Meg blinked at the blurred figures of Charles and her father, and wondered why they did not clear. Then she grabbed her own glasses out of her pocket and put them on, and her myopic eyes were able to focus.
Charles Wallace was tapping one foot impatiently against the floor. "IT is not pleased," he said. "IT is not pleased at all."
Mr. Murry released Meg and knelt in front of the little boy. "Charles," his voice was tender. "Charles Wallace."
"What do you want?"
"I'm your father, Charles. Look at me."
The pale blue eyes seemed to focus on Mr. Murry's face. "Hi, Pop," came an insolent voice.
"That isn't Charles!" Meg cried. "Oh, Father, Charles isn't like that. IT has him."
"Yes." Mr. Murry sounded tired. "I see." He held his arms out. "Charles. Come here."
Father will make it all right, Meg thought. Everything will be all right now.
Charles did not move toward the outstretched arms. He stood a few feet away from his father, and he did not look at him.
"Look at me," Mr. Murry commanded.
"No."
Mr. Murry's voice became harsh. "When you speak to me you will say 'No, Father,' or 'No, sir.' "
"Come off it, Pop," came the cold voice from Charles Wallace--Charles Wallace who, outside Camazotz, had been strange, had been different, but never rude. "You're not the boss around here."
Meg could see Calvin pounding again on the glass wall. "Calvin!" she called.
"He can't hear you," Charles said. He made a horrible face at Calvin, and then he thumbed his nose.
"Who's Calvin?" Mr. Murry asked.
"He's--" Meg started, but Charles Wallace cut her short.
"You'll have to defer your explanations. Let's go."
"Go where?"
"To IT."
"No," Mr. Murry said. "You can't take Meg there."
"Oh, can't I!"
"No, you cannot. You're my son, Charles, and I'm afraid you will have to do as I say."
"But he isn't Charles!" Meg cried in anguish. Why didn't her father understand? "Charles is nothing like that, Father! You know he's nothing like that!"
"He was only a baby when I left," Mr. Murry said heavily.
"Father, it's IT talking through Charles. IT isn't Charles. He's--he's bewitched."
"Fairy tales again," Charles said.
"You know IT, Father?" Meg asked.
"Yes."
"Have you seen IT?"
"Yes, Meg." Again his voice sounded exhausted. "Yes. I have." He turned to Charles. "You know she wouldn't be able to hold out."
"Exactly," Charles said.
"Father, you can't talk to him as though he were Charles! Ask Calvin! Calvin will tell you."
"Come along," Charles Wallace said. "We must go." He held up his hand carelessly and walked out of the cell, and there was nothing for Meg and Mr. Murry to do but to follow.
As they stepped into the corridor Meg caught at her father's sleeve. "Calvin, here's Father!"
Calvin turned anxiously toward them. His freckles and his hair stood out brilliantly against his white face.
"Make your introductions later," Charles Wallace said. "IT does not like to be kept waiting." He walked down the corridor, his gait seeming to get more jerky with each step. The others followed, walking rapidly to keep up.
"Does your father know about the Mrs W's?" Calvin asked Meg.
"There hasn't been time for anything. Everything's awful." Despair settled like a stone in the pit of Meg's stomach. She had been so certain that the moment she found her father everything would be all right. Everything would be settled. All the problems would be taken out of her hands. She would no longer be responsible for anything.
And instead of this happy and expected outcome, they seemed to be encountering all kinds of new troubles.
"He doesn't understand about Charles," she whispered to Calvin, looking unhappily at her father's back as he walked behind the little boy.
"Where are we going?" Calvin asked.
"To IT. Calvin, I don't want to go! I can't!" She stopped, but Charles continued his jerky pace.
"We can't leave Charles," Calvin said. "They wouldn't like it."
"Who wouldn't?"
"Mrs Whatsit & Co."
"But they've betrayed us! They brought us here to this terrible place and abandoned us!"
