Wings Read online

  "What?"

  "Well, if you were a human, would you expect to see nomes on a plane?" said Angalo.

  "Of course I wouldn't."

  "I bet you'd be amazed if you did see one, eh?"

  "Are you suggesting we deliberately show ourselves to a human?" Gurder said suspiciously. "We've never done that, you know."

  "I nearly did just now," said Masklin. "I won't do that again in a hurry!"

  "We've always preferred to starve to death on one peanut, you mean?"

  Gurder looked longingly at the piece of nut in his hand. They'd eaten peanuts in the Store, of course. Around Christmas Fayre, when the Food Hall was crammed with food you didn't normally see in the other seasons; they made a nice end to a meal. Probably they made a nice start to a meal too. What they didn't make was a meal. "What's the plan?" he said, wearily.

  One of the giving-out-food humans was pulling trays off a shelf when a movement made it look up. Its head turned very slowly.

  Something small and black was being lowered down right by its ear.

  It stuck tiny thumbs in small ears, wagged its fingers, and stuck out its tongue.

  "Thrrrrrrrrp," said Gurder.

  The tray in the human's hands crashed onto the floor in front of it. It made a long, drawn-out noise that sounded like a high-pitched foghorn, and backed away, raising its hands to its mouth. Finally it turned, very slowly, like a tree about to fall, and fled between the curtains.

  When it came back, with another human being, the little figure had gone.

  So had most of the food.

  "I don't know when I last had smoked salmon," said Gurder happily.

  "Mmmph," said Angalo.

  "You're not supposed to eat it like that," said Gurder severely. "You're not supposed to shove it all in your mouth and then cut off whatever won't fit. Whatever will people think?"

  " 'Sno people here," said Angalo indistinctly. " 'Sjust you an' Masklin."

  Masklin cut the lid off a container of milk. It was practically nome-sized.

  "This is more like it, eh?" said Gurder. "Proper food the natural way, out of tins and things. None of this having to clean the dirt off it, like in the quarry. And it's nice and warm in here too. It's the only way to travel. Anyone want some of this"

  - he prodded a dish vaguely, not sure of what was in it - "stuff?"

  The others shook their heads. The dish contained something shiny and wobbly and pink with a cherry on it, and in some strange way it managed to look like something you wouldn't eat even if it was pushed onto your plate after a week's starvation diet.

  "What does it taste like?" said Masklin, after Gurder had chewed a mouthful.

  "Tastes like pink," said Gurder.[4]

  "Anyone fancy the peanut to finish with?" said Angalo. He grinned. "No? I'll chuck it away, shall I?"

  "No!" said Masklin. They looked at him. "Sorry," he said. "I mean, you shouldn't. It's wrong to waste good food."

  [4] Little dishes of strange wobbly stuff tasting like pink turn up in nearly every meal on all airplanes. No one knows why. There's probably some sort of special religious reason.

  "It's wicked," said Gurder primly.

  "Mmm. Don't know about wicked," said Masklin. "Never been very clear on wicked. But it's stupid. Put it in your pack. You never know when you might need it."

  Angalo stretched his arms and yawned.

  "A wash would be nice," he said.

  "Didn't see any water," Masklin said. "There's probably a sink or a bathroom somewhere, but I wouldn't know where to start looking."

  "Talking of bathrooms..." said Angalo.

  "Right down the other end of the pipe, please," said Gurder.

  "And keep away from any wiring," volunteered the Thing. Angalo nodded in a puzzled fashion, and crawled away into the darkness.

  Gurder yawned and stretched his arms.

  "Won't the giving-out-food humans look for us?" he said.

  "I don't think so," said Masklin. "Back when we used to live Outside I'm sure humans saw us sometimes. I don't think they really believe their eyes. They wouldn't make those weird garden ornaments if they'd ever seen a real nome."

  Gurder reached into his robe and pulled out the picture of Grandson Richard, 39. Even in the dim light in the pipe, Masklin recognized it as the human in the seat. He hadn't got creases on his face from being folded up, and he wasn't made up of hundreds of tiny dots, but apart from that...

