“He’s a physicist.”
“Sure, we all know that. And he’s supposed to have left your mother and gone off with some dame.”
Meg jerked up from the stone on which she was perched, but Calvin grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back down. “Hold it, kid. I didn’t say anything you hadn’t heard already, did I?”
“No,” Meg said, but continued to pull away. “Let me go.”
“Come on, calm down. You know it isn’t true, I know it isn’t true. And how anybody after one look at your mother could believe any man would leave her for another woman just shows how far jealousy will make people go. Right?”
“I guess so,” Meg said, but her happiness had fled and she was back in a morass of anger and resentment.
“Look, dope.” Calvin shook her gently. “I just want to get things straight, sort of sort out the fact from fiction. Your father’s a physicist. That’s a fact, yes?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a Ph.D. several times over.”
“Yes.”
“Most of the time he works alone but some of the time he was at the Institute for Higher Learning in Princeton. Correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then he did some work for the government, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“You take it from there. That’s all I know.”
“That’s about all I know, too,” Meg said. “Maybe Mother knows more. I don’t know. What he did was—well, it was what they call Classified.”
“Top Secret, you mean?”
“That’s right.”
“And you don’t even have any idea what it was about?”
Meg shook her head. “No. Not really. Just an idea because of where he was.”
“Well, where?”
“Out in New Mexico for a while; we were with him there; and then he was in Florida at Cape Canaveral, and we were with him there, too. And then he was going to be traveling a lot, so we came here.”
“You’d always had this house?”
“Yes. But we used to live in it just in the summer.”
“And you don’t know where your father was sent?”
“No. At first we got lots of letters. Mother and Father always wrote each other every day. I think Mother still writes him every night. Every once in a while the postmistress makes some kind of a crack about all her letters.”
“I suppose they think she’s pursuing him or something,” Calvin said, rather bitterly. “They can’t understand plain, ordinary love when they see it. Well, go on. What happened next?”
“Nothing happened,” Meg said. “That’s the trouble.”
“Well, what about your father’s letters?”
“They just stopped coming.”
“You haven’t heard anything at all?”
“No,” Meg said. “Nothing.” Her voice was heavy with misery.
Silence fell between them, as tangible as the dark tree shadows that fell across their laps and that now seemed to rest upon them as heavily as though they possessed a measurable weight of their own.
At last Calvin spoke in a dry, unemotional voice, not looking at Meg. “Do you think he could be dead?”
Again Meg leaped up, and again Calvin pulled her down. “No! They’d have told us if he were dead! There’s always a telegram or something. They always tell you!”
“What do they tell you?”
Meg choked down a sob, managed to speak over it. “Oh, Calvin, Mother’s tried and tried to find out. She’s been down to Washington and everything. And all they’ll say is that he’s on a secret and dangerous mission, and she can be very proud of him, but he won’t be able to—to communicate with us for a while. And they’ll give us news as soon as they have it.”
“Meg, don’t get mad, but do you think maybe they don’t know?”
A slow tear trickled down Meg’s cheek. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Why don’t you cry?” Calvin asked gently. “You’re just crazy about your father, aren’t you? Go ahead and cry. It’ll do you good.”
Meg’s voice came out trembling over tears. “I cry much too much. I should be like Mother. I should be able to control myself.”
“Your mother’s a completely different person and she’s a lot older than you are.”
“I wish I were a different person,” Meg said shakily. “I hate myself.”
Calvin reached over and took off her glasses. Then he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped her tears. This gesture of tenderness undid her completely, and she put her head down on her knees and sobbed. Calvin sat quietly beside her, every once in a while patting her head. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed finally. “I’m terribly sorry. Now you’ll hate me.”
“Oh, Meg, you are a moron,” Calvin said. “Don’t you know you’re the nicest thing that’s happened to me in a long time?”
Meg raised her head, and moonlight shone on her tearstained face; without the glasses her eyes were unexpectedly beautiful. “If Charles Wallace is a sport, I think I’m a biological mistake.” Moonlight flashed against her braces as she spoke.
Now she was waiting to be contradicted. But Calvin said, “Do you know that this is the first time I’ve seen you without your glasses?”
“I’m blind as a bat without them. I’m near-sighted, like Father.”
“Well, you know what, you’ve got dream-boat eyes,” Calvin said. “Listen, you go right on wearing your glasses. I don’t think I want anybody else to see what gorgeous eyes you have.”
Meg smiled with pleasure. She could feel herself blushing and she wondered if the blush would be visible in the moonlight.
“Okay, hold it, you two,” came a voice out of the shadows. Charles Wallace stepped into the moonlight. “I wasn’t spying on you,” he said quickly, “and I hate to break things up, but this is it, kids, this is it!” His voice quivered with excitement.
“This is what?” Calvin asked.
“We’re going.”
“Going? Where?” Meg reached out and instinctively grabbed for Calvin’s hand.
“I don’t know exactly,” Charles Wallace said. “But I think it’s to find Father.”
