The only sensor he missed was the one on the stainless steel rat; that shot caromed off its metal back with a high mosquito whine. It surged out of the rut, made a half-circle around the box-shaped thing which had been following the snake, and charged across the clearing at surprising speed. It was making an angry clittering sound, and as it closed the distance, Eddie could see it had a mouth lined with long, sharp points. They did not look like teeth; they looked like sewing-machine needles, blurring up and down. No, he guessed these things were really not much like puppies, after all.
“Take it, Roland!” he shouted desperately, but when he snatched a quick look around he saw that Roland was still standing with his arms crossed on his chest, his expression serene and distant. He might have been thinking of chess problems or old love-letters.
The dish on the rat’s back suddenly locked down. It changed direction slightly and buzzed straight toward Susannah Dean.
One bullet left, Eddie thought. If I miss, it’ll take her face off.
Instead of shooting, he stepped forward and kicked the rat as hard as he could. He had replaced his shoes with a pair of deerskin moccasins, and he felt the jolt all the way up to his knee. The rat gave a rusty, ratcheting squeal, tumbled over and over in the dirt, and came to rest on its back. Eddie could see what looked like a dozen stubby mechanical legs pistoning up and down. Each was tipped with a sharp steel claw. These claws twirled around and around on gimbals the size of pencil-erasers.
A steel rod poked out of the robot’s midsection and flipped the gadget upright again. Eddie brought Roland’s revolver down, ignoring a momentary impulse to steady it with his free hand. That might be the way cops in his own world were taught to shoot, but it wasn’t the way it was done here. When you forget the gun is there, when it feels like you’re shooting with your finger, Roland had told them, then you’ll be somewhere near home.
Eddie pulled the trigger. The tiny radar-dish, which had begun to turn again in an effort to find the enemies, disappeared in a blue Hash. The rat made a choked noise-Chop!-and fell dead on its side.
Eddie turned with his heart jackhammering in his chest. He couldn’t remember being this furious since he realized that Roland meant to keep him in his world until his goddamned Tower was won or lost… probably until they were all worm-chow, in other words.
He levelled the empty gun at Roland’s heart and spoke in a thick voice he hardly recognized as his own. “If there was a round left in this, you could stop worrying about your fucking Tower right now.”
“Stop it, Eddie!” Susannah said sharply.
He looked at her. “It was going for you, Susannah, and it meant to turn you into ground chuck.”
“But it didn’t get me. You got it, Eddie. You got it.”
“No thanks to him.” Eddie made as if to re-holster the gun and then realized, to his further disgust, that he had nothing to put it in. Susannah was wearing the holster. “Him and his lessons. Him and his goddam lessons.” He turned to Roland. “I tell you, for two cents-”
Roland’s mildly interested expression suddenly changed. His eyes shifted to a point over Eddie’s left shoulder. “DOWN!” he shouted.
Eddie didn’t ask questions. His rage and confusion were wiped from his mind immediately. He dropped, and as he did, he saw the gunslinger’s left hand blur down to his side. My God, he thought, still falling, he CAN’T be that fast, no one can be that fast, I’m not bad but Susannah makes me look slow and he makes Susannah look like a turtle trying to walk uphill on a piece of glass-
Something passed just over his head, something that squealed at him in mechanical rage and pulled out a tuft of his hair. Then the gunslinger was shooting from the hip, three fast shots like thunder-cracks, and the squealing stopped. A creature which looked to Eddie like a large mechanical bat thudded to earth between the place where Eddie now lay and the one where Susannah knelt beside Roland. One of its jointed, rust-speckled wings thumped the ground once, weakly, as if angry at the missed chance, and then became still.
Roland crossed to Eddie, walking easy in his old sprung boots. He extended a hand. Eddie took it and let Roland help him to his feet. The wind had been knocked out of him and he found he couldn’t talk. Probably just as well… seems like every time I open my mouth I stick my goddam foot into it.
“Eddie! You all right?” Susannah was crossing the clearing to where he stood with his head bent and his hands planted on his upper thighs, trying to breathe.
“Yeah.” The word came out in a croak. He straightened up with an effort. “Just got a little haircut.”
“It was in a tree,” Roland said mildly. “1 didn’t see it myself, at first. The light gets tricky this time of day. He paused and then went on in that same mild voice: “She was never in any danger, Eddie.”
Eddie nodded his head. Roland, he now realized, could almost have eaten a hamburger and drunk a milkshake before beginning his draw. He was that fast.
“All right. Let’s just say I disapprove of your teaching techniques, okay? I’m not going to apologize, though, so if you’re waiting for one, you can stop now.”
Roland bent, picked Susannah up, and began to brush her off. He did this with a kind of impartial affection, like a mother brushing off her toddler after she has taken one of her necessary tumbles in the dust of the back yard. “Your apology is not expected or necessary,” he said. “Susannah and I had a conversation similar to this one two days ago. Didn’t we, Susannah?”
She nodded. “Roland’s of the opinion that apprentice gunslingers who won’t bite the hand that feeds them from time to time need a good lack in the slats.”
Eddie looked around at the wreckage and slowly began to beat the bone-dust out of his pants and shirt. “What if I told you I don’t want to be a gunslinger, Roland old buddy?”
“I’d say that what you want doesn’t much matter.” Roland was looking at the metal kiosk which stood against the rock wall, and seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. Eddie had seen this before. When the conversation turned to questions of should-be, could-be, or oughtta-be, Roland almost always lost interest.
“Ka?” Eddie asked, with a trace of his old bitterness.
“That’s right. Ka.” Roland walked over to the kiosk and passed a hand along the yellow and black stripes which ran down its front. “We have found one of the twelve portals which ring the edge of the world… one of the six paths to the Dark Tower.
“And that is also ka.”
27
EDDIE WENT BACK FOR Susannah’s wheelchair. No one had to ask him to do this; he wanted some time alone, to get himself back under control. Now that the shooting was over, every muscle in his body seemed to have picked up its own little thrumming tremor. He did not want either of them to see him this way-not because they might misread it as fear, but because one or both might know it for what it really was: excitement overload. He had liked it. Even when you added in the bat which had almost scalped him, he had liked it.
That’s bullshit, buddy. And you know it.
The trouble was, he didn’t know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could talk about how he didn’t want to be a gunslinger, how he didn’t want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had enjoyed blowing the electronic menagerie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland’s gun was his own private hand-held thunderstorm. He had enjoyed kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part-the being scared part- actually seemed to add to the enjoyment.