Jake looked up. There was no net. No machine-guns, either. He started walking forward again, picking his way around the deepest of the potholes and jumping over a washout. Beyond this latter, the driveway was tilted and cracked but mostly whole. “You can get down now,” he told Oy. “Boy, you’re heavy. Watch out or I’ll have to stick you in Weight Watchers.”
He looked straight ahead, squinting and shielding his eyes from the fierce glare. The lights were in a row running just beneath the Quonset’s curved roof. They threw his shadow out behind him, long and black. He saw rock-cat corpses, two on his left and two more on his right. Three of them were little more than skeletons. The fourth was in a high state of decomposition, but Jake could see a hole that looked too big for a bullet. He thought it had been made by a bah-bolt. The idea was comforting. No weapons of super-science at work here. Still, he was crazy not to be hightailing it back toward the river and the Calla beyond it. Wasn’t he? “Crazy,” he said.
“Razy,” Oy said, once more padding along at Jake’s heel.
A minute later they reached the door of the hut. Above it, on a rusting steel plate, was this: NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
Northeast Corridor
Arc Quadrant
OUTPOST 16
Medium Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
On the door itself, now hanging crooked by only two screws, was another sign. A joke? Some sort of nickname? Jake thought it might be a little of both. The letters were choked with rust and eroded by God knew how many years of blowing sand and grit, but he could still read them:
WELCOME TO THE DOGAN
EIGHT
Jake expected the door to be locked and wasn’t disappointed. The lever handle moved up and down only the tiniest bit. He guessed that when it had been new, there’d been no give in it at all. To the left of the door was a rusty steel panel with a button and a speaker grille. Beneath it was the word VERBAL. Jake reached for the button, and suddenly the lights lining the top of the building went out, leaving him in what at first seemed like utter darkness. They’re on a timer, he thought, waiting for his eyes to adjust. A pretty short one. Or maybe they re just getting tired, like everything else the Old People left behind.
His eyes readapted to the moonlight and he could see the entry-box again. He had a pretty good idea of what the verbal entry code must be. He pushed the button.
“WELCOME TO ARC QUADRANT OUTPOST 16,” said a voice. Jake jumped back, stifling a cry. He had expected a voice, but not one so eerily like that of Blaine the Mono. He almost expected it to drop into a John Wayne drawl and call him little trailhand. “THIS IS A MEDIUM SECURITY OUTPOST. PLEASE GIVE
THE VERBAL ENTRY CODE. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS. NINE… EIGHT…”
“Nineteen,” Jake said.
“INCORRECT ENTRY CODE. YOU MAY RETRY ONCE. FIVE… FOUR… THREE…”
“Ninety-nine,” Jake said.
“THANKYOU.”
The door clicked open.
NINE
Jake and Oy walked into a room that reminded him of the vast control-area Roland had carried him through beneath the city of Lud, as they had followed the steel ball which had guided them to Blaine’s cradle. This room was smaller, of course, but many of the dials and panels looked the same. There were chairs at some of the consoles, the kind that would roll along the floor so that the people who worked here could move from place to place without getting to their feet. There was a steady sigh of fresh air, but Jake could hear occasional rough rattling sounds from the machinery driving it. And while three-quarters of the panels were lighted, he could see a good many that were dark. Old and tired: he had been right about that. In one corner was a grinning skeleton in the remains of a brown khaki uniform.
On one side of the room was a bank of TV monitors. They reminded Jake a little bit of his father’s study at home, although father had had only three screens—one for each network— and here there were… he counted. Thirty. Three of them were fuzzy, showing pictures he couldn’t really make out. Two were rolling rapidly up and up, as if the vertical hold had fritzed out. Four were entirely dark. The other twenty-one were projecting pictures, and Jake looked at these with growing wonder. Halfa dozen showed various expanses of desert, including the hilltop guarded by the two misshapen cactuses. Two more showed the outpost—the
Dogan—from behind and from the driveway side. Under these were three screens showing the Dogan’s interior. One showed a room that looked like a galley or kitchen. The second showed a small bunkhouse that looked equipped to sleep eight (in one of the bunks, an upper, Jake spied another skeleton). The third inside-the-Dogan screen presented this room, from a high angle. Jake could see himself and Oy. There was a screen with a stretch of the railroad tracks on it, and one showing the Little Whye from this side, moonstruck and beautiful. On the far right was the causeway with the train-tracks crossing it.
It was the images on the other eight operating screens that astounded Jake. One showed Took’s General Store, now dark and deserted, closed up till daylight. One showed the Pavilion. Two showed the Calla high street.
Another showed Our Lady of Serenity Church, and one showed the living room of the rectory… inside the rectory! Jake could actually see the Pere’s cat, Snugglebutt, lying asleep on the hearth. The other two showed angles of what Jake assumed was the Manni village (he had not been there).
Where in hell’s name are the cameras? Jake wondered. How come nobody sees them ?
Because they were too small, he supposed. And because they’d been hidden. Smile, you’re on Candid Camera.
But the church… the rectory… those were buildings that hadn’t even existed in the Calla until a few years previous. And inside? Inside the rectory? Who had put a camera there, and when?
Jake didn’t know when, but he had a terrible idea that he knew who. Thank God they’d done most of their palavering on the porch, or outside on the lawn. But still, how much must the Wolves—or their masters—
know? How much had the infernal machines of this place, the infernal fucking machines of this place, recorded?
And transmitted?
Jake felt pain in his hands and realized they were tightly clenched, the nails biting into his palms. He opened them with an effort. He kept expecting the voice from the speaker-grille—the voice so much like Blaine’s—
to challenge him, ask him what he was doing here. But it was mostly silent in this room of not-quite-ruin; no sounds but the low hum of the equipment and the occasionally raspy whoosh of the air-exchangers. He looked over his shoulder at the door and saw it had closed behind him on a pneumatic hinge. He wasn’t worried about that; from this side it would probably open easily. If it didn’t, good old ninety-nine would get him out again. He remembered introducing himself to the folken that first night in the Pavilion, a night that already seemed a long time ago. I am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld, he had told them. The ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine. Why had he said that? He didn’t know. All he knew was that things kept showing up again. In school, Ms. Avery had read them a poem called “The Second Coming,” by William Buder Yeats. There had been something in it about a hawk turning and turning in a widening gyre, which was
— according to Ms. Avery—a kind of circle. But here things were in a spiral, not a circle. For the Ka-Tet of Nineteen (or of the Ninety and Nine, Jake had an idea they were really the same), things were tightening up even as the world around them grew old, grew loose, shut down, shed pieces of itself. It was like being in the cyclone which had carried Dorothy off to the Land of Oz, where witches were real and bumhugs ruled. To Jake’s heart it made perfect sense that they should be seeing the same things over and over, and more and more often, because—
Movement on one of the screens caught his eye. He looked at it and saw Benny’s Da’ and Andy the Messenger Robot coming over the hilltop guarded by the cactus sentries. As he watched, the spiny barrel arms swung inward to block the road—and, perhaps, impale the prey. Andy, however, had no reason to fear cactus spines. He swung an arm and broke one of the barrels off halfway down its length. It fell into the dust, spurting white goo. Maybe it wasn’t sap at all, Jake thought. Maybe it was blood. In any case, the cactus on the other side swiveled away in a hurry. Andy and Ben Slightman stopped for a moment, perhaps to discuss this. The screen’s resolution wasn’t clear enough to show if the human’s mouth was moving or not.