They did, and the forward wall reappeared—a blue-upholstered cir- cle that seemed to
float in empty space. It was unmarked by a door; if there was a way to get into the
operator’s room from the Barony Cabin, Eddie couldn’t see it. As they watched, a
rectangular area of this front wall darkened, going from blue to violet to black. A moment
later, a bright red line appeared on the rectangle, squiggling across its surface. Violet dots
appeared at irregular intervals along the line, and even before names appeared beside the
dots, Eddie realized he was looking at a route-map, one not much different from those
which were mounted in New York subway stations and on the trains themselves. A
flashing green dot appeared at Lud, which was Blaine’s base of operations as well as his
terminating point.
“YOU ARE LOOKING AT OUR ROUTE OF TRAVEL. ALTHOUGH THERE ARE
SOME TWISTS AND TURNS ALONG THE BUNNY-TRAIL, YOU WILL NOTE
THAT OUR COURSE KEEPS FIRMLY TO THE SOUTHWEST—ALONG THE PATH
OF THE BEAM. THE TOTAL DISTANCE IS JUST OVER EIGHT THOUSAND
WHEELS—OR SEVEN THOUSAND MILES, IF YOU PREFER THAT UNIT OF
MEASURE. IT WAS ONCE MUCH LESS, BUT THAT WAS BEFORE ALL
TEMPORAL SYNAPSES BEGAN TO MELT DOWN.”
“What do you mean, temporal synapses?” Susannah asked.
Blaine laughed his nasty laugh . . . but did not answer her question.
“AT MY TOP SPEED, WE WILL REACH THE TERMINATING POINT OF MY RUN
IN EIGHT HOURS AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES.”
“Eight hundred-plus miles an hour over the ground,” Susannah said. Her voice was soft
with awe. “Jesus-God.”
“I AM, OF COURSE, MAKING THE ASSUMPTION THAT ALL TRACKAGE
ALONG MY ROUTE REMAINS INTACT. IT HAS BEEN NINE YEARS AND FIVE
MONTHS SINCE I•VE BOTHERED TO MAKE THE RUN, SO I CAN’T SAY FOR
SURE.”
Ahead, the wall at the southeastern edge of the city was drawing closer. It was high and
thick and eroded to rubble at the top. It also appeared to be lined with
skeletons—thousands upon thousands of dead Luddites. The notch toward which Blaine
was slowly moving appeared to be at least two hundred feet deep, and here the trestle
which bore the track was very dark, as if someone had tried to burn it or blow it up.
“What happens if we come to a place where the track is gone?” Eddie asked. He realized he kept raising his voice to talk to Blaine, as if he were speaking to somebody on the
telephone and had a bad connection.
“AT EIGHT HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR?” Blaine sounded amused. “SEE YOU
LATER, ALLIGATOR, AFTER A WHILE, CROC- ODILE, DONT FORGET TO
WRITE.”
“Come on!” Eddie said. “Don’t tell me a machine as sophisticated as you can’t monitor your own trackage for breaks.”
“WELL, I COULD HAVE,” Blaine agreed, “BUT—AW, SHUCKS!— I BLEW THOSE
CIRCUITS OUT WHEN WE STARTED TO MOVE.”
Eddie’s face was a picture of astonishment. “Why?”
“IT’S QUITE A BIT MORE EXCITING THIS WAY, DON’T YOU THINK?”
Eddie, Susannah, and Jake exchanged thunderstruck looks. Roland, apparently not
surprised at all, sat placidly in his chair with his hands folded in his lap, looking down as
they passed thirty feet above the wretched hovels and demolished buildings which infested
this side of the city.
“LOOK CLOSELY AS WE LEAVE THE CITY, AND MARK WHAT YOU SEE,”
Blaine told them. “MARK IT VERY WELL.”
The invisible Barony Coach bore them toward the notch in the wall. They passed through,
and as they came out the other side, Eddie and Susannah screamed in unison. Jake took one
look and clapped his hands over his eyes. Oy began to bark wildly.
Roland stared down, eyes wide, lips set in a bloodless line like a scar. Understanding filled
him like bright white light.
Beyond the Great Wall of Lud, the real waste lands began.
7
THE MONO HAD BEEN descending as they approached the notch in the wall, putting
them not more than thirty feet above the ground. That made the shock greater … for when
they emerged on the other side, they were skimming along at a horrifying height—eight
hundred feet, perhaps a thousand.
