‘To IT. Calvin, I don’t want to go! I can’t!’ She stopped, but Charles continued his jerky pace.
‘We can’t leave Charles,’ Calvin said. ‘They wouldn’t like it.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’
‘Mrs Whatsit and Co.’
‘But they’ve betrayed us! They brought us here to this terrible place and abandoned us!’
Calvin looked at her in surprise. ‘You sit down and give up if you like,’ he said. ‘I’m sticking with Charles.’ He ran to keep up with Charles Wallace and Mr Murry.
‘I didn’t mean —’ Meg started, and pounded after them.
Just as she caught up with them Charles Wallace stopped and raised his hand, and there was the elevator again, its yellow light sinister. Meg felt her stomach jerk as the swift descent began. They were silent until the motion stopped, silent as they followed Charles Wallace through long corridors and out into the street. The CENTRAL Central Intelligence Building loomed up, stark and angular, behind them.
— Do something, Meg implored her father silently. — Do something. Help. Save us.
They turned a corner, and at the end of the street was a strange, domelike building. Its walls glowed with a flicker of violet flame. Its silvery roof pulsed with ominous light. The light was neither warm nor cold, but it seemed to reach out and touch them. This, Meg was sure, must be where IT was waiting for them.
They moved down the street, more slowly now, and as they came closer to the domed building the violet flickering seemed to reach out, to envelop them, to suck them in: they were inside.
Meg could feel a rhythmical pulsing. It was a pulsing not only about her, but in her as well, as though the rhythm of her heart and lungs was no longer her own but was being worked by some outside force. The closest she had come to the feeling before was when she had been practising artificial respiration with Girl Scouts, and the leader, an immensely powerful woman, had been working on Meg, intoning OUT goes the bad air, IN comes the good! while her heavy hands pressed, released, pressed, released.
Meg gasped, trying to breathe at her own normal rate, but the inexorable beat within and without continued. For a moment she could neither move nor look round to see what was happening to the others. She simply had to stand there, trying to balance herself into the artificial rhythm of her heart and lungs. Her eyes seemed to swim in a sea of red.
Then things began to clear, and she could breathe without gasping like a beached fish, and she could look about the great, circular, domed building. It was completely empty except for the pulse, which seemed a tangible thing, and a round dais exactly in the centre. On the dais lay — what? Meg could not tell, and yet she knew that it was from this that the rhythm came. She stepped forwards tentatively. She felt that she was beyond fear now. Charles Wallace was no longer Charles Wallace. Her father had been found but he had not made everything all right. Instead everything was worse than ever, and her adored father was bearded and thin and white and not omnipotent after all. No matter what happened next, things could be no more terrible or frightening than they already were.
Oh, couldn’t they?
As she continued to step slowly forward, at last she realized what the Thing on the dais was.
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.
‘
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. ‘
‘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.
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
