Terry Pratchett - Bromeliad 1 - Truckers

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Truckers (The Bromeliad part 1)
by
Terry Pratchett (1989)
version 1.0
Concerning Nomes and Time
Nomes are small. On the whole, small creatures don’t live for a long time. But perhaps they do live fast.
Let me explain.
One of the shortest-lived creatures on the planet Earth is the adult common mayfly. It lasts for one day.
The longest- living things are bristlecone pine trees, at 4,700 years and still counting.
This may seem tough on mayflies. But the important thing is not how long your life is, but how long it
seems.
To a mayfly, a single hour May last as long as a century. Perhaps old mayflies sit around complaining
about how life this minute isn’t a patch on the good old. minutes of long ago, when the world was young
and the sun seemed so much brighter and larvae showed you a bit of respect. Whereas the trees, which
are not famous for their quick reactions, may just have time to notice the way the sky keeps flickering
before the dry rot and woodworm set in.
It’s all a sort of relativity. The faster you live, the more time stretches out. To a nome, a year lasts as long
as ten years does to a human Remember it Don’t let it concern you They don’t. They don’t even know.
In the beginning...
i. &nbs p; There was the Site.
ii. &nbs p; And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) Moved upon the face of the Site, and Saw that it
had Potential.
iii. &nbs p; For it was In the High Street.
iv. &nbs p; Yea, it was also Handy for the Buses.
v. &nbs p; And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) said, Let there be a Store, And Let it be a Store
such as the World has not Seen hitherto;
vi. &nbs p; Let the length of it be from Palmer Street even unto the Fish Market, and the
Width of It, from the High Street right back to Disraeli Road;
vii. &nbs p; Let it be High even Unto Five Storeys plus Basement, And bright with Lifts; let
there be the Eter-nal Fires of the Boiler-Room in the sub-basement and, above all other
floors, let there be Customer Accounts to Order All Things;
viii. &nbs p; For this must be what all shall Know of Arnold Bros (est. 1905): All Things
Under One Roof. And it shall be called: the Store of Arnold Bros (est. 1905).
ix. &nbs p; And Thus it Was.
x. &nbs p; And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) divided the Store into Departments, of
Ironmongery, Corsetry, Modes and others After their Kind, and Created Humans to fill
them with All Things saying, Yea, All Things Are Here. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905)
said, Let there be Lorries, and Let their Colours be Red and Gold, and Let them. Go
Forth so that All May Know Arnold Bros (est. 1905), By Appointment, delivers All
Things;
xi. &nbs p; Let there be Santa’s Grottoes and Winter Sales and Summer Bargains and
Back to School Week and AU Commodities in their Season;
xii. &nbs p; And into the Store came the Nomes, that it would be their Place, for Ever and
Ever.
From The Book of Nome, Basements VI-XII
1
This is the story of the Going Home. This is the story of the Critical Path.
This is the story of the lorry roaring through the sleeping city and out into the country lanes, smashing
through street lamps and swinging from side to side and shattering shop windows and roll-ing to a halt
when the police chased it. And when the baffled men went back to their car to report Listen, will you,
listen? There isn’t anyone driving it!, it became the story of the lorry that started up again, rolled away
from the astonished men, and vanished into the night.
But the story didn’t end there.
It didn’t start there, either.
The sky rained dismal. It rained humdrum. It rained the kind of rain that is so much wetter than normal
rain, the kind of rain that comes down in big drops and splats, the kind of rain that is merely an upright
sea with slots in it.
It rained a tattoo on the old hamburger boxes and chip papers in the wire basket that was giving Masklin
a temporary hiding place.
Look at him. Wet. Cold. Extremely worried. And four inches high.
The waste-bin was usually a good hunting ground, even in winter. There were often a few cold chips in
their wrapping, sometimes even a chicken bone. Once or twice there had been a rat, too. It had been a
really good day when there had last been a rat — it had kept them going for a week. The trouble was
that you could get pretty fed up with rat by the third day. By the third mouthful, come to that.
