Eddie got no further. John raised a gnarled hand to stop him. Eddie tried to imagine a Texas Instruments calculator in that hand and discovered he could, and quite easily. Weird.
"Gimme a chance, youngster, and I'll tell you."
Eddie sat back, making a zipping motion across his lips.
"Keep the rose safe, that's first. Keep the writah safe, that's second. But beyond that, me and this guy Deepneau and this other guy Carver are s'posed to build up one of the world's most powerful corporations. We trade in real estate, we work with... uh..." He pulled out the battered green pad, consulted it quickly, and put it away. "We work with 'software developers," whatever they are, because they're gonna be the next wave of technology. We're supposed to remember three words."
He ticked them off. "Microsoft. Microchips. Intel. And n'matter how big we grow-or how fast-our three real jobs are the same: protect the rose, protect Stephen King, and try to screw over two other companies every chance we get. One's called Sombra. Other's..." There was the slightest of hesitations.
"The other's North Central Positronics. Sombra's mostly interested in proppity, accordin to you fellas. Positronics... well, science and gadgets, that's obvious even to me. If Sombra wants a piece of land, Tet tries t'get it first. If North Central wants a patent, we try to get it first, or at least to frig it up for them.
Throw it to a third party if it comes to that."
Eddie was nodding approval. He hadn't told John that last, the old guy had come up with it on his own.
"We're the Three Toothless Musketeers, the Old Farts of Apocalypse, and we're supposed to keep those two outfits from gettin what they want, by fair means or foul. Dirty tricks most definitely allowed." John grinned. "I never been to Harvard Business School"-Haa-vid Bi'ness School-"but I guess I can kick a fella in the crotch as well's anyone."
"Good," Roland said. He started to get up. "I think it's time we-"
Eddie raised a hand to stop him. Yes, he wanted to get to Susannah and Jake; couldn't wait to sweep his darling into his arms and cover her face with kisses. It seemed years since he had last seen her on the East Road in Calla Bryn Sturgis. Yet he couldn't leave it at this as easily as Roland, who had spent his life being obeyed and had come to take the death-allegiance of complete strangers as a matter of course. What Eddie saw on the other side of Dick Beckhardt's table wasn't another tool but an independent Yankee who was tough-minded and smart as a whip... but really too old for what they were asking. And speaking of too old, what about Aaron Deepneau, the Chemotherapy Kid?
"My friend wants to get moving and so do I," Eddie said.
"We've got miles to go yet."
"I know that. It's on your face, son. Like a scar."
Eddie was fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another. Outside, thunder cracked and lightning flashed.
"But why would you do this?" Eddie asked. "I have to know that. Why would you take all this on for two men you just met?"
John thought it over. He touched the cross he wore now and would wear until his death in the year of 1989-the cross given to Roland by an old woman in a forgotten town. He would touch it just that way in the years ahead when contemplating some big decision (the biggest might have been the one to sever Tet's connection with IBM, a company that had shown an everincreasing willingness to do business with North Central Positronics) or preparing for some covert action (the fire-bombing of Sombra Enterprises in New Delhi, for instance, in the year before he died). The cross spoke to Moses Carver and never spoke again in Cullum's presence no matter how much he blew on it, but sometimes, drifting to sleep with his hand clasped around it, he would think: 'Tis a sigul. Tis a sigul, dear-something that came from another world.
If he had regrets toward the end (other than about some of the tricks, which were filthy indeed and cost more than one man his life), it was that he never got a chance to visit the world on the other side, which he glimpsed one stormy evening on Turtleback Lane in the town of Lovell. From time to time Roland's sigul sent him dreams of a field filled with roses, and a sooty-black tower. Sometimes he was visited by terrible visions of two crimson eyes, floating unattached to any body and relentlessly scanning the horizon. Sometimes there were dreams in which he heard the sound of a man relentlessly winding his horn. From these latter dreams he would awake with tears on his cheeks, those of longing and loss and love. He would awake with his hand closed around the cross, thinking I denied Discordia and regret nothing; I have spat into the bodiless eyes of the Crimson King and rejoice; I threw my lot with the gunslinger's katet and the White and never once questioned the choice.
Yet for all that he wished he could have walked out, just once, into that other land: the one beyond the door.