17
   AROUND NOON THE NEXT day they reached the top of another drumlin and saw the bridge for the first time. It crossed the Send at a point where the river narrowed, bent due south, and passed in front of the city.
   "Holy Jesus," Eddie said softly. "Does that look familiar to you, Suze?"
   "Yes."
   "Jake?"
   "Yes—it looks like the George Washington Bridge ."
   "It sure does," Eddie agreed.
   "But what's the GWB doing in Missouri ?" Jake asked.
   Eddie looked at him. "Say what, sport?"
   Jake looked confused. "Mid-World, I mean. You know."
   Eddie was looking at him harder than ever. "How do you know this is Mid-World? You weren't with us when we came to that marker."
   Jake stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked down at his mocca­sins. "Dreamed it," he said briefly. "You don't think I booked this trip with my dad's travel-agent, do you?"
   Roland touched Eddie's shoulder. "Let it alone for now." Eddie glanced briefly at Roland and nodded.
   They stood looking at the bridge a little longer. They'd had time to get used to the city skyline, but this was something new. It dreamed in the distance, a faint shape sketched against the blue midmorning sky. Roland could make out four sets of impossibly tall metal towers—one set at each end of the bridge and two in the middle. Between them, gigantic cables swooped through the air in long arcs. Between these arcs and the base of the bridge were many vertical lines—either more cables or metal beams, he could not tell which. But he also saw gaps, and realized after a long time that the bridge was no longer perfectly level.
   "Yonder bridge is going to be in the river soon, I think," Roland said.
   "Well, maybe," Eddie said reluctantly, "but it doesn't really look that bad to me."
   Roland sighed. "Don't hope for too much, Eddie."
   "What's that supposed to mean?" Eddie heard the touchiness in his voice, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
   "It means that I want you to believe your eyes, Eddie—that's all. There was a saying when I was growing up: 'Only a fool believes he's dreaming before he wakes up.' Do you understand?"
   Eddie felt a sarcastic reply on his tongue and banished it after a brief struggle. It was just that Roland had a way—it was unintentional, he was sure, but that didn't make it any easier to deal with—of making him feel like such a kid.
   "I guess I do," he said at last. "It means the same thing as my mother's favorite saying."
   "And what was that?"
   "Hope for the best and expect the worst," Eddie said sourly.
   Roland's face lightened in a smile. "I think I like your mother's saying better."
   "But it is still standing!" Eddie burst out. "I agree it's not in such fantastic shape—probably nobody's done a really thorough maintenance check on it for a thousand years or so—but it is still there. The whole city is! Is it so wrong to hope we might find some things that'll help us there? Or some people that'll feed us and talk to us, like the old folks back in River Crossing, instead of shooting at us? Is it so wrong to hope our luck might be turning?"
   In the silence which followed, Eddie realized with embarrassment that he had been making a speech.
   "No." There was a kindness in Roland's voice—that kindness which always surprised Eddie when it came. "It's never wrong to hope." He looked around at Eddie and the others like a man coming out of a deep dream. "We're done travelling for today. It's time we had our own pala­ver, I think, and it's going to take awhile."
   The gunslinger left the road and walked into the high grass without looking back. After a moment, the other three followed.

18
   UNTIL THEY MET THE old people in River Crossing, Susannah had seen Roland strictly in terms of television shows she rarely watched: Cheyenne, The Rifleman, and, of course, the archetype of them all, Gunsmoke. That was one she had sometimes listened to on tin– radio with her father before it came on TV (she thought of how foreign the idea of radio drama would be to Eddie and Jake and smiled—Roland's was not the only world which had moved on). She could still remember what the narrator said at the beginning of every one of those radio playlets: "It makes a man watchful... and a little lonely."
   Until River Crossing, that had summed Roland up perfectly for her. He was not broad-shouldered, as Marshal Dillon had been, nor anywhere near as tall, and his face seemed to her more that of a tired poet than a wild-west lawman, but she had still seen him as an existential version of that make-believe Kansas peace officer, whose only mission in life (other than an occasional drink in The Longbranch with his friends Doc and Kitty) had been to Clean Up Dodge.
