The nomes had not got the railroad fully worked out yet. But it wasobviously dangerous, because they could see a road that crossed it and, whenever the railroad moving thing was coming, two gates came down overthe road.

The nomes knew what gates were for. You saw them on fields, to stopthings from getting out. It stood to reason, therefore, that the gateswere to stop the trains from escaping from their rails and rushing aroundthe place.

Then there were more fields, some gravel pits, good for fishing, for thenomes who wanted fish, and then there was the airport.

Masklin had spent hours in the summer watching the planes. They drovealong the ground, he noticed, and then went up sharply, like a bird, andgot smaller and smaller and disappeared.

That was the big worry. Masklin sat on his favorite stone, in the rainthat was starting to fall, and started to worry about it. So many thingswere worrying him these days he had to stack them up, but below all ofthem was this big one.

They should be going where the planes went. That was what the Thing hadtold him, when it was still speaking to him. The nomes had come from thesky. Up above the sky, in fact, which was a bit hard to understand, because surely the only thing there was above the sky was more sky. Andthey should go back. It was their ... something beginning with D.

Density. Their density. Worlds of their own, they once had. And somehowthey'd got stuck here. But-this was the worrying part-the ship thing, the airplane that flew through the really high sky, between the stars, was still up there somewhere. The first nomes had left it behind whenthey came down here in a smaller ship, and the small ship had crashed, and they hadn't been able to get back.

And he was the only one that knew.

The old Abbot-the one before Gurder-he had known. Grimma and Dorcas and Gurder all knew some of it, but they had busy minds and they werepractical people and there was so much to organize these days.