Stephen King – The Dark Tower

English, and I’ve sensed from time to time that some have limited progging abilities of

their own, can send and receive—at least a little—but if you dip into them, you get these

mind-numbing blasts of what sounds like mental static—white noise. I assumed it was some sort of protective device; Dinky believes it’s the way they actuallythink . Either way,

it makes it easier for them. They don’t have to remember to put on hats in the morning

when they go out!

“Trampas was one of the can-toi rovers. You might see him one day strolling along Main

Street in Pleasantville, or sitting on a bench in the middle of the Mall, usually with some

self-help book likeSeven Steps to Positive Thinking . Then, the next day, there he is

leaning against the side of Heartbreak House, taking in the sun. Same with the other can-toi

floaters. If there’s a pattern, I’ve never been able to anticipate it, or Dinky either. We don’t think there is one.

“What’s always made Trampas different is a complete lack of that sense of jealousy. He’s

actually friendly—or was; in some ways he hardly seemed to be a low man at all. Not many

of his can-toi colleagues seem to like him a whole hell of a lot. Which is ironic, you know,

because if there reallyis such a thing asbecoming, then Trampas is one of the few who

actually seem to be getting somewhere with it. Simple laughter, for instance. When most

low men laugh, it sounds like a basket of rocks rolling down a tin coal-chute: makes you

fair shiver, as Tanya says. When Trampas laughs, he sounds a little high-pitched but

otherwise normal. Because heis laughing, I think. Genuinely laughing. The others are just

forcing it.

“Anyway, I struck up a conversation with him one day. On Main Street, this was, outside

the Gem.Star Wars was back for its umpty-umpth revival. If there’s any movie the

Breakers never get enough of, it’sStar Wars .

“I asked him if he knew where his name came from. He said yes, of course, from his

clan-fam. Each can-toi is given a hume name by his clan-fam at some point in his

development; it’s a kind of maturity-marker. Dinky says they get that name the first time

they successfully whack off, but that’s just Dinky being Dinky. The fact is we don’t know

and it doesn’t matter, but some of the names are pretty hilarious. There’s one fellow who

looks like Rondo Hatton, a film actor from the thirties who suffered from acromegaly and

got work playing monsters and psychopaths, but his name is Thomas Carlyle. There’s

another one named Beowulf and a fellow named Van Gogh Baez.”

Susannah, a Bleecker Street folkie from way back, put her face in her hands to stifle a gust

of giggles.

“Anyway, I told him that Trampas was a character from a famous Western novel

calledThe Virginian . Only second banana to the actual hero, true, but Trampas has got the

one line from the book everyone remembers: ‘Smilewhen you say that!’ It tickled our

Trampas, and I ended up telling him the whole plot of the book over cups of drug-store

coffee.

“We became friends. I’d tell him what was going on in our little community of Breakers,

and he’d tell me all sorts of interesting but innocent things about what was going on over

onhis side of the fence. He also complained about his eczema, which made his head itch terribly. He kept lifting his hat—this little beanie-type of thing, almost like ayarmulke,

only made of denim—to scratch underneath. He claimed that was the worst place of all,

even worse than down there on your makie-man. And little by little, I realized that every

time he lifted his beanie to scratch, I could read his thoughts. Not just the ones on top butall of them. If I was fast—and I learned to be—I could pick and choose, exactly the way you’d

pick and choose articles in an encyclopedia by turning the pages. Only it wasn’t really like

that; it was more like someone turning a radio on and off during a news broadcast.”

“Holy shit,” Eddie said, and took another graham cracker. He wished mightily for milk to

dip them in; graham crackers without milk were almost like Oreos without the white stuff

in the middle.

“Imagine turning a radio or a TV on full-blast,” Ted said in his rusty, failing voice, “and

then turning it off again…justasquick.” He purposely ran this together, and they all

smiled—even Roland. “That’ll give you the idea. Now I’ll tell you what I learned. I suspect

you know it already, but I just can’t take the risk that you don’t. It’s too important.

“There is a Tower, lady and gentlemen, as youmust know. At one time six beams

crisscrossed there, both taking power from it—it’s some kind of unimaginable

power-source—and lending support, the way guy-wires support a radio tower. Four of

these Beams are now gone, the fourth very recently. The only two remaining are the Beam

of the Bear, Way of the Turtle—Shardik’s Beam—and the Beam of the Elephant, Way of

the Wolf—some call that one Gan’s Beam.

“I wonder if you can imagine my horror at discovering what I’d actually been doing in The

Study. When I’d been scratching that innocent itch. Although I knew all along that it was

something important,knew it.

“And there was something worse, something Ihadn’t suspected, something that applied

only to me. I’d known that I was different in some ways; for one thing, I seemed to be the

only Breaker with an ounce of compassion in my makeup. When they’ve got the mean reds,

I am, as I told you, the one they come to. Pimli Prentiss, the Master, married Tanya and

Joey Rastosovich—insisted on it, wouldn’t hear a word against the idea, kept saying that it

was his privilege and his responsibility, he was just like the captain on an old

cruise-ship—and of course they let him do it. But afterward, they came to my rooms and

Tanya said, ‘Youmarry us, Ted. Then we’ll really be married.’

“And sometimes I ask myself, ‘Did you think that was all it was? Before you started

visiting with Trampas, and listening every time he lifted up his cap to scratch, did you truly think that having a little pity and a little love in your soul were the only things that set you apart from the others? Or were you fooling yourself about that, too?’

“I don’t know for sure, but maybe I can find myself innocent on that particular charge. I

really did not understand that my talent goes far beyond progging and Breaking. I’m like a

microphone for a singer or a steroid for a muscle. I…hypethem. Say there’s a unit of

force—call itdarks, all right? In The Study, twenty or thirty people might be able to put out fifty darks an hour without me.With me? Maybe it jumps to fivehundred darks an hour.

And it jumps all at once.

“Listening to Trampas’s head, I came to see that they considered me the catch of the

century, maybe of all time, the one truly indispensable Breaker. I’d already helped them to

snap one Beam and I was cuttingcenturies off their work on Shardik’s Beam. And when

Shardik’s Beam snaps, lady and gentlemen, Gan’s can only last a little while. And when

Gan’s Beam also snaps, the Dark Tower will fall, creation will end, and the very Eye of

Existence will turn blind.

“How I ever kept Trampas from seeing my distress I don’t know. And I’ve reason to

believe that I didn’t keep as complete a poker face as I thought at the time.

“I knew I had to get out. And that was when Sheemie came to me the first time. Ithink he’d

been reading me all along, but even now I don’t know for sure, and neither does Dinky. All

I know is that one night he came to my room and thought to me, ‘I’ll make a hole for you,

sai, if you want, and you can go boogie-bye-bye.’ I asked him what he meant, and he just

looked at me. It’s funny how much a single look can say, isn’t it?Don’t insult my

intelligence. Don’t waste my time. Don’t waste your own . I didn’t read those thoughts in

his mind, not at all. I saw them on his face.”

Roland grunted agreement. His brilliant eyes were fixed on the turning reels of the tape

recorder.

“Idid ask him where the hole would come out. He said he didn’t know—I’d be taking luck

of the draw. All the same, I didn’t think it over for long. I was afraid that if I did, I’d find reasons to stay. I said, ‘Go ahead, Sheemie—send me boogie-bye-bye.’

“He closed his eyes and concentrated, and all at once the corner of my room was gone. I

could see cars going by. They were distorted, but they were actual American cars. I didn’t