   Now she understood that Roland had once been much more than a cop riding a Daliesque range at the end of the world. He had been a diplomat; a mediator; perhaps even a teacher. Most of all, he had been a soldier of what these people called "the white," by which she guessed they meant the civilizing forces that kept people from killing each other enough of the time to allow some sort of progress. In his time he had been more wandering knight-errant than bounty hunter. And in many ways, this still was his time; the people of River Crossing had certainly thought so. Why else would they have knelt in the dust to receive his blessing?
   In light of this new perception, Susannah could see how cleverly the gunslinger had managed them since that awful morning in the speaking ring, Each time they had begun a line of conversation which would lead to the comparing of notes—and what could be more natural, given the cataclysmic and inexplicable "drawing" each of them had experienced?— Roland had been there, stepping in quickly and turning the conversation into other channels so smoothly that none of them (even she, who had spent almost four years up to her neck in the civil-rights movement) had noticed what he was doing.
   Susannah thought she understood why—he had done it in order to give Jake time to heal. But understanding his motives didn't change her own feelings—astonishment, amusement, chagrin—about how neatly he had handled them. She remembered something Andrew, her chauffeur, had said shortly before Roland had drawn her into this world. Something about President Kennedy being the last gunslinger of the western world. She had scoffed then, but now she thought she understood. There was a lot more JFK than Matt Dillon in Roland. She suspected that Roland possessed little of Kennedy's imagination, but when it came to romance... dedication... charisma...
   And guile, she thought. Don't forget guile.
   She surprised herself by suddenly bursting into laughter.
   Roland had seated himself cross-legged. Now he turned toward her, raising his eyebrows. "Something funny?"
   "Very. Tell me something—how many languages can you speak?"
   The gunslinger thought it over. "Five," he said at last. "I used to speak the Sellian dialects fairly well, but I believe I've forgotten every­thing but the curses."
   Susannah laughed again. It was a cheerful, delighted sound. "You a fox, Roland," she said. "Indeed you are."
   Jake looked interested. "Say a swear in Strelleran," he said.
   "Sellian," Roland corrected. He thought a minute, then said some­thing very fast and greasy—to Eddie it sounded a little as if he was gargling with some very thick liquid. Week-old coffee, say. Roland grinned as he said it.
   Jake grinned back. "What does it mean?"
   Roland put an arm around the boy's shoulders for a moment. "That we have a lot of things to talk about."

19
   "WE ARE KA-TET," ROLAND began, "which means a group of people bound together by fate. The philosophers of my land said a ka-tet could only be broken by death or treachery. My great teacher, Cort, said that since death and treachery are also spokes on the wheel of ka, such a binding can never be broken. As the years pass and I see more, I come more and more to Cort's way of looking at it.
   "Each member of a ka-tet is like a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture … or part of a picture. It may take a great many ka-tets to finish one picture. You mustn't be surprised if you discover your lives have been touching in ways you haven't seen until now. For one thing, each of you three is capable of knowing each other's thoughts—"
   "What?" Eddie cried.
   "It's true. You share your thoughts so naturally that you haven't even been aware it's happening, but it has been. It's easier for me to see, no doubt, because I am not a full member of this ka-tet—possibly because I am not from your world—and so cannot take part completely in the thought-sharing ability. But I can send. Susannah … do you remember when we were in the circle?"
   "Yes. You told me to let the demon go when you told me. But you didn't say that out loud."
   "Eddie … do you remember when we were in the bear's clearing, and the mechanical bat came at you?"
   "Yes. You told me to get down."
   "He never opened his mouth, Eddie," Susannah said.
   "Yes, you did! You yelled! I heard you, man!"
   "I yelled, all right, but I did it with my mind." The gunslinger turned to Jake. "Do you remember? In the house?"
   "When the board I was pulling on wouldn't come up, you told me to pull on the other one. But if you can't read my mind, Roland, how did you know what land of trouble I was in?"
