Truckers

Terry Pratchett

Summary

To the thousands of tiny nomes who live under the floorboards of a large department store, there is no Outside. Things like Day and Night and Sun and Rain don't really exist, say all intelligent nomes. They're just daft old legends.

But soon a devestating piece of news is to shatter the nomes' existence: the Store -- their world -- is to be demolished...

So it's up to Masklin, one of the last nomes to come into the Store, to mastermind the unbelievable escape plan that will take all the nomes into the dangers of the great Outside.

It means they have to think. And they have to think big.

And they start to learn who they are and how they came to be there, and where their fantastic journey must one day take them.

Quotes

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.

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.

They needed [Masklin]. They needed someone to grumble at.

I'm not scared, [Masklin] told himself. This is much worse than anything I've ever faced, and it's not frightening. It's too terrible to be frightening.

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.

This was one of those times when time itself slowed down and everything was suddenly 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...

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 hearing, 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.

The basic colour for a practical nome's clothes is mud. ... 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 yellow mud, sometimes brown mud, something 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.

"Are you trying to tell me you came from Outside?" 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."

"Outside! What's it like?"

Masklin looked blank. "Well," he said. "It's sort of big--"

Masklin had never heard a rat called anything, except perhaps, if you were driven to it, "dinner."

"You shut up, you," said Granny, automatically.

"I'm leader, I am. You got no right, talking like that to a leader," Torrit whined.

"O'course you're leader," snapped Granny Morkie. "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.

...there was food. It didn't look like anything he recognized, but it had to be food. After all, people were eating it.

Angalo: "I expect you've never seen a banana before, have you?"
Granny: "Bit small, that one. Quite tiny, in fact, compared to the ones we got at home."
Angalo: "It is, is it?"
Granny: "Oh, yes. Very puny. Why, the ones we got at home ... why, we could hardly dig them out o' the ground!"

Fun, Masklin thought. It wasn't a familiar word. Perhaps it referred to running around muddy ditches with hungry teeth chasing you.

"Be quiet! You know the words of Arnold Bros. (est 1905)! Everything Under One Roof. Everything! Therefore, there can be no Outside."

"Do you even remember that you are shipwrecked?"

"I'm Masklin," said Masklin. "I don't know who Shipwrecked is."

Later on, those five words became one of the most famous quotations in nome history. The got taught in schools. They got carved in stone. And it's sad, therefore, that at the time no one thought they were particularly important.

"Humans are a bit like magpies, I've always said. They just want things that glitter."

"You do not comprehend?"

"I don't know what 'comprehend' means."

"Evidently language has changed in ways I do not understand. ... I will endeavour to clarify my statement," said the Thing. A few lights flashed.

"Jolly good," said Masklin.

"Big-fella Store him go Bang along plenty soon enough chop-chop?" said the Thing, hopefully.

"Robbed," he repeated. "It means having your things taken away from you. You just can't say you don't want it to happen!"

"Why not?" said Grimma.

"Because--" the old nome hesitated. "I don't know, really. Tradition, I suppose."

...they could read and write. Anyone who can tell you what a piece of paper is saying must be strange.

Now it was beginning to dawn on Masklin that there was a different sort of knowledge, and it consisted of the things you needed to understand in order to survive among other nomes. Things like: be very careful when you tell people things they don't want to hear. And: the thought that they may be wrong makes people very angry.

"Goodness me, I can't go around letting people believe I've been wrong all along, can I? The Abbots have been denying there is anything Outside for generations. I can't suddenly say they were all wrong. People would think I've gone mad."

"Would they?" said Masklin.

"Oh, yes. Politics, you see."

"The important thing about being a leader is not being right or wrong, but being certain. Otherwise people wouldn't know what to think. Of course, it helps to be right as well," the Abbot conceded.

Abbot: "It seems to me that you have exactly the right qualification for being a leader."
Masklin: "I don't think so!"
Abbot: "That's what I mean. You don't want to be one."

"People are always a lot more complicated than you think."

Masklin wasn't too familiar with the subtleties of human behaviour. Humans were humans, in the same way that cows were just cows.

"She's a servant of the store," said Gurder, who was still trembling. "She's the enemy of the dreadful Prices Slashed, who wanders the corridors at night with his terrible shining light, to catch evil nomes!"

"It's a good job you don't believe in him, then," said Masklin.

"Of course I don't," agreed Gurder.

"Your teeth are chattering, though."

"That's because my teeth believe in him. And so do my knees. And my stomach. It's only my head that doesn't, and it's being carried around by a load of superstitious cowards."

"You shouldn't take girls anywhere dangerous," said Gurder virtuously.

Once again Masklin got the feeling he'd come to recognize often since he'd arrived in the Store. They were talking, their mouths were opening and shutting, every word by itself was perfectly understandable, but when they were all put together they made no sense at all. The best thing to do was ignore them. Back home, if women weren't to go anywhere dangerous, they wouldn't go anywhere.

"There's beans in bean tins, and jam in jam jars. There should be fire in fire buckets."

"There's someone coming," Masklin whispered. "Get down to the floor, quickly!"

"Demolished!" moaned Gurder, hugging himself and rocking from side to side. "Everything Must Go! Final Reductions! We're all doomed!"

"Yes, but do you think you could go and be doomed on the floor?"

He'd learned that humans in the Store had their names on little badges because -- he'd been told -- they were so stupid they wouldn't remember them otherwise.

"He's very ill. He says he's dyin'. I suppose he should know."

"Dying of what?" said Masklin.

"Dyin' of bein' alive for such a long time," said Granny.

Granny's remedies, made from simple, honest, and generally nearly poisonous herbs and roots, were amazing things. After one dose of stomache-ache jollop, you made sure you never complained of stomach ache ever again. In its way, it was a sort of cure.

"I don't say you're blessed with brains," he said. "In fact I reckon you're the stupid but dutiful kind who gets to be leader when there's no glory in it."

"Can he hear me?" said Gurder.

"Maybe," said Grimma. "Perhaps. But he won't be able to answer you, because he's dead."

"Where do you bury your dead?" Gurder had asked.

"Inside badgers and foxes, often," [Masklin had] said.

They wouldn't be able to get to grips with the fact that the stars, fr'instance, were much further away. Even if you ran all the way, it'd probably take weeks to reach them.

The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each one of them into tricky jobs, and each one of them...

"How did you work that out?" said Grimma.

"The Thing told me," said Masklin. It's something called critical path analysis. It means there's always something you should have done first. For example, if you want to build a house you need to know how to make bricks, and before you can make bricks you need to know what kind of clay to use. And so on."

"What's clay?"

'Don't know."

"What're bricks?"

"Not sure."

"Well, what's a house?" she demanded.

"Haven't quite worked it out," said Masklin. "But anyway, it's all very important."

"And there's something else called progress chasing."

"What's that?"

"I think it means shouting at people, 'Why haven't you done it yet?'"

Gurder thumped the wall. "Why in the name of Arnold Bros (est. 1905) didn't you ask my permission first?"

"Would you have given it?"

"No!"

"That's why, you see," said Masklin.

"It's a small step for a man, but a giant leap for nomekind."

"No, no, no, what you do is, you get a gnu, then you point it at the driver and someone says, 'Look out, he's got a gnu!' and you say, 'Take us where we want to go or I'll fire this gnu at you!'"

-- "Host Age at 10,000 Feet", Nome style

[Angalo] was grimy, and ragged, and looked as though he hadn't slept for hours -- but he walked proudly, with a strange swaying motion, like a nome who has boldly gone where no nome has gone before and can't wait to be asked about it.

Masklin: "What's up with him?"
Granny: "He has to think. That always worries people."

Dorcas: "You're going to need a powerful lot of nomes to do all this. And they're going to need training."
Masklin: "But, but all that they'd have to do is pull and push when they're told, won't they?"
Dorcas: "Well, laddie, I'm six, I've seen a lot of people, and I've got to tell you, if you lined up ten nomes and shouted 'Pull!', four of them would push and two of them would say 'Pardon?' That's how people are."

According to Gurder, the big pink humans that stood in Fashions, and Kiddie Klothes, and Young Living, and never moved at all, were those who had incurred Arnold Bros (est. 1905)'s displeasure. They had been turned into horrible pink stuff, and some said they could even be taken apart. But certain Klothian philosophers said no, they were particularly good humans, who had been allowed to stay in the Store for ever and not made to disappear at Closing Time. Religion was very hard to understand.

"He says making electricity is very simple. You just need to get hold of some stuff called you-ranium."

"But you're supposed to help us!" said Masklin.

"I suggest you consider deeply the proper meaning of the word 'help'," said the box. "Either you are intelligent nomes, or just clever animals. It's up to you to find out which."

Grimma looked at the others. "Tell him we're ready to start."

"Excuse me," said Gurder. "If it's anyone's job to tell them when we're ready to start, it's my job to tell them we're ready to start. I want it to be quite clear that I'm the person who tells people to start." He looked sheepishly at Grimma. "Er. We're ready to start," he said.

"It's a cigarette. I've seen humans with it before. What about it?" said Masklin.

"It's alight," said Angalo. "Do you think it can't even smell the [diesel]?"

"What happens if it catches alight, then?" said Masklin, suspecting that he knew the answer.

"It goes whoomph," said Angalo.

"Just whoomph?"

"Whoomph is enough."

The Store was having its last sale. It was holding a Grand Final Clearance of specially selected sparks, and flames to suit every pocket.

"Remember to show consideration for other [drivers]," said Masklin, severely.

"Well, I am, aren't I? I'm not running into them, am I?" said Angalo.

Grimma: "You are a total idiot. And speed mad! Why don't you listen?"
Angalo: "You can't speak to me like that! Gurder, tell her she can't call me names like that!"
Gurder: "As far as I am concerened right now, she can call you what she likes. Go to it, young woman."

Masklin: "Just supposing -- for the sake of argument, you understand -- we need to steal one of those [airplanes], do you think it could be done?"
Dorcas: "Shouldn't be too hard to drive. They've only got three wheels."