Masklin scanned the lorry park.
And here it came, right on time, crashing through the puddles and pulling up with a hiss of brakes.
He’d watched this lorry arrive every Tuesday and Thursday morning for the last four weeks. He timed
the driver’s stop carefully.
They had exactly three minutes. To someone the size of a nome, that’s more than half an hour.
He scrambled down through the greasy paper, dropped out of the bottom of the bin, and ran for the
bushes at the edge of the park where Grimma and the old folk were waiting.
‘It’s here!’ he said. ‘Come on!’
They got to their feet, groaning and grumbling. He’d taken them through this dozens of times. He knew it
wasn’t any good shouting. They just got upset and confused, and then they’d grumble some more. They
grumbled about cold chips, even when Grimma warmed them up. They moaned about rat. He’d seriously
thought about leaving alone, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. They needed him. They needed
someone to grumble at.
But they were too slow. He felt like bursting into tears.
He turned to Grimma instead.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Give them a prod, or some-thing. They’ll never get moving!’
She patted his hand.
‘They’re frightened,’ she said. ‘You go on. I’ll bring them out.’
There wasn’t time to argue. Masklin ran back across the soaking mud of the park, unslinging the rope
and grapnel. It had taken him a week to make the hook, out of a bit of wire teased off a fence, and he’d
spent days practicing; he was already swinging it around his head as he reached the lorry’s wheel.
The hook caught the tarpaulin high above him at the second try. He tested it once or twice and then, his
feet scrabbling for a grip on the tire, pulled himself up.
He’d done it before. Oh, he’d done it three or four times. He scrambled under the heavy tarpaulin and
into the darkness beyond, pulling out more line and tying it as tightly as possible around one of the ropes
that were as thick as his arm.
Then he slid back to the edge and, thank good-ness, Grimma was herding the old people across the
gravel. He could hear them complaining about the puddles.
Masklin jumped up and down with impatience. It seemed to take hours. He explained it to them millions
of times, but people hadn’t been pulled up on to the backs of lorries when they were children and they
didn’t see why they should start now. Old Granny Morkie insisted that all the men look the other way so
that they wouldn’t see up her skirts, for example, and old Torrit whimpered so much that Masklin had to
lower him again so that Grimma could blindfold him. It wasn’t so bad after he’d hauled the first few up,
because they were able to help on the rope, but time still stretched out.
He pulled Grimma up last. She was light. They were all light, if it came to that. You didn’t get rat every
day.
It was amazing. They were all on board. He’d worked with an ear cocked for the sound of foot-steps on
gravel and the slamming of the driver’s door, and it hadn’t happened.
‘Right,’ he said, shaking with the effort. ‘That’s it, then. Now if we just go—’
‘I dropped the Thing,’ said old Torrit. ‘The Thing. I dropped It, d’you see? I dropped it down by the
wheel when she was blindfoldin’ me. You go and get it, boy.’
Masklin looked at him in horror. Then he poked his head out from under the tarpaulin and, yes, there it
was, far below. A tiny black cube on the ground.
The Thing.
It was lying in a puddle, although that wouldn’t affect it. Nothing touched the Thing. It wouldn’t even
burn.
And then he heard the sound of slow footsteps on the gravel.
‘There’s no time,’ he whispered. ‘There really is no time.’
‘We can’t go without it,’ said Grimma. ‘Of course we can. It’s just a, a thing. We won’t need the
wretched object where we’re going.’
He felt guilty as soon as he’d said it, amazed at his own lips for uttering such words. Grimma looked
horrified. Granny Morkie drew herself up to her full, quivering height.
‘May you be forgiven!’ she barked. ‘What a terrible thing to say! You tell him, Torrit.’ She nudged Torrit
in the ribs.
‘If we ain’t taking the Thing, I ain’t going,’ said Torrit sulkily. ‘It’s not—’
‘That’s your leader talkin’ to you,’ interrupted Granny Morkie. ‘So you do what you’re told. Leave it
behind, indeed! It wouldn’t be decent. It wouldn’t be right. So you go and get it, this minute.’
