The patients were already gone, of course; he'd had them out of their beds and down the stairs at the first bray of the smoke detector, at the first whiff of smoke. A number of orderlies-gutless wonders, and he knew who each of them was, oh yes, and a complete report would be made when the time came-had fled with the sickfolk, but five had stayed, including his personal assistant, Jack London. Gangli was proud of them, although one could not have told it from his hectoring voice as he skated up and down, up and down, in the thickening smoke.
"Get the papers, d'ye hear? You better, by all the gods that ever walked or crawled! You better!"
A red glare shot in through the window. Some sort of weapon, for it blew in the glass wall that separated his office from the ward and set his favorite easy-chair a-smolder.
Gangli ducked and skated under the laser beam, never slowing.
"Gan-a-damn!" cried one of the orderlies. He was a hume, extraordinarily ugly, his eyes bulging from his pale face. "What in the hell was th-"
"Never mind!" Gangli bawled. "Never mind what it was, you pissface clown! Get the papers! Get my motherfucking papers!"
From somewhere in front-the Mall?-came the hideous approaching clang-and-yowl of some rescue vehicle. "STAND CLEAR!" Gangli heard. "THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!"
Gangli had never heard of such a thing as Fire-Response Team Bravo, but there was so much they didn't know about this place. Why, he could barely use a third of the equipment in his own surgical suite! Never mind, the thing that mattered right now-
Before he could finish his thought, the gas-pods behind the kitchen blew up. There was a tremendous roar-seemingly from directly beneath them-and Gangli Tristum was thrown into the air, the metal wheels on his roller skates spinning.
The others were thrown as well, and suddenly the smoky air was full of flying papers. Looking at them, knowing that the papers would burn and he would be lucky not to burn with them, a clear thought came to Dr. Gangli: the end had come early.
FIFTEEN
Roland heard the telepathic command
(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP. YOU WON'T BE
begin to beat in his mind. It was time. He nodded at Jake and the Orizas flew. Their eerie whistling wasn't loud in the general cacophony, yet one of the guards must have heard something coming, because he was beginning to pivot when the plate's sharpened edge took his head off and tumbled it backward into the compound, the eyelashes fluttering in bewildered surprise. The headless body took two steps and then collapsed with its arms over the rail, blood pouring from the neck in a gaudy stream. The other guard was already down.
Eddie rolled effortlessly beneath the soo LINE boxcar and bounced to his feet on the compound side. Two more automated fire engines had come bolting out of the station hitherto hidden by the hardware store facade. They were wheelless, seeming to run on cushions of compressed air. Somewhere toward the north end of the campus (for so Eddie's mind persisted in identifying the Devar-Toi), something exploded. Good.
Lovely.
Roland and Jake took fresh plates from the dwindling supply and used them to cut through the three runs of fence.
The high-voltage one parted with a bitter, sizzling crack and a brief blink of blue fire. Then they were in. Moving quickly and without speaking, they ran past the now-unguarded towers with Oy trailing closely at Jake's heels. Here was an alley running between Henry Graham's Drug Store amp; Soda Fountain and the Pleasantville Book Store.
At the head of the alley, they looked out and saw that Main Street was currently empty, although a tangy electric smell (a subway-station smell, Eddie thought) from the last two fire engines still hung in the air, making the overall stench even worse. In the distance, fire-sirens whooped and smoke detectors brayed. Here in Pleasantville, Eddie couldn't help but think of the Main Street in Disneyland: no litter in the gutters, no rude graffiti on the walls, not even any dust on the plate-glass windows.
This was where homesick Breakers came when they needed a little whiff of America, he supposed, but didn't any of them want anything better, anything more realistic, than this plastic-fantastic still life? Maybe it looked more inviting with folks on the sidewalks and in the stores, but that was hard to believe. Hard for him to believe, at least. Maybe it was only a city boy's chauvinism.
Across from them were Pleasantville Shoes, Gay Paree Fashions, Hair Today, and the Gem Theater (COME IN IT'S KOOL INSIDE said the banner hanging from the bottom of the marquee). Roland raised a hand, motioning Eddie and Jake across to that side of the street. It was there, if all went as he hoped (it almost never did), that they would set their ambush.
They crossed in a crouch, Oy still scurrying at Jake's heel. So far everything seemed to be working like a charm, and that made the gunslinger nervous, indeed.
SIXTEEN
Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a smallscale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.
Never mind. We have reached that point, the one where the Battle of Algul Siento took on a life of its own, and all I can do now is point here and there and hope you can bring your own order out of the general chaos.
SEVENTEEN
Trampas, the eczema-plagued low man who inadvertently let Ted in on so much, rushed to the stream of Breakers who were fleeing from Damli House and grabbed one, a scrawny excarpenter with a receding hairline named Birdie McCann.
"Birdie, what is it?" Trampas shouted. He was currently wearing his thinking-cap, which meant he could not share in the telepathic pulse all around him. "What's happening, do you kn-"
"Shooting!" Birdie yelled, pulling free. "Shooting! They're out there!" He pointed vaguely behind him.
"Who? How m-"
"Watch out you idiots it's not slowing dozun!" yelled Gaskie O'Tego, from somewhere behind Trampas arid McCann.
Trampas looked up and was horrified to see the lead fire engine come roaring and swaying along the center of the Mall, red lights flashing, two stainless-steel robot firemen now clinging to the back. Pimli, Finli, and Jakli leaped aside. So did Tassa the houseboy. But Tammy Kelly lay facedown on the grass in a spreading soup of blood. She had been flattened by Fire-Response Team Bravo, which had not actually scrambled to fight a fire in over eight hundred years. Her complaining days were over.
And-
"STAND CLEAR!" blared the fire engine. Behind it, two more engines swerved gaudily around either side of Warden's House. Once again Tassa the houseboy barely leaped in time to save his skin. "THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!" Some sort of metallic node rose from the center of the engine, split open, and produced a steel whirligig that began to spray highpressure streams of water in eight different directions. "MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!"
And-
James Cagney-the taheen who was standing with Gaskie in the foyer of the Feveral Hall dormitory when the trouble started, remember him?-saw what was going to happen and began yelling at the guards who were staggering out of Damli's west wing, red-eyed and coughing, some with their pants on fire, a few-oh, praise Gan and Bessa and all the gods-with weapons.
Cag screamed at them to get out of the way and could hardly hear himself in the cacophony. He saw Joey Rastosovich pull two of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid bump aside another. A few of the coughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire engine and scattered on their own. Then Fire-
Response Team Bravo was plowing through the guards from the west wing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli House, spraying water to every point of the compass.
And-
"Dear Christ, no," Pimli Prentiss moaned. He clapped his hands over his eyes. Finli, on the other hand, was helpless to look away. He saw a low man-Ben Alexander, he was quite sure-chewed beneath the firetruck's huge wheels. He saw another struck by the grille and mashed against the side of Damli House as the engine crashed, spraying boards and glass, then breaking through a bulkhead which had been partially concealed by a bed of sickly flowers. One wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwell and a robot voice began to boom,
"ACCIDENT! NOTIFY THE STATION! ACCIDENT!"
No shit, Sherlock, Finli thought, looking at the blood on the grass with a kind of sick wonder. How many of his men and his valuable charges had the goddamned malfunctioning firetruck mowed down? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen?
From behind Damli House came that terrifying chow-chowchow sound once again, the sound of automatic weapons fire.
A fat Breaker named Waverlyjostled him. Finli snared him before Waverly could fly on by. "What happened? Who told you to go south?" For Finli, unlike Trampas, wasn't wearing any sort of thinking-cap and the message
(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON'T BE HURT)
was slamming into his head so hard and loud it was nearly impossible to think of anything else.
Beside him, Pimli-struggling to gather his wits-seized on the beating thought and managed one of his own: That's almost got to be Brautigan, grabbing an idea and amplifying it that way. Who else could?
And-
Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then Jakli and shouted at them to gather up all the armed guards and put them to work flanking the Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall and the streets that flanked the Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey eyes-panic-eyes-and he could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next two engines with their sirens whooping. The larger of the pair struck two of the Breakers, bearing them to the ground and running them over. One of these new casualties was Joey Rastosovich. When the engine had passed, beating at the grass with its compressed-air vents,