look, some of the words, they're the
same as last time, look! It's about Grandson Richard,
391"

Grimma ran the length of a story about some-
body slamming somebody's plan for something.

There was indeed a fuzzy picture of Grandson
Richard, 39, under the words: TV-IN-THE-SKY HITCH.

She knelt down and stared at the smaller words
below it.

"Read it aloud!" they said.

"'Richard Arnold, the Blackbury-based chair-
man of the Arnco International Group, said in
Florida today,' " she read, " 'that scientists are still
trying to r-r-regain control of Arnsat 1, the multi-
roillion-pound corn . . . communications sat . . .
tellite . . .' "

The nomes looked at one another.

"Multimillion pound," they said, "That's really

heavy."

'Hopes were high after yesterday's s-s-success-
•  123 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

ful l-lunch in Florida,' " Grimma read uncertainly
" 'that Arnsat 1 would begin test tr-tr-transmis-
sions today. Instead, it is s-sending a stream of
strange sig . . . signals. "It's like some sort of
c-code," said Arnold, 39 . . ." ' "

There was an appreciative murmur from the lis-
teners.

" 'It's as if it had a mind of its own,' " Grimma
read.

There was more stuff about "teething troubles,"
whatever that meant, but Grimma didn't bother to
read it.

She remembered the way Masklin had talked
about the stars, and why they stayed up. And there
was the Thing. He'd taken it with him. The Thing
could talk to electricity, couldn't it? It could listen
to the electricity in wires, and the stuff in the air
that Dorcas called "radio." If anything could send
strange signals, the Thing could. / may go even fur-
ther than the Long Drive, he'd said.

"They're alive," she said, to no one in particular.
"Masklin and Gurder and Angalo. They got to the
Florida place and they're alive."

She remembered him trying to tell her, some-
times, about the sky and the Thing and where
nomes first came from, and she'd never really un-
derstood, any more than he'd understood about the
little frogs.

"They're alive," she repeated. "I know they are. I
don't know exactly how or where, but they've got
some sort of plan and they're alive."

• 124 -                       I

DIGGERS

The nomes exchanged meaningful glances, and
the kind of meaning they were full of was, She's
fooling herself, but it'd take a braver nome than me

to tell her.

Granny Morkie patted her gently on the shoul-
der.

"Yes, yes," she said soothingly. "And thank good-
ness they had a successful lunch. I bet they needed
to get some food inside of them. And if I was you,
my girl, I'd get some sleep."

Grimma dreamed.

It was a confused dream. Dreams nearly always
are. They don't come neatly packaged. She
dreamed of loud noises and flashing lights. And
eyes.

Little yellow eyes. And Masklin, standing on a
branch, climbing through leaves, peering down at
little yellow eyes.

Fm seeing what he's doing now, she thought. He's
alive. I always knew he was, of course. But outer space has
got more leaves than I thought. Or perhaps none of it is
real and Pm just dreaming . . .

Then someone woke her up.

It's never wise to speculate about the meaning of
dreams, so she didn't.

It snowed again in the night, on an icy wind.
Some of the nomes scouted around the sheds and
came back with a few vegetables that had been
"missed, but it was a pitifully small amount. The

• 125 '

TEBBY PRATCHETT

tied-up human went to sleep after a while, and
snored like someone sawing a thick log with a thin
saw.

"The others will come looking for it in the morn-
ing," Grimma warned. "We mustn't be here then.
Perhaps we should—"

She stopped. They all listened.

Something was moving around under the floor-
boards.

"Is anyone still down there?" Grimma whis-
pered.

The nomes near her shook their heads. No one
wanted to be in the chilly space under the floor
when there was the warmth and light of the office
for the having.

"And it can't be rats," she said.

Then someone called out in that half-loud, half-
soft way of someone who wants to make himself
heard while at the same time remaining as quiet as
possible.

It turned out to be Sacco.

They dragged aside the floorboards the humans
had loosened and helped him up. He was covered
in mud and swaying with exhaustion.

"I couldn't find anyone!" he gasped. "I looked
everywhere and I couldn't find anyone and we saw
the trucks come here and I saw the lights on and I
thought the humans were still here and I came in
and I heard your voices and you've got to coine
because it's Dorcas!"

"He's alive?" said Grimma.

• 126 '

DIGGERS

"If he isn't, he can swear pretty well for a dead
person," said Sacco, sagging to the floor.

"We thought you were all de—" Grimma began.

"We're all fine except for Dorcas. He hurt him-
self jumping out of the truck! Come on, pleaseV

"You don't look in any state to go anywhere,"
said Grimma. She stood up. "You just tell us where

he is."

"We got him halfway up the road and we got so
tired and I left them and came on ahead," Sacco
blurted out. "They're under the hedge and—" His
eyes fell on the snoring bulk of the human. He
stared at Grimma.

"You've captured a humanf' he said. He stumbled
sideways. "Need a bit of a rest. So tired. So tired,"
he repeated, vaguely. Then he fell forward.

Grimma caught him and laid him down as gently
as she could.

"Someone put him somewhere warm and see if
there's any food left," she said to the nomes in gen-
eral. "And I want some of you to help me look for
the others. Come on. This isn't a night for being
outside."

The expression on the faces of some of the nomes
said that they definitely agreed with this point of
view, and that among the people who shouldn't be
out on a night like this was themselves.

"It's snowing quite a lot," said one of them, un-
certainly. "We'll never find them in all the dark and
snow."

Grimma glared at him.

• 127 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"We might," she said. "We might find them in all
the dark and snow. We won't find them by staying
in the light and warm, I know that much."

Several nomes pushed their way forward.
Grimma recognized Nooty's people, and the par-
ents of some of the lads. Then there was a bit of a
commotion from under the table, where the oldest
nomes were clustering together to keep warm and
have a good moan.

"I'm comin' too," said Granny Morkie. "Do me
good to have a drop of fresh air. What you all
lookin' at me like that for?"

"I think you ought to stay inside, Granny," said
Grimma gently.

"Don't you come the bein'-tactful-to-old-people
to me, my gel," said Granny, prodding her with
her stick. "I bin out in deep snow before you was
even thought of." She turned to the rest of the
nomes. "Nothin' to it if you acts sensible and keeps
yellin' out so's everyone knows where everyone is.
I went out to help look for my uncle Joe before I
was a year old," she said, proudly. "Dreadful snow,
that was. It come down sudden, like, when the men
were out huntin'. We found nearly all of him too."

"Yes, yes, all right, Granny," said Grimma
quickly. She looked at the others. "Well, we're go-
ing," she said.

In the end fifteen of them went, many out of
sheer embarrassment.

In the yellow light from the shed windows the

• 128 -

DIGGERS

snowflakes looked beautiful. By the time they
reached the ground they were pretty unpleasant.

The Store nomes really hated the Outside snow.
There had been snow in the Store, too, sprayed on
merchandise around Christmas Fayre time. But it
wasn't cold. And snowflakes were huge beautiful
things that were hung from the ceilings on bits of
thread. Proper snowflakes. Not ghastly things
which looked all right in the air but turned into
freezing wet stuff which was allowed to just lie
around on the floor.

It already was deep as their knees.

"What you do is," said Granny Morkie, "you lift
your feet up really high and plonk them down.
Nothin' to it."

The light from the shed shone out across the
quarry, but the dirt road was a dark tunnel leading
into the night.

"And spread out," said Grimma. "But keep to-
gether."

"Spread out and keep together," they muttered.

A senior nome put his hand up.

"You don't get robins at night, do you?" he asked
cautiously.

"No, of course not," said Grimma.

"No, you don't get robins at night, silly," said
Granny Morkie.

They looked relieved.

"No, you get foxes," Granny added, in a self-
^tisfied way. "Great big foxes. They get good and
hungry in the cold weather. And maybe you get

• 129 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

owls." She scratched her chin. "Cunnin' devils
owls. You never hear 'em till they're almost on top
o' you." She banged on the wall with her stick.
"Look sharp, you lot. Best foot forward. Unless
you're like my uncle Joe—a fox got 'is best foot, 'e
'ad to have a wooden leg, 'e was livid."

There was something about Granny Morkie's
cheering people up that always got them moving.
Anything was better than being cheered up some
more.

The snowflakes were caking up on the dried
grasses and ferns on either bank. Every now and
again some of it fell off, sometimes onto the dirt
road, often onto the nomes stumbling along it.
They prodded the snowy tussocks and peered
doubtfully into the gloomy holes under the hedge,
while the flakes continued to fall in a soft, crackly
silence. Robins, owls, and other terrors of the Out-
side lurked in every shadow.

Eventually the light was left behind and they
walked by the glow of the snow itself. Sometimes
one of them would call out, softly, and then they'd
all listen.