Masklin stared wordlessly down at the soaking mud and then, with a desperate motion, threw the line
over the edge and slid down it.
It was raining harder now, with a touch of sleet. The wind whipped at him as he dropped past the great
arc of the wheel and landed heavily in the puddle. He reached out and scooped up the Thing— And the
lorry started to move.
First there was a roar, so loud that it went beyond sound and became a solid wall of noise. Then there
was a blast of stinking air and a vibration that shook the ground.
He pulled sharply on the line and yelled at them to pull him up, and realized that even he couldn’t hear his
own voice. But Grimma or someone must have got the idea because, just as the big wheel began to turn,
the rope tightened and he felt his feet lifted off the mud.
He bounced and spun back and forth as, with painful slowness, they pulled him past the wheel. It turned
only a few inches away from him, a black, chilly blur, and all the time the hammering sound battered at his
head.
I’m not scared, he told himself. This is much worse than anything I’ve ever faced, and it’s not frightening.
It’s too terrible to be frightening.
He felt as though he was in a tiny, warm cocoon, away from all the noise and the wind. I’m going to die,
he thought, just because of this Thing which has never helped us at all, something that’s just a lump of
stuff, and now I’m going to die and go to the Heavens. I wonder if old Torrit is right about what happens
when you die? It seems a bit severe to have to die to find out. I’ve looked at the sky every night for years
and I’ve never seen any nomes up there...
But it didn’t really matter, it was all outside him, it wasn’t real— Hands reached down and caught him
under the arms and dragged him into the booming space under the tarpaulin and, with some difficulty,
prised the Thing out of his grip.
Behind the speeding lorry fresh curtains of grey rain dragged across the empty fields.
And, across the whole country, there were no more nomes.
There had been plenty of them, in the days when it didn’t seem to rain so much. Masklin could remember
at least forty. But then the motorway had come; the stream was put in pipes under-ground, and the
nearest hedges were grubbed up. Nomes had always lived in the corners of the world, and suddenly
there weren’t too many corners any more.
The numbers started going down. A lot of this was due to natural causes, and when you’re four inches
high natural causes can be anything with teeth and speed and hunger. Then Pyrrince, who was by way of
being the most adventurous, led a desperate expedition across the carriageway one night, to investigate
the woods on the other side. They never came back. Some said it was hawks, some said it was a lorry.
Some even said they’d made it halfway and were marooned on the cen-tral reservation between endless
swishing lines of cars.
Then the cafe had been built, a little further along the road. It had been a sort of improvement. It
depended how you looked at it. If cold leftover chips and scraps of grey chicken were food, then there
was suddenly enough for everyone.
And then it was spring, and Masklin looked around and found that there were just ten of them left, and
eight of those were too old to get about much. Old Torrit was nearly ten.
It had been a dreadful summer. Grimma organ-ized those who could still get about into midnight raids on
the litter-bins, and Masklin tried to hunt.
Hunting by yourself was like dying a bit at a time. Most of the things you were hunting were also hunting
you. And even if you were lucky and made a kill, how did you get it home? It had taken two days with
the rat, including sitting out at night to fight off other creatures. Ten strong hunters could do anything —
rob bees’ nests, trap mice, catch moles, anything but one hunter by himself, with no one to watch his
back in the long grass, was simply the next meal for everything with talons and claws.
To get enough to eat, you needed lots of healthy hunters. But to get lots of healthy hunters, you needed
enough to eat.
‘It’ll be all right in the autumn,’ said Grimma, bandaging his arm where a stoat had caught it. ‘There’ll be
mushrooms and berries and nuts and everything.’
Well, there hadn’t been any mushrooms and it rained so much that most of the berries rotted before they
ripened. There were plenty of nuts, though. The nearest hazel tree was half a day’s journey away.
Masklin could carry a dozen nuts if he smashed them out of their shells and dragged them back in a
paper bag from the bin. It took a whole day to do it, risking hawks all the way, and it was just enough
food for a day as well.
