Beyond the pantry was a neat little three-room apartment where Nigel presumably hung his hat. There was no bedroom, but beyond the living room and a butler's pantry full of monitoring equipment was a neat book-lined study with an oak desk and an easy chair beneath a halogen reading lamp. The computer on the desk had been manufactured by North Central Positronics, no surprise diere. Nigel brought them blankets and pillows which he assured them were fresh and clean.
"Maybe you sleep on your feet, but I guess you like to sit down to read like anyone else," Eddie said.
"Oh, yes indeedy, one-two-threedy," Nigel said. "I enjoy a good book. It's part of my programming."
"We'll sleep six hours, then push on," Roland told them.
Jake, meanwhile, was examining the books more closely. Oy moved beside him, always at heel, as Jake checked the spines, occasionally pulling one out for a closer peek. "He's got all of Dickens, it looks like," he said. "Also Steinbeck... Thomas Wolfe... a lot of Zane Grey... somebody named Max Brand... a guy named Elmore Leonard... and the always popular Steve King."
They all took time to look at the two shelves of King books, better than thirty in all, at least four of them very large and two the size of doorstops. King had been an extremely busy writerbee since his Bridgton days, it appeared. The newest volume was called Hearts in Atlantis and had been published in a year with which they were very familiar: 1999. The only ones missing, so far as they could tell, were the ones about them. Assuming King had gone ahead and written them. Jake checked the copyright pages, but there were few obvious holes. That might mean nothing, however, because he had written so much.
Susannah inquired of Nigel, who said he had never seen any books by Stephen King concerning Roland of Gilead or the Dark Tower. Then, having said so, he twisted his head viciously to the left and counted off in French, this time all the way to ten.
"Still," Eddie said after Nigel had retired, clicking and clacking and clucking his way out of the room, "I bet there's a lot of information here we could use. Roland, do you think we could pack the works of Stephen King and take them with us?"
"Maybe," Roland said, "but we won't. They might confuse us."
"Why do you say so?"
Roland only shook his head. He didn't know why he said so, but he knew it was true.
FOUR
The Arc 16 Experimental Station's nerve-center was four levels down from the Extraction Room, the kitchen, and Nigel's study. One entered the Control Suite through a capsule-shaped vestibule. The vestibule could only be opened from the outside by using three ID slides, one after the other. The piped-in Muzak on this lowest level of the Fedic Dogan sounded like Beatles tunes as rendered by The Comatose String Quartet.
Inside the Control Suite were over a dozen rooms, but the only one with which we need concern ourselves was the one filled with TV screens and security devices. One of these latter devices ran a small but vicious army of hunter-killer robots equipped with sneetches and laser pistols; another was supposed to release poison gas (the same kind Blaine had used to slaughter the people of Lud) in the event of a hostile takeover.
Which, in the view of Mordred Deschain, had happened. He had tried to activate both the hunter-killers and the gas; neither had responded. Now Mordred had a bloody nose, a blue bruise on his forehead, and a swollen lower lip, for he'd fallen out of the chair in which he sat and rolled about on the floor, bellowing reedy, childish cries which in no way reflected the true depth of his fury.
To be able to see them on at least five different screens and not be able to kill or even hurt them! No wonder he was in a fury! He had felt the living darkness closing in on him, the darkness which signaled his change, and had forced himself to be calm so the change wouldn't happen. He had already discovered that the transformation from his human self to his spider self (and back again) consumed shocking amounts of energy.
Later on that might not matter, but for the time being he had to be careful, lest he starve like a bee in a burned-over tract of forest.
What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that your first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature which can do you damage. Remember that it came of two fathers, both of them killers.
FIVE
Now, only a few hours after his birth, Mia's chap already weighed twenty pounds and had the look of a healthy six-months' baby.