Read A Wind in the Door for Free Online

can’t go too wrong with Jell-O.”
    Charles Wallace caught Meg’s eye, and she closed her mouth. He put his hand in the pocket of his robe again, though this time he did not produce the feather, and gave her a small, private smile. He may have been thinking about his dragons, but he had also been listening carefully, both to the conversation and to the storm, his fair head tilted slightly to one side. “This ripping in the
galaxy, Mother—does it have any effect on our own solar system?”
    “That,” Mrs. Murry replied, “is what we would all like to know.”
    Sandy brushed this aside impatiently. “It’s all much too complicated for me. I’m sure banking is a lot simpler.”
    “And more lucrative,” Dennys added.
    The windows shook in the wind. The twins looked through the darkness at the slashing rain.
    “It’s a good thing we brought in so much stuff from the garden before dinner.”
    “This is almost hail.”
    Meg asked nervously, “Is it dangerous, this—this ripping in the sky, or whatever it is?”
    “Meg, we really know nothing about it. It may have been going on all along, and we only now have the instruments to record it.”
    “Like farandolae,” Charles Wallace said. “We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.”
    “But is it dangerous?” Meg repeated.
    “Meg, we don’t know enough about it yet. That’s why it’s important that your father and some of the other physicists get together at once.”
    “But it could be dangerous?”
    “Anything can be dangerous.”

    Meg looked down at the remains of her dinner. Dragons and rips in the sky. Louise and Fortinbras greeting something large and strange. Charles Wallace pale and listless. She did not like any of it. “I’ll do the dishes,” she told her mother.
    They cleaned up the kitchen in silence. Mrs. Murry had sent the reluctant twins to practice for the school orchestra, Dennys on the flute, which he played well, accompanied by Sandy, less skillfully, on the piano. But it was a pleasant, familiar noise, and Meg relaxed into it. When the dishwasher was humming, the pots and pans polished and hung on their hooks, she went up to her attic bedroom to do her homework. This room was supposed to be her own, private place, and it would have been perfect except for the fact that it was seldom really private: the twins kept their electric trains in the big, open section of the attic; the ping-pong table was there, and anything anybody didn’t want around downstairs but didn’t want to throw away. Although Meg’s room was at the far end of the attic, it was easily available to the twins when they needed help with their math homework. And Charles Wallace always knew, without being told, when she was troubled, and would come up to the attic to sit on the foot of her bed. The only time she didn’t want Charles Wallace was when he himself was what was troubling her. She did not want him now.

    Rain was still spattering against her window, but with diminishing force. The wind was swinging around from the south to the west; the storm was passing and the temperature falling. Her room was cold, but she did not plug in the little electric heater her parents had given her to supplement the inadequate heat which came up the attic stairs. Instead, she shoved her books aside and tiptoed back downstairs, stepping carefully over the seventh stair, which not only creaked but sometimes gave off a report like a shot.
    The twins were still practicing. Her mother was in the living room, in front of the fire, reading to Charles Wallace, not from books about trains, or animals, which the twins had liked at that age, but from a scientific magazine, an article called “The Polarizabilities and Hyperpolarizabilities of Small Molecules,” by the theoretical chemist, Peter Liebmann.
    —Ouch, Meg thought ruefully.—This kind of thing is Charles Wallace’s bedtime reading and our parents expect him to go to first grade and not get into