And then the back of the burrow fell in, because of all the rain. It was almost pleasant to get out, then. It
was better than listening to the grumbling about him not doing essential repairs. Oh, and there was the
fire. You needed a fire at the burrow mouth, both for cooking and for keep-ing away night prowlers.
Granny Morkie went to sleep one day and let it go out. Even she had the decency to be embarrassed.
When Masklin came back that night he looked at the heap of dead ashes for a long time and then stuck
his spear in the ground and burst out laughing, and went on laughing until he started to cry. He couldn’t
face the rest of them. He had to go and sit outside where, presently, Grimma brought him a shellful of
nettle tea. Cold nettle tea.
‘They’re all very upset about it,’ she volun-teered.
Masklin gave a hollow laugh. ‘Oh, yes, I can tell,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard them “You ought to bring back
another fag-end, boy, I’m right out of tobac-co,” and “We never have fish these days, you might find the
time to go down to the river,” and “Self, self, self, that’s all you young people think about, in my day—”
Grimma sighed. ‘They do their best,’ she said. ‘It’s just that they don’t realize. There were hun-dreds of
us when they were young.’
‘It’s going to take days to get that fire lit,’ said Masklin. They had a spectacle lens; it needed a very
sunny day to work.
He poked aimlessly in the mud by his feet.
‘I’ve had enough,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m going to leave.!
‘But we need you!’
‘I need me, too. I mean, what kind of life is this?’
‘But they’ll die if you go away!’
‘They’ll die anyway,’ said Masklin.
‘That’s a wicked thing to say!’
‘Well, it’s true. Everyone dies anyway. We’ll die anyway. Look at you. You spend your whole time
washing and tidying up and cooking and chasing after them. You’re nearly three! It’s about time you had
a life of your own.’
‘Granny Morkie was very kind to me when I was small,’ said Grimma defensively. ‘You’ll be old one
day.’
‘You think? And who will be working their fingers to the bone to look after me?’
Masklin found himself getting angrier and angrier. He was certain he was in the right. But it felt as if he
was in the wrong, which made it worse.
He’d thought about this for a long time, and it had always left him feeling angry and awkward. All the
clever ones and the bold ones and the brave ones had gone long ago, one way or the other. Good old
Masklin, they’d said, stout chap, you look after the old folk and we’ll be back before you know it, just
as soon as we’ve found a better place. Every time good old Masklin thought about this he got indignant
with them for going and with himself for staying. He always gave in, that was his trouble. He knew it.
Whatever he promised him- self at the start, he always took the way of least resistance.
Grimma was glaring at him.
He shrugged.’
‘All right, all right, so they can come with us,’ he said.
‘You know they won’t go,’ she said. ‘They’re too old. They all grew up round here. They like it here.’
‘They like it here when there’s us around to wait on them,’ muttered Masklin.
They left it at that. There were nuts for dinner. Masklin’s had a maggot in it.
He went out afterwards and sat at the top of the bank with his chin in his hands, watching the motorway
again.
It was a stream of red and white lights. There were humans inside those boxes, going about whatever
mysterious business humans spent their time on. They were always in a hurry to get to it, whatever it was.
He was prepared to bet they didn’t eat rat. Humans had it really easy. They were big and slow, but they
didn’t have to live in damp burrows waiting for daft old women to let the fire go out. They never had
maggots in their tea. They went wherever they wanted and they did whatever they liked. The whole
world belonged to them.
And all night long they drove up and down in these little lorries with lights on. Didn’t they ever go to
sleep? There must be hundreds of them.
He’d dreamt of leaving on a lorry. They often stopped at the cafe. It would be easy.— well, fairly easy
—to find a way on to one. They were clean and shiny, they had to go somewhere better than this. And
after all, what was the alternative? They’d never see winter through; here, and setting out across the fields
with the bad weather coming on didn’t bear thinking about.
Of course, he’d never do it. You never actually did it, in the end. You just dreamed about following those
swishing lights.