   "I saw. I heard nothing, but I saw—just a little, as if through a dirty window." His eyes surveyed them. "This closeness and sharing of minds is called khef, a word that means many other things in the original tongue of the Old World —water, birth, and life-force are only three of them. Be aware of it. For now, that's all I want."
   "Can you be aware of something you don't believe in?" Eddie asked.
   Roland smiled. "Just keep an open mind."
   "That I can do."
   "Roland?" It was Jake. "Do you think Oy might be part of our ka-tet?"
   Susannah smiled. Roland didn't. "I'm not prepared to even guess right now, but I'll tell you this, Jake—I've been thinking about your furry friend a good deal. Ka does not rule all, and coincidences still happen... but the sudden appearance of a billy-bumbler that still remembers people doesn't seem completely coincidental to me."
   He glanced around at them.
   "I'll begin. Eddie will speak next, taking up from the place where I leave off. Then Susannah. Jake, you'll speak last. All right?"
   They nodded.
   "Fine," Roland said. "We are ka-tet—one from many. Let the pala­ver begin."

20
   THE TALK WENT ON until sundown, stopping only long enough for them to eat a cold meal, and by the time it was over, Eddie felt as if he had gone twelve hard rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. He no longer doubted that they had been "sharing khef," as Roland put it; he and Jake actually seemed to have been living each other's life in their dreams, as if they were two halves of the same whole.
   Roland began with what had happened under the mountains, where Jake's first life in this world had ended. He told of his own palaver with the man in black, and Walter's veiled words about a Beast and someone he called the Ageless Stranger. He told of the strange, daunting dream which had come to him, a dream in which the whole universe had been swallowed in a beam of fantastic white light. And how, at the end of that dream, there had been a single blade of purple grass.
   Eddie glanced sideways at Jake and was stunned by the knowledge— the recognition—in the boy's eyes.

21
   ROLAND HAD BABBLED PARTS of this story to Eddie in his time of delir­ium, but it was entirely new to Susannah, and she listened with wide eyes. As Roland repeated the things Walter had told him, she caught glints of her own world, like reflections in a smashed mirror: automobiles, cancer, rockets to the moon, artificial insemination. She had no idea who the Beast might be, but she recognized the name of the Ageless Stranger as a variation upon the name of Merlin, the magician who had supposedly orchestrated the career of King Arthur. Curiouser and curiouser.
   Roland told of how he had awakened to find Walter long years dead—time had somehow slipped forward, perhaps a hundred years, per­haps five hundred. Jake listened in fascinated silence as the gunslinger told of reaching the edge of the Western Sea, of how he had lost two of the fingers on his right hand, and how he had drawn Eddie and Susannah before encountering Jack Mort, the dark third.
   The gunslinger motioned to Eddie, who took up the tale with the coming of the great bear.
   "Shardik?" Jake interjected. "But that's the name of a book! A book in our world! It was written by the man who wrote that famous book about the rabbits—"
   "Richard Adams!" Eddie shouted. "And the book about the bunnies was Watership Down! I knew I knew that name! But how can that be, Roland? How is it that the people in your world know about things in ours?"
   "There are doors, aren't there?" Roland responded. "Haven't we seen four of them already? Do you think they never existed before, or never will again?"
   "But—"
   "All of us have seen the leavings of your world in mine, and when I was in your city of New York, I saw the marks of my world in yours. I saw gunslingers. Most were lax and slow, but they were gunslingers all the same, clearly members of their own ancient ka-tet."
   "Roland, they were just cops. You ran rings around them."
   "Not the last one. When Jack Mort and I were in the underground railway station, that one almost took me down. Except for blind luck— Mort's flint-and-steel—he would have done. That one … I saw his eyes. He knew the face of his father. I believe he knew it very well. And then … do you remember the name of Balazar's nightclub?"
   "Sure," Eddie said uneasily. "The Leaning Tower . But it could have been coincidence; you yourself said ka doesn't rule everything."
   Roland nodded. "You really are like Cuthbert—I remember some­thing he said when we were boys. We were planning a midnight lark in the cemetery, but Alain wouldn't go. He said he was afraid of offending the shades of his fathers and mothers. Cuthbert laughed at him. He said he wouldn't believe in ghosts until he caught one in his teeth."
