The Midwich Cuckoos

Chapter I. No Entry to Midwich

One of the luckiest accidents in my wife's life is that she happened to marry a man who was born on the 26th of September. But for that, we should both of us undoubtedly have been at home in Midwich on the night of the 26th – 27th, with consequences which, I have never ceased to be thankful, she was spared.

Because it was my birthday, however, and also to some extent because I had the day before received and signed a contract with an American publisher, we set off on the morning of the 26th for London, and a mild celebration. Very pleasant, too. A few satisfactory calls, lobster and Chablis at Wheeler's, Ustinov's latest extravaganza, a little supper, and so back to the hotel where Janet enjoyed the bathroom with that fascination which other people's plumbing always arouses in her.

Next morning, a leisurely departure on the way back to Midwich. A pause in Trayne, which is our nearest shopping town, for a few groceries; then on along the main road, through the village of Stouch, then the right-hand turn on to the secondary road for – But, no. Half the road is blocked by a pole from which dangles a notice 'ROAD CLOSED', and in the gap beside it stands a policeman who holds up his hand...

So I stop. The policeman advances to the offside of the car, I recognize him as a man from Trayne.

'Sorry, sir, but the road is closed.'

'You mean I'll have to go round by the Oppley Road?'

''Fraid that's closed, too, sir.'

'But – '

There is the sound of a horn behind.

"F you wouldn't mind backing off a bit to the left, sir.'

Rather bewildered, I do as he asks, and past us and past him goes an army three-ton lorry with khaki-clad youths leaning over the sides.

'Revolution in Midwich?' I inquire.

'Manoeuvres,' he tells me. 'The road's impassable.'

'Not both roads surely? We live in Midwich, you know, Constable.'

'I know, sir. But there's no way there just now. 'F I was you, sir, I'd go back to Trayne till we get it clear. Can't have parking here, 'cause of getting things through.'

Janet opens the door on her side and picks up her shopping-bag.

'I'll walk on, and you come along when the road's clear,' she tells me.

The constable hesitates. Then he lowers his voice.

'Seein' as you live there, ma'am, I'll tell you – but it's confidential like. 'Tisn't no use tryin', ma'am. Nobody can't get into Midwich, an' that's a fact.'

We stare at him.

'But why on earth not?' says Janet.

'That's just what they're tryin' to find out, ma'am. Now, 'f you was to go to the Eagle in Trayne, I'll see you're informed as soon as the road's clear.'

Janet and I looked at one another.

'Well,' she said to the constable, 'it seems very queer, but if you're quite sure we can't get through...'

'I am that, ma'am. It's orders, too. We'll let you know, as soon as maybe.'

If one wanted to make a fuss, it was no good making it with him; the man was only doing his duty, and as amiably as possible.

'Very well,' I agreed. 'Gayford's my name, Richard Gayford. I'll tell the Eagle to take a message for me in case I'm not there when it comes.'

I backed the car further until we were on the main road, and, taking his word for it that the other Midwich road was similarly closed, turned back the way we had come. Once we were the other side of Stouch village I pulled off the road into a field gateway.

'This,' I said, 'has a very odd smell about it. Shall we cut across the fields, and see what's going on?'

'That policeman's manner was sort of queer, too. Let's,' Janet agreed, opening her door.

What made it the more odd was that Midwich was, almost notoriously, a place where things did not happen.

Janet and I had lived there just over a year then, and found this to be almost its leading feature. Indeed, had there been posts at the entrances to the village bearing a red triangle and below them a notice:

MIDWICH. DO NOT DISTURB,

they would have seemed not inappropriate. And why Midwich should have been singled out in preference to any one of a thousand other villages for the curious event of the 26th of September seems likely to remain a mystery for ever.

For consider the simple ordinariness of the place.

Midwich lies roughly eight miles west-north-west of Trayne. The main road westward out of Trayne runs through the neighbouring villages of Stouch and Oppley, from each of which secondary roads lead to Midwich. The village itself is therefore at the apex of a road triangle which has Oppley and Stouch at its lower corners; its only other highway being a lane which rolls in a Chestertonian fashion some five miles to reach Hickham which is three miles north.

At the heart of Midwich is a triangular Green ornamented by five fine elms and a white-railed pond. The war memorial stands in the churchward corner of the Green, and spaced out round the sides are the church itself, the vicarage, the inn, the smithy, the post office, Mrs Welt's shop, and a number of cottages. Altogether, the village comprises some sixty cottages and small houses, a village hall, Kyle Manor, and The Grange.

The church is mostly perp. and dec., but with a Norman west doorway and font. The vicarage is Georgian; The Grange Victorian; Kyle Manor has Tudor roots with numerous later graftings. The cottages show most of the styles which have existed between the two Elizabeths, but even more recent than the two latest County Council cottages are the utilitarian wings that were added to The Grange when the Ministry took it over for Research.