  "Do you think he's here somewhere?" said Gurder wistfully.

  "Could be. Could be," said Masklin, feeling wretched. "But, look, Gurder... maybe Angalo goes a bit too far, but he could be right. Maybe Grandson Richard, 39, is just another human being, you know. Probably humans did build the Store just for humans. Your ancestors just moved in because, well, it was warm and dry. And -"

  "I'm not listening, you know," said Gurder. "I'm not going to be told that we're just things like rats and mice. We're special."

  "The Thing is quite definite about us coming from somewhere else, Gurder," said Masklin meekly.

  The Abbot folded up the picture. "Maybe we did. Maybe we didn't," he said. "That doesn't matter."

  "Angalo thinks it matters if it's true."

  "Don't see why. There's more than one kind of truth." Gurder shrugged. "I might say, you're just a lot of dust and juices and bones and hair, and that's true. And I might say, you're something inside your head that goes away when you die. That's true too. Ask the Thing."

  Colored lights flickered across the Thing's surface.

  Masklin looked shocked.

  "I've never asked it that sort of question," he said.

  "Why not? It's the first question Pd ask."

  "It'll probably say something like 'Does not compute' or 'Inoperative parameters.' That's what it says when it doesn't know and doesn't want to admit it. Thing?"

  The Thing didn't reply. Its lights changed their pattern.

  "Thing?" Masklin repeated.

  "I am monitoring communications."

  "It often does that when it's feeling bored," said Masklin to Gurder. "It just sits there listening to invisible messages in the air. Pay attention, Thing. This is important. We want -"

  The lights moved. A lot of them went red.

  "Thing! We -"

  The Thing made the little clicking noise that was the equivalent of clearing its throat.

  "A nome has been seen in the pilot's cabin."

  "Listen, Thing, we - What?"

  "I repeat: A nome has been seen in the pilots cabin."

  Masklin looked around wildly.

  "Angalo?"

  "That is an extreme probability," said the Thing.

  3

  TRAVELING HUMANS: Large, nomelike creatures. Many humans spend a lot of time traveling from place to place, which is odd because there are usually too many humans at the place they're going to anyway. Also see under Animals, Intelligence, Evolution, and Custard.

  From A Scientific Encyclopedia for the Enquiring Young Nome

  by Angalo de Haberdasheri.

  The sound of Masklin's and Gurder's voices echoed up and down the pipe as they scrambled over the wires.

  "I thought he was taking too long!"

  "You shouldn't have let him go off by himself! You know what he's like about driving things!"

  "I shouldn't have let him?"

  "He's just got no sense of - which way now? We're been searching for ages."

  Angalo had said he thought the inside of a plane would be a mass of wires and pipes. He was nearly right. The nomes squeezed their way through a narrow, cable-hung wodd under the floor.

  "I'm too old for this! There comes a time in a nome's life when he shouldn't crawl around the inside of terrible flying machines!"

  "How many time have you done it?"

  "Once too often!"

  "We are getting closer," said the Thing.

  "This is what comes of showing ourselves! It's a Judgment," declared Gurder.

  "Whose?" said Masklin grimly, helping
him up.

  "What do you mean?'

  "There has to be someone to make a judgment!"

  "I meant just a judgment in general!"

  Masklin stopped.

  "Where to now, Thing?"

  "The message told the giving-out-food humans that a strange little creature was on the flight deck," said the Thing. "That is where ^ are. There are many computers here."

  "They're talking to you, are they?"

  "A little. They are like children. Mostly they listen," said the Thing smugly. "They are not very intelligent."

  "What are we going to do?" said Gurder.

  "We're going to . . ," Masklin hesitated. The word "rescue" was looking up somewhere in the sentence ahead.

  It was a good, dramatic word.

  He longed to say it. The trouble was that there was another, simpler, nastier word a little farther beyond.

  It was "how"?

  "I don't think they'd try to hurt him," he said, hoping it was true. "Maybe they'll put him somewhere. We ought to find somewhere where we can see what's happening." He looked helplessly at the wires and intricate bits of metal in front of them.

