No reply. And Eddie could feel any period of grace they might have started with slipping
away. He thumbed the TALK/LISTEN and spoke with frantic vivacity as the sweat
trickled down his cheeks and neck.
Ask me a question.
“So—Blaine! What have you been up to these last few years? I guess you haven’t been
doing the old southeast run, huh? Any reason why not? Haven’t been feeling up to snuff?”
No sound but the rustle and flap of the pigeons. In his mind he saw Ardis trying to scream
as his cheeks melted and his tongue caught fire.
He felt the hair on the nape of his neck stirring and clumping together. Fear? Or gathering
electricity?
Hurry . . . he’s worse than ever before.
“Who built you, anyway?” Eddie asked frantically, thinking: If I only knew what the
fucking thing wanted! “Want to talk about that? Was it the Grays? Nah . . . probably the
Great Old Ones, right? Or . . .”
He trailed off. Now he could feel Blaine’s silence as a physical weight on his skin, like
fleshy, groping hands.
“What do you want?” he shouted. “Just what in hell do you want to hear?”
No answer—but the buttons on the box were glowing an angry dark red again, and Eddie
knew their time was almost up. He could hear a low buzzing sound nearby—a sound like
an electrical generator—and he didn’t believe that sound was just his imagination, no matter how much he wanted to think so.
“Blaine!” Susannah shouted suddenly. “Blaine, do you hear me?”
No answer . . . and Eddie felt the air was filling up with electricity as a bowl under a tap
fills up with water. He could feel it crackling bitterly in his nose with every breath he took;
could feel his fillings buzzing like angry insects.
“Blaine, I’ve got a question, and it is a pretty good one! Listen!” She closed her eyes for a moment, fingers rubbing frantically at her temples, and then opened her eyes again. ”
‘There is a thing that . . . uh . . . that nothing is, and yet it has a name; ’tis sometimes tall and . . . and sometimes short . . .’ ” She broke off and stared at Eddie with wide, agonized eyes. “Help me! I can’t remember how the rest of it goes!”
Eddie only stared at her as if she had gone mad. What in the name of God was she talking
about? Then it came to him, and it made a weirdly perfect sense, and the rest of the riddle
clicked into his mind as neatly as the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He swung toward
the speaker again.
” ‘It joins our talks, it joins our sport, and plays at every game.’ What is it? That’s our question, Blaine—what is it?”
The red light illuminating the COMMAND and ENTER buttons below the diamond of
numbers blinked out. There was an endless moment of silence before Blaine spoke
again . . . but Eddie was aware that the feeling of electricity crawling all over his skin was
diminishing.
“A SHADOW, OF COURSE,” the voice of Blaine responded. “AN EASY ONE . . . BUT
NOT BAD. NOT BAD AT ALL.”
The voice coming out of the speaker was animated by a thoughtful quality . . . and
something else, as well. Pleasure? Longing? Eddie couldn’t quite decide, but he did know
there was something in that voice that reminded him of Little Blaine. He knew something
else, as well: Susannah had saved their bacon, at least for the time being. He bent down and
kissed her cold, sweaty brow.
“DO YOU KNOW ANY MORE RIDDLES?” Blaine asked.
“Yes, lots,” Susannah said at once. “Our companion, Jake, has a whole book of them.”
“FROM THE NEW YORK PLACE OF WHERE?” Blaine asked, and now the tone of his
voice was perfectly clear, at least to Eddie. Blaine might be a machine, but Eddie had been
a heroin junkie for six years, and he knew stone greed when he heard it.
“From New York, right,” he said. “But Jake has been taken prisoner. A man named Gasher
took him.”
No answer . . . and then the buttons glowed that faint, rosy pink again. “Good so far,” the voice of Little Blaine whispered. “But you must be careful . . . he’s tricky. …”
The red lights reappeared at once.
“DID ONE OF YOU SPEAK?” Blaine’s voice was cold and—Eddie could have sworn it
was so—suspicious.
He looked at Susannah. Susannah looked back with the wide, fright- ened eyes of a little
girl who has heard something unnameable moving slyly beneath the bed.
“I cleared my throat, Blaine,” Eddie said. He swallowed and armed sweat from his
forehead. “I’m . . . shit, tell the truth and shame the devil. I’m scared to death.”
