（外文电子版资料）Terry Pratchett - Discworld - Wings.doc

In the beginning . . . . . . was Arnold Bros. (est. 1905), the great de- partment store. It was the home of several thousand nomes—as they called themselves—whod long ago given up life in the countryside and settled down under the floorboards of Mankind. Not that they had anything to do with humans. Humans were big and slow and stupid. Nomes live fast. To them, ten years is like a cen- tury. Since theyd been living in the Store for more than eighty years, theyd long ago forgotten that there were things like Sun and Rain and Wind. All there was, was the Store—created by the legendary Arnold Bros. (est. 1905) as a proper place for nomes to live. And then, into the Store from an Outside the nomes didnt believe existed, came Masklin and his little tribe. They knew what Rain and Wind ? 3 - were, all right. Thats why theyd tried to get away from them. With them they brought the Thing. For years they had thought of the Thing as a sort of talisman or lucky charm. Only in the Store, near electric- ity, did it wake up and tell a few selected nomes things they hardly understood. They learned that they had originally come from the stars, in some sort of Ship, and that some- where up in the sky that Ship had been waiting for thousands of years to take them home. And they learned that the Store was going to be demolished in three weeks. How Masklin tricked, bullied, and persuaded the nomes into leaving the Store by stealing one of its huge trucks is recounted in Truckers. They made it to an old quarry, and for a little while things went well enough. But when youre four inches high in a world full of giant people, things never go very well for very long. They found that humans were going to reopen the quarry. At the same time, they also found a scrap of newspaper that had a picture of Richard Arnold, grandson of one of the brothers who founded Ar- nold Bros. The company that had owned the Store was now a big international concern, and Grand- son Richard, 39—said the newspaper—