The Bromeliad 1 - Truckers
Page 15
They might have thought: that's an unusual vehicle, it seems to have lost quite a few things it should have, like one headlight, a bumper and most of the paint down one side, and picked up a number of things it shouldn't have, like some bits of bush and more dents than a sheet of corrugated iron.
They might have wondered why it had a 'Road Works Ahead' sign hanging from one door-handle.
And they would have certainly wondered why it rolled to a stop.
The police car behind it stopped rather more impressively, in a shower of gravel. Two men almost fell out of it and ran to the lorry, wrenching open the doors.
If the watchers had been able to understand Human, they'd have heard someone say, All right, chummy, that's it for tonight and then say, Where's he gone? There's just a load of string in here! And then someone else would say, I bet he's nipped out and has legged it over the fields.
And while this was going on, and while the policemen poked vaguely in the hedge and shone their torches into the mist, the watchers might have noticed a couple of very small shadows run from under the rear of the lorry and disappear under the car. They moved very fast, like mice. Like mice, their voices were high-pitched, fast and squeaky.
They were carrying a pair of pliers.
A few seconds later they scurried back again. And, almost as soon as they'd disappeared under the lorry, it started up.
The men shouted and ran back to their car.
But instead of roaring into life, it went whirr, whirr, whirr in the misty night.
After a while one of them got out and lifted the bonnet.
As the lorry vanished into the mist, its single rear light a fading glow, he knelt down, reached under the car, and held up a handful of neatly cut wires...
This is what the watchers would have seen. In fact, the only watchers were a couple of cows, and they didn't understand any of it. Perhaps it nearly ends there.
A couple of days later the lorry was found in a ditch some way outside the town. What was stranger was this: the battery, and every wire, light bulb, and switch had been taken out of it. So had the radio.
The cab was full of bits of string.
14
xv. And the nomes said, here is a New Place, to be ours for Ever and Ever.
xvi. And the Outsider said Nothing.
From The Book of Nome, Exits Chap. 4, v.XV-XVI It had been a quarry. The nomes knew this because the gate had a rusty sign on it: Quarry. Dangerous. Do Not Enter. They found it after a mad panicking run across the fields. By luck, if you listened to Angalo. Because of Arnold Bros (est. 1905) if you believed Gurder.
It doesn't matter how they settled in, found the few old tumbledown buildings, explored the caves and rock heaps, cleared out the rats. That wasn't too difficult. The harder part was persuading most of the older nomes to go outside; they felt happier with a floor over their heads. Granny Morkie came in useful there. She made them watch her walk up and down outside, braving the terrible Fresh Air.
Besides, the food taken from the Store didn't last for ever. There was hunger, and there were rabbits in the fields above. Vegetables, too. Not nice and clean, of course, as Arnold Bros (est. 1905) had intended they should be, but just sticking in the ground covered with dirt. There were complaints about this. The molehills that appeared in a nearby field were simply the result of the first experimental potato mine.
After a couple of nasty experiences, foxes learned to keep away. And then there was Dorcas's discovery of electricity, still in wires leading to a box in one of the deserted sheds. Getting at it while staying alive seemed to need nearly as much planning as the Great Drive, with a lot of broom-handles and rubber gloves involved.
After a lot of thought, Masklin had pushed the Thing near one of the electric wires. It had flashed a few lights but had kept silent. He felt it was listening. He could hear it listening.
He'd taken it away again, and tucked it into a gap in one of the walls. He had an obscure feeling that it wasn't time to use the Thing yet. The longer they left it, he thought, the longer they'd have to work out for themselves what it was they were doing. He'd like to wake it up later and say, 'Look, this is what we've done, all by ourselves.' Gurder had already worked out that they were probably somewhere in China.
And so the winter became spring, and spring became summer.
But it wasn't finished, Masklin felt.
He sat on the rocks above the quarry, on guard. They always kept a guard on duty, just in case. One of Dorcas's inventions, a switch which was connected to a wire which would light a bulb down under one of the sheds, was hidden under a stone by his side. He'd been promised radio, one of these days. One of these days might be quite soon, because Dorcas had pupils now. They seemed to spend a lot of time in one of the tumbledown sheds, surrounded by bits of wire and looking very serious.
Guard duty was quite popular, at least on sunny days.
This was home, now. The nomes were settling in, filling in the corners, planning, spreading out, starting to belong.
Especially Bobo. He'd disappeared on the first day, and turned up again, scruffy and proud, as the leader of the quarry rats and father of a lot of little ratlings. Perhaps it was because of this that the rats and the nomes seemed to be getting along okay, politely avoiding each other whenever possible and not eating one another.
They belong here more than we do, thought Masklin. This isn't really our place. This belongs to humans. They've just forgotten about it for a while, but one day they'll remember it. They'll come back here and we'll have to move on. We'll always have to move on. We'll always try to create our own little worlds inside the big world. We used to have it all, and now we think we're lucky to have a little bit.
He looked down at the quarry below him. He could just make out Grimma sitting in the sun with some of the young nomes, teaching them to read.
That was a good thing, anyway. He'd never be that good at it, but the kids seemed to pick it up easily enough. But there were still problems. The departmental families, for example. They had no departments to rule, and spent a lot of time squabbling.
There seemed to be arguments going on the whole time, and everyone expected him to sort them out. It seemed the only time nomes acted together was when they had something to occupy their minds Beyond the moon, the Thing had said. You used to live in the stars.
Masklin lay back and listened to the bees.
One day we'll go back. We'll find a way to get to the big ship in the sky, and we'll go back. But not yet. It'll take some doing, and the hard part again will be getting people to understand. Every time we climb up a step we settle down and think we've got to the top of the stairs, and start bickering about things.
Still, even knowing that the stairs are there is a pretty good start.
From here, he could see for miles across the countryside. For instance, he could see the airport.
It had been quite frightening, the day they'd seen the first jet go over, but a few of the nomes had recalled pictures from books they'd read and it turned out to be nothing more than a sort of lorry built to drive in the sky.
Masklin hadn't told anyone why he thought that knowing more about the airport would be a good idea. Some of the others suspected, he knew, but there was so much to do that they weren't thinking about it now.
He'd led up to it carefully. He'd just said that it was important to find out as much about this new world as possible, just in case. He'd put it in such a way that no one had said, 'In case of what?' and, anyway, there were people to spare and the weather was good.
He'd led a team of nomes across the fields to it; it had been a week's journey, but there were thirty of them and there had been no problems. They'd even had to cross a motorway, but they'd found a tunnel built for badgers, and a badger coming along it the other way turned around and hurried off when they approached. Bad news like armed nomes spreads quickly.
And then they'd found the wire fence, and climbed up it a little way, and spent hours watching the p
lanes landing and taking off.
Masklin had felt, just as he had done once or twice before, that here was something very important. The jets looked big and terrible, but once he'd thought that about lorries. You just had to know about them. Once you had the name, you had something you could handle, like a sort of lever. One day, they could be useful. One day, the nomes might need them.
To take another step.
Funnily enough, he felt quite optimistic about it. He'd had one glorious moment of feeling that, although they-argued and bickered and got things wrong and tripped over themselves, nomes would come through in the end. Because Dorcas had been watching the planes, too, clinging to the wire with a calculating look in his eyes. And Masklin bad said: 'Just supposing - for the sake of argument, you understand we need to steal one of those, do you think it could be done?' And Dorcas had rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
'Shouldn't be too hard to drive,' he said, and grinned. 'They've only got three wheels.'
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