until the guy died. You know what they called a guy like that, Eddie?
Eddie had shaken his head, cold with the vision of it.
They called him a honey-pot,Henry had said. Something sweet. Something to draw flies. Or
maybe even a bear.
That’s what Detta was doing: using him as a honeypot.
She left him some seven feet below the high tide line, left him without a word, left him
facing the ocean. It was not the tide coming in to drown him that the gunslinger, looking
through the door, was supposed to see, because the tide was on the ebb and wouldn’t get up
this far again for another six hours. And long before then . . .
Eddie rolled his eyes up a little and saw the sun striking a long gold track across the ocean.
What was it? Four o’clock? About that. Sunset would come around seven.
It would be dark long before he had to worry about the tide.
And when dark came, the lobstrosities would come rol- ling out of the waves; they would
crawl their questioning way up the beach to where he lay helplessly trussed, and then they
would tear him apart.
7
That time stretched out interminably for Eddie Dean. The idea of time itself became a joke.
Even his horror of what was going to happen to him when it got dark faded as his legs
began to throb with a discomfort which worked its way up the scale of feeling to pain and
finally to shrieking agony. He would relax his muscles, all the knots would pull tight, and
when he was on the verge of strangling he would manage somehow to pull his ankles up
again, releasing the pressure, allowing some breath to return. He was no longer sure he
could make it to dark. There might come a time when he would simply be unable to bring
his legs back up.
CHAPTER 3
ROLAND TAKES HIS
MEDICINE
1
Now Jack Mort knew the gunslinger was here. If he had been another person—an Eddie
Dean or an Odetta Walker, for instance—Roland would have held palaver with the man, if
only to ease his natural panic and confusion at suddenly finding one’s self shoved rudely
into the passenger seat of the body one’s brain had driven one’s whole life.
But because Mort was a monster—worse, than Detta Walker ever had been or could
be—he made no effort to explain or speak at all. He could hear the man’s clamorings— Who
are you? What’s happening to me?—but disregarded them. The gunslinger concentrated on
his short list of necessi- ties, using the man’s mind with no compunction at all. The
clamorings became screams of terror. The gunslinger went right on disregarding them.
The only way he could remain in the worm-pit which was this man’s mind was to regard
him as no more than a combina- tion atlas and encyclopedia. Mort had all the information
Roland needed. The plan he made was rough, but rough was often better than smooth.
When it came to planning, there were no creatures in the universe more different than
Roland and Jack Mort.
When you planned rough, you allowed room for improv- isation. And improvisation at
short notice had always been one of Roland’s strong points.
2
A fat man with lenses over his eyes, like the bald man who had poked his head into Mort’s
office five minutes earlier (it seemed that in Eddie’s world many people wore these, which
his Mortcypedia identified as “glasses”), got into the elevator with him. He looked at the briefcase in the hand of the man who he believed to be Jack Mort and then at Mort himself.
“Going to see Dorfman, Jack?”
The gunslinger said nothing.
“If you think you can talk him out of sub-leasing, I can tell you it’s a waste of time,” the fat man said, then blinked as his colleague took a quick step backward. The doors of the little
box closed and suddenly they were falling.
He clawed at Mort’s mind, ignoring the screams, and found this was all right. The fall was
controlled.
“If I spoke out of turn, I’m sorry,” the fat man said. The gunslinger thought: This one is afraid, too. “You’ve handled the jerk better than anyone else in the firm, that’s what I think.”
The gunslinger said nothing. He waited only to be out of this falling coffin.
“I say so, too,” the fat man continued eagerly. “Why, just yesterday I was at lunch with—”
Jack Mort’s head turned, and behind Jack Mort’s gold-rimmed glasses, eyes that seemed a
somehow different shade of blue than Jack’s eyes had ever been before stared at the fat man.
“Shut up,” the gunslinger said tonelessly.
Color fell from the fat man’s face and he took two quick steps backward. His flabby
buttocks smacked the fake wood panels at the back of the little moving coffin, which suddenly stopped. The doors opened and the gunslinger, wearing Jack Mort’s body like a
tight-fitting set of clothes, stepped out with no look back. The fat man held his finger on the
DOOR OPEN button of the elevator and waited inside until Mort was out of sight. Always
did have a screw loose, the fat man thought, but this could be serious. This could be a breakdown.
The fat man found that the idea of Jack Mort tucked safely away in a sanitarium
somewhere was very comforting.
The gunslinger wouldn’t have been surprised.
3
Somewhere between the echoing room which his Mort- cypedia identified as a lobby, to wit, a place of entry and exit from the offices which filled this sky-tower, and the bright
sunshine of street (his Mortcypedia identified this street as both 6th Avenue and Avenue of the Americas), the screaming of Roland’s host stopped. Mort had not died of fright; the
gunslinger felt with a deep instinct which was the same as knowing that if Mort died,
their kas would be expelled forever, into that void of possibility which lay beyond all
physical worlds. Not dead—fainted. Fainted at the overload of terror and strangeness, as
Roland himself had done upon entering the man’s mind and discovering its secrets and the
crossing of destinies too great to be coincidence.
He was glad Mort had fainted. As long as the man’s unconsciousness hadn’t affected
Roland’s access to the man’s knowledge and memories—and it hadn’t—he was glad to have
him out of the way.
The yellow cars were public conveyences called Tack-Sees or Cabs or Hax. The tribes which drove them, the Mortcypedia told him, were two: Spix andMockies. To make one
stop, you held your hand up like a pupil in a classroom.
Roland did this, and after several Tack-Sees which were obviously empty save for their
drivers had gone by him, he saw that these had signs which read Off-Duty. Since these were Great Letters, the gunslinger didn’t need Mort’s help. He waited, then put his hand up again.
This time the Tack-See pulled over. The gunslinger got into the back seat. He smelled old
smoke, old sweat, old perfume. It smelled like a coach in his own world.
“Where to, my friend?” the driver asked—Roland had no idea if he was of the Spix
or Mockies tribe, and had no inten- tion of asking. It might be impolite in this world.
“I’m not sure,” Roland said.
“This ain’t no encounter group, my friend. Time is money.”
Tell him to put his flag down,the Mortcypedia told him.
“Put your flag down,” Roland said.
“That ain’t rolling nothing but time,” the driver replied.
Tell him you’ll tip him five bux,the Mortcypedia advised.
“I’ll tip you five bucks,” Roland said.
“Let’s see it,” the cabbie replied. “Money talks, bullshit walks.”
Ask him if he wants the money or if he wants to go fuck himself,the Mortcypedia advised
instantly.
“Do you want the money, or do you want to go fuck yourself?” Roland asked in a cold,
dead voice.
The cabbie’s eyes glanced apprehensively into the rear-view mirror for just a moment, and
he said no more.
Roland consulted Jack Mort’s accumulated store of knowledge more fully this time. The
cabbie glanced up again, quickly, during the fifteen seconds his fare spent simply sit- ting
there with his head slightly lowered and his left hand spread across his brow, as if he had an
Excedrin Headache. The cabbie had decided to tell the guy to get out or he’d yell for a cop
when the fare looked up and said mildly, “I’d like you to take me to Seventh Avenue and
Forty-Ninth street. For this trip I will pay you ten dollars over the fare on your taxi meter,
no matter what your tribe.”
A weirdo,the driver (a WASP from Vermont trying to break into showbiz) thought, but
maybe a rich weirdo. He dropped the cab into gear. “We’re there, buddy,” he said, and pulling into traffic he added mentally, And the sooner the better.