A Wind in the Door - by Madeline L’Engle

SEVEN

Metron Ariston

Meg bent over Mr. Jenkins. She did not realize that Blajeny was there until she heard his voice.

“Really, Proginoskes, you ought to know better than to take anyone by surprise like that, particularly a stilllimited one like Mr. Jenkins.” He stood between the cherubim and Meg, almost as tall as the school building, half amused, half angry.

Proginoskes fluttered several wings in halfhearted apology. “I was very relieved.”

“Quite.”

“Will this—uh—Mr. Jenkins ever be anything but a limited one?”

“That is a limited and limiting thought, Proginoskes,” Blajeny said sternly. “I am surprised.”

Now the cherubim was truly abashed. He closed his eyes and covered them with wings, keeping only three eyes open, one each to gaze at Blajeny, Meg, and the prone Mr. Jenkins.

Blajeny turned to Meg. “My child, I am very pleased with you.”

Meg blushed. “Shouldn’t we do something about Mr. Jenkins?”

Blajeny knelt on the dusty ground. His dark fingers, with their vast span, pressed gently against Mr. Jenkins’s temples; the principal’s usually pasty face was grey; his body gave a spasmodic twitch; he opened his eyes and closed them again immediately; moaned.

Tension and relief had set Meg on the verge of hysteria; she was half laughing, half crying. “Blajeny, don’t you realize you must be almost as frightening to poor Mr. Jenkins as Progo?” She, too, dropped to her knees beside the principal. “Mr. Jenkins, I’m here. Meg. I know you don’t like me, but at least I’m familiar. Open your eyes. It’s all right. Really it is.”

Slowly, cautiously, he opened his eyes. “I must make an appointment with a psychiatrist. Immediately.”

Meg spoke soothingly, as to a very small child. “You aren’t hallucinating, Mr. Jenkins, honestly you aren’t. It’s all right. They’re friends, Blajeny and Progo. And they’re real.”

Mr. Jenkins closed his eyes, opened them again, focused on Meg.

“Blajeny is a Teacher, Mr. Jenkins, and Progo is a—well, he’s a cherubim.” She could hardly blame Mr. Jenkins for looking incredulous.

His voice was thin. “Either I am in the process of a nervous breakdown, which is not unlikely, or I am dreaming. That’s it. I must be asleep.” He struggled to sit up, with Meg’s assistance. “But why, then, are you in my dream? Why am I lying on the ground? Has somebody hit me? I wouldn’t put it past the bigger boys—” He rubbed his hand over his head, searching for a bruise. “Why are you here, Margaret? I seem to remember—” He looked once more at Blajeny and Proginoskes and shuddered. “They’re still here. No. I am still dreaming. Why can’t I wake up? This isn’t real.”

Meg echoed Blajeny. “What is real?” She turned to the Teacher, but he was no longer paying attention to Mr. Jenkins. She followed Blajeny’s gaze, and saw Louise slithering rapidly towards them.

A fresh shudder shook Mr. Jenkins. “Not the snake again—I have a phobia about—”

Meg soothed. “Louise is really very friendly. She won’t hurt you.”

“Snakes.” Mr. Jenkins shook his head. “Snakes and monsters and giants … It’s not possible, none of this is possible …”

Blajeny turned from his conversation with Louise the Larger, spoke urgently. “We must go at once. The Echthroi are enraged. Charles Wallace’s mitochondritis is now acute.”

“Oh, Blajeny, take us home quickly,” Meg cried. “I must be with him!”

“There isn’t time. We must go at once to Metron Ariston.”

“Where?”

Without answering, Blajeny turned from Meg to Mr. Jenkins. “You, sir: do you wish to return to your school and continue your regular day’s work? Or will you throw in your lot with us?”

Mr. Jenkins looked completely bewildered. “I am having a nervous breakdown.”

“You don’t need to have one if you don’t want to. You have simply been faced with several things outside your current spheres of experience. That does not mean that they—we—do not exist.”

