Stephen King – The Dark Tower

didn’t—he cared about them. They were certainly easier to deal with than the murderers,

rapists, and armed robbers of Attica.

Some were reading old newspapers or magazines. A foursome was throwing horseshoes.

Another foursome was on the putting green. Tanya Leeds and Joey Rastosovich were

playing chess under a graceful old elm, the sunlight making dapples on their faces. They

greeted him with real pleasure, and why not? Tanya Leeds was now actually Tanya

Rastosovich, for Pimli had married them a month ago, just like the captain of a ship. And

he supposed that in a way, that was what this was: the good shipAlgul Siento, a cruise

vessel that sailed the dark seas of Thunderclap in her own sunny spotlight. The sun went

out from time to time, say true, but today’s outage had been minimal, only forty-three

seconds.

“How’s it going, Tanya? Joseph?” Always Joseph and never Joey, at least not to his face;

he didn’t like it.

They said it was going fine and gave him those dazed, fuck-struck smiles of which only

newlyweds are capable. Finli said nothing to the Rastosoviches, but near the Damli House

end of the Mall, he stopped before a young man sitting on a faux marble bench beneath a

tree, reading a book.

“Sai Earnshaw?” the taheen asked.

Dinky looked up, eyebrows raised in polite enquiry. His face, studded with a bad case of acne, bore the same polite no-expression.

“I see you’re readingThe Magus, ” Finli said, almost shyly. “I myself am readingThe

Collector . Quite a coincidence!”

“If you say so,” Dinky replied. His expression didn’t change.

“I wonder what you think of Fowles? I’m quite busy right now, but perhaps later we could

discuss him.”

Still wearing that politely expressionless expression, Dinky Earnshaw said, “Perhaps later

you could take your copy ofThe Collector —hardcover, I hope—and stick it up your furry

ass. Sideways.”

Finli’s hopeful smile disappeared. He gave a small but perfectly correct bow. “I’m sorry

you feel that way, sai.”

“The fuck outta here,” Dinky said, and opened his book again. He raised it pointedly

before his face.

Pimli and Finli o’ Tego walked on. There was a period of silence during which the Master

of Algul Siento tried out different approaches to Finli, wanting to know how badly he’d

been hurt by the young man’s comment. The taheen was proud of his ability to read and

appreciate hume literature, that much Pimli knew. Then Finli saved him the trouble by

putting both of his long-fingered hands—his ass wasn’t actually furry, but his fingers

were—between his legs.

“Just checking to make sure my nuts are still there,” he said, and Pimli thought the good

humor he heard in the Chief of Security’s voice was real, not forced.

“I’m sorry about that,” Pimli said. “If there’s anyone in Blue Heaven who has an authentic

case of post-adolescent angst, it’s sai Earnshaw.”

“ ‘You’re tearing me apart!’ ” Finli moaned, and when the Master gave him a startled look,

Finli grinned, showing those rows of tiny sharp teeth. “It’s a famous line from a film

calledRebel Without a Cause, ” he said. “Dinky Earnshaw makes me think of James Dean.”

He paused to consider. “Without the haunting good looks, of course.”

“An interesting case,” Prentiss said. “He was recruited for an assassination program run by

a Positronics subsidiary. He killed his control and ran. We caught him, of course. He’s

never been any real trouble—not for us—but he’s got that pain-in-the-ass attitude.”

“But you feel he’s not a problem.”

Pimli gave him a sideways glance. “Is there somethingyou feel I should know about him?”

“No, no. I’ve never seen you so jumpy as you’ve been over the last few weeks. Hell, call a

spade a spade—soparanoid .”

“My grandfather had a proverb,” Pimli said. “ ‘You don’t worry about dropping the eggs

until you’re almost home.’ We’re almost home now.”

