Diggers by Terry Pratchett Page A

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    Humans clomped slowly around the train and what remained of the truck. Lots of other vehicles had turned up at what was, for humans, great speed. Many of them had blue lights on top.
    The nomes had learned to be worried by things with flashing blue lights on top.
    The Land Rover belonging to the quarry men was there as well. One of the quarry men was pointing to the wrecked truck and shouting at the others. He’d opened the smashed engine compartment and was pointing to where the battery wasn’t.
    Beside the railway, the breeze rustled the long grass. And some of the long grass rustled without any wind at all.
    Dorcas had been right. Where humans went once, they went again. The quarry belonged to them. Three trucks were parked outside the sheds, and humans were everywhere. Some were repairing the fence. Some were taking boxes and drums off the trucks. One was even in the manager’s office, tidying up.
    The nomes crouched where they could, listening fearfully to the sounds above them. There weren’t many hiding places for two thousand nomes, small though they were.
    It was a very long day. In the shadows under some of the sheds, in the darkness behind crates, in some cases even on the dusty rafters under the tin roofs, the nomes passed it as best they could.
    There were escapes so narrow, a postcard couldn’t have got through them. Old Munby Confectioneri and most of his family were left blinking in the light when a human moved the tatty old box they were cowering behind. Only a quick dash to the shelter of a stack of cans saved them. And, of course, the fact that humans never really looked hard at what they were doing.
    That wasn’t the worst bit, though.
    The worst bit was much worse.
    The nomes sat in the noisy darkness, not daring even to speak, and felt their world vanishing. Not because the humans hated nomes. Because they didn’t notice them.
    There was Dorcas’s electricity, for example. He’d spent a long time twisting bits of wire together and finding a safe way to steal electricity from the fuse box. A human pulled them out without thinking, twiddled inside with a screwdriver, and put up a new box with a lock on it. Then it mended the telephone.
    The Store nomes needed electricity. They couldn’t remember a time when they had been without it. It was a natural thing, like air. And now theirs was a world of endless darkness.
    And still the terror went on. The rough floorboards shook overhead, raining dust and splinters. Metal drums boomed like thunder. There was the continual sound of hammering. The humans were back, and they meant to stay.
    They did go eventually, though. When the daylight drained from the winter sky, like steel growing cold, some of the humans got into their vehicles and drove off down the lane.
    They did one puzzling thing before they left. Nomes had to scramble over one another to get out of the way when one of the floorboards in the manager’s office was pulled up. A huge hand reached down and put a little tray on the packed earth under the floor. Then the darkness came back as the board was replaced.
    The nomes sat in the gloom and wondered why on earth the humans, after a day like this, were giving them food.
    The tray was piled with flour. It wasn’t much, compared to Store food, but to nomes who had spent all day hungry and miserable, it smelled good .
    A couple of younger ones crawled closer. It was the most tantalizing smell.
    One of them took a handful of the stuff.
    â€œDon’t eat it!”
    Grimma pushed her way through the packed bodies.
    â€œBut it smells so—” one of the nomes warbled.
    â€œHave you ever smelled anything like it before?” she said.
    â€œWell, no—”
    â€œSo you don’t know it’s good to eat, do you? Listen. I know about stuff like this. Where we—where I used to live, in the hole . . . there was a place along the road where humans came to eat, and sometimes