“Stop it,” Ted almost snarled. “Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don’t waste the one or increase the other, if you please.”
Susannah was stung but held back a retort. Instead she took the binoculars, raised them to her eyes, and adjusted them. What she saw merely heightened her sense of looking at a small but perfect college campus, one that merged beautifully with the neighboring village. No town-versus-gown tensions there,
I bet, she thought. / bet Elmville and Breaker U go together like peanut butter and jelly, Abbott and Costello, hand and glove. Whenever there was a Ray Bradbury short in the Saturday Evening Post, she always turned to it first, she loved Bradbury, and what she was looking at through the binoculars made her think of Greentown,
Bradbury’s idealized Illinois village. A place where adults sat out on their porches in rocking chairs, drinking lemonade, and the kids played tag with flashlights in the lightning-bugstitched dusk of summer evenings. And the nearby college campus? No drinking there, at least not to excess. No joysticks or goofballs or rock and roll, either. It would be a place where the girls kissed the boys goodnight with chaste ardor and were glad to sign back in so that the Dormitory Mom wouldn’t think ill of them. A place where the sun shone all day, where Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters sang on the radio, and nobody suspected they were actually living in the ruins of a world that had moved on.
No, she thought coldly. Some of them know. That’s why these three showed up to meet us.
“That’s the Devar-Toi,” Roland said flatly. Not a question.
“Yeah,” Dinky said. “The good old Devar-Toi.” He stood beside Roland and pointed at a large white building near the dormitories. “See that white one? That’s Heartbreak House, where the can-toi live. Ted calls em the low men. They’re taheen-human hybrids. And they don’t call it the Devar-Toi, they call it Algul Siento, which means-”
“Blue Heaven,” Roland said, and Jake realized why: all of the buildings except for the rock towers had blue tiled roofs.
Not Narnia but Blue Heaven. Where a bunch of folks were busy bringing about the end of the world.
All the worlds.
SIX
“It looks like the pleasantest place in existence, at least since In-World fell,” Ted said. “Doesn’t it?”
“Pretty nice, all right,” Eddie agreed. He had at least a thousand questions, and guessed Suze and Jake probably had another thousand between them, but this wasn’t the time to ask them. In any case, he kept looking at that wonderful litde hundred-acre oasis down there. The one sunny green spot in all of Thunderclap. The one nice place. And why not? Nothing but the best for Our Breaker Buddies.
And, in spite of himself, one question did slip out.
“Ted, why does the Crimson King want to bring the Tower down? Do you know?”
Ted gave him a brief glance. Eddie thought it cool, maybe downright cold, until the man smiled. When he did, his whole face lit up. Also, his eyes had quit doing that creepy in-and-out thing, which was a big improvement.
“He’s mad,” Ted told him. “Nuttier than a fruitcake. Riding the fabled rubber bicycle. Didn’t I tell you that?” And then, before Eddie could reply: ’Yes, it’s quite nice. Whether you call it Devar-Toi, the Big Prison, or Algul Siento, it looks a treat. It is a treat.”
“Very classy accommos,” Dinky agreed. Even Stanley was looking down at the sunlit community with an expression of faint longing.
“The food is the best,” Ted went on, “and the double feature at the Gem Theater changes twice a week. If you don’t want to go to the movies, you can bring the movies home on DVDs.”
“What are those?” Eddie asked, then shook his head. “Never mind. Go on.”
Ted shrugged, as if to say What else do you need?
“Absolutely astral sex, for one thing,” Dinky said. “It’s sim, but it’s still incredible-I made it with Marilyn Monroe,
Madonna, and Nicole Kidman all in one week.” He said this with a certain uneasy pride. “I could have had them all at the same time if I’d wanted to. The only way you can tell they’re not real is to breathe directly on them, from close up. When you do, the part you blow on… kinda disappears. It’s unsettling.”
“Booze? Dope?” Eddie asked.
“Booze in limited quantities,” Ted replied. “If you’re into oenology, for instance, you’ll experience fresh wonders at every meal.”
“What’s oenology?” Jake asked.
“The science of wine-snobbery, sugarbun,” Susannah said.
“If you come to Blue Heaven addicted to something,” Dinky said, “they get you off it. Kindly. The one or two guys who proved especially tough nuts in that area…” His eyes met Ted’s briefly. Ted shrugged and nodded. “Those dudes disappeared.”
“In truth, the low men don’t need any more Breakers,” Ted said. “They’ve got enough to finish the job right now.”
“How many?” Roland asked.
“About three hundred,” Dinky said.
