The correct answer to a joke-riddle Eddie had first heard in the alley behind Dahlie’s, or at some similar gathering-point, but Blaine had apparently paid a price for forcing his mind into a channel that could conceive it: the Barony Coach lights were flashing more wildly than ever, and Eddie could hear a low humming from inside the walls—the kind of sound your stereo amp made just before its shit blew up.

Pink light stuttered from the route-map. “Stop!” Little Blaine cried, his voice so wavery it sounded like the voice of a character from an old Warner Bros. cartoon. “Stop it, you’re killing him!”

What do you think he’s trying to do to us, squirt? Eddie thought.

He considered shooting Blaine one Jake had told while they’d been sitting around the campfire that night—What’s green, weighs a hundred tons, and lives at the bottom of the ocean? Moby Snot!—and then didn’t. He wanted to stick further inside the bounds of logic than that one allowed... and he could do it. He didn’t think he would have to get much more surreal than the level of, say, a third-grader with a fair-to-good collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards in order to fuck Blaine up royally... and permanently. Because no matter how many emotions his fancy dipolar circuits had allowed him to mimic, he was still an it—a computer. Even following Eddie this far into riddledom’s Twilight Zone had caused Blaine’s sanity to totter.

“Why do people go to bed, Blaine?”

“BECAUSE... BECAUSE... GODS DAMN YOU, BECAUSE...”

A low squalling started up from beneath them, and suddenly the Barony Coach swayed violently from right to left. Susannah screamed. Jake was thrown into her lap. The gunslinger grabbed them both.

“BECAUSE THE BED WON’T COME TO THEM, GODS DAMN YOU! NINE MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS!”

“Give up, Blaine,” Eddie said. “Stop before I have to blow your mind completely. If you don’t quit, it’s going to happen. We both know it.”

“NO!”

“I got a million of these puppies. Been hearing them my whole life. They stick to my mind the way flies stick to flypaper. Hey, with some people it’s recipes. So what do you say? Want to give?”

“NO! NINE MINUTES AND THIRTY SECONDS!”

“Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby cross the road?”

The mono took another of those gigantic lurches; Eddie didn’t understand how it could still stay on its track after that, but somehow it did. The screaming from beneath them grew louder; the walls, floor, and ceiling of the car began to cycle madly between opacity and transparency. At one moment they were enclosed, at the next they were rushing over a gray daylight landscape that stretched flat and featureless to a horizon which ran across the world in a straight line.