It was very cold.                             i|

Granny Morkie stopped suddenly.

"Fox," she announced. "I can smell it. Can't mis-
take a fox. Rank."

They huddled together and stared apprehen-
sively into the darkness.

"Might not still be around, mind," said Granny.
"Hangs about for a long time, that smell."

• 130 '

DIGGERS

They relaxed a bit.
"Really, Granny," muttered Grimma.
"I was just tryin' to be a help," sniffed Granny
Morkie. "You don't want my help, you've only got

to say."

"We're doing this wrong," said Grimma. "It's
Dorcas we're looking for. He wouldn't just be sit-
ting out in the open, would he? He knows about
foxes. He'd get the boys to find somewhere shel-
tered and as safe as possible."

Nooty's father stepped forward.

"If you look the way the snow falls," he said hesi-
tantly, "you can see the air conditioning is blowing
it this way." He pointed. "So it piles up more on
this side of things than that side. So they'd want to
be as much away from the air conditioning as pos-
sible, wouldn't they?"

"It's called the wind, when it's Outside," said
Grimma gently. "But you're right. That means"—
she peered at the hedges—"they'd be on the other
side of the hedge. In the field, up against the bank.
Come on."

They scrambled up through the masses of dead
leaves and dripping twigs and into the field be-
yond.

It was desolate. A few tufts of dead grass stuck
above the endless wilderness of snow. Several of
the nomes groaned.

It's the size, Grimma thought. They don't mind
Ae quarry, or the thickets above it, or even the
^ad, because a lot of it is closed in and you can

• 131 '

pretend there are sort of walls around you. It's too
big for them here.

"Stick close to the hedge," she said, more cheer-
fully than she felt. "There's not so much snow
there."

Oh, Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), she thought. Dorcas
doesn't believe in you, and I certainly don't believe
in you, but if you could just see your way clear to
existing just long enough for us to find them, we'd
all appreciate it very much. And perhaps if you
could stop the snow and see us all safely back to the
quarry as well, that would be a big help.

That's crazy, she thought. Masklin always said
that if there was an Arnold Bros., he was sort of
inside our heads, helping us think.

She realized that she was staring at the snow.

Why is there a hole in it? she thought.

132

IV.   There is nowhere to go, and we must go.
—From the Book of Nome, Exits III, v. IV

"Rabbits, I thought," she said.

Dorcas patted her hand.

"Well done," he said weakly.

"We were on the road after Sacco left," said
Nooty, "and it was getting really cold and Dorcas
said to take him to the other side of the hedge and,
well, it was me who said you can see rabbits in this
field sometimes, and be said find a rabbit hole. So
we did. We thought we'd be here all night."

"Ow," moaned Dorcas.

"Don't make a fuss, I didn't hurt a bit," said
Granny Morkie cheerfully, as she examined his leg.
"Nothin' broken, but it's a nasty sprain."

The Store nomes looked around the burrow with
interest and a certain amount of approval. It was
nicely closed in.

"Your ancestors probably lived in holes like

• 133 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

this," said Grimma. "With shelves and things, of
course."

"Very nice," said a nome. "Homey. Almost like
being under the floor."

"Stinks a bit," said another,

"That'll be the rabbits," said Dorcas, nodding to-
ward the deeper darkness. "We've heard them rus-
tling about, but they're staying out of our way.
Nooty said he thought there was a fox snuffling
around a while ago."

"We'd better get you back as soon as possible,"
said Grimma. "I don't think any fox would bother
the pack of us. After all, the local ones know who
we are. Eat a nome and you die, that's what they've
learned."

The nomes shuffled their feet. It was true, of
course. The trouble was, they thought, that the per-
son who'd really regret it the most would be the
one nome who was eaten. Knowing that the fox
might be given a bad time afterward wouldn't be
much consolation.

Besides, they were cold and wet and the burrow,
while it wouldn't have sounded like a very com-
fortable proposition back at the quarry, was sud-
denly much better than the horrible night outside.
They'd staggered past a dozen burrows, calling
down into the gloom, before they'd heard Nooty's
voice answering them.

"I really don't think we need worry," said
Grimma. "Foxes learn very quickly. Isn't that so,
Granny?"

• 134 '

DIGGERS

"Eh?" said Granny Morkie.

"I was telling everyone how foxes learn
quickly," said Grimma desperately.

"Oh, yes. Right enough," said Granny. "He'll go
a long way out of his way for something he likes to
eat, will your average fox. Especially when it's cold
weather."

"I didn't mean that! Why do you have to make
everything sound so body

"I'm sure I don't mean to," said Granny Morkie,
and sniffed.

"We must get back," said Dorcas firmly. "This
snow isn't just going to go away, is it? I can get
along okay if I've got someone to lean on."

"We can make you a stretcher," said Grimma.
"Though goodness knows there isn't much to get
back to."

"We saw the humans go up the road," said
Nooty. "But we had to go all the way along to the
badger tunnel and there were no real paths. Then
we tried to cut across the fields at the bottom and
that was a mistake, they were all plowed up. We
haven't had anything to eat," he added.

"Don't expect much, then," said Grimma. "The
humans took most of our supplies. They think
we're rats."

"Well, that's not so bad," said Dorcas. "We used
to encourage them to think we were, back in the
Store. They used to put traps down. We used to
hunt rats in the basement and put them in the
^aps, when I was a lad."

• 135 •

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Now they're using poisoned food," said
Grimma.

"That's not good."

"Come on. Let's get you back."

The snow was still falling outside, but raggedy
fashion, as if the last flakes in stock were being sold
off cheaply. There was a line of red light in the east
—not the dawn, but the promise of the dawn. It
didn't look cheerful. When the sun did rise, it
would find itself locked behind bars of cloud.

They broke off some pieces of dead cow-parsley
stalks to make a rough sort of chair for Dorcas,
which four nomes could carry. He'd been right
about the shelter of the hedge. The snow wasn't
very deep there, but it made up for it by being
littered with old leaves, twigs, and debris. It was
slow going.

It must be great to be a human, Grimma thought
as thorns the length of her hand tore at her dress.
Masklin was right, this really is their world. It's the
right size for them. They go where they want and
do whatever they like. We think we do things for
ourselves and all we do is live in odd corners of
their world—under their floors, stealing things.

The other nomes trudged along in weary silence.
The only sound, apart from the crunch of feet on
snow and leaves, was that of Granny Morkie eat-
ing. She'd found some hawthorn berries on a bush
and was chewing her way through one with every
sign of enjoyment. She'd offered them around, but
the other nomes found them bitter and unpleasant.

• 136 '

DIGGERS

"Prob'ly an acquired taste," she muttered, glar-
ing at Grimma.

It's one we all are going to have to acquire,
thought Grimma, ignoring Granny's hurt stare.
The only hope we've got is to split up and leave the
quarry in little groups, once we get back. Move out
into the country, go back to living in old rabbit
holes and eating whatever we can find. Some
groups may survive the winter, once the old people
have died off.

And it'll be good-bye electricity, good-bye read-
ing, good-bye bananas . . .

But I'll wait at the quarry until Masklin comes back.

"Cheer up, my girl," said Granny Morkie, trying
to be friendly. "Don't look so gloomy. It may never
happen, that's what I always say."

Even Granny was shocked when Grimma looked
at her with a face from which all the color had
drained away. The girl's mouth opened and shut a
few times.

Then she folded up, very gently, and collapsed to
her knees and started to sob.

It was the most shocking sound they'd heard.
Grimma yelled, complained, bullied, and com-
manded. Hearing her cry was wrong, as though the
whole world had turned upside down.

"All I did was try to cheer her up," mumbled
Granny Morkie.

The embarrassed nomes stood around in a circle.
No one dared go near Grimma. Anything might
happen. If you tried to pat her on the shoulder and

• 137 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

say "There, there," anything might happen. She
might bite your hand off, or anything.

Dorcas looked at the nomes on either side of him
sighed, and eased himself up off his makeshift
stretcher. He limped over to Grimma, catching
hold of a thorn twig to steady himself.

"You've found us, we're going back to the
quarry, everything's all right," he said soothingly.

"It isn't! We'll have to move on!" she sobbed.
"You'd have been better off staying in the hole! It's
all gone bad!"

"Well, I would have said—" Dorcas began.

"We've got no food and we can't stop the humans
and we're trapped in the quarry and I've tried to
keep everyone together and now it's all gone bad!"

"We ought to have gone up to that barn right at
the start," said Nooty.

"You still could," said Grimma. "All the younger
people could. Just get as far away from here as pos-
sible!"

"But children couldn't walk it, and old people
certainly couldn't manage the snow," said Dorcas.
"You know that. You're just despairing."