Meg felt an unwilling sense of protectiveness towards this unattractive little man she had Named. “Mr. Jenkins, don’t you think you’d better report that you’re not well today, and come with us?”

Mr. Jenkins held out his hands helplessly. “Were there—there were—two other—two men who resembled me?”

“Yes, of course there were. But they’ve gone.”

“Where?”

Meg turned to Blajeny.

The Teacher looked grave. “When an Echthros takes on a human body, it tends to keep it.”

Meg caught hold of the stone grey of the Teacher’s sleeve. “The first test—how did it happen? You didn’t make it up, did you? You couldn’t have told the Echthroi to turn into Mr. Jenkins, could you?”

“Meg,” he replied quietly, “I told you I needed your help.”

“You mean—you mean this was going to happen, anyhow, the Echthroi turning into Mr. Jenkins, even if—”

“Mr. Jenkins was a perfect host for their purposes.”

Rather shakily, Mr. Jenkins tottered towards Blajeny, sputtering, “Now, see here, I don’t know who you are and I don’t care, but I demand an explanation.”

Blajeny’s voice was now more like an English horn than a cello. “Perhaps in your world today such a phenomenon would be called schizophrenia. I prefer the old idea of possession.”

“Schiz—are you, sir, questioning my sanity?”

Louise’s small voice whistled urgently.

“Mr. Jenkins,” Blajeny said quietly, “we must leave. Either return to your school or come with us. Now.”

To Meg’s surprise she found herself urging, “Please come with us, Mr. Jenkins.”

“But my duty—”

“You know you can’t just go back to school again after what’s happened.”

Mr. Jenkins moaned again. His complexion had turned from grey to pale green.

“And after you’ve met the cherubim and Blajeny—”

“Cheru—”

Louise whistled again.

Blajeny asked, “Are you coming with us or not?”

“Margaret Named me,” Mr. Jenkins said softly. “Yes. I will come.”

Proginoskes reached out a great pinion and pulled Meg in to him. She felt the tremendous heartbeat, a beat which reverberated like a brass gong. Then she saw the ovoid eye, open, dilating …

She was through.

 

 

It was something of an anticlimax to find that they were no farther from home than the star-watching rock.

Wait: was it, after all, the star-watching rock?

She blinked, and when she opened her eyes Mr. Jenkins and Blajeny were there, and Calvin was there, too (oh, thank you, Blajeny!), holding his hand out to her, and she was warmed in the radiance of his big smile.

It was no longer autumn-cold. There was a light breeze, warm and summery. All about them, encircling them, was the sound of summer insects, crickets, katydids, and—less pleasantly—the shrill of a mosquito. Frogs were crunking away, and a tree toad sang its scratchy song. The sky was thick with stars, stars which always seemed closer to earth in summer than in winter.

Blajeny sat down, cross-legged, on the rock, and beckoned to them. Meg sat in front of him, and saw that Louise was coiled nearby, her head resting on one of Proginoskes’s outstretched wings. Calvin sat beside Meg, and Mr. Jenkins stood awkwardly, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

Meg moved a little closer to Calvin and looked up at the sky.

And gasped. The stars, the low, daisy-thick summer stars, were not the familiar planets and constellations she had so often watched with her parents. They were as different as had been the constellations where Proginoskes had taken her to see the terrible work of the Echthroi.

“Blajeny,” Calvin asked, “where are we?”

“Metron Ariston.”

“What’s Metron Ariston? Is it a planet?”

“No. It’s an idea, a postulatum. I find it easier to posit when I am in my home galaxy, so we are near the Mondrion solar system of the Veganuel galaxy. The stars you see are those I know, those which I see from my home planet.”

“Why are we here?”

“The postulatum Metron Ariston makes it possible for all sizes to become relative. Within Metron Ariston you may be sized so that you are able to converse with a giant star or a tiny farandola.”

Meg felt a moment of shock and disbelief. Farandolae were still less real to her than Charles Wallace’s “dragons.” “A farandola! Are we really going to see one?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s impossible. A farandola is so small that—”

“How small is it?” Blajeny asked.

“So small that it’s beyond rational conceiving, my mother says.”

