A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle [41]
Meg reacted as she sometimes reacted to Mr. Jenkins at school. She scowled down at the ground in sullen fury. “It might help if you gave us something to eat,” she complained. “We’re all starved. If you’re going to be horrible to us you might as well give us full stomachs first.”
Again the thoughts coming at her broke into laughter. “Isn’t she the funny girl, though! It’s lucky for you that you amuse me, my dear, or I shouldn’t be so easy on you. The boys I find not nearly so diverting. Ah, well. Now, tell me, young lady, if I feed you will you stop interfering with me?”
“No,” Meg said.
“Starvation does work wonders, of course,” the man told her. “I hate to use such primitive methods on you, but of course you realize that you force them on me.”
“I wouldn’t eat your old food, anyhow.” Meg was still all churned up and angry as though she were in Mr. Jenkins’ office. “I wouldn’t trust it.”
“Of course our food, being synthetic, is not superior to your messes of beans and bacon and so forth, but I assure you that it’s far more nourishing, and though it has no taste of its own, a slight conditioning is all that is necessary to give you the illusion that you are eating a roast turkey dinner.”
“If I ate now I’d throw up, anyhow,” Meg said.
Still holding Meg’s and Calvin’s hands, Charles Wallace stepped forward. “Okay, what next?” he asked the man on the chair. “We’ve had enough of these preliminaries. Let’s get on with it.”
“That’s exactly what we were doing,” the man said, “until your sister interfered by practically giving you a brain concussion. Shall we try again?”
“No!” Meg cried. “No, Charles. Please. Let me do it. Or Calvin.”
“But it is only the little boy whose neurological system is complex enough. If you tried to conduct the necessary neurons your brains would explode.”
“And Charles’s wouldn’t?”
“I think not.”
“But there’s a possibility?”
“There’s always a possibility.”
“Then he mustn’t do it.”
“I think you will have to grant him the right to make his own decisions.”
But Meg, with the dogged tenacity that had so often caused her trouble, continued. “You mean Calvin and I can’t know who you really are?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t say that. You can’t know it in the same way, nor is it as important to me to have you know. Ah, here we are!” From somewhere in the shadows appeared four more men in dark smocks carrying a table. It was covered with a white cloth, like the tables used by Room Service in hotels, and held a metal hot box containing something that smelled delicious, something that smelled like a turkey dinner.
There’s something phoney in the whole setup, Meg thought. There is definitely something rotten in the state of Camazotz.
Again the thoughts seemed to break into laughter. “Of course it doesn’t really smell, but isn’t it as good as though it really did?”
“I don’t smell anything,” Charles Wallace said.
“I know, young man, and think how much you’re missing. This will all taste to you as though you were eating sand. But I suggest that you force it down. I would rather not have your decisions come from the weakness of an empty stomach.”
The table was set up in front of them, and the dark-smocked men heaped their plates with turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes and gravy and little green peas with big yellow blobs of butter melting in them and cranberries and sweet potatoes topped with gooey browned marshmallows and olives and celery and rosebud radishes and—
Meg felt her stomach rumbling loudly. The saliva came to her mouth.
“Oh, Jeeminy—” Calvin mumbled.
Chairs appeared and the four men who had provided the feast slid back into the shadows.
Charles Wallace freed his hands from Meg and Calvin and plunked himself down on one of the chairs.
“Come on,” he said. “If it’s poisoned it’s poisoned, but I don’t think it is.”
Calvin sat down. Meg continued to stand indecisively.
Calvin took a bite. He