The existence of Midwich has never been convincingly accounted for. It was not in a strategic position to hold a market, not even across a packway of any importance. It appears, at some unknown time, simply to have occurred; the Domesday survey notes it as a hamlet, and it has continued as little more, for the railway age ignored it, as had the coach roads, and even the navigation canals.

So far as is known, it rests upon no desirable minerals: no official eye ever saw it as a likely site for an aerodrome, or a bombing-range, or a battle school; only the Ministry intruded, and the reconditioning of The Grange had little effect upon the village life. Midwich has – or rather, had – lived and drowsed upon its good soil in Arcadian undistinction for a thousand years; and there seemed, until the late evening of the 26th of September, no reason why it should not so to do for the next millennium, too.

This must not be taken, however, to mean that Midwich is altogether without history. It has had its moments. In 1931 it was the centre of an untraced outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. And in 1916 an off-course Zeppelin unloaded a bomb which fell in a ploughed field and fortunately failed to explode. And before that it hit the headlines – well, anyway, the broadsheets – when Black Ned, a second-class highwayman, was shot on the steps of The Scythe and Stone Inn by Sweet Polly Parker, and although this gesture of reproof appears to have been of a more personal than social nature, she was, nevertheless, much lauded for it in the ballads of 1768.

Then, too, there was the sensational closure of the nearby St Accius' Abbey, and the redistribution of the brethren for reasons which have been a subject of intermittent local speculation ever since it took place, in 1493.

Other events include the stabling of Cromwell's horses in the church, and a visit by William Wordsworth, who was inspired by the Abbey ruins to the production of one of his more routine commendatory sonnets.

With these exceptions, however, recorded time seems to have flowed over Midwich without a ripple.

Nor would the inhabitants – save, perhaps, some of the youthful in their brief pre-marital restlessness – have it otherwise. Indeed, but for the Vicar and his wife, the Zellabys at Kyle Manor, the doctor, the district-nurse, ourselves, and, of course, the Researchers, they had most of them lived there for numerous generations in a placid continuity which had become a right.

During the day of the 26th of September there seems to have been no trace of a foreshadow. Possibly Mrs Brant, the blacksmith's wife, did feel a trace of uneasiness at the sight of nine magpies in one field, as she afterwards claimed; and Miss Ogle, the postmistress, may have been perturbed on the previous night by a dream of singularly large vampire bats; but, if so, it is unfortunate that Mrs Brant's omens and Miss Ogle's dreams should have been so frequent as to nullify their alarm value. No other evidence has been produced to suggest that on that Monday, until late in the evening, Midwich was anything but normal. Just, in fact, as it had appeared to be when Janet and I set off for London. And yet, on Tuesday the 27th...

We locked the car, climbed the gate, and started over the field of stubble keeping well in to the hedge. At the end of that we came to another field of stubble and bore leftwards across it, slightly uphill. It was a big field with a good hedge on the far side, and we had to go further left to find a gate we could climb. Half-way across the pasture beyond brought us to the top of the rise, and we were able to look out across Midwich – not that much of – it was visible for trees, but we could see a couple of wisps of greyish smoke lazily rising, and the church spire sticking up by the elms. Also, in the middle of the next field I could see four or five cows lying down, apparently asleep.

I am not a countryman, I only live there, but I remember thinking rather far back in my mind that there was something not quite right about that. Cows folded up, chewing cud, yes, commonly enough; but cows lying down fast asleep, well, no. But it did not do more at the time than give me a vague feeling of something out of true. We went on.

We climbed the fence of the field where the cows were and started across that, too.

A voice hallooed at us, away on the left. I looked round and made out a khaki-clad figure in the middle of the next field. He was calling something unintelligible, but the way he was waving his stick was without doubt a sign for us to go back. I stopped.

'Oh, come on, Richard. He's miles away,' said Janet impatiently, and began to run on ahead.

I still hesitated, looking at the figure who was now waving his stick more energetically than ever, and shouting more loudly, though no more intelligibly. I decided to follow Janet. She had perhaps twenty yards start of me by now, and then, just as I started off, she staggered, collapsed without a sound, and lay quite still...

I stopped dead. That was involuntary. If she had gone down with a twisted ankle, or had simply tripped I should have run on, to her. But this was so sudden and so complete that for a moment I thought, idiotically, that she had been shot.

The stop was only momentary. Then I went on again.

Dimly I was aware of the man away on the left still shouting, but I did not bother about him. I hurried towards her...

But I did not reach her.

I went out so completely that I never even saw the ground come up to hit me...

Chapter 2. All Quiet in Midwich

As I said, all was normal in Midwich on the 26th. I have looked into the matter extensively, and can tell you where practically everyone was, and what they were doing that evening.

The Scythe and Stone, for instance, was entertaining its regulars in their usual numbers. Some of the younger villagers had gone to the pictures in Trayne – mostly the same ones who had gone there the previous Monday. In the post office Miss Ogle was knitting beside her switchboard, and finding, as usual, that real life conversation was more interesting than the wireless. Mr Tapper, who used to be a jobbing gardener before he won something fabulous in a football pool, was in a bad temper with his prized colour-television set which had gone on the blink again in its red circuit, and was abusing it in language that had already driven his wife to bed. Lights still burnt in one or two of the new laboratories shouldered on to The Grange, but there was nothing unusual in that; it was common for one or two Researchers to conduct their mysterious pursuits late into the night.

