patience. “They’re sitting on that pile of crates just inside. Get them, please.”
Eddie barely noticed this byplay. He was too charmed (and amused) by that single broad
ray of sun, shining down on a green and cheerful plot of land, as unlikely in this dark and
sterile desert as…well, he supposed, as unlikely as Central Park must seem to tourists from
the Midwest making their first trip to New York.
He could see buildings that looked like college dormitories—niceones—and others that
looked like comfy old manor houses with wide stretches of green lawn before them. At the
far side of the sunbeam’s area was what looked like a street lined with shops. The perfect
little Main Street America, except for one thing: in all directions it ended in dark and rocky desert. He saw four stone towers, their sides agreeably green with ivy. No, make that six.
The other two were mostly concealed in stands of graceful old elms. Elms in the desert!
Dink returned with a pair of binoculars and offered them to Roland, who shook his head.
“Don’t hold it against him,” Eddie said. “His eyes…well, let’s just say they’re something
else. I wouldn’t mind a peek, though.”
“Me, either,” Susannah said.
Eddie handed her the binoculars. “Ladies first.”
“No, really, I—”
“Stop it,” Ted almost snarled. “Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don’t waste the
one or increase the other, if you please.”
Susannah was stung but held back a retort. Instead she took the binoculars, raised them to
her eyes, and adjusted them. What she saw merely heightened her sense of looking at a
small but perfect college campus, one that merged beautifully with the neighboring
village.No town-versus-gown tensions there, I bet, she thought.I bet Elmville and Breaker
U go together like peanut butter and jelly, Abbott and Costello, hand and glove . Whenever
there was a Ray Bradbury short in theSaturday Evening Post, she always turned to it first,
sheloved Bradbury, and what she was looking at through the binoculars made her think of
Green-town, Bradbury’s idealized Illinois village. A place where adults sat out on their
porches in rocking chairs, drinking lemonade, and the kids played tag with flashlights in
the lightning-bug-stitched dusk of summer evenings. And the nearby college campus? No
drinking there, at least not to excess. No joysticks or goofballs or rock and roll, either. It would be a place where the girls kissed the boys goodnight with chaste ardor and were glad
to sign back in so that the Dormitory Mom wouldn’t think ill of them. A place where the
sun shone all day, where Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters sang on the radio, and
nobody suspected they were actually living in the ruins of a world that had moved on.
No,she thought coldly.Some of them know. That’s why these three showed up to meet us.
“That’s the Devar-Toi,” Roland said flatly. Not a question.
“Yeah,” Dinky said. “The good old Devar-Toi.” He stood beside Roland and pointed at a
large white building near the dormitories. “See that white one? That’s Heartbreak House,
where the can-toi live. Ted calls em the low men. They’re taheen-human hybrids. And they
don’t call it the Devar-Toi, they call it Algul Siento, which means—”
“Blue Heaven,” Roland said, and Jake realized why: all of the buildings except for the
rock towers had blue tiled roofs. Not Narnia but Blue Heaven. Where a bunch of folks were
busy bringing about the end of the world.
Allthe worlds.
Six
“It looks like the pleasantest place in existence, at least since In-World fell,” Ted said.
“Doesn’t it?”
“Pretty nice, all right,” Eddie agreed. He had at least a thousand questions, and guessed Suze and Jake probably had another thousand between them, but this wasn’t the time to ask
them. In any case, he kept looking at that wonderful little hundred-acre oasis down there.
The one sunny green spot in all of Thunderclap. The onenice place. And why not? Nothing
but the best for Our Breaker Buddies.
And, in spite of himself, one questiondid slip out.
“Ted, why does the Crimson King want to bring the Tower down? Do you know?”
Ted gave him a brief glance. Eddie thought it cool, maybe downright cold, until the man
smiled. When he did, his whole face lit up. Also, his eyes had quit doing that creepy
in-and-out thing, which was abig improvement.
“He’s mad,” Ted told him. “Nuttier than a fruitcake. Riding the fabled rubber bicycle.
