"This is it," said Dorcas.
"Are we at the barn yet?" a nome called up.
"No," said Grimma. "Not yet. Nearly."
Dorcas made a face.
"We might as well accept it now," he said. "You'll end up waving a stick with a star on it. I just hope they don't force me to mend their shoes." Grimma looked thoughtful. "If we drove as hard as we could at that car coming toward us-" she began.
"No," said Dorcas, firmly. "It really wouldn't solve anything."
"It'd make me feel a lot better," said Grimma.
She looked around at the fields.
"Why's it gone all dark?" she said. "We can't have been running all day. It was early morning when we started out."
"Doesn't time fly when you're enjoying yourself?" said Dorcas gloomily. "And I don't like milk much. I don't mind doing their housework if I don'? have to drink milk, but-"
"Just look, will you?"
Darkness was spreading across the fields.
"It might be an ellipse," said Dorcas. "I read about them. It all goes dark when the Sun covers the Moon. And possibly vice versa," he added doubtfully.
The car ahead of them squealed to a halt, crashed backward across the road into a stone wall, and came to an abrupt stop. In the field by the road the sheep were running away. It wasn't theordinary panic of sheep ordinarily disturbed. They had their heads downand were pounding across the ground with one aim in mind. They were sheepwho had decided that this was no time to waste energy panicking when itcould be used for galloping away as fast as possible.
A loud and unpleasant humming noise filled the air.
"My word," Dorcas said weakly. "They're pretty darn terrifying, theseellipses." Down below, the nomes were panicking. They weren't sheep, theycould all think for themselves, and when you started to think hard about sudden darkness and mysterious humming noises, panicking seemed a logicalidea.
Little lines of crawling blue fire crackled over the Cat's battered paintwork. Dorcas felt his hair standing on end.
Grimma stared upward.
The sky was totally black. "It's ... all ... right," she said slowly. "Do you know, I think it's all right!"
Dorcas looked at his hands. Sparks crackled off his fingertips.
"It is, is it?" was all he could think of.
"That isn't night, it's a shadow. There's something huge floating above us."
"And that's better than night, is it?" said Dorcas.
"I think so. Come on, let's get off."
She shinned down the rope to the Cat's deck. She was smiling madly. That was almost as terrifying as everything else put together. They weren't used to Grimma smiling.
"Give me a hand," she said. "We've got to get down. So he can be sure it's us." They looked at her in astonishment as she wrestled with the gangplank.
"Come on," she repeated. "Help me, can't you?"
"He? Who he?" said Dorcas. "What he? What do you mean?"
"Him," said Grimma. "I know it's him. You people-help me!"
They helped. Sometimes, when you're totally confused, you'll listen to anyone who seems to have any sort of aim in mind. They grabbed the plank and shoved it out of the back of the cab until it tilted and swung down toward the road. At least there wasn't so much sky now. The blue was a thin line around the edge of the solid darkness overhead.
Not entirely solid. When Dorcas's eyes grew used to it, he could make out squares and rectangles and circles. Nomes scurried down the plank and milled around on the road below, uncertain whether to run or stay.
Above them one of the dark squares in the shadow moved aside. There was a clank, and then a rectangle of darkness whirred down very gently, like an elevator without wires, and landed softly on the road. It was quite big. There was something on it. Something in a pot. Something red and yellow and green.
The nomes craned forward to see what it was.
Chapter 15
II. Thus ended the journey of the Cat, and thenomes fled, looking not behind.
-From the Book of Nome, Stranger Frogs I, v. II.
Dorcas clambered down awkwardly onto the Cat's oily deck. It was empty now, except for the bits of string and wood that the nomes had used.
They've dropped things just any old way, he thought, listening to the distant chattering of the nomes. It's not right, leaving litter. Poor old Cat deserves more than this. There was some sort of excitement going on outside, but he didn't pay it much attention.
He bumbled around for a bit, trying to coil up the string and push the wood into neat piles. He pulled down the wires that had let the Cat taste the electricity. He got down on his hands and knees and tried to rub out the muddy footprints. The Cat made noises, even with the engine stopped. Little pops and sizzles, and the occasional ping.
It was going to sleep again. Sleeping was something cats did a lot of, he'd heard. Dorcas sat down and leaned against the yellow metal. He didn't know what was going on. It was so far outside anything he'd ever seen before that his mind wasn't letting him worry about it. Perhaps that thing up there is just another machine, he thought wearily. A machine for making night come down suddenly.
He reached out and stroked the Cat. "Well done," he said.
Sacco and Nooty found him sitting with his head against the cab wall, staring vacantly at his feet. "Everyone's been looking for you!" Sacco said. "It's like an airplane without wings! It's just floating there in the air! So you must come and tell us what makes it go ... I say, are you all right?" "Hmm?"
"Are you all right?" said Nooty. "You look rather odd."
Dorcas nodded slowly. "Just a bit worn out," he said.
"Yes, but, you see, we need you," said Sacco insistently.
Dorcas groaned and allowed himself to be helped to his feet. He took a last look around the cab. "He really went, didn't he?" he said. "He really went very well. All things considered. For his age."
He tried to give Sacco a cheerful look.
"What are you talking about?" said Sacco.
"All that time in that shed. Since the world was made, perhaps. And I just greased him and fuelled him up and away he went," said Dorcas.
"The machine? Oh, yes. Well done," said Sacco.
"But-" Nooty pointed upward.
Dorcas shrugged.
"Oh, I'm not bothered about that," he said. "It's probably Masklin's doing. Perfectly simple explanation. Grimma is right. It's probably that flying thing he went off to get."
"But something has come out of it!" said Nooty.
"Not Masklin, you mean?"
"It's some kind of plant!"
Dorcas sighed. Always one thing after another. He patted the Cat again.
"Well, I care," he said.
He straightened up, and turned to the others. "All right," he said. "Show me."
It was in a metal pot in the middle of the floating platform. The nomes craned and tried to climb on one another's shoulders to look at it, and none of them knew what it was except for Grimma, who was staring at it with a strange quiet smile on her face. It was a branch from a tree. On the branch was a flower the size of a bucket.
If you climbed high enough, you could see that, held within its glistening petals, was a pool of water. And from the depths of the pool little yellow frogs stared up at the nomes. "Have you any idea what it is?" said Sacco.
Dorcas smiled. "Masklin's found out that it's a good idea to send a girl flowers," he said. "And I think everything's all right." He glanced at Grimma.
"Yes, but what is it?"
"I seem to remember it's called a bromeliad," said Dorcas. "It grows on the top of very tall trees in wet forests a long way away, and littlefrogs spend their whole lives in it. Your whole life in one flower.
Imagine that. Grimma once said she thought it was the most astonishingthing in the world."
Sacco bit his lip thoughtfully.
"Well, there's electricity," he said. "Electricity is quite astonishing."
"Or hydraulics," said Nooty, taking his hand. "You told me hydraulics was fascinating."