But although all was so normal, even the most ordinary-seeming day is special for someone. For instance, it was, as I have said, my birthday, so it happened that our cottage was closed and dark. And up at Kyle Manor it happened, also, to be the day when Miss Ferrelyn Zellaby put it to Mr Alan (temporarily Second-Lieutenant) Hughes that, in practice, it takes more than two to make an engagement; that it would be a friendly gesture to tell her father about it.

Alan, after some hesitation and demur, allowed himself to be persuaded into Gordon Zellaby's study to make him acquainted with the situation.

He found the master of Kyle Manor spread comfortably about a large armchair, his eyes closed, and his elegantly white head leaning against the chair's right wing, so that at first sight he appeared to have been lulled to sleep by the excellently reproduced music that pervaded the room. Without speaking, or opening his eyes, however, he dispelled this impression by waving his left hand at another easy chair and then putting his finger to his lips for silence.

Alan tiptoed to the indicated chair, and sat down. There then followed an interlude during which all the phrases that he had summoned to the tip of his tongue drained back somewhere beyond its root, and for the next ten minutes or so he occupied himself by a survey of the room.

One wall was covered from floor to ceiling by books which broke off only to allow the door by which he had entered. More books, in lower bookcases, ran round most of the room, halting in places to accommodate the french windows, the chimney-piece, where flickered a pleasant though not quite necessary fire, and the record player. One of the several glass-fronted cases was devoted to the Zellaby Works in various editions and languages, with room on the bottom shelf for a few more.

Above this case hung a sketch in red chalk of a handsome young man who could, after some forty years, still be seen in Gordon Zellaby. On another case a vigorous bronze recorded the impression he had made on Epstein some twenty-five years later. A few signed portraits of other notable persons hung here and there on the walls. The space above and about the fireplace was reserved for more domestic mementoes. Along with portraits of Gordon Zellaby's father, mother, brother, and two sisters, hung likenesses of Ferrelyn, and her mother (Mrs Zellaby Number 1).

A portrait of Angela, the present Mrs Gordon Zellaby, stood upon the centre piece and focus of the room, the large, leather-topped desk where the Works were written.

Reminder of the Works caused Alan to wonder whether his timing might not have been more propitious, for a new Work was in process of gestation. This was made manifest by a certain distraitness in Mr Zellaby at present.

'It always happens when he's brewing,' Ferrelyn had explained. 'Part of him seems to get lost. He goes off on long walks and can't make out where he is and rings up to be brought home, and so on. It's a bit trying while it lasts, but it gets all right again once he eventually starts to write the book. While it's on, we just have to be firm with him, and see he has his meals, and all that.'

The room in general, with its comfortable chairs, convenient lights, and thick carpet, struck Alan as a practical result of its owner's views on the balanced life. He recalled that in While We Last , the only one of the Works he had read as yet, Zellaby had treated ascetism and overindulgence as similar evidences of maladjustment. It had been an interesting, but, he thought, gloomy book; the author had not seemed to him to give proper weight to the fact that the new generation was more dynamic, and rather more clear-sighted than those that had preceded it...

At last the music tied itself up with a neat bow, and ceased. Zellaby stopped the machine by a switch on the arm of his chair, opened his eyes, and regarded Alan.

'I hope you don't mind,' he apologized. 'One feels that once Bach has started his pattern he should be allowed to finish it. Besides,' he added, glancing at the playing-cabinet, 'we still lack a code for dealing with these innovations. Is the art of the musician less worthy of respect simply because he is not present in person? What is the gracious thing? – For me to defer to you, for you to defer to me, or for both of us to defer to genius – even genius at second-hand? Nobody can tell us. We shall never know.

'We don't seem to be good at integrating novelties with our social lives, do we? The world of the etiquette book fell to pieces at the end of the last century, and there has been no code of manners to tell us how to deal with anything invented since. Not even rules for an individualist to break, which is itself another blow at freedom. Rather a pity, don't you think?'

'Er, yes,' said Alan. 'I – er -'

'Though, mind you,' Mr Zellaby continued, 'it is a trifle d mod even to perceive the existence of the problem. The true fruit of this century has little interest in coming to living-terms with innovations; it just greedily grabs them all as they come along. Only when it encounters something really big does it become aware of a social problem at all, and then, rather than make concessions, it yammers for the impossibly easy way out, uninvention, suppression – as in the matter of The Bomb.'

'Er – yes, I suppose so. What I -'

Mr Zellaby perceived a lack of fervour in the response.

'When one is young,' he said understandingly, 'the unconventional, the unregulated, hand-to-mouth way of life has a romantic aspect. But such, you must agree, are not the lines on which to run a complex world. Luckily, we in the West still retain the skeleton of our ethics, but there are signs that the old bones are finding the weight of new knowledge difficult to carry with confidence, don't you think?'

