“TO … TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS?” Blame’s voice firmed, and repeated the question as a statement. “TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS. A RIDDLE BASED
UPON THE EXAGGERATED SIMPLICITY OF—”
“Right. Good one, Blaine, but never mind trying to kill time—it won’t work.
Next—”
“I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY—”
“Then stop the mono,” Eddie said. “If you’re that upset, stop right here, and I will.”
“NO.”
“Okay, then, on we go. What’s Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in the rain?”
There was another of those clicks, this time so loud it felt like having a blunt spike driven against his eardrum. A pause of five seconds. Now the flashing green dot on the route-map was so close to Topeka that it lit the word like neon each time it flashed. Then: “PADDY O’FURNITURE.”
The correct answer to a joke-riddle Eddie had first heard in the alley behind Dahlie’s, or at some similar gathering-point, but Blaine had apparently paid a price for forcing his mind into a channel that could conceive it: the Barony Coach lights were flashing more wildly than ever, and Eddie could hear a low humming from inside the walls—the kind of sound your stereo amp made just before its shit blew up.
Pink light stuttered from the route-map. “Stop!” Little Blaine cried, his voice so wavery it sounded like the voice of a character from an old Warner Bros. cartoon.
“Stop it, you’re killing him!”
What do you think he’s trying to do to us, squirt? Eddie thought.
He considered shooting Blaine one Jake had told while they’d been sitting around the campfire that night—What’s green, weighs a hundred tons, and lives at the bottom of the ocean? Moby Snot!—and then didn’t. He wanted to stick further inside the bounds of logic than that one allowed . . . and he could do it. He didn’t think he would have to get much more surreal than the level of, say, a third-grader with a fair-to-good collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards in order to fuck Blaine up royally … and permanently. Because no matter how many emotions his fancy dipolar circuits had allowed him to mimic, he was still an it— a computer. Even following Eddie this far into riddledom’s Twilight Zone had caused Blaine’s sanity to totter.
“Why do people go to bed, Blaine?”
“BECAUSE … BECAUSE … GODS DAMN YOU, BECAUSE …”
A low squalling started up from beneath them, and suddenly the Barony Coach swayed violently from right to left. Susannah screamed. Jake was thrown into her
lap. The gunslinger grabbed them both.
“BECAUSE THE BED WON’T COME TO THEM, GODS DAMN YOU! NINE
MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS!”
“Give up, Blaine,” Eddie said. “Stop before I have to blow your mind completely.
If you don’t quit, it’s going to happen. We both know it.”
“NO!”
“I got a million of these puppies. Been hearing them my whole life.
They stick to my mind the way flies stick to flypaper. Hey, with some people it’s recipes. So what do you say? Want to give?”
“NO! NINE MINUTES AND THIRTY SECONDS!”
“Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby cross the road?”
The mono took another of those gigantic lurches; Eddie didn’t understand how it could still stay on its track after that, but somehow it did. The screaming from beneath them grew louder; the walls, floor, and ceiling of the car began to cycle madly between opacity and transparency. At one moment they were enclosed, at the next they were rushing over a gray daylight landscape that stretched flat and featureless to a horizon which ran across the world in a straight line.
The voice which came from the speakers was now that of a panicky child: “I KNOW IT, JUST A MOMENT, I KNOW IT, RETRIEVAL IN PROGRESS,
ALL LOGIC CIRCUITS IN USE—”
“Answer,” Roland said.
“I NEED MORE TIME! YOU MUST GIVE IT TO ME!” Now there was a kind of cracked triumph in that splintered voice. “NO TEMPORAL LIMITS FOR
ANSWERING WERE SET, ROLAND OF GILEAD, HATEFUL GUNSLINGER
OUT OF A PAST THAT SHOULD HAVE STAYED DEAD!”
“No,” Roland agreed, “no time limits were set, you are quite right. But you may not kill us with a riddle still unanswered, Blaine, and Topeka draws nigh.
Answer!”
The Barony Coach cycled into invisibility again, and Eddie saw what appeared to be a tall and rusty grain elevator go flashing past; it was in his view barely long enough for him to identify it. Now he fully appreciated the maniacal speed at which they were travelling; perhaps three hundred miles faster than a commercial jet at cruising speed.
