by Stephen King
There was no warning shout, no stern request for identification, only the faint snuffle of the breeze. The lights were turned on by motion-sensors, Jake guessed. What came next? Machine-gun fire directed by dipolar computers? A scurry of small but deadly robots like those Roland, Eddie, and Susannah had dispatched in the clearing where the Beam they were following had begun? Maybe a big net dropping from overhead, like in this jungle movie he'd seen once on TV?
Jake looked up. There was no net. No machine-guns, either. He started walking forward again, picking his way around the deepest of the potholes and jumping over a washout. Beyond this latter, the driveway was tilted and cracked but mostly whole. "You can get down now," he told Oy. "Boy, you're heavy. Watch out or I'll have to stick you in Weight Watchers."
He looked straight ahead, squinting and shielding his eyes from the fierce glare. The lights were in a row running just beneath the Quonset's curved roof. They threw his shadow out behind him, long and black. He saw rock-cat corpses, two on his left and two more on his right. Three of them were little more than skeletons. The fourth was in a high state of decomposition, but Jake could see a hole that looked too big for a bullet. He thought it had been made by a bah-bolt. The idea was comforting. No weapons of super-science at work here. Still, he was crazy not to be hightailing it back toward the river and the Calla beyond it. Wasn't he?
"Crazy," he said.
"Razy," Oy said, once more padding along at Jake's heel.
A minute later they reached the door of the hut. Above it, on a rusting steel plate, was this:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
Northeast Corridor
Arc Quadrant
OUTPOST 16
Medium Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
On the door itself, now hanging crooked by only two screws, was another sign. A joke? Some sort of nickname? Jake thought it might be a little of both. The letters were choked with rust and eroded by God knew how many years of blowing sand and grit, but he could still read them:
WELCOME TO THE DOGAN
EIGHT
Jake expected the door to be locked and wasn't disappointed. The lever handle moved up and down only the tiniest bit. He guessed that when it had been new, there'd been no give in it at all. To the left of the door was a rusty steel panel with a button and a speaker grille. Beneath it was the word VERBAL. Jake reached for the button, and suddenly the lights lining the top of the building went out, leaving him in what at first seemed like utter darkness. They're on a timer, he thought, waiting for his eyes to adjust. A pretty short one. Or maybe they're just getting tired, like everything else the Old People left behind.
His eyes readapted to the moonlight and he could see the entry-box again. He had a pretty good idea of what the verbal entry code must be. He pushed the button.
"WELCOME TO ARC QUADRANT OUTPOST 16," said a voice. Jake jumped back, stifling a cry. He had expected a voice, but not one so eerily like that of Blaine the Mono. He almost expected it to drop into a John Wayne drawl and call him little trailhand. "THIS IS A MEDIUM SECURITY OUTPOST. PLEASE GIVE THE VERBAL ENTRY CODE. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS. NINE . . . EIGHT . . . "
"Nineteen," Jake said.
"INCORRECT ENTRY CODE. YOU MAY RETRY ONCE. FIVE . . . FOUR . . . THREE . . . "
"Ninety-nine," Jake said.
"THANK YOU."
The door clicked open.
NINE
Jake and Oy walked into a room that reminded him of the vast control-area Roland had carried him through beneath the city of Lud, as they had followed the steel ball which had guided them to Blaine's cradle. This room was smaller, of course, but many of the dials and panels looked the same. There were chairs at some of the consoles, the kind that would roll along the floor so that the people who worked here could move from place to place without getting to their feet. There was a steady sigh of fresh air, but Jake could hear occasional rough rattling sounds from the machinery driving it. And while three-quarters of the panels were lighted, he could see a good many that were dark. Old and tired: he had been right about that. In one corner was a grinning skeleton in the remains of a brown khaki uniform.
