Stephen King – The Dark Tower

ride it like a pony. If you chose investment, that fifty grand might be seventy-five when you came waltzing out of the jungle with a bone-deep tan, a whole new set of muscles, and a

lifetime of stories to tell. And, of course, once you were out you had what the limeys liked

to call “the other half” to put on top of it.

This was like that, Armitage told Ted earnestly. Only the front half would be a cool quarter

of a million and the back end half a million.

“Which sounded incredible,” Ted said from the Wollensak. “Of course it did, by jiminy. I

didn’t find out until later how incredibly cheap they were buying us, even at those prices.

Dinky is particularly eloquent on the subject of their stinginess…‘they’ in this case being

all the King’s bureaucrats. He says the Crimson King is trying to bring about the end of all

creation on the budget plan, and of course he’s right, but I think even Dinky

realizes—although he won’t admit it, of course—that if you offer a man too much, he

simply refuses to believe it. Or, depending on his imagination (many telepaths and precogs

have almost no imagination at all), beunable to believe it. In our case the period of

indenture was to be six years, with an option to renew, and Armitage needed my decision

immediately. Few techniques are so successful, lady and gentlemen, as the one where you

boggle your target’s mind, freeze him with greed, then blitz him.

“I was duly blitzed, and agreed at once. Armitage told me that my quarter-mil would be in

the Seaman’s San Francisco Bank as of that afternoon, and I could draw on it as soon as I

got down there. I asked him if I had to sign a contract. He reached out one of his

hands—big as a ham, it was—and told methat was our contract. I asked him where I’d be

going and what I’d be doing—all questions I should have asked first, I’m sure you’d agree,

but I was so stunned it never crossed my mind.

“Besides, I was pretty sure I knew. I thought I’d be working for the government. Some

kind of Cold War deal. The telepathic branch of the CIA or FBI, set up on an island in the

Pacific. I remember thinking it would make one hell of a radio play.

“Armitage told me, ‘You’ll be traveling far, Ted, but it will also be right next door. And

for the time being, that’s all I can say. Except to keep your mouth shut about our

arrangement during the eight weeks before you actually…mmm…ship out. Remember that

loose lips sink ships. At the risk of inculcating you with paranoia, assume that you are

being watched.’

“And of course Iwas watched. Later—toolater, in a manner of speaking—I was able to

replay my last two months in Frisco and realize that the can-toi were watching me the

whole time.

“The low men.”

Eight

“Armitage and two other humes met us outside the Mark Hopkins Hotel,” said the voice

from the tape recorder. “I remember the date with perfect clarity; it was Halloween of 1955.

Five o’clock in the afternoon. Me, Jace McGovern, Dave Ittaway, Dick…I can’t remember

his last name, he died about six months later, Humma said it was pneumonia and the rest of

the ki’cans backed him up—ki’can sort of means shit-people or shit-folken,if you’re

interested—but it was suicide and I knew it if no one else did. The rest…well, remember

Doc Number Two? The rest were and are like him. ‘Don’t tell me what I don’t want to

know, sai, don’t mess up my worldview.’ Anyway, the last one was Tanya Leeds. Tough

little thing…”

A pause and a click. Then Ted’s voice resumed, sounding temporarily refreshed. The third

tape had almost finished.He must have really burned through the rest of the story, Eddie

thought, and found that the idea disappointed him. Whatever else he was, Ted was a hell of

a good tale-spinner.

“Armitage and his colleagues showed up in a Ford station wagon, what we called a woody

in those charming days. They drove us inland, to a town called Santa Mira. There was a

paved main street. The rest of them were dirt. I remember there were a lot of oil-derricks,

looking like praying mantises, sort of…although it was dark by then and they were really

just shapes against the sky.

“I was expecting a train depot, or maybe a bus withCHARTERED in the destination

window. Instead we pulled up to this empty freight depot with a sign readingSANTA

MIRA SHIPPING hanging askew on the front and I got a thought, clear as day, from Dick

whatever-his-name was.They’re going to kill us, he was thinking.They brought us out here

to kill us and steal our stuff .

“If you’re not a telepath, you don’t know how scary something like that can be. How the surety of it kind of…invades your head. I saw Dave Ittaway go pale, and although Tanya

didn’t make a sound—she was a tough little thing, as I told you—it was bright enough in

the car to see there were tears standing in the corners of her eyes.

“I leaned over her, took Dick’s hands in mine, and squeezed down on them when he tried

to pull away. I thought at him,They didn’t give us a quarter of a mill each, most of it still stashed safe in the Seaman’s Bank, so they could bring us out to the williwags and steal our

watches. And Jace thought at me,I don’t even havea watch. I pawned my Gruen two years

ago in Albuquerque, and by the time I thought about buying another one—around midnight

last night, this was—all the stores were closed and I was too drunk to climb down off the

barstool I was on, anyway.

“That relaxed us, and we all had a laugh. Armitage asked us what we were laughing about

and that relaxed us even more, because we had something they didn’t, could communicate

in a way they couldn’t. I told him it was nothing, then gave Dick’s hands another little

squeeze. It did the job. I…facilitated him, I suppose. It was my first time doing that. The

first of many. That’s part of the reason I’m so tired; all that facilitating wears a man out.

“Armitage and the others led us inside. The place was deserted, but at the far end there was

a door with two words chalked on it, along with those moons and stars.THUNDERCLAP

STATION , it said. Well, therewas no station: no tracks, no buses, no road other than the

one we’d used to get there. There were windows on either side of the door and nothing on

the other side of the building but a couple of smaller buildings—deserted sheds, one of

them just a burnt-out shell—and a lot of scrub-land littered with trash.

“Dave Ittaway said, ‘Why are we going out there?’ and one of the others said, ‘You’ll see,’

and we certainly did.

“ ‘Ladies first,’ Armitage said, and he opened the door.

“It was dark on the other side, but not the samekind of dark. It wasdarker dark. If you’ve

seen Thunderclap at night, you’ll know. And it sounded different. Old buddy Dick there

had some second thoughts and turned around. One of the men pulled a gun. And I’ll never

forget what Armitage said. Because he sounded…kindly. ‘Too late to back out now,’ he

said. ‘Now you can only go forward.’

“And I think right then I knew that business about the six-year plan, and re-upping if we

wanted to, was what my friend Bobby Garfield andhis friend Sully-John would have called

just a shuck and jive. Not that we could read it in their thoughts. They were all wearing hats, you see. You never see a low man—or a low lady, for that matter—without a hat on. The

men’s looked like plain old fedoras, the sort most guys wore back then, but these were no

ordinary lids. They were thinking-caps. Althoughanti -thinking-caps would be more

accurate; they muffle the thoughts of the people wearing them. If you try to prog someone

who’s wearing one—progis Dinky’s word for thought-reading—you just get a hum with a

lot of whispering underneath. Very unpleasant, like the todash chimes. If you’ve heard them, you know. Discourages too much effort, and effort’s the last thing most of the

telepaths in the Algul are interested in. What the Breakers are mostly interested in, lady and gentlemen, is going along to get along. Which only shows up for what it is—monstrous—if

you pull back and take the long view. One more thing most Breakers are not into. Quite

often you hear a saying—a little poem—around campus, or see it chalked on the walls:

‘Enjoy the cruise, turn on the fan, there’s nothing to lose, so work on your tan.’ It means a lot more than ‘Take it easy.’ The implications of that little piece of doggerel are extremely unpleasant. I wonder if you can see that.”