And above the rushing lights, the stars. Torrit said the stars were very important. Right at the moment,
Masklin didn’t agree. You couldn’t eat them. They weren’t even much good for seeing by. The stars
were pretty useless, when you thought about it...
Somebody screamed.
Masklin’s body got to his feet almost before his mind had even thought about it, and sped silently through
the scrubby bushes towards the burrow.
Where, its head entirely underground and its brush waving excitedly at the stars, was a dog fox. He
recognized it. He’d had a couple of close shaves with it in the past.
Somewhere inside Masklin’s head, the bit of him that was really him — old Torrit had a lot to say about
this bit was horrified to see him snatch up his spear, which was still in the ground where he had plunged it,
and stab the fox as hard as he could in a hind leg.
There was a muffled yelp and the animal struggled backwards, turning an evil, foaming
mask to its tormentor. Two bright yellow eyes focused on Masklin, who leaned panting on his spear. This
was one of those times when time
itself slowed down and everything was sud-denly more real. Perhaps, if you knew you were going to
die, your senses crammed in as much detail as they could while they still had the chance...
There were flecks of blood around the creature’s muzzle.
Masklin felt himself become angry. It welled up inside him, like a huge bubble He didn’t-have much, and
this grinning thing was taking even that away from him.
As the red tongue lolled out, he knew that he had two choices. He could run, or he could die. So he
attacked instead. The spear soared from his hand like a bird, catching the fox in the lip. It screamed and
pawed at the wound, and Masklin was running, running across the dirt, propelled by the engine of his
anger, and then jumping and grabbing handfuls of rank red fur and hauling him-self up the fox’s flank to
land astride its neck and drawing his stone knife and stabbing, stabbing, at everything that was wrong
with the world...
The fox screamed again and leapt away. If he was capable of thinking then Masklin would have known
that his knife wasn’t doing much more than annoying the creature, but it wasn’t used to meals fighting
back with such fury and its only thought now was to get away. It breasted the embankment and rushed
headlong down it, towards the lights of the motorway.
Masklin started to think again. The rushing of the traffic filled his ears. He let go and threw himself into the
long grass as the creature galloped out on to the asphalt.
He landed heavily and rolled over, all the breath knocked out of him.
But he remembered what happened next. It stayed in his memory for a long time, long after
he’d seen so many strange things that there really should have been no room for it.
The fox, as still as a statue in a headlight’s beam, snarled its defiance as it tried to outstare ten tons of
metal hurtling towards it at seventy miles an hour.
There was a bump, a swish, and darkness.
Masklin lay face down in the cool moss for a long time. Then, dreading what he was about to see, trying
not to imagine it, he pulled himself to his feet and plodded back towards whatever was left of his home.
Grimma was waiting at the burrow’s mouth, holding a twig like a club. She spun round and nearly
brained Masklin as he staggered out of the darkness and leaned against the bank. He stuck out a weary
hand and pushed the stick aside.
‘We didn’t know where you’d gone,’ she said, her voice on the edge of hysteria. ‘We just heard the
noise and there it was you should have been here and it got Mr Mert and Mrs Coom and it was dig-ging
at the—’
She stopped, and seemed to sag.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Masklin coldly, ‘I’m all right, thank you very much.’
‘What what happened?’
He ignored her, and trooped into the darkness of the burrow and lay down. He could hear the old ones
whispering as he sank into a deep, chilly sleep.
I should have been here, he thought.
They depend on me.
We’re going. All of us.
It had seemed a good idea, then.
It looked a bit different, now.
Now the nomes clustered at one end of the great dark space inside the lorry. They were silent. There
wasn’t any room to be noisy. The roar of the engine filled the air from edge to edge. Sometimes it would
falter, and start again. Occasionally the whole lorry lurched.
Grimma crawled across the trembling floor.
‘How long is it going to take to get there?’ she said.
‘Where?’ said Masklin.
‘Wherever we’re going.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘They’re hungry, you see.’
They always were. Masklin looked hopelessly at the huddle of old ones. One or two of them were
watching him expectantly.