"We've tried everything! It's just got worse! We
thought it would be a lovely life in the Outside and
now it's all falling to pieces!"

Dorcas gave her a long, blank look.

"We might as well give up right now," she said.
"We might as well give up and die right here."

There was a horrified silence.

It was broken by Dorcas.

• 138 -

DIGGERS

"Er," he said. "Er. Are you sure? Are you really

sure?"

The tone of his voice made Grimma look up.

All the nomes were staring.

There was a fox looking down at them.

It was one of those moments when Time itself
freezes solid. Grimma could see the yellow-green
glow in the fox's eyes and the cloud of its breath.
Its tongue lolled out.

It looked surprised.

It was new to these parts and had never seen
nomes before. Its not-very-complicated mind was
trying to come to terms with the fact that the shape
of the nomes—two arms, two legs, a head at the top
—was a shape it associated with humans and had
learned to avoid, but the size was the size it had
always thought of as a mouthful.

The nomes stood rooted in terror. There was no
sense in trying to run away. A fox had twice as
many legs to run after you. You'd end up dead any-
way, but at least you wouldn't end up dead and out
of breath as well.

There was a growl.

To the nomes' astonishment, it had come from
Grimma.

She snatched Granny Morkie's walking stick,
strode forward, and whacked the fox across the
nose before it could move. It yelped and blinked
stupidly.

"Shove off!" she shouted. "How dare you come
here!" She hit it again. It jerked its head away.

• 139 '

TERRY PRATCHETT               ''.

Grimma took another step forward and caught it a
backward thump across the muzzle.

The fox made up its mind. There were definitely
rabbits further down the hedge. Rabbits didn't hit
back. It knew where it was with rabbits.

It whined, backed away with its eyes fixed on
Grimma, and then darted off into the darkness.

The nomes breathed out.

"Well," said Dorcas.

"I'm sorry, but I just can't stand foxes," said
Grimma. "And Masklin said we should let them
know who's boss."

"I'm not arguing," said Dorcas.

Grimma looked vaguely at the stick.          ,|

"What was I saying before that?" she said.

"You were saying we might as well give up and
die right here," said Granny Morkie helpfully.
Grimma glared at her.

"No I wasn't," she said. "I was just feeling a bit
tired, that's all. Come on. We'll catch our death
standing here."

"Or the other way around," said Sacco, staring
into the fox-haunted darkness.

"That's not funny," snapped Grimma, striding
off.

"I didn't mean it to be," said Sacco, shivering.

Overhead, quite unnoticed by the nomes, a
rather strangely bright star zigzagged across the
sky. It was small, or perhaps it was really very big
but a long way off. If you looked at it long enough,
it might just appear disc-shaped. It was causing a

• 140 '

DIGGERS

lot of messages to be sent through the air, all
around the world.
It seemed to be looking for something.

There were flickering lights in the quarry by the
time they got back. Another group of nomes was
about to set out to look for them. Not with much
enthusiasm, admittedly, but they were going to try.

The cheer that went up when it was realized that
everyone was back safely almost made Grimma for-
get that they were safely back to a very unsafe
place. She'd read something in the book of prov-
erbs that summed it up perfectly. As far as she
could remember, it was something about jumping
out of the thing you cook in and into the thing you
cooked on. Or something.

Grimma led the rescue party into the office and
listened while Sacco, with many interruptions, re-
counted the adventure from the time Dorcas, out of
sudden terror, had jumped out of the truck and had
been carried off the rails just before the train ar-
rived. It sounded brave and exciting. And point-
less, Grimma thought, but she kept that to herself.

"It wasn't as bad as it looked," Sacco said. "I
mean, the truck was smashed but the train didn't
even come off the rails. We saw it all," he finished.
"I'm starving."

He gave them a bright smile, which faded like a
sunset.

"There's no food?" he said.

• 141 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Even less than that," said a nome. "If you've got
some bread, we could have a snow sandwich."

Sacco thought about this.

"There's the rabbits," he said. "There were rab-
bits in the field."

"And in the dark," said Dorcas, who appeared to
have something on his mind.

"Well, yes," admitted Sacco.

"And with that fox hanging about," said Nooty.

Another proverb floated up in Grimma's mind.

"Needs must," she said, "when the Devil drives."

They looked at her in the flickering light of the
matches.

"Who's he?" said Nooty.

"Some sort of horrible person that lives under
the ground in a hot place, I think," said Grimma.

"Like the boiler room in the Store?"

"I suppose so."

"And what sort of vehicle does he drive?" said
Sacco, looking interested.

"It just means that sometimes you're forced to do
things," said Grimma testily. "I don't think he ac-
tually drives anything."

"Well, no. There wouldn't be the room down
there, for one thing."

Dorcas coughed. He seemed to be upset about
something. Well, everyone was upset, but he was
even more upset.

"All right," he said quietly.

Something about the way he said it made thein^
pay attention.

• 142 -

DIGGERS

"You'd all better come with me," he went on.
"Believe me, I'd rather you didn't have to."

"Where to?" said Grimma.

"The old sheds. The ones by the cliff," said Dor-
cas.

"But they're all tumbled down. And you said

they were very dangerous."

"Oh, they are. They are. There's piles of junk
and stuff in cans the children shouldn't touch and
stuff like that."

He twiddled his beard nervously.

"But," he said, "there's something else. Some-
thing I've been sort of working on, sort of."

He looked her in the eye. "Something of mine,"
he said. "The most marvellous thing I've ever seen.
Even better than frogs in a flower."

Then he coughed. "Anyway, there's plenty of
room in there," he said. "The floors are just earth,
er, but the sheds are big and there are lots of places,
er, to hide."

A snore from the human shook the office.

"Besides, I don't like being so close to that
thing," he added.

There was a general murmur of agreement about
this.

"Had you thought about what you're going to do
with it?" said Dorcas.

"Some people wanted to kill it, but I don't think
that's a good idea," said Grimma. "I think the other
humans would get really upset about it."

"Besides, it doesn't seem right," said Dorcas.

• 143 -

TEKBY PBATCHETT

"I know what you mean."

"So . . . what shall we do with it?"

Grimma glared at the huge face. Every pore, ev-
ery hair, was huge. It was strange to think that if
there were creatures smaller than nomes, little peo-
ple perhaps the size of ants, her own face might
look like that. If you looked at it philosophically,
the whole thing about big and small was just a mat-
ter of size.

"We'll leave it," she said. "But ... is there any
paper here?"

"Loads of it on the desk," said Nooty.

"Go and fetch some, please. Dorcas, you've al-
ways got something to write with, haven't you?"

Dorcas fumbled in his pockets until he found a
stub of pencil lead.

"Don't waste it," he said. "Don't know if I'll ever
get any more."

Eventually Nooty came back towing a yellowing
sheet of paper. At the top of it, in heavy black let-
tering, were the words BLACKBURY SAND AND GRAVEL
INC. Below that was the word INVOICE.

Grimma thought for a while, and then licked the
stub and, in big letters, started to write.

"What are you doing?" said Dorcas.

"Trying to communicate," said Grimma. She
carefully traced another word, pressing quite hard.

"I've always thought it might be worth trying,"
said Dorcas. "But is this the right time?"

"Yes," said Grimma. She finished the last word.

. 144 .

DIGGERS

"What do you think?" she said, handing Dorcas

the pencil lead.

The writing was a bit jagged where she had
pressed hard, and her grasp of grammar and writ-
ing wasn't as good as her skill at reading, but it was
clear enough.

"I would have done it differently," said Dorcas,
reading it.

"Perhaps you would, but this is the way I've
done it."

"Yes." Dorcas put his head on one side. "Well,
it's definitely a communication. You can't get much
more communicating than that. Yes."

Grimma tried to sound cheerful. "And now," she
said, "Let's see this shed of yours."

Two minutes later the office shed was empty of
nomes. The human snored on the floor, one hand
outstretched.

There was a piece of paper in it now.

It Said: BLACKBURY SAND AND GRAVEL INC.

It said: INVOICE.

It said: We Could of Kiled You. LEAV US
ALONE.

Now it was quite light outside, and the snow had
stopped.

"They'll see our tracks," said Sacco. "Even hu-
mans will notice this many tracks."

"It doesn't matter," said Dorcas. "Just get every-
one into the old sheds."

• 145 •

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Are you sure, Dorcas?" said Grimma. "Are you
really sure this is a good idea?"

"No."

They joined the stream of nomes hurrying
through a crack in the crumbling corrugated metal
and entered the vast, echoing chamber of the shed.