   "Good for him!" Eddie exclaimed. "Bravo!"
   Roland smiled. "I thought you'd like that. At any rate, let's leave this ghost for now. Go on with your story."
   Eddie told of the vision which had come to him when Roland threw the jawbone into the fire—the vision of the key and the rose. He told of his dream, and how he had walked through the door of Tom and Gerry's Artistic Deli and into the field of roses which was dominated by the tall, soot-colored Tower. He told of the blackness which had issued from its windows, forming a shape in the sky overhead, speaking directly to Jake now, because Jake was listening with hungry concentration and growing wonder. He tried to convey some sense of the exaltation and terror which had permeated the dream, and saw from their eyes—Jake's most of all— that he was either doing a better job of that than he could have hoped for … or that they'd had dreams of their own.
   He told of following Shardik's backtrail to the Portal of the Bear, and how, when he put his head against it, he'd found himself remember­ing the day he had talked his brother into taking him to Dutch Hill, so he could see The Mansion. He told about die cup and the needle, and how the pointing needle had become unnecessary once they realized they could see the Beam at work in everything it touched, even the birds in the sky.
   Susannah took up the tale at this point. As she spoke, telling of how Eddie had begun to carve his own version of the key, Jake lay back, laced his hands together behind his head, and watched the clouds run slowly toward the city on their straight southeasterly course. The orderly shape they made showed the presence of the Beam as clearly as smoke leaving a chimney shows die direction of the wind.
   She finished with the story of how they had finally hauled Jake into this world, closing the split track of his and Roland's memories as sud­denly and as completely as Eddie had closed the door in the speaking ring. The only fact she left out was really not a fact at all—at least, not yet. She'd had no morning sickness, after all, and a single missed period meant nothing by itself. As Roland himself might have said, that was a tale best left for another day.
   Yet as she finished, she found herself wishing she could forget what Aunt Talitha had said when Jake told her this was his home now: Gods pity you, then, for the sun is going down on this world. It's going down forever.
   "And now it's your turn, Jake," Roland said.
   Jake sat up and looked toward Lud, where the windows of the west-em towers reflected back the late afternoon light in golden sheets. "It's all crazy," he murmured, "but it almost makes sense. Like a dream when you wake up."
   "Maybe we can help you make sense of it," Susannah said.
   "Maybe you can. At least you can help me think about the train. I'm tired of trying to make sense of Blaine by myself." He sighed. "You know what Roland went through, living two lives at the same time, so I can skip that part. I'm not sure I could ever explain how it felt, anyway, and I don't want to. It was gross. I guess I better start with my Final Essay, because that's when I finally stopped thinking that the whole thing might just go away." He looked around at them somberly. "That was when I gave up."

22
   JAKE TALKED THE SUN down.
   He told them everything he could remember, beginning with My Understanding of Truth and ending with the monstrous doorkeeper which had literally come out of the woodwork to attack him. The other three listened without a single interruption.
   When he was finished, Roland turned to Eddie, his eyes bright with a mixture of emotions Eddie initially took for wonder. Then he realized he was looking at powerful excitement... and deep fear. His mouth went dry. Because if Roland was afraid—
   "Do you still doubt that our worlds overlap each other, Eddie?"
   He shook his head. "Of course not. I walked down the same street, and I did it in his clothes! But... Jake, can I see that book? Charlie the Choo-Choo?"
   Jake reached for his pack, but Roland stayed his hand. "Not yet," he said. "Go back to the vacant lot, Jake. Tell that part once more. Try to remember everything."
   "Maybe you should hypnotize me," Jake said hesitantly. "Like you did before, at the way station."
   Roland shook his head. "There's no need. What happened to you in that lot was the most important thing ever to happen in your life, Jake. In all our lives. You can remember everything."
