The Waste Lands

Roland thought for a moment, and what came to mind was Cuthbert’s favorite riddle. “All right, Blaine,” he said, “I will. What’s better than all the gods and worse than Old Man Splitfoot? Dead people eat it always; live people who eat it die slow.”

There was a long pause. Jake put his face in Oy’s fur to try to get away from the stink of the roasted Gray.

“Be careful, gunslinger.” The voice was as small as a cool puff of breeze on summer’s hottest day. The voice of the machine had come from all the speakers, but this one came only from the speaker directly overhead. “Be careful, Jake of New York. Remember that these are The Drawers. Go slow and be very careful.” Jake looked at the gunslinger with widening eyes. Roland gave his head a small, faint shake and raised one finger. He looked as if he was scratching the side of his nose, but that finger also lay across his lips, and Jake had an idea Roland was actually telling him to keep his mouth shut. “A CLEVER RIDDLE,” Blaine said at last. There seemed to be real admiration in its voice. “THE ANSWER IS NOTHING, IS IT NOT?” “That’s right,” Roland said. “You’re pretty clever yourself, Blaine.” When the voice spoke again, Roland heard what Eddie had heard already: a deep and ungovernable greed. “ASK ME ANOTHER.” Roland drew a deep breath. “Not just now.” “I HOPE YOU ARE NOT REFUSING ME, ROLAND, SON OF STEVEN, FOR THAT IS ALSO RUDE. EXTREMELY RUDE.”

“Take us to our friends and help us get out of Lud,” Roland said. “Then there may be time for riddling.”

“I COULD KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND,” the voice said, and now it was as cold as winter’s darkest day.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I’m sure you could. But the riddles would die with us.” “I COULD TAKE THE BOY’S BOOK.”

“Thieving is ruder than either refusal or interruption,” Roland remarked. He spoke as if merely passing the time of day, but the remaining fingers of his right hand were tight on Jake’s shoulder. “Besides,” Jake said, looking up at the speaker in the ceiling, “the answers aren’t in the book. Those pages were torn out.” In a flash of inspiration, he tapped his temple. “They’re up here, though.”

“YOU FELLOWS WANT TO REMEMBER THAT NOBODY LOVES A SMARTASS,” Blaine said. There was another explosion, this one louder and closer. One of the ventilator grilles blew off and shot across the kitchen like a projectile. A moment later two men and a woman emerged through the door which led to the rest of the Grays’ warren. The gunslinger levelled his revolver at them, then lowered it as they stumbled across the kitchen and into the silo beyond without so much as a look at Roland and Jake. To Roland they looked like animals fleeing before a forest fire. A stainless steel panel in the ceiling slid open, revealing a square of darkness. Something silvery flashed within it, and a few moments later a steel sphere, perhaps a foot in diameter, dropped from the hole and hung in the air of the kitchen.

“FOLLOW,” Blaine said flatly.

“Will it take us to Eddie and Susannah?” Jake asked hopefully. Blaine replied only with silence . . . but when the sphere began floating down the corridor, Roland and Jake followed it.

JAKE HAD NO CLEAR memory of the time which followed, and that was probably merciful. He had left his world over a year before nine hundred people would commit suicide together in a small South American country called Gyana, but he knew about the periodic death-rushes of the lem-mings, and what was happening in the disintegrating undercity of the Grays was like that. There were explosions, some on their level but most far below them; acrid smoke occasionally drifted from the ventilator grilles, but most of the air-purifiers were still working and they whipped the worst of it away before it could gather in choking clouds. They saw no fires. Yet the Grays were reacting as if the time of the apocalypse had come. Most only fled, their faces blank O’s of panic, but many had committed suicide in the halls and interconnected rooms through which the steel sphere led Roland and Jake. Some had shot themselves; many more had slashed their throats or wrists; a few appeared to have swallowed poison. On all the faces of the dead was the same expression of overmastering terror. Jake could only vaguely understand what had driven them to this. Roland had a better idea of what had happened to them—to their minds—when the long-dead city first came to life around them and then seemed to commence tearing itself apart. And it was Roland who understood that Blaine was doing it on purpose. That Blaine was driving them to it.

They ducked around a man hanging from an overhead heating-duct and pounded down a flight of steel stairs behind the floating steel ball. “Jake!” Roland shouted. “You never let me in at all, did you?” Jake shook his head.

“I didn’t think so. It was Blaine.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs and hurried along a narrow corridor toward a hatch with the words ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE printed on it in the spiked letters of the High Speech.

“Is it Blaine?” Jake asked.

“Yes—that’s as good a name as any.”

“What about the other v—“

“Hush!” Roland said grimly.

The steel ball paused in front of the hatchway. The wheel spun and the hatch popped ajar. Roland pulled it open, and they stepped into a huge underground room which stretched away in three directions as far as they could see. It was filled with seemingly endless aisles of control panels and electronic equipment. Most of the panels were still dark and dead, but as Jake and Roland stood inside the door, looking about with wide eyes, they could see pilot-lights coming on and hear machinery cycling up.