The Bromeliad 2 - Diggers

Chapter 10

I. Nisodemus said unto them, Do you doubt that Ican 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 thelead, 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 sawDorcas and some of the boys go into the truck. And then it rolled awaydown the hill and then it went over the highway and then it stopped righton the railroad tracks and then ... and then ..."

"I forbade all meddling with these infernal machines," said Nisodemus.

"And I said we were to stop, um, putting people on watch, didn't I? Thewatch Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) maintains should be enough for humblenomes!"

"Yes ... well ... Dorcas said he thought it wouldn't do any harm ifwe gave him a hand, sort of thing," said the nome nervously. "And hesaid-"

"I gave orders!" screamed Nisodemus. "You will all obey me! Did I notstop the truck by the power of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905)?"

"No," said Grimma quietly. "No, you didn't. Dorcas did. He put nails downin the road."

There was a huge, horrified silence. In the middle of it Nisodemus wentslowly white with rage.

"Liar!" he shouted.

"No," said Grimma, meekly. "He really did. He really did all sorts ofthings to help us, and we never said 'please' or 'thank you' and now he'sdead."

There were sirens along the road below and a lot of excitement around thestationary 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. Aclever person like him."

Grimma looked helplessly at the crowd. She saw Nooty's parents in thecrowd. They were a quiet, patient couple. She'd hardly ever spoken tothem. 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. "Dorcasisn't the type to go around dying all the time. Not when we need him."

Grimma nodded.

"And now," she went on, "I think even humans will be wondering what'shappening here. They'll soon work out where the truck came from andthey'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 willconfront them and defy them. Um. We will treat them with scorn. We don't need Dorcas, we need nothing except faith in Arnold Bros. (est. 1905).

Nails, indeed!"

"If you start out now," said Grimma, "you should all be able to get tothe barn, even through what's left of the snow. I don't think the quarrywill 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 muchfood and stuff as possible. 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 it pulled away from theexcitement around the train, crossed the main highway, and headed slowlyup the dirt road.

I will call upon the power of Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) to smite thehumans!" shouted Nisodemus.

The nomes looked unhappy. Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) had never smittenanyone in the Store. He'd just founded it, and seen to it that nomeslived comfortable and not very strenuous lives in it, and apart fromputting the signs on the walls hadn't really interfered very much. Now, suddenly, he was going around being angry and upset all the time, andsmiting people. It was very bewildering.

"I will stand here and defy the dreadful minions of Order!" Nisodemusyelled. "I will teach them a lesson they won't forget."

The rest of the nomes said nothing. If Nisodemus wanted to stand in frontof 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 unitedin opposition! Um. If you truly believe in Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), noharm will come to you!"

The flashing light was well up the road now-Soon it would be crossingthe wide patch in front of the gates, where the great chain hunguselessly from the broken padlock.

Grimma opened her mouth to say: Don't be stupid, you idiots. ArnoldBros. (est. 1905) doesn't want you to stand in front of cars. I've seenwhat happens to nomes who stand in front of cars. Your relatives have tobury you in an envelope- She was about to say all that, and decided not to.

For months and months people had been telling nomes what to do. Perhapsit was time to stop.

She saw a number of worried faces in the crowd turn toward her, andsomeone 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 thisthing 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 theworried discussions behind him.

" 'Do whatever you think best,' " muttered a nome. "What sort of help isthat?"

They stood in their hundreds, watching the car wind closer. Nisodemusstood 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 few seconds, it wouldhave been amazed.

"Well, probably it wouldn't. Birds are somewhat stupid creatures and havea hard enough job even coming to terms with the ordinary, let alone theextraordinary. But if it had been an unusually intelligent bird, anescaped myna bird, perhaps, or a parrot that had been blown severalthousand 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 gatein the fence.

And there are little black dots on the ground ahead of it. One dotstanding very still, right in the path of the thing, and the others, theothers ...

Breaking away and running. Running for their lives.

They never did find Nisodemus again, even though a party ofstrong-stomached nomes went back much later and searched through the rutsand the mud.

So a rumor grew up that perhaps, at the last minute, he had jumped upand caught hold of part of the car and had clambered onto it somehow. Andthen he'd waited there, too ashamed to face other nomes, until the carwent back to wherever it came from, and had got off, and was living outthe rest of his life quietly and without any fuss. He had been a goodnome in his way, they said. Whatever else you might say about him, hebelieved in things and he did what he thought was proper, so it was onlyright 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 Bookof Nome.

What nomes might have thought in those private moments before they wentto 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, greatspeed. Many of them had lights on top.

The nomes had learned to be worried by things with flashing lights ontop.

The Land-Rover belonging to the quarrymen was there as well. One of thequarrymen was pointing to the wrecked truck and shouting at the others.

It had opened the smashed engine compartment, and was pointing towhere the battery wasn't.