‘There isn’t anything I can do,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry too, but there’s nothing here. It’s empty.’
‘Granny Morkie gets very upset when she’s missed a meal,’ said Grimma.
Masklin gave her a long, blank stare. Then he crawled his way to the group and sat down between Torrit
and the old woman.
He’d never really talked to them, he realized. When he was small they were giants who were no concern
of his, and then he’d been a hunter among hunters, and this year he’d either been out looking for food or
deep in an exhausted sleep. But he knew why Torrit was the leader of the tribe. It stood to reason, he
was the oldest nome. The oldest was always leader, that way there couldn’t be any arguments. Not the
oldest woman, of course, because everyone knew this was unthinkable; even Granny Morkie was quite
firm about that. Which was a bit odd, because she treated him like an idiot and Torrit never made a
decision without looking at her out of the corner of his eye. Masklin sighed. He stared at his knees.
‘Look, I don’t know how long—’ he began.
‘Don’t you worry about me, boy,’ said Granny Morkie, who seemed to have quite recovered. ‘This is all
rather excitin’, ain’t it?’
‘But it might take ages,’ said Masklin, ‘I didn’t know it was going to take this long. It was just a mad
idea...’
She poked him with a bony finger. ‘Young man,’ she said, ‘I was alive in the Great Winter of 1986.
Terrible, that was. You can’t tell me anything about going hungry. Grimma’s a good girl, but she worries.’
‘But I don’t even know where we’re going!’ Masklin burst out. ‘I’m sorry!’
Torrit, who was sitting with the Thing on his skinny knees, peered shortsightedly at him.
We have the Thing,’ he said. ‘It will show us the Way, it will.’
Masklin nodded gloomily. Funny how Torrit always knew what the Thing wanted. It was just a black
square thing, but it had some very defi-nite ideas about the importance of regular meals and how you
should always listen to what the old folk said. It seemed to have an answer for every-thing.
‘And where does this Way take us?’ said Masklin.
‘You knows that well enough. To the Heavens.’
‘Oh. Yes,’ said Masklin. He glared at the Thing. He was pretty certain that it didn’t tell old Torrit
anything at all; he knew he had pretty good hear-ing, and he never heard it say anything. It never did
anything, it never moved. The only thing it ever did was look black and square. It was good at that.
‘Only by followin’ the Thing closely in all par-ticulars can we be sure of going to the Heavens,’ said
Torrit, uncertainly, as if he’d been told this a long time ago and hadn’t understood it even then.
‘Yes, well,’ said Masklin. He stood up on the swaying floor and made his way to the tarpaulin.
Then he paused to screw up his courage and poked his head under the gap.
There- was nothing but blurs and lights,. and strange smells.
It was-all going wrong. It had seemed so sensible that night, a week ago. Anything was better than here.
That seemed so obvious then. But it was odd. The old ones moaned like anything when things weren’t
exactly to their liking but now, when everything was looking bad, they were almost cheerful.
People were a lot more complicated than they looked. Perhaps the Thing could tell you that, too, if you
knew how to ask.
The lorry turned a corner and rumbled down into blackness and then, without warning, stopped. He
found himself looking into a huge lighted- space, full of lorries, full of humans...
He pulled his head back quickly and scuttled across the floor to Torrit.
‘Er,’ he said.
‘Yes, lad?’
‘Heaven. Do humans go there?’
The old nome shook his head. ‘The Heavens,’ he said. ‘More than one of’em see? Only nomes go
there.’
‘You’re absolutely certain?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Torrit beamed. ‘O’course, they may have heavens of their own,’ he said, ‘I don’t know about
that. But they ain’t ours, you may depend upon it.’
‘Oh.’
Torrit stared at the Thing again.
We’ve stopped,’ he said. ‘Where are we?’
Masklin stared wearily into the darkness.
‘I think I had better go and find out,’ he said.
There was whistling outside, and the distant rumble of human voices. The lights went out. There was a
rattling noise, followed by a click, and then silence.