On one side of the room was a bank of TV monitors. They reminded Jake a little bit of his father's study at home, although his father had had only three screens--one for each network--and here there were . . . he counted. Thirty. Three of them were fuzzy, showing pictures he couldn't really make out. Two were rolling rapidly up and up, as if the vertical hold had fritzed out. Four were entirely dark. The other twenty-one were projecting pictures, and Jake looked at these with growing wonder. Half a dozen showed various expanses of desert, including the hilltop guarded by the two misshapen cactuses. Two more showed the outpost--the Dogan--from behind and from the driveway side. Under these were three screens showing the Dogan's interior. One showed a room that looked like a galley or kitchen. The second showed a small bunkhouse that looked equipped to sleep eight (in one of the bunks, an upper, Jake spied another skeleton). The third inside-the-Dogan screen presented this room, from a high angle. Jake could see himself and Oy. There was a screen with a stretch of the railroad tracks on it, and one showing the Little Whye from this side, moonstruck and beautiful. On the far right was the causeway with the train-tracks crossing it.
It was the images on the other eight operating screens that astounded Jake. One showed Took's General Store, now dark and deserted, closed up till daylight. One showed the Pavilion. Two showed the Calla high street. Another showed Our Lady of Serenity Church, and one showed the living room of the rectory . . . inside the rectory! Jake could actually see the Pere's cat, Snugglebutt, lying asleep on the hearth. The other two showed angles of what Jake assumed was the Manni village (he had not been there).
Where in hell's name are the cameras? Jake wondered. How come nobody sees them?
Because they were too small, he supposed. And because they'd been hidden. Smile, you're on Candid Camera.
But the church . . . the rectory . . . those were buildings that hadn't even existed in the Calla until a few years previous. And inside? Inside the rectory? Who had put a camera there, and when?
Jake didn't know when, but he had a terrible idea that he knew who. Thank God they'd done most of their palavering on the porch, or outside on the lawn. But still, how much must the Wolves--or their masters--know? How much had the infernal machines of this place, the infernal fucking machines of this place, recorded?
And transmitted?
Jake felt pain in his hands and realized they were tightly clenched, the nails biting into his palms. He opened them with an effort. He kept expecting the voice from the speaker-grille--the voice so much like Blaine's--to challenge him, ask him what he was doing here. But it was mostly silent in this room of not-quite-ruin; no sounds but the low hum of the equipment and the occasionally raspy whoosh of the air-exchangers. He looked over his shoulder at the door and saw it had closed behind him on a pneumatic hinge. He wasn't worried about that; from this side it would probably open easily. If it didn't, good old ninety-nine would get him out again. He remembered introducing himself to the folken that first night in the Pavilion, a night that already seemed a long time ago. I am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld, he had told them. The ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine. Why had he said that? He didn't know. All he knew was that things kept showing up again. In school, Ms. Avery had read them a poem called "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. There had been something in it about a hawk turning and turning in a widening gyre, which was--according to Ms. Avery--a kind of circle. But here things were in a spiral, not a circle. For the Ka-Tet of Nineteen (or of the Ninety and Nine; Jake had an idea they were really the same), things were tightening up even as the world around them grew old, grew loose, shut down, shed pieces of itself. It was like being in the cyclone which had carried Dorothy off to the Land of Oz, where witches were real and bumhugs ruled. To Jake's heart it made perfect sense that they should be seeing the same things over and over, and
more and more often, because--
Movement on one of the screens caught his eye. He looked at it and saw Benny's Da' and Andy the Messenger Robot coming over the hilltop guarded by the cactus sentries. As he watched, the spiny barrel arms swung inward to block the road--and, perhaps, impale the prey. Andy, however, had no reason to fear cactus spines. He swung an arm and broke one of the barrels off halfway down its length. It fell into the dust, spurting white goo. Maybe it wasn't sap at all, Jake thought. Maybe it was blood. In any case, the cactus on the other side swiveled away in a hurry. Andy and Ben Slightman stopped for a moment, perhaps to discuss this. The screen's resolution wasn't clear enough to show if the human's mouth was moving or not.
Jake was seized by an awful, throat-closing panic. His body suddenly seemed too heavy, as if it were being tugged by the gravity of a giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn. He couldn't breathe; his chest lay perfectly flat. This is what Goldilocks would have felt like, he thought in a faint and distant way, if she had awakened in the little bed that was just right to hear the Three Bears coming back in downstairs. He hadn't eaten the porridge, he hadn't broken Baby Bear's chair, but he now knew too many secrets. They boiled down to one secret. One monstrous secret.
Now they were coming down the road. Coming to the Dogan.