Calvin looked at her in surprise. "You sit down and give up if you like," he said. "I'm sticking with Charles." He ran to keep up with Charles Wallace and Mr. Murry.
"I didn't mean--" Meg started, and pounded after them.
Just as she caught up with them Charles Wallace stopped and raised his hand, and there was the elevator again, its yellow light sinister. Meg felt her stomach jerk as the swift descent began. They were silent until the motion stopped, silent as they followed Charles Wallace through long corridors and out into the street. The CENTRAL Central Intelligence Building loomed up, stark and angular, behind them.
--Do something, Meg implored her father silently.--Do something. Help. Save us.
They turned a corner, and at the end of the street was a strange, domelike building. Its walls glowed with a flicker of violet flame. Its silvery roof pulsed with ominous light. The light was neither warm nor cold, but it seemed to reach out and touch them. This, Meg was sure, must be where IT was waiting for them.
They moved down the street, more slowly now, and as they came closer to the domed building the violet flickering seemed to reach out, to envelop them, to suck them in: they were inside.
Meg could feel a rhythmical pulsing. It was a pulsing not only about her, but in her as well, as though the rhythm of her heart and lungs was no longer her own but was being worked by some outside force. The closest she had come to the feeling before was when she had been practicing artificial respiration with Girl Scouts, and the leader, an immensely powerful woman, had been working on Meg, intoning OUT goes the bad air, IN comes the good! while her heavy hands pressed, released, pressed, released.
Meg gasped, trying to breathe at her own normal rate, but the inexorable beat within and without continued. For a moment she could neither move nor look around to see what was happening to the others. She simply had to stand there, trying to balance herself into the artificial rhythm of her heart and lungs. Her eyes seemed to swim in a sea of red.
Then things began to clear, and she could breathe without gasping like a beached fish, and she could look about the great, circular, domed building. It was completely empty except for the pulse, which seemed a tangible thing, and a round dais exactly in the center. On the dais lay--what? Meg could not tell, and yet she knew that it was from this that the rhythm came. She stepped forward tentatively. She felt that she was beyond fear now. Charles Wallace was no longer Charles Wallace. Her father had been found but he had not made everything all right. Instead everything was worse than ever, and her adored father was bearded and thin and white and not omnipotent after all. No matter what happened next, things could be no more terrible or frightening than they already were.
Oh, couldn't they?
As she continued to step slowly forward, at last she realized what the Thing on the dais was.
IT was a brain.
A disembodied brain. An oversized brain, just enough larger than normal to be completely revolting and terrifying. A living brain. A brain that pulsed and quivered, that seized and commanded. No wonder the brain was called IT. IT was the most horrible, the most repellent thing she had ever seen, far more nauseating than anything she had ever imagined with her conscious mind, or that had ever tormented her in her most terrible nightmares.
But as she had felt she was beyond fear, so now she was beyond screaming.
She looked at Charles Wallace, and he stood there, turned toward IT, his jaw hanging slightly loose; and his vacant blue eyes slowly twirled.
Oh, yes, things could always be worse. These twirling eyes within Charles Wallace's soft round face made Meg icy cold inside and out.
She loo
ked away from Charles Wallace and at her father. Her father stood there with Mrs Who's glasses still perched on his nose--did he remember that he had them on?--and he shouted to Calvin. "Don't give in!"
"I won't! Help Meg!" Calvin yelled back. It was absolutely silent within the dome, and yet Meg realized that the only way to speak was to shout with all the power possible. For everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned, was the rhythm, and as it continued to control the systole and diastole of her heart, the intake and outlet of her breath, the red miasma began to creep before her eyes again, and she was afraid that she was going to lose consciousness, and if she did that she would be completely in the power of IT.
Mrs Whatsit had said, "Meg, I give you your faults."
What were her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness. Yes, it was to her faults that she turned to save herself now.
With an immense effort she tried to breathe against the rhythm of IT. But ITs power was too strong. Each time she managed to take a breath out of rhythm an iron hand seemed to squeeze her heart and lungs.
