“The machine, yes. The threat to the rose.”

“Jake saw the rose, Roland. It was fine.”

Roland nodded. “In his when, the when of that particular day, the rose was thriving. But that doesn’t mean it will continue to do so. If the construction the sign spoke of comes... if the bulldozer comes...”

“There are other worlds than these,” Eddie said. “Remember?”

“Some things may exist only in one. In one where, in one when.” Roland lay down and looked up at the stars. “We must protect that rose,” he said. “We must protect it at all costs.”

“You think it’s another door, don’t you? One that opens on the Dark Tower.”

The gunslinger looked at him from eyes that ran with starshine. “I think it may be the Tower,” he said. “And if it’s destroyed—”

His eyes closed. He said no more.

Eddie lay awake late.

11

The new day dawned clear and bright and cold. In the strong morning sunlight, the thing Eddie had spotted the evening before was more clearly visible... but he still couldn’t tell what it was. Another riddle, and he was getting damned sick of them.

He stood squinting at it, shading his eyes from the sun, with Susannah on one side of him and Jake on the other. Roland was back by the campfire, packing what he called their gunna, a word which seemed to mean all their worldly goods. He appeared not to be concerned with the thing up ahead, or to know what it was.

How far away? Thirty miles? Fifty? The answer seemed to depend on how far could you see in all this flat land, and Eddie didn’t know the answer. One thing he felt quite sure of was that Jake had been right on at least two counts—it was some kind of building, and it sprawled across all four lanes of the highway. It must; how else could they see it? It would have been lost in the thinny... wouldn’t it?

Maybe it’s standing in one of those open patches—what Suze calls “the holes in the clouds.” Or maybe the thinny ends before we get that far. Or maybe it’s a goddam hallucination. In any case, you might as well put it out of your mind for the time being. Got a little more turnpikin’ to do.

Still, the building held him. It looked like an airy Arabian Nights confection of blue and gold... except Eddie had an idea that the blue was stolen from the sky and the gold from the newly risen sun.

“Roland, come here a second!”

At first he didn’t think the gunslinger would, but then Roland cinched a rawhide lace on Susannah’s pack, rose, put his hands in the small of his back, stretched, and walked over to them.

“Gods, one would think no one in this band has the wit to housekeep but me,” Roland said.