Chapter IV:
THE DOOR INTO THUNDERCLAP
ONE
When the four wanderers woke from their sleep (Roland first, and after six hours exactly), there were more popkins stacked on a cloth-covered tray, and and also more drinks. Of the domestic robot, however, there was no sign.
“All right, enough,” Roland said, after calling Nigel for the third time. “He told us he was on his last legs; seems that while we slept, he fell off em.”
“He was doing something he didn’t want to do,” Jake said.
His face looked pale and puffy. From sleeping too heavily was Roland’s first thought, and then wondered how he could be such a fool. The boy had been crying for Pere Callahan.
“Doing what?” Eddie asked, slipping his pack over one shoulder and then hoisting Susannah onto his hip. “For who?
And why?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said. “He didn’t want me to know, and I didn’t feel right about prying. I know he was just a robot, but with that nice English voice and all, he seemed like more.”
“That’s a scruple you may need to get over,” Roland said, as gently as he could.
“How heavy am I, sugar?” Susannah asked Eddie cheerfully.
“Or maybe what I should ask is ’How bad you missin that good old wheelchair?’ Not to mention the shoulder-rig.”
“Suze, you hated that piggyback rig from the word go and we both know it.”
“Wasn’t askin about that, and you know it.”
It always fascinated Roland when Detta crept unheard into Susannah’s voice, or-even more spooky-her face. The woman herself seemed unaware of these incursions, as her husband did now.
“I’d carry you to the end of the world,” Eddie said sentimentally, and kissed the tip of her nose. “Unless you put on another ten pounds or so, that is. Then I might have to leave you and look for a lighter lady.”
She poked him-not gently, either-and then turned to Roland. “This is a damn big place, once you’re down underneath.
How’re we gonna find the door that goes through to Thunderclap?”
Roland shook his head. He didn’t know.
“How bout you, Cisco?” Eddie asked Jake. “You’re the one who’s strong in the touch. Can you use it to find the door we want?”
“Maybe if I knew how to start,” Jake said, “but I don’t.”
And with that, all three of them again looked at Roland. No, make it four, because even the gods-cursed bumbler was staring.
Eddie would have made a joke to dispel any discomfort he felt at such a combined stare, and Roland actually fumbled for one. Something about how too many eyes spoiled the pie, maybe? No. That saying, which he’d heard from Susannah, was about cooks and broth. In the end he simply said, “We’ll cast about a little, the way hounds do when they’ve lost the scent, and see what we find.”
“Maybe another wheelchair for me to ride in,” Susannah said brighdy. “This nasty white boy has got his hands all over my purity.”
Eddie gave her a sincere look. “If it was really pure, hon,” he said, “it wouldn’t be cracked like it is.”
TWO
It was Oy who actually took over and led them, but not until they returned to the kitchen. The humans were poking about with a kind of aimlessness that Jake found rather unsettling when Oy began to bark out his name: “Ake! Ake-Ake!”
Theyjoined the bumbler at a chocked-open door that read C-LEVEL. Oy went a little way along the corridor then looked back over his shoulder, eyes brilliant. When he saw they weren’t following, he barked his disappointment.
“What do you think?” Roland asked. “Should we follow him?”
“Yes,” Jake said.
“What scent has he got?” Eddie asked. “Do you know?”
“Maybe something from the Dogan,” Jake said. “The real one, on the other side of the River Whye. Where Oy and I overheard Ben Slightman’s Da’ and the… you know, the robot.”
“Jake?” Eddie asked. ’You okay, kid?”
“Yes,” Jake said, although he’d had a bit of a bad turn, remembering how Benny’s Da’ had screamed. Andy the Messenger Robot, apparently tired of Slightman’s grumbling, had pushed or pinched something in the man’s elbow-a nerve, probably-and Slightman had “hollered like an owl,” as Roland might say (and probably with at least mild contempt). Slightman the Younger was beyond such things, now, of course, and it was that realization-a boy, once full of fun and now cool as riverbank clay-which had made the son of Elmer pause. You had to die, yes, and Jake hoped he could do it at least moderately well when the hour came. He’d had some training in how to do it, after all. It was the thought of all that grave-time that chilled him. That downtime. That lie-still-and-continue-to-be-dead time.
