Meg echoed Blajeny. “What is real?” She turned to the Teacher, but he was no longer paying attention to Mr. Jenkins. She followed Blajeny’s gaze, and saw Louise slithering rapidly towards them.
A fresh shudder shook Mr. Jenkins. “Not the snake again —I have a phobia about—“
Meg soothed, “Louise is really very friendly. She won’t hurt you.”
“Snakes.” Mr. Jenkins shook his head. “Snakes and monsters and giants . . . It’s not possible, none of this is possible . . .”
Blajeny turned from his conversation with Louise the Larger, spoke urgently. “We must go at once. The Echthroi are enraged. -Charles Wallace’s mitochondritis is now acute.”
“Oh, Blajeny, take us home quickly,” Meg cried. “I must be with him!”
“There isn’t time. We must go at once to Metron Aris-ton.”
“Where?”
Without answering, Blajeny turned from Meg to Mr. Jenkins. “You, sir: do you wish to return to your school and continue your regular day’s work? Or will you throw in your lot with us?”
Mr. Jenkins looked completely bewildered. “I am having a nervous breakdown.”
“You don’t need to have one if you don’t want to. You have simply been faced with several things outside your current spheres of experience. That does not mean that they—we—do not exist.”
Meg felt an unwilling sense of protectiveness towards this unattractive little man she had Named. “Mr. Jenkins, don’t you think you’d better report that you’re not well today, and come with us?”
Mr. Jenkins held out his hands helplessly. “Were there —there were—two other—two men who resembled me?”
“Yes, of course there were. But they’ve gone.”
“Where?”
Meg turned to Blajeny.
The Teacher looked grave. “When an Echthros takes on a human body, it tends to keep it.”
Meg caught hold of the stone grey of the Teacher’s sleeve. “The first test—how did it happen? You didn’t make it up, did you? You couldn’t have told the Echthroi to turn into Mr. Jenkins, could you?”
“Meg,” he replied quietly, “I told you I needed your help.”
“You mean—you mean this was going to happen, anyhow, the Echthroi turning into Mr. Jenkins, even if—“
“Mr. Jenkins was a perfect host for their purposes.”
Rather shakily, Mr. Jenkins tottered towards Blajeny, sputtering, “Now, see here, I don’t know who you are and I don’t care, but I demand an explanation.”
Blajeny’s voice was now more like an English horn than a cello. “Perhaps in your world today such a phenomenon would be called schizophrenia. I prefer the old idea of possession.”
“Schiz—are you, sir, questioning my sanity?”
Louise’s small voice whistled urgently.
“Mr. Jenkins,” Blajeny said quietly, “we must leave. Either return to your school or come with us. Now.”
To Meg’s surprise she found herself urging, “Please come with us, Mr. Jenkins.”
“But my duty—“
“You know you can’t just go back to school again after what’s happened.”
Mr. Jenkins moaned again. His complexion had turned from grey to pale green.
“And after you’ve met the cherubim and Blajeny—“
“Cheru—“
Louise whistled again.
Blajeny asked, “Are you coming with us or not?”
“Margaret Named me,” Mr. Jenkins said softly. “Yes. I will come.”
Proginoskes reached out a great pinion and pulled Meg in to him. She felt the tremendous heartbeat, a beat which reverberated like a brass gong. Then she saw the ovoid eye, open, dilating . . .
She was through.
It was something of an anticlimax to find that they were no farther from home than the star-watching rock.
Wait: was it, after all, the star-watching rock?
She blinked, and when she opened her eyes Mr. Jenkins and Blajeny were there, and Calvin was there, too (oh, thank you, Blajeny!), holding his hand out to her, and she was warmed in the radiance of his big smile.
It was no longer autumn-cold. There was a light breeze, warm and summery. All about them, encircling them, was the sound of summer insects, crickets, katydids, and—less pleasantly—the shrill of a mosquito. Frogs were crunking away, and a tree toad sang its scratchy song. The sky was thick with stars, stars which always seemed closer to earth in summer than in winter.
