"Whoa!" Eddie cried. "What the hell?"
Susannah was amused as well as amazed. What Ted was pointing out reminded her of Cecil B. DeMille's Bible epic The Ten Commandments, especially the parts where the Red Sea opened by Moses had looked suspiciously like Jell-O and the voice of God coming from the burning bush sounded quite a bit like Charles Laughton. Still, it xoas amazing. In a cheesy Hollywood-special-effects way, that was.
What they saw was a single fat and gorgeous bolt of sunlight slanting down from a hole in the sagging clouds. It cut through the strangely dark air like a searchlight beam and lit a compound that might have been six miles from Thunderclap Station.
And "about six miles" was really all you could say, because there was no more north or south in this world, at least not that you could count on. Now there was only the Path of the Beam.
"Dinky, there's a pair of binoculars in-"
"The lower cave, right?"
"No, I brought them up the last time we were here," Ted replied with carefully maintained patience. "They're sitting on that pile of crates just inside. Get them, please."
Eddie barely noticed this byplay. He was too charmed (and amused) by that single broad ray of sun, shining down on a green and cheerful plot of land, as unlikely in this dark and sterile desert as... well, he supposed, as unlikely as Central Park must seem to tourists from the Midwest making their first trip to New York.
He could see buildings that looked like college dormitories-nice ones-and others that looked like comfy old manor houses with wide stretches of green lawn before them. At the far side of the sunbeam's area was what looked like a street lined with shops. The perfect little Main Street America, except for one thing: in all directions it ended in dark and rocky desert. He saw four stone towers, their sides agreeably green with ivy. No, make that six. The other two were mostly concealed in stands of graceful old elms. Elms in the desert!
Dink returned with a pair of binoculars and offered them to Roland, who shook his head.
"Don't hold it against him," Eddie said. "His eyes... well, let's just say they're something else. I wouldn't mind a peek, though."
"Me, either," Susannah said.
Eddie handed her the binoculars. "Ladies first."
"No, really, I-"
"Stop it," Ted almost snarled. "Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase the other, if you please."
Susannah was stung but held back a retort. Instead she took the binoculars, raised them to her eyes, and adjusted them. What she saw merely heightened her sense of looking at a small but perfect college campus, one that merged beautifully with the neighboring village. No town-versus-gown tensions there,
I bet, she thought. / bet Elmville and Breaker U go together like peanut butter and jelly, Abbott and Costello, hand and glove. Whenever there was a Ray Bradbury short in the Saturday Evening Post, she always turned to it first, she loved Bradbury, and what she was looking at through the binoculars made her think of Greentown,
Bradbury's idealized Illinois village. A place where adults sat out on their porches in rocking chairs, drinking lemonade, and the kids played tag with flashlights in the lightning-bugstitched dusk of summer evenings. And the nearby college campus? No drinking there, at least not to excess. No joysticks or goofballs or rock and roll, either. It would be a place where the girls kissed the boys goodnight with chaste ardor and were glad to sign back in so that the Dormitory Mom wouldn't think ill of them. A place where the sun shone all day, where Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters sang on the radio, and nobody suspected they were actually living in the ruins of a world that had moved on.
No, she thought coldly. Some of them know. That's why these three showed up to meet us.
"That's the Devar-Toi," Roland said flatly. Not a question.
"Yeah," Dinky said. "The good old Devar-Toi." He stood beside Roland and pointed at a large white building near the dormitories. "See that white one? That's Heartbreak House, where the can-toi live. Ted calls em the low men. They're taheen-human hybrids. And they don't call it the Devar-Toi, they call it Algul Siento, which means-"
"Blue Heaven," Roland said, and Jake realized why: all of the buildings except for the rock towers had blue tiled roofs.
Not Narnia but Blue Heaven. Where a bunch of folks were busy bringing about the end of the world.
All the worlds.
SIX
"It looks like the pleasantest place in existence, at least since In-World fell," Ted said. "Doesn't it?"
"Pretty nice, all right," Eddie agreed. He had at least a thousand questions, and guessed Suze and Jake probably had another thousand between them, but this wasn't the time to ask them. In any case, he kept looking at that wonderful litde hundred-acre oasis down there. The one sunny green spot in all of Thunderclap. The one nice place. And why not? Nothing but the best for Our Breaker Buddies.