by Stephen King
“The Extraction Room,” Roland mused, studying the serried ranks of beds. “Do you call it so?”
“Yes, sai.” And then, almost timidly: “Vocal elisions and fricatives suggest that you’re angry. Is that the case?”
“They brought children here by the hundreds and thousands—healthy ones, for the most part, from a world where too many are still born twisted—and sucked away their minds. Why would I be angry?”
“Sai, I’m sure I don’t know,” Nigel said. He was, perhaps, repenting his decision to come back here. “But I had no part in the extraction procedures, I assure you. I am in charge of domestic services, including maintenance.”
“Bring me a pencil and a piece of chalk.”
“Sai, you won’t destroy me, will you? It was Dr. Scowther who was in charge of the extractions over the last twelve or fourteen years, and Dr. Scowther is dead. This lady-sai shot him, and with his own gun.” There was a touch of reproach in Nigel’s voice, which was quite expressive within its narrow range.
Roland only repeated: “Bring me a pencil and a piece of chalk, and do it jin-jin.”
Nigel went off on his errand.
“When you say a new player, you mean the baby,” Susannah said.
“Certainly. He has two fathers, that bah-bo.”
Susannah nodded. She was thinking about the tale Mia had told her during their todash visit to the abandoned town of Fedic—abandoned, that was, except for the likes of Sayre and Scowther and the marauding Wolves. Two women, one white and one black, one pregnant and one not, sitting in chairs outside the Gin-Puppy Saloon. There Mia had told Eddie Dean’s wife a great deal—more than either of them had known, perhaps.
That’s where they changed me, Mia had told her, “they” presumably meaning Scowther and a team of other doctors. Plus magicians? Folk like the Manni, only gone over to the other side? Maybe. Who could say? In the Extraction Room she’d been made mortal. Then, with Roland’s sperm already in her, something else had happened. Mia didn’t remember much about that part, only a red darkness. Susannah wondered now if the Crimson King had come to her in person, mounting her with its huge and ancient spider’s body, or if its unspeakable sperm had been transported somehow to mix with Roland’s. In either case, the baby grew into the loathsome hybrid Susannah had seen: not a werewolf but a were-spider. And now it was out there, somewhere. Or perhaps it was here, watching them even as they palavered and Nigel returned with various writing implements.
Yes, she thought. It’s watching us. And hating us…but not equally. Mostly it’s Roland the dan-tete hates. Its first father.
She shivered.
“Mordred means to kill you, Roland,” she said. “That’s its job. What it was made for. To end you, and your quest, and the Tower.”
“Yes,” Roland said, “and to rule in his father’s place. For the Crimson King is old, and I have come more and more to believe that he is imprisoned, somehow. If that’s so, then he’s no longer our real enemy.”
“Will we go to his castle on the other side of the Discordia?” Jake asked. It was the first time he’d spoken in half an hour. “We will, won’t we?”
“I think so, yes,” Roland said. “Le Casse Roi Russe, the old legends call it. We’ll go there ka-tet and slay what lives there.”
“Let it be so,” Eddie said. “By God, let that be so.”
“Aye,” Roland agreed. “But our first job is the Breakers. The Beamquake we felt in Calla Bryn Sturgis, just before we came here, suggests that their work is nearly done. Yet even if it isn’t—”
“Ending what they’re doing is our job,” Eddie said.
Roland nodded. He looked more tired than ever. “Aye,” he said. “Killing them or setting them free. Either way, we must finish their meddling with the two Beams that remain. And we must finish off the dan-tete. The one that belongs to the Crimson King…and to me.”
Five
Nigel ended up being quite helpful (although not just to Roland and his ka-tet, as things fell). To begin with he brought two pencils, two pens (one of them a great old thing that would have looked at home in the hand of a Dickens scrivener), and three pieces of chalk, one of them in a silver holder that looked like a lady’s lipstick. Roland chose this and gave Jake another piece. “I can’t write words you’d understand easily,” he said, “but our numbers are the same, or close enough. Print what I say to one side, Jake, and fair.”
Jake did as he was bid. The result was crude but understandable enough, a map with a legend.