Alan drew breath. Recollections of previous entanglements in the web of Zellaby discourse forced him to the direct solution.

'Actually, sir, it was on quite another matter I wanted to see you,' he said.

When Zellaby noticed the interruptions of his audible reflections he was accustomed to take them in mild good part. He now postponed further contemplation of the ethical skeleton to inquire:

'But of course, my dear fellow. By all means. What is it?'

'It's that – well, it's about Ferrelyn, sir.'

'Ferrelyn? Oh yes. I'm afraid she's gone up to London for a couple of days to see her mother. She'll be back tomorrow.'

'Er – it was today she came back, Mr Zellaby.'

'Really?' exclaimed Zellaby. He thought it over. 'Yes, you're quite right. She was here for dinner. You both were,' he said triumphantly.

'Yes,' said Alan, and holding his chance with determination, he ploughed ahead with his news, unhappily conscious that not one stone of his prepared phrases remained upon another, but getting through it somehow.

Zellaby listened patiently until Alan finally stumbled to a conclusion with:

'So I do hope, sir, that you will have no objection to our becoming officially engaged,' and at that his eyes widened slightly.

'My dear fellow, you overestimate my position. Ferrelyn is a sensible girl, and I have no doubt whatever that by this time she and her mother know all about you, and have, together, reached a well-considered decision.'

'But I've never even met Mrs Holder,' Alan objected.

'If you had, you would have a better grasp of the situation. Jane is a great organizer,' Mr Zellaby told him, regarding one of the pictures on the mantel with benevolence. He got up.

'Well, now, you have performed your part very creditably; so I, too, must behave as Ferrelyn considers proper. Would you care to assemble the company while I fetch the bottle?'

A few minutes, with his wife, his daughter, and his prospective son-in-law grouped about him, he lifted his glass.

'Let us now drink,' announced Zellaby, 'to the adjunction of fond spirits. It is true that the institution of marriage as it is proclaimed by Church and state displays a depressingly mechanistic attitude of mind towards partnership – one not unlike, in fact, that of Noah. The human spirit, however, is tough, and it quite often happens that love is able to survive this coarse, institutional thumbing. Let us hope, therefore -'

'Daddy,' Ferrelyn broke in, 'it's after ten, and Alan has to get back to camp in time, or he'll be cashiered, or something. All you really have to say is "long life and happiness to you both".'

'Oh,' said Mr Zellaby. 'Are you sure that's enough? It seems very brief. However, if you think it suitable, then I say it, my dear. Most wholeheartedly I say it.'

He did.

Alan set down his empty glass.

'I'm afraid what Ferrelyn said was right, sir. I shall have to leave now,' he said.

Zellaby nodded sympathetically.

'It must be a trying time for you. How much longer will they keep you?'

Alan said he hoped to be free of the army in about three months. Zellaby nodded again.

'I expect the experience will turn out to have value. Sometimes I regret the lack of it myself. Too young for one war, tethered to a desk in the Ministry of Information in the next. Something more active would have been preferable. Well, good night, my dear fellow. It's -' He broke off, struck by a sudden thought. 'Dear me, I know we all call you Alan, but I don't believe I know your other name. Perhaps we ought to have that in order.'

Alan told him, and they shook hands again.

As he emerged into the hall with Ferrelyn he noticed the clock.

'I say, I'll have to step on it. See you tomorrow, darling. Six o'clock. Good night, my sweet.'

They kissed fervently but briefly in the doorway, and he broke away down the steps, bounding towards the small red car parked on the drive. The engine started and roared. He gave a final wave, and, with a spurt of gravel from the rear wheels, dashed away.

Ferrelyn watched the rear lights dwindle and vanish. She stood listening until the erstwhile roar became a distant hum, and then closed the front door. On her way back to the study she noticed that the hall clock now showed ten-fifteen.

Still, then, at ten-fifteen nothing in Midwich was abnormal.

With the departure of Alan's car peace was able to settle down again over a community which was, by and large, engaged in winding up an uneventful day in expectation of a no less uneventful morrow.

Many cottage windows still threw yellow beams into the mild evening where they glistered in the dampness of an earlier shower. The occasional surges of voices and laughter which swept the place were not local; they originated with a well-handled studio-audience miles away and several days ago, and formed merely a background against which most of the village was preparing for bed. Many of the very old and very young had gone there already, and wives were now filling their own hot-water bottles.

The last customers to be persuaded out of The Scythe and Stone had lingered for a few minutes to get their night-eyes and gone their ways, and by ten-fifteen all but one Alfred Wait and a certain Harry Crankhart, who were still engaged in argument about fertilizers, had reached their homes.

Only one event of the day still impended – the passage of the bus that would be bringing the more dashing spirits back from their evening in Trayne. With that over, Midwich could finally settle down for the night.

