"They're... what do they call em in the old movies? Trusties, I guess. They've got a little village about two miles beyond the station in that direction." He pointed. "They do groundskeeping work at the Algul, and there might be three or four skilled enough to do roofwork... replacing shingles and such. Whatever contaminants there are in the air here, those poor shmucks are especially vulnerable to em. Only on them it comes out looking like radiation sickness instead of just pimples and eczema."
"Tell me about it," Eddie said, remembering poor old Chevin of Chayven: his sore-eaten face and urine-soaked robe.
"They're wandering folhen," Ted put in. "Bedouins. I think they follow the railroad tracks, for the most part. There are catacombs under the station and Algul Siento. The Rods know their way around them. There's tons of food down there, and twice a week they'll bring it into the Devar on sledges. Mostly now that's what we eat. It's still good, but..." He shrugged.
"Things are falling down fast," Dinky said in a tone of uncharacteristic gloom. "But like the man said, the wine's great."
"If I asked you to bring one of the Children of Roderick with you tomorrow," Roland said, "could you do that?"
Ted and Dinky exchanged a startled glance. Then both of them looked at Stanley. Stanley nodded, shrugged, and spread his hands before him, palms down: Why, gunslinger?
Roland stood for a moment lost in thought. Then he turned to Ted. "Bring one with half a brain left in his head," Roland instructed. "Tell him 'dan sur, dan tur, dan Roland, dan Gilead."
Tell it back."
Without hesitation, Ted repeated it.
Roland nodded. "If he still hesitates, tell him Chevin of Chayven says he must come. They speak a little plain, do they not?"
"Sure," Dinky said. "But mister... you couldn't let a Rod come up here and see you and then turn him free again. Their mouths are hung in the middle and run on both ends."
"Bring one," Roland said, "and we'll see what we see. I have what my ka-mai Eddie calls a hunch. Do you ken hunch-think?"
Ted and Dinky nodded.
"If it works out, fine. If not... be assured that the fellow you bring will never tell what he saw here."
"You'd kill him if your hunch doesn't pan out?" Ted asked.
1 Roland nodded.
Ted gave a bitter laugh. "Of course you would. It reminds me of the part in Huckleberry Finn when Huck sees a steamboat blow up. He runs to Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas with the news, and when one of them asks if anyone was killed, Huck says with perfect aplomb, 'No, ma'am, only a nigger.' In this case we can say 'Only a Rod. Gunslinger-man had a hunch, but it didn't pan out.'"
Roland gave him a cold smile, one that was unnaturally full of teeth. Eddie had seen it before and was glad it wasn't aimed at him. He said, "I thought you knew what the stakes were, sai Ted. Did I misunderstand?"
Ted met his gaze for a moment, then looked down at the ground. His mouth was working.
During this, Dinky appeared to be engaged in silent palaver with Stanley. Now he said: "If you want a Rod, we'll get you one.
It's not much of a problem. The problem may be getting here at all. If we don't..."
Roland waited patiently for the young man to finish. When he didn't, the gunslinger asked: "If you don't, what would you have us do?"
Ted shrugged. The gesture was such a perfect imitation of Dinky's that it was funny. "The best you can," he said. "There are also weapons in the lower cave. A dozen of the electric fireballs they call sneetches. A number of machine-guns, what I've heard some of the low men call speed-shooters. They're U.S. Army AR-15s. Other things we're not sure of."
"One of them's some kind of sci-fi raygun like in a movie,"
Dinky said. "I think it's supposed to disintegrate things, but either I'm too dumb to turn it on or the battery's dead." He turned anxiously to the white-haired man. "Five minutes are up, and more. We have to put an egg in our shoe and beat it, Tedster.
Let's chug."
"Yes. Well, we'll be back tomorrow. Perhaps by then you'll have a plan."
"You don't?" Eddie asked, surprised.
"My plan was to run, young man. It seemed like a terribly bright idea at the time. I ran all the way to the spring of 1960.
They caught me and brought me back, with a little help from my young friend Bobby's mother. And now, we really must-"
"One more minute, do it please ya," Roland said, and stepped toward Stanley. Stanley looked down at his feet, but his beard-scruffy cheeks once more flooded with color. And-
He's shivering, Susannah thought. Like an animal in the woods, faced with its first human being.
Stanley looked perhaps thirty-five, but he could have been older; his face had the carefree smoothness Susannah associated with certain mental defects. Ted and Dinky both had pimples, but Stanley had none. Roland put his hands on the fellow's forearms and looked earnestly at him. At first the gunslinger's eyes met nothing but the masses of dark, curly hair on Stanley's bowed head.
