and began: ” ‘Bob Brooks was an engineer for The Mid-World Railway Company, on the
St. Louis to Topeka run…..• ”
24
” ‘. . . AND EVERY NOW AND then the children hear him singing his old song in his soft, gruff voice,’ ” Jake finished. He showed them the last picture—the happy children who
might actually have been screaming— and then closed the book. The sun had gone down;
the sky was purple.
“Well, it’s not a perfect fit,” Eddie said, “more like a dream where the water sometimes runs uphill—but it fits well enough to scare me silly. This is Mid-World—Charlie’s
territory. Only his name over here isn’t Charlie at all. Over here it’s Blaine the Mono.”
Roland was looking at Jake. “What do you think?” he asked. “Should we go around the city? Stay away from this train?”
Jake thought it over, head down, hands working distractedly through Oy’s thick, silky fur.
“I’d like to,” he said at last, “but if I’ve got this stuff about ka right, I don’t think we’re supposed to.”
Roland nodded. “If it’s ka, questions of what we’re supposed to or not supposed to do aren’t even in it; if we tried to go around, we’d find circumstances forcing us back. In such cases
it’s better to give in to the inevitable promptly instead of putting it off. What do you think,
Eddie?”
Eddie thought as long and as carefully as Jake had done. He didn’t want anything to do
with a talking train that ran by itself, and whether you called it Charlie the Choo-Choo or
Blaine the Mono, everything Jake had told them and read them suggested that it might be a
very nasty piece of work. But they had a tremendous distance to cross, and some- where, at
the end of it, was the thing they had come to find. And with that thought, Eddie was amazed
to discover he knew exactly what he thought, and what he wanted. He raised his head and
for almost the first time since he had come to this world, he fixed Roland’s faded blue eyes
firmly with his hazel ones.
“I want to stand in that field of roses, and I want to see the Tower that stands there. I don’t know what comes next. Mourners please omit flowers, probably, and for all of us. But I
don’t care. I want to stand there. I guess I don’t care if Blaine’s the devil and the train runs through hell itself on the way to the Tower. I vote we go.”
Roland nodded and turned to Susannah.
“Well, I didn’t have any dreams about the Dark Tower,” she said, “so I can deal with the question on that level—the level of desire, I suppose you’d say. But I’ve come to believe in
ka, and I’m not so numb that I can’t feel it when someone starts rapping on my head with his
knuckles and saying, ‘That way, idiot.’ What about you, Roland? What do you think?”
“I think there’s been enough talk for one day, and it’s time to let it go until tomorrow.”
“What about Riddle-De-Dum!—” Jake asked, “do you want to look at that?”
“There’ll be time enough for that another day,” Roland said. “Let’s get some sleep.”
25
BUT THE GUNSLINGER LAY long awake, and when the rhythmic drum- ming began
again, he got up and walked back to the road. He stood looking toward the bridge and the
city. He was every inch the diplomat Susannah had suspected, and he had known the train
was the next step on the road they must travel almost from the moment he had heard of it …
but he’d felt it would be unwise to say so. Eddie in particular hated to feel pushed; when he
sensed that was being done, he simply lowered his head, planted his feet, made his silly
jokes, and balked like a mule. This time he wanted what Roland wanted, but he was still apt
to say day if Roland said night, and night if Roland said day. It was safer to walk softly, and
surer to ask instead of telling.
He turned to go back . . . and his hand dropped to his gun as he saw a dark shape standing
on the edge of the road, looking at him. He didn’t draw, but it was a near thing.
“I wondered if you’d be able to sleep after that little performance,” Eddie said. “Guess the answer’s no.”
“I didn’t hear you at all, Eddie. You’re learning . .. only this time you almost got a bullet in the gut for your pains.”
“You didn’t hear me because you have a lot on your mind.” Eddie joined him, and even by starlight, Roland saw he hadn’t fooled Eddie a bit. His respect for Eddie continued to grow.
It was Cuthbert Eddie reminded him of, but in many ways he had already surpassed
Cuthbert.
If I underestimate him, Roland thought, I’m apt to come away with a bloody paw. And if I
let him down, or do something that looks to him like a double-cross, he’ll probably try to
kill me.
“What’s on your mind, Eddie?”
“You. Us. I want you to know something. I guess until tonight I just assumed that you
knew already. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Tell me, then.” He thought again: How like Cuthbert he is!
“We’re with you because we have to be—that’s your goddamned ka. But we’re also with
you because we want to be. I know that’s true of me and Susannah, and I’m pretty sure it’s
true of Jake, too. You’ve got a good brain, me old khef-mate, but I think you must keep it in a bomb- shelter, because it’s bitchin hard to get through sometimes. I want to see it, Roland.
Can you dig what I’m telling you? I want to see the Tower.” He looked closely into
Roland’s face, apparently did not see what he’d hoped to find there, and raised his hands in
exasperation. “What I mean is I want you to let go of my ears.”
“Let go of your ears?”
“Yeah. Because you don’t have to drag me anymore. I’m coming of my own accord. We’re
coming of our own accord. If you died in your sleep tonight, we’d bury you and then go on.
We probably wouldn’t last long, but we’d die in the path of the Beam. Now do you
understand?”
“Yes. Now I do.”
“You say you understand me, and I think you do … but do you believe me, as well?”
Of course, he thought. Where else do you have to go, Eddie, in this world that’s so strange
to you? And what else could you do? You’d make a piss-poor farmer.
But that was mean and unfair, and he knew it. Denigrating free will by confusing it with ka
was worse than blasphemy; it was tiresome and stupid. “Yes,” he said. “I believe you.
Upon my soul, I do.”
“Then stop behaving like we’re a bunch of sheep and you’re the shepherd walking along
behind us, waving a crook to make sure we don’t trot our stupid selves off the road and into
a quicksand bog. Open your mind to us. If we’re going to die in the city or on that train, I
want to die knowing I was more than a marker on your game-board.”
Roland felt anger heat his cheeks, but he had never been much good at self-deception. He
wasn’t angry because Eddie was wrong but because Eddie had seen through him. Roland
had watched him come steadily forward, leaving his prison further and further
behind—and Susannah, too, for she had also been imprisoned—and yet his heart had never
quite accepted the evidence of his senses. His heart apparently wanted to go on seeing them
as different, lesser creatures.
Roland drew in deep air. “Gunslinger, I cry your pardon.”
Eddie nodded. “We’re running into a whole hurricane of trouble here … I feel it, and I’m
scared to death. But it’s not your trouble, it’s our trouble. Okay?”
“Yes.”
“How bad do you think it can get in the city?”
“I don’t know. I only know that we have to try and protect Jake, because the old auntie said
both sides would want him. Some of it depends on how long it takes us to find this train. A lot more depends on what happens when we find it. If we had two more in our party, I’d put
Jake in a moving box with guns on every side of him. Since we don’t, we’ll move in
column—me first, Jake pushing Susannah behind, and you on drogue.”
“How much trouble, Roland? Make a guess.”
“I can’t.”
“I think you can. You don’t know the city, but you know how the people in your world
have been behaving since things started to fall apart. How much trouble?”
Roland turned toward the steady sound of the drumbeats and thought it over. “Maybe not