   So Jake went through it again. It was clear to all of them that his experience in the vacant lot where Tom and Gerry's once had stood was the secret heart of the ka-tet they shared. In Eddie's dream, the Artistic Deli had still been standing; in Jake's reality it had been torn down, but in both cases it was a place of enormous, talismanic power. Nor did Roland doubt that the vacant lot with its broken bricks and shattered glass was another version of what Susannah knew as the Drawers and the place he had seen at the end of his vision in the place of bones.
   As he told this part of his story for the second time, speaking very slowly now, Jake found that what the gunslinger had said was true: he could remember everything. His recall improved until he almost seemed to be reliving the experience. He told them of the sign which said that a building called Turtle Bay Condominiums was slated to stand on the spot where Tom and Gerry's had once stood. He even remembered the little poem which had been spray-painted on the fence, and recited it for them:
   "See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
   On his shell he holds the earth.
   If you want to run and play,
   Come along the BEAM today."
   Susannah murmured, "His thought is slow but always kind; He holds us all within his mind... isn't that how it went, Roland?"
   "What?" Jake asked. "How what went?"
   "A poem I learned as a child," Roland said. "It's another connection, one that really tells us something, although I'm not sure it's anything we need to know... still, one never knows when a little understanding may come in handy."
   "Twelve portals connected by six Beams," Eddie said. "We started at the Bear. We're only going as far as the middle—to the Tower—but if we went all the way to the other end, we'd come to the Portal of the Turtle, wouldn't we?"
   Roland nodded. "I'm sure we would."
   "Portal of the Turtle," Jake said thoughtfully, rolling the words in his mouth, seeming to taste them. Then he finished by telling them again about the gorgeous voice of the choir, his realization that there were faces and stories and histories everywhere, and his growing belief that he had stumbled on something very like the core of all existence. Last of all, he told them again about finding the key and seeing the rose. In the totality of his recall, Jake began to weep, although he seemed unaware of it.
   "When it opened," he said, "I saw the middle was the brightest yellow you ever saw in your life. At first I thought it was pollen and it only looked bright because everything in that lot looked bright. Even looking at the old candy-wrappers and beer-bottles was like looking at the greatest paintings you ever saw. Only then I realized it was a sun. I know it sounds crazy, but that's what it was. Only it was more than one. It was—"
   "It was all suns," Roland murmured. "It was everything real." "Yes! And it was right—but it was wrong, too. I can't explain how it was wrong, but it was. It was like two heartbeats, one inside of the other, and the one inside had a disease. Or an infection. And then I fainted."

23
   "You SAW THE SAME thing at the end of your dream, Roland, didn't you?" Susannah asked. Her voice was soft with awe. "The blade of grass you saw near the end of it … you thought that blade was purple because it was splattered with paint."
   "You don't understand," Jake said. "It really was purple. When I was seeing it the way it really was, it was purple. Like no grass I ever saw before. The paint was just camouflage. The way the doorkeeper camouflaged itself to look like an old deserted house."
   The sun had reached the horizon. Roland asked Jake if he would now show them Charlie the Choo-Choo and then read it to them. Jake handed the book around. Both Eddie and Susannah looked at the cover for a long time.
   "I had this book when I was a little lad," Eddie said at last. He spoke in the flat tones of utter surety. "Then we moved from Queens to Brooklyn —I wasn't even four years old—and I lost it. But I remember the picture on the cover. And I felt the same way you do, Jake. I didn't like it. I didn't trust it."
   Susannah raised her eyes to look at Eddie. "I had it, too—how could I ever forget the little girl with my name... although of course it was my middle name back in those days. And I felt the same way about the train. I didn't like it and I didn't trust it." She tapped the front of the book with her finger before passing it on to Roland. "I thought that smile was a great big fake."
   Roland gave it only a cursory glance before returning his eyes to Susannah. "Did you lose yours, too?"
   "Yes."
   "And I'll bet I know when," Eddie said.
   Susannah nodded. "I'll bet you do. It was after that man dropped the brick on my head. I had it when we went north to my Aunt Blue's wedding. I had it on the train. I remember, because I kept asking my dad if Charlie the Choo-Choo was pulling us. I didn't want it to be Charlie, because we were supposed to go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I thought Charlie might take us anywhere. Didn't he end up pulling folks around a toy village or something like that, Jake?"