Grimma looked around her. Rust and time had
eaten large holes in the walls and ceiling. Old cans
and coils of wire were stacked willy-nilly in the
corners, along with odd-shaped bits of metal and
jam jars with nails in them. Everything stank of oil.

"What's the part we ought to know about?" she
said.

Dorcas pointed to the shadows at the far end of
the shed, where she could just make out something
big and indistinct.

"It just looks like . . . some sort of big
cloth . . ." she said.

"It's, um, underneath it. Is everyone in?" Dorcas
cupped his hands around his mouth. "Is everyone
in?" he shouted. He turned to Nooty.

"I need to know where everyone is," he said. "I
don't want anyone to be frightened, but I don't
want unnecessary people getting in the way."

"Unnecessary for what?" said Grimma, but he
ignored her.

"Sacco, you take some of the lads and get those
things we put in the hedge," said Dorcas. "We'll
definitely need the battery and I'm really not cer-
tain how much fuel there is."

"Dorcas! What is it?" said Grimma, tapping her
foot.

• 146 -

DIGGERS

Dorcas got like this sometimes, she knew. When
he was thinking about machines or things he could
do with his hands, he started to ignore people. His
voice changed too.

He gave her a long, slow look as if he were seeing
her for the first time. Then he looked down at his

feet.

"You'd better, er, come and see," he said. "I shall
need you to explain things to everyone. You're so
much better at that sort of thing."

Grimma followed him across the chilly floor as
more nomes filed into the shed and huddled appre-
hensively along the walls.

He led her under the shadow of the tarp, which
formed a sort of big, dusty cave.

A tire like a truck's loomed up a little way away
in the gloom, but it was far more knobby than any
she had seen.

"Oh. It's just a truck," she said, uncertainly.
"You've got a truck in here, have you?"

"No," said Dorcas. "It's a Cat."

Grimma's response was impressive. She spun
around in an effort to see in every direction at
once.

"Where? Where?" she screamed. "You idiot! You
brought us where there's a caty

Dorcas said nothing. He just pointed upward.

Grimma looked up. And then looked up some
more. Into the mouth of the Cat.

147

IV.   Dorcas said, This is the Cat, Great Beast
with teeth.

V.   Needs Must. If we are driven, let us
Drive.

—From the Book of Nome, Cat II, v. IV-V

Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the
descriptions are not enough. Books should be writ-
ten with soundtracks, like films.

Something deep, on an organ, perhaps.

Grimma stared. Soundtrack on:

Deedle-dah-DEEdleDAHda-dum

It can't really be alive, she thought desperately.
It's not really about to bite me. Dorcas wouldn't
have brought me in here if he knew there was a
monster about to bite me. I'm not going to be
frightened. I'm not frightened at all. I am a think-
ing nome and I'm not frightened'.

"I think the knobby wheels are just to make it
grip the ground better," said Dorcas, his voice
sounding a long way off. "Now, I've had a good

• 148 -

DIGGERS

look around it and, you know, there's nothing re-
ally wrong with it, it's just very old—"

Grimma's gaze travelled along the huge yellow
neck.

Deedle-dah—deedle-dah-D UM

"Then I thought, I'm sure it could be started up.
These diesel engines are quite easy really, and of
course there were pictures in one of the books, al-
though I'm not sure about these pipes, hydraulics I
think its called, but there was this book on one of
the benches, Workshop Manual, and I've put grease
on things and cleaned it up," Dorcas gabbled.

Dah-dah-dah-DUM

"I suppose the humans, or whatever, knew they
would be coming back, and I've been up and looked
at the controls and, you know, it's probably easier
than the truck was, only of course there's these ex-
tra levers for the hydraulics, but that shouldn't be a
problem if there's enough gas, which . . ."

He stopped, aware of her silence.

"Is there something the matter?" he said.

"What is it?" said Grimma.

"I was just telling you," said Dorcas. "It's fasci-
nating. You see, these pipes pump some sort of stuff
which made those parts up there move, and those
pistons are forced out, which makes the arm thing
over there—"

"I didn't ask you what it does, I asked you what
lt is," said Grimma, impatiently. "Because I know
one thing. It's not a cat, Dorcas."

• 149 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"You're wrong about that," said Dorcas. "See
what's painted on it. Just up there, look."

She looked where he pointed. Grimma's brow
wrinkled.

"C ... A ... T," she said. "Cat? But ...
but . . . Dorcas, that can't be right. Not really
right. Look, a cat's got, well, whiskers. And hair.
And it's a whole lot smaller."

"Dunno," said Dorcas, and he shrugged. "It's
written right there. I'm not about to argue with
things that are written right there. Maybe it's a big
cat. Maybe all the whiskers dropped out a long
time ago. You know? Like some old nomes lose
their hair?"

"W-well," said Grimma, uncertainly. "But even
the shape isn't right, and—"

"What do I know about this?" said Dorcas. "I'm
not an expert in natural history. Anyway, come
over to this side."

She followed him dreamily, and, once more,
stared into the darkness under the tarp.

"There," he said. "There's no mistaking what
they are, I hope."

"Oh, my," said Grimma, and raised her hand to
her mouth.

"Yes," said Dorcas. "That's what I thought.
When I first found this I thought, oh, it's a sort of
truck, well, well, and then I walked up here and I
found that it was a truck with—"

"Teeth," said Grimma, softly. "Great big metal
teeth. A mouth at both ends?"

• 150 •

DIGGERS

"That's right," said Dorcas proudly. "The Cat. A
sort of truck. A truck with two heads. A truck with
teeth."

Dah-DUM

"Does it—does it work?" said Grimma.

"It should. It should. I've tested what I can. Basic
principle is like a truck, but there's a lot of extra
levers and things—"

"Why didn't you tell me about this before?"
Grimma demanded.

"Dunno. Because I didn't have to, I suppose,"
said Dorcas.

"But it's huge. You can't keep something like this
to yourself!"

"Everyone has to have something they can keep
to themselves," said Dorcas vaguely. "Anyway, the
size isn't important. It's just so, well, so perfect."
Dorcas patted a knobby tire. "You know, you said
humans think someone made the world in a week?
When I saw the Cat for the first time I thought,
okay, this is what he used."

He stared up into the shadows.

"First thing we've got to do is get the tarp off,"
he said. "It'll be very heavy, so we'll need lots of
people. You'd better warn them. The Cat can be a
bit scary when you see it for the first time."

"Didn't frighten me a bit," said Grimma.

"I know," said Dorcas. "I was watching your
face."

151

TERRY PRATCHETT

The nomes looked expectantly at Grimma.

"The thing to remember," she said, "is that it's
just a machine. Just a sort of truck. But when you
first see it, it can be rather frightening, so hold on
to small children's hands. And run smartly back-
ward when the tarp comes down."

There was a chorus of nods.

"All right. Grab hold."

Six hundred nomes spat on their hands and
grasped the edge of the heavy cloth.

"When I say pull, I want you to pull."

The nomes took the strain.

"?«///"

The creases in the tarp flattened out and disap-
peared.

"Pull!"

It began to move. Then, as it slid over the Cat's
angular shape, its own weight started to tug at it.

"Run!"

It came down like an oily green avalanche, piling
up into a mountain of folds, but no one bothered
about it because the sun shone through the dusty,
cobwebbed windows and made the Cat glow.

Several nomes screamed. Mothers picked up
their children. There was a movement toward the
doors.

The light twinkled on the tips of the teeth.

It does look like a head, Grimma thought. On a
long neck. And he's got another one at the other
end. What am I saying? It has got another one at
the other end.

• 152 •

DIGGERS

"I said it's all right!" she shouted over the rising
din. "Look! It's not even moving!"

"Hey!" shouted another voice. She looked up.
Nooty and Sacco had climbed out along the Cat's
neck, and were sitting there, waving cheerfully.

That did it. The tide of nomes reached the wall
and stopped. You always feel foolish, running away
from something that isn't chasing you. They hesi-
tated and then slowly inched their way back.

"Well, well," said Granny Morkie, hobbling for-
ward. "So that's what they look like. I always won-
dered."

Grimma stared at her.

"What what look like?" she said.

"Oh, the big diggers," said Granny. "They'd all
gone when I was born, but our dad saw 'em. Great
big yellow things with teeth that et dirt, he said. I
always thought he was having me on."

The Cat was still not eating people. Some of the
more adventurous nomes started to climb on it.

"It was when the big highway was built,"
Granny went on, leaning on her stick. "They were
all over the place, Dad said. Big yellow things with
teeth and knobby tires."

Grimma stared at her with the kind of expres-
sion reserved for people who turn out, against all
expectation, to have interesting and secret histo-
ries.

"And there was others too," the old woman went
on. "Things that shoved dirt in piles and every-

• 153 •

TERRY PRATCHETT

thing. This would have been, oh, fifteen years ago
now. Never thought I'd see one."

