The Waste Lands

“Eddie! You all right?” Susa

“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 begi

“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 Susa

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 Susa

That’s bullshit, buddy. And you know it.

The trouble was, he didn’t know it. He had come face to face with something Susa

All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was begi

As he wrestled Susa

And another voice spoke up inside. I’ll bet his other friends-the ones with the names that sound like they came straight from the Round Table in King Arthur’s court-I’ll bet they felt the same way, Eddie. And they’re all dead. Every one of them.

He recognized that voice, like it or not. It belonged to Henry, and that made it a hard voice not to hear.

28

ROLAND, WITH SUSANNAH BALANCED on his right hip, was standing in front of the metal box that looked like a subway entrance closed for the night. Eddie left the wheelchair at the edge of the clearing and walked over. As he did, the steady humming noise and the vibration under his feet became louder. The machinery making the noise, he realized, was either inside the box or under it. It seemed that he heard it not with his ears but somewhere deep inside his head, and in the hollows of his gut.

“So this is one of the twelve portals. Where does it go, Roland? Disney World?”

Roland shook his head. “I don’t know where it goes. Maybe nowhere… or everywhere. There’s a lot about my world I don’t know-surely you both have realized that. And there are things I used to know which have changed.”

“Because the world has moved on?”

“Yes.” Roland glanced at him. “Here, that is not a figure of speech. The world really is moving on, and it goes ever faster. At the same time, things are wearing out… falling apart…” He kicked die mechanical corpse of the walking box to illustrate his point.

Eddie thought of the rough diagram of the portals which Roland had drawn in the dirt. “Is this the edge of the world?” he asked, almost timidly. “I mean, it doesn’t look much different than anyplace else.” He laughed a little. “If there’s a drop-off, I don’t see it.”

Roland shook his head. “It’s not that kind of edge. It’s the place where one of the Beams starts. Or so I was taught.”

“Beams?” Susa

“The Great Old Ones didn’t make the world, but they did re-make it. Some tale-tellers say the Beams saved it; others say they are the seeds of the world’s destruction. The Great Old Ones created the Beams. They are lines of some sort… lines which bind… and hold…”

“Are you talking about magnetism?” Susa

His whole face lit up, transforming its harsh planes and furrows into something new and amazing, and for a moment Eddie knew how Roland would look if he actually did reach his Tower.

“Yes! Not just magnetism, but that is a part of it… and gravity… and the proper alignment of space, size, and dimension. The Beams are the forces which bind these things together.”

“Welcome to physics in the nuthouse,” Eddie said in a low voice.

Susa

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know that this is point A,” Eddie said. “If we walked long enough in a straight line, we’d come to another portal-call it point C-on the other edge of the world. But before we did, we’d come to point B. The center-point. The Dark Tower.”

The gunslinger nodded.

“How long a trip is it? Do you know?”

“No. But I know it’s very far, and that the distance grows with every day that passes.”