Diggers (20 page)

“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 insistently.

Dorcas groaned and allowed himself to be helped to his feet. He took a last look around the cab.

“It really went, didn't it?” he said. “It 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 made, perhaps. And I just greased him and fueled 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 explanation. Grimma is right. It's probably that flying thing he went off to get.”

“But something's 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 Big John 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 inside it, held with its glistening petals, was a pool of water. And from the depths of the pool, little yellow frogs stared up at the nomes.

“Have
you
any idea what it is?” said Sacco.

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. “Very literal-minded lad, that lad. Very active imagination.”

He stared from the flower to Big John 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 interested 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. . . .”

AIRPORT: A place where people hurry up and wait.

From
A Scientific Encyclopedia
for the Inquiring Young Nome
by Angalo de Haberdasheri

L
ET THE EYE
of your imagination be a camera. . . .

This is the universe, a glittering ball of galaxies like the ornament on some unimaginable Christmas tree. Find a galaxy. . . .

Focus

This is a galaxy, swirled like the cream in a cup of coffee, every pinpoint of light a star.

Find a star. . . .

Focus

This is a solar system, where planets barrel through the darkness around the central fires of the sun. Some planets hug close, hot enough to melt lead. Some drift far out, where the comets are born. Find a blue planet. . . .

Focus

This is a planet. Most of it is covered in water. It's called Earth.

Find a country. . . .

Focus

. . . blues and greens and browns under the sun, and here's a pale oblong which is . . .

Focus

. . . an airport, a concrete hive for silver bees, and there's a . . .

Focus

. . . building full of people and noise and . . .

Focus

. . . a hall of lights and bustle and . . .

Focus

. . . a bin full of rubbish and . . .

Focus

. . . a pair of tiny eyes . . .

Focus

Focus

Focus

Click!

Masklin slid cautiously down an old burger carton.

He'd been watching humans. Hundreds and hundreds of humans. It was beginning to dawn on him that getting on a jet plane wasn't like stealing a truck.

Angalo and Gurder had nestled deep into the rubbish and were gloomily eating the remains of a cold, greasy french fry.

This has come as a shock to all of us, Masklin thought.

I mean, take Gurder. Back in the Store he was the Abbot. He believed that Arnold Bros made the Store for nomes. And he still thinks there's some sort of Arnold Bros somewhere, watching over us, because we are important. And now we're out here, and all we've found is that nomes aren't important at all. . . .

And there's Angalo. He doesn't believe in Arnold Bros, but he likes to think Arnold Bros exists just so that he can go on not believing in him.

And there's me.

I never thought it would be this hard.

I thought jet planes were just trucks with more wings and less wheels.

There's more humans in this place than I've ever seen before. How can we find Grandson Richard, 39, in a place like this?

I hope they're going to save me some of that potato. . . .

Angalo looked up.

“Seen him?” he said, sarcastically.

Masklin shrugged. “There's lots of humans with beards,” he said. “They all look the same to me.”

“I
told
you,” said Angalo. “Blind faith never works.” He glared at Gurder.

“He could have gone already,” said Masklin. “He could have walked right past me.”

“So let's get back,” said Angalo. “People will be missing us. We've made the effort, we've seen the airport, we've nearly got trodden on
dozens
of times. Now let's get back to the real world.”

“What do you think, Gurder?” said Masklin.

The Abbot gave him a long, despairing look.

“I don't know,” he said. “I really don't know. I'd hoped . . .”

His voice trailed off. He looked so downcast that even Angalo patted him on the shoulder.

“Don't take it so hard,” he said. “You didn't
really
think some sort of Grandson Richard, 39, was going to swoop down out of the sky and carry us off to Florida, did you? Look, we've given it a try. It hasn't worked. Let's go home.”

“Of course I didn't think
that
,” said Gurder irritably. “I just thought that . . . maybe in some way . . . there'd be a way.”

“The world belongs to humans. They built everything. They run everything. We might as well accept it,” said Angalo.

Masklin looked at the Thing. He knew it was listening. Even though it was just a small black cube, it somehow always looked more alert when it was listening.

The trouble was, it spoke only when it felt like it. It'd always give you just enough help, and no more. It seemed to be testing him the whole time.

Somehow, asking the Thing for help was like admitting that you'd run out of ideas. But . . .

“Thing,” he said, “I know you can hear me, because there must be loads of electricity in this building. We're at the airport. We can't find Grandson Richard, 39. We don't know how to
start
looking. Please help us.”

The Thing stayed silent.

“If you
don't
help us,” said Masklin quietly, “we'll go back to the quarry and face the humans, but that won't matter to you because we'll leave you here. We really will. And no nomes will ever find you again. There will never be another chance. We'll die out, there will be no more nomes anywhere, and it will be because of you. And in years and years to come you'll be all alone and useless and you'll think, Perhaps I should have helped Masklin when he asked me, and then you'll think, If I had my time all over again, I
would
have helped him. Well, Thing, imagine all that has happened and you've magically got your wish. Help us.”

“It's a machine!” snapped Angalo. “You can't blackmail a machine—!”

One small red light lit up on the Thing's black surface.

“I know you can tell what other machines are thinking,” said Masklin. “But can you tell what nomes are thinking? Read my mind, Thing, if you don't think I'm serious. You want nomes to act intelligently. Well, I
am
acting intelligently. I'm intelligent enough to know when I need help. I need help now. And you can help. I know you can. If you don't help us, we'll leave right now and forget you ever existed.”

A second light came on, very faintly.

Masklin stood up and nodded to the others.

“All right,” he said. “Let's go.”

The Thing made the little electronic noise that was the machine's equivalent of a nome clearing his throat.

“How can I be of assistance?”
it said.

Angalo grinned at Gurder.

Masklin sat down again.

“Find Grandson Richard Arnold, 39,” he said.

“This will take a long time,”
said the Thing.

“Oh.”

A few lights moved on the Thing's surface. Then it said,
“I have located a Richard Arnold, aged thirty-nine. He has just gone into the first-class departure lounge for flight 205 to Miami, Florida.”

“That didn't take a very long time,” said Masklin.

“It was three hundred microseconds,”
said the Thing.
“That's long.”