  "You'd better let me lead, then," said Gurder, in a matter-of-fact voice.

  "Why?"

  "You might be very good at wide-open spaces," said the Abbot, pushing past him. "But in the Store we know all about getting around inside things."

  He rubbed his hands together.

  "Right," he said, and then grabbed a cable and slid through a gap Masklin hadn't even noticed was there.

  "Used to do this sort of thing when I was a boy," he said. "We used to get up to all sorts of tricks."

  "Yes?" said Masklin.

  "Down this way, I think. Mind the wires. Oh, yes. Up and down the elevator shafts, in and out of the telephone switchboard -"

  "I thought you always said kids spent far too much time running around and getting into mischief these days?"

  "Ah. Yes. Well, that's juvenile delinquency," said Gurder sternly. "It's quite different from our youthful high spirits. Let's try up here."

  They crawled between two warm metal walls. There was daylight ahead.

  Masklin and Gurder lay down and pulled themselves forward.

  There was an odd-shaped room, not a lot bigger than the cab of the Truck itself. Like the cab, it was really just a space where the human drivers fitted into the machinery. There was a lot of that.

  It covered the walls and ceiling. Lights and switches, dials and levers. Masklin thought, if Dorcas were here, we'd never get him to leave. Angalo's here somewhere, and we want him to leave.

  There were two humans kneeling on the floor. One of the giving-out-food females was standing by them. There was a lot of mooing and growling going on.

  "Human talking," muttered Masklin. "I wish we could understand it."

  "Very well, " said the Thing. "Stand by." "You can understand human noises?" "Certainly. They 're only nome noises slowed down." "What? What? You never told us that! You never told us that before!"

  "There are many billions of things I have not told you. Where would you like me to start?"

  "You can start by telling me what they're saying now," said Masklin. "Please?"

  "One of the humans has just said, 'It must have been a mouse or something,' and the other one said, 'You show me a mouse wearing clothes, and I'll admit it was a mouse.' And the giving-out-food female said, 'It was no mouse I saw. It blew a raspberry at me (exclamation).' "

  "What's a raspberry?"

  "The small red fruit of the plant Rubus idaeus."

  Masklin turned to Gurder.

  "Did you?"

  "Me? What fruit? Listen, if there'd been any fruit around I'd have eaten it. I just went 'thrrrrrrrrp.'"

  "One of the humans has just said, 'I looked around and there it was, staring out the window.'"

  "That's Angalo all right," said Gurder.

  "Now the other kneeling-down human has said, Well, whatever it is, it's behind this panel and it can't go anywhere.'"

  "It's taking off a bit of the wall!" said Masklin. "Oh, no! It's reaching inside!"

  The human mooed.

  "The human said, 'It bit me! The little devil bit me!' " said the Thing, conversationally.

  "Yep. That's Angalo," said Gurder. "His father was like that too. A fighter in a tight corner."

  "But they don't know what they've got!" said Masklin urgently. "They've seen him, but he ran away! They're arguing about it! They don't really believe in nomes! If we can get him out before he's caught, they're bound to think it was a mouse or something!"

  "I suppose we could get around there inside the walls," said Gurder. "But it'd take too long."

  Masklin looked desperately around the cabin. Besides the three people trying to catch Angalo there were two humans up at the front. They must be the drivers, he thought.

  "I'm right out of ideas," he said. "Can you think of anything, Thing?"

  "There is practically no limit to what I can think of."

  "I mean, is there anything you can do to help us rescue Angalo?"

  "Yes."

  "You'd better do it, then."

  "Yes."

  A moment later they heard the low clanging of alarms. Lights began to flash. The drivers shouted and leaned forward and started doing things to switches.

  "What's going on?" said Masklin.

  "It is possible that the humans are startled that they are no longer flying this machine," said the Thing.

  "They're not? Who is, then?"

  The lights rippled smoothly across the Thing.

  "lam."