Suddenly two eyes seemed to spring at them out of the darkness; it was the moonlight striking on Mrs Who’s glasses. She was standing next to Charles Wallace, and how she had managed to appear where a moment ago there had been nothing but flickering shadows in the moonlight Meg had no idea. She heard a sound behind her and turned around. There was Mrs Whatsit scrambling over the wall.
“My, but I wish there were no wind,” Mrs Whatsit said plaintively. “It’s so difficult with all these clothes.” She wore her outfit of the night before, rubber boots and all, with the addition of one of Mrs. Buncombe’s sheets which she had draped over her. As she slid off the wall the sheet caught in a low branch and came off. The felt hat slipped over both eyes, and another branch plucked at the pink stole. “Oh, dear,” she sighed. “I shall never learn to manage.”
Mrs Who wafted over to her, tiny feet scarcely seeming to touch the ground, the lenses of her glasses glittering. “Come t’è picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!” With a clawlike hand she pushed the hat up on Mrs Whatsit’s forehead, untangled the stole from the tree, and with a deft gesture took the sheet and folded it.
“Oh, thank you,” Mrs Whatsit said. “You’re so clever!”
“Un asno viejo sabe más que un potro. A. Perez. An old ass knows more than a young colt.”
“Just because you’re a paltry few billion years—” Mrs Whatsit was starting indignantly, when a sharp, strange voice cut in.
“Alll rrightt, girrllss. Thiss iss nno ttime forr bbickkerring.”
“It’s Mrs Which,” Charles Wallace said.
There was a faint gust of wind, the leaves shivered in it, the patterns of moonlight shifted, and in a circle of silver something shimmered, quivered, and the voice said, “I ddo nott thinkk I willl matterrialize commpletely. I ffindd itt
verry ttirinngg, andd wee hhave mmuch ttoo ddoo.”
FOUR
The Black Thing
The trees were lashed into a violent frenzy. Meg screamed and clutched at Calvin, and Mrs Which’s authoritative voice called out, “Qquiett, chilldd!”
Did a shadow fall across the moon or did the moon simply go out, extinguished as abruptly and completely as a candle? There was still the sound of leaves, a terrified, terrifying rushing. All light was gone. Darkness was complete. Suddenly the wind was gone, and all sound. Meg felt that Calvin was being torn from her. When she reached for him her fingers touched nothing.
She screamed out, “Charles!” and whether it was to help him or for him to help her, she did not know. The word was flung back down her throat and she choked on it.
She was completely alone.
She had lost the protection of Calvin’s hand. Charles was nowhere, either to save or to turn to. She was alone in a fragment of nothingness. No light, no sound, no feeling. Where was her body? She tried to move in her panic, but there was nothing to move. Just as light and sound had vanished, she was gone, too. The corporeal Meg simply was not.
Then she felt her limbs again. Her legs and arms were tingling faintly, as though they had been asleep. She blinked her eyes rapidly, but though she herself was somehow back, nothing else was. It was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light. Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you. She was lost in a horrifying void.
It was the same way with the silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.
Suddenly she was aware of her heart beating rapidly within the cage of her ribs. Had it stopped before? What had made it start again? The tingling in her arms and legs grew stronger, and suddenly she felt movement. This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, traveling its elliptic course about the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.
I am asleep; I am dreaming, she thought. I’m having a nightmare. I want to wake up. Let me wake up.
“Well!” Charles Wallace’s voice said. “That was quite a trip! I do think you might have warned us.”
Light began to pulse and quiver. Meg blinked and shoved shakily at her glasses and there was Charles Wallace standing indignantly in front of her, his hands on his hips. “Meg!” he shouted. “Calvin! Where are you?”
She saw Charles, she heard him, but she could not go to him. She could not shove through the strange, trembling light to meet him.
Calvin’s voice came as though it were pushing through a cloud. “Well, just give me time, will you? I’m older than you are.”
Meg gasped. It wasn’t that Calvin wasn’t there and then that he was. It wasn’t that part of him came first and then the rest of him followed, like a hand and then an arm, an eye and then a nose. It was a sort of shimmering, a looking at Calvin through water, through smoke, through fire, and then there he was, solid and reassuring.
“Meg!” Charles Wallace’s voice came. “Meg! Calvin, where’s Meg?”
“I’m right here,” she tried to say, but her voice seemed to be caught at its source.
“Meg!” Calvin cried, and he turned around, looking about wildly.
“Mrs Which, you haven’t left Meg behind, have you?” Charles Wallace shouted.
“If you’ve hurt Meg, any of you—” Calvin started, but suddenly Meg felt a violent push and a shattering as though she had been thrust through a wall of glass.
“Oh, there you are!” Charles Wallace said, and rushed over to her and hugged her.
“But where am I?” Meg asked breathlessly, relieved to hear that her voice was now coming out of her in more or less a normal way.
She looked around rather wildly. They were standing in a sunlit field, and the air about them was moving with the delicious fragrance that comes only on the rarest of spring days when the sun’s touch is gentle and the apple blossoms are just beginning to unfold. She pushed her glasses up on her nose to reassure herself that what she was seeing was real.