“THAT IS VERY WISE OF YOU. THESE RIDDLES OF WHICH YOU SPEAK—ARE
THEY STUPID? I WON’T HAVE MY PATIENCE TRIED WITH STUPID RIDDLES.”
“Most are smart,” Susannah said, but she looked anxiously at Eddie as she said it.
“YOU LIE. YOU DON’T KNOW THE QUALITY OF THESE RIDDLES AT ALL.”
“How can you say—”
“VOICE ANALYSIS. FRICTIVE PATTERNS AND DIPH- THONG
STRESS-EMPHASIS PROVIDE A RELIABLE QUOTIENT OF TRUTH/UNTRUTH.
PREDICTIVE RELIABILITY IS 97 PER CENT, PLUS OR MINUS .5 PER CENT.” The
voice fell silent for a moment, and when it spoke again, it did so in a menacing drawl that
Eddie found very familiar. It was the voice of Humphrey Bogart. “I SHUGGEST YOU
SHTICK TO WHAT YOU KNOW, SHWEET-HEART. THE LAST GUY THAT TRIED
SHADING THE TRUTH WITH ME WOUND UP AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEND IN
A PAIR OF SHEMENT COWBOY BOOTS.”
“Christ,” Eddie said. “We walked four hundred miles or so to meet the computer version of Rich Little. How can you imitate guys like John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, Blaine?
Guys from our world?”
Nothing.
“Okay, you don’t want to answer that one. How about this one—if a riddle was what you
wanted, why didn’t you just say so?”
Again there was no answer, but Eddie discovered that he didn’t really need one. Blaine
liked riddles, so he had asked them one. Susannah had solved it. Eddie guessed that if she
had failed to do so, the two of them would now look like a couple of giant-economy-size
charcoal bri- quets lying on the floor of the Cradle of Lud.
“Blaine?” Susannah asked uneasily. There was no answer. “Blaine, are you still there?”
“YES. TELL ME ANOTHER ONE.”
“When is a door not a door?” Eddie asked.
“WHEN IT’S AJAR. YOU’LL HAVE TO DO BETTER THAN THAT IF YOU REALLY
EXPECT ME TO TAKE YOU SOME- WHERE. CAN YOU DO BETTER THAN
THAT?”
“If Roland gets here, I’m sure we can,” Susannah said. “Regardless of how good the riddles in Jake’s book may be, Roland knows hundreds— he actually studied them as a child.”
Having said this, she realized she could not conceive of Roland as a child. “Will you take
us, Blaine?”
“I MIGHT,” Blaine said, and Eddie was quite sure he heard a dim thread of cruelty running through that voice. “BUT YOU’LL HAVE TO PRIME THE PUMP TO GET ME GOING,
AND MY PUMP PRIMES BACKWARD.”
“Meaning what?” Eddie asked, looking through the bars at the smooth pink line of Blaine’s back. But Blaine did not reply to this or any of the other questions they asked. The bright
orange lights stayed on, but both Big Blaine and Little Blaine seemed to have gone into
hiberna- tion. Eddie, however, knew better. Blaine was awake. Blaine was watch- ing them.
Blaine was listening to their frictive patterns and diphthong stress-emphasis.
He looked at Susannah.
” ‘You’ll have to prime the pump, but my pump primes backward,’ ” he said bleakly. “It’s a riddle, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.” She looked at the triangular window, so like a half-lidded, mocking eye, and then pulled him close so she could whisper in his ear. “It’s totally insane,
Eddie—schizophrenic, paranoid, probably delusional as well.”
“Tell me about it,” he breathed back. “What we’ve got here is a lunatic genius
ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound.
Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest .”
“Do you have any idea what the answer is?”
Eddie shook his head. “You?”
“A little tickle, way back in my mind. False light, probably. I keep thinking about what
Roland said: a good riddle is always sensible and always solvable. It’s like a magician’s
trick.”
“Misdirection.”
She nodded. “Go fire another shot, Eddie—let em know we’re still here.”
“Yeah. Now if we could only be sure that they’re still there.”
“Do you think they are, Eddie?”
Eddie had started away, and he spoke without stopping or looking back. “I don’t
know—that’s a riddle not even Blaine could answer.”