Mrs. Murry demurred, “I’m not wholly impractical, you know, Sandy, and neither is your father.”
“Spending hours and hours peering into your micro-electron microscope, and listening to that micro-sonar whatsit isn’t practical,” Sandy announced.
“You just look at things nobody else can see,” Dennys added, “and listen to things nobody else can hear, and think about them.”
Meg defended her mother. “It would be a good idea if more people knew how to think. After Mother thinks about something long enough, then she puts it into practice. Or someone else does.”
Charles Wallace cocked his head with a pleased look. “Does practical mean that something works out in practice?”
His mother nodded.
“So it doesn’t matter if Mother sits and thinks. Or if Father spends weeks over one equation. Even if he writes it on the tablecloth. His equations are practical if someone else makes them work out in practice.” He reached in his pocket, as though in answer to Meg’s thoughts about the dragons, and drew out a feather, not a bird feather, but a strange glitter catching the light. “All right, my practical brothers, what is this?”
Sandy, sitting next to Charles Wallace, bent over the dragon feather. “A feather.”
Dennys got up and went around the table so that he could see. “Let me—“
Charles Wallace held the feather between them. “What kind is it?”
“Hey, this is most peculiar!” Sandy touched the base of the feather. “I don’t think it’s from a bird.”
“Why not?” Charles Wallace asked.
“The rachis isn’t right.”
“The what?” Meg asked.
“The rachis. Sort of part of the quill. The rachis should be hollow, and this is solid, and seems to be metallic. Hey, Charles, where’d you get this thing?”
Charles Wallace handed the feather to his mother. She looked at it carefully. “Sandy’s right. The rachis isn’t like a bird’s.”
Dennys said, “Then what—“
Charles Wallace retrieved the feather and put it back in his pocket. “It was on the ground by the big rocks in the north pasture. Not just this one feather. Quite a few others.”
Meg suppressed a slightly hysterical giggle. “Charles and I think it may be fewmets.”
Sandy turned to her with injured dignity. “Fewmets are dragon droppings.”
Dennys said, “Don’t be silly.” Then, “Do you know what it is, Mother?”
She shook her head. “What do you think it is, Charles?”
Charles Wallace, as he occasionally did, retreated into himself. When Meg had decided he wasn’t going to answer at all, he said, “It’s something that’s not in Sandy’s and Dennys’s practical world. When I find out more, I’ll tell you.” He sounded very like their mother.
“Okay, then.” Dennys had lost interest. He returned to his chair. “Did Father tell you why he has to go rushing off to Brookhaven, or is it another of those top-secret classified: things?”
Mrs. Murry looked down at the checked tablecloth, and at the remains of an equation which had not come out in the wash; doodling equations on anything available was a habit of which she could not break her husband. “It’s not really secret. There’ve been several bits about it in the papers recently.”
“About what?” Sandy asked.
“There’s been an unexplainable phenomenon, not in our part of the galaxy, but far across it, and in several other galaxies—well, the easiest way to explain it is that our new supersensitive sonic instruments have been picking up strange sounds, sounds which aren’t on any normal register, but much higher. After such a sound—a cosmic scream, the Times rather sensationally called it—there appears to be a small rip in the galaxy.”
“What does that mean?” Dennys asked.
“It seems to mean that several stars have vanished.”
“Vanished where?”
“That’s the odd part. Vanished. Completely. Where the stars were there is, as far as our instruments can detect, nothing. Your father was out in California several weeks ago, you remember, at Mount Palomar.”
“But things can’t just vanish,” Sandy said. “We had it in school—the balance of matter.”
Their mother added, very quietly, “It seems to be getting unbalanced.”
“You mean like the ecology?”
“No. I mean that matter actually seems to be being annihilated.”
Dennys said flatly, “But that’s impossible.”
“E = MC2,” Sandy said. “Matter can be converted into energy, and energy into matter. You have to have one or the other.”
Mrs. Murry said, “Thus far, Einstein’s law has never been disproved. But it’s coming into question.”
“Nothingness—“ Dennys said. “That’s impossible.”
“One would hope so.”
“And that’s what Father’s going off about?”
“Yes, to consult with several other scientists, Shasti from India, Shen Shu from China—you’ve heard of them.”
