"It loomed over them, so big that you had to keep on stepping back and back to see how big it was. It wasn't a thing, it was a bit of shaped sky..."
Somewhere in a place so far up there is no down, a ship is waiting to take the nomes home - back to wherever they came from. With their home in a quarry under threat, one nome -Masklin - knows that they've got to find a way of contacting this ship.

It means going to Florida (wherever that is), then getting to the launch of a communications satellite (whatever that is).A ridiculous plan. Impossible. But Masklin doesn't know this so he tries to do it anyway. And the first step is to try and hitch a ride on a new kind of truck, a truck with wings -

Concorde .. .He doesn't want to cause any trouble. He only wants to stea lone of those space shuttle things. But when you're only four inches high in a world full of humans, things have a nasty habit of getting rather complicated...