3
The gunslinger thought this man, prisoner or not, was probably better at the fine art of survival than any of the other men he had seen in the air-carriage. The others were fat things, for the most part, and even those who looked reasonably fit also looked open, unguarded, their faces those of spoiled and cosseted children, the faces of men who would fight - eventually―but who would whine almost endlessly before they did; you could let their guts out onto their shoes and their last expressions would not be rage or agony but stupid surprise.
The prisoner was better ... but not good enough. Not at all.
The army woman. She saw something. I don't know what, but she saw something wrong. She's awake to him in a way she's not to the others.
The prisoner sat down. Looked at a limp-covered book he thought of as a "Magda-Seen," although who Magda might have been or what she might have seen mattered not a whit to Roland. The gunslinger did not want to look at a book, amazing as such things were; he wanted to look at the woman in the army uniform. The urge to come forward and take control was very great. But he held against it ... at least for the time being.
The prisoner had gone somewhere and gotten a drug. Not the drug he himself took, nor one that would help cure the gunslinger's sick body, but one that people paid a lot of money for because it was against the law. He would give this drug to his brother, who would in turn give it to a man named Balazar. The deal would be complete when Balazar traded them the kind of drug they took for this one―if, that was, the prisoner was able to correctly perform a ritual unknown to the gunslinger (and a world as strange as this must of necessity have many strange rituals); it was called Clearing the Customs.
But the woman sees him.
Could she keep him from Clearing the Customs? Roland thought the answer was probably yes. And then? Gaol. And if the prisoner were gaoled, there would be no place to get the sort of medicine his infected, dying body needed.
He must Clear the Customs, Roland thought. He must. And he must go with his brother to this man Balazar. It's not in the plan, the brother won't like it, but he must.
Because a man who dealt in drugs would either know a man or be a man who also cured the sick. A man who could listen to what was wrong and then ... maybe ...
He must Clear the Customs, the gunslinger thought.
The answer was so large and simple, so close to him, that he very nearly did not see it at all. It was the drug the prisoner meant to smuggle in that would make Clearing the Customs so difficult, of course; there might be some sort of Oracle who might be consulted in the cases of people who seemed suspicious. Otherwise, Roland gleaned, the Clearing ceremony would be simplicity itself, as crossing a friendly border was in his own world. One made the sign of fealty to that kingdom's monarch―a simple token gesture―and was allowed to pass.
He was able to take things from the prisoner's world to his own. The tooter-fish popkin proved that. He would take the bags of drugs as he had taken the popkin. The prisoner would Clear the Customs. And then Roland would bring the bags of drugs back.
Can you?
Ah, here was a question disturbing enough to distract him from the view of the water below ... they had gone over what looked like a huge ocean and were now turning back toward the coastline. As they did, the water grew steadily closer. The air-carriage was coming down (Eddie's glance was brief, cursory; the gunslinger's as rapt as the child seeing his first snowfall). He could take things from this world, that he knew. But bring them back again? That was a thing of which he as yet had no knowing. He would have to find out.
The gunslinger reached into the prisoner's pocket and closed the prisoner's fingers over a coin.
Roland went back through the door.
4
The birds flew away when he sat up. They hadn't dared come as close this time. He ached; he was woozy, feverish ... yet it was amazing how much even a little bit of nourishment had revived him.
He looked at the coin he had brought back with him this time. It looked like silver, but the reddish tint at the edge suggested it was really made of some baser metal. On one side was a profile of a man whose face suggested nobility, courage, stubbornness. His hair, both curled at the base of the skull and pigged at the nape of the neck, suggested a bit of vanity as well. He turned the coin over and saw something so startling it caused him to cry out in a rusty, croaking voice.
On the back was an eagle, the device which had decorated his own banner, in those dim days when there had still been kingdoms and banners to symbolize them.
Time's short. Go back. Hurry.
But he tarried a moment longer, thinking. It was harder to think inside this head―the prisoner's was far from clear, but it was, temporarily at least, a cleaner vessel than his own.
To try the coin both ways was only half the experiment, wasn't it?
He took one of the shells from his cartridge belt and folded it over the coin in his hand.
Roland stepped back through the door.
5
The prisoner's coin was still there, firmly curled within the pocketed hand. He didn't have to come forward to check on the shell; he knew it hadn't made the trip.
He came forward anyway, briefly, because there was one thing he had to know. Had to see.
So he turned, as if to adjust the little paper thing on the back of his seat (by all the gods that ever were, there was paper everywhere in this world), and looked through the doorway. He saw his body, collapsed as before, now with a fresh trickle of blood flowing from a cut on his cheek―a stone must have done it when he left himself and crossed over.
The cartridge he had been holding along with the coin lay at the base of the door, on the sand.
Still, enough was answered. The prisoner could Clear the Customs. Their guards o' the watch might search him from head to toe, from ass**le to appetite, and back again.
They'd find nothing.
The gunslinger settled back, content, unaware, at least for the time being, that he still had not grasped the extent of his problem.
6
The 727 came in low and smooth over the salt marshes of Long Island , leaving sooty trails of spent fuel behind. The landing gear came down with a rumble and a thump.
7
3A, the man with the two-tone eyes, straightened up and Jane saw―actually saw―a snub-nosed Uzi in his hands before she realized it was nothing but his duty declaration card and a little zipper bag of the sort which men sometimes use to hold their passports.
The plane settled like silk.
Letting out a deep, shaking shudder, she tightened the red top on the Thermos.
