The Waste Lands (14 page)

A steel rod poked out of the robot’s midsection and flipped the gadget upright again. Eddie brought Roland’s revolver down, ignoring a momentary impulse to steady it with his free hand. That might be the way cops in his own world were taught to shoot, but it wasn’t the way it was done here.
When you forget the gun is there, when it feels like you’re shooting with your finger
, Roland had told them,
then you’ll be somewhere near home
.

Eddie pulled the trigger. The tiny radar-dish, which had begun to turn again in an effort to find the enemies, disappeared in a blue flash. The rat made a choked noise—
Cloop!
—and fell dead on its side.

Eddie turned with his heart jackhammering in his chest. He couldn’t remember being this furious since he realized that Roland meant to keep him in his world until his goddamned Tower was won or lost . . . probably until they were all worm-chow, in other words.

He levelled the empty gun at Roland’s heart and spoke in a thick voice he hardly recognized as his own. “If there was a round left in this, you could stop worrying about your fucking Tower right now.”

“Stop it, Eddie!” Susannah said sharply.

He looked at her. “It was going for
you
, Susannah, and it meant to turn you into ground chuck.”

“But it didn’t get me.
You
got
it
, Eddie. You got it. ”

“No thanks to him.” Eddie made as if to re-holster the gun and then realized, to his further disgust, that he had nothing to put it in. Susannah was wearing the holster. “Him and his lessons. Him and his goddam
lessons.
” He turned to Roland. “I tell you, for two cents—”

Roland’s mildly interested expression suddenly changed. His eyes shifted to a point over Eddie’s left shoulder.
“DOWN!”
he shouted.

Eddie didn’t ask questions. His rage and confusion were wiped from his mind immediately. He dropped, and as he did, he saw the gunslinger’s left hand blur down to his side.
My God
, he thought, still falling, he
CAN’T be that fast,
no one
can be that fast, I’m not bad but Susannah makes me look slow and he makes Susannah look like a turtle trying to walk uphill on a piece of glass—

Something passed just over his head, something that squealed at him in mechanical rage and pulled out a tuft of his hair. Then the gunslinger was shooting from the hip, three fast shots like thunder-cracks, and the squealing stopped. A creature which looked to Eddie like a large mechanical bat thudded to earth between the place where Eddie now lay and the one where Susannah knelt beside Roland. One of its jointed, rust-speckled wings thumped the ground once, weakly, as if angry at the missed chance, and then became still.

Roland crossed to Eddie, walking easy in his old sprung boots. He extended a hand. Eddie took it and let Roland help him to his feet. The wind had been knocked out of him and he found he couldn’t talk.
Probably just as well . . . seems like every time I open my mouth I stick my goddam foot into it.

“Eddie! You all right?” Susannah was crossing the clearing to where he stood with his head bent and his hands planted on his upper thighs, trying to breathe.

“Yeah.” The word came out in a croak. He straightened up with an effort. “Just got a little haircut.”

“It was in a tree,” Roland said mildly. “I didn’t see it myself, at first. The light gets tricky this time of day.” He paused and then went on in that same mild voice: “She was never in any danger, Eddie.”

Eddie nodded his head. Roland, he now realized, could almost have eaten a hamburger and drunk a milkshake before beginning his draw. He was that fast.

“All right. Let’s just say I disapprove of your teaching techniques, okay? I’m not going to apologize, though, so if you’re waiting for one, you can stop now.”

Roland bent, picked Susannah up, and began to brush her off. He did this with a kind of impartial affection, like a mother brushing off her toddler after she has taken one of her necessary tumbles in the dust of the back yard. “Your apology is not expected or necessary,” he said. “Susannah and I had a conversation similar to this one two days ago. Didn’t we, Susannah?”

She nodded. “Roland’s of the opinion that apprentice gunslingers who won’t bite the hand that feeds them from time to time need a good kick in the slats.”

Eddie looked around at the wreckage and slowly began to beat the bone-dust out of his pants and shirt. “What if I told you I don’t want to
be
a gunslinger, Roland old buddy?”

“I’d say that what you want doesn’t much matter.” Roland was looking at the metal kiosk which stood against the rock wall, and seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. Eddie had seen this before. When the conversation turned to questions of should-be, could-be, or oughtta-be, Roland almost always lost interest.

“
Ka
?” Eddie asked, with a trace of his old bitterness.

“That’s right.
Ka.
” Roland walked over to the kiosk and passed a hand along the yellow and black stripes which ran down its front. “We have found one of the twelve portals which ring the edge of the world . . . one of the six paths to the Dark Tower.

“And that is also
ka.”

EDDIE WENT BACK FOR Susannah’s wheelchair. No one had to ask him to do this; he wanted some time alone, to get himself back under control. Now that the shooting was over, every muscle in his body seemed to have picked up its own little thrumming tremor. He did not want either of them to see him this way—not because they might misread it as fear, but because one or both might know it for what it really was: excitement overload. He had liked it. Even when you added in the bat which had almost scalped him, he had liked it.

The trouble was, he
didn’t
know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could
talk
about how he didn’t want to be a gunslinger, how he didn’t want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had
enjoyed
blowing the electronic menagerie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland’s gun was his own private hand-held thunderstorm. He had
enjoyed
kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part—the being scared part—actually seemed to add to the enjoyment.

All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that Roland’s illness was a communicable disease.

As he wrestled Susannah’s chair through the tangle of junk-alders, cursing the branches that whipped at his face and tried to poke his eyes out, Eddie found himself able to admit at least some of these things, and the admission cooled his blood a little.
I want to see if it looks the way it did in my dream, he thought. To see something like that . . . that would be really fantastic.