“Three hundred and seven, to be exact,” Ted said. “We’re quartered in five dorms, although that word conjures the wrong image. We have our own suites, and as much-or as little-contact with our fellow Breakers as we wish.”
“And you know what you’re doing?” Susannah asked.
“Yes. Although most don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”
“I don’t understand why they don’t mutiny.”
“What’s your when, ma’am?” Dinky asked her.
“My…?” Then she understood. “1964.”
He sighed and shook his head. “So you don’t know about Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. It’s easier to explain if you know about that. Almost a thousand people committed suicide at this religious compound a Jesus-guy from San Francisco set up in Guyana. They drank poisoned Kool-Aid out of a tub while he watched them from the porch of his house and used a bullhorn to tell them stories about his mother.”
Susannah was staring at him with horrified disbelief, Ted with poorly disguised impatience. Yet he must have thought something about this was important, because he held silence.
“Almost a thousand,” Dinky reiterated. “Because they were confused and lonely and they thought Jim Jones was their friend. Because-dig it-they had nothing to go back to. And it’s like that here. If the Breakers united, tfiey could make a mental hammer that’d knock Prentiss and The Weasel and the taheen and the can-toi all the way into the next galaxy. Instead there’s no one but me, Stanley, and everyone’s favorite super-breaker, the totally eventual Mr. Theodore Brautigan of Milford, Connecticut.
Harvard Class of ’20, Drama Society, Debate Club, editor of The Crimson, and-of course!-Phi Beta Crapper.”
“Can we trust you three?” Roland asked. The question sounded deceptively idle, little more than a time-passer.
“You have to,” Ted said. ’You’ve no one else. Neither do we.”
“If we were on their side,” Dinky said, “don’t you think we’d have something better to wear on our feet than moccasins made out of rubber fuckin tires? In Blue Heaven you get everything except for a few basics. Stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily think of as indispensable, but stuff that… well, it’s harder to take a powder when you’ve got nothing to wear but your Algul Siento slippers, let’s put it that way.”
“I still can’t believe it,'Jake said. “All those people working to break the Beams, I mean. No offense, but-”
Dinky turned on him with his fists clenched and a tight, furious smile on his face. Oy immediately stepped in front of Jake, growling low and showing his teeth. Dinky either didn’t notice or paid no attention. ’Yeah? Well guess what, kiddo? I take offense. I take offense like a motherfucker. What do you know about what it’s like to spend your whole life on the outside, to be the butt of the joke every time, to always be Carrie at the fuckin prom?”
“Who?” Eddie asked, confused, but Dinky was on a roll and paid no attention.
“There are guys down there who can’t walk or talk. One chick with no arms. Several with hydrocephalus, which means they have heads out to fuckin New Jersey.” He held his hands two feet beyond his head on either side, a gesture they all took for exaggeration. Later they would discover it was not. “Poor old Stanley here, he’s one of the ones who can’t talk.”
Roland glanced at Stanley, with his pallid, stubbly face and his masses of curly dark hair. And the gunslinger almost smiled.
“I think he can talk,” he said, and then: “Do’ee bear your father’s name, Stanley? I believe thee does.”
Stanley lowered his head, and color mounted in his cheeks, yet he was smiling. At the same time he began to cry again. Just what in the hell’s going on here? Eddie wondered.
Ted clearly wondered, too. “Sai Deschain, I wonder if I could ask-”
“No, no, cry pardon,” Roland said. “Your time is short just now, so you said and we all feel it. Do the Breakers know how they’re being fed? What they’re being fed, to increase their powers?”
Ted abruptly sat on a rock and looked down at the shining steel cobweb of rails. “It has to do with the kiddies they bring through the Station, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“They don’t know and I don’t know,” Ted said in that same heavy voice. “Not really. We’re fed dozens of pills a day. They come morning, noon, and night. Some are vitamins. Some are no doubt intended to keep us docile. I’ve had some luck purging those from my system, and Dinky’s, and Stanley’s.
Only… for such a purging to work, gunslinger, you must want it to work. Do you understand?”
Roland nodded.
“I’ve thought for a long time that they must also be giving us some kind of… I don’t know… brain-booster… but with so many pills, it’s impossible to tell which one it might be. Which one it is that makes us cannibals, or vampires, or both.” He paused, looking down at the improbable sunray. He extended his hands on both sides. Dinky took one, Stanley the other.
“Watch this,” Dinky said. “This is good.”
Ted closed his eyes. So did the other two. For a moment there was nothing to see but three men looking out over the dark desert toward the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam… and they were looking, Roland knew. Even with their eyes shut.
The sunbeam winked out. For a space of perhaps a dozen seconds the Devar-Toi was as dark as the desert, and Thunderclap Station, and the
