popped out in a shower of rust and dried moss. The hole behind it was far too small for a man… but not for a billy-bumbler. He put the grille down, picked Oy up, and spoke softly into his ear.
“Go… see… come back. Do you understand? Don’t let them see you. Just go and see and come back.”
Oy gazed up into his face, saying nothing, not even Jake’s name. Roland had no idea if he had understood or not, but wasting time in ponderation would not help matters. He placed Oy in the ventilator shaft. The bumbler sniffed at the crumbles of dried moss, sneezed delicately, then only crouched there with the draft rippling through his long, silky fur, looking doubtfully at Roland with his strange eyes.
“Go and see and come back,” Roland repeated in a whisper, and Oy disappeared into the shadows, walking silently, claws retracted, on the pads of his paws.
Roland drew his gun again and did the hardest thing. He waited.
Oy returned less than three minutes later. Roland lifted him out of the shaft and put him on the floor. Oy looked up at him with his long neck extended. “How many, Oy?” Roland asked. “How many did you see?”
For a long moment he thought the bumbler wouldn’t do anything except go on staring in his anxious way. Then he lifted his right paw tentatively in the air, extended the claws, and looked at it, as if trying to remember something very difficult. At last he began to tap on the steel floor.
One… two… three… four. A pause. Then two more, quick and delicate, the extended claws clicking lightly on the steel: five, six. Oy paused a second time, head down, looking like a child lost in the throes of some titanic mental struggle. Then he tapped his claws one final time on the steel, looking up at Roland as he did it. “Ake!”
Six. Grays… and Jake.
Roland picked Oy up and stroked him. “Good!” he murmured into Oy’s ear. In truth, he was almost overwhelmed with surprise and gratitude. He had hoped for something, but this careful response was amazing. And he had few doubts about the accuracy of the count. “Good boy!”
“Oy! Ake!”
Yes, Jake. Jake was the problem. Jake, to whom he had made a promise he intended to keep.
The gunslinger thought deeply in his strange fashion-that combination of dry pragmatism and wild intuition which had probably come from his strange grandmother, Deidre the Mad, and had kept him alive all these years after his old companions had passed. Now he was depending on it to keep Jake alive, too.
He picked Oy up again, knowing Jake might live-might-but the bumbler was almost certainly going to die. He whispered several simple words into Oy’s cocked ear, repeating them over and over. At last he ceased speaking and returned him to the ventilator shaft. “Good boy,” he whispered. “Go on, now. Get it done. My heart goes with you.”
“Oy! Art! Ake!” the bumbler whispered, and then scurried off into the darkness again.
Roland waited for all hell to break loose.
30
ASK ME A QUESTION, Eddie Dean of New York. And it better be a good one… if it’s not, you and your woman are going to die, no matter where you came from.
And, dear God, how did you respond to something like that?
The dark red light had gone out; now the pink one reappeared. “Hurry,” the faint voice of Little Blaine urged them. “He’s worse than ever before… hurry or he’ll kill you!”
Eddie was vaguely aware that flocks of disturbed pigeons were still swooping aimlessly through the Cradle, and that some of them had smashed headfirst into the pillars and dropped dead on the floor.
“What does it want?” Susannah hissed at the speaker and the voice of Little Blaine somewhere behind it. “For God’s sake, what does it want?”
No reply. And Eddie could feel any period of grace they might have started with slipping away. He thumbed the TALK/LISTEN and spoke with frantic vivacity as the sweat trickled down his cheeks and neck.
Ask me a question.
“So-Blaine! What have you been up to these last few years? I guess you haven’t been doing the old southeast run, huh? Any reason why not? Haven’t been feeling up to snuff?”
No sound but the rustle and flap of the pigeons. In his mind he saw Ardis trying to scream as his cheeks melted and his tongue caught fire.
He felt the hair on the nape of his neck stirring and clumping together. Fear? Or gathering electricity?
Hurry… he’s worse than ever before.
“Who built you, anyway?” Eddie asked frantically, thinking: If I only knew what the fucking thing wanted! “Want to talk about that? Was it the Grays? Nah… probably the Great Old Ones, right? Or…”
He trailed off. Now he could feel Blaine’s silence as a physical weight on his skin, like fleshy, groping hands.
“What do you want?” he shouted. “Just what in hell do you want to hear?”
No answer-but the buttons on the box were glowing an angry dark red again, and Eddie knew their time was almost up. He could hear a low buzzing sound nearby-a sound like an electrical generator-and he didn’t believe that sound was just his imagination, no matter how much he wanted to think so.
“Blaine!” Susannah shouted suddenly. “Blaine, do you hear me?”
No answer… and Eddie felt the air was filling up with electricity as a bowl under a tap fills up with water. He could feel it crackling bitterly in his nose with every breath he took; could feel his fillings buzzing like angry insects.
“Blaine, I’ve got a question, and it is a pretty good one! Listen!” She closed her eyes for a moment, fingers rubbing frantically at her temples, and then opened her eyes again. “There is a thing that… uh… that nothing is, and yet it has a name; ’tis sometimes tall and… and sometimes short…” She broke off and stared at Eddie with wide, agonized eyes. “Help me! I can’t remember how the rest of it goes!””Eddie only stared at her as if she had gone mad. What in the name of God was she talking about? Then it came to him, and it made a weirdly perfect sense, and the rest of the riddle clicked into his mind as neatly as the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He swung toward the speaker again.
