Instead of responding as he usually did, by repeating his name, Oy looked past Jake and commenced a low
growl. At the same moment the pony shifted and gave a nervous whinny. Jake reined him, realizing that bitter
(but not entirely unpleasant) smell of gin and juniper had gotten stronger. He looked around and saw two
spiny barrels of the cactus-tangle on his right swiveling slowly and blindly toward him. There was a faint
grinding sound, and dribbles of white sap were running down the cactus's central barrel. The needles on the
arms swinging toward Jake looked long and wicked in the moonlight. The thing had smelled him, and it was
hungry.
"Come on," he told Oy, and booted the pony's sides lightly. The pony needed no further urging. It hurried
downhill, not quite trotting, toward the building with the fluorescent lights. Oy gave the moving cactus a
final mistrustful look, then followed them.
SEVEN
Jake reached the driveway and stopped. About fifty yards farther down the road (it was now very definitely a
road, or had been once upon a time), train-tracks crossed and then ran on toward the Devar-Tete Whye, where
a low bridge took them across. The folken called that bridge "the causeway." The older folken, Callahan had
told them, called it the devil's causeway.
"The trains that bring the roont ones back from Thunderclap come on those tracks," he murmured to Oy. And
did he feel the tug of the Beam? Jake was sure he did. He had an idea that when they left Calla Bryn Sturgis
—if they left Calla Bryn Sturgis—it would be along those tracks.
He stood where he was a moment longer, feet out of the stirrups, then headed the pony up the crumbling
driveway toward the building. To Jake it looked like a Quonset hut on a military base. Oy, with his short legs,
was having hard going on the broken-up surface. That busted-up paving would be dangerous for his horse,
too. Once the frozen gate was behind them, he dismounted and looked for a place to tether his mount. There
were bushes close by, but something told him they were too close. Too visible. He led the pony out onto the
hardpan, stopped, and looked around at Oy. "Stay!"
"Stay! Oy! Ake!"
Jake found more bushes behind a pile of boulders like a strew of huge and eroded toy blocks. Here he felt
satisified enough to tether the pony. Once it was done, he stroked the long, velvety muzzle. "Not long," he
said. "Can you be good?"
The pony blew through his nose and appeared to nod. Which meant exactly nothing, Jake knew. And it was
probably a needless precaution, anyway. Still, better safe than sorry. He went back to the driveway and bent
to scoop the bumbler up. As soon as he straightened, a row of brilliant lights flashed on, pinning him like a
bug on a microscope stage. Holding Oy in the curve of one arm, Jake raised the other to shield his eyes. Oy
whined and blinked.
There was no warning shout, no stern request for identification, only the faint snuffle of the breeze. The
lights were turned on by motion-sensors, Jake guessed. What came next? Machine-gun fire directed by
dipolar computers? A scurry of small but deadly robots like those Roland, Eddie, and Susannah had
dispatched in the clearing where the Beam they were following had begun? Maybe a big net dropping from
overhead, like in this jungle movie he'd seen once on TV?
Jake looked up. There was no net. No machine-guns, either. He started walking forward again, picking his
way around the deepest of the potholes and jumping over a washout. Beyond this latter, the driveway was
tilted and cracked but mostly whole. "You can get down now," he told Oy. "Boy, you're heavy. Watch out or
I'll have to stick you in Weight Watchers."
He looked straight ahead, squinting and shielding his eyes from the fierce glare. The lights were in a row
running just beneath the Quonset's curved roof. They threw his shadow out behind him, long and black. He
saw rock-cat corpses, two on his left and two more on his right. Three of them were little more than
skeletons. The fourth was in a high state of decomposition, but Jake could see a hole that looked too big for a
bullet. He thought it had been made by a bah-bolt. The idea was comforting. No weapons of super-science at
work here. Still, he was crazy not to be hightailing it back toward the river and the Calla beyond it. Wasn't
he? "Crazy," he said.
"Razy," Oy said, once more padding along at Jake's heel.
