Diggers

Terry Pratchett

Summary

When their home, a large department store, was demolished, thousands of tiny nomes made a daring and dramatic escape on a stolen lorry -- and only just in the nick of time. The abandoned quarry they found was perfect for their needs.

At last they are safe. Or are they?

Soon strange things start to happen. Like the tops of puddles growing hard and cold, and the water coming down from the sky in frozen bits. Worse is to come though. The quarry is to be re-opened -- their new home is under threat.

A newspaper cutting sends three brave nomes off on a desperate mission which, if it succeeds, could lead them all to their ultimate home...

Meanwhile, back at the quarry, the remaining nomes prepare to defend their home against the intruders. But how long will they be able to keep the humans at bay -- even with the help of the monster Jekub?

Quotes

[Masklin] wasn't the leader. He'd have liked to be a leader. A leader could stick his chin out and do brave things. What Masklin has to do was argue and persuade and, sometimes, lie very slightly. He found it was often easier to get people to do things if you let them think it was their idea.

Nomes liked arguing. At least the Council of Drivers meant they could argue without hardly ever hitting one another.

"Anyway, that means Granny Morkie is the oldest nome," he said eventually. "And that means she's entitled to a place on the Council even though she's a woman. Abbot Gurder objected to that but we said, all right, you tell her, and he wouldn't, so she is. Um."

Changing was necessary. Change was right. He was all in favour of change.

What he was dead against was things not staying the same.

The nomes had not got the railway fully worked out yet. But it was obviously dangerous, because they could see a lane that crossed it and, whenever the railway moving thing was coming, two gates came down over the road.

The nomes knew what gates were for. You saw them on fields, to stop things getting out. It stood to reason, therefore, that the gates were to stop the railway from escaping its rails and rushing around on the roads.

Humans were big and stupid, that was true enough, but there was something unstoppable about them and they seemed to be controlled by bits of paper. Back in the Store a piece of paper had said the Store was going to be demolished and, sure enough, it had been demolished. You couldn't trust humans with bits of paper.

Gurder: "Of course I can read it. I know what every word means."
Masklin: "Well, then?"
Gurder: "It's what every sentence means that's giving me trouble."

Gurder: "We don't know anything. We mustn't start getting upset until we've found out what's going on."
Nisodemus: "And then can we get upset?"

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

"Holy utterances are often difficult to understand," said Gurder gravely.

"This must be a powerful holy one," said Dorcas.

"What's television?" said Masklin.

"A means of sending pictures through the air."

"Does this happen a lot?"

"All the time."

Masklin made a mental note to look out for any pictures in the air.

"It is very cold in space."

"Well, couldn't we sort of jump around a bit to keep warm?" said Masklin desperately.

"I think you do not appreciate what it is that space contains."

"What's that, then?"

"Nothing. It contains nothing. And everything. But there is very little everything and more nothing than you could imagine."

"This is not the right time. You are ill-prepared."

Masklin clenched his fists. "I'll never be well-prepared! I was born in a hole, Thing! A muddy hole in the ground! How can I ever be well-prepared for anything? That's what being alive is, Thing! It's being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, Thing! You only get one chance and then you die and they don't let you go round again after you've got the hang of it! Do you understand, Thing! So we'll try it now! I order you to help! You're a machine and you must do what you're told!"

The lights formed a spiral.

"You're learning fast," said the Thing.

"I read about them in a book," [Grimma] said. "There's this place, you see. Called Southamerica. And there's these hills where it's hot and rains all the time, and in the rain forests there are these very tall trees and right in the top branches of the trees there are these great big flowers called bromeliads and water gets into the flowers and makes little pools and there's a type of frog that lays eggs in the pools and tadpoles hatch and grow into new frogs and these little frogs live their whole lives in the flowers right at the top of the trees and don't even know about the ground and the world is full of things like that and now I know about them and I'm never ever going to be able to see them and then you," she gulped for breath, "want me to come and live with you in a hole and wash your socks!"

Masklin ran this sentence through his head again, in case it made any sense when you listened to it a second time.

Seven years old. Just about the time when a nome ought to be taking it easy. And I'm out here, where there aren't any proper walls to the world, and the water goes cold and hard as glass some mornings, and the ventilation and heating systems are quite shockingly out of control. Of course -- he pulled himself together a bit -- as a scientist I find all these phenomena extremely interesting. It would just be nicer to find them extremely interesting from somewhere nice and snug, inside.

Dorcas had spent many a peaceful hour getting to know Jekub. He was someone to talk to. He was the best kind of person to talk to, in fact, because you didn't have to listen to him back.

[Grimma had] invented schools for children, on the basis that since reading and writing were quite difficult it was best to get them over with early.

Not only was Grimma the best reader among the nomes, she also had an amazing ability to understand what she was reading.

She sniffed, and smiled a bit, but not too much because if there is one thing worse than someone who doesn't understand you it's someone who understands perfectly, before you've had a chance to have a good pout about not being understood.