Didn’t I tell you that?” And then, before Eddie could reply: “Yes, it’s quite nice. Whether
you call it Devar-Toi, the Big Prison, or Algul Siento, it looks a treat. Itis a treat.”
“Very classy accommos,” Dinky agreed. Even Stanley was looking down at the sunlit
community with an expression of faint longing.
“The food is the best,” Ted went on, “and the double feature at the Gem Theater changes
twice a week. If you don’t want to go to the movies, you can bring the movies home on
DVDs.”
“What are those?” Eddie asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. Go on.”
Ted shrugged, as if to sayWhat else do you need?
“Absolutely astral sex, for one thing,” Dinky said. “It’s sim, but it’s still incredible—I
made it with Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Nicole Kidman all in one week.” He said this
with a certain uneasy pride. “I could have had them all at the same time if I’d wanted to.
The only way you can tell they’re not real is to breathe directly on them, from close up.
When you do, the part you blow on…kinda disappears. It’s unsettling.”
“Booze? Dope?” Eddie asked.
“Booze in limited quantities,” Ted replied. “If you’re into oenology, for instance, you’ll
experience fresh wonders at every meal.”
“What’s oenology?” Jake asked.
“The science of wine-snobbery, sugarbun,” Susannah said.
“If you come to Blue Heaven addicted to something,” Dinky said, “they get you off it.
Kindly. The one or two guys who proved especially tough nuts in that area…” His eyes met Ted’s briefly. Ted shrugged and nodded. “Those dudes disappeared.”
“In truth, the low men don’tneed any more Breakers,” Ted said. “They’ve got enough to
finish the job right now.”
“How many?” Roland asked.
“About three hundred,” Dinky said.
“Three hundred and seven, to be exact,” Ted said. “We’re quartered in five dorms,
although that word conjures the wrong image. We have our own suites, and as much—or as
little—contact with our fellow Breakers as we wish.”
“And you know what you’re doing?” Susannah asked.
“Yes. Although most don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”
“I don’t understand why they don’t mutiny.”
“What’s your when, ma’am?” Dinky asked her.
“My…?” Then she understood. “1964.”
He sighed and shook his head. “So you don’t know about Jim Jones and the People’s
Temple. It’s easier to explain if you know about that. Almost a thousand people committed
suicide at this religious compound a Jesus-guy from San Francisco set up in Guyana. They
drank poisoned Kool-Aid out of a tub while he watched them from the porch of his house
and used a bullhorn to tell them stories about his mother.”
Susannah was staring at him with horrified disbelief, Ted with poorly disguised
impatience. Yet he must have thought something about this was important, because he held
silence.
“Almost a thousand,” Dinky reiterated. “Because they were confused and lonely and they
thought Jim Jones was their friend. Because—dig it—they had nothing to go back to. And
it’s like that here. If the Breakers united, they could make a mental hammer that’d knock
Prentiss and The Weasel and the taheen and the can-toi all the way into the next galaxy.
Instead there’s no one but me, Stanley, and everyone’s favorite super-breaker, the totally
eventual Mr. Theodore Brautigan of Milford, Connecticut. Harvard Class of ’20, Drama
Society, Debate Club, editor ofThe Crimson, and—of course!—Phi Beta Crapper.”
“Can we trust you three?” Roland asked. The question sounded deceptively idle, little
more than a time-passer.
“You have to,” Ted said. “You’ve no one else. Neither do we.”
“If we were on their side,” Dinky said, “don’t you think we’d have something better to wear on our feet than moccasins made out of rubber fuckin tires? In Blue Heaven you get
everything except for a few basics. Stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily think of as indispensable,
but stuff that…well, it’s harder to take a powder when you’ve got nothing to wear but your
Algul Siento slippers, let’s put it that way.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Jake said. “All those people working to break the Beams, I mean.
No offense, but—”
Dinky turned on him with his fists clenched and a tight, furious smile on his face. Oy
immediately stepped in front of Jake, growling low and showing his teeth. Dinky either
didn’t notice or paid no attention. “Yeah? Well guess what, kiddo? Itake offense. I take
offense like a motherfucker. What doyou know about what it’s like to spend your whole