The Dark Tower

The tests are administered by humes (a term Ted Brautigan won’t know for another few weeks—not until he steps out of the year 1955 and into the no-time of the Algul). The interviewer he eventually meets in San Francisco is also a hume. Ted will learn (among a great many other things) that the disguises the low men wear, most particularly the masks they wear, are not good, not when you’re up close and personal. Up close and personal you can see the truth: they are hume/taheen hybrids who take the matter of their becoming with a religious fervor. The easiest way to find yourself wrapped in a low-man bearhug with a set of murderous low-man teeth searching for your carotid artery is to aver that the only two things they are becoming is older and uglier. The red marks on their foreheads—the Eye of the King—usually disappear when they are America-side (or dry up, like temporarily dormant pimples), and the masks take on a weird organic quality, except for behind the ears, where the hairy, tooth-scabbed underflesh shows, and inside the nostrils, where one can see dozens of little moving cilia. But who is so impolite as to look up a fellow’s snot-gutters?

Whatever they think, up close and personal there’s something definitely wrong with them even when they’re America-side, and no one wants to scare the new fish before the net’s properly in place. So it’s humes (an abbreviation the can-toi won’t even use; they find it demeaning, like “nigger” or “vamp”) at the exams, humes in the interview rooms, nothing but humes until later, when they go through one of the working America-side doorways and come out in Thunderclap.

Ted is tested, along with a hundred or so others, in a gymnasium that reminds him of the one back in East Hartford. This one has been filled with rows and rows of study-hall desks (wrestling mats have been considerately laid down to keep the desks’ old-fashioned round iron bases from scratching the varnished hardwood), but after the first round of testing—a ninety-minute diagnostic full of math, English, and vocabulary questions—half of them are empty. After the second round, it’s three quarters. Round Two consists of some mighty weird questions, highly subjective questions, and in several cases Ted gives an answer in which he does not believe, because he thinks—maybe knows—that the people giving the test want a different answer from the one he (and most people) would ordinarily give. For instance, there’s this little honey: