A Wind in the Door: Chapters 5–7

“My dear child,” Mr. Jenkins said, and his voice was unwontedly compassionate.

“We must think. We must think.” Proginoskes’s kythe almost became opaque for a second, and Meg felt that he was restraining himself from spouting fire.

But she trusted Proginoskes implicitly.

“I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming—making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn’t need to hate. That’s why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished.”

It is the ways of the Echthroi which are insane. The ways of the Teachers are often strange, but they are never haphazard.

She turned away from the school building, towards the early-morning shouts and whistles, and pressed her face against the soft feathers of one great pinion.

She gave a startled jump as the first bell went off inside the school building, strident, demanding.

“For some reason obscure to me, you are supposed to choose between the impostors and me. It is certainly in my interests to have you pass this absurd test. Then perhaps I can keep you out of my school.”

If you would simply stop approaching each problem in your life as though you were Einstein and had to solve the problems of the universe, and would deign to follow one or two basic rules, you—and I—would have a great deal less trouble.

“Meg,” Mr. Jenkins Two said, “I urge you to resolve this nonsense and tell the impostors that I am Mr. Jenkins. This whole farce is wasting a great deal of time. I am Mr. Jenkins, as you have cause to know.”

The three men stood side by side, identical, grey, dour, unperceptive, overworked: unlovable.

If Charles Wallace’s interests are different from those of our usual first-grader, we will try to understand that he has been taught by an eminent physicist father.

Charles Wallace stroked her soothingly, and looked speculatively at the three men.

All three folded their arms impassively across their chests.

If any of them group together and try bullying, I shall use strong disciplinary methods. This school has been run in far too lax and permissive a manner.

They shuddered slightly, not quite simultaneously, but in syncopation.

The Mr. Jenkinses followed him, walking abreast, all with the stiff, ungainly gait which was distinctively and solely Mr. Jenkins.

The Mr. Jenkinses followed him, walking abreast, all with the stiff, ungainly gait which was distinctively and solely Mr. Jenkins.

“I think that when they turn the corner there’ll be only one of them. It gives us a small respite, at any rate.”

She found herself almost laughing as she remembered Mr. Jenkins saying, “Margaret, you are the most contumacious child it has ever been my misfortune to have in this office,” and she had had to go home and look up "contumacious."

Proginoskes held three of its wings demurely over a great many of its eyes.

Her voice issued from her lips almost without volition, cold, calm, emotionless.

Proginoskes materialized, delicately unfolding wing after wing to reveal his myriad various eyes.

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

She felt the tremendous heartbeat, a beat which reverberated like a brass gong.

“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.”

Mr. Jenkins responded in a strange voice she had never heard from him before, completely unlike his usual, nasal, shrill asperity.

His freckles seemed larger and more profuse than ever.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Blajeny turned away from Sporos in quiet rebuff.

She felt prickles of foreboding.

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?”

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

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