- A Wind in the Door -
A Rip in the Galaxy
"... 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 alone 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."
...
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 ou 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 lest 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, "The 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 easiet 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."
--------
The Man in the Night
"Nevertheless you are called, and anybody who is invited to study with one of the Teachers is called because he is needed. You have talents we cannot afford to lose."
...
"My children," Blajeny said gravely, "my school building is the entire cosmos. Before your time with me is over, I may have to take you great distances, and to very strange places."
...
Blajeny bowed to the snake.
Louise most definitely returned the bow.
Blajeny explained gravely, "She is a colleague of mine."
"But -- but -- hey now," Calvin sputtered, "wait a minute -- "
"She is a Teacher. That is why she is so fond of the two boys -- Sandy and Dennys. One day they will be Teachers, too."
Meg said, "They're going to be successful businessmen and support the rest of us in the way to which we are not accustomed."
Blajeny waved this aside. "They will be Teachers. It is a High Calling, and you must not be distressed that it is not yours. You, too, have a Work."
--------
Farandolae and Mitochondria
She was with the twins. Charles Wallace, she thought, had sent her.
The twins were in the garden, digging, grimly spading up and turning under the old tomato plants, the frost-blackened zinnias, the lettuce gone to seed, turning them under to enrich the earth for the next spring, the next planting, with set faces working silently, taking out their anxiety over Charles Wallace in physical labor.
Sandy broke the silence. "Where's Meg?"
Dennys pause, his foot on his pitchfork as he pressed it into the earth. "She should be getting home from school soon."
"Charles Wallace said she isn't in school. He said that Meg is in him. I heard him."
"Charles Wallace is delirious."
"Have you ever seen anyone die?"
"Only animals."
"I wish Meg would come home."
"So do I."
They went on with their preparation of the garden for the winter cold and snow.