Dinky started to speak. Ted silenced him with a gesture.
"Will'ee not look me in the face?" Roland asked. He spoke with a gentleness Susannah had rarely heard in his voice.
"Will'ee not, before you go, Stanley, son of Stanley? Sheemie that was?"
Susannah felt her mouth drop open. Beside her, Eddie grunted like a man who has been punched. She thought, But Roland's old... so old! Which means that if this is the tavern-boy he knexu in Mejis... the one with the donkey and the pink sombrera hat... then he must also be...
The man raised his face slowly. Tears were streaming from his eyes.
"Good old Will Dearborn," he said. His voice was hoarse, and jigged up and down through the registers as a voice will do when it has lain long unused. "I'm so sorry, sai. Were you to pull your gun and shoot me, I'd understand. So I would."
"Why do'ee say so, Sheemie?" Roland asked in that same gende voice.
Stanley's tears flowed faster. "You saved my life. Arthur and Richard, too, but mosdy you, good old Will Dearborn who was really Roland of Gilead. And I let her die! Her that you loved!
And I loved her, too!"
The man's face twisted in agony and he tried to pull away from Roland. Yet Roland held him.
"None of that was your fault, Sheemie."
"I should have died for her!" he cried. "I should have died in her place! I'm stupid! Foolish as they said!" He slapped himself across the face, first one way and dien the other, leaving red weals. Before he could do it again, Roland seized the hand and forced it down to his side again.
"'Twas Rhea did the harm," Roland said.
Stanley-who had been Sheemie an eon ago-looked into Roland's face, searching his eyes.
"Aye," Roland said, nodding. "'Twas the Coos... and me, as well. I should have stayed with her. If anyone was blameless m the business, Sheemie-Stanley-it was you."
"Do you say so, gunslinger? Truey-true?"
Roland nodded. "We'll palaver all you would about this, if there's time, and about those old days, but not now. No time now. You have to go with your friends, and I must stay with mine."
Sheemie looked at him a moment longer, and yes, Susannah W now see the boy who had busded about a long-ago tavern called the Travellers' Rest, picking up empty beer schooners and dropping them into die wash-barrel which stood beneath die two-headed elk's head that was known as The Romp, avoiding the occasional shove from Coral Thorin or the even more ill-natured kicks that were apt to come from an aging whore called Pettie the Trotter. She could see the boy who had almost been killed for spilling liquor on the boots of a hardcase named Roy Depape. It had been Cuthbert who had saved Sheemie from death that night... but it had been Roland, known to the townsfolk as Will Dearborn, who had saved them all.
Sheemie put his arms around Roland's neck and hugged him tight. Roland smiled and stroked his curly hair with his disfigured right hand. A loud, honking sob escaped Sheemie's throat. Susannah could see the tears in the corners of the gunslinger's eyes.
"Aye," Roland said, speaking in a voice almost too low to hear. "I always knew you were special; Bert and Alain did, too. And here we find each other, well-met further down the path. We're well-met, Sheemie son of Stanley. So we are. So we are."
Chapter VI:THE MASTER OF BLUE HEAVEN
ONE
Pimli Prentiss, the Algul Siento Master, was in the bathroom when Finli (known in some quarters as The Weasel) knocked at the door. Prentiss was examining his complexion by the unforgiving light of the fluorescent bar over the washbasin. In the magnifying mirror, his skin looked like a grayish, crater-pocked plain, not much different from the surface of the wastelands stretching in every direction around the Algul. The sore on which he was currently concentrating looked like an erupting volcano.
"Who be for me?" Prentiss bawled, although he had a pretty good idea.
"Finli O'Tego!"
"Walk in, Finli!" Never taking his eyes from the mirror. His fingers, closing in on the sides of the infected pimple, looked huge. They applied pressure.
Finli crossed Prentiss's office and stood in the bathroom door. He had to bend slightly in order to look in. He stood over seven feet, very tall even for a taheen.
"Back from the station like I was never gone," said Finli. Like most of the taheen, his speaking voice reeled wildly back and forth between a yelp and a growl. To Pimli, they all sounded like the hybrids from H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, and he kept expecting them to break into a chorus of "Are we not men?" Finli had picked this out of his mind once and asked about it. Prentiss had replied with complete honesty, knowing that in a society where low-grade telepathy was the rule, honesty was ever the best policy. The only policy, when dealing with the taheen. Besides, he liked Finli O'Tego.