the snow, but you can't get him to stop. He's got his orders to follow. His programmin, he calls it."
The old man saw Roland getting ready to speak and raised his hand. "Nay, nay, I'm not drawrin it out to irritate cher, sir or sai or whichever you prefer-it's just that I'm not much used to cump'ny.
"Once you get down b'low the snowline it must be another ten or twelve days a-walkin, but ain't no need in the world to walk unless you fancy it. There's another one of those Positronics huts down there with any number a' wheelie vehicles parked inside. Like golf-carts, they are. The bat'tries are all dead, natcherly-flat as yer hat-but there's a gennie there, too,
Honda just like mine, and it was a-workin the last time I was down there, for Bill keeps things in trim as much as he can. If you could charge up one of those wheelies, why that'd cut your time down to four days at most. So here's what I think: if you had to hoof it the whole way, it might take you as long as nineteen days. If you can go the last leg in one O'Them hummers-that's what I call em, hummers, for that's the sound they make when they're runnin-I should say ten days. Maybe eleven."
The room fell silent. The wind gusted, throwing snow against the side of the cottage, and Susannah once more marked how it sounded almost like a human cry. A trick of the angles and eaves, no doubt.
"Less than three weeks, even if we had to walk," Roland said. He reached out toward the Polaroid photograph of the dusky stone tower standing against the sunset sky, but did not quite touch it. It was as if, Susannah thought, he were afraid to touch it. "After all the years and all the miles."
Not to mention the gallons of spilled blood, Susannah thought, but she would not have said this even if the two of them had been alone. There was no need to; he knew how much blood had been spilled as well as she did. Bvit there was something offkey here. Off-key or downright wrong. And the gunslinger did not seem to know that.
Sympathy was to respect the feelings of another. Empathy was to actually share those feelings. Why would folks call any land Empathica?
And why would this pleasant old man lie about it?
"Tell me something, Joe Collins," Roland said.
"Aye, gunslinger, if I can."
"Have you been right up to it? Laid your hand on the stone of it?"
The old man looked at first to see if Roland was joshing him.
When he was sure that wasn't the case, he looked shocked. "No,"
he said, and for the first time sounded as American as Susannah herself. "That pitcher's as close as I dared go. The edge of the rosefield. I'm gonna say two, two hundred and fifty yards away.
What the robot'd call five hundred arcs O'The wheel."
Roland nodded. "And why not?"
"Because I thought to go closer might kill me, but I wouldn't be able to stop. The voices would draw me on. So I thought then, and so I do think, even today."
SEVEN
After dinner-surely the finest meal Susannah had had since being hijacked into this other world, and possibly the best in her entire life-the sore on her face burst wide open. It was Joe Collins's fault, in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold against the only inhabitant of Odd's Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was the last thing he would have wanted, surely.
He served chicken, roasted to a turn and especially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashed potatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs, green peas ("Only canned, say sorry," he told them), and a dish of little boiled onions bathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drank it with childish greed, although both passed on "the teensy piss o' rum." Oy had his own dinner; Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and then set it on the floor by die stove. Oy made quick work of it and then lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the combination living room/dining room, licking his chops to get every taste of giblet gravy out of his whiskers while watching the humes with his ears up.
"I couldn't eat dessert so don't ask me," Susannah said when she'd finished cleaning