“It joins our talks, it joins our sport, and plays at every game.’ What is it? That’s our question, Blaine-what is it?””The red light illuminating the COMMAND and ENTER buttons below the diamond of numbers blinked out. There was an endless moment of silence before Blaine spoke again… but Eddie was aware that the feeling of electricity crawling all over his skin was diminishing.
“A SHADOW, OF COURSE,” the voice of Blaine responded. “AN EASY ONE… BUT NOT BAD. NOT BAD AT ALL.”
The voice coming out of the speaker was animated by a thoughtful quality… and something else, as well. Pleasure? Longing? Eddie couldn’t quite decide, but he did know there was something in that voice that reminded him of Little Blaine. He knew something else, as well: Susannah had saved their bacon, at least for the time being. He bent down and kissed her cold, sweaty brow.
“DO YOU KNOW ANY MORE RIDDLES?” Blaine asked.
“Yes, lots,” Susannah said at once. “Our companion, Jake, has a whole book of them.”
“FROM THE NEW YORK PLACE OF WHERE?” Blaine asked, and now the tone of his voice was perfectly clear, at least to Eddie. Blaine might be a machine, but Eddie had been a heroin junkie for six years, and he knew stone greed when he heard it.
“From New York, right,” he said. “But Jake has been taken prisoner. A man named Gasher took him.”
No answer… and then the buttons glowed that faint, rosy pink again. “Good so far,” the voice of Little Blaine whispered. “But you must be careful… he’s tricky…”
The red lights reappeared at once.
“DID ONE OF YOU SPEAK?” Blaine’s voice was cold and-Eddie could have sworn it was so-suspicious.
He looked at Susannah. Susannah looked back with the wide, frightened eyes of a little girl who has heard something unnameable moving slyly beneath the bed.
“I cleared my throat, Blaine,” Eddie said. He swallowed and armed sweat from his forehead. “I’m… shit, tell the truth and shame the devil. I’m scared to death.”
“THAT IS VERY WISE OF YOU. THESE RIDDLES OF WHICH YOU SPEAK-ARE THEY STUPID? I WON’T HAVE MY PATIENCE TRIED WITH STUPID RIDDLES.”
“Most are smart,” Susannah said, but she looked anxiously at Eddie as she said it.
“YOU LIE. YOU DON’T KNOW THE QUALITY OF THESE RIDDLES AT ALL.”
“How can you say-”
“VOICE ANALYSIS. FRICTIVE PATTERNS AND DIPHTHONG STRESS-EMPHASIS PROVIDE A RELIABLE QUOTIENT OF TRUTH/UNTRUTH. PREDICTIVE RELIABILITY IS 97 PER CENT, PLUS OR MINUS.5 PER CENT.” The voice fell silent for a moment, and when it spoke again, it did so in a menacing drawl that Eddie found very familiar. It was the voice of Humphrey Bogart. “I SHUGGEST YOU SHTICK TO WHAT YOU KNOW, SHWEET-HEART. THE LAST GUY THAT TRIED SHADING THE TRUTH WITH ME WOUND UP AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEND IN A PAIR OF SHEMENT COWBOY BOOTS.”
“Christ,” Eddie said. “We walked four hundred miles or so to meet the computer version of Rich Little. How can you imitate guys like John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, Blaine? Guys from our world?”
Nothing.
“Okay, you don’t want to answer that one. How about this one-if a riddle was what you wanted, why didn’t you just say so?”
Again there was no answer, but Eddie discovered that he didn’t really need one. Blaine liked riddles, so he had asked them one. Susannah had solved it. Eddie guessed that if she had failed to do so, the two of them would now look like a couple of giant-economy-size charcoal briquets lying on the floor of the Cradle of Lud.
“Blaine?” Susannah asked uneasily. There was no answer. “Blaine, are you still there?”
“YES. TELL ME ANOTHER ONE.”
“When is a door not a door?” Eddie asked.
“WHEN IT’S AJAR. YOU’ll HAVE TO DO BETTER THAN THAT IF YOU REALLY EXPECT ME TO TAKE YOU SOMEWHERE. CAN YOU DO BETTER THAN THAT?”
“If Roland gets here, I’m sure we can,” Susannah said. “Regardless of how good the riddles in Jake’s book may be, Roland knows hundreds- he actually studied them as a child.” Having said this, she realized she could not conceive of Roland as a child. “Will you take us, Blaine?”
“I MIGHT,” Blaine said, and Eddie was quite sure he heard a dim thread of cruelty running through that voice. “BUT YOU’ll HAVE TO PRIME THE PUMP TO GET ME GOING, AND MY PUMP PRIMES BACKWARD.”
“Meaning what?” Eddie asked, looking through the bars at the smooth pink line of Blaine’s back. But Blaine did not reply to this or any of the other questions they asked. The bright orange lights stayed on, but both Big Blaine and Little Blaine seemed to have gone into hibernation. Eddie, however, knew better. Blaine was awake. Blaine was watching them. Blaine was listening to their frictive patterns and diphthong stress-emphasis.
He looked at Susannah.
“You’ll have to prime the pump, but my pump primes backward,” he said bleakly. “It’s a riddle, isn’t it?””“Yes, of course.” She looked at the triangular window, so like a half-lidded, mocking eye, and then pulled him close so she could whisper in his ear. “It’s totally insane, Eddie-schizophrenic, paranoid, probably delusional as well.”
“Tell me about it,” he breathed back. “What we’ve got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