Beside the railroad the breeze rustled the long grass. And some of thelong grass rustled without any wind at all.

Dorcas had been right. Where humans went once, they went again. Thequarry belonged to them. Three trucks were parked outside the sheds andhumans were everywhere. Some were repairing the fence. Some were takingboxes and drums off trucks. One was even in the manager's office, Leaningup.

The nomes crouched where they could, listening fearfully to the soundsabove 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 thedarkness behind crates, in some cases even on the dusty rafters under thetin roofs, the nomes passed it as best they could.

There were escapes so narrow a postcard couldn't have got through them.

Old Munby Confectioner! and most of his family were left blinking inthe light when a human moved the beat-up old box they were coweringbehind. 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 whatthey 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 felttheir world vanishing. Not because the humans hated nomes. Because theydidn't notice them.

There was Dorcas's electricity, for example. He'd spent a long timetwisting bits of wire together and finding a safe way to stealelectricity from the fusebox. A human pulled the wire bits out withoutthinking, fiddled inside with a screwdriver, and then put up a new boxwith a lock on it.

The Store nomes needed electricity. They couldn't remember a time whenthey had been without it. It was a natural thing, like air. And nowtheirs was a world of endless darkness.

And still the terror went on. The rough floorboards shook overhead, raining dust and splinters. Metal drums boomed like thunder. There wasthe continual sound of hammering. The humans were back, and they meant tostay.

They did go eventually, though. When the daylight drained from thewinter sky, like steel growing cold, some of the humans got into theirvehicles and drove off down the dirt road.

They did one puzzling thing before they left. Nomes had to scramble overone another to get out of the way when one of the floorboards in the manager's office was pulled up. A huge hand reached down and put a littletray on the packed earth under the floor. Then the darkness came backas the board was replaced.

The nomes sat in the gloom and wondered why on earth the humans, after aday 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 tantalizingsmell.

One of them took a handful of the stuff.

"Don't eat it!"

Grimma pushed her way through the packed bodies.

"But it smells so-" one of the nomes warbled.

"Have you ever smelled anything like it before?" she said.

"Well, no-"

"So you don't know it's good to eat, do you? Listen. I know about stufflike this. Where we-where I used to live, in the hole ... there was aplace along the highway where humans came to eat, and sometimes we'd findstuff 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? Thatdidn't make sense.

"I remember there was some canned meat we had once in the Store," said anelderly nome. "Gave us all a nasty upset, I remember." He gave Grimma ahopeful look.

She shook her head. "This isn't like that," she said. "We used to finddead 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 manager's office, readinga paper.

From a knothole near the floor the nomes watched carefully. There werehuge boots, great sweeps of trouser, a mountain range of jacket and, farabove, the distant gleam of electric light on a bald head.

After a long while the human put the paper down and reached over to thedesk by its side. The watching nomes gazed at a pack of sandwiches bigger than they were, and a Thermos flask that steamed when it was openedand filled the shed with the smell of soup.

They climbed back down and reported to Grimma. She was sitting by thefood tray, and had ordered six of the older and more sensible nomes tostand guard around it to keep children away.

"It's not doing anything," she was told. "It's just sitting there. We sawit look out of the window once or twice."

"Then it'll be here all night," said Grimma. "I expect the humans arewondering 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 atlast. "We could go there."

"Dorcas said-Dorcas used to say it was very dangerous in the old sheds," said a nome cautiously. "Because of all the old metal and stuff-Verydangerous, he said."

"More dangerous than here?" said Grimma, with Just a trace of her oldsarcasm.

"You've got a point."

"Please, ma'am."

It was one of the younger female nomes. They "eld Grimma in awe becauseof the way she Touted at the men and read better than anyone.

This one held a baby in her arms, and kept curtsying every time shefinished a sentence.

"What it is, Sorrit?" said Grimma.

"Please, ma'am, some of the children are very hungry, ma'am. There isn'tanything wholesome to eat down here, you see." She gave Grimma a pleading look.

Grimma nodded. The stores were under the other sheds, what was left ofthem. The main potato store had been found by some of the humans, whichwas perhaps why the poison had been put down. Anyway, they couldn't lighta fire and there was no meat. No one had been doing any proper huntingfor days, because Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) would provide, according toNisodemus.

"As soon as it gets light I think all the hunters we can spare should goout," said Grimma.

They considered this. The dawn was a long way away. To a nome, a nightwas 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," saidGrimma.

"And the old people too," said a nome. "It's going to freeze againtonight. We haven't got the electric and we can't light a fireoutside."

They sat staring glumly at the dirt.

What Grimma was thinking was: They're not bickering. They're notgrumbling. Things are so serious they're actually not arguing and blamingeach other.

"All right," she said. "And what do you all think we should do?"