Then she remembered that when they had been standing before the man with red eyes, and the man with red eyes had been intoning the multiplication table at them, Charles Wallace had fought against his power by shouting out nursery rhymes, and Calvin by the Gettysburg Address.
"Georgie, porgie, pudding and pie," she yelled. "Kissed the girls and made them cry."
That was no good. It was too easy for nursery rhymes to fall into the rhythm of IT.
She didn't know the Gettysburg Address. How did the Declaration of Independence begin? She had memorized it only that winter, not because she was required to at school, but simply because she liked it.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident!" she shouted, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
As she cried out the words she felt a mind moving in on her own, felt IT seizing, squeezing her brain. Then she realized that Charles Wallace was speaking, or being spoken through by IT.
"But that's exactly what we have on Camazotz. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike."
For a moment her brain reeled with confusion. Then came a moment of blazing truth. "No!" she cried triumphantly. "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"
"Good girl, Meg!" her father shouted at her.
But Charles Wallace continued as though there had been no interruption. "In Camazotz all are equal. In Camazotz everybody is the same as everybody else," but he gave her no argument, provided no answer, and she held on to her moment of revelation.
Like and equal are two entirely different things.
For the moment she had escaped from the power of IT.
But how?
She knew that her own puny little brain was no match for this great, bodiless, pulsing, writhing mass on the round dais. She shuddered as she looked at IT. In the lab at school there was a human brain preserved in formaldehyde, and the seniors preparing for college had to take it out and look at it and study it. Meg had felt that when that day came she would never be able to endure it. But now she thought that if only she had a dissecting knife she would slash at IT, cutting ruthlessly through cerebrum, cerebellum.
Words spoke within her, directly this time, not through Charles. "Don't you realize that if you destroy me, you also destroy your little brother?"
If that great brain were cut, were crushed, would every mind under ITs control on Camazotz die, too? Charles Wallace and the man with red eyes and the man who ran the number-one spelling machine on the second-grade level and all the children playing ball and skipping rope and all the mothers and all the men and women going in and out of the buildings? Was their life completely dependent on IT? Were they beyond all possibility of salvation?
She felt the brain reaching at her again as she let her stubborn control slip. Red fog glazed her eyes.
Faintly she heard her father's voice, though she knew he was shouting at the top of his lungs. "The periodic table of elements, Meg! Say it!"
A picture flashed into her mind of winter evenings spent sitting before the open fire and studying with her father. "Hydrogen. Helium," she started obediently. Keep them in their proper atomic order. What next. She knew it. Yes. "Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine." She shouted the words at her father, turned away from IT. "Neon. Sodium. Magnesium. Aluminum. Silicon. Phosphorus."
"Too rhythmical," her father shouted. "What's the square root of five?"
For a moment she was able to concentrate. Rack your brains yourself, Meg. Don't let IT rack them. "The square root of five is 2.236," she cried triumphantly, "because 2.236 times 2.236 equals 5!"
"What's the square root of seven?"
"The square root of seven is--" She broke off. She wasn't holding out. IT was getting at her, and she couldn't concentrate, not even on math, and soon she, too, would be absorbed in IT, she would be an IT.
"Tesser, sir!" she heard Calvin's voice through the red darkness. "Tesser!"
She felt her father grab her by the wrist, there was a terrible jerk that seemed to break every bone in her body, then the dark nothing of tessering.
If tessering with Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which had been a strange and fearful experience, it was nothing like tessering with her father. After all, Mrs Which was experienced at it, and Mr. Murry--how did he know anything about it at all? Meg felt that she was being torn apart by a whirlwind. She was lost in an agony of pain that finally dissolved into the darkness of complete unconsciousness.
TEN
Absolute Zero
The first sign of returning consciousness was cold. Then sound. She was aware of voices that seemed to be traveling through her across an arctic waste. Slowly the icy sounds cleared and she realized that the voices belonged to her father and Calvin. She did not hear Charles Wallace. She tried to open her eyes but the lids would not move. She tried to sit up, but she could not stir. She struggled to turn over, to move her hands, her feet, but nothing happened. She knew that she had a body, but it was as lifeless as marble.