“Let him alone!” moaned the voice of Little Blaine. “You’re killing him, I say!
Killing him!”
“Isn’t that ’bout what he wanted?” Susannah asked in the voice of Detta Walker.
“To die? That’s what he said. We don’t mind, either. You not so bad, Little Blaine, but even a world as fucked up as this one has to be better with your big brother gone. It’s just him takin us with him we been objectin to all this time.”
“Last chance,” Roland said. “Answer or give up the goose, Blaine.”
“I … I … YOU . . . SIXTEEN LOG THIRTY-THREE . . . ALL COSINE
SUBSCRIPTS … ANTI … ANTI … IN ALL THESE YEARS . . . BEAM . . .
FLOOD . . . PYTHAGOREAN . . . CARTESIAN LOGIC . . . CAN I … DARE I
… A PEACH . . . EAT A PEACH … ALLMAN BROTHERS . . . PATRICIA . . .
CROCODILE AND WHIPLASH SMILE … CLOCK OF DIALS . . . TICK
TOCK, ELEVEN O’CLOCK, THE MAN’S IN THE MOON AND HE’S READY
TO ROCK . . . INCESSAMENT . . . INCESSAMENT, MON CHER … OH MY
HEAD . . . BLAINE . . . BLAINE DARES . . . BLAINE WILL ANSWER … I …”
Blaine, now screaming in the voice of an infant, lapsed into some other language and began to sing. Eddie thought it was French. He knew none of the words, but when the drums kicked in, he knew the song perfectly well: “Velcro Fly” by Z.Z.
Top.
The glass over the route-map blew out. A moment later, the route-map itself exploded from its socket, revealing twinkling lights and a maze of circuit-boards behind it. The lights pulsed in time to the drums. Suddenly blue fire flashed out, sizzling the surface around the hole in the wall where the map had been, scorching it black. From deeper within that wall, toward Blaine’s blunt, bullet-shaped snout, came a thick grinding noise.
“It crossed the road because it was stapled to the chicken, you dopey fuck!” Eddie yelled. He got to his feet and started to walk toward the smoking hole where the route-map had been. Susannah grabbed at the back of his shirt, but Eddie barely felt it. Barely knew where he was, in fact. The battle-fire had dropped over him, burning him everywhere with its righteous heat, sizzling his sight, frying his synapses and roasting his heart in its holy glow. He had Blaine in his sights, and although the thing behind the voice was already mortally wounded, he was unable to stop squeezing the trigger: I shoot with my mind.
“What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of
dead woodchucks?” Eddie raved. “You can’t unload a truck-load of bowling balls with a pitchfork!”
A terrible shriek of mingled anger and agony issued from the hole where the route-map had been. It was followed by a gust of blue fire, as if somewhere forward of Barony Coach an electric dragon had exhaled violently. Jake called a warning, but Eddie didn’t need it; his reflexes had been replaced with razor-blades. He ducked, and the burst of electricity went over his right shoulder, making the hair on that side of his neck stand up. He drew the gun he wore—a heavy .45 with a worn sandalwood grip, one of two revolvers which Roland had brought out of Mid-World’s ruin. He kept walking as he bore down on the front of the coach .. . and of course he kept talking. As Roland had said, Eddie would die talking. As his old friend Cuthbert had done. Eddie could think of many worse ways to go, and only one better.
“Say, Blaine, you ugly, sadistic fuck! Since we’re talking riddles, what is the greatest riddle of the Orient? Many men smoke but Fu Manchu! Get it? No? So solly, Cholly! How about this one? Why’d the woman name her son Seven and a Half? Because she drew his name out of a hat!”
He had reached the pulsing square. Now he lifted Roland’s gun and the Barony Coach suddenly filled with its thunder. He put all six rounds into the hole, fanning the hammer with the flat of his hand in the way Roland had shown them, knowing only that this was right, this was proper . . . this was ka, goddammit, fucking ka, it was the way you ended things if you were a gunslinger. He was one of Roland’s tribe, all right, his soul was probably damned to the deepest pit of hell, and he wouldn’t have changed it for all the heroin in Asia.