They had left the silver glint of a biting autumn evening; and now around them everything was golden with light. The grasses of the field were a tender new green, and scattered about were tiny, multicolored flowers. Meg turned slowly to face a mountain reaching so high into the sky that its peak was lost in a crown of puffy white clouds. From the trees at the base of the mountain came a sudden singing of birds. There was an air of such ineffable peace and joy all around her that her heart’s wild thumping slowed.
“When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning, or in rain,”
came Mrs Who’s voice. Suddenly the three of them were there, Mrs Whatsit with her pink stole askew; Mrs Who with her spectacles gleaming; and Mrs Which still little more than a shimmer. Delicate, multicolored butterflies were fluttering about them, as though in greeting.
Mrs Whatsit and Mrs Who began to giggle, and they giggled until it seemed that, whatever their private joke was, they would fall down with the wild fun of it. The shimmer seemed to be laughing, too. It became vaguely darker and more solid; and then there appeared a figure in a black robe and a black peaked hat, beady eyes, a beaked nose, and long gray hair; one bony claw clutched a broomstick.
“Wwell, jusstt ttoo kkeepp yyou girrlls happpy,” the strange voice said, and Mrs Whatsit and Mrs Who fell into each other’s arms in gales of laughter.
“If you ladies have had your fun I think you should tell Calvin and Meg a little more about all this,” Charles Wallace said coldly. “You scared Meg half out of her wits, whisking her off this way without any warning.”
“Finxerunt animi, raro et perpauca loquentis,” Mrs Who intoned. “Horace. To action little, less to words inclined.”
“Mrs Who, I wish you’d stop quoting!” Charles Wallace sounded very annoyed.
Mrs Whatsit adjusted her stole. “But she finds it so difficult to verbalize, Charles dear. It helps her if she can quote instead of working out words of her own.”
“Anndd wee mussttn’tt looose ourr sensses of hummorr,” Mrs Which said. “Thee onnlly wway ttoo ccope withh ssometthingg ddeadly sseriouss iss ttoo ttry ttoo trreatt itt a llittlle lligghtly.”
“But that’s going to be hard for Meg,” Mrs Whatsit said. “It’s going to be hard for her to realize that we are serious.”
“What about me?” Calvin asked.
“The life of your father isn’t at stake,” Mrs Whatsit told him.
“What about Charles Wallace, then?”
Mrs Whatsit’s unoiled-door-hinge voice was warm with affection and pride. “Charles Wallace knows. Charles Wallace knows that it’s far more than just the life of his father. Charles Wallace knows what’s at stake.”
“But remember,” Mrs Who said, Euripides. Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything.”
“Where are we now, and how did we get here?” Calvin asked.
“Uriel, the third planet of the star Malak in the spiral nebula Messier 101.”
“This I’m supposed to believe?” Calvin asked indignantly.
“Aas yyou llike,” Mrs Which said coldly.
For some reason Meg felt that Mrs Which, despite her looks and ephemeral broomstick, was someone in whom one could put complete trust. “It doesn’t seem any more peculiar than anything else that’s happened.”
“Well, then, someone just tell me how we got here!” Calvin’s voice was still angry and his freckles seemed to stand out on his face. “Even traveling at the speed of light it would take us years and years to get here.”
“Oh, we don’t travel at the speed of anything,” Mrs Whatsit explained earnestly. “We tesser. Or you might say, we wrinkle.”
“Clear as mud,” Calvin said.
Tesser, Meg thought. Could that have anything to do with Mother’s tesseract?
She was about to ask when Mrs Which started to speak, and one did not interrupt when Mrs Which was speaking. “Mrs Whatsit iss yyoungg andd nnaïve.”
“She keeps thinking she can explain things in words,” Mrs Who said. “Qui plus sait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”
“But she has to use words for Meg and Calvin,” Charles reminded Mrs Who. “If you brought them along, they have a right to know what’s going on.”
Meg went up to Mrs Which. In the intensity of her question she had forgotten all about the tesseract. “Is my father here?”
Mrs Which shook her head. “Nnott heeere, Megg. Llett Mrs Whatsitt expllainn. Shee isss yyoungg annd thee llanguage of worrds iss eeasierr fforr hherr thann itt iss fforr Mrs Whoo andd mee.”
“We stopped here,” Mrs Whatsit explained, “more or less to catch our breaths. And to give you a chance to know what you’re up against.”
“But what about Father?” Meg asked. “Is he all right?”
“For the moment, love, yes. He’s one of the reasons we’re here. But you see, he’s only one.”
“Well, where is he? Please take me to him!”
“We can’t, not yet,” Charles said. “You have to be patient, Meg.”
“But I’m not patient!” Meg cried passionately. “I’ve never been patient!”
Mrs Who’s glasses shone at her gently. “If you want to help your father then you must learn patience. Vitam impendere vero. To stake one’s life for the truth. That is what we must do.”
The Wrinkle in Time Quintet Page 5