"You mean the highways were made?" said
Grimma. The Cat was covered with young nomes
now. She could see Dorcas in the back of the cab,
explaining what various levers did.

"That's what he said," said Granny. "You didn't
think they was natch'ral, did you?"

"Oh. No. No. Of course not," said Grimma.
"Don't be silly."

And she thought, I wonder if Dorcas is right?
Perhaps everything was made. Everything in the
whole world. Some parts early, some parts later.
You start with hills and clouds and things, and then
you add highways and Stores. Perhaps the job of
humans is to make the world, and they're still do-
ing it. That's why the machines have to suit them.

Gurder would have understood this sort of
thing. I wish he were back.

And then Masklin would be back too.

She tried to think about something else.

Knobby tires. That was a good start. The Cat's
back wheels were nearly as high as a human. It
doesn't need highways. Of course it doesn't. It
makes highways. So it has to be able to go where
highways aren't.

She pushed her way through the crowds to the
back of the cab, where another group of nomes
were already nomehandling a plank into position,
and scrambled up to where Dorcas was trying to

• 154 -

DIGGERS

make himself heard in the middle of an excited

crowd.

"You're going to drive this out of here?" she de-
manded.

He looked up.

"Oh, yes," he said happily. "I think so. I hope so.
I imagine we've got at least an hour before any
more humans come, and it's not a lot different from

a truck."

"We know how to do it!" shouted one of the
younger nomes. "My dad told me all about the
strings and stuff!"

Grimma looked around the cab. It seemed to be
full of levers.

It'd been more than half a year since the Long
Drive, and she'd never taken much notice of me-
chanical things, but she couldn't help thinking the
old truck cab had been a lot less crowded. There
had been some pedals and a lever and the steering
wheel, and that had been about it.

She turned back to Dorcas.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"No," he said. "You know I'm never sure. But a
lot of the controls are for its mou—for the bucket.
The thing with the teeth in it. At the end of its
neck. I mean, the control arms. We needn't bother
with them. They're amazingly ingenious, though,
and all you have to do—"

"Where's everyone going to sit? There isn't
much room."

Dorcas shrugged. "I suppose the older people

• 155 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

can travel in the cab. The youngsters will have to
hang on where they can. We can wrap wires and
things around the place. For handholds, I mean.
Look, don't worry. We'll be driving in the light and
we don't have to go fast."

"And then we'll get to the barn, won't we, Dor-
cas?" said Nooty. "Where it'll be warm and there's
lots of food."

"I hope so," said Dorcas. "Now, let's get on with
things. We haven't got much time. Where's Sacco
with the battery?"

Grimma thought, Will there be lots of food at the
barn? Where did we get that idea? Angalo said that
turnips or something were stored up there, and
there may be some potatoes. That's not exactly a
feast.

Her stomach, thinking thoughts of its own, rum-
bled in disagreement. It had been a very long night
to pass on a tiny piece of cheese sandwich.

Anyway, we can't stay here now. Anywhere will
be better than here.

"Dorcas," she said, "Is there anything I can help
with?"

He looked up. "You could read the instruction
book," he said. "See if it says how to drive it."

"Don't you know?"

"Er. Not in so many words. Not exactly. I mean, I
know how to do it, it's just that I don't know what
to do."

It was under the bench on one side of the shed.
Grimma propped it up and tried to concentrate de-

• 156 •

DIGGERS

spite the noise. I bet he does know, she thought.
But this is his moment, and he doesn't want me
getting in the way.

The nomes moved like people with a purpose.
Things were far too bad to spend time grumbling.
Funny thing, she thought as she turned the dirty
pages, that people only seem to stop complaining
when things get really bad. That's when they start
using words like pulling together, shoulders to the
wheel, and noses to the grindstone. She'd found
"nose to the grindstone" in a book. Apparently it
meant "to keep on with things." She didn't see why
people were supposed to work hard if you ground
their noses; it seemed more likely that they'd work
hard if you promised to grind their noses if they
didn't.

It had been the same with "Road Works Ahead"
on the Long Drive. The road ahead works. How
could it mean anything else? But the road had been
full of holes. Where was the sense in that? Words
ought to mean what they meant.

She turned the page.

There was a big brown ring on this one, where a
human had put down a cup.

And the words Caterpillar Tractor Company,
She gave them a blank look.

This is just what I mean, she thought. A caterpil-
lar is a baby butterfly. A tractor is a sort of truck
humans use in fields. Company is what you have
when you're not alone. The words all mean some-

• 157 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

thing, and then they get put together, and who
knows what they mean then?

Across the floor a group of nomes swarmed
around the slowly moving bulk of the battery.
They were rolling it on rusty ball bearings.

The can of fuel wobbled after it.

Grimma turned another page and stared at the
pictures of levers with numbers on them. Suddenly
people were keen on the barn, she thought. Sud-
denly, when things were not just averagely awful
but promising to be really dreadful, they seemed
almost happy. Masklin had known about that. It's
amazing what people would do, he said, if you
found the right place to push.

She went on reading.

Back hoe. Now, what was that supposed to
mean? Maybe you had to shout instructions to the
Cat? Like, maybe, "Back, hoe!" And "Forward,
hey!" Or maybe not?

She stared at the pages, and tried to get inter-
ested in levers.

The clouds running before the sun were spread-
ing across the pink of the sky. Red sky in the morn-
ing, Grimma had read once. It meant sailors were
unhappy. She didn't know what sailors were,
though, or why they made the sky red when they
were unhappy.

In the dark office the human awoke, mooed for a
while, and tried to jerk free of the cobweb of wires

• 158 '

DIGGERS

that held it down. After a lot of effort it wriggled
most of one arm free.

What the human did next would have surprised
most nomes. It caught hold of a chair and, with a
great deal of grunting, managed to tip it over. It
pulled it across the floor, manipulated the leg un-
der a couple of strands of wire, and heaved.

A minute later it was sitting upright, pulling
more wires free.

Its huge eyes fell on the scrap of paper on the
floor.

It stared at it for a moment, rubbing its arms,
and then it picked up the telephone.

Dorcas prodded vaguely at a wire.

"Are you sure the battery is connected the right
way, sir?" said Sacco.

"I can tell the difference between red wires and
black wires, you know," said Dorcas mildly, prod-
ding another wire.

"Then perhaps the battery doesn't have enough
electricity," said Grimma helpfully, trying to see
over their shoulders. "Perhaps it's all run to the
bottom, or gone dry."

Dorcas and Sacco exchanged glances.

"Electricity doesn't sink," said Dorcas patiently.
"Or dry up, as far as I know. It's either there or it
isn't. Excuse me." He peered up into the mass of
wires again, and gave one a poke. There was a pop,
and a fat blue spark.

• 159 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"It's there all right," he added. "It's just that it
isn't where it should be."

Grimma walked back across the greasy floor of
the cab. Groups of nomes were standing around,
waiting. Hundreds of them were clutching the
wires attached to the big steering wheel above
them. Other teams stood by with bits of wood
pressing, like battering rams, on the pedals.

"Just a bit of a delay," she said. "All the electrici-
ty's got lost."

There were nomes everywhere. On the Long
Drive there had been a whole truck for them. But
the Cat's cab was smaller, and people had to pack
themselves in where they could.

What a ragged bunch, Grimma thought. And it
was true. Even in the sudden rush from the Store
the nomes had been able to bring a lot of stuff. And
they had been plump and well dressed.

Now they were thinner and leaner and much
dirtier and all they were taking with them were the
torn and grubby clothes they stood up in. Even the
books had been left behind. A hundred books took
up the space of three hundred nomes, and while
Grimma privately thought that some of the books
were more useful than many of the nomes, she'd
accepted Dorcas's promise that they would come
back one day and try to retrieve them from their
hiding place under the floor.

Well, thought Grimma. We tried. We really made
an effort. We came to the quarry to dig in, look
after ourselves, live proper lives. And we failed. We

160

DIGGERS

thought all we had to do was bring the right things
from the Store, but we brought a lot of wrong
things too. Next time we'll need to go as far away
from humans as possible, and I don't actually think
anywhere is far enough.

She climbed up onto the rickety driving plat-
form, which had been made by tying a plank across
the cab. There were even nomes on this. They
watched her expectantly.

At least driving the Cat should be easier. The
leaders of the teams on the controls could see her,
so she wouldn't have to mess around with sema-
phore and pieces of thread as they'd done when
they left the Store. And a lot of the nomes had done
this before too . . .

She heard Dorcas shout, "Try it this time!"

There was a click. There was a whirr. Then the
Cat roared.