In the Vicarage, at ten-fifteen, Miss Polly Rushton was thinking that if only she had gone to bed half an hour ago she could be enjoying the book that now lay neglected on her knees, and how much pleasanter that would be than listening to the present contest between her uncle and aunt. For, on one side of the room Uncle Hubert, the Reverend Hubert Leebody, was attempting to listen to a Third Programme disquisition on the Pre-Sophoclean Conception of the Oedipus Complex, while, on the other, Aunt Dora was telephoning. Mr Leebody, determined that scholarship should not be submerged by piffle, had already made two advances in volume, and still had forty-five degrees of knob turning in reserve. He could not be blamed for failing to guess that what was striking him as a particularly nugatory exchange of feminine concerns could turn out to be of importance. No one else would have guessed it, either.

The call was from South Kensington, London, where a Mrs Cluey was seeking the support of her lifelong friend Mrs Leebody. By ten-sixteen she had reached the kernel of the matter.

'Now, tell me, Dora – and, mind, I do want your honest opinion on this: do you think that in Kathy's case it should be white satin, or white brocade?'

Mrs Leebody stalled. Clearly this was a matter where the word 'honest' was relative, and it was inconsiderate of Mrs Cluey, to say the least, to phrase her question with no perceptible bias. Probably satin, thought Mrs Leebody, but she hesitated to risk the friendship of years on a guess. She tried for a lead.

'Of course, for a very young bride... but then one wouldn't call Kathy such a very young bride, perhaps...'

'Not very young,' agreed Mrs Cluey, and waited.

Mrs Leebody dratted her friend's importunity, and also her husband's wireless programme which made thinking and finesse difficult.

'Well,' she said at last, 'both can look charming, of course, but for Kathy I really think -'

At which point her voice abruptly stopped...

Far away in South Kensington Mrs Cluey joggled the rest impatiently, and looked at her watch. Presently she pressed the bar down for a moment, and then dialled O.

'I wish to make a complaint,' she said. 'I have just been cut off in the middle of a most important conversation.'

The exchange told her it would try to reconnect her. A few minutes later it confessed failure.

'Most inefficient,' said Mrs Cluey. 'I shall put in a written complaint. I refuse to pay for a minute more than we had – indeed, I really don't see why I should pay for that, in the circumstances. We were cut off at ten-seventeen exactly.'

The man at the exchange responded with formal tact, and made a note of the time, for reference – 22.17 hrs 26th Sept...

Chapter 3. Midwich Rests

From ten– seventeen that night, information about Midwich becomes episodic. Its telephones remained dead. The bus that should have passed through it failed to reach Stouch, and a truck that went to look for the bus did not return. A notification from the RAF was received in Trayne of some unidentified flying object, not, repeat not, a service machine, detected by radar in the Midwich area, possibly making a forced landing. Someone in Oppley reported a house on fire in Midwich, with, apparently, nothing being done about it. The Trayne fire appliance turned out -and thereafter failed to make any reports. The Trayne police despatched a car to find out what had happened to the fire-engine, and that, too, vanished into silence. Oppley reported a second fire, and still, seemingly, nothing being done, Constable Gobby, in Stouch, was rung up, and sent off on his bicycle to Midwich; and no more was heard of him, either...

The dawn of the 27th was an affair of slatternly rags soaking in a dishwater sky, with a grey light weakly filtering through. Nevertheless, in Oppley and in Stouch cocks crowed, and other birds welcomed it more melodiously. In Midwich, however, no birds sang.

In Oppley and Stouch, too, as in other places, hands were soon reaching out to silence alarm clocks, but in Midwich the clocks rattled on till they ran down.

In other villages sleepy-eyed men left their cottages and encountered their work-mates with sleepy good mornings; in Midwich no one encountered anyone.

For Midwich lay entranced...

While the rest of the world began to fill the day with clamour, Midwich slept on... Its men and women, its horses, cows, and sheep; its pigs, its poultry, its larks, moles, and mice all lay still. There was a pocket of silence in Midwich, broken only by the frouing of the leaves, the chiming of the church clock, and the gurgle of the Opple as it slid over the weir beside the mill...

And while the dawn was still a poor, weak thing an olive-green van, with the words 'Post Office Telephones' just discernible upon it, set out from Trayne with the object of putting the rest of the world into touch with Midwich again.

In Stouch it paused at the village call box to inquire whether Midwich had yet shown any signs of life. Midwich had not; it was still as deeply incommunicado as it had been since 22.17 hrs. The van restarted and rattled on through the uncertainly gathering daylight.

'Cor!' said the lineman to his driver companion. ' Cor! That there Miss Ogle ain't 'alf goin' to cop 'erself a basinful of 'Er Majesty's displeasure over this little lot.'

'I don't get it,' complained the driver. "F you'd asked me I'd of said the old girl was always listenin' when there was anyone on the blower, day or night. Jest goes to show,' he added, vaguely.

A little out of Stouch, the van swung sharply to the right, and bounced along the by-road to Midwich for half a mile or so. Then it rounded a corner to encounter a situation which called for all the driver's presence of mind.