"Call me an ass**le," she said in a low voice to Susy, buckling the cross-over belts now that it was too late. She had told Susy what she suspected on the final approach, so Susy would be ready. "You have every right."
"No," Susy said. "You did the right thing."
"I over-reacted. And dinner's on me."
"Like hell it is. And don't look at him. Look at me. Smile, Janey."
Jane smiled. Nodded. Wondered what in God's name was going on now.
"You were watching his hands," Susy said, and laughed. Jane joined in. "I was watching what happened to his shirt when he bent over to get his bag. He's got enough stuff under there to stock a Woolworth's notions counter. Only I don't think he's carrying the kind of stuff you can buy at Woolworth's."
Jane threw back her head and laughed again, feeling like a puppet. "How do we handle it?" Susy had five years' seniority on her, and Jane, who only a minute ago had felt she had the situation under some desperate kind of control, now only felt glad to have Susy beside her.
"We don't. Tell the Captain while we're taxiing in. The Captain speaks to customs. Your friend there gets in line like everyone else, except then he gets pulled out of line by some men who escort him to a little room. It's going to be the first in a very long succession of little rooms for him, I think."
"Jesus." Jane was smiling, but chills, alternately hot and cold, were racing through her.
She hit the pop-release on her harness when the reverse thrusters began to wind down, handed the Thermos to Susy, then got up and rapped on the cockpit door.
Not a terrorist but a drug-smuggler. Thank God for small favors. Yet in a way she hated it. He had been cute.
Not much, but a little.
8
He still doesn't see, the gunslinger thought with anger and dawning desperation. Gods!
Eddie had bent to get the papers he needed for the ritual, and when he looked up the army woman was staring at him, her eyes bulging, her cheeks as white as the paper things on the backs of the seats. The silver tube with the red top, which he had at first taken for some kind of canteen, was apparently a weapon. She was holding it up between her br**sts now. Roland thought that in a moment or two she would either throw it or spin off the red top and shoot him with it.
Then she relaxed and buckled her harness even though the thump told both the gunslinger and the prisoner the aircarriage had already landed. She turned to the army woman she was sitting with and said something. The other woman laughed and nodded, but if that was a real laugh, the gunslinger thought, he was a river-toad.
The gunslinger wondered how the man whose mind had become temporary home for the gunslinger's own ka, could be so stupid. Some of it was what he was putting into his body, of course ... one of this world's versions of devil-weed. Some, but not all. He was not soft and unobservant like the others, but in time he might be.
They are as they are because they live in the light, the gunslinger thought suddenly. That light of civilization you were taught to adore above all other things. They live in a world which has not moved on.
If this was what people became in such a world, Roland was not sure he didn't prefer the dark. "That was before the world moved on," people said in his own world, and it was always said in tones of bereft sadness ... but it was, perhaps, sadness without thought, without consideration.
She thought I/he―meant to grab a weapon when I/he―bent down to get the papers. When she saw the papers she relaxed and did what everyone else did before the carriage came down to the ground again. Now she and her friend are talking and laughing but their faces―her face especially, the face of the woman with the metal tube―are not right. They are talking, all right, but they are only pretending to laugh ...and that is because what they are talking about is I/him.
The air-carriage was now moving along what seemed a long concrete road, one of many. Mostly he watched the women, but from the edges of his vision the gunslinger could see other air-carriages moving here and there along other roads. Some lumbered; some moved with incredible speed, not like carriages at all but like projectiles fired from guns or cannons, preparing to leap into the air. As desperate as his own situation had become, part of him wanted very much to come forward and turn his head so he could see these vehicles as they leaped into the sky. They were man-made but every bit as fabulous as the stories of the Grand Featherex which had supposedly once lived in the distant (and probably mythical) kingdom of Garlan―more fabulous, perhaps, simply because these were man-made.
The woman who had brought him the popkin unfastened her harness (this less than a minute since she had fastened it) and went forward to a small door. That's where the driver sits, the gunslinger thought, but when the door was opened and she stepped in he saw it apparently took three drivers to operate the air-carriage, and even the brief glimpse he was afforded of what seemed like a million dials and levers and lights made him understand why.
The prisoner was looking at all but seeing nothing―Cort would have first sneered, then driven him through the nearest wall. The prisoner's mind was completely occupied with grabbing the bag under the seat and his light jacket from the overhead bin ... and facing the ordeal of the ritual.
The prisoner saw nothing; the gunslinger saw everything.
The woman thought him a thief or a madman. He―or perhaps it was I, yes, that's likely enough―did something tomake her think that. She changed her mind, and then the other woman changed it back ...only now I think they know what's really wrong. They know he's going to try to profane the ritual.
Then, in a thunderclap, he saw the rest of his problem. First, it wasn't just a matter of taking the bags into his world as he had the coin; the coin hadn't been stuck to the prisoner's body with the glue-string the prisoner had wrapped around and around his upper body to hold the bags tight to his skin. This glue-string was only part of his problem. The prisoner hadn't missed the temporary disappearance of one coin among many, but when he realized that whatever it was he had risked his life for was suddenly gone, he was surely going to raise the racks ... and what then?
It was more than possible that the prisoner would begin to behave in a manner so irrational that it would get him locked away in gaol as quickly as being caught in the act of profanation. The loss would be bad enough; for the bags under his arms to simply melt away to nothing would probably make him think he really had gone mad.
The air-carriage, ox-like now that it was on the ground, labored its way through a left turn. The gunslinger realized that he had no time for the luxury of further thought. He had to do more than come forward; he must make contact with Eddie Dean.
Right now.