The sound bounced around the cave of the shed.
It was so loud and so deep it wasn't really sound at
all, just something that turned the air hard and
then hit you with it. Nomes flung themselves flat
on the trembling deck of the cab.

Grimma, clutching at her ears, saw Dorcas run-
ning across the floor, waving his hands. The team
on the accelerator pedal gave him a "Who, us?"
look and stopped pushing.

The sound died down to a deep, rumbling purr,
a mummummummum that still had a feel-it-in-the-
bone quality. Dorcas hurried back and climbed,
with a lot of stopping for breath, up to the plank.

• 161 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

When he got there he sat down and rubbed his
brow.

"I'm getting too old for this sort of thing," he
said. "When a nome gets to a certain age, it's time
to stop stealing giant vehicles. Well-known fact.
Anyway. It's ticking over nicely. You might as well
take us out."

"What, all by myself?" said Grimma.          i;

"Yes. Why not?"

"It's just that, well, I thought Sacco or someone
would be up here." I thought a male nome would
be driving, she thought.

"They'd like to," said Dorcas. "They'd love to.
And we'd be zipping all over the place, I don't
doubt it, with them crying 'yippee!' and whatnot.
No. I want a nice peaceful drive across the fields,
thank you very much. The gentle touch."

He leaned down.

"Everyone ready down there?" he yelled.

There was a chorus of nervous "yesses," and one
or two cheerful ones.

"I wonder if putting Sacco in charge of the go-
faster pedal is really a good idea," mused Dorcas.
He straightened up.

"Er. You're not worried, are you?" he said.

Grimma snorted. "What? Me? No. Of course not.
It does not," she added, "present a problem."

"0-kay," he said. "Let's go."

There was silence, except for the deep thrum-
ming of the engine.

• 162 '

DIGGERS

Grimma paused.

If Masklin were here, she thought, he'd do this
better than me. No one mentions him anymore. Or
Angalo. Or Gurder. They don't like thinking about
them. That must be something nomes learned hun-
dreds of years ago, in this world full of foxes and
rushing things and a hundred nasty ways to die. If
someone is missing, you must stop thinking about
them, you must put them out of your mind. But I
think about him all the time.

I just went on about the frogs in the flowers, and
I never thought about his dreams.

Dorcas gently put his arm around her. She was
shaking. Everyone was shaking to the deep chugging
of the motor. But she was shaking worse.

"We should have sent some people to the airport
to see what happened to him," she muttered. "It
would have showed that we cared, and—"

"We didn't have the time, and we didn't have the
people," said Dorcas softly. "When he comes back
we can explain about that. He's bound to under-
stand."
"Yes," she whispered.
"And now," said Dorcas, standing back, "let's

go!"

Grimma took a deep breath.
"First gear," she bellowed, "and go forward verr-

rry slowly."

The teams pushed and pulled their way over the
deck. There was a slight shudder and the engine

• 163 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

noise dropped. The Cat lurched forward and jolted
to a stop. The motor coughed and died.

Dorcas looked thoughtfully at his fingernails.

"Hand brake, hand brake, hand brake," he
hummed softly.

Grimma glared at him, and cupped her hands
around her mouth. "Take the hand brake off!" she
shouted. "Right! Now, get into first gear and go for-
ward very slowly!"

There was a click, and silence.

"Startthemotor, startthemotor, startthemotor,"
murmured Dorcas, rocking back and forth on his
heels.

Grimma sagged. "Put everything back where it
was and start the motor," she screamed.

Nooty, in charge of the hand brake team, called
up, "Do you want the hand brake on or off, miss?"

"What?"

"You haven't told us what to do with the hand
brake, miss," said Sacco. The nomes with him
started to grin.

Grimma shook a finger at him. "Listen, mister,"
she snapped, "if I have to come down there and tell
you what to do with the hand brake, you'll all be
extremely sorry, all right? Now stop giggling like
that and get this thing moving! Quickly!"

There was a click. The Cat howled again and
started to move. A cheer went up from the nomes.

"Right," said Grimma. "That's more like it."

"The doors, the doors, the doors, we didn't open
the doors," hummed Dorcas.

164

DIGGERS

"Of course we didn't open the doors," said
Grimma as the digger began to go faster. "We never
open the doors! What do we need to open the doors
for? This is the Cat!"

165

V.    There is nothing that can be in our way,
for this is the Cat, that laughs at barriers,
and purrs brrm-brrm.

—From the Book of Nome, Cat III, v. V

It was an old shed. It was a very rusty shed. It was
a shed that wobbled in high winds. The only thing
even vaguely new about it was the padlock on the
door, which the Cat hit at about six miles an hour.
The rickety building rang like a gong, leapt off its
foundations, and was dragged halfway across the
quarry before it fell apart in a shower of rust and
smoke. The Cat emerged like a very angry chick
from a very old egg and then rolled to a stop.

Grimma picked herself up from the plank and
nervously started to pick bits of rust off herself.

"We've stopped," she said vaguely, her ears still
ringing. "Why have we stopped, Dorcas?"

He didn't bother to try to get up. The thump of
the Cat hitting the door had knocked all the breath
out of him.

• 166 -

DIGGERS

"I think," he said, "that everyone might have
been flung about a little. Why did you want it to go

so fast?"

"Sorry!" Sacco called up. "Bit of a misunder-
standing there, I think!"

Grimma pulled herself together. "Well," she
said, "I got us out, anyway. I've got the hang of it
now. We'll just . . . we'll just . . . we'll . . ."

Dorcas heard her voice fade into silence. He

looked up.

There was a truck parked in front of the quarry.
And three humans were running toward the Cat in
big, floating bounds.
"Oh, dear," he said.

"Didn't it read my note?" asked Grimma.
"I'm afraid it did," said Dorcas. "Now, we
shouldn't panic. We've got a choice. We can ei-
ther—"

"Go forward," snapped Grimma. "Right now!"
"No, no," said Dorcas weakly, "I wasn't going to

suggest that—"
"First gear!" Grimma commanded. "And lots of

fast!"

"No, you don't want to do that," Dorcas mur-
mured.

"Watch me," said Grimma. "I warned them! They
can read, we know they can read! If they're really
intelligent, they're intelligent enough to know bet-
ter!"

The Cat gathered speed.

• 167 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"You mustn't do this," said Dorcas. "We've al-
ways kept away from humans!"

"They don't keep away from us!" shouted
Grimma.

"But—"

"They demolished the Store, they tried to stop us
from escaping, now they're taking our quarry, and
they don't even know what we are!" said Grimma. "Re-
member the gardening department in the Store?
Those horrible garden ornament statues? Well, I'm
going to show them real nomes . . ."

"You can't beat humans!" shouted Dorcas above
the roar of the engine. "They're too big! You're too
small!"

"They may be big," said Grimma, "and I may be
small. But I'm the one with the great big truck.
With teeth." She leaned over the plank. "Everyone
hang on down there," she shouted. "This may be
rough."

It had dawned on the great slow creatures out-
side that something was wrong. They stopped their
lumbering charge and, very slowly, tried to dodge
out of the way. Two of them managed to leap into
the empty office as the Cat bowled past.

"I see," said Grimma. "They must think we're
stupid. Take a big left turn. More. More. Now
stop. Okay." She rubbed her hands together.

"What are you going to do?" whispered Dorcas,
terrified.

Grimma leaned over the plank.

"Sacco," she said. "You see those other levers?"

168

DIGGERS

The pale round blobs of the humans' faces ap-
peared at the dusty windows of the shed.

The Cat was twenty feet away, vibrating gently
in the early morning mist. Then the engine roared.
The big front shovel came up, catching the sun-
light.

The Cat sprang forward, bouncing across the
quarry floor and taking out one wall of the shed
like ripping the lid off a can. The other walls and
the roof folded up gently, as if it were a house of
cards with the ace of spades flipped away.

The digger careened around in a big circle, so
that when the two humans crawled out of the
wreckage it was the first thing they saw. Throb-
bing, with the big metal mouth poised to bite.

They ran.

They ran almost as fast as nomes.

"I've always wanted to do that," said Grimma, in
a satisfied voice. "Now, where did the other human

go.^"

"Back to the truck, I think," said Dorcas weakly.

"Fine," said Grimma. "Now—lots of right,
Sacco. Stop. Now forward, slowly."

"Can we sort of stop this and just go now?
Please?" pleaded Dorcas.

"The humans' truck is in the way," said
Grimma, reasonably enough. "They've stopped
right in the entrance."

"Then we're trapped," said Dorcas.

• 169 '

TEKRY PRATCHETT

Grimma laughed. It wasn't a very amusing
sound. Dorcas suddenly felt almost as sorry for the
humans as he was feeling for himself.