He had a sudden view of a fire-engine, half heeled over, with its near-side wheels in the ditch, and a black saloon car which had climbed half-way up the bank on the other side a few yards further on, with a man and a bicycle lying half in the ditch behind it. He pulled hard over, attempting an S turn which would avoid both vehicles, but before he could complete it his own van ran on to the narrow verge, bumped along for a few more yards, then ploughed to a stop, with its side in the hedge.

Half an hour later the first bus of the day, proceeding at a light-hearted speed, since it never had a passenger before it picked up the Midwich children for school in Oppley, rattled round the same corner to jamb itself neatly into the gap between the fire-engine and the van, and block the road completely.

On Midwich's other road – that connecting it with Oppley – a similar tangle of vehicles gave at first sight the impression that the highway had, overnight become a dump. And on that side the mail-van was the first vehicle to stop without becoming involved.

One of its occupants got out, and walked forward to investigate the disorder. He was just approaching the rear of the stationary bus when, without any warning, he quietly folded up, and dropped to the ground. The driver's jaw fell open, and he stared. Then, looking beyond his fallen companion, he saw the heads of some of the bus passengers, all quite motionless. He reversed hastily, turned, and made for Oppley and the nearest telephone.

Meanwhile the similar state of affairs on the Stouch side had been discovered by the driver of a baker's van, and twenty minutes later almost identical action was taking place on both the approaches to Midwich. Ambulances swept up with something of the air of mechanized Galahads. Their rear doors opened. Uniformed men emerged, fastening their tunic buttons, and providently pinching the embers from half-smoked cigarettes. They surveyed the pile-ups in a knowledgeable, confidence-inspiring way, unrolled stretchers, and prepared to advance.

On the Oppley road the two leading bearers approached the prone postman competently, but then, as the one in the lead drew level with the body, he wilted, sagged, and subsided across the last casualty's legs. The hind bearer goggled. Out of a babble behind him his ears picked up the word 'Gas!' he dropped the stretcher-handles as if they had turned hot, and stepped hastily back.

There was a pause for consultation. Presently the ambulance driver delivered a verdict, shaking his head.

'Not our kind of job,' he said, with the air of one recalling a useful Union decision. 'More like the fire chaps' pigeon, I'd say.'

'The army's, I reckon,' said the bearer. 'Gas masks, not just smoke masks, is what's wanted here.'

Chapter 4. Operation Midwich

About the time that Janet and I were approaching Trayne, Lieutenant Alan Hughes was standing side by side with Leading-Fireman Norris on the Oppley road. They were watching while a fireman grappled at the fallen ambulance-man with a long ceiling-hook. Presently the hook lodged, and began to haul him in. The body was dragged across a yard and a half of tarmac – and then sat up abruptly, and swore.

It seemed to Alan that he had never heard more beautiful language. Already, the acute anxiety with which he had arrived on the scene had been allayed by the discovery that the victims of whatever-it-was were quietly, but quite definitely, breathing as they lay there. Now it was established that one, at least, of them showed no visible ill effects of quite ninety minutes' experience of it.

'Good,' Alan said. 'If he's all right, it looks as if the rest may be – though it doesn't get us much nearer to knowing what it is.'

The next to be hooked and pulled out was the postman. He had been there somewhat longer than the ambulance-man, but his recovery was every bit as spontaneous and satisfactory.

'The line seems to be quite sharp – and stationary,' Alan added. 'Whoever heard of a perfectly stationary gas – and with a light wind blowing, too? It doesn't make sense.'

'Can't be droplet stuff evaporating off the ground, either,' said the Leading-Fireman. 'Kind of hits 'em like a hammer. I never heard of a droplet one like that, did you?'

Alan shook his head. 'Besides,' he agreed, 'anything really volatile would have cleared by now. What's more, it wouldn't have vaporized last night and caught the bus and the rest. The bus was due in Midwich at ten-twenty-five – and I came over this bit of road myself only a few minutes before that. There wasn't anything wrong with it then. In fact, that must be the bus I met just running into Oppley.'

'I wonder how far it stretches?' mused the Leading-Fireman. 'Must be fairly wide, or we'd see things what were trying to come this way.'

They continued to gaze in perplexity towards Midwich. Beyond the vehicles the road continued with a clear, innocent-looking, slightly shining, surface to the next turn. Just like any other road almost dry after a shower. Now that the morning mist had lifted it was possible to see the tower of Midwich church jutting above the hedges. When one disregarded the immediate foreground, the prospect was the very negation of mystery.

The firemen, assisted by Alan's squad, continued to drag out the forms within easy reach. Their experience seemed to leave no impression on the victims. Each one, on coming clear, sat up alertly, and maintained with obvious truth that he needed no help from the ambulance-men.

The next job was to clear an inverted tractor out of the way so that the further vehicles and their occupants could be pulled clear.

