A Wind in the Door Read online

  "Is he well enough to go to school?"

  "I think so. For now. I don't want to take him out until I have to."

  "Why not?"

  "He'd just have to go back eventually, Meg, and then things would be harder than ever. If he can just get through these first weeks--"

  "Mother, nobody around here has ever known a six-year-old boy like Charles."

  "He's extremely intelligent. But there was a day when it wasn't unusual for a twelve-or thirteen-year-old to graduate from Harvard, or Oxford or Cambridge."

  "It's unusual today. And you and Father can hardly send him to Harvard at six. Anyhow, it isn't just that he's intelligent. How does he know what we're thinking and feeling? I don't know how much you've told him, but he knows an awful lot about mitochondria and farandolae."

  "I've told him a reasonable amount."

  "He knows more than a reasonable amount. And he knows you're worried about him."

  Mrs. Murry perched on one of the high stools by the kitchen counter which divided the work area from the rest of the bright, rambly dining and studying room. She sighed, "You're right, Meg. Charles Wallace not only has a good mind, he has extraordinary powers of intuition. If he can learn to discipline and channel them when he grows up--if he--" She broke off. "I have to think about getting dinner."

  Meg knew when to stop pushing her mother. "I'll help. What're we having?" She did not mention Charles Wallace's dragons. She did not mention Louise the Larger's strange behavior, nor the shadow of whatever it was they had not quite seen.

  "Oh, spaghetti's easy"--Mrs. Murry pushed a curl of dark red hair back from her forehead--"and good on an autumn night."

  "And we've got all the tomatoes and peppers and stuff from the twins' garden. Mother, I love the twins even when they get in my hair, but Charles--"

  "I know, Meg. You and Charles have always had a very special relationship."

  "Mother, I can't stand what's happening to him at school."

  "Neither can I, Meg."

  "Then what are you doing about it?"

  "We're trying to do nothing. It would be easy--for now--to take Charles out of school. We thought about that immediately, even before he--But Charles Wallace is going to have to live in a world made up of people who don't think at all in any of the ways that he does, and the sooner he starts learning to get along with them, the better. Neither you nor Charles has the ability to adapt that the twins do."

  "Charles is a lot brighter than the twins."

  "A life form which can't adapt doesn't last very long."

  "I still don't like it."

  "Neither do your father and I, Meg. Bear with us. Remember, you do have a tendency to rush in when the best thing to do is wait and be patient for a while."

  "I'm not in the least patient."

  "Is that for my information?" Mrs. Murry took tomatoes, onions, green and red peppers, garlic and leeks out of the vegetable bin. Then, starting to slice onions into a large, black iron pot, she said thoughtfully, "You know, Meg, you went through a pretty rough time at school yourself."

  "Not as bad as Charles. And I'm not as bright as Charles--except maybe in math."

  "Possibly you're not--though you do tend to underestimate your own particular capacities. What I'm getting at is that you do seem, this year, to be finding school moderately bearable."

  "Mr. Jenkins isn't there any more. And Calvin O'Keefe is. Calvin's important. He's the basketball star and president of the senior class and everything. Anybody Calvin likes is sort of protected by his--his aura."

  "Why do you suppose Calvin likes you?"

  "Not because of my beauty, that's for sure."

  "But he does like you, doesn't he, Meg?"

  "Well, yes, I guess so, but Calvin likes lots of people. And he could have any girl in school if he wanted to."

  "But he chose you, didn't he?"

  Meg could feel herself flushing. She put her hands up to her cheeks. "Well. Yes. But it's different. It's because of some of the things we've been through together. And we're friend-friends--I mean, we're not like most of the other kids."

  "I'm glad you're friend-friends. I've become very fond of that skinny, carrot-headed young man."

  Meg laughed. "I think Calvin confuses you with Pallas Athene. You're his absolute ideal. And he likes all of us. His own family's certainly a mess. I really think he likes me only because of our family."

  Mrs. Murry sighed. "Stop being self-deprecating, Meg."