Mr. Jenkins made a small confused noise and shifted weight again. Blajeny said, “And yet Mrs. Murry is convinced that she has proved the existence of farandolae. Now let us suppose: here we are in Veganuel galaxy, two trillion light-years away. Veganuel is just about the same size as your own Earth’s galaxy. How long does it take the Milky Way to rotate once around?”

As no one else spoke, Meg answered, “Two hundred billion years, clockwise.”

“So that gives us a general idea of the size of your galaxy, doesn’t it?”

“Very general,” Calvin said. “Our minds can’t comprehend anything that huge, that macrocosmic.”

“Don’t try to comprehend with your mind. Your minds are very limited. Use your intuition. Think of the size of your galaxy. Now, think of your sun. It’s a star, and it is a great deal smaller than the entire galaxy, isn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“Think of yourselves, now, in comparison with the size of your sun. Think how much smaller you are. Have you done that?”

“Sort of,” Meg said.

“Now think of a mitochondrion. Think of the mitochondria which live in the cells of all living things, and how much smaller a mitochondrion is than you.”

Mr. Jenkins said, to himself, “I thought Charles Wallace was making them up to show off.”

Blajeny continued, “Now consider that a farandola is as much smaller than a mitochondrion as a mitochondrion is smaller than you are.”

“This time,” Calvin said, “the problem is that our minds can’t comprehend anything that microcosmic.”

Blajeny said, “Another way of putting it would be to say that a farandola is as much smaller than you are as your galaxy is larger than you are.”

Calvin whistled. “Then, to a farandola, any of us would be as big as a galaxy?”

“More or less. You are a galaxy for your farandolae.”

“Then how can we possibly meet one?”

Blajeny’s voice was patient. “I have just told you that in Metron Ariston we can almost do away with variations in size, which are, in reality, quite unimportant.” He turned his head and looked in the direction of the great glacial rocks.

“The rocks,” Meg asked, “are they really there?”

“Nothing is anywhere in Metron Ariston,” Blajeny said. “I am trying to make things as easy for you as I can by giving you a familiar visual setting. You must try to understand things not only with your little human minds, which are not a great deal of use in the problems which confront us.”

At last Mr. Jenkins sat, crouching uncomfortably on the rock. “With what can I understand, then? I don’t have very much intuition.”

“You must understand with your hearts. With the whole of yourselves, not just a fragment.”

Mr. Jenkins groaned. “I am too old to be educable. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I have lived beyond my time.”

Meg cried, “Oh, no, you haven’t, Mr. Jenkins, you’re just beginning!”

Mr. Jenkins shook his head in mournful negation. “Maybe it would have been better if you’d never Named me. Why did I ever have to see you this way? Or your little brother? Or that frightful beast?”

Proginoskes made what seemed like a minor volcanic upheaval.

Mr. Jenkins stiffened a little, though he could hardly become paler. “Are there any more like you?”

“There are a goodly number of cherubim,” Proginoskes replied, “but none exactly alike.”

“That’s it,” Mr. Jenkins said. “That’s precisely it.” Absentmindedly he brushed at the dandruff and lint on the shoulders of his dark suit.

Blajeny, listening carefully, bowed his great head courteously. “Precisely what, Mr. Jenkins?”

“Nobody should be exactly like anybody else.”

“Is anybody?”

“Those—those—imitation Mr. Jenkinses—to see myself doubled and trebled—there’s nothing left to hold on to.”

Impulsively Meg got up and ran to the principal. “But they aren’t like you, Mr. Jenkins! Nobody is! You are unique. I Named you, didn’t I?”

Mr. Jenkins’s eyes looked blurred and bewildered through the lenses of his spectacles. “Yes. Yes, you did. I suppose that’s why I’m here—wherever here is.” He turned to Blajeny. “Those other Mr. Jenkinses—you called them Echthroi?”

“Yes. The Echthroi are those who hate, those who would keep you from being Named, who would un-Name you. It is the nature of love to create. It is the nature of hate to destroy.”

