Roland thought about it. "Were I to guess," he said, "I'd say that sai King left those signs and siguls."
"The writer," Eddie said. He weighed the idea, then nodded slowly. He vaguely remembered a concept from high school-the god from the machine, it was called. There was a fancy Latin term for it as well, but that one he couldn't remember.
Had probably been writing Mary Lou Kenopensky's name on his desk while the other kids had been obediently taking notes.
The basic concept was that if a playwright got himself into a corner he could send down the god, who arrived in a flowerdecked bucka wagon from overhead and rescued the characters who were in trouble. This no doubt pleased the more religious playgoers, who believed that God-not the specialeffects version who came down from some overhead platform the audience couldn't see but the One who wert in heaven-really did save people who deserved it. Such ideas had undoubtedly gone out of fashion in the modern age, but Eddie thought that popular novelists-of the sort sai King seemed on his way to becoming-probably still used the technique, only disguising it better. Litde escape hatches. Cards that read GET OUT OF JAIL FREE or ESCAPE THE PIRATES Or FREAK STORM CUTS ELECTRICAL POWER, EXECUTION POSTPONED. The god from die machine (who was actually the writer), patiently working to keep the characters safe so his tale wouldn't end with an unsatisfying line like
"And so the ka-tet was wiped out on Jericho Hill and the bad guys won, rule Discordia, so sorry, better luck next time (what next time, ha-ha), THE END."
Little safety nets, like a key. Not to mention a scrimshaw turde.
"If he wrote those things into his story," Eddie said, "it was long after we saw him in 1977."
"Aye," Roland agreed.
"And I don't think he thought them up," Eddie said. "Not really. He's just... I dunno, just a..."
"A bumhug?" Susannah asked, smiling.
"No!" Jake said, sounding a litde shocked. "Not diat. He's a sender. A telecaster." He was thinking about his father and his father's job at the Network.
"Bingo," Eddie said, and leveled a finger at die boy. This idea led him to another: that if Stephen King did not remain alive long enough to write those things into his tale, the key and the turde would not be there when they were needed. Jake would have been eaten by the Doorkeeper in the house on Dutch Hill... always assuming he got that far, which he probably wouldn't have done. And if he escaped the Dutch Hill monster, he would've been eaten by the Grandfathers-Callahan's Type One vampires-in the Dixie Pig.
Susannah thought to tell them about the vision she'd had as Mia was beginning her final journey from the Plaza-Park Hotel to the Dixie Pig. In this vision she'd been jugged in ajail cell in Oxford, Mississippi, and there had been voices coming from a TV somewhere. Chet Huntley, Walter Cronkite, Frank McGee: newscasters chanting the names of the dead. Some of those names, like President Kennedy and the Diem brothers, she'd known. Others, like Christa McAuliffe, she had not. But one of the names had been Stephen King's, she was quite sure of it.
Chet Huntley's partner
(good night Chet good night David)
saying that Stephen King had been struck and killed by a Dodge minivan while walking near his house. King had been fifty-two, according to Brinkley.
Had Susannah told them that, a great many things might have happened differently, or not at all. She was opening her mouth to add it into the conversation-a falling chip on a hillside strikes a stone which strikes a larger stone which then strikes two others and starts a landslide-when there was the clunk of an opening door and the clack of approaching footsteps.
They all turned, Jake reaching for a 'Riza, the others for their guns.
"Relax, fellas," Susannah murmured. "It's all right. I know this guy." And then to DNK 45932, DOMESTIC, she said: "I didn't expect to see you again so soon. In fact, I didn't expect to see you at all. What's up, Nigel old buddy?"
So this time something which might have been spoken was not, and the deus ex machina which might have descended to rescue a writer who had a date with a Dodge minivan on a latespring day in the year of '99 remained where it was, high above the mortals who acted their parts below.
THREE
The nice thing about robots, in Susannah's opinion, was that most of them didn't hold grudges. Nigel told her that no one had been available to fix his visual equipment (although he might be able to do it himself, he said, given access to the right components, discs, and repair tutorials), so he had come back here, relying on the infrared, to pick up the remains of the shattered (and completely unneeded) incubator. He thanked her for her interest and introduced himself to her friends.
"Nice to meet you, Nige," Eddie said, "but you'll want to get started on those repairs, I kennit, so we won't keep you."