wondered what their job had been. Surely not protection; the bear had been built to protect itself, and Eddie guessed that if old Shardik had come upon the three of them while still in its prime, it would have chewed them up and spat them out in short order. Perhaps these little robots had been its maintenance crew, or scouts, or messengers. He guessed that they could be dangerous, but only in their own defense . . . or their master’s. They did not seem warlike.
There was, in fact, something pitiful about them. Most of the crew was now defunct, their master was gone, and Eddie believed they knew it somehow. It was not menace they projected but a strange, inhuman sadness. Old and almost worn out, they paced and rolled and wriggled their anxious way around the worry-track they had dug in this godforsaken clearing, and it almost seemed to Eddie that he could read the confused run of their thoughts; Oh dear, oh dear, what now? What is our purpose, now that He is gone? And who will take care of us, now that He is gone? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . .
Eddie felt a tug on the back of his leg and came very close to screaming in fear and surprise. He wheeled, cocking Roland’s gun, and saw Susannah looking up at him with wide eyes. Eddie let out a long breath and dropped the hammer carefully back to its resting position. He knelt, put his hands on Susannah’s shoulders, kissed her cheek, then whispered in her ear: “I came really close to putting a bullet in your silly head—what are you doing here?”
“Wanted to see,” she whispered back, looking not even slightly abashed. Her eyes shifted to Roland as he also hunkered beside her. “Besides, it was spooky back there by myself.”
She had sustained a number of small scratches crawling after them through the brush, but Roland had to admit to himself that she could be as quiet as a ghost when she wanted to be; he hadn’t heard a thing. He took a rag (the last remnant of his old shirt) from his back pocket and wiped the little trickles of blood from her arms. He examined his work for a moment and then dabbed at a small nick on her forehead as well. “Have your look, then,” he said. His voice was hardly more than the movement of his lips. “I guess you earned it.”
He used one hand to open a sightline at her level in the hock and greenberry bushes, then waited while she stared raptly into the clearing. At last she pulled back and Roland allowed the bushes to close again.
“I feel sorry for them,” she whispered. “Isn’t that crazy?”
“Not at all,” Roland whispered back. “They are creatures of great sadness, I think, in their own strange way. Eddie is going to put them out of their misery.”
Eddie began to shake his head at once.
“Yes, you are . . . unless you want to hunker here in what you call ‘the toolies’ all night. Go for the hats. The little twirling things.”
“What if I miss?” Eddie whispered at him furiously.
Roland shrugged.
Eddie stood up and reluctantly cocked the gunslinger’s revolver again. He looked through the bushes at the circling servomechanisms, going around and around in their lonely, useless orbit. It’ll be like shooting puppies, he thought glumly. Then he saw one of them—it was the thing that looked like a walking box—extrude an ugly-looking pincer device from its middle and clamp it for a moment on the snake. The snake made a surprised buzzing sound and leaped ahead. The walking box withdrew its pincer.
Well . . . maybe not exactly like shooting puppies, Eddie decided. He glanced at Roland again. Roland looked back expressionlessly, arms folded across his chest.
You pick some goddam strange times to keep school, buddy.
Eddie thought of Susannah, first shooting the bear in the ass, then blowing its sensor device to smithereens as it bore down on her and Roland, and felt a little ashamed of himself. And there was more: part of him wanted to go for it, just as part of him had wanted to go up against Balazar and his crew of plug-uglies in The Leaning Tower. The compulsion was probably sick, but that didn’t change its basic attraction: Let’s see who walks away . . let’s just see.
Yeah, that was pretty sick, all right.
Pretend it’s just a shooting gallery, and you want to