"God, no," Eddie agreed. "We'd be all too likely to find Balazar'd persuaded Tower to sell, and there we'd be, bag of cash in one hand, thumbs up our asses, and big grins on our faces to pass the time of day."
There was a moment of silence - perhaps they were considering this lurid image - and then Roland said, "You make it sound very easy, and why not? To you three, the concept of doorways between this world and your world of tack-sees and astin and fottergrafs seems almost as mundane as riding a mule would to me. Or strapping on a sixgun. And there's good reason for you to feel that way. Each of you has been through one of these doors. Eddie has actually gone both ways - into this world and then back into his own."
"I gotta tell you that the return trip to New York wasn't much fun," Eddie said. "Too much gunplay." Not to mention my brother's severed head rolling across the floor ofBalazar's office .
"Neither was getting through the door on Dutch Hill," Jake added.
Roland nodded, ceding these points without yielding his own. "All my life I've accepted what you said the first time I knew you, Jake - what you said when you were dying."
Jake looked down, pale and without answer. He did not like to recall that (it was mercifully hazy in any case), and knew that Roland didn't, either. Good! he thought. You shouldn't want to remember! You let me drop! You let me die!
"You said there were other worlds than these," Roland said, "and there are. New York in all its multiple whens is only one of many. That we are drawn there again and again has to do with the rose. I have no doubt of that, nor do I doubt that in some way I do not understand the rose is the Dark Tower. Either that or - "
"Or it's another door," Susannah murmured. "One that opens on the Dark Tower itself."
Roland nodded. "The idea has done more than cross my mind. In any case, the Manni know of these other worlds, and in some fashion have dedicated their lives to them. They believe todash to be the holiest of rites and most exalted of states. My father and his friends have long known of the glass balls; this I have told you. That the Wizard's Rainbow, todash, and these magical doors may all be much the same is something we have guessed."
"Where you going with this, sug?" Susannah asked.
"I'm simply reminding you that I have wandered long," Roland said. "Because of changes in time - a softening of time which I know you all have felt - I've quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand years, sometimes skipping over whole generations the way a sea-bird may cruise from one wave-top to the next, only wetting its feet in the foam. Never in all this time did I come across one of these doors between the worlds until I came to the ones on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea. I had no idea what they were, although I could have told you something of todash and the bends o' the rainbow."
Roland looked at them earnestly.
"You speak as though my world were as filled with magical doorways as yours is with..." He thought about it. "... with airplanes or stage-buses. That's not so."
"Where we are now isn't the same as anywhere you've been before, Roland," Susannah said. She touched his deeply tanned wrist, her fingers gentle. "We're not in your world anymore. You said so yourself, back in that version of Topeka where Blaine finally blew his top."
"Agreed," Roland said. "I only want you to realize that such doors may be far more rare than you realize. And now you're speaking not of one but two. Doors you can aim in time, the way you'd aim a gun."
I do not aim with my hand , Eddie thought, and shivered a little. "When you put it that way, Roland, it does sound a little iffy."
"Then what do we do next?" Jake asked.
"I might be able to help you with that," a voice said.
They all turned, only Roland without surprise. He had heard the stranger when he arrived, about halfway through their palaver. Roland did turn with interest, however, and one look at the man standing twenty feet from them on the edge of the road was enough to tell him that the newcomer was either from the world of his new friends, or from one right next door.
"Who are you?" Eddie asked.
"Where are your friends?" Susannah asked.
"Where are you from?" Jake asked. His eyes were alight with eagerness.
The stranger wore a long black coat open over a dark shirt with a notched collar. His hair was long and white, sticking up on the sides and in front as if scared. His forehead was marked with a T-shaped scar. "My friends are still back there a little piece," he said, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the woods in a deliberately nonspecific way. "I now call Calla Bryn Sturgis my home. Before that, Detroit, Michigan, where I worked in a homeless shelter, making soup and running AA meetings. Work I knew quite well. Before that - for a short while - Topeka, Kansas."
He observed the way the three younger ones started at that with a kind of interested amusement.
"Before that, New York City. And before that , a little town called Jerusalem's Lot, in the state of Maine."
SEVEN