A minute later they reached the door of the hut. Above it, on a rusting steel plate, was this:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
Northeast Corridor
Arc Quadrant
OUTPOST 16
Medium Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
On the door itself, now hanging crooked by only two screws, was another sign. A joke? Some sort of
nickname? Jake thought it might be a little of both. The letters were choked with rust and eroded by God
knew how many years of blowing sand and grit, but he could still read them:
WELCOME TO THE DOGAN
EIGHT
Jake expected the door to be locked and wasn't disappointed. The lever handle moved up and down only the
tiniest bit. He guessed that when it had been new, there'd been no give in it at all. To the left of the door was a
rusty steel panel with a button and a speaker grille. Beneath it was the word VERBAL. Jake reached for the
button, and suddenly the lights lining the top of the building went out, leaving him in what at first seemed
like utter darkness. They're on a timer, he thought, waiting for his eyes to adjust. A pretty short one. Or
maybe they re just getting tired, like everything else the Old People left behind.
His eyes readapted to the moonlight and he could see the entry-box again. He had a pretty good idea of what
the verbal entry code must be. He pushed the button.
"WELCOME TO ARC QUADRANT OUTPOST 16," said a voice. Jake jumped back, stifling a cry. He had
expected a voice, but not one so eerily like that of Blaine the Mono. He almost expected it to drop into a John
Wayne drawl and call him little trailhand. "THIS IS A MEDIUM SECURITY OUTPOST. PLEASE GIVE
THE VERBAL ENTRY CODE. YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS. NINE… EIGHT…"
"Nineteen," Jake said.
"INCORRECT ENTRY CODE. YOU MAY RETRY ONCE. FIVE… FOUR… THREE…"
"Ninety-nine," Jake said.
"THANKYOU."
The door clicked open.
NINE
Jake and Oy walked into a room that reminded him of the vast control-area Roland had carried him through
beneath the city of Lud, as they had followed the steel ball which had guided them to Blaine's cradle. This
room was smaller, of course, but many of the dials and panels looked the same. There were chairs at some of
the consoles, the kind that would roll along the floor so that the people who worked here could move from
place to place without getting to their feet. There was a steady sigh of fresh air, but Jake could hear
occasional rough rattling sounds from the machinery driving it. And while three-quarters of the panels were
lighted, he could see a good many that were dark. Old and tired: he had been right about that. In one corner
was a grinning skeleton in the remains of a brown khaki uniform.
On one side of the room was a bank of TV monitors. They reminded Jake a little bit of his father's study at
home, although father had had only three screens—one for each network— and here there were… he
counted. Thirty. Three of them were fuzzy, showing pictures he couldn't really make out. Two were rolling
rapidly up and up, as if the vertical hold had fritzed out. Four were entirely dark. The other twenty-one were
projecting pictures, and Jake looked at these with growing wonder. Halfa dozen showed various expanses of
desert, including the hilltop guarded by the two misshapen cactuses. Two more showed the outpost—the
Dogan—from behind and from the driveway side. Under these were three screens showing the Dogan's
interior. One showed a room that looked like a galley or kitchen. The second showed a small bunkhouse that
looked equipped to sleep eight (in one of the bunks, an upper, Jake spied another skeleton). The third insidethe-
Dogan screen presented this room, from a high angle. Jake could see himself and Oy. There was a screen
with a stretch of the railroad tracks on it, and one showing the Little Whye from this side, moonstruck and
beautiful. On the far right was the causeway with the train-tracks crossing it.
It was the images on the other eight operating screens that astounded Jake. One showed Took's General Store,
now dark and deserted, closed up till daylight. One showed the Pavilion. Two showed the Calla high street.
Another showed Our Lady of Serenity Church, and one showed the living room of the rectory… inside the
rectory! Jake could actually see the Pere's cat, Snugglebutt, lying asleep on the hearth. The other two showed
angles of what Jake assumed was the Manni village (he had not been there).
Where in hell's name are the cameras? Jake wondered. How come nobody sees them ?
Because they were too small, he supposed. And because they'd been hidden. Smile, you're on Candid
Camera.
But the church… the rectory… those were buildings that hadn't even existed in the Calla until a few years
previous. And inside? Inside the rectory? Who had put a camera there, and when?
