The Waste Lands (Page 24)

Eddie 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 messen-gers. 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 shoot-ing 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 win your honey a stuffed dog, he thought. Or a stuffed bear. He drew a bead on the walking box and then looked around impatiently when Roland touched his shoulder. “Say your lesson, Eddie. And be true.”

Eddie hissed impatiently through his teeth, angry at the distraction, but Roland’s eyes didn’t flinch and so he drew a deep breath and tried to clear everything from his mind: the squeaks and squalls of equipment that had been running too long, the aches and pains in his body, the knowledge that Susannah was here, propped up on the heels of her hands, watching, the further knowledge that she was closest to the ground, and if he missed one of the gadgets out there, she would be the handiest target if it decided to retaliate. ” ‘I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.’ “

That was a joke, he thought; he wouldn’t know his old man if he passed him on the street. But he could feel the words doing their work, clearing his mind and settling his nerves. He didn’t know if he was the stuff of which gunslingers were made—the idea seemed fabulously unlikely to him, even though he knew he had managed to hold up his end pretty well during the shootout at Balazar’s nightclub—but he did know that part of him liked the coldness that fell over him when he spoke the words of the old, old catechism the gunslinger had taught them; the coldness and the way things seemed to stand forth with their own breathless clarity. There was another part of him which understood that this was just another deadly drug, not much different from the heroin which had killed Henry and almost killed him, but that did not alter the thin, tight pleasure of the moment. It drummed in him like taut cables vibrating in a high wind. ” ‘I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgot-ten the face of his father.