Truckers Read Free Page B

poked his head under the gap.
    There was nothing but blurs and lights, and strange smells.
    It was all going wrong. It had seemed so sensible that night, a week ago. Anything was better than here. That had seemed so obvious then. But it was odd. The old ones moaned like anything when things weren’t exactly to their liking, but now, when everything was looking bad, they were almost cheerful.
    People were a lot more complicated than they looked. Perhaps the Thing could tell you that, too, if you knew how to ask.
    The truck turned a corner and rumbled down into blackness and then, without warning, stopped. He found himself looking into a huge lighted space, full of trucks, full of humans . . . .
    He pulled his head back quickly and scuttled across the floor to Torrit.
    â€œEr,” he said.
    â€œYes, lad?”
    â€œHeaven. Do humans go there?”
    The old nome shook his head. “ The Heavens,” he said. “More than one of ’em, see? Only nomes go there.”
    â€œYou’re absolutely certain?”
    â€œOh, yes.” Torrit beamed. “O’ course, they may have heavens of their own,” he said. “I don’t know about that. But they ain’t ours, you may depend upon it.”
    â€œOh.”
    Torrit stared at the Thing again.
    â€œWe’ve stopped,” he said. “Where are we?”
    Masklin stared wearily into the darkness.
    â€œI think I had better go and find out,” he said.
    There was whistling outside, and the distant rumble of human voices. The lights went out. There was a rattling noise, followed by a click, and then silence.
    After a while there was a faint scrabbling around the back of one of the silent trucks. A length of line, no thicker than thread, dropped down until it touched the oily floor of the garage.
    A minute went by. Then, lowering itself with great care hand over hand, a small, stumpy figure shinned down the line and dropped onto the floor. It stood rock still for a few seconds after landing, with only its eyes moving.
    It was not entirely human. There were definitely the right number of arms and legs, and the additional bits like eyes and so on were in the usual places, but the figure that was now creeping across the darkened floor in its mouse skins looked like a brick wall on legs. Nomes are so stocky that a Japanese sumo wrestler would look half starved by comparison, and the way this one moved suggested that it was considerably tougher than old boots.
    Masklin was, in fact, terrified out of his life. There was nothing here that he recognized, except for the smell of all , which he had come to associate with humans and especially with trucks (Torrit had told him loftily that all was a burning water that trucks drank, at which point Masklin knew the old nome had gone mad. It stood to reason. Water didn’t burn).
    None of it made any sense. Vast cans loomed above him. There were huge pieces of metal that had a made look about them. This was definitely a part of a human heaven. Humans liked metal.
    He did skirt warily around a cigarette end and made a mental note to take it back for Torrit.
    There were other trucks in this place, all of them silent. It was, Masklin decided, a truck nest. Which meant that the only food in it was probably all .
    He untensed a bit and prodded about under a bench that towered against one wall like a house. There were drifts of wastepaper there, and, led by a smell which here was even stronger than all , he found a whole apple core. It was going brown, but it was a pretty good find.
    He slung it across one shoulder and turned around.
    There was a rat watching him thoughtfully. It was considerably bigger and sleeker than the things that fought the nomes for the scraps from the litter bin. It dropped on all fours and trotted toward him.
    Masklin felt that he was on firmer ground here. All these huge dark shapes and cans and ghastly smells were quite beyond him, but he knew what a rat was, all right, and