Meg’s stomach seemed to drop, and she realized that the square box in which they stood must be an elevator and that they had started to move upward with great speed. The yellow light lit up their faces, and the pale blue of Charles’s eyes absorbed the yellow and turned green. Calvin licked his lips. “Where are we going?”
“Up.” Charles continued his lecture. “On Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems. You know that, don’t you, dear sister?”
“No,” Meg said.
“Oh, yes, you do. You’ve seen at home how true it is. You know that’s the reason you’re not happy at school. Because you’re different.”
“I’m different, and I’m happy,” Calvin said.
“But you pretend that you aren’t different.”
“I’m different, and I like being different.” Calvin’s voice was unnaturally loud.
“Maybe I don’t like being different,” Meg said. “but I don’t want to be like everybody else, either.”
Charles Wallace raised his hand and the motion of the square box ceased and one of the walls seemed to disappear. Charles stepped out, Meg and Calvin following him, Calvin just barely making it before the wall came into being again, and they could no longer see where the opening had been.
“You wanted Calvin to get left behind, didn’t you?” Meg said.
“I am merely trying to teach you to stay on your toes, I warn you, if I have any more trouble from either of you, I shall have to take you to IT.”
As the word IT fell from Charles’s lips, again Meg felt as though she had been touched by something slimy and horrible. “So what is this IT?” she asked.
“You might call IT the Boss.” Then Charles Wallace giggled, a giggle that was the most sinister sound Meg had ever heard. “IT sometimes calls ITseIf the Happiest Sadist.”
Meg spoke coldly, to cover her fear. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s s-a-d-i-s-t, not s-a-d-d-e-s-t, you know,” Charles Wallace said, and giggled again. “Lots of people don’t pronounce it correctly.”
“Well, I don’t care,” Meg said defiantly. “I don’t ever want to see IT, and that’s that.”
Charles Wallace’s strange, monotonous voice ground against her ears. “Meg, you’re supposed to have some mind. Why do you think we have wars at home? Why do you think people get confused and unhappy? Because they all live their own, separate, individual lives. I’ve been trying to explain to you in the simplest possible way that on Camazotz individuals have been done away with. Camazotz is ONE mind. It’s IT. And that’s why everybody’s so happy and efficient- That’s what old witches like Mrs. Whatsit don’t want to have happen at home.”
“She’s not a witch,” Meg interrupted.
“No?”
“No,” Calvin said. “You know she’s not. You know that’s just their game. Their way, maybe, of laughing in the dark.”
“In the dark is correct,” Charles continued. ‘They want us to go on being confused instead of properly organized.”
Meg shook her head violently. “No!” she shouted. “I know our world isn’t perfect, Charles, but it’s better than this. This isn’t the only alternative! It can’t be!”
“Nobody suffers here,” Charles intoned. “Nobody is ever unhappy.”
“But nobody’s ever happy, either,” Meg said earnestly.
“Maybe it you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy. Calvin, I want to go home.”
“We can’t leave Charles,” Calvin told her, “and we can’t go before we’ve found your father. You know that. But you’re right, Meg, and Mrs. Which is right. This is Evil.”
Charles Wallace shook his head, and scorn and disapproval seemed to emanate from him. “Come- We’re wasting time.” He moved rapidly down the corridor, but continued to speak. “How dreadful it is to be low, individual organisms. Tch-tch-tch.” His pace quickened from step to step, his short legs flashing, so that Meg and Calvin almost had to run to keep up with him. “Now see this,” he said. He raised his liand and suddenly they could see through one of the walls into a small room. In the room a little boy was bouncing a ball. He was bouncing it in rhythm, and the walls of his little cell seemed to pulse with the rhythm of the ball. And each time the ball bounced he screamed as though he were in pain.
“That’s the little boy we saw this afternoon,” Calvin said sharply, “the little boy who wasn’t bouncing the ball like the others.”
Charles Wallace giggled again. “Yes. Every once in a while there’s a little trouble with cooperation, but it’s easily taken care of. After today he’ll never desire to deviate again. Ah, here we are.”
He moved rapidly down the corridor and again held up his hand to make the wall transparent. They looked into another small room or cell. In the center of it was a large, round, transparent column, and inside this column was a man.
“FATHER!” Meg screamed.
Chapter 9 — IT
MEG rushed at the man imprisoned in the column, but as she reached what seemed to be the open door she was hurled back as though .she had crashed into a brick wall.
Calvin caught her. “It’s just transparent like glass this time,” he told her. “We can’t go through it.”
Meg was so sick and dizzy from the impact that she could not answer. For a moment she was afraid that she would throw up or faint. Charles Wallace laughed again, the laugh that was not his own, and it was this that saved her, for once more anger overcame her pain and fear. Charles Wallace, her own real, dear Charles Wallace, never laughed at her when she hurt herself. Instead, his arms would go quickly around her neck and he would press his soft cheek against hers in loving comfort. But the demon Charles Wallace snickered. She turned away from him and looked again at the man in the column.
“Oh, Father-” she whispered longingly, but the man in the column did not move to look at her. The hornrimmed glasses, which always seemed so much a part of him, were gone, and the expression of his eyes was turned inward, as though he were deep in thought. He had grown a beard, and the silky brown was shot with gray. His hair, too, had not been cut. It wasn’t just the overlong hair of the man in the snapshot at Cape Canaveral; it was pushed back from his high forehead and fell softly almost to his shoulders, so that he looked like someone in another century, or a shipwrecked sailor. But there was no question, despite the change in him, that he was her father, her own beloved father.
“My, he looks a mess, doesn’t he?” Charles Wallace said, and sniggered.
Meg swung on him with sick rage. “Charles, that’s Father! Father!”
“So what?”
Meg turned away from him and held out her arms to the man in the column.
“He doesn’t see us, Meg,” Calvin said gently.
“Why? Why?”
“I think it’s sort of like those little peepholes they have in apartments, in the front doors,” Calvin explained. “You know. From inside you can look through and see everything. And from outside you can’t see anything at all.
We can see him, but he can’t see us.”
“Charles!” Meg pleaded. “Let me in to Father!”
“Why?” Charles asked placidly.
Meg remembered that when they were in the room with the man with red eyes she had knocked Charles Wallace back into himself when she tackled him and his head cracked the floor; so she hurled herself at him. But before she could reach him his fist shot out and punched her hard in the stomach. She gasped for breath. Sickly, she turned away from her brother, back to the transparent wall. There was the cell, there was the column with her father inside. Although she could see him, although she was almost close enough to touch him, he seemed farther away than he had been when she had pointed him out to Calvin in the picture on the piano. He stood there quietly as though frozen in a column of ice, an expression of suffering and endurance on his face that pierced into her heart like an arrow.
“You say you want to help Father?” Charles Wallace’s voice came from behind her, with no emotion whatsoever.
“Yes. Don’t you?” Meg demanded, swinging around and glaring at him.
“But of course. That is why we are here.”
“Then what do we do?” Meg tried to keep the franticness out of her voice, trying to sound as drained of feeling as Charles, but nevertheless ending on a squeak.
“You must do as I have done, and go in to IT,” Charles said.
“No.”
“I can see you don’t really want to save Father.”
“How will my being a zombie save Father?”
“You will just have to take my word for it, Margaret,” came the cold, fiat voice from Charles Wallace. “IT wants you and IT will get you. Don’t forget that I, too, am part of IT, now. You know I wouldn’t have done IT if IT weren’t the right thing to do.”