   "An amusement park."
   "Yes, of course it was. There's a picture of him hauling kids around that place at the end, isn't there? They're all smiling and laughing, except I always thought they looked like they were screaming to be let off."
   "Yes!" Jake cried. "Yes, that's right! That's just right!"
   "I thought Charlie might take us to his place—wherever he lived— instead of to my Aunt's wedding, and never let us go home again."
   "You can't go home again," Eddie muttered, and ran his hands ner­vously through his hair.
   "All the time we were on that train I wouldn't let go of the book. I even remember thinking, 'If he tries to steal us, I'll rip out his pages until he quits.' But of course we arrived right where we were supposed to, and on time, too. Daddy even took me up front, so I could see the engine. It was a diesel, not a steam engine, and I remember that made me happy. Then, after the wedding, that man Mort dropped the brick on me and I was in a coma for a long time. I never saw Charlie the Choo-Choo after that. Not until now." She hesitated, then added: "This could be my copy, for all I know—or Eddie's."
   "Yeah, and probably is," Eddie said. His face was pale and solemn... and then he grinned like a lad. " 'See the TURTLE, ain't he keen? All things serve the fuckin Beam.' "
   Roland glanced west. "The sun's going down. Read the story before we lose the light, Jake."
   Jake turned to the first page, showed them the picture of Engineer Bob in Charlie's cab, 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 some­where, 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 drum­ming 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 bomb­shelter, 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 too much. I'd guess the fighting men who are still there are old and demoralized. It may he that yon have the straight of it, and some will even offer to help us on our way, as the River Crossing ka-tet did. Mayhap we won't see them at all—they'll see MS, see we're packing iron, and just put their heads down and let us go our way. If that fails, I'm hoping that they'll scatter like rats if we gun a few."
   "And if they decide to make a fight of it?"
   Roland smiled grimly. "Then, Eddie, we'll all remember the faces of our fathers."
   Eddie's eyes gleamed in the darkness, and Roland was once more reminded forcibly of Cuthbert—Cuthbert who had once said he would believe in ghosts when he could catch one in his teeth, Cuthbert with whom he had once scattered breadcrumbs beneath the hangman's gibbet.
   "Have I answered all your questions?"
   "Nope—but I think you played straight with me this time."
   "Then goodnight, Eddie."
   "Goodnight."
   Eddie turned and walked away. Roland watched him go. Now that he was listening, he could hear him... but just barely. He started back himself, then turned toward the darkness where the city of Lud was.
   He's what the old woman called a Pube. She said both sides would want him.
   You won't let me drop this time?
   No. Not this time, not ever again.
   But he knew something none of the others did. Perhaps, after the talk he'd just had with Eddie, he should tell them... yet he thought he would keep the knowledge to himself a little while longer.
   In the old tongue which had once been his world's lingua franca, most words, like khef and ka, had many meanings. The word char, how­ever—char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo—had only one.
   Char meant death.

• V • BRIDGE AND CITY
   
1
   THEY CAME UPON THE downed airplane three days later.
   Jake pointed it out first at midmorning—a flash of light about ten miles away, as if a mirror lay in the grass. As they drew closer, they saw a large dark object at the side of the Great Road .
   "It looks like a dead bird," Roland said. "A big one."
   "That's no bird," Eddie said. "That's an airplane. I'm pretty sure the glare is sunlight bouncing off the canopy."
   An hour later they stood silently at the edge of the road, looking at the ancient wreck. Three plump crows stood on the tattered skin of the fuselage, staring insolently at the newcomers. Jake pried a cobble from the edge of the road and shied it at them. The crows lumbered into the air, cawing indignantly.
   One wing had broken off in the crash and lay thirty yards away, a shadow like a diving board in the tall grass. The rest of the plane was pretty much intact. The canopy had cracked in a starburst pattern where the pilot's head had struck it. There was a large, rust-colored stain there.
   Oy trotted over to where three rusty propeller blades rose from the grass, sniffed at them, then returned hastily to Jake.
