IT was a brain.
A disembodied brain. An oversized brain, just enough larger than normal to be completely revolting and terrifying. A living brain. A brain that pulsed and quivered, that seized and commanded. No wonder the brain was called IT. IT was the most horrible, the most repellent thing she had ever seen.
But as she had felt she was beyond fear, so now she was beyond screaming.
She looked at Charles Wallace, and he stood there, turned towards IT, his jaw hanging slightly loose; and his vacant blue eyes slowly twirled.
Oh yes, things could always be worse. Those twirling eyes within Charles Wallace’s soft round face made Meg icy cold inside and out.
She looked away from Charles Wallace and at her father. Her father stood there with Mrs Who’s glasses still perched on his nose – did he remember that he had them on? – and he shouted to Calvin. ‘Don’t give in!’
‘I won’t! Help Meg!’ Calvin yelled back. It was absolutely silent within the dome, and yet Meg realized that the only way to speak was to shout with all the power possible.
For everywhere she looked, everywhere she turned, was the rhythm, and as it continued to control the systole and diastole of her heart, the intake and outlet of her breath, the red miasma began to creep before her eyes again, and she was afraid that she was going to lose consciousness, and if she did that she would be completely in the power of IT.
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 IT’s 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.
‘Georgie, 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 inalienable 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 IT’s 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. Aluminium. 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 the 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.
10. Absolute Zero