  "Maybe at least I can learn to cook as well as you do. Did you know it was one of Calvin's brothers who beat Charles Wallace up today? I bet he's upset--I don't mean Whippy, he couldn't care less--Calvin. Somebody's bound to have told him."

  "Do you want to call him?"

  "Not me. Not Calvin. I just have to wait. Maybe he'll come over or something." She sighed. "I wish life didn't have to be so complicated. Do you suppose I'll ever be a double Ph.D. like you, Mother?"

  Mrs. Murry looked up from slicing peppers, and laughed. "It's really not the answer to all problems. There are other solutions. At this point I'm more interested in knowing whether or not I've put too many red peppers in the spaghetti sauce; I've lost count."

  They had just sat down to dinner when Mr. Murry phoned to tell them that he was going directly from Washington to Brookhaven for a week. Such trips were not unusual for either of their parents, but right now anything that took either her father or mother away struck Meg as sinister. Without much conviction she said, "I hope he has fun. He likes lots of the people there." But she felt a panicky dependence on having both her parents home at night. It wasn't only because of her fears for Charles Wallace; it was that suddenly the whole world was unsafe and uncertain. Several houses nearby had been broken into that autumn, and while nothing of great value had been taken, drawers had been emptied with casual maliciousness, food dumped on living-room floors, upholstery slashed. Even their safe little village was revealing itself to be unpredictable and irrational and precarious, and while Meg had already begun to understand this with her mind, she had never before felt it with the whole of herself. Now a cold awareness of the uncertainty of all life, no matter how careful the planning, hollowed emptily in the pit of her stomach. She swallowed.

  Charles Wallace looked at her and said, unsmilingly, "The best laid plans of mice and men ..."

  "Gang aft agley," Sandy finished.

  "Man proposes, God disposes," Dennys added, not to be outdone.

  The twins held out their plates for more spaghetti, neither one ever having been known to lose his appetite. "Why does Father have to stay a whole week?" Sandy asked.

  "It's his work, after all," Dennys said. "Mother, I think you could have put more hot peppers in the sauce."

  "He's been away a lot this autumn. He ought to stay home with his family at least some of the time. I think the sauce is okay."

  "Of course it's okay. I just like it a little hotter."

  Meg was not thinking about spaghetti, although she was sprinkling Parmesan over hers. She wondered what their mother would say if Charles Wallace told her about his dragons. If there really were dragons, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in the north pasture, oughtn't their parents to know?

  Sandy said, "When I grow up I'm going to be a banker and make money. Someone in this family has to stay in the real world."

  "Not that we don't think science is the real world, Mother," Dennys said, "but you and Father aren't practical scientists, you're theoretical scientists."

  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 p
ractice 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.

  Rain was still spattering against her window, but with diminishing force. The wind was swinging around from the south to the west; the storm was passing and the temperature falling. Her room was cold, but she did not plug in the little electric heater her parents had given her to supplement the inadequate heat which came up the attic stairs. Instead, she shoved her books aside and tiptoed back downstairs, stepping carefully over the seventh stair, which not only creaked but sometimes gave off a report like a shot.

  The twins were still practicing. Her mother was in the living room, in front of the fire, reading to Charles Wallace, not from books about trains, or animals, which the twins had liked at that age, but from a scientific magazine, an article called "The Polarizabilities and Hyperpolarizabilities of Small Molecules," by the theoretical chemist, Peter Liebmann.

  --Ouch, Meg thought ruefully.--This kind of thing is Charles Wallace's bedtime reading and our parents expect him to go to first grade and not get into trouble?

  Charles Wallace lay on the floor in front of the fire, staring into the flames, half listening, half brooding, his head as usual pillowed on Fortinbras's comfortable bulk. Meg would have liked to take Fort with her, but that would mean letting the family know she was going out. She hurried as quickly and silently as possible through the kitchen and out into the pantry. As she pulled the kitchen door closed behind her, slowly, carefully, so nobody would hear, the pantry door flew open with a bang, and the door to her mother's lab, on the left, slammed shut in a gust of wind.