Mr. Jenkins said, heavily, “I fear I have not been a loving person.”

Meg felt a flash of intuition as sharp and brilliant as the cherubim’s flame; like flame, it burned. “Oh, Mr. Jenkins, don’t you see? Every time I was in your office, being awful and hating you, I was really hating myself more than you. Mother was right. She told me that you underestimate yourself.”

Mr. Jenkins responded in a strange voice she had never heard from him before, completely unlike his usual, nasal, shrill asperity. “We both do, don’t we, Margaret? When I thought your parents were looking down on me, I was really looking down on myself. But I don’t see any other way to look at myself.”

Now at last Meg glimpsed the Mr. Jenkins who had bought shoes for Calvin, who had clumsily tried to make those shoes look worn.

Mr. Jenkins turned to Blajeny. “These Echth—”

“Echthroi. Singular, Echthros.”

“These Echthroi who took on—who took on my likeness,” Mr. Jenkins said, “can they cause more trouble?”

“Yes.”

“They would harm Charles Wallace?”

“They would X—extinguish him,” the cherubim said.

Meg reached out in longing and fear towards her brother. “We shouldn’t have left him—” she started, then closed her mouth. She felt the cherubim moving gently within her, helping her, giving her little shoves of thought, and then she seemed to be with Charles Wallace, not in actuality, not in person, but in her heart. In her heart’s sight she saw their mother carrying him up the stairs, Charles limp in his mother’s arms, legs dangling. Mrs. Murry went into his room, a small, paneled room with a little fireplace, and one wall papered in a blue and white snowflake pattern, a safe, comfortable room. The window looked out onto the pine woods behind the house; the light which came in was gentle, and kind.

Mrs. Murry laid Charles Wallace down on his bed, and began to undress him. The child barely had the strength to help her; he made an effort to smile and said, “I’ll be better soon. Meg will …”

“Meg will be home from school in a couple of hours,” their mother said. “She’ll be right up to see you. And Dr. Louise is on her way.”

“Meg isn’t—in school.” Speaking was almost too great an effort.

Mrs. Murry did not contradict him, as perhaps she might have normally, but helped him into his pajamas.

“I’m cold, Mother.”

She pulled the covers up over him. “I’ll get another blanket.”

A sound of feet pounding up the stairs, and the twins burst in:

“What’s this? What’s the matter?”

“Is Charles sick?”

Mrs. Murry answered quietly, “He’s not feeling very well.”

“Bad enough to go to bed?”

“Did he have trouble in school again?”

“School was fine. He took Louise and she made a great hit, evidently.”

“Our Louise?”

“Louise the Larger?”

“Yes.”

“Bully for you, Charles!”

“That’s telling them!”

Charles Wallace managed a reasonably good smile.

“Sandy,” Mrs. Murry said, “please bring up some wood for a fire. It’s a little chilly. Dennys, if you’d please go to the cedar closet and get another blanket …”

“Okay. Sure. Right away.”

“And Meg’ll read to you or something when she gets home, Charles.”

Meg thought she heard Charles Wallace saying once again that Meg was not in school, but it was as though a mist swept over the vivid scene, and Charles Wallace’s room was gone, and Meg was standing, pressed close against the cherubim, who had one wing strongly about her.

Blajeny said, “Now, my children, we must have a lesson. Let us make believe that it is daytime. You can, you know. Believing takes practice, but neither you, Calvin, nor you, Meg, is old enough to have forgotten completely how to do it. You must make believe for yourselves and for Mr. Jenkins. This may seem a trivial task, in view of the gravity of the circumstances, but it is practice for what is to come. Now. Make believe. Turn night to day.”

The cherubim withdrew his wing and Meg put her hand in Blajeny’s. Her own hand was very small in comparison, as small as it had been when she was younger than Charles Wallace and had held her father’s hand in complete love and trust. She looked up at Blajeny’s grave, black face, looked into the strange amber eyes which sometimes seemed to hold the cold light of the moon, and which now glowed with the warmth of the sun. Color flooded the imaged sky of Metron Ariston, a vast, arching blue canopy, cloudless, and shimmering with warmth. About the rock the green grasses of summer rippled in the breeze; a bird sang, was joined by another, others, until melody was all around them. The grass was brightened by field flowers, daisies, black-eyed Susans, Indian paintbrushes, butter-and-eggs, purple thistles, all the summer flowers blooming abundantly and brilliantly.

