Chapter IV

TOPEKA

1

Jake stood on the slightly tilted roof of Blaine the Mono, looking southeast along the Path of the Beam. The wind riffled his hair (now quite long and decidedly un-Piperish) back from his temples and forehead in waves. His eyes were wide with surprise.

He didn’t know what he had expected to see—a smaller and more provincial version of Lud, perhaps—but what he had not expected was what loomed above the trees of a nearby park. It was a green roadsign (against the dull gray autumn sky, it almost screamed with color) with a blue shield mounted on it:

Roland joined him, lifted Oy gently out of his shirt, and put him down. The bumbler sniffed the pink surface of Blaine’s roof, then looked toward the front of the mono. Here the train’s smooth bullet shape was broken by crumpled metal which had peeled back in jagged wings. Two dark slashes—they began at the mono’s tip and extended to a point about ten yards from where Jake and Roland stood—gored the roof in parallel lines. At the end of each was a wide, flat metal pole painted in stripes of yellow and black. These seemed to jut from the top of the mono at a point just forward of the Barony Coach. To Jake they looked a little like football goalposts.

“Those are the piers he talked about hitting,” Susannah murmured.

Roland nodded.

“We got off lucky, big boy, you know it? If this thing had been going much faster...”

“Ka,” Eddie said from behind them. He sounded as if he might be smiling.

Roland nodded. “Just so. Ka.”

Jake dismissed the transteel goalposts and turned back toward the sign. He was half-convinced it would be gone, or that it would say something else (MID-WORLD TOLL ROAD, perhaps, or BEWARE OF DEMONS), but it was still there and still said the same thing.

“Eddie? Susannah? Do you see that?”

They looked along his pointing finger. For a moment—one long enough for Jake to fear he was having a hallucination—neither of them said anything. Then, softly, Eddie said: “Holy shit. Are we back home? If we are, where are all the people? And if something like Blaine has been stopping off in Topeka—our Topeka, Topeka, Kansas—how come I haven’t seen anything about it on Sixty Minutes?”

“What’s Sixty Minutes?” Susannah asked. She was shading her eyes, looking southeast toward the sign.

“TV show,” Eddie said. “You missed it by five or ten years. Old white guys in ties. Doesn’t matter. That sign—”

“It’s Kansas, all right,” Susannah said. “Our Kansas. I guess.” She had spotted another sign, just visible over the trees. Now she pointed until Jake, Eddie, and Roland had all seen it:

“There a Kansas in your world, Roland?”