“Awk!” he said, gasping. “That smell!”
“Slipper’s foot-warming lotion,” Mixun said, nodding. “They must use it all over.”
He and Raegel were freezing, so they loudly demanded some protection from the cold for themselves. Wheeler was in a hurry to report to his colleagues, and he dashed off, leaving little Slipper to assist the humans.
“I’m doubtful there’s any clothing in camp that will fit you,” he said, stroking his beardless chin.
“Anything you have-blankets will do. Anything!”
“Very well. Follow me.”
They followed Slipper to a low structure made of driftwood and blocks of ice, cut and fitted with all the care of traditional masonry. Both men had to duck to enter the icehouse. It was surprisingly warm inside, which accounted for the walls running rivulets of water and the ceiling yielding a constant supply of shockingly cold drops.
The building was a warren of corridors and rooms, all sized to gnomish standards. Slipper led them a merry route through the bustling halls, and more than once Mixun lost sight of their guide as he passed through a crowd of fellow gnomes.
“Little mites all look alike!” he declared under his breath. Raegel chided him for his ignorance.
“They’re as different as you and me,” he said. “See? There’s Slipper, over there.”
“All right, hawkeye, you lead!”
Graciously, Raegel did just that. Before long, Slipper led them to a supply room. Furs and yard goods lay in heaps everywhere. “Help yourselves,” said the gnome. He turned to leave.
“Wait!” said Mixun. “These aren’t clothes. They’re just piles of cloth!”
“Can’t you make your own clothes? I can show you how to make your own, using the Improved Squirm-Proof Full Body Stitcher. You lie down on a table, see, with cloth beneath you and on top, and the machine sews around you, creating perfectly fitting clothes-”
“Never mind, friend Slipper,” Raegel said. “We’ll manage.” He found a brown woolen blanket and cut it into strips with Tamaro’s dagger, winding the strips around his legs as puttees. Mixun draped a gray linsey-woolsey blanket around his shoulders like a mantle.
Slipper sniffed. “If you want to be crude about it!” He tried to leave again.
“Wait,” Mixun said. “What about food? Where can we get something to eat?”
“Follow your nose. It will lead you to the Nevermind South Efficient Eatery and Experimental Food Shop.”
Raegel tied his leggings in place. “Now that sounds like fine dining to me.”
More warmly dressed and their hunger assuaged by a visit to the Efficient Eatery (“Just our luck-it’s experimental food day,” Raegel said when he saw the strange victuals offered), the men wandered around the gnome camp, trying to figure out what the little men were doing.
Former farmer Raegel, who developed an eye for counting free-roaming chickens as a child, estimated there were a thousand gnomes in Nevermind South. Other giant wheels, like Snow Biter, came and went via the sea. Since gnomes were always shouting their business for all to hear, Mixun heard every returning wheel master declare things like “The cut is sixty-nine percent complete,” or “the cut is seventy-seven percent complete.” At one point he snagged a busy gnome and asked, “What is this ‘cut’ I keep hearing about?”
“The cut that will make the Excellent Continental Ice Project,” said the gnome.
“You’re cutting out blocks of ice?” said Raegel.
“No, just one block.” The full-bearded gnome, clad in the cut-down pelt of a polar bear, slipped out of the puzzled Mixun’s grasp and hurried on.
“These little men are mad,” he declared.
“That’s been said before,” Raegel agreed. “Still, they do have lots of energy.”
Just then a shrill metallic whistle screamed, causing the two friends to leap, ready to run from whatever danger had just been announced. Instead of an attack, the gnomes poured out of their huts and houses and formed themselves into a disorganized mass, all facing northwest.
Even then, they couldn’t stop talking. A quartet of senior gnomes (recognizable by their knee-length beards) climbed atop a platform of ice bricks and waited for the mob to calm. It never did, so one of the elders put a large, elaborate-looking horn in his mouth and blew. The same piercing shriek emerged, overpowering all conversation.
“Comrades! Fellow inventors! Lend me your aural and ocular attention!” cried the longest-bearded gnome on the platform.
“Lend him what?” asked Raegel.
“I don’t know, but I’m not giving them any money,” Mixun warned.
“Shh!” said six gnomes in front of them. “The Chief Designer speaks!”
“Fellow technocrats! As of three o’ clock and ten minutes past this afternoon, the cut has reached eighty percent of our goal. At this rate it will take just two more days to reach the next phase of the Excellent Continental Ice Project!”
The gnomes on either side of the Chief Designer did some rapid calculating with nubs of chalk on slates.
“Uh, Chief, it will take two days and eight and half hours,” said one.
“Ha! You forgot to carry the one! It’s three days, two hours-”
“You forgot to allow for wind resistance!”
“Colleagues, colleagues! What about the Wingerish Fever?”
“Enough!” bellowed the Chief Designer. “Culmination is nigh, whatever the exact hour! At the Splitting minus one day, the hammer towers will begin operation. At Splitting minus six hours, all colleagues will secure their work and await the Splash.”
“Do you have any notion what he’s talking about?” Mixun asked.
“Not a whit,” Raegel said. “Seems to me they’re digging trenches in the ice with those wheel-machines- maybe to roof ‘em over and make tunnels out of them. That way they can get around no matter how much it snows.”
Mixun was impressed by his friend’s analytical powers. He had only one objection. “What could the gnomes be getting around to? There’s nothing here but snow, ice, and rocks.”
In answer, Raegel only shrugged.
The men passed the night and all the following day in idleness, eating, sleeping, or wandering around the camp and observing inexplicable gnome behavior. The snowy scene was littered with their odd machines, often highly complicated devices to do the simplest jobs-like the pendulum powered potato masher in the Efficient Eatery, or the snow whisk operated by the increasing weight of seagull droppings collecting on a teetering platform overlooking the sea.
Their second night at Nevermind South, Mixun and Raegel bedded down in the storeroom of the main ice-building. They were alive and well, which was a great improvement over their prospects since leaving Port o’ Call, but Mixun was already restless.
“We’ve got to find a way off this snowpile,” he whispered in the dark. “I’ll go mad if I have to stay here too long! How’re we going to get back to the real world?”
“If we had a boat, we could sail across Ice Mountain Bay to the Plains of Dust,” Raegel said.
Mixun said, “That won’t do.”
“What’s wrong with that? The gnomes must have gotten here by boat. We could borrow one of theirs, I’m certain.”
“I’m not against taking a boat. I just can’t go to the desert country.”
“Eh? Why’s that?”
“Because I can’t, that’s why. Why don’t you want to return to Throt?”
Raegel cleared his throat. “I get your meaning. Hmm. Ergoth is a possibility.”
“Are we still wanted in Silvamori?” Mixun said.