left him feeling disgruntled, and it would please him to be able to start off the morning by giving them a good answer. Of course they wouldn’t be able to check any answer against the back of the book, but he had an idea that with good riddles a good answer was usually self-evident.
Sometimes tall and sometimes short. He thought that was the key and all the rest was probably just misdirection. What was sometimes tall and sometimes short? Pants? No. Pants were sometimes short and sometimes long, but he had never heard of tall pants. Tales? Like pants, it only fit snugly one way. Drinks were sometimes both tall and short—
“Order,” he murmured, and thought for a moment that he must have stumbled across the solution—both adjectives fit the noun glove-tight. A tall order was a big job; a short order was something you got on the quick in a restaurant—a hamburger or a tuna melt. Except that tall orders and tuna melts didn’t join our talk or play at every game.
He felt a rush of frustration and had to smile at himself, getting all wound up about a harmless word-game in a kid’s book. All the same, he found it a little easier to believe that people might really kill each other over riddles . . . if the stakes were high enough and cheating was involved.
Let it go—you’re doing exactly what Roland said, thinking right past it.
Still, what else did he have to think about?
Then the drumming from the city began again, and he did have something else. There was no build-up; at one moment it wasn’t there, and at the next it was going full force, as if a switch had been turned. Eddie walked to the edge of the road, turned toward the city, and listened. After a few moments he looked around to see if the drums had awakened the others, but he was still alone. He turned toward Lud again and cupped his ears forward with the sides of his hands.
Bump . . . ba-bump . . . ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
Bump . . . ba-bump . . . ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
Eddie became more and more sure that he had been right about what it was; that he had, at least, solved this riddle.
Bump . . . ba-bump . . . ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
The idea that he was standing by a deserted road in an almost empty world, standing some one hundred and seventy miles from a city which had been built by some fabulous lost civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line . . . that was crazy, but was it any crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s?
Eddie sang the words to the Z.Z. Top song in a whisper:
“You need just enough of that sticky stuff
To hold the seam on your fine blue-jeans
I say yeah, yeah . . .”
They fit the beat perfectly. It was the disco-pulse percussion of “Velcro Fly.” Eddie was sure of it.
A short time later the sound ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he could hear only the wind, and, more faintly, the Send River, which had a bed but never slept.
5
THE NEXT FOUR DAYS were uneventful. They walked; they watched the bridge and the city grow larger and define themselves more clearly; they camped; they ate; they riddled; they kept watch turn and turn about (Jake had pestered Roland into letting him keep a short watch in the two hours just before dawn); they slept. The only remarkable incident had to do with the bees.
Around noon on the third day after the discovery of the downed plane, a buzzing sound came to them, growing louder and louder until it dominated the day. At last Roland stopped. “There,” he said, and pointed toward a grove of eucalyptus trees.
“It sounds like bees,” Susannah said.
Roland’s faded blue eyes gleamed. “Could be we’ll have a little dessert tonight.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Roland,” Eddie said, “but I have this aversion to being stung.”
“Don’t we all,” Roland agreed, “but the day is windless. I think we can smoke them to sleep and steal their comb right out from under them without setting half the world on fire. Let’s have a look.”
He carried Susannah, who was as eager for the adventure as the gunslinger himself, toward the grove. Eddie and Jake lagged behind, and Oy, apparently having decided that