They did not ask him where he was going to spend the night—though Meg wondered—because it was the kind of presumptuous question one could not possibly ask Blajeny. They left him standing and watching after them, the folds of his robes chiseled like granite, his dark face catching and refracting the moonlight like fused glass.
They crossed the orchard and garden and entered the house, as usual, by the back way, through the pantry. The door to the lab was open, and the lights on. Mrs. Murry was bent over her microscope, and Dr. Colubra was curled up in an old red leather chair, reading. The lab was a long, narrow room with great slabs of stone for the floor. It had originally been used to keep milk and butter and other perishables, long before the days of refrigerators, and it was still difficult to heat in winter. The long work counter with the stone sink at one end was ideal for Mrs. Murry’s lab equipment. In one corner were two comfortable chairs and a reading lamp, which softened the clinical glare of the lights over the counter. But Meg could not think of a time when she had seen her mother relaxing in one of those chairs; she inevitably perched on one of the lab stools.
She looked up from the strange convolutions of the micro-electron microscope. “Charles! What are you doing out of bed?”
“I woke up,” Charles Wallace said blandly. “I knew Meg and Calvin were outside, so I went to get them.”
Mrs. Murry glanced sharply at her son, then greeted Calvin warmly.
Charles Wallace asked, “Is it okay if we make some cocoa?”
“It’s very late for you to be up, Charles, and tomorrow’s a school day.”
“It’ll help me get back to sleep.”
Mrs. Murry seemed about to refuse, but Dr. Colubra closed her book, saying, “Why not, for once? Let Charles have a nap when he gets home in the afternoon. I’d like some cocoa myself. Let’s make it out here while your mother goes on with her work. I’ll do it.”
“I’ll get the milk and stuff from the kitchen,” Meg said.
With Dr. Louise present they were not, she felt, free to talk to their mother about the events of the evening. The children were all fond of Dr. Louise, and trusted her completely as a physician, but they were not quite sure that she had their parents’ capacity to accept the extraordinary. Almost sure, but not quite. Dr. Colubra had a good deal in common with their parents; she, too, had given up work which paid extremely well in both money and prestige, to come live in this small rural village. (Too many of my colleagues have forgotten that they are supposed to practice the art of healing. If I don’t have the gift of healing in my hands, then all my expensive training isn’t worth very much!) She, too, had turned her back on the glitter of worldly success. Meg knew that her parents, despite the fact that they were consulted by the President of the United States, had given up much when they moved to the country in order to devote their lives to pure research. Their discoveries, many of them made in this stone laboratory, had made the Murrys more, rather than less, open to the strange, to the mysterious, to the unexplainable. Dr. Colubra’s work was perforce more straightforward, and Meg was not sure how she would respond to talk of a strange dark Teacher, eight or nine feet tall, and even less sure how she would react to their description of a cherubim. She’d probably insist they were suffering from mass psychosis and that they all should see a psychiatrist at once.
Or is it just that I’m afraid to talk about it, even to Mother? Meg wondered, as she took sugar, cocoa, milk, and a saucepan from the kitchen and returned to the pantry.
Dr. Colubra was saying, “That stuff about cosmic screams and rips in distant galaxies offends every bit of the rational part of me.”
Mrs. Murry leaned against the counter. “You didn’t believe in farandolae, either, until I proved them to you.”
“You haven’t proven them to me,” Dr. Louise said. “Yet.” She looked slightly ruffled, like a little grey bird. Her short, curly hair was grey; her eyes were grey above a small beak of a nose; she wore a grey flannel suit. “The main reason I think you may be right is that you go to that idiot machine—“ she pointed at the micro-electron microscope—“the way my husband used to go to his violin. It was always like a lovers’ meeting.”
Mrs. Murry turned away from her ‘idiot machine.’ “I think I wish I’d never heard of farandolae, much less come to the conclusions—“ She stopped abruptly, then said, “By the way, kids, I was rather surprised, just before you all barged into the lab, to have Mr. Jenkins call to suggest that we give Charles Wallace lessons in self-defense.”
