Meg Saves Her Father From IT
In the following passage, Meg confronts IT in order to free her father from Camazotz. As you read the passage think about how the author tells us about Meg's motivation for confronting IT.
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 exaclty 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 on 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 her own puny brain was no match for this great, bodiless, pulsing, writhing mass on the round dias. 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 thime, not through Charles. "Don't you realize that if you destroy me, you also destroy your littlle 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 the red eyes and the man who ran old 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 it at the top of his lungs. "The periodic table of the elements, Meg! Say it!"
A picture flashed into her mind of winter evenings spent sitting before the open fire and studying with her father.
(Chapter 9, pages 160-161)
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