Eddie wanted his money’s worth.

“You can go through by yourself,” Eddie said slowly.

“Yes.”

“Sort of.”

“Yes.”

“You wind up in her head. Like you wound up in mine.”

“Yes.”

“So you can hitchhike into my world, but that’s all.”

Roland said nothing. Hitchhike was one of the words Eddie sometimes used that he didn’t exactly understand . . . but he caught the drift.

“But you could go through in your body. Like at Balazar’s.” He was talking out loud but really talking to himself. “Except you’d need me for that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then take me with you.”

The gunslinger opened his mouth, but Eddie was already rushing on.

“Not now, I don’t mean now,” he said. “I know it would cause a riot or some goddam thing if we just . . . popped out over there.” He laughed rather wildly. “Like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, except without any hat, sure I did. We’ll wait until she’s alone, and—”

“No.”

“I’ll come back with you,” Eddie said. “I swear it, Roland. I mean, I know you got a job to do, and I know I’m a part of it. I know you saved my ass at Customs, but I think I saved yours at Balazar’s—now what do you think?”

“I think you did,” Roland said. He remembered the way Eddie had risen up from behind the desk, regardless of the risk, and felt an instant of doubt.

But only an instant.

“So? Peter pays Paul. One hand washes the other. All I want to do is go back for a few hours. Grab some take-out chicken, maybe a box of Dunkin Donuts.” Eddie nodded toward the doorway, where things had begun to move again. “So what do you say?”

“No,” the gunslinger said, but for a moment he was hardly thinking about Eddie. That movement up the aisle—the Lady, whoever she was, wasn’t moving the way an ordinary person moved—wasn’t moving, for instance, the way Eddie had moved when Roland looked through his eyes, or (now that he stopped to think of it, which he never had before, any more than he had ever stopped and really noticed the constant presence of his own nose in the lower range of his peripheral vision) the way he moved himself. When one walked, vision became a mild pendulum: left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg, the world rocking back and forth so mildly and gently that after awhile—shortly after you began to walk, he supposed—you simply ignored it. There was none of that pendulum movement in the Lady’s walk—she simply moved smoothly up the aisle, as if riding along tracks. Ironically, Eddie had had this same perception . . . only to Eddie it had looked like a SteadiCam shot. He had found this perception comforting because it was familiar.

To Roland it was alien . . . but then Eddie was breaking in, his voice shrill.

“Well why not? Just why the fuck not?”