A smile lit Eddie’s face; he shook his finger at the route-map. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, ‘You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I’ll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.’”

“Hurry up!” Jake whispered at him. “If you can do something, do it!”

“It doesn’t like silly questions,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t like silly games. And we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it.”

Eddie searched for the other riddle that had been in Jake’s Final Essay, found it, posed it.

“Blaine: when is a door not a door?”

Once again, for the first time since Susannah had asked Blaine what had four legs and flies, there came a peculiar clicking sound, like a man popping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. The pause was briefer than the one which had followed Susannah’s opening riddle, but it was still there—Eddie heard it. “WHEN IT’S A JAR, OF COURSE,” Blaine said. He sounded dour, unhappy. “THIRTEEN MINUTES AND FIVE SECONDS REMAIN BEFORE TERMINATION, EDDIE OF NEW YORK—WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?”

Eddie sat bolt upright, staring at the route-map, and although he could feel warm trickles of sweat running down his back, that smile on his face widened.

“Quit your whining, pal. If you want the privilege of smearing us all over the landscape, you’ll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren’t quite up to your standards of logic.”

“YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me? Don’t make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the game; now play it.”

Thin pink light flashed briefly out of the route-map. “You’re making him angry,” Little Blaine mourned. “Oh, you’re making him so angry.”

“Get lost, squirt,” Eddie said, not unkindly, and when the pink glow receded, once again revealing a flashing green dot that was almost on top of Topeka, Eddie said: “Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn’t fall off, too?”

“THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER.” On the last word Blaine’s voice actually dropped into a lower register, making him sound like a fourteen-year-old coping with a change of voice.

Roland’s eyes were not just gleaming now but blazing. “What do you say, Blaine? I would understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?”

“NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT—”

“Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle.”