Stephen King – The Dark Tower

beside her, and descended the ladder. Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn,

smoking a cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its

appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of silent beauty.

The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened, it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any idea what it was or what it might mean to them.

“I think it’s likely the robot he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing,”

he said. “He may have one of those antenna-things on his head, like the Wolves. You

remember?”

She remembered very well, and said so.

“It may be that he holds some special allegiance to Dandelo,” Roland said. “I don’t think

that’s likely, but it wouldn’t be the strangest thing I ever ran across. Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And I’ll be ready with my gun.”

“But you don’t think so.” She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on this point.

“No,” Roland said. “He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way to the Tower itself. Even

if not, he might take us to the far edge of the White Lands. That would be good, for the

boy’s still weak.”

This raised a question in her mind. “We call him the boy, because he looks like a boy,” she

said. “How old do you think he is?”

Roland shook his head. “Surely no younger than sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as

old as thirty. Time was strange when the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops

and twists. I can attest to that.”

“Did Stephen King put him in our way?”

“I can’t say, only that he knew of him, sure.” He paused. “The Tower is so close! Do you

feel it?”

She did, and all the time. Sometimes it was a pulsing, sometimes it was singing, quite

often it was both. And the Polaroid still hung in Dandelo’s hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer. Each night in her dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that

photograph standing at the end of its field of roses, sooty gray-black stone against a

troubled sky where the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the two Beams that

still held. She knew what the voices sang—commala! commala!

commala-come-come!—but she did not think that they sang to her, or for her. No, say no, say never in life; this was Roland’s song, and Roland’s alone. But she had begun to hope

that that didn’t necessarily mean she was going to die between here and the end of her

quest.

She had been having her own dreams.

Ten

Less than an hour after the sun rose (firmly in the east, and we all say thankya), an orange

vehicle—combination truck and bulldozer—appeared over the horizon and came slowly

but steadily toward them, pushing a big wing of fresh snow to its right, making the high

bank even higher on that side. Susannah guessed that when it reached the intersection of

Tower Road and Odd Lane, Stuttering Bill (almost surely the plow’s operator) would

swing it around and plow back the other way. Maybe he stopped here, as a rule, not for

coffee but for a fresh squirt of oil, or something. She smiled at the idea, and at something

else, as well. There was a loudspeaker mounted on the cab’s roof and a rock and roll song

she actually knew was issuing forth. Susannah laughed, delighted. “ ‘California Sun’ ! The

Rivieras! Oh, doesn’t it soundfine !”

“If you say so,” Roland agreed. “Just keep hold of thy plate.”

“You can count on that,” she said.

Patrick had joined them. As always since Roland had found them in the pantry, he had a

pad and a pencil. Now he wrote a single word in capital letters and held it out to Susannah,

knowing that Roland could read very little of what he wrote, even if it was printed in letters that were big-big. The word in the lower quadrant of the sketch-pad wasBILL . This was

below an amazing drawing of Oy, with a comic-strip speech-balloon over his head

readingYARK! YARK! All this he had casually crossed out so she wouldn’t think it was

what he wanted her to look at. The slashed X sort of broke her heart, because the picture

beneath its crossed lines was Oy to the life.

Eleven

The plow pulled up in front of Dandelo’s hut, and although the engine continued to run,

the music cut off. Down from the driver’s seat there galumphed a tall (eight feet at the very least), shiny-headed robot who looked quite a lot like Nigel from the Arc 16 Experimental

Station and Andy from Calla Bryn Sturgis. He cocked his metal arms and put his metal

hands on his hips in a way that would likely have reminded Eddie of George Lucas’s C3P0,

had Eddie been there. The robot spoke in an amplified voice that rolled away across the

snowfields:

“HELLO, J-JOE! WHAT DO YOU NUH-NUH-KNOW? HOW ARE TRICKS IN

KUH-KUH-KOKOMO?”

Roland stepped out of the late Lippy’s quarters. “Hile, Bill,” he said mildly. “Long days and pleasant nights.”

The robot turned. His eyes flashed bright blue. That looked like surprise to Susannah. He

showed no alarm that she could see, however, and didn’t appear to be armed, but she had

already marked the antenna rising from the center of his head—twirling and twirling in the

bright morning light—and she felt confident she could clip it with an Oriza if she needed to.

Easy-peasy-Japaneezy, Eddie would have said.

“Ah!” said the robot. “A gudda-gah, gunna-gah, g-g-g—” He raised an arm that had not

oneelbow-joint

but two and smacked his head with it. From inside came a little whistling

noise—Wheeep!—and then he finished: “A gunslinger!”

Susannah laughed. She couldn’t help it. They had come all this way to meet an oversized

electronic version of Porky Pig.T’beya-t’beya-t’beya, that’s all, folks!

“I had heard rumors of such on the l-l-l-land,” the robot said, ignoring her laughter. “Are

you Ruh-Ruh-Roland of G-Gilead?”

“So I am,” Roland said. “And you?”

“William, D-746541-M, Maintenance Robot, Many Other Functions. Joe Collins calls me

Stuh-huttering B-Bill. I’ve got a f-f-fried sir-hirkit somewhere inside. I could fix it, but he fuh-fuh-forbade me. And since he’s the only h-human around…or was…” He stopped.

Susannah could quite clearly hear the clitter-clack of relays somewhere inside and whatshe

thought of wasn’t C3P0, who she’d of course never seen, but Robby the Robot

fromForbidden Planet .

Then Stuttering Bill quite touched her heart by putting one metal hand to his forehead and

bowing…but not to either her or to Roland. He said, “Hile, Patrick D-Danville, son of

S-S-Sonia! It’s good to see you out and in the c-c-clear, so it is!” And Susannah could hear

the emotion in Stuttering Bill’s voice. It was genuine gladness, and she felt more than okay

about lowering her plate.

Twelve

They palavered in the yard. Bill would have been quite willing to go into the hut, for he

had but rudimentary olfactory equipment. The humes were better equipped and knew that

the hut stank and had not even warmth to recommend it, for the furnace and the fire were

both out. In any case, the palaver didn’t take long. William the Maintenance Robot (Many

Other Functions) had counted the being that sometimes called itself Joe Collins as his

master, for there was no longer anyone else to lay claim to the job. Besides,

Collins/Dandelo had the necessary code-words.

“I w-was nuh-not able to g-give him the c-code wuh-wuh-hurds when he a-asked,” said Stuttering Bill, “but my p-programming did not pruh-prohibit bringing him cer-hertain

m-manuals that had the ih-information he needed.”

“Bureaucracy is so wonderful,” Susannah said.

Bill said he had stayed away from “J-J-Joe” as often (and as long) as he could, although he

had to come when Tower Road needed plowing—that was also in his programming—and

once a month to bring provisions (canned goods, mostly) from what he called “the

Federal.” He also liked to see Patrick, who had once given Bill a wonderful picture of

himself that he looked at often (and of which he had made many copies). Yet every time he

came, he confided, he was sure he would find Patrick gone—killed and thrown casually

into the woods somewhere back toward what Bill called “the Buh-Buh-Bads,” like an old

piece of trash. But now here he was, alive and free, and Bill was delighted.

“For I do have r-r-rudimentary em-m-motions,” he said, sounding to Susannah like

someone owning up to a bad habit.

“Do you need the code-words from us, in order to accept our orders?” Roland asked.

“Yes, sai,” Stuttering Bill said.