"Certainly, sai."
"I don't suppose you could rustle me up an Elvis Special,"
Jake said longingly. "That's peanut bvitter, banana, and bacon."
"Jesus, kid," Eddie said. "I don't know if you can tell in this light, but I'm turning green."
"I have no bacon or bananas, unfortunately," Nigel said
(pronouncing the latter ba-NAW-nas), "but I do have peanut butter and three kinds of jelly. Also apple butter."
"Apple butter'd be good," Jake said.
"Go on, Susannah," Roland said as Nigel moved off on his errand. "Although I suppose I needn't speed you along so; after we eat, we'll need to take some rest." He sounded far from pleased with the idea.
"I don't think there's any more to tell," she said. "It sounds confusing-looks confusing, too, mosdy because our litde map doesn't have any scale-but it's essentially just a loop they make every twenty-four years or so: from Fedic to Calla Bryn Sturgis, then back to Fedic with the kids, so they can do the extraction. Then they take the kids back to the Callas and the brainfood to this prison where the Breakers are."
"The devar-toi," Jake said.
Susannah nodded. "The question is what we do to interrupt the cycle."
"We go through the door to Thunderclap station," Roland said, "and from the station to where the Breakers are kept. And there..." He looked at each of his ka-tet in turn, then raised his finger and made a dryly expressive shooting gesture.
"There'll be guards," Eddie said. "Maybe a lot of them.
What if we're outnumbered?"
"It won't be the first time," Roland said.
Chapter II:THE WATCHER
ONE
When Nigel returned, he was bearing a tray the size of a wagonwheel.
On it were stacks of sandwiches, two Thermoses filled with soup (beef and chicken), plus canned drinks. There was Coke, Sprite, Nozz-A-La, and something called Wit Green Wit.
Eddie tried tfiis last and pronounced it foul beyond description.
All of them could see that Nigel was no longer the same pippip, jolly-good fellow he'd been for God alone knew how many decades and centuries. His lozenge-shaped head kept jerking to one side or the other. When it went to the left he would mutter
"Un, deux, trois!" To the right it was "Ein, zwei, drei!" A constant low clacking had begun in his diaphragm.
"Sugar, what's wrong with you?" Susannah asked as the domestic robot lowered the tray to the floor amidst them.
"Self-diagnostic exam series suggests total systemic breakdown during the next two to six hours," Nigel said, sounding glum but otherwise calm. "Pre-existing logic faults, quarantined until now, have leaked into the GMS." He then twisted his head viciously to the right. "Ein, zioei, drei! Live free or die, here's Greg in your eye!"
"What's GMS?" Jake asked.
"And who's Greg?" Eddie added.
"GMS stands for general mentation systems," said Nigel.
"There are two such systems, rational and irrational. Conscious and subconscious, as you might say. As for Greg, that would be Greg Stillson, a character in a novel I'm reading. Quite enjoyable.
It's called The Dead Zone, by Stephen King. As to why I bring him up in this context, I have no idea."
TWO
Nigel explained that logic faults were common in what he called Asimov Robots. The smarter the robot, the more the logic faults... and the sooner they started showing up. The old people (Nigel called them the Makers) compensated for this by setting up a stringent quarantine system, treating mental glitches as though they were smallpox or cholera. (Jake thought this sounded like a really fine way of dealing with insanity, although he supposed that psychiatrists wouldn't care for the idea much; it would put them out of business.) Nigel believed that the trauma of having his eyes shot out had weakened his mental survival-systems somehow, and now all sorts of bad stuff was loose in his circuits, eroding his deductive and inductive reasoning capabilities, gobbling logic^systems left and right. He told Susannah he didn't hold this against her in the slightest. Susannah raised a fist to her forehead and thanked him big-big. In truth, she did not completely believe good old DNK 45932, although she was damned if she knew why. Maybe it was just a holdover from their time in Calla Bryn Sturgis, where a robot not much different from Nigel had turned out to be a nasty, grudge-holding cully indeed. And there was something else.
I spy with my little eye, Susannah thought.
"Hold out thy hands, Nigel."
When die robot did, diey all saw the wiry hairs caught in the joints of his steel fingers. There was also a drop of blood on a...
would you call it a knuckle? "What's this?" she asked, holding several of the hairs up.