Colors blazed more brightly than normal. Calvin’s hair, the shade of an Indian paintbrush, burned like sunlight. His freckles seemed larger and more profuse than ever. The faded blue of his jacket had deepened to meet the gentian blue of his eyes. He had on one red sock and one purple sock.

Meg’s old kilt, faded from countless washings, looked bright and new, but her hair, she thought, was probably as mouse-brown as ever; and Mr. Jenkins was still pasty and colorless. Louise the Larger, however, looked even larger than usual, and her coils shone with purple and gold.

Meg looked towards Proginoskes and the shining of the cherubim was so brilliant it almost blinded her; she had to look away.

“Now, my children,” Blajeny said, and he included Mr. Jenkins in the appellation, “we will welcome the other member of this class.”

From behind the smaller of the two glacial rocks a tiny creature appeared and scampered over to them. It looked rather like a small, silver-blue mouse, and yet it seemed to Meg to be a sea creature rather than a land creature. Its ears were large and velvety, the fur shading off into lavender fringes at the tips, blowing gently in the breeze like sea plants moving in the currents of the ocean. Its whiskers were unusually long; its eyes were large and milky and had no visible pupil or iris, but there was nothing dulled about them; they shone like moonstones.

It spoke, but with neither a mouse’s squeak nor a human voice. The sound was like harp strings being plucked under water, and the long whiskers vibrated almost as though they were being played. It did not give forth words, and yet it was quite plain that it was saying something like “Hello, are you my classmates?”

Blajeny spoke in the mouse-creature’s language; words did not issue from his mouth; his granite lips were closed; and yet the children heard the lovely rippling harp sound.

The mouse-creature did not seem pleased, and made sounds which conveyed a good deal of doubt. Meg understood it to be complaining that if it had to pass even the most preliminary of examinations with an earthling, it was dubious that it could do so. A cherubim might be of some help, but surely earthlings were nothing but—

Proginoskes said, “I, too, had misgivings about earthlings. But the girl earthling and I have just come through the first ordeal, and it was the girl who did it.”

The mouse-creature’s whiskers twingled. “It can’t have been much of an ordeal. Can we please get going, Blajeny? We have only a parsec before I make my preliminary report. And I can see I have a great deal to teach whomever I’m unfortunate enough to have as a partner—even if it’s the cherubim.” Its long, lavender tail, which had a fish-like fan at the tip, switched, and its whiskers bristled in Meg’s direction.

Meg bristled, too. “Perhaps when I’m as old as you are I’ll have learned a few things to teach you!”

Mouse-creature’s whiskers vibrated wildly. “Age is immaterial. In any case, it so happens that I was born only yesterday.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

Mouse-creature drew itself up; now it reminded Meg not so much of a mouse as of a small shrimp with antennae waving wildly. “There’s only one of us farandolae born every generation or so nowadays, and we start our schooling the moment we’re born.”

“You’re a farandola!”

“Naturally. What did you expect me to be? What else could I possibly be? Everybody knows that the farandolae—”

She interrupted. “Everybody doesn’t. The existence of farandolae wasn’t even guessed at until a few years ago when we began to learn more about mitochondria, and my mother has just now isolated the effect of farandolae on mitochondria with her micro-sonarscope. And even with the micro-electron microscope, farandolae can just be proved to exist, they can’t really be seen.”

The mouse-creature’s, the farandola’s, whiskers twanged. “It’s a very stupid breed of creature that doesn’t know its own inhabitants. Especially if it’s fortunate enough to be inhabited by farandolae. We are extremely important and getting more so.”

Past the farandola, behind Proginoskes and Louise the Larger, the shape of a Mr. Jenkins blew rapidly across the horizon.

