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?” Susannah asked. “What Beams?”
“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?” Susannah asked cautiously. 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. Susannah ignored this. “And the Dark Tower? Is it some kind of generator? A central power-source for these Beams?”
“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.”
Eddie had bent to examine the walking box. Now he straightened up and stared at Roland. “That can’t be.” He sounded like a man trying to explain to a small child that there really isn’t a boogeyman living in his closet, that there can’t be because there isn’t any such thing as the boogeyman, not really. “Worlds don’t grow, Roland.”
“Don’t they? When I was a boy, Eddie, there were maps. I remem-ber one in particular. It was called The Greater Kingdoms of the Western Earth. It showed my land, which was called by the name Gilead. It showed the Downland Baronies, which were overrun by riot and civil war in the year after I won my guns, and the hills, and the desert, and the mountains, and the Western Sea. It was a long distance from Gilead to the Western Sea—a thousand miles or more—but it had taken me over twenty years to cross that distance.” “That’s impossible,” Susannah said quickly, fearfully. “Even if you walked the whole distance it couldn’t take twenty years.” “Well, you have to allow for stops to write postcards and drink beer,” Eddie said, but they both ignored him.
“I didn’t walk but rode most of the distance on horseback,” Roland said. “I was—slowed up, shall we say?—every now and then, but for most of that time I was moving. Moving away from John Farson, who led the revolt which toppled the world I grew up in and who wanted my head on a pole in his courtyard—he had good reason to want that, I suppose, since I and my compatriots were responsible for the deaths of a great many of his followers—and because I stole something he held very dear.”
“What, Roland?” Eddie asked curiously.
Roland shook his head. “That’s a story for another day … or maybe never. For now, think not of that but of this: I’ve come many thousands of miles. Because the world is growing.”
“A thing like that just can’t happen,” Eddie reiterated, but he was badly shaken, all the same. “There’d be earthquakes . . . floods . . . tidal waves … I don’t know what all …”
“Look!” Roland said furiously. “Just look around you! What do you see? A world that is slowing down like a child’s top even as it speeds up and moves on in some other way none of us understand. Look at your kills, Eddie! Look at your kills, for your father’s sake!”
He took two strides toward the stream, picked up the steel snake, examined it briefly, and tossed it to Eddie, who caught it with his left hand. The snake broke in two pieces as he did so.
“You see? It’s exhausted. All the creatures we found here were exhausted. If we hadn’t come, they would have died before long, anyway. Just as the hear would have died.”
“The bear had some sort of disease,” Susannah said. The gunslinger nodded. “Parasites which attacked the natural parts of its body. But why did they never attack it before?” Susannah did not reply.
Eddie was examining the snake. Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire. Yet he could see flecks of rust, not just on the surface of the half-snake he still held, but in its guts as well. And there was a patch of wetness where either oil had leaked out or water had seeped in. This moisture had rotted away some of the wires, and a greenish stuff that looked like moss had grown over several of the thumbnail-sized circuit boards. Eddie turned the snake over. A steel plate proclaimed it to be the work of North Central Positronics, Ltd. There was a serial number, but no name. Probably too unimportant to name, he thought. Just a sophisti-cated mechanical Roto-Rooter designed to give old Br’er Bear an enema every once In a while, keep him regular, or something equally disgusting. He dropped the snake and wiped his hands on his pants. Roland had picked up the tractor-gadget. He yanked at one of the treads. It came off easily, showering a cloud of rust down between his boots. He tossed it aside.