Oy was looking up at him anxiously, his long neck stretched to the max, but Jake could barely see him. Black flowers were blooming in front of his eyes. Soon he would faint. They would find him stretched out here on the floor. Oy might try to protect him, but if Andy didn't take care of the bumbler, Ben Slightman would. There were four dead rock-cats out there and Benny's Da' had dispatched at least one of them with his trusty bah. One small barking billy-bumbler would be no problem for him.
Would you be so cowardly, then? Roland asked inside his head. But why would they kill such a coward as you? Why would they not just send you west with the broken ones who have forgotten the faces of their fathers?
That brought him back. Most of the way, at least. He took a huge breath, yanking in air until the bottoms of his lungs hurt. He let it out in an explosive whoosh. Then he slapped himself across the face, good and hard.
"Ake!" Oy cried in a reproving--almost shocked--voice.
"S'okay," Jake said. He looked at the monitors showing the galley and the bunkroom and decided on the latter. There was nothing to hide behind or under in the galley. There might be a closet, but what if there wasn't? He'd be screwed.
"Oy, to me," he said, and crossed the humming room beneath the bright white lights.
TEN
The bunkroom held the ghostly aroma of ancient spices: cinnamon and clove. Jake wondered--in a distracted, back-of-the-mind way--if the tombs beneath the Pyramids had smelled this way when the first explorers had broken into them. From the upper bunk in the corner, the reclining skeleton grinned at him, as if in welcome. Feel like a nap, little trailhand? I'm taking a long one! Its ribcage shimmered with silky overlays of spiderweb, and Jake wondered in that same distracted way how many generations of spider-babies had been born in that empty cavity. On another pillow lay a jawbone, prodding a ghostly, ghastly memory from the back of the boy's mind. Once, in a world where he had died, the gunslinger had found a bone like that. And used it.
The forefront of his mind pounded with two cold questions and one even colder resolve. The questions were how long it would take them to get here and whether or not they would discover his pony. If Slightman had been riding a horse of his own, Jake was sure the amiable little pony would have whinnied a greeting already. Luckily, Slightman was on foot, as he had been last time. Jake would have come on foot himself, had he known his goal was less than a mile east of the river. Of course, when he'd snuck away from the Rocking B, he hadn't even been sure that he had a goal.
The resolve was to kill both the tin-man and the flesh-and-blood man if he was discovered. If he could, that was. Andy might be tough, but those bulging blue-glass eyes looked like a weak point. If he could blind him--
There'll be water if God wills it, said the gunslinger who now always lived in his head, for good and ill. Your job now is to hide if you can. Where?
Not in the bunks. All of them were visible in the monitor covering this room and there was no way he could impersonate a skeleton. Under one of the two bunk-stacks at the rear? Risky, but it would serve . . . unless . . .
Jake spied another door. He sprang forward, depressed the lever-handle, and pulled the door open. It was a closet, and closets made fine hiding places, but this one was filled with jumbles of dusty electronic equipment, top to bottom. Some of it fell out.
"Beans!" he whispered in a low, urgent voice. He picked up what had fallen, tossed it high and low, then shut the closet door again. Okay, it would have to be under one of the beds--
"WELCOME TO ARC QUADRANT OUTPOST 16," boomed the recorded voice. Jake flinched, and saw another door, this one to his left and standing partway open. Try the door or squeeze under one of the two tiers of bunks at the rear of the room? He had time to try one bolthole or the other, but not both. "THIS IS A MEDIUM SECURITY OUTPOST."
Jake went for the door, and it was just as well he went when he did, because Slightman didn't let the recording finish its spiel. "Ninety-nine," came his voice from the loudspeakers, and the recording thanked him.
It was another closet, this one empty except for two or three moldering shirts in one corner and a dust-caked poncho slumped on a hook. The air was almost as dusty as the poncho, and Oy uttered three fast, delicate sneezes as he padded in.
Jake dropped to one knee and put an arm around Oy's slender neck. "No more of that unless you want to get us both killed," he said. "You be quiet, Oy."
"Kiyit Oy," the bumbler whispered back, and winked. Jake reached up and pulled the door back to within two inches of shut, as it had been before. He hoped.