Jake didn't know when, but he had a terrible idea that he knew who. Thank God they'd done most of their
palavering on the porch, or outside on the lawn. But still, how much must the Wolves—or their masters—
know? How much had the infernal machines of this place, the infernal fucking machines of this place,
recorded?
And transmitted?
Jake felt pain in his hands and realized they were tightly clenched, the nails biting into his palms. He opened
them with an effort. He kept expecting the voice from the speaker-grille—the voice so much like Blaine's—
to challenge him, ask him what he was doing here. But it was mostly silent in this room of not-quite-ruin; no
sounds but the low hum of the equipment and the occasionally raspy whoosh of the air-exchangers. He
looked over his shoulder at the door and saw it had closed behind him on a pneumatic hinge. He wasn't
worried about that; from this side it would probably open easily. If it didn't, good old ninety-nine would get
him out again. He remembered introducing himself to the folken that first night in the Pavilion, a night that
already seemed a long time ago. I am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld, he had told them. The
ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine. Why had he said that? He didn't know. All he knew was that things kept
showing up again. In school, Ms. Avery had read them a poem called "The Second Coming," by William
Buder Yeats. There had been something in it about a hawk turning and turning in a widening gyre, which was
— according to Ms. Avery—a kind of circle. But here things were in a spiral, not a circle. For the Ka-Tet of
Nineteen (or of the Ninety and Nine, Jake had an idea they were really the same), things were tightening up
even as the world around them grew old, grew loose, shut down, shed pieces of itself. It was like being in the
cyclone which had carried Dorothy off to the Land of Oz, where witches were real and bumhugs ruled. To
Jake's heart it made perfect sense that they should be seeing the same things over and over, and more and
more often, because—
Movement on one of the screens caught his eye. He looked at it and saw Benny's Da' and Andy the
Messenger Robot coming over the hilltop guarded by the cactus sentries. As he watched, the spiny barrel
arms swung inward to block the road—and, perhaps, impale the prey. Andy, however, had no reason to fear
cactus spines. He swung an arm and broke one of the barrels off halfway down its length. It fell into the dust,
spurting white goo. Maybe it wasn't sap at all, Jake thought. Maybe it was blood. In any case, the cactus on
the other side swiveled away in a hurry. Andy and Ben Slightman stopped for a moment, perhaps to discuss
this. The screen's resolution wasn't clear enough to show if the human's mouth was moving or not.
Jake was seized by an awful, throat-closing panic. His body suddenly seemed too heavy, as if it were being
tugged by the gravity of a giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn. He couldn't breathe; his chest lay perfecdy flat.
This is what Goldilocks would have felt like, he thought in a faint and distant way, if she had awakened in the
little bed that was just right to hear the Three Bears coming back in downstairs. He hadn't eaten the porridge,
he hadn't broken Baby Bear's chair, but he now knew too many secrets. They boiled down to one secret. One
monstrous secret.
Now they were coming down the road. Coming to the Dogan.
Oy was looking up at him anxiously, his long neck stretched to the max, but Jake could barely see him. Black
flowers were blooming in front of his eyes. Soon he would faint. They would find him stretched out here on
the floor. Oy might try to protect him, but if Andy didn't take care of the bumbler, Ben Slightman would.
There were four dead rock-cats out there and Benny's Da' had dispatched at least one of them with his trusty
bah. One small barking billy-bumbler would be no problem for him. Would you be so cowardly, then ?
Roland asked inside his head. But why would they kill such a coward as you ? Why would they not just send
you west with the broken ones who have forgotten the faces of their fathers?
That brought him back. Most of the way, at least. He took a huge breath, yanking in air until the bottoms of
his lungs hurt. He let it out in an explosive whoosh. Then he slapped himself across the face, good and hard.
"Ake!" Oy cried in a reproving—almost shocked—voice.
"S'okay," Jake said. He looked at the monitors showing the galley and the bunkroom and decided on the
latter. There was nothing to hide behind or under in the galley. There might be a closet, but what if there
wasn't? He'd be screwed.
"Oy, to me," he said, and crossed the humming room beneath the bright white lights.
