Diggers (13 page)

“Dorcas said—Dorcas used to say it was very dangerous in the old sheds,” said a nome cautiously. “Because of all the old junk 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, m'm.”

It was one of the younger female nomes. They held Grimma in awe because of the way she shouted at the men and read better than anyone. This one held a baby in her arms and kept curtseying every time she finished a sentence.

“What is it, Sorrit?” said Grimma.

“Please, m'm, some of the children are very hungry, m'm. There isn't anything 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 of them. The main potato 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 going to freeze again tonight. We haven't got the electric 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 serious, they're actually not arguing and blaming each other.

“All right,” she said, “and what do
you
all think we should do?”

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 v. I–III

T
HE HUMAN LOWERED
its newspaper and listened.

There was a rustling in the walls. There was a scratching under the floor.

Its eyes swiveled to the table beside it.

A group of small creatures was 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.

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 chutney, and the thermos, once they got the top off, was full of coffee. “Store food,” the nomes told one another. “Good Store food, like we used to know.”

They poured into the room from every crack and mousehole. There was an electric heater by the table, and they sat in solemn rows in front of its glowing red bar, or wandered around the cramped 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 it contains Polydichloromethylinlon-4, whatever that is. ‘Clears Outbuildings Of Troublesome . . .'” She paused.

“Troublesome what?” said the listening nomes. “Troublesome what?”

Grimma lowered her voice.

“It says, ‘Clears Outbuildings Of Troublesome
Vermin
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 poison.

“We should make the human eat it,” said one of them. “Fill up its mouth with Polyputheketlon 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. Masklin always said that they're nearly as intelligent as we are. You can't go around poisoning intelligent creatures.”

“
They
tried.”

“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 trouble.”

That was a point. But they had shown themselves to a human. No nome could remember it 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 carried 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 electric wire. It was a lot tougher than rope. And they were a lot angrier. Gullible hadn't been driving a great big truck around the place and putting down rat poison.

They'd gone through its pockets and piled up the 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 after its mooing got on everyone's nerves.

Now they stood around eating fragments of sandwich and watching its eyes.

Humans can't understand nomes. Their voices are too fast and too high, like a bat squeak. It was probably just as well.

“
I
say we should find something sharp and stick it into it,” said a nome. “In all the soft bits.”

“There's things we could do with matches,” said a lady nome, 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 the lady nome. “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,
me
?” The lady 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
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 say. 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 to,” said the lady nome, putting her head on 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.”

“Quite gross,” said the lady.

“You could almost feel sorry for them, with great big noses like that.”

Grimma stared 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 long slow world and we live in a small short fast one, and we can't understand each other. They can't even see us unless we stand still like I'm standing 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?—
communicate
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 fingers 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 & GAZETTE. It had more of the great blocky writing, some of the letters nearly as big as a nome's head.

Grimma 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 (TABLERS RAISE £455 FOR HOSPITAL 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 something quite unbelievable (CIVIC CENTER RATES RUMPUS).

“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, 39!
”

Grimma ran the length of a story about somebody slamming somebody's plan for something.

There was indeed a fuzzy picture of Grandson Richard, 39, under the words: “TV-IN-THE-SKY HITCH.”