ELEVEN
He could hear them quite clearly--too clearly. Jake realized there were mikes and speakers all over this place. The idea did nothing for his peace of mind. Because if he and Oy could hear them . . .
It was the cactuses they were talking about, or rather that Slightman was talking about. He called them boom-flurry, and wanted to know what had gotten them all fashed.
"Almost certainly more rock-cats, sai," Andy said in his complacent, slightly prissy voice. Eddie said Andy reminded him of a robot named C3PO in Star Wars, a movie to which Jake had been looking forward. He had missed it by less than a month. "It's their mating season, you know."
"Piss on that," Slightman said. "Are you telling me boom-flurry don't know rock-cats from something they can actually catch and eat? Someone's been out here, I tell you. And not long since."
A cold thought slipped into Jake's mind: had the floor of the Dogan been dusty? He'd been too busy gawking at the control panels and TV monitors to notice. If he and Oy had left tracks, those two might have noticed already. They might only be pretending to have a conversation about the cactuses while they actually crept toward the bunkroom door.
Jake took the Ruger out of the docker's clutch and held it in his right hand with his thumb on the safety.
"A guilty conscience doth make cowards of us all," Andy said in his complacent, just-thought-you'd-like-to-know voice. "That's my free adaptation of a--"
"Shut up, you bag of bolts and wires," Slightman snarled. "I--" Then he screamed. Jake felt Oy stiffen against him, felt his fur begin to rise. The bumbler started to growl. Jake slipped a hand around his snout.
"Let go!" Slightman cried out. "Let go of me!"
"Of course, sai Slightman," Andy said, now sounding solicitous. "I only pressed a small nerve in your elbow, you know. There would be no lasting damage unless I applied at least twenty foot-pounds of pressure."
"Why in the hell would you do that?" Slightman sounded injured, almost whiny. "En't I doing all you could want, and more? En't I risking my life for my boy?"
"Not to mention a few little extras," Andy said silkily. "Your spectacles . . . the music machine you k
eep deep down in your saddlebag . . . and, of course--"
"You know why I'm doing it and what'd happen to me if I was found out," Slightman said. The whine had gone out of his voice. Now he sounded dignified and a little weary. Jake listened to that tone with growing dismay. If he got out of this and had to squeal on Benny's Da', he wanted to squeal on a villain. "Yar, I've taken a few little extras, you say true, I say thankya. Glasses, so I can see better to betray the people I've known all my life. A music machine so I won't have to hear the conscience you prate about so easy and can get to sleep at night. Then you pinch something in my arm that makes me feel like my by-Riza eyes are going to fall right out of my by-Riza head."
"I allow it from the rest of them," Andy said, and now his voice had changed. Jake once more thought of Blaine, and once more his dismay grew. What if Tian Jaffords heard this voice? What if Vaughn Eisenhart heard it? Overholser? The rest of the folken? "They heap contumely on my head like hot coals and never do I raise a word o' protest, let alone a hand. 'Go here, Andy. Go there, Andy. Stop yer foolish singing, Andy. Stuff yer prattle. Don't tell us of the future, because we don't want to hear it.' So I don't, except of the Wolves, because they'd hear what makes em sad and I'd tell em, yes I would; to me each tear's a drop of gold. 'You're nobbut a stupid pile of lights n wires,' they say. 'Tell us the weather, sing the babby to sleep, then get t'hell out o' here.' And I allow it. Foolish Andy am I, every child's toy and always fair game for a tongue-whipping. But I won't take a tongue-whipping from you, sai. You hope to have a future in the Calla after the Wolves are done with it for another few years, don't you?"
"You know I do," Slightman said, so low Jake could barely hear him. "And I deserve it."
"You and your son, both say thankya, passing your days in the Calla, both say commala! And that can happen, but it depends on more than the death of the outworlders. It depends on my silence. If you want it, I demand respect."
"That's absurd," Slightman said after a brief pause. From his place in the closet, Jake agreed wholeheartedly. A robot demanding respect was absurd. But so was a giant bear patrolling an empty forest, a Morlock thug trying to unravel the secrets of dipolar computers, or a train that lived only to hear and solve new riddles. "And besides, hear me I beg, how can I respect you when I don't even respect myself?"