She heard Calvin's frozen voice: "Her heart is beating so slowly--"
Her father's voice: "But it's beating. She's alive."
"Barely."
"We couldn't find a heartbeat at all at first. We thought she was dead."
"Yes."
"And then we could feel her heart, very faintly, the beats very far apart. And then it got stronger. So all we have to do is wait." Her father's words sounded brittle in her ears, as though they were being chipped out of ice.
Calvin: "Yes. You're right, sir."
She wanted to call out to them. "I'm alive! I'm very much alive! Only I've been turned to stone."
But she could not call out anymore than she could move.
Calvin's voice again. "Anyhow you got her away from IT. You got us both away and we couldn't have gone on holding out. IT's so much more powerful and strong than--How did we stay out, sir? How did we manage as long as we did?"
Her father: "Because IT's completely unused to being refused. That's the only reason I could keep from being absorbed, too. No mind has tried to hold out against IT for so many thousands of centuries that certain centers have become soft and atrophied through lack of use. If you hadn't come to me when you did I'm not sure how much longer I would have lasted. I was on the point of giving in."
Calvin: "Oh, no, sir--"
Her father: "Yes. Nothing seemed important anymore but rest, and of course IT offered me complete rest. I had almost come to the conclusion that I was wrong to fight, that IT was right after all, and everything I believed in most passionately was nothing but a madman's dream. But then you and Meg came in to me, broke through my prison, and hope and faith returned."
Calvin: "Sir, why were you on Camazotz at all? Was there a particular reason for going there?"
Her father, with a frigid laugh: "Going to Camazotz was a complete acc
ident. I never intended even to leave our own solar system. I was heading for Mars. Tessering is even more complicated than we had expected."
Calvin: "Sir, how was IT able to get Charles Wallace before it got Meg and me?"
Her father: "From what you've told me it's because Charles Wallace thought he could deliberately go into IT and return. He trusted too much to his own strength--listen!--I think the heartbeat is getting stronger!"
His words no longer sounded to her quite as frozen. Was it his words that were ice, or her ears? Why did she hear only her father and Calvin? Why didn't Charles Wallace speak?
Silence. A long silence. Then Calvin's voice again: "Can't we do anything? Can't we look for help? Do we just have to go on waiting?"
Her father: "We can't leave her. And we must stay together. We must not be afraid to take time."
Calvin: "You mean we were? We rushed into things on Camazotz too fast, and Charles Wallace rushed in too fast, and that's why he got caught?"
"Maybe. I'm not sure. I don't know enough yet. Time is different on Camazotz, anyhow. Our time, inadequate though it is, at least is straightforward. It may not be even fully one-dimensional, because it can't move back and forth on its line, only ahead; but at least it's consistent in its direction. Time on Camazotz seems to be inverted, turned in on itself. So I have no idea whether I was imprisoned in that column for centuries or only for minutes." Silence for a moment. Then her father's voice again. "I think I feel a pulse in her wrist now."
Meg could not feel his fingers against her wrist. She could not feel her wrist at all. Her body was still stone, but her mind was beginning to be capable of movement. She tried desperately to make some kind of a sound, a signal to them, but nothing happened.
Their voices started again. Calvin: "About your project, sir. Were you on it alone?"
Her father: "Oh, no. There were half a dozen of us working on it and I daresay a number of others we don't know about. Certainly we weren't the only nation to investigate along that line. It's not really a new idea. But we did try very hard not to let it be known abroad that we were trying to make it practicable."
"Did you come to Camazotz alone? Or were there others with you?"
"I came alone. You see, Calvin, there was no way to try it out ahead with rats or monkeys or dogs. And we had no idea whether it would really work or whether it would be complete bodily disintegration. Playing with time and space is a dangerous game."
A Wrinkle in Time Page 12