The humans must have been having similar
thoughts, if humans had thoughts. He could see
their pale faces watching the Cat lurch toward
them.

They're wondering why they can't see a human
inside, he thought. They can't work it out. Here's
this machine, moving all by itself. It's a puzzler, for
humans.

They reached some sort of conclusion, though.
He saw both truck doors fly open and the humans
jump out just as the Cat . . .

There was a crunch, and the truck jerked as the
Cat hit it. The knobby wheels spun for a moment,
and then the truck rolled backward. Clouds of
steam poured out.

"That's for Nisodemus," said Grimma.

"I thought you didn't like him," said Dorcas.

"Yes, but he was a nome."

Dorcas nodded. They were all, when you got
right down to it, nomes. It was just as well to re-
member whose side you were on.

"May I suggest you change gear?" he said qui-
etly.

"Why? What's wrong with the one we've got?"

"You'll be able to push better if you go down a
gear. Trust me."

*   *   *

• 170 '

DIGGERS

Humans were watching. They were watching,
because a machine rolling around by itself is some-
thing that you do watch, even if you've just had to
climb a tree or hide behind a hedge.

They saw the Cat roll backward, change gear
with a roar, and attack the truck again. The win-
dows shattered.

Dorcas was really unhappy about this.

"You're killing a truck," he said.

"Don't be silly," said Grimma. "It's a machine.
Just bits of metal. Back, hoe!"

"Yes, but someone made it," said Dorcas. "They
must be very hard to make. I hate destroying things
that are hard to make."

"They ran over Nisodemus," said Grimma.
"And when we used to live in a hole, nomes were
always being squashed by cars. Forward, hey!"

"Yes, but nomes aren't hard to make," said Dor-
cas, hanging on grimly as they smashed into the
truck again. "You just need other nomes."

"Back, hoe! You're weird. Forward, hey!"

The Cat struck again. One of the truck's head-
lights exploded. Dorcas winced.

Then the truck was pushed clear. Smoke was bil-
lowing out from it now, where fuel had spilled
over the hot engine. The Cat backed off and rum-
bled around it. The nomes were really getting the
hang of him now.

"Right," said Grimma. "Straight ahead." She

• 171 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

nudged Dorcas. "We'll go and find this barn now,
shall we?"

"Just go down the road, and I think there's a
gateway into the fields," Dorcas mumbled. "It had
an actual gate in it," he added. "I suppose it would
be too much to ask you to let us open it first?"

Behind them the truck burst into flames. Not
spectacularly, but in a workmanlike way, as if it
were going to go on burning all day. Dorcas saw a
human take off its coat and flap uselessly at the fire.
He felt quite sorry for it.

The Cat rolled unopposed down the dirt road.
Some of the nomes started to sing as they sweated
over the ropes.

"Now, then," said Grimma, "where's this gate-
way? Through the gate and across the fields, you
said, and—"

"It's just before you get to the car with the flash-
ing lights on top," said Dorcas slowly. "The one
that's just coming up the road."

They stared at it.

"Cars with lights on the top are bad news," said
Grimma.

"You're right there," said Dorcas. "They're often
full of humans who very seriously want to know
what's going on. There were lots of them down at
the railroad."

Grimma looked along the hedge.

"This is the gateway coming up, is it?" she said.

"Yes."

Grimma leaned down.

• 172 -

DIGGERS

"Slow down and turn sharp right," she said.

The teams swung into action. Sacco even
changed gear without being asked. Nomes hung
like spiders from the steering wheel, hauling it
around.

There was a gate in the gateway. But it was old
and held to the post with bits of string in proper
agricultural fashion. It wouldn't have stopped any-
thing very determined, and it had no chance with
the Cat.

Dorcas winced again.

The field on the other side was brown soil. Cor-
rugated earth, the nomes called it, after the corru-
gated cardboard you sometimes got in the packing
department in the Store. There was snow between
the furrows. The big wheels churned it into mud.

Dorcas was half expecting the car to follow
them. It stopped instead, and two humans in dark
blue suits got out and started to lumber across the
field. There's no stopping humans, he thought
glumly. They're like the weather.

The field ran gently uphill, around the quarry.
The Cat's engine thudded.

There was a fence ahead, with a grassy field be-
yond it. The wire parted with a twang. Dorcas
watched it roll back, and wondered whether
Grimma would let him stop and collect a bit of it.
You always knew where you were with wire.

The humans were still following. Out of the cor-
ner of his eye, because up here there was altogether

• 173 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

too much Outside to look at, Dorcas saw flashing
lights on the highway, far away.

He pointed them out to Grimma.

"I know," she said. "I've seen them. But what
else could we have done?" she added desperately.
"Gone off and lived in the flowers like good little
pixies?"

"I don't know," said Dorcas wearily. "I'm not
sure about anything anymore."

Another wire fence twanged. There was shorter
grass up here, and the ground curved.

And then there was nothing but sky, and the Cat
speeding up as the wheels bounced over the field at
the top of the hill.

Dorcas had never seen so much sky. There was
nothing around them, just a bit of scrub in the dis-
tance. And it was silent. Well, not silent at all, be-
cause of the Cat's roar. But it looked like the kind
of place that would be silent if diggers full of des-
perate nomes weren't thundering across it.

Some sheep ran out of the way.

"There's the barn up ahead, that stone building
on the horiz—" Grimma began. Then she said,
"Are you all right, Dorcas?"

"If I keep my eyes shut," he whispered.

"You look dreadful."

"Ifeel worse."

"But you've been Outside before."

"Grimma, we're the highest thing there is!
There's nothing higher than us for miles, or what-

• 174 -

DIGGERS

ever you call those things! If I open my eyes I'll fall
into the sky!"

Grimma leaned down to the perspiring drivers.

"Right just a bit!" she shouted. "That's it! Now,
all the fast you can!"

"Hold on to the Cat!" she shouted, as the engine
noise grew. "You know he can't fly!"

The machine bumped up on a stony track that
led in the general direction of the distant barn.
Dorcas risked opening one eye.

He'd never been to the barn. Was anyone certain
there was food there, or was it just a guess? Perhaps
at least it'd be warm.

But there was a flashing light near it, coming
toward them.

"Why won't they leave us alone?" shouted
Grimma. "Stop!"

The Cat rolled to a halt. The engine ticked over
in the chilly air.

"This must lead down to another highway," said
Dorcas.

"We can't go back," said Grimma.

"No."

"Or forward."

"No."

Grimma drummed her fingers on the Cat's
metal.

"Have you got any other ideas?"

"We could try going across the fields," said Dor-
cas.

"Where would that take us?" said Grimma.

• 175 •

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Away from here, for a start."

"But we wouldn't know where we were going!"
said Grimma.

Dorcas shrugged. "It's either that or paint flow-
ers."

Grimma tried to smile.

"And those little wings wouldn't suit me," she
said.

"What's going on up there?" Sacco yelled up.

"We ought to tell people," Grimma whispered.
"Everyone thinks we're going to the barn."

She looked around. The car was closer, bumping
heavily over the rough track. The two humans
were still coming the other way. "Don't humans
ever give up?" she said to herself.

She leaned over the edge of the plank.

"Some left, Sacco," she said. "And then just go
steadily."

The Cat bounced off the track and rolled over
the cold grass. There was another wire fence in the
far distance, and a few more sheep.

We don't know where we're going, she thought.
The only important thing is to go. Masklin knew it.
This isn't our world.

"Perhaps we should have talked to humans," she
said aloud.

"No, you were right," said Dorcas. "In this
world everything belongs to humans and we would
belong to them too. There wouldn't be any room
for us to be us."

The fence came closer. There was a road on the

• 176 '

DIGGERS

other side. Not a dirt road, but a proper road with
black gravel on it.

"Right or left?" said Grimma. "What do you
think?"

"It doesn't matter," said Dorcas as the digger
twanged through the fence.

"We'll try going left, then," she said. "Slow
down, Sacco! Left a bit. More. More. Steady at that.
Oh, no!"

There was another car in the distance. It had
flashing lights on the top.

Dorcas risked a look behind them.

There was another flashing light there.

"No," he said.

"What?" said Grimma.

"Just a little while ago you asked if humans ever
gave up," he said. "They don't."

"Stop," said Grimma.

The teams trotted obediently across the Cat's
floor. The digger rolled gently to a halt again, en-
gine ticking over.

"This is it," said Dorcas.

"Are we at the barn yet?" a nome called up.

"No," said Grimma. "Not yet. Nearly."

Dorcas made a face.

"We might as well accept it now," he said.
"You'll end up waving a stick with a star on it. I
just hope they don't force me to mend their shoes."