And another voice spoke up inside.
I’ll bet his other friends—the ones with the names that sound like they came straight from the Round Table in King Arthur’s court—I’ll bet they felt the same way, Eddie. And they’re all dead. Every one of them.

He recognized that voice, like it or not. It belonged to Henry, and that made it a hard voice not to hear.

ROLAND, WITH SUSANNAH BALANCED on his right hip, was standing in front of the metal box that looked like a subway entrance closed for the night. Eddie left the wheelchair at the edge of the clearing and walked over. As he did, the steady humming noise and the vibration under his feet became louder. The machinery making the noise, he realized, was either inside the box or under it. It seemed that he heard it not with his ears but somewhere deep inside his head, and in the hollows of his gut.

“So this is one of the twelve portals. Where does it go, Roland? Disney World?”

Roland shook his head. “I don’t know where it goes. Maybe nowhere . . . or everywhere. There’s a lot about my world I don’t know—surely you both have realized that. And there are things I used to know which have changed.”

“Because the world has moved on?”

“Yes.” Roland glanced at him. “Here, that is not a figure of speech. The world really is moving on, and it goes ever faster. At the same time, things are wearing out . . . falling apart . . .” He kicked the mechanical corpse of the walking box to illustrate his point.

Eddie thought of the rough diagram of the portals which Roland had drawn in the dirt.
“Is
this the edge of the world?” he asked, almost timidly. “I mean, it doesn’t look much different than anyplace else.” He laughed a little. “If there’s a drop-off, I don’t see it.”

Roland shook his head. “It’s not that kind of edge. It’s the place where one of the Beams starts. Or so I was taught.”

“Beams?” Susannah asked. “What Beams?”

“The Great Old Ones didn’t make the world, but they did
re
-make it. Some tale-tellers say the Beams saved it; others say they are the seeds of the world’s destruction. The Great Old Ones created the Beams. They are lines of some sort . . lines which
bind
. . . and
hold
. . .”

“Are you talking about magnetism?” Susannah asked cautiously.

His whole face lit up, transforming its harsh planes and furrows into something new and amazing, and for a moment Eddie knew how Roland would look if he actually
did
reach his Tower.

“Yes! Not
just
magnetism, but that is a part of it . . . and gravity . . . and the proper alignment of space, size, and dimension. The Beams are the forces which bind these things together.” “Welcome to physics in the nuthouse,” Eddie said in a low voice.

Susannah ignored this. “And the Dark Tower? Is it some kind of generator? A central power-source for these Beams?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you
do
know that this is point A,” Eddie said. “If we walked long enough in a straight line, we’d come to another portal—call it point C—on the other edge of the world. But before we did, we’d come to point B. The center-point. The Dark Tower.”

The gunslinger nodded.

“How long a trip is it? Do you know?”

“No. But I know it’s very far, and that the distance grows with every day that passes.”

Eddie had bent to examine the walking box. Now he straightened up and stared at Roland. “That can’t be.” He sounded like a man trying to explain to a small child that there really isn’t a boogeyman living in his closet, that there
can’t
be because there isn’t any such thing as the boogeyman, not really. “Worlds don’t
grow,
Roland.”

“Don’t they? When I was a boy, Eddie, there were maps. I remember one in particular. It was called The Greater Kingdoms of the Western Earth. It showed my land, which was called by the name Gilead. It showed the Downland Baronies, which were overrun by riot and civil war in the year after I won my guns, and the hills, and the desert, and the mountains, and the Western Sea. It was a long distance from Gilead to the Western Sea—a thousand miles or more—
but it had taken me over twenty years to cross that distance.”

“That’s impossible,” Susannah said quickly, fearfully. “Even if you
walked
the whole distance it couldn’t take twenty years.”

“Well, you have to allow for stops to write post-cards and drink beer,” Eddie said, but they both ignored him.

“I didn’t walk but rode most of the distance on horseback,” Roland said. “I was—slowed up, shall we say?—every now and then, but for most of that time I was moving. Moving away from John Farson, who led the revolt which toppled the world I grew up in and who wanted my head on a pole in his courtyard—he had good reason to want that, I suppose, since I and my compatriots were responsible for the deaths of a great many of his followers—and because I stole something he held very dear.”

“What, Roland?” Eddie asked curiously.

Roland shook his head. “That’s a story for another day . . . or maybe never. For now, think not of that but of this: I’ve come
many
thousands of miles. Because the world is growing.”

“A thing like that just can’t happen,” Eddie reiterated, but he was badly shaken, all the same. “There’d be earthquakes . . . floods . . . tidal waves . . . I don’t know what all . . .”

“Look!”
Roland said furiously. “Just look around you! What do you see? A world that is slowing down like a child’s top even as it speeds up and moves on in some other way none of us understand. Look at your kills, Eddie! Look at your kills, for your father’s sake!”

He took two strides toward the stream, picked up the steel snake, examined it briefly, and tossed it to Eddie, who caught it with his left hand. The snake broke in two pieces as he did so.

“You see? It’s exhausted.
All
the creatures we found here were exhausted. If we hadn’t come, they would have died before long, anyway. Just as the bear would have died.”

“The bear had some sort of disease,” Susannah said.

The gunslinger nodded. “Parasites which attacked the natural parts of its body. But why did they never attack it before?”

Susannah did not reply.

Eddie was examining the snake. Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire. Yet he could see flecks of rust, not just on the surface of the half-snake he still held, but in its guts as well. And there was a patch of wetness where either oil had leaked out or water had seeped in. This moisture had rotted away some of the wires, and a greenish stuff that looked like moss had grown over several of the thumbnail-sized circuit boards.