   The man in the cockpit was u dust-dry mummy wearing a padded leather vest and a helmet with a spike on top. His lips were gone, his teeth exposed in a final desperate grimace. Fingers which had once been as large as sausages but were now only skin-covered bones clutched the wheel. His skull was caved in where it had hit the canopy, and Roland guessed that the greenish-gray scales which coated the left side of his face were all that remained of his brains. The dead man's head was tilted back, as if he had been sure, even at the moment of his death, that he could regain the sky again. The plane's remaining wing still jutted from the encroaching grass. On it was a fading insignia which depicted a fist holding a thunderbolt.
   "Looks like Aunt Talitha was wrong and the old albino man had the right of it, after all," Susannah said in an awed voice. "That must be David Quick, the outlaw prince. Look at the size of him, Roland—they must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!"
   Roland nodded. The heat and the years had wasted the man in the mechanical bird to no more than a skeleton wrapped in dry hide, but he could still see how broad the shoulders had been, and the misshapen head was massive. "So fell Lord Perth," he said, "and the countryside did shake with that thunder."
   Jake looked at him questioningly.
   "It's from an old poem. Lord Perth was a giant who went forth to war with a thousand men, but he was still in his own country when a little boy threw a stone at him and hit him in the knee. He stumbled, the weight of his armor bore him down, and he broke his neck in the fall."
   Jake said, "Like our story of David and Goliath."
   "There was no fire," Eddie said. "I bet he just ran out of gas and tried a dead-stick landing on the road. He might have been an outlaw and a barbarian, but he had a yard of guts."
   Roland nodded, and looked at Jake. "You all right with this?"
   "Yes. If the guy was still, you know, runny, I might not be." Jake looked from the dead man in the airplane to the city. Lud was much closer and clearer now, and although they could see many broken win­dows in the towers, he, like Eddie, had not entirely given up hope of finding some sort of help there. "I bet things sort of fell apart in the city once he was gone."
   "I think you'd win that bet," Roland said.
   "You know something?" Jake was studying the plane again. "The people who built that city might have made their own airplanes, but I'm pretty sure this is one of ours. I did a school paper on air combat when I was in the fifth grade, and I think I recognize it. Roland, can I take a closer look?"
   Roland nodded. "I'll go with you."
   Together they walked over to the plane with the high grass swishing at their pants. "Look," Jake said. "See the machine-gun under the wing? That's an air-cooled German model, and this is a Focke-Wulf from just before World War II. I'm sure it is. So what's it doing here?"
   "Lots of planes disappear," Eddie said. "Take the Bermuda Triangle, for instance. That's a place over one of our oceans, Roland. It's supposed to be jinxed. Maybe it's a great big doorway between our worlds—one that's almost always open." Eddie hunched his shoulders and essayed a bad Rod Serling imitation. "Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for turbu­lence: you're flying into... the Roland Zone !"
   Jake and Roland, who were now standing beneath the plane's remaining wing, ignored him.
   "Boost me up, Roland."
   Roland shook his head. "That wing looks solid, but it's not—this thing has been here a long time, Jake. You'd fall."
   "Make a step, then."
   Eddie said, "I'll do it, Roland."
   Roland studied his diminished right hand for a moment, shrugged, then laced his hands together. "This'll do. He's light."
   Jake shook off his moccasin and then stepped lightly into the stirrup Roland had made. Oy began to bark shrilly, though whether in excitement or alarm, Roland couldn't tell.
   Jake's chest was now pressing against one of the airplane's rusty flaps, and he was looking right at the fist-and-thunderbolt design. It had peeled up a little from the surface of the wing along one edge. He seized this flap and pulled. It came off the wing so easily that he would have fallen backward if Eddie, standing directly behind him, hadn't steadied him with a hand on the butt.
   "I knew it," Jake said. There was another symbol beneath the fist-and-thunderbolt, and now it was almost totally revealed. It was a swastika. "I just wanted to see it. You can put me down now."
   They started out again, but they could see the tail of the plane every time they looked back that afternoon, looming out of the high grass like Lord Perth's burial monument.