“Fedic,” Roland said, pointing to 1, and then drew a short chalk line to 2. “And here’s Castle Discordia, with the doors beneath. An almighty tangle of em, from what we hear. There’ll be a passage that’ll take us from here to there, under the castle. Now, Susannah, tell again how the Wolves go, and what they do.” He handed her the chalk in its holder.
She took it, noticing with some admiration that it sharpened itself as it was used. A small trick but a neat one.
“They ride through a one-way door that brings them out here,” she said, drawing a line from 2 to 3, which Jake had dubbed Thunderclap Station. “We ought to know this door when we see it, because it’ll be big, unless they go through single-file.”
“Maybe they do,” Eddie said. “Unless I’m wrong, they’re pretty well stuck with what the old people left them.”
“You’re not wrong,” Roland said. “Go on, Susannah.” He wasn’t hunkering but sitting with his right leg stretched stiffly out. Eddie wondered how badly his hip was hurting him, and if he had any of Rosalita’s cat-oil in his newly recovered purse. He doubted it.
She said, “The Wolves ride from Thunderclap along the course of the railroad tracks, at least until they’re out of the shadow…or the darkness…or whatever it is. Do you know, Roland?”
“No, but we’ll see soon enough.” He made his impatient twirling gesture with his left hand.
“They cross the river to the Callas and take the children. When they get back to the Thunderclap Station, I think they must board their horses and their prisoners on a train and go back to Fedic that way, for the door’s no good to them.”
“Aye, I think that’s the way of it,” Roland agreed. “They bypass the devar-toi—the prison we’ve marked with an 8—for the time being.”
Susannah said: “Scowther and his Nazi doctors used the hood-things on these beds to extract something from the kids. It’s the stuff they give to the Breakers. Feed it to em or inject em with it, I guess. The kids and the brain-stuff go back to Thunderclap Station by the door. The kiddies are sent back to Calla Bryn Sturgis, maybe the other Callas as well, and at what you call the devar-toi—”
“Mawster, dinnah is served,” Eddie said bleakly.
Nigel chipped in at this point, sounding absolutely cheerful. “Would you care for a bite, sais?”
Jake consulted his stomach and found it was rumbling. It was horrible to be this hungry so soon after the Pere’s death—and after the things he had seen in the Dixie Pig—but he was, nevertheless. “Is there food, Nigel? Is there really?”
“Yes, indeed, young man,” Nigel said. “Only tinned goods, I’m afraid, but I can offer better than two dozen choices, including baked beans, tuna-fish, several kinds of soup—”
“Tooter-fish for me,” Roland said, “but bring an array, if you will.”
“Certainly, sai.”
“I don’t suppose you could rustle me up an Elvis Special,” Jake said longingly. “That’s peanut butter, banana, and bacon.”
“Jesus, kid,” Eddie said. “I don’t know if you can tell in this light, but I’m turning green.”
“I have no bacon or bananas, unfortunately,” Nigel said (pronouncing the latter ba-NAW-nas), “but I do have peanut butter and three kinds of jelly. Also apple butter.”
“Apple butter’d be good,” Jake said.
“Go on, Susannah,” Roland said as Nigel moved off on his errand. “Although I suppose I needn’t speed you along so; after we eat, we’ll need to ta
ke some rest.” He sounded far from pleased with the idea.
“I don’t think there’s any more to tell,” she said. “It sounds confusing—looks confusing, too, mostly because our little map doesn’t have any scale—but it’s essentially just a loop they make every twenty-four years or so: from Fedic to Calla Bryn Sturgis, then back to Fedic with the kids, so they can do the extraction. Then they take the kids back to the Callas and the brainfood to this prison where the Breakers are.”
“The devar-toi,” Jake said.
Susannah nodded. “The question is what we do to interrupt the cycle.”
“We go through the door to Thunderclap station,” Roland said, “and from the station to where the Breakers are kept. And there…” He looked at each of his ka-tet in turn, then raised his finger and made a dryly expressive shooting gesture.
“There’ll be guards,” Eddie said. “Maybe a lot of them. What if we’re outnumbered?”