Andy’s scent-cold but oily and distinctive-had been all over the Dogan on the far side of the River Whye, for he and Slightman the Elder had met there many times before the Wolf raid that had been greeted by Roland and his makeshift posse. This smell wasn’t exactly the same, but it was interesting.
Certainly it was the only familiar one Oy had struck so far, and he wanted to follow it.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Eddie said. “I see something we need.”
He put Susannah down, crossed the kitchen, and returned rolling a stainless-steel table probably meant for transporting stacks of freshly washed dishes or larger utensils.
“Upsy-daisy, don’t be crazy,” Eddie said, and lifted Susannah onto it.
She sat there comfortably enough, gripping the sides, but looked dubious. “And when we come to a flight of stairs? What then, sugarboy?”
“Sugarboy will burn that bridge when he comes to it,”
Eddie said, and pushed the rolling table into the hall. “Mush, Oy! On, you huskies!”
“Oy! Husk!” The bumbler hurried briskly along, bending his head every now and again to dip into the scent but mostly not bothering much. It was too fresh and too wide to need much attention. It was the smell of the Wolves he had found. After an hour’s walk, they passed a hangar-sized door marked TO HORSES.
Beyond this, the trail led them to a door which read STAGING AREA and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. (That they were followed for part of their hike by Walter o’ Dim was a thing none of them, not even Jake-strong in the touch though he was-suspected. On the boy, at least, the hooded man’s “thinking-cap” worked quite well. When Walter was sure where the bumbler was leading them, he’d turned back to palaver with Mordred-a mistake, as it turned out, but one with this consolation: he would never make another.)
Oy sat before the closed door, which was the kind that swung both ways, with his cartoon squiggle of tail tight against his hindquarters, and barked. “Ake, ope-ope! Ope, Ake!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said, “in a minute. Hold your water.”
“STAGING AREA,” Eddie said. “That sounds at least moderately hopeful.”
They were still pushing Susannah on the stainless-steel table, having negotiated the only stairway they’d come to (a fairly short one) without too much trouble. Susannah had gone down first on her butt-her usual mode of descent-while Roland and Eddie carried the table along behind her. Jake went between the woman and the men with Eddie’s gun raised, the long scrolled barrel laid into the hollow of his left shoulder, a position known as “the guard.”
Roland now drew his own gun, laid it in the hollow of his right shoulder, and pushed the door open. He went through in a slight crouch, ready to dive either way or jump backward if the situation demanded it.
The situation did not. Had Eddie been first, he might have believed (if only momentarily) that he was being attacked by flying Wolves sort of like the flying monkeys in The Wizard ofOz.
Roland, however, was not overburdened with imagination, and even though a good many of the overhead fluorescent light strips in this huge, barnlike space had gone out, he wasted no time-or adrenaline-in mistaking the suspended objects for anything but what they actually were: broken robot raiders awaiting repair.
“Come on in,” he said, and his words came echoing back to him. Somewhere, high in the shadows, came a flutter of wings.
Swallows, or perhaps barn-rusties that had found their way in from outside. “I think all’s well.”
They came, and stood looking up with silent awe. Only Jake’s four-footed friend was unimpressed. Oy was taking advantage of the break to groom himself, first the left side and then the right. At last Susannah, still sitting on the rolling steel table, said: “Tell you what, I’ve seen a lot, but I haven’t ever seen anything quite like this.”
Neither had the others. The huge room was thick with Wolves that seemed suspended in flight. Some wore their green Dr. Doom hoods and capes; others hung naked save for their steel suits. Some were headless, some armless, and a few were missing either one leg or the other. Their gray metal faces seemed to snarl or grin, depending on how the light hit them.