Mr. Jenkins? Meg wondered. Aloud she said, “But Mr. Jenkins never calls parents. Parents have to go to him.” She almost asked, ‘Are you sure it was Mr. Jenkins?’ And stopped herself as she remembered that she had not told Blajeny about the horrible Mr. Jenkins-not-Mr. Jenkins who had turned into a bird of nothingness, the Mr. Jenkins Louise had resented so fiercely. She should have told Blajeny; she would tell him first thing in the morning.
Charles Wallace climbed up onto one of the lab stools and perched close to his mother. “What I really need are lessons in adaptation. I’ve been reading Darwin, but he hasn’t helped me much.”
“See what we mean?” Calvin asked Dr. Louise. “That’s hardly what one expects from a six-year-old.”
“He-really does read Darwin,” Meg assured the doctor.
“And I still haven’t learned how to adapt,” Charles Wallace added.
Dr. Louise was making a paste of cocoa, sugar, and a little hot -water from one of Mrs. Murry’s retorts. “This is just water, isn’t it?” she asked.
“From our artesian well. The very best water.”
Dr. Louise added milk, little by little. “You kids are too young to remember, and your mother is a good ten years younger than I am, but I’ll never forget, a great many years ago, when the first astronauts went to the moon, and I sat up all night to watch them.”
“I remember it all right,” Mrs. Murry said. “I wasn’t that young.”
Dr. Louise stirred the cocoa which was heating over a Bunsen burner. “Do you remember those first steps on the moon, so tentative to begin with, on that strange, airless, alien terrain? And then, in a short time, Armstrong and Aldrin were striding about confidently, and the commentator remarked on this as an extraordinary example of man’s remarkable ability to adapt”
“But all they had to adapt to was the moon’s surface!” Meg objected. “It wasn’t inhabited. I’ll bet when our astronauts reach some place with inhabitants it won’t be so easy. It’s a lot simpler to adapt to low gravity, or no atmosphere, or even sandstorms, than it is to hostile inhabitants.”
Fortinbras, who had an uncanine fondness for cocoa, came padding out to the lab, his nose twitching in anticipation. He stood on his hind legs and put his front paws on Charles Wallace’s shoulders.
Dr. Colubra asked Meg, “Do you think the first-graders in the village school are hostile inhabitants, then?”
“Of course! Charles isn’t like them, and so they’re hostile towards him. People are always hostile to anybody who’s different.”
“Until they get used to him,” the doctor said.
“They’re not getting used to Charles.”
Charles Wallace, fondling the big dog, said, “Don’t forget to give Fort a saucer—he likes cocoa.”
“You have the strangest pets,” Dr. Louise said, but she poured a small dish of cocoa for Fortinbras. “I’ll let it cool a bit before I put it on the floor. Meg, we need mugs.”
“Okay.” Meg hurried off to the kitchen, collected a stack of mugs, and returned to the laboratory.
Dr. Louise lined them up and poured the cocoa. “Speaking of pets, how’s my namesake?”
Meg nearly spilled the cocoa she was handing to her mother. She looked closely at Dr. Louise, but though the question had seemed pointed, the little bird face showed nothing more than amused interest; as Charles Wallace said, Dr. Louise was very good at talking on one level and thinking on another.
Charles Wallace answered the question. “Louise the Larger is a magnificent snake. I wonder if she’d like some cocoa? Snakes like milk, don’t they?”
Mrs. Murry said firmly, “You are not going back out tonight to find if the snake, magnificent though she be, likes cocoa. Save your experimental zeal for daylight. Louise is undoubtedly sound asleep.”
Dr. Louise carefully poured out the last of the cocoa into her own mug. “Some snakes are very sociable at night. Many years ago when I was working in a hospital in the Philippines I had a boa constrictor for a pet; we had a problem with rats in the ward, and my boa constrictor did a thorough job of keeping the rodent population down. He also liked cream-of-mushroom soup, though I never tried him on cocoa, and he was a delightful companion in the evenings, affectionate and cuddly.”