“It won’t be the first time,” Roland said.
Chapter II:
The Watcher
One
When Nigel returned, he was bearing a tray the size of a wagon-wheel. On it were stacks of sandwiches, two Thermoses filled with soup (beef and chicken), plus canned drinks. There was Coke, Sprite, Nozz-A-La, and something called Wit Green Wit. Eddie tried this last and pronounced it foul beyond description.
All of them could see that Nigel was no longer the same pippip, jolly-good fellow he’d been for God alone knew how many decades and centuries. His lozenge-shaped head kept jerking to one side or the other. When it went to the left he would mutter “Un, deux, trois!” To the right it was “Ein, zwei, drei!” A constant low clacking had begun in his diaphragm.
“Sugar, what’s wrong with you?” Susannah asked as the domestic robot lowered the tray to the floor amidst them.
“Self-diagnostic exam series suggests total systemic breakdown during the next two to six hours,” Nigel said, sounding glum but otherwise calm. “Pre-existing logic faults, quarantined until now, have leaked into the GMS.” He then twisted his head viciously to the right. “Ein, zwei, drei! Live free or die, here’s Greg in your eye!”
“What’s GMS?” Jake asked.
“And who’s Greg?” Eddie added.
“GMS stands for general mentation systems,” said Nigel. “There are two such systems, rational and irrational. Conscious and subconscious, as you might say. As for Greg, that would be Greg Stillson, a character in a novel I’m reading. Quite enjoyable. It’s called The Dead Zone, by Stephen King. As to why I bring him up in this context, I have no idea.”
Two
Nigel explained that logic faults were common in what he called Asimov Robots. The smarter the robot, the more the logic faults…and the sooner they started showing up. The old people (Nigel called them the Makers) compensated for this by setting up a stringent quarantine system, treating mental glitches as though they were smallpox or cholera. (Jake thought this sounded like a really fine way of dealing with insanity, although he supposed that psychiatrists wouldn’t care for the idea much; it would put them out of business.) Nigel believed that the trauma of having his eyes shot out had weakened his mental survival-systems somehow, and now all sorts of bad stuff was loose in his circuits, eroding his deductive and inductive reasoning capabilities, gobbling logic-systems left and right. He told Susannah he didn’t hold this against her in the slightest. Susannah raised a fist to her forehead and thanked him big-big. In truth, she did not completely believe good old DNK 45932, although she was damned if she knew why. Maybe it was just a holdover from their time in Calla Bryn Sturgis, where a robot not much different from Nigel had turned out to be a nasty, grudge-holding cully indeed. And there was something else.
I spy with my little eye, Susannah thought.
“Hold out thy hands, Nigel.”
When the robot did, they all saw the wiry hairs caught in the joints of his steel fingers. There was also a drop of blood on a…would you call it a knuckle? “What’s this?” she asked, holding several of the hairs up.
“I’m sorry, mum, I cawn’t—”
Couldn’t see. No, of course not. Nigel had infrared, but his actual eyesight was gone, courtesy of Susannah Dean, daughter of Dan, gunslinger in the Ka-Tet of Nineteen.
“They’re hairs. I also spy some blood.”
“Ah, yes,” Nigel said. “Rats in the kitchen, mum. I’m programmed to dispose of vermin when I detect them. There are a great many these days, I’m sorry to say; the world is moving on.” And then, snapping his head violently to the left: “Un-deuxtrois! Minnie Mouse est la mouse pour moi!”
“Um…did you kill Minnie and Mickey before or after you made the sandwiches, Nige old buddy?” Eddie asked.
“After, sai, I assure you.”
“Well, I might pass, anyway,” Eddie said. “I had a poorboy back in Maine, and it’s sticking to my ribs like a motherfucker.”
“You should say un, deux, trois,” Susannah told him. The words were out before she knew she was going to say them.
“Cry pardon?” Eddie was sitting with his arm around her. Since the four of them had gotten back together, he touched Susannah at every opportunity, as if needing to confirm the fact that she was more than just wishful thinking.