After awhile there was a faint scrabbling around the back of one of the silent lorries. A length of line, no
thicker than thread, dropped down until it touched the oily floor of the garage.
A minute went by. Then, lowering itself with great care hand overhand, a small, stumpy figure shinned
down the line and dropped on to the floor. It stood rock-still for a few seconds after landing, with only its
eyes moving.
It was not entirely human. There were defi-nitely the right number of arms and legs, and
- the additional bits like eyes and so on were in the usual places, but the figure that was now creeping
across the darkened floor in its mouseskins looked like a brick wall on legs. Nomes are so stocky that a
Japanese Sumo wrestler would look half-starved by comparison, and the way this one moved sug-gested
that it was considerably tougher than old boots.
Masklin was, in fact, terrified out of his life. There was nothing here that he recognized, except for the
smell of all, which he had come to associate with humans and especially with lorries (Torrit had told him
loftily that all was a burning water that lorries drank, at which point Masklin knew the old nome had gone
mad. It stood to reason. Water didn’t burn).
None of it made any sense. Vast cans loomed above him. There were huge pieces of metal that had a
made look about them. This was definitely apart of a human heaven. Humans liked metal.
He did skirt warily around a cigarette-end,
and made a mental note to take it back for Torrit.
There were other lorries in this place, all of them silent. It was, Masklin decided, a lorry nest. Which
meant that the only food in it was probably all.
He untensed a bit, and prodded about under a bench that towered against one wall like a house. There
were drifts of waste paper there, and, led by a smell which here was even stronger than all, he found a
whole apple core. It was going brown, but it was a pretty good find.
He slung it across one shoulder and turned around.
There was a rat watching him thoughtfully. It was considerably bigger and sleeker than the things that
fought the nomes for the scraps from the waste-bin. It dropped on all fours and trotted towards him.
Masklin felt that he was on firmer ground here. All these huge dark shapes and cans and ghastly smells
were quite beyond him, but he knew what a rat was all right, and what to do about one.
He dropped the core, brought his spear back slowly and carefully, aimed at a point just between the
creature’s eyes.
Two things happened at once.
Masklin noticed that the rat had a little red collar.
And a voice said: ‘Don’t! He took a long time to train. Bargains Galore! Where did you come from?’
The stranger was a nome. At least, Masklin had to assume so. He was certainly nome height, and moved
like a nome.
But his clothes. .
The basic colour for a practical nome’s clothes is mud. That was common sense. Grimma knew fifty
ways of making dyes from wild plants and they all yielded a colour that was, when you came right down
to it, basically muddy. Sometimes yel-low mud, sometimes brown mud, sometimes even greenish mud
but still, well, mud. Because any nome who ventured out wearing jolly reds and blues would have a life
expectancy of perhaps half an hour before something digestive happened to him.
Whereas this nome looked like a rainbow. He wore brightly coloured clothes of a material so fine it
looked like chip wrapping, a belt studded with bits of glass, proper leather boots, and a hat with a feather
in it. As he talked he slapped his leg idly with a leather strap which, it turned out, was the lead for the rat.
‘Well?’ he snapped. ‘Answer me!’
‘I came off the lorry,’ said Masklin shortly, eyeing the rat. It stopped scratching its ears, gave him a look,
and went and hid behind its master.
‘What were you doing on there? Answer me!’
Masklin pulled himself up. ‘We were travelling,’ he said.
The nome glared at him. ‘What’s travelling?’ he snapped.
‘Moving along,’ said Masklin. ‘You know? Com-ing from one place and going to another place.’
This seemed to have a strange effect on the stranger. If it didn’t actually make him polite, at least it took
the edge off his tone.
‘Are you trying to tell me you came from Out-side?’ he said.
‘That’s right.’
‘But that’s impossible!’
‘Is it?’ Masklin looked worried.
‘There’s nothing Outside!’
‘Is there? Sorry,’ said Masklin. ‘But we seem to have come in from it, anyway. Is this a problem?