Alan left his Sergeant and the Leading-Fireman directing the work, and climbed over a stile. The field-path beyond climbed a small rise, and gave him a better view of the Midwich terrain. He was able to see several roofs, including those of Kyle Manor, and The Grange, also the topmost stones of the Abbey ruins, and two drifts of grey smoke. A placid scene. But a few further yards brought him to a point where he could see four sheep lying motionless in a field. The sight troubled him, not because he now thought it likely that any real harm had come to the sheep, but because it indicated that the barrier-zone was wider than he had hoped. He contemplated the creatures and the landscape beyond, and noticed two cows on their sides still further away. He watched them for a minute or two to make sure there was no movement, and then turned and walked thoughtfully back to the road.

'Sergeant Decker,' he called.

The sergeant came over, and saluted.

'Sergeant,' said Alan, 'I want you to get hold of a canary – in a cage, of course.'

The sergeant blinked.

'Er – a canary, sir?' he asked, uneasily.

'Well, I suppose a budgerigar would do as well. There ought to be some in Oppley. You'd better take the jeep. Tell the owner there'll be compensation if necessary.'

'I – er -'

'Cut along now, Sergeant. I want that bird here as soon as you can manage it.'

'Very good, sir. Er – a canary,' the sergeant added, to make sure.

'Yes,' said Alan.

I became aware that I was slithering along the ground, face down. Very odd. One moment I was hurrying towards Janet, then, with no interval at all, this...

The motion stopped. I sat up to find myself surrounded by a collection of people. There was a fireman, engaged in disentangling a murderouslooking hook from my clothing. A St John Ambulance man regarding me with a professionally hopeful eye. A very young private carrying a pail of whitewash, another holding a map, and an equally young corporal armed with a bird-cage on the end of a long pole. Also an unencumbered officer. In addition to this somewhat surrealistic collection there was Janet, still lying where she had fallen. I got to my feet just as the fireman, having freed his hook, reached it towards her, and caught the belt of her mackintosh. He began to pull, and of course the belt broke, so he reached it across her, and began to roll her towards us. At the second time over, she sat up, looking disarranged, and indignant.

'Feeling all right, Mr Gayford?' asked a voice beside me.

I looked round and recognized the officer as Alan Hughes whom we had met at the Zellabys' a couple of times.

'Yes,' I said. 'But what's going on here?'

He disregarded that for the moment, and helped Janet to her feet. Then he turned to the corporal.

'I'd better get back to the road. Just carry on with this, Corporal.'

'Yes, sir,' said the corporal. He lowered his pole from the vertical, and with the cage still dangling at its end, thrust it forward tentatively. The bird fell off its perch, and lay on the sanded floor of the cage. The corporal withdrew the cage. The bird gave a slightly indignant tweet, and hopped back on its perch. One watching private stepped forward with his bucket and daubed a little whitewash on the grass, the other made a mark on his map. The party then moved along a dozen yards or so, and repeated the performance.

This time it was Janet who inquired what on earth was happening. Alan explained as much as he knew, and added:

'There's obviously no chance of getting into the place while this lasts. Much your best course would be to make for Trayne, and wait there for the all-clear.'

We looked after the corporal's party, just in time to see the bird fall off its perch once more, and then across the innocent fields to Midwich. After our experience there did not appear to be any useful alternative. Janet nodded. So we thanked young Hughes, and presently parted from him to make our way back to the car.

At the The Eagle Janet insisted that we should book a room for the night, just in case... and then went up to it. I gravitated to the bar.

The place was quite unusually full for noon, and almost entirely of strangers. The majority of them were talking somewhat histrionically in small groups or pairs; though a few individuals were drinking privately and thoughtfully. I wormed my way to the counter with some difficulty, and as I was worming it back again, drink in hand, a voice at my shoulder said:

'Now, what on earth would you be doing in this lot, Richard?'

The voice was familiar, and so, when I looked round, was the face, though it took me a second or two to place it – there was not only the veil of years to be drawn aside, but a military cap had to be juggled into the place of the present tweed. But when this had been done, I was delighted.

'My dear Bernard!' I exclaimed. 'This is wonderful! Come along out of this mob.' And I seized his arm, and towed him into the lounge.

The sight of him made me feel young again: took me back to the beaches, the Ardennes, the Reichswald, and the Rhine. It was a good meeting. I sent the waiter for more drinks. It took about half an hour for the first ebullition to level out, but when it did:

'You never answered my first question,' he reminded me, looking at me carefully. 'I'd no idea you'd gone in for that sort of thing.'

'What sort of thing?' I inquired.

He lifted his head slightly, towards the bar.

'The Press,' he explained.

'Oh, is that it! I was wondering why the invasion.'

One eyebrow descended a little.

'Well, if you're not part of it, what are you?' he said.

'I just live in these parts,' I told him.

At that moment Janet came into the lounge, and I introduced him.

'Janet dear, this is Bernard Westcott. He used to be Captain Westcott when we were together, but I know he became a Major, and now -?'

'Colonel,' admitted Bernard, and greeted her charmingly.

'I am so glad,' Janet told him. 'I've heard a lot about you. I know one says that, but this time it happens to be true.'

