“If you’ve changed your mind…”
Eddie was shaking his head. “No. I want to go through with it.” He flashed a sudden, bright grin. “You’re not worried about me scoring, are you? Finding the man and getting high?”
From deep in the cave, Henry exulted, “It’s China White, bro! Them niggers sell the best!”
“Not at all,” Roland said. “There are plenty of things I am worried about, but you returning to your old habits isn’t one of them.”
“Good.” Eddie stepped a little farther into the cave, looking at the free-standing door. Except for the hieroglyphics on the front and the crystal knob with the rose etched on it, this one looked exactly like the ones on the beach. “If you go around—?”
“If you go around, the door’s gone,” Roland said. “There is a hell of a drop-off, though… all the way to Na’ar, for all I know. I’d mind that, if I were you.”
“Good advice, and Fast Eddie says thankya.” He tried the crystal doorknob and found it wouldn’t budge in either direction. He had expected that, too. He stepped back.
Roland said, “You need to think of New York. Of Second Avenue in particular, I think. And of the time. The year of nineteen and seven-seven.”
“How do you think of a year?”
When Roland spoke, his voice betrayed a touch of impatience. “Think of how it was on the day you and Jake followed Jake’s earlier self, I suppose.”
Eddie started to say that was the wrong day, it was too early, then closed his mouth. If they were right about the rules, he couldn’t go back to that day, not todash, not in the flesh, either. If they were right, time over there was somehow hooked to time over here, only running a little faster. If they were right about the rules…
if there were rules…
Well, why don’t you just go and see?
“Eddie? Do you want me to try hypnotizing you?” Roland had drawn a shell from his gunbelt. “It can make you see the past more clearly.”
“No. I think I better do this straight and wide-awake.”
Eddie opened and closed his hands several times, taking and releasing deep breaths as he did so. His heart wasn’t running particularly fast—was going slow, if anything—but each beat seemed to shiver through his entire body. Christ, all this would have been so much easier if there were just some controls you could set, like in Professor Peabody’s Wayback Machine or that movie about the Morlocks!
“Hey, do I look all right?” he asked Roland. “I mean, if I land on Second Avenue at high noon, how much attention am I going to attract?”
“If you appear in front of people,” Roland said, “probably quite a lot. I’d advise you to ignore anyone who wants to palaver with you on the subject and vacate the area immediately.”
“That much I know. I meant how do I look clotheswise?”
Roland gave a small shrug. “I don’t know, Eddie. It’s your city, not mine.”
Eddie could have demurred. Brooklyn was his city. Had been, anyway. As a rule he hadn’t gone into Manhattan from one month to the next, thought of it almost as another country. Still, he supposed he knew what Roland meant. He inventoried himself and saw a plain flannel shirt with horn buttons above dark-blue jeans with burnished nickel rivets instead of copper ones, and a button-up fly. (Eddie had seen zippers in Lud, but none since.) He reckoned he would pass for normal on the street. New York normal, at least. Anyone who gave him a second look would think cafe waiter/artist-wannabe playing hippie on his day off. He didn’t think most people would even bother with the first look, and that was absolutely to the good. But there was one thing he could add—
“Have you got a piece of rawhide?” he asked Roland.
From deep in the cave, the voice of Mr. Tubther, his fifth-grade teacher, cried out with lugubrious intensity.
“You had potential! You were a wonderful student, and look at what you turned into! Why did you let your brother spoil you?”
To which Henry replied, in sobbing outrage: “He let me die! He killed me!”
Roland swung his purse off his shoulder, put it on the floor at the mouth of the cave beside the pink bag, opened it, rummaged through it. Eddie had no idea how many things were in there; he only knew he’d never seen the bottom of it. At last the gunslinger found what Eddie had asked for and held it out.
While Eddie tied back his hair with the hank of rawhide (he thought it finished off the artistic-hippie look quite nicely), Roland took out what he called his swag-bag, opened it, and began to empty out its contents.
