Susannah thought about this, then nodded her head. “I see… I think. This time-travel business is some confusing shit, isn’t it?”
Roland began to pick up his goods and strap them back into place. “Time we were moving on.”
Eddie stood up and shrugged into his pack. “You can take comfort from one thing, at least,” he told Roland. “You-or this ka-tet business- were able to save the kid after all.”
Roland had been knotting the harness-strings at his chest. Now he looked up, and the blazing clarity of his eyes made Eddie flinch backward. “Have I?” he asked harshly. “Have I really? I’m going insane an inch at a time, trying to live with two versions of the same reality. I had hoped at first that one or the other would begin to fade away, but that’s not happening. In fact, the exact opposite is happening: those two realities are growing louder and louder in my head, clamoring at each other like opposing factions which must soon go to war. So tell me this, Eddie: How do you suppose Jake feels? How do you suppose it feels to know you are dead in one world and alive in another?”
The lark sang again, but none of them noticed. Eddie stared into the faded blue eyes blazing out of Roland’s pale face and could not think of a thing to say.
24
THEY CAMPED ABOUT FIFTEEN miles due east of the dead bear that night, slept the sleep of the completely exhausted (even Roland slept the night through, although his dreams were nightmare carnival-rides), and were up the next morning at sunrise. Eddie kindled a small fire without speaking, and glanced at Susannah as a pistol-shot rang out in the woods nearby.
“Breakfast,” she said.
Roland returned three minutes later with a hide slung over one shoulder. On it lay the freshly gutted corpse of a rabbit. Susannah cooked it. They ate and moved on.
Eddie kept trying to imagine what it would be like to have a memory of your own death. On that one he kept coming up short.
25
SHORTLY AFTER NOON THEY entered an area where most of the trees had been pulled over and the bushes mashed flat-it looked as though a cyclone had touched down here many years before, creating a wide and dismal alley of destruction.
“We’re close to the place we want to find,” Roland said. “He pulled down everything to clear the sightlines. Our friend the bear wanted no surprises. He was big, but not complacent.”
“Has it left us any surprises?” Eddie asked.
“He may have done so.” Roland smiled a little and touched Eddie on the shoulder. “But there’s this-they’ll be old surprises.”
Their progress through this zone of destruction was slow. Most of the fallen trees were very old-many had almost rejoined the soil from which they had sprung-but they still made enough of a tangle to create a formidable obstacle course. It would have been difficult enough if all three of them had been able-bodied; with Susannah strapped to the gunslinger’s back in her harness, it became an exercise in aggravation and endurance.
The flattened trees and jumbles of underbrush served to obscure the bear’s backtrail, and that also worked to slow their speed. Until midday they had followed claw-marks as clear as trail-blazes on the trees. Here, however, near its starting point, the bear’s rage had not been full-blown, and these handy signs of its passage disappeared. Roland moved slowly, looking for droppings in the bushes and tufts of hair on the tree-trunks over which the bear had climbed. It took all afternoon to cross three miles of this decayed jumble.
Eddie had just decided they were going to lose the light and would have to camp in these creepy surroundings when they came to a thin skirt of alders. Beyond it, he could hear a stream babbling noisily over a bed of stones. Behind them, the setting sun was radiating spokes of sullen red light across the jumbled ground they had just crossed, turning the fallen trees into crisscrossing black shapes like Chinese ideograms.
Roland called a halt and eased Susannah down. He stretched his back, twisting it this way and that with his hands on his hips.
“That it for the night?” Eddie asked.
Roland shook his head. “Give Eddie your gun, Susannah.”
She did as he said, looking at him questioningly.
“Come on, Eddie. The place we want is on the other side of those trees. We’ll have a look. We might do a little work, as well.”
“What makes you think-”
“Open your ears.”
Eddie listened and realized he heard machinery. He further realized that he had been hearing it for some time now. “I don’t want to leave Susannah.”
“We’re not going far and she has a good loud voice. Besides, if there’s danger, it’s ahead-we’ll be between it and her.”
Eddie looked down at Susannah.
“Go on-just make sure you’re back soon.” She looked back the way they had come with thoughtful eyes. “I don’t know if there’s ha ants here or not, but it feels like there are.”
“We’ll be back before dark,” Roland promised. He started toward the screen of alders, and after a moment, Eddie followed him.
26
FIFTEEN YARDS INTO THE trees, Eddie realized that they were following a path, one the bear had probably made for itself over the years. The alders bent above them in a tunnel. The sounds were louder now, and he began to sort them out. One was a low, deep, humming noise. He could feel it in his feet-a faint vibration, as if some large piece of machinery was running in the earth. Above it, closer and more urgent, were crisscrossing sounds like bright scratches-squeals, squeaks, chitterings.
Roland placed his mouth against Eddie’s ear and said, “I think there’s little danger if we’re quiet.”
They moved on another five yards and then Roland stopped again. He drew his gun and used the barrel to brush aside a branch which hung heavy with sunset-tinted leaves. Eddie looked through this small opening and into the clearing where the bear had lived for so long-the base of operations from which he had set forth on his many expeditions of pillage and terror.
There was no undergrowth here; the ground had been beaten bald long since. A stream emerged from the base of a rock wall about fifty feet high and ran through the arrowhead-shaped clearing. On their side of the stream, backed up against the wall, was a metal box about nine feet high. Its roof was curved, and it reminded Eddie of a subway entrance. The front was painted in diagonal yellow and black stripes. The earth which floored the clearing was not black, like the topsoil in the forest, but a strange powdery gray. It was littered with bones, and after a moment Eddie realized that what he had taken for gray soil was more bones, bones so old they were crumbling back to dust.
Things were moving in the dirt-the things making the squealing, chittering noises. Four… no, five of them. Small metal devices, the largest about the size of a Collie pup. They were robots, Eddie realized, or something like robots. They were similar to each other and to the bear they had undoubtedly served in one way only-atop each of them, a tiny radar-dish turned rapidly.
More thinking caps, Eddie thought. My God, what kind of world is this, anyway?
The largest of these devices looked a little like the Tonka tractor Eddie had gotten for his sixth or seventh birthday; its treads churned up tiny gray clouds of bone-dust as it rolled along. Another looked like a stainless steel rat. A third appeared to be a snake constructed of jointed steel segments-it writhed and humped its way along. They formed a rough circle on the far side of the stream, going around and around on a deep course they had carved in the ground. Looking at them made Eddie think of cartoons he had seen in the stacks of old Saturday Evening Post magazines his mother had for some reason saved and stored in the front hall of their apartment. In the cartoons, worried, cigarette-smoking men paced ruts in the carpet while they waited for their wives to give birth.