Diggers by Terry Pratchett

yelled. “I will teach them a lesson they won’t forget.”
    The rest of the nomes said nothing. If Nisodemus wanted to stand in front of a car, then that was all right by them.
    â€œWe will all defy them!” he shouted.
    â€œEr . . . what?” said a nome.
    â€œBrothers, let us stand here resolute and show Order that we are united in opposition! Um. If you truly believe in Arnold Bros (est. 1905), no harm will come to you!”
    The flashing light was well up the lane now. Soon it would be crossing the wide patch in front of the gates, where the great chain hung uselessly from the broken padlock.
    Grimma opened her mouth to say: Don’t be stupid, you idiots, Arnold Bros (est. 1905) doesn’t want you to stand in front of cars. I’ve seen what happens to nomes who stand in front of cars. Your relatives have to bury you in an envelope.
    She was about to say all that and decided not to. For months and months people had been telling nomes what to do. Perhaps it was time to stop.
    She saw a number of worried faces in the crowd turn toward her, and someone said, “What shall we do , Grimma?”
    â€œYeah,” said another nome, “she’s a Driver, they always know what to do.”
    She smiled at them. It wasn’t a very happy smile.
    â€œDo whatever you think best,” she said.
    There was a chorus of indrawn breaths.
    â€œWell, yeah,” said a nome, “but, well, Nisodemus says we can stop this thing just by believing we can. Is that true, or what?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Grimma. “You might be able to. I know I can’t.”
    She turned and walked off quickly toward the sheds.
    â€œStand firm,” commanded Nisodemus. He hadn’t been listening to the worried discussions behind him. Perhaps he wasn’t able to listen to anything now, except for little voices deep inside his head.
    â€œâ€˜Do whatever you think best,’” muttered a nome. “What sort of help is that?”
    They stood in their hundreds, watching the car coming closer. Nisodemus stood slightly ahead of the crowd, holding his hands in the air.
    The only sound was the crunch of tires on gravel.
    If a bird had looked down on the quarry in the next few seconds, it would have been amazed.
    Well, probably it wouldn’t. Birds are somewhat stupid creatures and have a hard enough job even coming to terms with the ordinary, let alone the extraordinary. But if it had been an unusually intelligent bird—an escaped mynah bird, perhaps, or a parrot that had been blown several thousand miles off course by very strong winds—it would have thought:
    Oh. There is a wide hole in the hill, with little old rusty sheds in it, and a fence in front of it.
    And there is a car with a blue light on the top of it just going through a gate in the fence.
    And there are little black dots on the ground ahead of it. One dot standing very still, right in the path of the thing, and the others, the others—
    Breaking away and running. Running for their lives.
    They never did find Nisodemus again, even though a party of strong-stomached nomes went back much later and searched through the ruts and the mud.
    So a rumor grew up that perhaps, at the last minute, he had jumped up and caught hold of part of the car and had clambered onto it somehow. And then he’d waited there, too ashamed to face other nomes, until the car went back to wherever it came from, and had got off, and was living out the rest of his life quietly and without any fuss. He had been a good nome in his way, they said. Whatever else you might say about him, he believed in things, and he did what he thought was proper, so it was only right that he’d been spared and was still out there in the world, somewhere.
    This was what they told one another, and what they wrote down in The Book of Nome .
    What nomes might have thought in those private moments before they went to sleep . . . well, that was