The Dark Tower

There in the room filled with the frilly pink tutus, his fedora hat cocked back on his crewcut head, Armitage asked if Ted had ever heard of “the South American Seabees.” When Ted replied that he hadn’t, Armitage told him that a consortium of wealthy South American businessmen, mostly Brazilian, had hired a bunch of American engineers, construction workers, and roughnecks in 1946. Over a hundred in all. These were the South American Seabees. The consortium hired them all for a four-year period, and at different pay-grades, but the pay was extremely generous — almost embarrassingly so — at all grades. A ’dozer operator might sign a contract for $20,000 a year, for instance, which was tall tickets in those days. But there was more: a bonus equal to one year’s pay. A total of $100,000. If, that was, the fellow would agree to one unusual condition: you go, you work, and you don’t come back until the four years are up or the work is done. You got two days off every week, just like in America, and you got a vacation every year, just like in America, but in the pampas. You couldn’t go back to North America (or even Rio) until your four-year hitch was over. If you died in South America, you got planted there — no one was going to pay to have your body shipped back to Wilkes-Barre. But you got fifty grand up front, and a sixty-day grace period during which you could spend it, save it, invest it, or ride it like a pony. If you chose investment, that fifty grand might be seventy-five when you came waltzing out of the jungle with a bone-deep tan, a whole new set of muscles, and a lifetime of stories to tell. And, of course, once you were out you had what the limeys liked to call “the other half” to put on top of it.

This was like that, Armitage told Ted earnestly. Only the front half would be a cool quarter of a million and the back end half a million.

“Which sounded incredible,” Ted said from the Wollensak. “Of course it did, by jiminy. I didn’t find out until later how incredibly cheap they were buying us, even at those prices. Dinky is particularly eloquent on the subject of their stinginess…‘they’ in this case being all the King’s bureaucrats. He says the Crimson King is trying to bring about the end of all creation on the budget plan, and of course he’s right, but I think even Dinky realizes — although he won’t admit it, of course — that if you offer a man too much, he simply refuses to believe it. Or, depending on his imagination (many telepaths and precogs have almost no imagination at all), be unable to believe it. In our case the period of indenture was to be six years, with an option to renew, and Armitage needed my decision immediately. Few techniques are so successful, lady and gentlemen, as the one where you boggle your target’s mind, freeze him with greed, then blitz him.

“I was duly blitzed, and agreed at once. Armitage told me that my quarter-mil would be in the Seaman’s San Francisco Bank as of that afternoon, and I could draw on it as soon as I got down there. I asked him if I had to sign a contract. He reached out one of his hands — big as a ham, it was — and told me that was our contract. I asked him where I’d be going and what I’d be doing — all questions I should have asked first, I’m sure you’d agree, but I was so stunned it never crossed my mind.

“Besides, I was pretty sure I knew. I thought I’d be working for the government. Some kind of Cold War deal. The telepathic branch of the CIA or FBI, set up on an island in the Pacific. I remember thinking it would make one hell of a radio play.

“Armitage told me, ‘You’ll be traveling far, Ted, but it will also be right next door. And for the time being, that’s all I can say. Except to keep your mouth shut about our arrangement during the eight weeks before you actually…mmm…ship out. Remember that loose lips sink ships. At the risk of inculcating you with paranoia, assume that you are being watched.’

“And of course I was watched. Later—too later, in a manner of speaking — I was able to replay my last two months in Frisco and realize that the can-toi were watching me the whole time.

“The low men.”

Eight

“Armitage and two other humes met us outside the Mark Hopkins Hotel,” said the voice from the tape recorder. “I remember the date with perfect clarity; it was Halloween of 1955. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Me, Jace McGovern, Dave Ittaway, Dick…I can’t remember his last name, he died about six months later, Humma said it was pneumonia and the rest of the ki’cans backed him up — ki’can sort of means shit-people or shit-folken, if you’re interested — but it was suicide and I knew it if no one else did. The rest…well, remember Doc Number Two? The rest were and are like him. ‘Don’t tell me what I don’t want to know, sai, don’t mess up my worldview.’ Anyway, the last one was Tanya Leeds. Tough little thing…”