'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 definite 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 everything.
'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 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.
'Only by followin' the Thing closely in all particulars 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 definitely 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 suggested 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 yellow 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? Coming 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 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. Is this a problem? 'You mean really Outside?' said the nome sidling closer.