Grimma looked thoughtful. "If we drove as hard
as we could at that car coming toward us—" she
began.

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TERRY PRATCHETT

"No," said Dorcas, firmly. "It really wouldn't
solve anything."

"It'd make me feel a lot better," said Grimma.

She looked around at the fields.

"Why's it gone all dark?" she said. "We can't
have been running all day. It was early morning
when we started out."

"Doesn't time fly when you're enjoying your-
self?" said Dorcas gloomily. "And I don't like milk
much. I don't mind doing their housework if I don'?
have to drink milk, but—"

"Just look, will you?"

Darkness was spreading across the fields.

"It might be an ellipse," said Dorcas. "I read
about them. It all goes dark when the Sun covers
the Moon. And possibly vice versa," he added
doubtfully.

The car ahead of them squealed to a halt, crashed
backward across the road into a stone wall, and
came to an abrupt stop.

In the field by the road the sheep were running
away. It wasn't the ordinary panic of sheep ordi-
narily disturbed. They had their heads down and
were pounding across the ground with one aim in
mind. They were sheep who had decided that this
was no time to waste energy panicking when it
could be used for galloping away as fast as possible.

A loud and unpleasant humming noise filled the
air.

"My word," Dorcas said weakly. "They're pretty
darn terrifying, these ellipses." Down below, the

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DIGGERS

nomes were panicking. They weren't sheep, they
could all think for themselves, and when you
started to think hard about sudden darkness and
mysterious humming noises, panicking seemed a
logical idea.

Little lines of crawling blue fire crackled over
the Cat's battered paintwork. Dorcas felt his hair
standing on end.

Grimma stared upward.

The sky was totally black.

"It's ... all ... right," she said slowly. "Do
you know, I think it's all right!"

Dorcas looked at his hands. Sparks crackled off
his fingertips.

"It is, is it?" was all he could think of.

"That isn't night, it's a shadow. There's some-
thing huge floating above us."

"And that's better than night, is it?" said Dorcas.

"I think so. Come on, let's get off."

She shinned down the rope to the Cat's deck. She
was smiling madly. That was almost as terrifying
as everything else put together. They weren't used
to Grimma smiling.

"Give me a hand," she said. "We've got to get
down. So he can be sure it's us."

They looked at her in astonishment as she wres-
tled with the gangplank.

"Come ow," she repeated. "Help me, can't you?"

"He? Who he?" said Dorcas. "What he? What do
you mean?"

• 179 '

TERRY PRATCHETT

"Him," said Grimma. "I know it's him. You peo-
ple—help me!"

They helped. Sometimes, when you're totally
confused, you'll listen to anyone who seems to have
any sort of aim in mind. They grabbed the plank
and shoved it out of the back of the cab until it
tilted and swung down toward the road.

At least there wasn't so much sky now. The blue
was a thin line around the edge of the solid dark-
ness overhead.

Not entirely solid. When Dorcas's eyes grew
used to it, he could make out squares and rectangles
and circles.

Nomes scurried down the plank and milled
around on the road below, uncertain whether to
run or stay.

Above them one of the dark squares in the
shadow moved aside. There was a clank, and then a
rectangle of darkness whirred down very gently,
like an elevator without wires, and landed softly on
the road. It was quite big.

There was something on it. Something in a pot.
Something red and yellow and green.

The nomes craned forward to see what it was.

Thus ended the journey of the Cat, and
the nomes fled, looking not behind.
—From the Book of Nome, Stranger Frogs I, v. I

I.

Dorcas clambered down awkwardly onto the Cat's
oily deck. It was empty now, except for the bits of
string and wood that the nomes had used.

They've dropped things just any old way, he
thought, listening to the distant chattering of the
nomes. It's not right, leaving litter. Poor old Cat
deserves more than this.

There was some sort of excitement going on out-
side, but he didn't pay it much attention.

He bumbled around for a bit, trying to coil up
the string and push the wood into neat piles. He
pulled down the wires that had let the Cat taste the
electricity. He got down on his hands and knees
and tried to rub out the muddy footprints.

The Cat made noises, even with the engine
stopped. Little pops and sizzles, and the occasional
ping.

180                                                                181

TERRY PRATCHETT

It was going to sleep again. Sleeping was some-
thing cats did a lot of, he'd heard.

Dorcas sat down and leaned against the yellow
metal. He didn't know what was going on. It was
so far outside anything he'd ever seen before that
his mind wasn't letting him worry about it.

Perhaps that thing up there is just another ma-
chine, he thought wearily. A machine for making
night come down suddenly.

He reached out and stroked the Cat.

"Well done," he said.

Sacco and Nooty found him sitting with his head
against the cab wall, staring vacantly at his feet.

"Everyone's been looking for you!" Sacco said.
"It's like an airplane without wings! It's just float-
ing there in the air! So you must come and tell us
what makes it go ... I say, are you all right?"

"Hmm?"

"Are you all right?" said Nooty. "You look rather
odd."

Dorcas nodded slowly. "Just a bit worn out," he
said.

"Yes, but, you see, we need you," said Sacco in-
sistently.

Dorcas groaned and allowed himself to be helped
to his feet. He took a last look around the cab.

"He really went, didn't he?" he said. "He really
went very well. All things considered. For his age."

He tried to give Sacco a cheerful look.

"What are you talking about?" said Sacco.

"All that time in that shed. Since the world was

• 182 •

DIGGERS

made, perhaps. And I just greased him and fuelled
him up and away he went," said Dorcas.

"The machine? Oh, yes. Well done," said Sacco.

"But—" Nooty pointed upward.

Dorcas shrugged.

"Oh, I'm not bothered about that," he said. "It's
probably Masklin's doing. Perfectly simple expla-
nation. Grimma is right. It's probably that flying
thing he went off to get."

"But something has come out of it!" said Nooty.

"Not Masklin, you mean?"

"It's some kind of plant!"

Dorcas sighed. Always one thing after another.
He patted the Cat again.

"Well, I care," he said.

He straightened up, and turned to the others.

"All right," he said. "Show me."

It was in a metal pot in the middle of the floating
platform. The nomes craned and tried to climb on
one another's shoulders to look at it, and none of
them knew what it was except for Grimma, who
was staring at it with a strange quiet smile on her
face.

It was a branch from a tree. On the branch was a
flower the size of a bucket.

If you climbed high enough, you could see that,
held within its glistening petals, was a pool of wa-
ter. And from the depths of the pool little yellow
frogs stared up at the nomes.

"Have you any idea what it is?" said Sacco.

• 183 -

TERRY PRATCHETT

Dorcas smiled. "Masklin's found out that it's a
good idea to send a girl flowers," he said. "And I
think everything's all right." He glanced at
Grimma.

"Yes, but what is it?"

"I seem to remember it's called a bromeliad,"
said Dorcas. "It grows on the top of very tall trees
in wet forests a long way away, and little frogs
spend their whole lives in it. Your whole life in one
flower. Imagine that. Grimma once said she
thought it was the most astonishing thing in the
world."

Sacco bit his lip thoughtfully.

"Well, there's electricity," he said. "Electricity is
quite astonishing."

"Or hydraulics," said Nooty, taking his hand.
"You told me hydraulics was fascinating."

"Masklin must have got it for her," said Dorcas,
ignoring them. "Very literal-minded lad, that lad.
Very active imagination."

He stared from the flower to the Cat, looking
small and old under the humming shadow of the
ship.

And felt, suddenly, quite cheerful. He was still
tired enough to go to sleep standing up, but he felt
his mind fizzing with ideas. Of course there were a
lot of questions, but right now the answers didn't
matter; it was enough just to enjoy the questions,
and know that the world was full of astonishing
things, and that he wasn't a frog.

Or at least he was the kind of frog who was inter-

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DIGGERS

ested in how flowers grew and whether you could
get to other flowers if you jumped hard enough.

And just when you'd got out of the flower, and
were feeling really proud of yourself, you'd look at
the new, big, wide endless world around you.

And eventually you'd notice that it had petals
around the horizon.

Dorcas grinned.

"I'd very much like to know," he said, "what
Masklin has been doing these past few weeks."

185

About the Author

Terry Pratchett is the author of the highly ac-
claimed group of Discworld novels, which includes
The Color of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and Equal
Rites. Although these books were intended for
adults, they have a devoted following among
younger readers as well.

Diggers is Terry Pratchett's second book, follow-
ing Truckers, in the Bromeliad trilogy for young
adults about the adventures of the nomes. The ad-
ventures of Masklin, Gurder, and Angalo will be
unfolded in the last Book of the Nomes.

Terry Pratchett lives with his family in England,
where, he says, he grows carnivorous plants and
tries to make computers do things they were never
intended to do.