And it was true. Seventeen days ago, not long before the last batch of Wolves had come

galloping through the door from the Arc 16 Staging Area, their equipment in the basement

of Damli House had picked up the first appreciable bend in the Bear-Turtle Beam. Since

then the Beam of Eagle and Lion had snapped. Soon the Breakers would no longer be

needed; soon the disintegration of the second-to-last Beam would happen with or without

their help. It was like a precariously balanced object that had now picked up a sway. Soon it would go too far beyond its point of perfect balance, and then it would fall. Or, in the case of the Beam, it would break. Wink out of existence. It was the Tower that would fall. The

last Beam, that of Wolf and Elephant, might hold for another week or another month, but

not much longer.

Thinking of that should have pleased Pimli, but it didn’t. Mostly because his thoughts had

returned to the Greencloaks. Sixty or so had gone through Calla-bound last time, the usual

deployment, and they should have been back in the usual seventy-two hours with the usual

catch of Calla children.

Instead…nothing.

He asked Finli whathe thought about that.

Finli stopped. He looked grave. “I think it may have been a virus,” he said.

“Cry pardon?”

“A computer virus. We’ve seen it happen with a good deal of our computer equipment in

Damli, and you want to remember that, no matter how fearsome the Greencloaks may look

to a bunch of rice-farmers, computers on legs is all they really are.” He paused. “Or the

Calla-folkenmay have found a way to kill them. Would it surprise me to find that they’d

gotten up on their hind legs to fight? A little, but not a lot. Especially if someone with guts stepped forward to lead them.”

“Someone like a gunslinger, mayhap?”

Finli gave him a look that stopped just short of patronizing.

Ted Brautigan and Stanley Ruiz rode up the sidewalk on ten-speed bikes, and when the

Master and the Security Head raised hands to them, both raised their hands in return.

Brautigan didn’t smile but Ruiz did, the loose happy smile of a true mental defective. He

was all eye-boogers, stubbly cheeks, and spit-shiny lips, but a powerful bugger just the same, before God he was, and such a man could do worse than chum around with

Brautigan, who had changed completely since being hauled back from his little “vacation”

in Connecticut. Pimli was amused by the identical tweed caps the two men were

wearing—their bikes were also identical—but not by Finli’s look.

“Quit it,” Pimli said.

“Quit what, sai?” Finli asked.

“Looking at me as if I were a little kid who just lost the top off his ice cream cone and

doesn’t have the wit to realize it.”

But Finli didn’t back down. He rarely did, which was one of the things Pimli liked about

him. “If you don’t want folk to look at you like a child, then you mustn’t act like one.

There’ve been rumors of gunslingers coming out of Mid-World to save the day for a

thousand years and more. And never a single authenticated sighting. Personally, I’d be

more apt to expect a visit from your Man Jesus.”

“The Rods say—”

Finli winced as if this actually hurt his head. “Don’t start with what the Rods say. Surely

you respect my intelligence—and your own—more than that. Their brains have rotted even

faster than their skins. As for the Wolves, let me advance a radical concept: it doesn’t

matterwhere they are or what’s happened to them. We’ve got enough booster to finish the

job, and that’s all I care about.”

The Security Head stood for a moment at the steps that led up to the Damli House porch.

He was looking after the two men on the identical bikes and frowning thoughtfully.

“Brautigan’s been a lot of trouble.”

“Hasn’t he just!” Pimli laughed ruefully. “But his troublesome days are over. He’s been

told that his special friends from Connecticut—a boy named Robert Garfield and a girl

named Carol Gerber—will die if he makes any more trouble. Also he’s come to realize that

while a number of his fellow Breakers regard him as a mentor, and some, such as the

softheaded boy he’s with, revere him, no one is interested in his…philosophical ideas, shall

we say. Not any longer, if they ever were. And I had a talk with him after he came back. A

heart-to-heart.”

This was news to Finli. “About what?”

“Certain facts of life. Sai Brautigan has come to understand that his unique powers no

longer matter as much as they once did. It’s gone too far for that. The remaining two Beams

are going to break with him or without him. And he knows that at the end there’s apt to

be…confusion. Fear and confusion.” Pimli nodded slowly. “Brautigan wants to be here at

the end, if only to comfort such as Stanley Ruiz when the sky tears open.

“Come, let’s have another look at the tapes and the telemetry. Just to be safe.”