place. But now . . . suppose there is someone there, Eddie? Someone in charge who turns out to be . . .” He couldn’t finish.
Eddie could. “Someone who turns out to be just another bumhug? Is that it? God not dead but feeble-minded and malicious?”
Roland nodded. This was not, in fact, precisely what he was afraid of, but he thought Eddie
had at least come close.
“How can that be, Roland? Considering what we feel?”
Roland shrugged, as if to say anything could be.
“In any case, what choice do we have?”
“None,” Roland said bleakly. “All things serve the Beam.”
Whatever the great and singing force was, it seemed to be coming from the road that ran west
from the shopping center, back into the woods. Kansas Road, according to the sign, and that
made Eddie think of Dorothy and Toto and Blaine the Mono.
He dropped the transmission of their borrowed Ford into Drive and started rolling forward.
His heart was beating in his chest with slow, exclamatory force. He wondered if Moses had felt
like this when he approached the burning bush which contained God. He wondered if Jacob had
felt like this, awakening to find a stranger, both radiant and fair, in his camp — the angel with whom he would wrestle. He thought that they probably had. He felt sure that another part of their journey was about to come to an end — another answer lay up ahead.
God living on Kansas Road, in the town of Bridgton, Maine? It should have sounded crazy,
but didn’t.
Just don’t strike me dead, Eddie thought, and turned west. I need to get back to my sweetheart, so please don’t strike me dead, whoever or whatever you are.
“Man, I’m so scared,” he said.
Roland reached out and briefly grasped his hand.
TWO
Three miles from the shopping center, they came to a dirt road which struck off into the pine
trees on their left. There had been other byways, which Eddie had passed without slowing from
the steady thirty miles an hour he had been maintaining, but at this one he stopped.
Both front windows were down. They could hear the wind in the trees, the grouchy call of a
crow, the not-too-distant buzz of a powerboat, and the rumble of the Ford’s engine. Except for a hundred thousand voices singing in rough harmony, those were the only sounds. The sign marking the turnoff said no more than private drive. Nevertheless, Eddie was nodding.
“This is it.”
“Yes, I know. How’s your leg?”
“Hurts. Don’t worry about it. Are we gonna do this?”
“We have to,” Roland said. ‘You were right to bring us here. What’s here is the other half of this. ” He tapped the paper in his pocket, the one conveying ownership of the vacant lot to the Tet Corporation.
“You think this guy King is the rose’s twin.”
“You say true.” Roland smiled at his own choice of words. Eddie thought he’d rarely seen one so sad. “We’ve picked up the Calla way of talking, haven’t we? Jake first, then all of us. But that will fall away.”
“Further to go,” Eddie said. It wasn’t a question.
“Aye, and it will be dangerous. Still . . . maybe nothing so dangerous as this. Shall we roll?”
“In a minute. Roland, do you remember Susannah mentioning a man named Moses Carver?”
“A stem . . . which is to say a man of affairs. He took over her father’s business when sai Holmes died, am I correct?”
“Yeah. He was also Suze’s godfather. She said he could be trusted completely. Remember how mad she got at Jake and me when we suggested he might have stolen the company’s money?”
Roland nodded.
“I trust her judgment,” Eddie said. “What about you?”
“Yes.”
“If Carver is honest, we might be able to put him in charge of the things we need to accomplish in this world.”
None of this seemed terribly important compared to the force Eddie felt rising all around him,
but he thought it was. They might only have one chance to protect the rose now and ensure its
survival later. They had to do it right, and Eddie knew that meant heeding the will of destiny.
In a word, ka.
“Suze says Holmes Dental was worth eight or ten million when you snatched her out of New
York, Roland. If Carver’s as good as I hope he is, the company might be worth twelve or
fourteen million by now.”
“That’s a lot?”
“Delah,” Eddie said, tossing his open hand at the horizon, and Roland nodded. “It sounds funny to talk about using the profits from some kind of dental process to save the viniverse, but that’s just what I am talking about. And the money the tooth-fairy left her may only be the beginning. Microsoft, for instance. Remember me mentioning that name to Tower?”
Roland nodded. “Slow down, Eddie. Calm down , I beg.”
“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, and pulled in a deep breath.
“It’s this place. The singing. The faces . . . do you see the faces in the trees? In the shadows?”
“I see them very well.”
“It makes me feel a little crazy. Bear with me. What I’m talking about is merging Holmes
Dental and the Tet Corporation, then using our knowledge of the future to turn it into one of the richest combinations in the history of the world. Resources to equal those of the Sombra
Corporation . . . or maybe North Central Positronics itself.”
Roland shrugged, then lifted a hand as if to ask how Eddie could talk about money while in
the presence of the immense force flowing along the barrel of the Beam and through them, lifting the hair from the napes of their necks, making their sinuses tingle, turning every woodsy shadow into a watching face . . . as if a multitude had gathered here to watch them play out a crucial scene in their drama.
“I know how you feel, but it matters, ” Eddie insisted. “Believe me, it does. Suppose, for instance, we were to grow fast enough to buy out North Central Positronics before it can rise as a force in this world? Roland, we might be able to turn it, the way you can turn even the biggest river with no more than a single spade up in its headwaters, where it’s only a trickle.”
At this Roland’s eyes gleamed. “Take it over,” he said. “Turn its purpose from the Crimson King’s to our own. Yes, that might be possible.”
“Whether it is or isn’t, we have to remember that we’re not just playing for 1977, or 1987, where I came from, or 1999, where Suze went.” In that world, Eddie realized, Calvin Tower
might be dead and Aaron Deepneau would be for sure, their final action in the Dark Tower’s
drama — saving Donald Callahan from the Hitler Brothers — long finished. Swept from the
stage, both of them. Into the clearing at the end of the path along with Gasher and Hoots, Benny Slight-man, Susan Delgado
(Calla, Callahan, Susan, Susannah)
and the Tick-Tock Man, even Blaine and Patricia. Roland and his ka-tet would also pass into
that clearing, be it early or late. In the end — if they were fantastically lucky and suicidally brave
— only the Dark Tower would stand. If they could nip North Central Positronics in the bud, they
might be able to save all the Beams that had been broken. Even if they failed at that, two Beams might be enough to hold the Tower in place: the rose in New York and a man named Stephen
King in Maine. Eddie’s head had no proof that this was indeed the case . . . but his heart believed it.
“What we’re playing for, Roland, is the ages.”
Roland made a fist and thumped it lightly on the dusty dashboard of John Cullum’s old Ford
and nodded.
“Anything can go on that lot, you realize that? Anything. A building, a park, a monument, The National Gramophone Institute. As long as the rose stays. This guy Carver can make the Tet
Corporation legal, maybe working with Aaron Deepneau — ”
“Yes,” Roland said. “I liked Deepneau. He had a true face.”
Eddie thought so, too. “Anyway, they can draw up legal papers that take care of the rose —
the rose always stays, no matter what. And I’ve got a feeling that it will. 2007, 2057, 2525, 3700 .
. . hell, the year 19,000 . . . I think it’ll always be there. Because it may be fragile, but I think it’s also immortal. We have to do it right while we have the chance, though. Because this is the key world. In this one you never get a chance to whittle a little more if the key doesn’t turn. In this world I don’t think there are any do-overs.”