The Dark Tower

He’s impatient to be off, Susannah thought, and after all this time, why wouldn’t be be? I’m anxious to be off, myself.

“Well, if you say so, let it be so,” Bill said, sounding unhappy about it. “I suppose I just hate to see you go. When will I see humes again?”

None of them answered that. They didn’t know.

“There’s a mighty loud horn on the roof,” Bill said, pointing at the Federal. “I don’t know what sort of trouble it was meant to signal — radiation leaks, mayhap, or some sort of attack — but I do know the sound of it will carry across a hundred wheels at least. More, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction. If I should see the fellow you think is following you, or if such motion-sensors as still work pick him up, I’ll set it off. Perhaps you’ll hear.”

“Thank you,” Roland said.

“Were you to drive, you could outrun him easily,” Bill pointed out. “You’d reach the Tower and never have to see him.”

“That’s true enough,” Roland said, but he showed absolutely no sign of changing his mind, and Susannah was glad.

“What will you do about the one you call his Red Father, if he really does command Can’-Ka No Rey?”

Roland shook his head, although he had discussed this probability with Susannah. He thought they might be able to circle the Tower from a distance and come then to its base from a direction that was blind to the balcony on which the Crimson King was trapped. Then they could work their way around to the door beneath him. They wouldn’t know if that was possible until they could actually see the Tower and the lay of the land, of course.

“Well, there’ll be water if God wills it,” said the robot formerly known as Stuttering Bill, “or so the old people did say. And mayhap I’ll see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope it’s so, for there’s many I’ve known that I’d see again.”

He sounded so forlorn that Susannah went to him and raised her arms to be picked up, not thinking about the absurdity of wanting to hug a robot. But he did and she did — quite fervently, too. Bill made up for the malicious Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, and was worth hugging for that, if nothing else. As his arms closed around her, it occurred to Susannah that Bill could break her in two with those titanium-steel arms if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He was gentle.

“Long days and pleasant nights, Bill,” she said. “May you do well, and we all say so.”

“Thank you, madam,” he said and put her down. “I say thudda-thank, thumma-thank, thukka—” Wheep! And he struck his head, producing a bright clang. “I say thank ya kindly.” He paused. “I did fix the stutter, say true, but as I may have told you, I am not entirely without emotions.”

Five

Patrick surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah’s electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in the Federal had detected him), but did not hear it…and the wind was blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them.

When they finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into Patrick’s tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but Roland hardly touched his own food.

When dinner was done, Patrick took up his pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah. She knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the little bag of personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener, and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing the boy? If so, it hadn’t worked. Later in life, perhaps, when the sublime connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations.