“That’s impossible,” Susannah said quickly, fearfully. “Even if you walked the whole distance it couldn’t take twenty years.”

“Well, you have to allow for stops to write postcards and drink beer,” Eddie said, but they both ignored him.

“I didn’t walk but rode most of the distance on horseback,” Roland said. “I was—slowed up, shall we say?—every now and then, but for most of that time I was moving. Moving away from John Farson, who led the revolt which toppled the world I grew up in and who wanted my head on a pole in his courtyard—he had good reason to want that, I suppose, since I and my compatriots were responsible for the deaths of a great many of his followers—and because I stole something he held very dear.”

“What, Roland?” Eddie asked curiously.

Roland shook his head. “That’s a story for another day... or maybe never. For now, think not of that but of this: I’ve come many thousands of miles. Because the world is growing.”

“A thing like that just can’t happen,” Eddie reiterated, but he was badly shaken, all the same. “There’d be earthquakes... floods... tidal waves... I don’t know what all...”

“Look!” Roland said furiously. “Just look around you! What do you see? A world that is slowing down like a child’s top even as it speeds up and moves on in some other way none of us understand. Look at your kills, Eddie! Look at your kills, for your father’s sake!”

He took two strides toward the stream, picked up the steel snake, examined it briefly, and tossed it to Eddie, who caught it with his left hand. The snake broke in two pieces as he did so.

“You see? It’s exhausted. All the creatures we found here were exhausted. If we hadn’t come, they would have died before long, anyway. Just as the bear would have died.”

“The bear had some sort of disease,” Susannah said.

The gunslinger nodded. “Parasites which attacked the natural parts of its body. But why did they never attack it before?”

Susannah did not reply.

Eddie was examining the snake. Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire. Yet he could see flecks of rust, not just on the surface of the half-snake he still held, but in its guts as well. And there was a patch of wetness where either oil had leaked out or water had seeped in. This moisture had rotted away some of the wires, and a greenish stuff that looked like moss had grown over several of the thumbnail-sized circuit boards.

Eddie turned the snake over. A steel plate proclaimed it to be the work of North Central Positronics, Ltd. There was a serial number, but no name. Probably too unimportant to name, he thought. Just a sophisticated mechanical Roto-Rooter designed to give old Br’er Bear an enema every once in a while, keep him regular, or something equally disgusting.