The Dark Tower-Part 1#-2#(46)

"Because it feels hinky-di-di." Pimli, smiling a little.

"Hinky-di-di, yar." Finli did not smile; his cunning little teeth remained hidden inside his shiny brown muzzle.

Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, let's go up to The Study. Perhaps seeing all those Breakers at work will soothe you."

"P'rhaps it will," Finli said, but he still didn't smile.

Pimli said gently, "It's all right, Fin."

"I suppose," said the taheen, looking doubtfully around at the equipment, and then at Beeman and Trelawney, the two low men, who were respectfully waiting at the door for the two big bugs to finish their palaver. "I suppose 'tis." Only his heart didn't believe it. The only thing he was sure his heart believed was that there were no teleports left in Algul Siento.

Telemetry didn't lie.

SEVEN

Beeman and Trelawney saw them all the way down the oakpaneled basement corridor to the staff elevator, which was also oak-paneled. There was a fire-extinguisher on the wall of the car and another sign reminding Devar-folken that they had to work together to create a fire-free environment.

This too had been turned upside down.

Pimli's eyes met Finli's. The Master believed he saw amusement in his Security Chiefs look, but of course what he saw might have been no more than his own sense of humor, reflected back at him like a face in a mirror. Finli untacked the sign without a word and turned it rightside up. Neither of them commented on the elevator machinery, which was loud and ill-sounding. Nor on the way the car shuddered in the shaft. If it froze, escape through the upper hatch would be no problem, not even for a slighdy overweight (well …  quite overweight) fellow like Prentiss. Damli House was hardly a skyscraper, and there was plenty of help near at hand.

They reached the third floor, where the sign on the closed elevator door was rightside up. It said STAFF ONLY and PLEASE USE KEY and GO DOWN IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE REACHED THIS LEVEL IN ERROR. YOU WILL NOT BE PENALIZED IF YOU REPORT IMMEDIATELY.

As Finli produced his key-card, he said with a casualness that might have been feigned (God damn his unreadable black eyes): "Have you heard from sai Sayre?"

"No," Pimli said (rather crossly), "nor do I really expect to.

We're isolated here for a reason, deliberately forgotten in the desert just like the scientists of the Manhattan Project back in the 1940s. The last time I saw him, he told me it might be …  well, the last time I saw him."

"Relax," Finli said. "I was just asking." He swiped the keycard down its slot and the elevator door slid open with a rather hellish screee sound.

EIGHT

The Study was a long, high room in the center of Damli, also oak-paneled and rising three full stories to a glass roof that allowed the Algul's hard-won sunlight to pour in. On the balcony opposite the door throvigh which Prentiss and the Tego entered was an odd trio consisting of a ravenhead taheen named Jakli, a can-toi technician named Conroy, and two hume guards whose names Pimli could not immediately recall.

Taheen, can-toi, and humes got on together during work hours by virtue of careful-and sometimes brittle-courtesy, but one did not expect to see them socializing off-duty. And indeed the balcony was strictly off-limits when it came to "socializing."

The Breakers below were neither animals in a zoo nor exotic fish in an aquarium; Pimli (Finli O'Tego, as well) had made this point to the staff over and over. The Master of Algul Siento had only had to lobo one staff member in all his years here, a perfectly idiotic hume guard named David Burke, who had actually been throwing something-had it been peanut-shells?-down on the Breakers below. When Burke had realized the Master was serious about lobotomizing him, he begged for a second chance, promising he'd never do anything so foolish and demeaning again. Pimli had turned a deaf ear. He'd seen a chance to make an example which would stand for years, perhaps for decades, and had taken it. You could see the now truly idiotic Mr. Burke around to this day, walking on the Mall or out by Left'rds Bound'ry, mouth slack and eyes vaguely puzzled-almost know who I am, /almost remember what I did to end up like this, those eyes said. He was a living example of what simply wasn't done when one was in the presence of working Breakers. But there was no rule expressly prohibiting staff from coming up here and they all did from time to time.

Becavise it was refreshing.