Roland looked back over his shoulder at the wall, which was now receding behind them. It
had seemed very high as they approached it, but from this perspective it seemed puny
indeed—a splintered fingernail of stone clinging to the edge of a vast, sterile headland.
Granite cliffs, wet with rain, plunged into what seemed at first glance to be an endless
abyss. Directly below the wall, the rock was lined with large circular holes like empty
eyesockets. Black water and tendrils of purple mist emerged from these in brackish, sludgy
streams and spread downward over the granite in stinking, overlapping fans that looked
almost as old as the rock itself. That must be where all the city’s waste-product goes, the
gunslinger thought. Over the edge and into the pit.
Except it wasn’t a pit; it was a sunken plain. It was as if the land beyond the city had lain on top of a titanic, flat-roofed elevator, and at some point in the dim, unrecorded past the
elevator had gone down, taking a huge chunk of the world with it. Blaine’s single track,
centered on its narrow trestle, soaring above this fallen land and below the rain-swollen
clouds, seemed to float in empty space.
“What’s holding us up?” Susannah cried.
“THE BEAM, OF COURSE,” Blaine replied. “ALL THINGS SERVE IT, YOU KNOW.
LOOK DOWN—I WILL APPLY 4X MAGNI- FICATION TO THE LOWER
QUADRANT SCREENS.”
Even Roland felt vertigo twist his gut as the land beneath them seemed to swell upward
toward the place where they were floating. The picture which appeared was ugly beyond
his past knowledge of ugliness . . . and that knowledge, sadly, was wide indeed. The lands
below had been fused and blasted by some terrible event—the disastrous cataclysm which
had driven this part of the world deep into itself in the first place, no doubt. The surface of
the earth had become distorted black glass, humped upward into spalls and twists which
could not properly be called hills and twisted downward into deep cracks and folds which
could not properly be called valleys. A few stunted nightmare trees flailed twisted branches
at the sky; under magnification, they seemed to clutch at the travellers like the arms of
lunatics. Here and there clusters of thick ceramic pipes jutted through the glassy surface of
the ground. Some seemed dead or dormant, but within others they could see gleams of
eldritch blue-green light, as if titanic forges and furnaces ran on and on in the bowels of the
earth. Misshapen flying things which looked like pterodactyls cruised between these pipes on leathery wings, occasionally snapping at each other with their hooked beaks. Whole
flocks of these gruesome aviators roosted on the circular tops of other stacks, apparently
warming themselves in the updrafts of the eternal fires beneath.
They passed above a fissure zig-zagging along a north-south course like a dead river
bed . . . except it wasn’t dead. Deep inside lay a thin thread of deepest scarlet, pulsing like a heartbeat. Other, smaller fissures branched out from this, and Susannah, who had read her
Tolkien, thought: This is what Frodo and Sam saw when they reached the heart of Mordor.
These are the Cracks of Doom.
A fiery fountain erupted directly below them, spewing flaming rocks and stringy clots of
lava upward. For a moment it seemed they would be engulfed in flames. Jake shrieked and
pulled his feet up on his chair, clutching Oy to his chest.
“DON’T WORRY, LITTLE TRAILHAND,” John Wayne drawled. “REMEMBER THAT
YOU’RE SEEING IT UNDER MAG- NIFICATION.”
The flare died. The rocks, many as big as factories, fell back in a soundless storm.
Susannah found herself entranced by the bleak horrors unrolling below them, caught in a
deadly fascination she could not break . . . and she felt the dark part of her personality, that side of her khef which was Detta Walker, doing more than just watching; that part of her
was drink- ing in this view, understanding it, recognizing it. In a way, it was the place Detta
had always sought, the physical counterpart of her mad mind and laughing, desolate heart.
The empty hills north and east of the West- ern Sea; the shattered woods around the Portal
of the Bear; the empty plains northwest of the Send; all these paled in comparison to this
fantas- tic, endless vista of desolation. They had come to The Drawers and entered the
waste lands; the poisoned darkness of that shunned place now lay all around them.
8
BUT THESE LANDS, THOUGH poisoned, were not entirely dead. From time to time the
travellers caught sight of figures below them—misshapen things which bore no
resemblance to either men or animals—prancing and cavorting in the smouldering
wilderness. Most seemed to congregate either around the clusters of cyclopean chimneys
thrusting out of the fused earth or at the lips of the fiery crevasses which cut through the