A Wrinkle in Time: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Next, the children watch the battle between a star and the darkness in the ball of the Happy Medium. The star, in a great burst of light, gives its life to destroy the Darkness in a part of the galaxy. Mrs. Which reveals that that is what Mrs. Whatsit did: she was once a star, and gave her life in the battle against the Black Thing, and is a star no longer. All the children look at Mrs. Whatsit with a new sense of respect and love.

As a parting gift, the Medium shows the children their mothers; this turns out to be not as happy a thing as she had thought, for when they see Calvin's mother, she is unkempt and beating one of Calvin's younger siblings, and Mrs. Murry is sitting in her lab, writing to Mr. Murry like she does every night, and eventually puts her face in her hands, showing the unhappiness that she doesn't allow to show in front of her children. As sad as this sight is, Meg is only inspired even more to fight the Black Thing and rescue her father.

The three Mrs. W's and the three children then leave the Happy Medium, and tesser to Camazotz, the dark planet on which Mr. Murry is held captive. This time, the tesseract is painfully cold and dark as they must pass through the Darkness to get to the planet. On Camazotz, the children find themselves standing on a hill outside a town, which looks like any normal town on Earth.

Mrs. Whatsit tells the children that she cannot come with them in search of Mr. Murry; they are on their own here. However, she gives them three "gifts": to Calvin, his unusual ability to communicate, to Meg, her faults, and to Charles, his childhood. Mrs. Who, who, like Mrs. Which, wasn't able to materialize fully on Camazotz, gives Calvin a quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest which begins, "For that he was a spirit too delicate / To act their earthy and abhorr'd commands…" To Charles, Mrs. Who gives a quote from Goethe, a reminder that he does not know everything. To Meg, she gives her glasses, to be used only in grave danger. Mrs. Which gives all three of them her command: to go down into the town and to stay together, no matter what. Then the Mrs. W's disappear, and the three children go down into the town.

As Meg, Charles, and Calvin walk through the neighborhood on the outskirts, they notice that every house is exactly the same. The children outside the houses play ball and jump rope in rhythm with the actions of all the others. Then all the mothers come out of their houses at the same time, clap their hands, and the children proceed inside. It's strangely robotic. There is one boy who remains, however, who wasn't bouncing his ball in rhythm with all the rest, and his mother upon seeing him rushes outside and brings him in. Picking up the ball that the boy has just dropped, Charles Wallace goes to knock on that family's door. The mother opens the door and seems very frightened, and tells him that all her papers are in order and that nothing should be wrong. The three children leave her and keep walking towards the center of town.

A paper boy on his bike passes them, throwing every newspaper exactly the same way, and he suspiciously stops them and asks them what they're doing out. When Charles asks him about this city, the boy tells him that it has the highest production levels on the planet, that there has been no trouble there for centuries, and that is the location of CENTRAL Central Intelligence, where IT makes ITs home. The children have no idea what any of that means, but the boy directs the children towards the CENTRAL Central Intelligence center, and they head toward it.

Eventually they come to an enormous building which must be the CENTRAL Central Intelligence. Adults are going in and out in a mechanical manner, paying no attention to the children. As Charles tries to mentally probe them a bit, he becomes sure that they're not robots because they have minds, but their minds are all pulsing in the same way. He becomes frightened once he realizes he can't get through to them at all. After an argument about whether or not they ought to go in, especially if this is the place of danger where Mr. Murry is being kept, the three decide to go in together. Charles is worried that he won't recognize his father after not seeing him for a year, but Meg reassures him. Calvin says he's having another one of his intuitions, another compulsion (like the one he had when he first met them), that if they go inside the building they'll be in terrible danger. But they realize they have no choice.