For one thing, being near working Breakers made talk unnecessary. What they called "good mind" kicked in as you walked down the third-floor hall on either side, from either elevator, and when you opened the doors giving on the balcony good mind bloomed in your head, opening all sorts of perceptual doorways. Aldous Huxley, Pimli had thought on more than one occasion, would have gone absolutely bonkers up here. Sometimes one found one's heels leaving the floor in a kind of half-assed float. The stuff in your pockets tended to rise and hang in the air. Formerly baffling situations seemed to resolve themselves the moment you turned your thoughts to them. If you'd forgotten something, your five o'clock appointment or your brother-in-law's middle name, for instance, this was the place where you could remember. And even if you realized that what you'd forgotten was important, you were never distressed. Folken left the balcony with smiles on their faces even if they'd come up in the foulest of moods (a foul mood was an excellent reason to visit the balcony in the first place). It was as if some sort of happy-gas, invisible to the eye and unmeasurable by even the most sophisticated telemetry, always rose from the Breakers below.

The two of them hiled the trio across the way, then approached die wide fumed-oak railing and looked down. The room below might have been the capacious library of some richly endowed gentlemen's club in London. Softly glowing lamps, many with genuine Tiffany shades, stood on little tables or shone on the walls (oak-paneled, of course). The rugs were the most exquisite Turkish. There was a Matisse on one wall, a Rembrandt on another …  and on a third was the Mona Lisa.

The real one, as opposed to the fake hanging in the Louvre on Keystone Earth. A man stood before it with his arms clasped behind him. From up here he looked as though he were studying the painting-trying to decipher the famously enigmatic smile, maybe-but Pimli knew better. The men and women holding magazines looked as though they were reading, too, but if you were right down there you'd see that they were gazing blankly over the tops of their McCalVs and their Harper's or a littie off to one side. An eleven- or twelve-year-old girl in a gorgeous striped summer dress that might have cost sixteen hundred dollars in a Rodeo Drive kiddie boutique was sitting before a dollhouse on the hearth, but Pimli knew she wasn't paying any attention to the exquisitely made replica of Damli at all.

Thirty-three of them down there. Thirty-three in all. At eight o'clock, an hour after the artificial sun snapped off, thirty-three fresh Breakers would troop in. And there was one fellow-one and one only-who came and went just as he pleased. A fellow who'd gone under the wire and paid no penalty for it at all …  except for being brought back, that was, and for this man, that was penalty enough.

As if the thought had summoned him, the door at the end of the room opened, and Ted Brautigan slipped quietly in. He was still wearing his tweed riding cap. Daneeka Rostov looked up from the dollhouse and gave him a smile. Brautigan dropped her a wink in return. Pimli gave Finli a little nudge.

Finli: (I see him)

But it was more than seeing. They felt him. The moment Brautigan came into the room, those on the balcony-and, much more important, those on the floor-felt the powerlevel rise. They still weren't completely sure what they'd gotten in Brautigan, and the testing equipment didn't help in that regard (the old dog had blown out several pieces of it himself, and on purpose, the Master was quite sure). If there were others like him, the low men had found none on their talent hunts (now suspended; they had all the talent they needed to finish the job). One thing that did seem clear was Brautigan's talent as a facilitator, a psychic who was not just powerful by himself but was able to up the abilities of others just by being near them. Finli's thoughts, ordinarily unreadable even to Breakers, now burned in Pimli's mind like neon.

Finli: (He is extraordinary)

Pimli: (And, so far as we know, unique Have you seen the thing)

Image: Eyes growing and shrinking, growing and shrinking.

Finli: (Yes Do you know what causes it)

Pimli: (Not at all Nor care dear Finli nor care That old)

Image: An elderly mongrel with burdocks in his matted fur, limping along on three legs.

(has almost finished his work almost time to)

Image: A gun, one of the hume guards' Berettas, against the side of the old mongrel's head.

Three stories below them, the subject of their conversation picked up a newspaper (the newspapers were all old, now, old like Brautigan himself, years out of date), sat in a leatherupholstered club chair so voluminous it seemed almost to swallow him, and appeared to read.

Pimli felt the psychic force rising past them and dirough them, to the skylight and through that, too, rising to the Beam that ran directly above Algul, working against it, chipping and eroding and rubbing relentlessly against the grain. Eating holes in the magic. Working patiently to put out the eyes of the Bear.

To crack the shell of the Turtle. To break the Beam which ran from Shardik to Maturin. To topple the Dark Tower which stood between.