‘You mean really Outside?’ said the nome sidling closer.
‘I suppose I do. We never really thought about it What’s this p1—’
‘What’s it like?’
‘What?’
‘Outside! What’s it like?’
Masklin looked blank. Well,’ he said. ‘It’s sort of big—’
‘Yes?’
‘And, er, there’s a lot of it—’
‘Yes? Yes?’
‘With, you know, things in it—’
‘Is it true the ceiling is so high you can’t see it?’ said the nome, apparently beside himself with excitement.
‘Don’t know. What’s a ceiling?’ said Masklin.
‘That is,’ said the nome, pointing up to a gloom. roof of girders and shadows.
‘Oh, I haven’t seen anything like that,’ said Masklin. ‘Outside it’s blue or grey, with white things floating
around in it.’
‘And, and, the walls are such a long way off, and there’s a sort of green carpet thing that grows on the
ground?’ said the nome, hopping from one foot to the other.
‘Don’t know,’ said Masklin, even more mystified ‘What’s a carpet?’
Wow!’ The nome got a grip on himself and e tended a shaking hand. ‘My name’s Angalo,’ he said.
‘Angalo de Haberdasheri. Haha. Of course that won’t mean anything to you! And this is Bobo.’
The rat appeared to grin. Masklin had never heard a rat called anything, except perhaps, if you were
driven to it, ‘dinner’.
‘I’m Masklin,’ he said. ‘Is it all right if the rest of us come down? It was a long journey.’
‘Gosh, yes! All from Outside? My father’ll never believe it!’
‘I’m. sorry,’ said Masklin. ‘I don’t understand. What’s so special? We were outside. Now we’re
inside.’
Angalo ignored him. He was staring at the oth-ers as they came stiffly down the line, grumbling.
‘Old people, too!’ said Angalo. ‘And they look just like us! Not even pointy heads or anything!’
‘Sauce!’ said Granny Morkie. Angalo stopped grinning.
‘Madam,’ he said icily, ‘do you know who you’re talking to?’
‘Someone who’s not too old for a smacked bot-tom,’ said Granny Morkie. ‘If I looked just like you, my
lad, I’d look a great deal better. Pointy heads, indeed!’
Angalo’s mouth opened and shut silently. Then he said: ‘It’s amazing! I mean, Dorcas said that even if
there was a possibility of life outside the Store, it wouldn’t be life as we know it! Please, please, all follow
me.’
They exchanged glances as Angalo scurried away towards the edge of the lorry nest, but followed him
anyway. There wasn’t much of an alternative.
‘I remember when your old dad stayed out too in the sun one day. He talked rubbish, too, just like this
one,’ said Granny Morkie quietly. Torrit appeared to be reaching a conclusion. They waited for it
politely.
‘I reckon,’ he said at last, ‘I reckon we ought to eat his rat.’
‘You shut up, you,’ said Granny, automatically. ‘I’m leader, I am. You’ve got no right, talking like that to
a leader,’ Torrit whined.
‘O’course you’re leader,’ snapped Granny Mor-kie ‘Who said you weren’t leader? I never said you.
weren’t leader. You’re leader.’
‘Right,’ sniffed Torrit.
‘And now shut up,’ said Granny. Masklin tapped Angalo on the shoulder. ‘Where is this place?’ he said.
Angalo stopped by the wall, which towered up into the distance.
‘You don’t know?’ he said.
We just thought, well, we just hoped that the lorries went to — to a good place to be,’ said Grimma.
‘Well, you heard right,’ said Angalo proudly. ‘This is the best place to be. This is the Store!’
摘要：

Truckers (TheBromeliadpart1)byTerryPratchett(1989)version1.0ConcerningNomesandTimeNomesaresmall.Onthewhole,smallcreaturesdon’tliveforalongtime.Butperhapstheydolivefast.Letmeexplain.Oneoftheshortest-livedcreaturesontheplanetEarthistheadultcommonmayfly.Itlastsforoneday.Thelongest-livingthingsarebristl...

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