Blajeny sat down, cross-legged, on the rock, and beckoned to them. Meg sat in front of him, and saw that Louise was coiled nearby, her head resting on one of Proginoskes’s outstretched wings. Calvin sat beside Meg, and Mr. Jenkins stood awkwardly, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
Meg moved a little closer to Calvin and looked up at the sky.
And gasped. The stars, the low, daisy-thick summer stars, were not the familiar planets and constellations she had so often watched with her parents. They were as different as had been the constellations where Proginoskes had taken her to see the terrible work of the Echthroi.
“Blajeny,” Calvin asked, “where are we?”
“Metron Ariston.”
“What’s Metron Ariston? Is it a planet?”
“No. It’s an idea, a postulatum. I find it easier to posit when I am in my home galaxy, so we are near the Mondrion solar system of the Veganuel galaxy. The stars you see are those I know, those which I see from my home planet.”
“Why are we here?”
“The postulatum Metron Ariston makes it possible for all sizes to become relative. Within Metron Ariston you may be sized so that you are able to converse with a giant star or a tiny farandola.”
Meg felt a moment of shock and disbelief. Farandolae were still less real to her than Charles Wallace’s ‘dragons.’ “A farandola! Are we really going to see one?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s impossible. A farandola is so small that—“
“How small is it?” Blajeny asked.
“So small that it’s beyond rational conceiving, my mother says.”
Mr. Jenkins made a small confused noise and shifted weight again. Blajeny said, “And yet Mrs. Murry is convinced that she has proved the existence of farandolae. Now let us suppose: here we are in Veganuel galaxy, two trillion light-years away. Veganuel is just about the same size as your own Earth’s galaxy. How long does it take the Milky Way to rotate once around?”
As no one else spoke, Meg answered, ‘Two hundred billion years, clockwise.”
“So that gives us a general idea of the size of your galaxy, doesn’t it?”
“Very general,” Calvin said. “Our minds can’t comprehend anything that huge, that macrocosmic.”
“Don’t try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition. Think of the size of your galaxy. Now, think of your sun. It’s a star, and it is a great deal smaller than the entire galaxy, isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“Think of yourselves, now, in comparison with the size of your sun. Think how much smaller you are. Have you done that?”
“Sort of,” Meg said.
“Now think of a mitochondrion. Think of the mitochondria which live in the cells of all living things, and how much smaller a mitochondrion is than you.”
Mr. Jenkins said, to himself, “I thought Charles Wallace was making them up to show off.”
Blajeny continued, “Now consider that a farandola is as much smaller than a mitochondrion as a mitochondrion is smaller than you are.”
“This time,” Calvin said, “the problem is that our minds can’t comprehend anything that microcosmic.”
Blajeny said, “Another way of putting it would be to say that a farandola is as much smaller than you are as your galaxy is larger than you are.”
Calvin whistled. “Then, to a farandola, any of us would be as big as a galaxy?”
“More or less. You are a galaxy for your farandolae.”
“Then how can we possibly meet one?”
Blajeny’s voice was patient. “I have just told you that in Metron Ariston we can almost do away with variations in size, which are, in reality, quite unimportant.” He turned his head and looked in the direction of die great glacial rocks.
“The rocks,” Meg asked, “are they really there?”
“Nothing is anywhere in Metron Ariston,” Blajeny said.
“I am trying to make things as easy for you as I can by giving you a familiar visual setting. You must try to understand things not only with your little human minds, which are not a great deal of use in the problems which confront us.”
At last Mr. Jenkins sat, crouching uncomfortably on the rock. “With what can I understand, then? I don’t have very much intuition.”
“You must understand with your hearts. With the whole of yourselves, not just a fragment.”
Mr. Jenkins groaned. “I am too old to be educable. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I have lived beyond my time.”
Meg cried, “Oh, no, you haven’t, Mr. Jenkins, you’re just beginning!”
Mr. Jenkins shook his head in mournful negation. “Maybe it would have been better if you’d never Named me. Why did I ever have to see you this way? Or your little brother? Or that frightful beast?”
Proginoskes made what seemed like a minor volcanic upheaval.
Mr. Jenkins stiffened a little, though he could hardly become paler. “Are there any more like you?”