the runway at LaGuardia or Idlewild. “PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS, MY
INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS.”
Jake dropped into one of the swivel chairs. Oy jumped promptly into his lap. Roland took
the chair nearest him, sparing one glance at the ice-sculpture. The barrel of the revolver
was beginning to drip slowly into the shallow china basin in which the sculpture stood.
Eddie sat down on one of the sofas with Susannah. It was every bit as comfortable as his
hand had told him it would be. “Exactly where are we going, Blaine?”
Blaine replied in the patient voice of someone who realizes he is speaking to a mental
inferior and must make allowances. “ALONG THE PATH OF THE BEAM. AT LEAST,
AS FAR ALONG IT AS MY TRACK GOES.”
“To the Dark Tower?” Roland asked. Susannah realized it was the first time the gunslinger had actually spoken to the loquacious ghost in the machine below Lud.
“Only as far as Topeka,” Jake said in a low voice.
“YES,” Blaine said. “TOPEKA IS THE NAME OF MY TERMI- NATING POINT,
ALTHOUGH I AM SURPRISED YOU KNOW IT.”
With all you know about our world, Jake thought, how come you don’t know that some
lady wrote a book about you, Blaine? Was it the name-change? Was something that simple enough to fool a complicated machine like you into overlooking your own biography? And
what about Beryl Evans, the woman who supposedly wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Did
you know her, Blaine? And where is she now?
Good questions . . . but Jake somehow didn’t think this would be a good time to ask them.
The throb of the engines became steadily stronger. A faint thud— not nearly as strong as
the explosion which had shaken the Cradle as they boarded—ran through the floor. An
expression of alarm crossed Susannah’s face. “Oh shit! Eddie! My wheelchair! It’s back
there!”
Eddie put an arm around her shoulders. “Too late now, babe,” he said as Blaine the Mono began to move, sliding toward its slot in the Cradle for the first time in ten years . . . and for the last time in its long, long history.
5
“THE BARONY CABIN HAS A PARTICULARLY FINE VISUAL MODE,” Blaine said.
“WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO ACTIVATE IT?”
Jake glanced at Roland, who shrugged and nodded.
“Yes, please,” Jake said.
What happened then was so spectacular that it stunned all of them to silence…although
Roland, who knew little of technology but who had spent his entire life on comfortable
terms with magic, was the least wonder-struck of the four. It was not a matter of windows
appearing in the compartment’s curved walls; the entire cabin—floor and ceiling as well as
walls—grew milky, grew translucent, grew transparent, and then disappeared completely.
Within a space of five seconds, Blaine the Mono seemed to be gone and the pilgrims
seemed to be zooming through the lanes of the city with no aid or support at all.
Susannah and Eddie clutched each other like small children in the path of a charging
animal. Oy barked and tried to jump down the front of Jake’s shirt. Jake barely noticed; he
was clutching the sides of his seat and looking from side to side, his eyes wide with
amazement. His initial alarm was being replaced by amazed delight.
The furniture groupings were still here, he saw; so was the bar, the piano-harpsichord, and
the ice-sculpture Blaine had created as a party-favor, but now this living-room
configuration appeared to be cruising seventy feet above Lud’s rain-soaked central district.
Five feet to Jake’s left, Eddie and Susannah were floating along on one of the couches;
three feet to his right, Roland was sitting in a powder-blue swivel chair, his dusty, battered boots resting on nothing, flying serenely over the rubble-strewn urban waste land below.
Jake could feel the carpet beneath his moccasins, but his eyes insisted that neither the
carpet nor the floor beneath it was still there. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the
dark slot in the stone flank of the Cradle slowly receding in the distance.
“Eddie! Susannah! Check it out!”
Jake got to his feet, holding Oy inside his shirt, and began to walk slowly through what
looked like empty space. Taking the initial step required a great deal of willpower, because
his eyes told him there was nothing at all between the floating islands of furniture, but once
he began to move, the undeniable feel of the floor beneath him made it easier. To Eddie and
Susannah, the boy appeared to be walking on thin air while the battered, dingy buildings of
the city slid by on either side.