“Nothing.” Later, when Nigel was either out of the room or completely broken down, she’d tell him her intuition. She thought that robots of Nigel and Andy’s type, like those in the Isaac Asimov stories she’d read as a teenager, weren’t supposed to lie. Perhaps Andy had either been modified or had modified himself so that wasn’t a problem. With Nigel, she thought it was a problem, indeed: can ya say problem big-big. She had an idea that, unlike Andy, Nigel was essentially goodhearted, but yes—he’d either lied or gilded the truth about the rats in the larder. Maybe about other things, as well. Ein, zwei, drei and Un, deux, trois was his method of letting off the pressure. For awhile, anyway.
It’s Mordred, she thought, looking around. She took a sandwich because she had to eat—like Jake, she was ravenous—but her appetite was gone and she knew she’d take no enjoyment from what she plugged grimly down her throat. He’s been at Nigel, and now he’s watching us somewhere. I know it—I feel it.
And, as she took her first bite of some long-preserved, vacuum-packed mystery-meat:
A mother always knows.
Three
None of them wanted to sleep in the Extraction Room (although they would have had their pick of three hundred or more freshly made beds) nor in the deserted town outside, so Nigel took them to his quarters, pausing every now and then for a vicious head-clearing shake and to count off in either German or French. To this he began adding numbers in some other language none of them knew.
Their way led them through a kitchen—all stainless steel and smoothly humming machines, quite different from the ancient cookhouse Susannah had visited todash beneath Castle Discordia—and although they saw the moderate clutter of the meal Nigel had prepared them, there was no sign of rats, living or dead. None of them commented on this.
Susannah’s sense of being observed came and went.
Beyond the pantry was a neat little three-room apartment where Nigel presumably hung his hat. There was no bedroom, but beyond the living room and a butler’s pantry full of monitoring equipment was a neat book-lined study with an oak desk and an easy chair beneath a halogen reading lamp. The computer on the desk had been manufactured by North Central Positronics, no surprise there. Nigel brought them blankets and pillows which he assured them were fresh and clean.
“Maybe you sleep on your feet, but I guess you like to sit down to read like anyone else,” Eddie said.
“Oh, yes indeedy, one-two-threedy,” Nigel said. “I enjoy a good book. It’s part of my programming.”
“We’ll sleep six hours, then push on,” Roland told them.
Jake, meanwhile, was examining the books more closely. Oy moved beside him, always at heel, as Jake checked the spines, occasionally pulling one out for a closer peek. “
He’s got all of Dickens, it looks like,” he said. “Also Steinbeck…Thomas Wolfe…a lot of Zane Grey…somebody named Max Brand…a guy named Elmore Leonard…and the always popular Steve King.”
They all took time to look at the two shelves of King books, better than thirty in all, at least four of them very large and two the size of doorstops. King had been an extremely busy writer-bee since his Bridgton days, it appeared. The newest volume was called Hearts in Atlantis and had been published in a year with which they were very familiar: 1999. The only ones missing, so far as they could tell, were the ones about them. Assuming King had gone ahead and written them. Jake checked the copyright pages, but there were few obvious holes. That might mean nothing, however, because he had written so much.
Susannah inquired of Nigel, who said he had never seen any books by Stephen King concerning Roland of Gilead or the Dark Tower. Then, having said so, he twisted his head viciously to the left and counted off in French, this time all the way to ten.
“Still,” Eddie said after Nigel had retired, clicking and clacking and clucking his way out of the room, “I bet there’s a lot of information here we could use. Roland, do you think we could pack the works of Stephen King and take them with us?”
“Maybe,” Roland said, “but we won’t. They might confuse us.”
“Why do you say so?”
Roland only shook his head. He didn’t know why he said so, but he knew it was true.
Four
The Arc 16 Experimental Station’s nerve-center was four levels down from the Extraction Room, the kitchen, and Nigel’s study. One entered the Control Suite through a capsule-shaped vestibule. The vestibule could only be opened from the outside by using three ID slides, one after the other. The piped-in Muzak on this lowest level of the Fedic Dogan sounded like Beatles tunes as rendered by The Comatose String Quartet.
