Quick staggered backward as the man’s hands shot out with the flickery speed of heat lightning. One broke the chain which held the tiny glass-enclosed pendulum clock; the other stripped Jake Chambers’s Seiko from his forearm.

“I’ll just take these, shall I?” Fannin the Wizard smiled charmingly, his lips modestly closed over those awful teeth. “Or do you object?”

“No,” Quick said, surrendering the last symbols of his long leadership without a qualm (without, in fact, even being aware that he was doing so). “Be my guest.”

“Thank you, Andrew,” the dark man said softly. “Now we must step lively—I’m expecting a drastic change in the atmosphere of these environs in the next five minutes or so. We must get to the nearest closet where gas masks are stored before that happens, and it’s apt to be a near thing. I could survive the change quite nicely, but I’m afraid you might have some difficulties.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Andrew Quick said. His head had begun to throb again, and his mind was whirling.

“Nor do you need to,” the stranger said smoothly. “Come, Andrew— I think we should hurry. Busy, busy day, eh? With luck, Blaine will fry them right on the platform, where they are no doubt still standing—he’s become very eccentric over the years, poor fellow. But I think we should hurry, just the same.”

He slid his arm over Quick’s shoulders and, giggling, led him through the hatchway Roland and Jake had used only a few minutes before.

VI

RIDDLE AND WASTE LANDS

1

“ALL RIGHT,” ROLAND SAID. “Tell me his riddle.”

“What about all the people out there?” Eddie asked, pointing across the wide, pillared Plaza of the Cradle and toward the city beyond. “What can we do for them?”

“Nothing,” Roland said, “but it’s still possible that we may be able to do something for ourselves. Now what was the riddle?”

Eddie looked toward the streamlined shape of the mono. “He said we’d have to prime the pump to get him going. Only his pump primes backward. Does it mean anything to you?”

Roland thought it over carefully, then shook his head. He looked down at Jake. “Any ideas, Jake?”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t even see a pump.”

“That’s probably the easy part,” Roland said. “We say he and him instead of it and that because Blaine sounds like a living being, but he’s still a machine—a sophisticated one, but a machine. He started his own engines, but it must take some sort of code or combination to open the gate and the train doors.”

“We better hurry up,” Jake said nervously. “It’s got to be two or three minutes since he last talked to us. At least.”

“Don’t count on it,” Eddie said gloomily. “Time’s weird over here.”

“Still—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Eddie glanced toward Susannah, but she was sitting astride Roland’s hip and looking at the numeric diamond with a daydreamy expression on her face. He looked back at Roland. “I’m pretty sure you’re right about it being a combination—that must be what all those number-pads are for.” He raised his voice. “Is that it, Blaine? Have we got at least that much right?”