"I'm sorry, mum, I cawn't-"
Couldn't see. No, of course not. Nigel had infrared, but his actual eyesight was gone, courtesy of Susannah Dean, daughter of Dan, gunslinger in the Ka-Tet of Nineteen.
"They're hairs. I also spy some blood."
"Ah, yes," Nigel said. "Rats in the kitchen, mum. I'm programmed to dispose of vermin when I detect them. There are a great many these days, I'm sorry to say; the world is moving on." And then, snapping his head violently to the left: "Un-deuxtrois!
Minnie Mouse est la mouse pour moi!n
"Um... did you kill Minnie and Mickey before or after you made the sandwiches, Nige old buddy?" Eddie asked.
"After, sai, I assure you."
"Well, I might pass, anyway," Eddie said. "I had a poorboy back in Maine, and it's sticking to my ribs like a motherfucker."
"You should say un, deux, trois," Susannah told him. The words were out before she knew she was going to say them.
"Cry pardon?" Eddie was sitting with his arm around her.
Since the four of them had gotten back together, he touched Susannah at every opportunity, as if needing to confirm the fact that she was more than just wishful thinking.
"Nothing." Later, when Nigel was either out of the room or completely broken down, she'd tell him her intuition. She thought that robots of Nigel and Andy's type, like those in the Isaac Asimov stories she'd read as a teenager, weren't supposed to lie. Perhaps Andy had either been modified or had modified himself so that wasn't a problem. With Nigel, she thought it was a problem, indeed: can ya say problem big-big. She had an idea that, unlike Andy, Nigel was essentially goodhearted, but yes-he'd either lied or gilded the truth about the rats in the larder.
Maybe about other things, as well. Ein, zwei, drei and Un, deux, trois was his method of letting off the pressure. For awhile, anyway.
It's Mordred, she thought, looking around. She took a sandwich because she had to eat-like Jake, she was ravenous-but her appetite was gone and she knew she'd take no enjoyment from what she plugged grimly down her throat. He's been at Nigel, and now he's watching us somewhere. I know it-I feel it.
And, as she took her first bite of some long-preserved, vacuum-packed mystery-meat:
A mother always knows.
THREE
None of them wanted to sleep in the Extraction Room 1 (although they would have had their pick of three hundred or more freshly made beds) nor in the deserted town outside, so Nigel took them to his quarters, pausing every now and then for a vicious head-clearing shake and to count off in either German or French. To this he began adding numbers in some other language none of them knew.
Their way led them through a kitchen-all stainless steel and smoothly humming machines, quite different from the ancient cookhouse Susannah had visited todash beneath Castle Discordia-and although they saw the moderate clutter of the meal Nigel had prepared them, there was no sign of rats, living or dead. None of them commented on this.
Susannah's sense of being observed came and went.
Beyond the pantry was a neat little three-room apartment where Nigel presumably hung his hat. There was no bedroom, but beyond the living room and a butler's pantry full of monitoring equipment was a neat book-lined study with an oak desk and an easy chair beneath a halogen reading lamp. The computer on the desk had been manufactured by North Central Positronics, no surprise diere. Nigel brought them blankets and pillows which he assured them were fresh and clean.
"Maybe you sleep on your feet, but I guess you like to sit down to read like anyone else," Eddie said.
"Oh, yes indeedy, one-two-threedy," Nigel said. "I enjoy a good book. It's part of my programming."
"We'll sleep six hours, then push on," Roland told them.
Jake, meanwhile, was examining the books more closely. Oy moved beside him, always at heel, as Jake checked the spines, occasionally pulling one out for a closer peek. "He's got all of Dickens, it looks like," he said. "Also Steinbeck... Thomas Wolfe... a lot of Zane Grey... somebody named Max Brand... a guy named Elmore Leonard... and the always popular Steve King."
They all took time to look at the two shelves of King books, better than thirty in all, at least four of them very large and two the size of doorstops. King had been an extremely busy writerbee since his Bridgton days, it appeared. The newest volume was called Hearts in Atlantis and had been published in a year with which they were very familiar: 1999. The only ones missing, so far as they could tell, were the ones about them. Assuming King had gone ahead and written them. Jake checked the copyright pages, but there were few obvious holes. That might mean nothing, however, because he had written so much.