Mr. Jenkins, standing near Meg and Calvin, quivered.

Blajeny looked grim. “Echthroi at work.”

The mouse-creature-farandola paid no attention. “My quercus, my tree, hasn’t had an offspring for a hundred years—our years, of course. It will take me that long to become full-grown myself, and this is only my second phase.”

Meg spoke in her most ungracious manner. “You’re going to tell us about your first phase whether we want you to or not. So go ahead.” The glimpse of Charles Wallace, followed by the sight of another Echthros-Mr. Jenkins, had forced her to realize that the successful passing of the first test did not mean that everything was going to be all right.

Mouse-shrimp-farandola reacted by an intensified trembling of feelers. “Yesterday morning I was still contained inside the single golden fruit hanging on my tree. At noon it burst and fell open, and there was I, newly hatched. In my tadpole stage I was delivered to Metron Ariston and transmogrified, and here am I. My name is Sporos, by the way, and I do not like your thinking names like mouse-creature and shrimp-thing at me. Sporos. When I have finished this phase of my education—if I finish—with one of you for a partner, I will root myself, and Deepen. After an aeon I’ll send up a small green shoot out of my kelp bed, and start growing into an aqueous deciduous spore-reproducing fruit-bearing coniferous farandola.”

Calvin looked horrified. “You’re mad. I’ve studied biology. You’re not possible.”

“Neither are you,” Sporos replied indignantly. “Nothing important is. Blajeny, is it my misfortune to be paired with one of these earthlings?”

Louise the Larger lifted her head out of her coils and looked at Sporos, her heavy lids met and closed.

Blajeny said, “You are hardly making yourself popular, Sporos.”

“I’m not a mere earthling. Earthlings are important only because they are inhabited by farandolae. Popularity is immaterial to farandolae.”

Blajeny turned away from Sporos in quiet rebuff. “Calvin. You and Sporos are to work together.”

“Oh, well, you can’t win them all,” was more or less the effect of what Sporos was vibrating, and Meg thought it would have been a more appropriate response coming from Calvin.

Mr. Jenkins said, “Blajeny, if I may presume—”

“Yes?”

“That other—I did see another copy of myself just a few moments ago, did I not?”

“Yes. I am afraid you did.”

“What does it mean?”

Blajeny said, “It means nothing good.”

Proginoskes added, “You see, we aren’t any place. We’re in Metron Ariston. We’re simply in an idea which Blajeny happens to be having in the middle of the Mondrion solar system in Veganuel galaxy. An Echthros-Mr. Jenkins oughtn’t to be able to follow us here. It means—”

“What?” Meg demanded.

Like Blajeny, Proginoskes said, “Nothing good.”

Sporos twingled his whiskers. “Need we stand around chittering? When are we going?”

“Very soon.”

“Where?” Meg demanded. She felt prickles of foreboding.

“To a far place, Meg.”

“But Mother and Father—Charles Wallace—the twins—we can’t just go off this way with Charles Wallace so ill and—”

“That is why we are going, Meg,” Blajeny said.

Sporos rippled his undulating notes, and Meg translated something like: “Can’t you just call home, or just reach out and talk to each other when you want to?” and then a horrified, “Oh, my goodness, I don’t see how anybody as ignorant as you three earthlings seem to be can possibly manage. Do you mean on your earth host you never communicate with each other and with other planets? You mean your planet revolves about all isolated in space? Aren’t you terribly lonely? Isn’t he?”

“He?”

“Or she. Your planet. Aren’t you lonely?”

“Maybe we are, a little,” Calvin conceded. “But it’s a beautiful planet.”

“That,” Sporos said, “is as it may be. Since I was only born yesterday and came right into Metron Ariston and to Blajeny, I don’t know the planets except the ones in the Mondrion solar system, and they talk back and forth all the time; they chatter too much, if you ask me.”

“We didn’t,” Meg tried to interrupt, but Sporos twingled on.