“Don’t do that, kid,” Eddie said feebly. “You’re gonna make me sick up.”
Juke lilted Oy carefully out of his shirt. “It’s okay,’ he said, and set him down. “See?”
“Oy!” the humbler agreed, but after one look between his paws at the city park currently unrolling beneath them, he attempted to crawl onto Jake’s feet and sit on his moccasins.
Jake looked forward and saw the broad gray stroke of the monorail track ahead of them,
rising slowly but steadily through the buildings and disappearing into the rain. He looked
down again and saw nothing but the street and floating membranes of low cloud.
“How come I can’t see the track underneath us, Blaine?”
“THE IMAGES YOU SEE ARE COMPUTER-GENERATED,” Blaine replied. “THE
COMPUTER ERASES THE TRACK FROM THE LOWER-QUADRANT IMAGE IN
ORDER TO PRESENT A MORE PLEASING VIEW, AND ALSO TO REINFORCE
THE ILLU- SION THAT THE PASSENGERS ARE FLYING.”
“It’s incredible,” Susannah murmured. Her initial fear had passed and she was looking
around eagerly. “It’s like being on a flying carpet. I keep expecting the wind to blow back my hair—”
“I CAN PROVIDE THAT SENSATION, IF YOU LIKE,” Blaine said. “ALSO A LITTLE
MOISTURE, WHICH WILL MATCH CUR- RENT OUTSIDE CONDITIONS. IT
MIGHT NECESSITATE A CHANGE OF CLOTHES, HOWEVER.”
“That’s all right, Blaine. There’s such a thing as taking an illusion too far.”
The track slipped through a tall cluster of buildings which reminded Jake a little of the
Wall Street area in New York. When they cleared these, the track dipped to pass under
what looked like an elevated road. That was when they saw the purple cloud, and the crowd of people fleeing before it.
6
“BLAINE, WHAT’S THAT?” JAKE asked, but he already knew.
Blaine laughed . . . but made no other reply.
The purple vapor drifted from gratings in the sidewalk and the smashed windows of
deserted buildings, but most of it seemed to be coming from manholes like the one Gasher
had used to get into the tunnels below the streets. Their iron covers had been blown clear by
the explosion they had felt as they were boarding the mono. They watched in silent horror
as the bruise-colored gas crept down the avenues and spread into the debris-lit- tered
side-streets. It drove those inhabitants of Lud still interested in survival before it like cattle.
Most were Pubes, judging from their scarves, but Jake could see a few splashes of bright
yellow, as well. Old animosities had been forgotten now that the end was finally upon
them.
The purple cloud began to catch up with the stragglers—mostly old people who were
unable to run. They fell down, clawing at their throats and screaming soundlessly, the
instant the gas touched them. Jake saw an agonized face staring up at him in disbelief as
they passed over, saw the eyesockets suddenly fill up with blood, and closed his eyes.
Ahead, the monorail track disappeared into the oncoming purple fog. Eddie winced and
held his breath as they plunged in, but of course it parted around them, and no whiff of the
death engulfing the city came to them. Looking into the streets below was like looking
through a stained-glass window into hell.
Susannah put her face against his chest.
“Make the walls come back, Blaine,” Eddie said. “We don’t want to see that.”
Blaine made no reply, and the transparency around and below them remained. The cloud
was already disintegrating into ragged purple streamers. Beyond it, the buildings of the city
grew smaller and closer together. The streets of this section were tangled alleyways,
seemingly without order or coherence. In some places, whole blocks appeared to have
burned flat . . . and a long time ago, for the plains were reclaiming these areas, burying the
rubble in the grasses which would some day swallow all of Lud. The way the jungle
swallowed the great civilizations of the Incas and Mayas, Eddie thought. The wheel of ka
turns and the world moves on,
Beyond the slums—that, Eddie felt sure, was what they had been even before the evil days
came—was a gleaming wall. Blaine was moving slowly in that direction. They could see a
deep square notch cut in the white stone. The monorail track passed through it.
“LOOK TOWARD THE FRONT OF THE CABIN, PLEASE,” Blaine invited.