Outside the dining-room windows came a sudden brilliant flash of light, followed by a loud clap of thunder. The windows rattled. The kitchen door burst open. Everybody jumped.
Meg sprang up, crying nervously, “Oh, Mother—“
“Sit down, Meg. You’ve heard thunder before.”
“You’re sure it’s not one of those cosmic things?”
Sandy shut the door.
Mrs. Murry was calmly reassuring. “Positive. They’re completely inaudible to human ears.” Lightning flashed again. Thunder boomed. “As a matter of fact, there are only two instruments in the world delicate enough to pick up the sound, which is incredibly high-pitched. It’s perfectly possible that it’s been going on for billennia, and only now are our instruments capable of recording it.”
“Birds can hear sounds way above our normal pitch,” Sandy said, “I mean, way up the scale, that we can’t hear at all.”
“Birds can’t hear this.”
Dennys said, “I wonder if snakes can hear as high a pitch as birds?”
“Snakes don’t have ears,” Sandy contradicted.
“So? They feel vibrations and sound waves. I think Louise hears all kinds of things out of human range. What’s for dessert?”
Meg’s voice was still tense. “We don’t usually have thunderstorms in October,”
“Please calm down, Meg.” Mrs. Murry started clearing the table. “If you’ll stop and think, you’ll remember that we’ve had an unseasonable storm for every month in the year.”
Sandy said, “Why does Meg always exaggerate everything? Why does she have to be so cosmic? What’s for dessert?”
“I don’t—“ Meg started defensively, then jumped as the rain began to pelt against the windows.
“There’s some ice cream in the freezer,” Mrs. Murry said. “Sorry, I haven’t been thinking about desserts.”
“Meg’s supposed to make desserts,” Dennys said. “Not that we expect pies or anything, Meg, but even you can’t go too wrong with Jell-O.”
Charles Wallace caught Meg’s eye, and she closed her mouth. He put his hand in the pocket of his robe again, though this time he did not produce the feather, and gave her a small, private smile. He may have been thinking about his dragons, but he had also been listening carefully, both to the conversation and to the storm, his fair head tilted slightly to one side. “This ripping in the galaxy,
Mother—does it have any effect on our own solar system?”
“That,” Mrs. Murry replied, “is what we would all like to know.”
Sandy brushed this aside impatiently. “It’s all much too complicated for me. I’m sure banking is a lot simpler.”
“And more lucrative,” Dennys added.
The windows shook in the wind. The twins looked through the darkness at the slashing rain.
“It’s a good thing we brought in so much stuff from the garden before dinner.”
“This is almost hail.”
Meg asked nervously, “Is it dangerous, this—this ripping in the sky, or whatever it is?”
“Meg, we really know nothing about it. It may have been going on all along, and we only now have the instruments to record it.”
“Like farandolae,” Charles Wallace said. “We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.”
“But is it dangerous?” Meg repeated.
“Meg, we don’t know enough about it yet. That’s why it’s important that your father and some of the other physicists get together at once.”
“But it could be dangerous?”
“Anything can be dangerous.”
Meg looked down at the remains of her dinner. Dragons and rips in the sky. Louise and Fortinbras greeting something large and strange. Charles Wallace pale and listless. She did not like any of it. “I’ll do the dishes,” she told her mother.
They cleaned up the kitchen in silence. Mrs. Murry had sent the reluctant twins to practice for the school orchestra, Dennys on the flute, which he played well, accompanied by Sandy, less skillfully, on the piano. But it was a pleasant, familiar noise, and Meg relaxed into it. When the dishwasher was humming, the pots and pans polished and hung on their hooks, she went up to her attic bedroom to do her homework. This room was supposed to be her own, private place, and it would have been perfect except for the fact that it was seldom really private: the twins kept their electric trains in the big, open section of the attic; the ping-pong table was there, and anything anybody didn’t want around downstairs but didn’t want to throw away. Although Meg’s room was at the far end of the attic, it was easily available to the twins when they needed help with their math homework. And Charles Wallace always knew, without being told, when she was troubled, and would come up to the attic to sit on the foot of her bed. The only time she didn’t want Charles Wallace was when he himself was what was troubling her. She did not want him now.