“I do hope I wasn’t born in some dreadful mitochondrion which lives in some horrible isolated human host on a lonely planet like yours. You are all from the same planet? I thought so. Oh dear, oh dear, I can see you aren’t going to be the least help to me in passing any of the trials. I’d better see what time it is.”

“How do you tell time?” Calvin asked curiously.

“By the leaves, of course. You mean to say you don’t even know the time of day?”

“Of course I do. With my watch.”

“What’s a watch?”

Calvin extended his wrist. He was very proud of his watch, which had been a prize at school, and gave the date as well as the hour, had a sweep hand, and was a stop watch as well.

“What a peculiar object.” Sporos regarded it with a certain contempt. “Does it work just for your time, or for time in general?”

“Just for our time, I guess.”

“You mean, if you want to know what time it is anywhere here in Blajeny’s galaxy, or in a distant mitochondrion, your watch thing won’t tell you?”

“Well—no. It just tells the time for whatever time zone I’m in.”

“Mighty Yadah! How confused everything must be on your planet. I only hope my human host isn’t in your planet.”

Mr. Jenkins said plaintively, “If someone would just explain to me what is going on—”

“Mr. Jenkins,” Meg said. “You know what the Echthroi are—”

“But I don’t. I only know that they impersonated me.”

Blajeny placed both great hands on Mr. Jenkins’s stooped shoulders and looked down at him gravely. “There are evil forces at work in the world.”

Mr. Jenkins nodded mutely. He did not dispute that.

“They are throughout the universe.”

Mr. Jenkins glanced at the cherubim, who had stretched out his wings to their fullest span as though to flex his muscles. “How—how big are they?”

“They are no size and they are every size. An Echthros can be as large as a galaxy and as small as a farandola. Or, as you have seen, a replica of yourself. They are the powers of nothingness, those who would un-Name. Their aim is total X—to extinguish all creation.”

“What do they have to do with Charles Wallace?”

“The Echthroi are trying to destroy his mitochondria.”

“But why would they bother with a child?”

“It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.”

Louise the Larger whistled urgently, and Meg was almost sure that the snake was telling them that she would stay with Charles Wallace, that she would encourage him to keep on fighting to live. “Oh, Louise, please, please, you won’t leave him? You will help him?”

“I will not leave him.”

“Will he be all right?”

Louise answered with silence.

Blajeny said to Mr. Jenkins, “Charles Wallace will die if his mitochondria die. Do you understand that?”

Mr. Jenkins shook his head. “I thought he was making things up with his big words. I thought he was trying to show off. I didn’t know there really were mitochondria.”

Blajeny turned to Meg. “Explain.”

“I’ll try. But I’m not sure I really understand either, Mr. Jenkins. But I do know that we need energy to live. Okay?”

“Thus far.”

She felt Blajeny kything information to her, and involuntarily her mind sorted it, simplified, put it into words which she hoped Mr. Jenkins would understand. “Well, each of our mitochondria has its own built-in system to limit the rate at which it burns fuel, okay, Mr. Jenkins?”

“Pray continue, Margaret.”

“If the number of farandolae in any mitochondrion drops below a critical point, then hydrogen transport can’t occur; there isn’t enough fuel, and the result is death through energy lack.” She felt the skin on her arms and legs prickling coldly. To put into words what might be happening within Charles Wallace was almost unendurable.

She felt Blajeny prodding her and continued. “Something’s happening in Charles Wallace’s mitochondria. I’m not sure what it is, because it’s all words I don’t know, but his farandolae are dying—maybe they’re killing each other—no, that’s not right. It sounds to me as though they’re refusing to sing, and that doesn’t make any sense. The point is that they’re dying and so his mitochondria can’t produce enough oxygen.” She broke off, angrily. “Blajeny! This is all nonsense! How can we possibly stop them from doing whatever it is they’re doing, when they’re so small they aren’t even visible? You’ve got to tell us! How can we help Charles?”

Blajeny’s kything was calm and cold as steel. “You will know soon.”

“Know what?”

“What you must do to overcome the Echthroi. When you get there, my children, you will know.”

“When we get where?”

“To one of Charles Wallace’s mitochondria.”