There was the partially depleted sack of tobacco Callahan had given him, several kinds of coin and currency, a sewing kit, the mended cup he had turned into a rough compass not far from Shardik’s clearing, an old scrap of map, and the newer one the Tavery twins had drawn. When the bag was empty, he took the big revolver with the sandalwood grip from the holster on his left hip. He rolled the cylinder, checked the loads, nodded, and snapped the cylinder back into place. Then he put the gun into the swag-bag, yanked the lacings tight, and tied them in a clove hitch that would come loose at a single pull. He held the bag out to Eddie by the worn strap.
At first Eddie didn’t want to take it. “Nah, man, that’s yours.”
“These last weeks you’ve worn it as much as I have. Probably more.”
“Yeah, but this is New York we’re talking about, Roland. In New York, everybody steals.”
“They won’t steal from you. Take the gun.”
Eddie looked into Roland’s eyes for a moment, then took the swag-bag and slung the strap over his shoulder.
“You’ve got a feeling.”
“A hunch, yes.”
“Ka at work?”
Roland shrugged. “It’s always at work.”
“All right,” Eddie said. “And Roland—if I don’t make it back, take care of Suze.”
“Your job is to make sure I don’t have to.”
No, Eddie thought. My job is to protect the rose.
He turned to the door. He had a thousand more questions, but Roland was right, the time to ask them was done.
“Eddie, if you really don’t want to—”
“No,” he said. “I do want to.” He raised his left hand and gave a thumbs-up. “When you see me do that, open the box.”
“All right.”
Roland speaking from behind him. Because now it was just Eddie and the door. The door with unfound written on it in some strange and lovely language. Once he’d read a novel called The Door Into Summer, by… who? One of the science-fiction guys he was always dragging home from the library, one of his old reliables, perfect for the long afternoons of summer vacation. Murray Leinster, Paul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison… Robert Heinlein. He thought it was Heinlein who’d written The Door Into Summer. Henry always ragging him about the books he brought home, calling him the wittle sissy, the wittle bookworm, asking him if he could read and jerk off at the same time, wanting to know how he could sit fuckin still for so long with his nose stuck in some made-up piece of shit about rockets and time machines. Henry older than him. Henry covered with pimples that were always shiny with Noxema and StriDex. Henry getting ready to go into the Army. Eddie younger. Eddie bringing books home from the library.
Eddie thirteen years old, almost the age Jake is now. It’s 1977 and he’s thirteen and on Second Avenue and the taxis are shiny yellow in the sun. A black man wearing Walkman earphones is walking past Chew Chew Mama’s, Eddie can see him, Eddie knows the black man is listening to Elton John singing— what else?
—”Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” The sidewalk is crowded. It’s late afternoon and people are going home after another day in the steel arroyos of Calla New York, where they grow money instead of rice, can ya say prime rate. Women looking amiably weird in expensive business suits and sneakers; their high heels are in their gunna because the workday is done and they’re going home. Everyone seems to be smiling because the light is so bright and the air is so warm, it’s summer in the city and somewhere there’s the sound of a jack hammer, like on that old Lovin Spoonful song. Before him is a door into the summer of ’77, the cabbies are getting a buck and a quarter on the drop and thirty cents every fifth of a mile thereafter, it was less before and it’ll be more after but this is now, the dancing point of now. The space shuttle with the teacher on board hasn’t blown up. John Lennon is still alive, although he won’t be much longer if he doesn’t stop messing with that wicked heroin, that China White. As for Eddie Dean, Edward Cantor Dean, he knows nothing about heroin. A few cigarettes are his only vice (other than trying to jack off, at which he will not be successful for almost another year). He’s thirteen. It’s 1977 and he has exactly four hairs on his chest, he counts them religiously each morning, hoping for big number five. It’s the summer after the Summer of the Tall Ships. It’s a late afternoon in the month of June and he can hear a happy tune. The tune is coming from the speakers over the doorway of the Tower of Power record shop, it’s Mungo Jerry singing “In the Summertime,” and—