[Dorcas] was always at a loss when people acted like this. When machines went funny you just oiled them or prodded them or, if nothing else worked, hit them with a hammer. Nomes didn't respond well to this treatment.

"Of course he'll come back," said Dorcas reassuringly. "What could have happened to him, after all?"

"He could have been eaten or run over or trodded on or blown away or fallen down a hole or trapped," said Grimma.

"Er, yes," said Dorcas. "Apart from that, I meant."

Grimma: "Do you know, humans think the world was made by a sort of big human?"
Dorcas: "Get away?"
Grimma: "It took a week."
Dorcas: "I expect it had some help, then."

The world was quite difficult enough as it was without people going around trying to make it better all the time.

If there was one thing that really got up a nome's nose, it was someone saying, "Here is a really sensible idea. Why are you too stupid to understand?"

"We could make a run for the thickets or something," he said vaguely.

"We could stay and fight," said Grimma.

Dorcas growled. "Oh, that's easy. We fight all the time. Bicker, bicker, bicker. That's nomish nature for you."

"We're not going to run away again," [Grimma] said flatly. "We shall fight them in the lane. We shall fight them at the gates. We shall fight them in the quarry. And we shall never surrender."

-- Channeling the ghost of Winston Churchill?

"And the book said [nomes] paint the flowers to make them pretty colours," said Grimma.

Dorcas stared at her.

"Nah," he said, eventually. "I've looked at the colours on flowers. They're definitely built-in."

"I only read manuals. It's not a proper book, I've always said, unless it's got lists and part numbers in it."

"Look, you wanted me to stop the lorry and I've stopped the lorry," said Dorcas. "So just shut up, will you?"

Grimma looked at him in horror.

"What did you say?" she said.

Dorcas swallowed. Oh, well. If you were going to get shouted at, you might as well get your money's worth.

"People are a bit like machines ... and words like please and thank you are just like grease. They make them work better."

What he needed was a lever. What he needed was about fifty nomes. What he needed most of all was not to be here.

"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."

"I couldn't find anyone!" he gasped. "I looked everywhere and couldn't find anyone and we saw the trucks come here and I saw the lights on and I thought the humans were still here and I came in and I heard your voices and you've got to come because it's Dorcas!"

"He's alive?" said Grimma.

"If he isn't, he can swear pretty well for a dead person," said Sacco, sagging to the floor.

"Come on. This isn't a night for being outside."

The expressions on the faces of some of the nomes said that they definitely agreed with this point of view, and that among the people who shouldn't be out on a night like this was themselves.

In the end fifteen of them went, many out of sheer embarassment.

There was something about Granny Morkie cheering people up that always got them moving. Anything was better than being cheered up some more.

"We'd better get you back as soon as possible," said Grimma. "I don't think any fox would bother the pack of us. After all, the local ones know who we are. Eat a nome and you died, that's what they learned."

The nomes shuffled their feet. It was true, of course. The trouble was, they thought, that the person who'd really regret it the most would be the one nome who was eaten. Knowing that the fox might be given a bad time afterwards wouldn't be a lot of consolation.

The nomes stood rooted in terror. There was no sense in trying to run away. A fox had twice as many legs to run after you. You'd end up dead anyway, but at least you wouldn't end up dead out of breath as well.

"J ... C ... B," she said. "Jcb? Jekub? It's got no vowels in it. What sort of name is that?"

Grimma stared at her with the kind of expression reserved for people who turned out, against all expectation, to have interesting and secret histories.

She'd found "nose to the grindstone" in a book. Apparently it meant "to get on with things." She didn't know why people were supposed to work hard if you ground their noses; it seemed more likely that they'd work hard if you promised to grind their noses if they didn't.

"When a nome gets to a certain age, it's time to stop stealing giant vehicles."

"You can't beat humans!" shouted Dorcas, above the roar of the engine. "They're too big! You're too small!"

"They may be big," said Grimma, "and I may be small. But I'm the one with the giant truck. With teeth."

-- Grimma gets pissed

Dorcas: "You're killing a truck."
Grimma: "Don't be silly. It's a machine. Just bits of metal."
Dorcas: "Yes, but someone made it. They must be very hard to make. I hate destroying things that are hard to make."
Grimma: "They ran over Nisodemus. And when we used to live in a hole, nomes were always being squashed by cars."
Dorcas: "Yes, but nomes aren't hard to make. You just need other nomes."
Grimma: "You're weird."

There was nothing around them, just a bit of scrub in the distance. And it was silent. Well, not silent at all, because of Jekub's roar. But it looked the kind of place that would be silent if diggers full of desperate nomes weren't thundering across it.

In the field by the road the sheep were running away. It wasn't the ordinary panic of sheep ordinarily disturbed. They had their heads down and were pounding across the ground with one aim in mind. They were sheep who had decided that this was no time to waste energy panicking when it could be used for galloping away as fast as possible.

Down below, the nomes were panicking. They weren't sheep, every nome could think for itself, and when you started to think hard about sudden darkness and mysterious humming noises, panicking seemed a logical idea.

[Grimma] was smiling madly. That was almost as terrifying as everything else put together.