  One of the frogs fell off the branch, and disappeared quietly into the leafy canopy far below. Since very small light animals can fall a long way without being hurt, it's quite likely that it survived in the forest world under the tree and had the second most interesting experience any tree frog has ever had.

  The rest of them crawled onward. They were going to have the most interesting experience any frog ever had anywhere, one which would go down in frog history and be remembered for ... maybe even for minutes.

  Masklin helped Gurder along another metal channel full of wires. Overhead, they could hear human feet and the growling of humans in trouble.

  "I don't think they're very happy about it," said Gurder.

  "But they haven't got time to look for something that was probably a mouse," said Masklin.

  "It's not a mouse, it's Angalo!" • "But afterward they'll think it was a mouse. I don't think humans want to know things that disturb them."

  "Sound just like nomes to me," said Gurder.

  Masklin looked at the Thing under his arm.

  "Are you really driving the Concorde?" he said.

  "Yes."

  "I thought to drive things you had to turn wheels and change gears and things?" said Masklin.

  "That is all done by machines. The humans press buttons and turn wheels just to tell machines what to do."

  "So what are you doing, then?"

  "7," said the Thing, "am being in charge."

  Masklin listened to the muted thunder of the engines.

  "Is that hard?" he said.

  "Not in itself. However, the humans keep trying to interfere."

  "I think we'd better find Angalo quickly, then," said Gurder. "Come on."

  They inched their way along another cable tunnel.

  "They ought to thank us for letting our Thing do their job for them," said Gurder solemnly.

  "I don't think they see it like that, exactly," said Masklin.

  "We are flying at a height of 55,000 feet at 1,352 miles per hour, " said the Thing.

  When they didn't comment, it added, "That's very high and very fast."

  "That's good," said Masklin, who realized that some sort of remark was expected.

  "Very, very fast."

  The two nomes squeezed through the gap between a couple of metal plates.

  "Faster than a bullet, in fact."

  "Amazing," said
Masklin.

  "Twice the speed of sound in this atmosphere," the Thing went on.

  "Wow."

  "I wonder if I can put it another way," said the Thing, and it managed to sound slightly annoyed. "It could get from the Store to the quarry in under fifteen seconds."

  "Good job we didn't meet it coming the other way, then," said Masklin.

  "Oh, stop teasing it," said Gurder. "It wants you to tell it it's a good boy - Thing," he corrected himself.

  "I do not," said the Thing, rather more quickly than usual. "I was merely pointing out that this is a very specialized machine and requires skillful control."

  "Perhaps you shouldn't talk so much, then," said Masklin.

  The Thing rippled its lights at him.

  "That was nasty," said Gurder.

  "Well, I've spent a year doing what the Thing's told me and I've never had so much as a 'thank you,'" said Masklin. "How high are 55,000 feet, anyway?"

  "Ten miles. Twice as far as the distance from the Store to the quarry."

  Gurder stopped.

  "Up?" he said. "We're that far ?"

  He looked down at the floor.

  "Oh," he said.

  "Now, don't you start," said Masklin quickly.

  "We've got enough problems with Angalo. Stop holding on to the wall like that!"

  Gurder had gone white.

  "We must be as high as all those fluffy white cloud things," he breathed.

  'Wo," said the Thing.

  "That's some comfort, then," said Gurder.

  "They 're all a long way below us."

  "Oh."

  Masklin grabbed the Abbot's arm.

  "Angalo, remember?" he said.

  Gurder nodded slowly and inched his way forward, holding on to things with his eyes closed.

  "We mustn't lose our heads," said Masklin. "Even if we are up so high." He looked down. The metal below him was quite solid. You needed to use imagination to see through it to the ground below.

  The trouble was that he had a very good imagination.

  "Ugh," he said. "Come on, Gurder. Give me your hand."

  "It's right in front of you."

  "Sorry. Didn't see it with my eyes shut."

  They spent what seemed like ages cautiously moving up and down among the wiring, until eventually Gurder said, "It's no good. There isn't a hole big enough to get through. He'd have found it if there was."

  "Then we've got to find a way into the cab and get him out that way," said Masklin.