Mrs. Whatsit had said, “Meg, I give you your faults.”
What were her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness. Yes, it was to her faults that she turned to save herself now.
With an immense effort she tried to breathe against the rhythm of IT. But ITs power was too strong. Each time she managed to take a breath out of rhythm an iron hand seemed to squeeze her heart and lungs.
Then she remembered that when they had been standing before the man with red eyes, and the man with red eyes had been intoning the multiplication table at them, Charles Wallace had fought against his power by shouting out nursery rhymes, and Calvin by the Gettysburg Address.
“Georgia, porgie, pudding and pie,” she yelled. “Kissed the girls and made them cry.”
That was no good. It was too easy for nursery rhymes to fall into the rhythm of IT.
She didn’t know the Gettysburg Address. How did the Declaration of Independence begin? She had memorized it only that winter, not because she was required to at school, but simply because she liked it.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident!” she shouted, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
As she cried out the words she felt a mind moving in on her own, felt IT seizing, squeezing her brain. Then she realized that Charles Wallace was speaking, or being spoken through by IT.
“But that’s exactly what we have on Camazotz. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike.”
For a moment her brain reeled with confusion. Then came a moment of blazing truth. “No!” she cried triumphantly. “Like and equal are not the same thing at all!”
“Good girl, Meg!” her father shouted at her.
But Charles Wallace continued as though there had been no interruption. “In Camazotz all are equal. In Camazotz everybody is the same as everybody else,” but he gave her no argument, provided no answer, and she held on to her moment of revelation.
Like and equal are two entirely different things.
For the moment she had escaped from the power of IT.
But how?
She knew that her own puny little brain was no match for this great, bodiless, pulsing, writhing mass on the round dais. She shuddered as she looked at IT. In the lab at school there was a human brain preserved in formaldehyde, and the seniors preparing for college had to take it out and look at it and study it. Meg had felt that when that day came she would never be able to endure it. But now she thought that if only she had a dissecting knife she would slash at IT, cutting ruthlessly through cerebrum, cerebellum.
Words spoke within her, directly this time, not through Charles. “Don’t you realize that if you destroy me, you also destroy your little brother?”
If that great brain were cut, were crushed, would every mind under ITs control on Camazotz die, too? Charles Wallace and the man with red eyes and the man who ran the number one spelling machine on the second grade level and all the children playing ball and skipping rope and all the mothers and all the men and women going in and out of the buildings? Was their life completely dependent on IT? Were they beyond all possibility of salvation?
She felt the brain reaching at her again as she let her stubborn control slip. Red fog glazed her eyes.
Faintly she heard her father’s voice, though she knew he was shouting at the top of his lungs. “The periodic table of elements, Meg! Say it!”
A picture flashed into her mind of winter evenings spent sitting before the open fire and studying with her father. “Hydrogen. Helium,” she started obediently. Keep them in their proper atomic order. What next. She knew it. Yes. “Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine.” She shouted the words at her father, turned away from IT. “Neon. Sodium. Magnesium. Aluminum. Silicon. Phosphorus.”
“Too rhythmical,” her father shouted. ”What’s the square root of five?”
For a moment she was able to concentrate. Rack your brains yourself, Meg. Don’t let IT rack them. “The square root of five is 2.236,” she cried triumphantly, “because 2.236 times 2.236 equals 5!”
“What’s the square root of seven?”
“The square root of seven is-” She broke off. She wasn’t’ holding out. IT was getting at her, and she couldn’t concentrate, not even on math, and soon she, too, would be absorbed in IT, she would be an IT.
Tesser, sir!” she heard Calvin’s voice through die red darkness. “Tesser!”
She felt her father grab her by the wrist, there was a terrible jerk that seemed to break every bone in her body, then the dark nothing of tessering.
If tessering with Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had been a strange and fearful experience, it was nothing like tessering with her father. After all, Mrs. Which was experienced at it, and Mr. Murry-how did he know anything about it at all? Meg felt that she was being torn apart by a whirlwind. She was lost in an agony of pain that finally dissolved into the darkness of complete unconsciousness.
Chapter 10 — Absolute Zero
THE first sign of returning consciousness was cold. Then sound. She was aware of voices that seemed to be traveling through her across an arctic waste. Slowly the icy sounds cleared and she realized that the voices belonged to her father and Calvin. She did not hear Charles Wallace. She tried to open her eyes but the lids would not move. She tried to sit up, but she could not stir. She struggled to turn over, to move her hands, her feet, but nothing happened. She knew that she had a body, but it was as lifeless as marble.
She heard Calvin’s frozen voice: “Her heart is beating so slowly-”
Her father s voice: “But it’s beating. She’s alive.”
“Barely.”
“We couldn’t find a heartbeat at all at first. We thought she was dead.”
“Yes.”
“And then we could feel her heart, very faintly, the beats very far apart. And then it got stronger. So all we have to do is wait.” Her father’s words sounded brittle in her ears,. as though they were being chipped out of ice.
Calvin; “Yes. You’re right, sir.”
She wanted to call out to them. “I’m alive! I’m very much alive! Only I’ve been turned to stone.”
But she could not call out any more than she could move.
Calvin’s voice again. “Anyhow you got her away from IT. You got us both away and we couldn’t have gone on holding out. IT’S so much more powerful and strong than- How did we stay out, sir? How did we manage as long as we did?”
Her father: “Because IT’S completely unused to being refused. That’s the only reason I could keep from being absorbed, too. No mind has tried to hold out against IT for so many thousands of centuries that certain centers have become soft and atrophied through lack of use. If you hadn’t come to me when you did I’m not sure how much longer I would have lasted. I was on the point of giving in.”
Calvin: “Oh, no, sir-”
Her father: “Yes. Nothing seemed important any more but rest, and of course IT offered me complete rest. I had almost come to the conclusion that I was wrong to fight, that IT was right after all, and everything I believed in most passionately was nothing but a madman’s dream. But then you and Meg came in to me, broke through my prison, and hope and faith returned.”
Calvin: “Sir, why were you on Camazotz at all? Was there a particular reason for going there?”
Her father, with a frigid laugh: “Going to Camazotz was a complete accident. I never intended even to leave our own solar system. I was heading for Mars. Tessering is even more complicated than we had expected,”
Calvin: “Sir, how was IT able to get Charles Wallace before it got Meg and me?”
Her father: “From what you’ve told me it’s because Charles Wallace thought he could deliberately go into IT and return. He trusted too much to his own strength- listen!-I think the heartbeat is getting stronger!”
His words no longer sounded to her quite as frozen. Was it his words that were ice, or her ears? Why did she hear only her father and Calvin? Why didn’t Charles Wallace speak?
Silence. A long silence. Then Calvin’s voice again: “Can’t we do anything? Can’t we look for help? Do we just have to go on waiting?”
Her fattier: “We can’t leave her. And we must stay together. We must not be afraid to take time.”
Calvin: “You mean we were? We rushed into things on Camazotz too fast, and Charles Wallace rushed in too fast, and that’s why he got caught?”