Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,17

reminded himself, he wasn’t a thinking-machine with a city-wide bank of computers to draw on. All he could do was go for it; God hates a coward, as Eddie sometimes said. If the last ten failed, he would try Aaron Deepneau’s Samson riddle (Out of the eater came forth meat, and so on). If that one also failed, he’d probably . . . shit, he didn’t know what he’d do, or even how he’d feel. The truth is, Jake thought, I’m fried.

And why not? He had gone through an extraordinary swarm of emotions in the last eight hours or so. First, terror: of being sure he and Oy were going to drop off the suspension bridge and to their deaths in the River Send; of being driven through the crazed maze that was Lud by Gasher; of having to look into the Tick-Tock Man’s terrible green eyes and try to answer his unanswerable questions about time, Nazis, and the nature of transitive circuits. Being questioned by Tick-Tock had been like having to take a final exam in hell.

Then the exhilaration of being rescued by Roland (and Oy; without Oy he would almost certainly be toast now), the wonder of all they had seen beneath the city, his awe at the way Susannah had solved Blaine’s gate-riddle, and the final mad rush to get aboard the mono before Blaine could release the stocks of nerve-gas stored under Lud.

After surviving all that, a kind of blissed-out surety had settled over him—of course Roland would stump Blaine, who would then keep his part of the bargain and set them down safe and sound at his final stop (whatever passed for Topeka in this world). Then they would find the Dark Tower and do whatever they were supposed to do there, right what needed righting, fix what needed fixing. And then? They Lived Happily Ever After, of course. Like folk in a fairy tale.

Except . . .

They shared each other’s thoughts, Roland had said; sharing khef was part of what ka-tet meant. And what had been seeping into Jake’s thoughts ever since Roland stepped into the aisle and began to try Blaine with riddles from his young days was a sense of doom. It wasn’t coming just from the gunslinger; Susannah was sending out the same grim blue-black vibe. Only Eddie wasn’t sending it, and that was because he’d gone off somewhere, was chasing his own thoughts. That might be good, but there were no guarantees, and—

—and Jake began to be scared again. Worse, he felt desperate, like a creature that is pressed deeper and deeper into its final corner by a relentless foe. His fingers worked restlessly in Oy’s fur, and when he looked down at them, he realized an amazing thing: the hand which Oy had bitten into to keep from falling off the bridge no longer hurt. He could see the holes the bumbler’s teeth had made, and blood was still crusted in his palm and on his wrist, but the hand itself no longer hurt. He flexed it cautiously. There was some pain, but it was low and distant, hardly there at all.

“Blaine, what may go up a chimney down but cannot go down a chimney up?”

“A LADY’S PARASOL,” Blaine replied in that tone of jolly complacency which Jake, too, was coming to loathe.

“Thankee-sai, Blaine, once again you have answered true. Next—”

“Roland?”

The gunslinger looked around at Jake, and his look of concentration lightened a bit. It wasn’t a smile, but it went a little way in that direction, at least, and Jake was glad.

“What is it, Jake?”

“My hand. It was hurting like crazy, and now it’s stopped!”

“SHUCKS,” Blaine said in the drawling voice of John Wayne. “I COULDN’T WATCH A HOUND SUFFER WITH A MASHED-UP FOREPAW LIKE THAT, LET ALONE A FINE LITTLE TRAILHAND LIKE YOURSELF. SO I FIXED IT UP.”

“How?” Jake asked.

“LOOK ON THE ARM OF YOUR SEAT.”

Jake did, and saw a faint gridwork of lines. It looked a little like the speaker of the transistor radio he’d had when he was seven or eight.

“ANOTHER BENEFIT OF TRAVELLING BARONY CLASS,” Blaine went on in his smug voice. It crossed Jake’s mind that Blaine would fit in perfectly at the Piper School. The world’s first slo-trans, dipolar nerd. “THE HAND-SCAN SPECTRUM MAGNIFIER IS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL ALSO CAPABLE OF ADMINISTERING MINOR FIRST AID, SUCH AS I HAVE PERFORMED ON YOU. IT IS ALSO A NUTRIENT DELIVERY SYSTEM, A BRAIN-PATTERN RECORDING DEVICE, A STRESS-ANALYZER, AND AN EMOTION-ENHANCER WHICH CAN NATURALLY STIMULATE