But the gunslinger did not hear. They careened onward into the strange dark.
They went on three periods of waking and sleeping without incident.
During the fourth period of waking (halfway through? threequarters? they didn’t know — only that they weren’t tired enough yet to stop) there was a sharp thump beneath them, the handcar swayed, and their bodies immediately leaned to the right with gravity as the rails took a gradual turn to the left.
There was a light ahead — a glow so faint and alien that it seemed at first to be a totally new element, neither earth, air, fire, or water. It had no color and could only be discerned by the fact that they had regained their hands and faces in a dimension beyond that of touch. Their eyes had become so lightsensitive that they noticed the glow over five miles before they approached it.
“The end,” the boy said tightly. “It’s the end.”
“No.” The gunslinger spoke with odd assurance. “It isn’t.”
And it was not. They reached light but not day.
As they approached the source of the glow, they saw for the first time that the rock wall to the left had fallen away and their tracks had been joined by others which crossed in a complex spider web. The light laid them in burnished vectors. On some of them there were dark boxcars, passenger coaches, a stage that had been adapted to rails. They made the gunslinger nervous, like ghost galleons trapped in an underground Sargasso.
The light grew stronger, hurting their eyes a little, but growing slowly enough to allow them to adapt. They came from dark to light like divers coming up from deep fathoms in slow stages.
Ahead, drawing nearer, was a huge hangar stretching up into the dark. Cut into it, showing yellow squares of light, were a series of perhaps twentyfour entranceways, growing from the size of toy windows to a height of twenty feet as they drew closer. They passed inside through one of the middle ways. Written above were a series of characters, in various languages, the gunslinger presumed. He was astounded to find that he could read the last one; it was an ancient root of the High Speech itself and said: TRACK 10 TO SURFACE AND POINTS WEST
The light inside was brighter; the tracks met and merged through a series of switchings. Here some of the traffic lanterns still worked, flashing eternal reds and greens and ambers.
They rolled between rising stone piers caked black with the passage of thousands of vehicles, and then they were in some kind of central terminal. The gunslinger let the handcar coast slowly to a stop, and they peered around.
“It’s like the subway,” the boy said.
“Subway?”
“Never mind.”
The boy climbed up and onto the hard cement. They looked at silent, deserted booths where newspapers and books had once been vended; an ancient bootery; a weapon shop (the gunslinger, with a sudden burst of excitement, saw revolvers and rifles; closer inspection showed that their barrels had been filled with lead; he did, however, pick out a bow, which he slung over his back, and a quiver of almost useless, badly weighted arrows); a women’s apparel shop. Somewhere a converter was turning the air over and over, as it had for thousands of years — but perhaps not for much longer. It had a grating noise somewhere in the middle of its cycle which served to remind that perpetual motion, even under strictly controlled conditions, is still a fool’s dream. The air had a mechanized taste. Their shoes made flat echoes.
The boy cried out: “Hey! Hey….”
The gunslinger turned around and went to him. The boy was standing, transfixed, at the book stall. Inside, sprawled in the far corner, was a mummy. The mummy was wearing a blue uniform with gold piping — a trainman’s uniform by the look. There was an ancient, perfectly preserved newspaper on the mummy’s lap, which crumbled to dust when the gunslinger attempted to look at it. The mummy’s face was like an old, shriveled apple. Cautiously, the gunslinger touched the cheek. There was a small puff of dust, and they looked through the cheek and into the mummy’s mouth. A gold tooth twinkled.
“Gas,” the gunslinger murmured. “They used to be able to make a gas that would do this.”
“They fought wars with it,” the boy said darkly.
“Yes.”
There were other mummies, not a great many, but a few. They were all wearing blue and gold ornamental uniforms. The gunslinger supposed that the gas had been used when the place was empty of all incoming and outgoing traffic. Perhaps, in some dim day, the station had been a military objective of some longgone army and cause.
The thought depressed him.
“We had better go on,” he said, and started toward Track 10 and the handcar again. But the boy stood rebelliously behind him.
“Not going.”
The gunslinger turned back, surprised.
The boy’s face was twisted and trembling. “You won’t get what you want until I’m dead. I’ll take my chances by myself.”
The gunslinger nodded noncommittally, hating himself. “Okay.” He turned around and walked across to the stone piers and leaped easily down onto the handcar.
“You made a deal!” The boy screamed after him. “I know you did!”
The gunslinger, not replying, carefully put the bow in front of the Tpost rising out of the handcar’s floor, out of harm’s way.
The boy’s fists were clenched, his features drawn in agony.
How easily you bluff this young boy, the gunslinger told himself dryly. Again and again his intuition has led him to this point, and again and again you have led him on by the nose — after all, he has no friends but you.
In a sudden, simple thought (almost a vision) it came to him that all he had to do was give it over, turn around, take the boy with him, make him the center of a new force. The Tower did not have to be obtained in this humiliating, noserubbing way. Let it come after the boy had a growth of years, when the two of them could cast the man in black aside like a cheap windup toy.
Surely, he thought cynically. Surely.
He knew with sudden coldness that going backward would mean death for both of them — death or worse: entombment with the living dead behind them. Decay of all the faculties. With, perhaps, the guns of his father living long after both of them, kept in rotten splendor as totems not unlike the unforgotten gas pump.
Show some guts, he told himself falsely.
He reached for the handle and began to pump it. The handcar moved away from the stone piers.
The boy screamed: “Wait!” And began running on the diagonal, toward where the handcar would emerge toward the darkness ahead. The gunslinger had an impulse to speed up, to leave the boy alone yet at least with an uncertainty.
Instead, he caught him as he leaped. The heart beneath
the thin shirt thrummed and fluttered as Jake clung to him. It was like the beat of a chicken’s heart.
It was very close now.
The sound of the river had become very loud, filling even their dreams with its steady thunder. The gunslinger, more as a whim than anything else, let the boy pump them ahead while he shot a number of arrows into the dark, tethered by fine white lengths of thread.
The bow was very bad, incredibly preserved but with a terrible pull and aim despite that, and the gunslinger knew that very little would improve it. Even restringing would not help the tired wood. The arrows would not fly far into the dark, but the last one he sent out came back wet and slick. The gunslinger only shrugged when the boy asked him how far, but privately he didn’t think the arrow could have traveled more than a hundred yards from the rotted bow — and lucky to get that.
And still the sound grew louder.
During the third waking period after the station, a spectral radiance began to grow again. They had entered a long tunnel of some weird phosphorescent rock, and the wet walls glittered and twinkled with thousands of minute starbursts. They saw things in a kind of eerie, horrorhouse surreality.
The brute sound of the river was channeled to them by the confining rock, magnified in its own natural amplifier. Yet the sound remained oddly constant, even as they approached the crossing point the gunslinger was sure lay ahead, because the walls were widening, drawing back. The angle of their ascent became more pronounced.
The tracks arrowed straight ahead in the new light. To the gunslinger they looked like the captive tubes of swamp
gas sometimes sold for a pretty at the Feast of Joseph fairtime; to the boy they looked like endless streamers of neon tubing. But in its glow they could both see that the rock that had enclosed them so long ended up ahead in ragged twin peninsulas that pointed toward a gulf of darkness ahead —the chasm over the river.