She invited him to lunch with us, but he said that he had business to attend to, and was already overdue. His tone of regret was genuine enough for her to say:

'Dinner, then? At home, if we can get there, but here if we are still exiled?'

'At home?' queried Bernard.

'In Midwich,' she explained. 'It's about eight miles away.'

Bernard's manner changed slightly.

'You live in Midwich?' he inquired, looking from her to me. 'Have you been there long?'

'About a year now,' I told him. 'We'd normally be there now, but -' I explained how we came to be stranded at The Eagle.

He thought for some moments after I finished, and then seemed to come to a decision. He turned to Janet.

'Mrs Gayford, I wonder if you would excuse me if I were to take your husband along with me? It's this Midwich business that has brought me here. I think he might be able to help us, if he's willing.'

'To find out what's happened, you mean?' Janet asked.

'Well – let's say in connexion with it. What do you think?' he added to me.

'If I can, of course. Though I don't see... Who is us?' I inquired.

'I'll explain as we go,' he told me. 'I really ought to have been there an hour ago. I'd not drag him off like this, if it weren't important, Mrs Gayford. You'll be all right on your own here?'

Janet assured him that The Eagle was a safe place, and we rose.

'Just one thing,' he added before we left, 'don't let any of those fellows in the bar pester you. Get them slung out if they try. They're all a bit peevish since they've learnt that their editors won't be touching this Midwich business. Not a word to any of 'em. Tell you more about it later.'

'Very well. Agog, but silent. That's me,' Janet agreed as we left.

HQ had been established a little back from the affected area, on the Oppley road. At the police-block Bernard produced a pass which earned him a salute from the constable on duty, and we passed through without further trouble. A very young three-pipper sitting forlornly in a tent brightened up at our arrival, and decided that as Colonel Latcher was out inspecting the lines it was his duty to put us in the picture.

The caged-birds had now, it seemed, finished their job, and been returned to their doting and reluctantly public-spirited owners.

'We'll probably have protests from the RSPCA, as well as claims for damages when they contract croup or something,' said the Captain, 'but here's the result.' And he produced a large-scale map showing a perfect circle almost two miles in diameter, with Midwich Church lying somewhat south and a little east of its centre.

'That's it ,' he explained, 'and as far as we can tell it is a circle, not just a belt. We've got an o.p. on Oppley church tower, and no movement in the area has been observed – and there are a couple of chaps lying in the road outside the pub who haven't moved, either. As to what it is, we're not much further.

'We've established that it is static, invisible, odourless, non-registering on radar, non-echoing on sound, immediate in effect on at least mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects; and apparently has no after-effects – at least, no direct effects, though naturally the people in the bus and the others who were in it for some time are feeling roughish from exposure. But that's about as far as we go. Frankly, as to what it really is, we haven't a clue yet.'

Bernard asked him a few questions which elicited little more, and then we made our way in search of Colonel Latcher. We found him after a while, in company with an older man who turned out to be the Chief Constable of Winshire. Both of them, with some lesser lights in attendance, were standing on a slight rise regarding the terrain. Their grouping suggested an eighteenth-century engraving of generals watching a battle that was not going too well, only there was no visible battle. Bernard introduced himself and me. The Colonel regarded him intently.

'Ah!' he said. 'Ah yes. You're the chap on the phone who told me this had to be kept quiet.'

Before Bernard could reply, the Chief Constable came in:

' Kept quiet! Kept quiet, indeed. A two-mile circle of country completely blanketed by this thing, and you'd like it kept quiet.'

'That was the instruction,' said Bernard. 'The Security -'

'But how the devil do they think -?'

Colonel Latcher cut in, heading him off.

'We've done our best to put it around as a surprise tactical exercise. Bit thin, but it makes something to say. Had to say something. Trouble is, for all we know it may be some little trick of our own gone wrong. So much damned secrecy nowadays that nobody knows anything. Don't know what the other chap has; don't even know what you may have to use yourself. All these scientist fellers in back rooms ruining the profession. Can't keep up with what you don't know. Soldiering'll soon be nothing but wizards and wires.'

'The news agencies are on to it already,' grumbled the Chief Constable. 'We've headed some of 'em off. But you know what they are. They'll be sneaking round some way, pushing their noses into it, and having to be pulled out. And how are we going to keep them quiet?'

'That, at least, needn't worry you much,' Bernard told him. 'There's been a Home Office advice on this already. Very sore they are. But I think it will hold. It really depends on whether it turns out to have enough sensation in it to make trouble worth while.'

'H'm,' said the Colonel, looking out across the somnolent scene again. 'And I suppose that depends on whether, from a newspaper view, the sleeping beauty would be a sensation, or a bore.'

Quite an assortment of people kept on turning up in the course of the next hour or two, all apparently representing the interests of various departments, civil and military. A larger tent was erected beside the Oppley road, and in it a conference was called for 16.30. Colonel Latcher led off with a review of the situation. It did not take long. Just as he was concluding it a Group Captain arrived. He marched in with a malevolent air, and slapped a large photograph down on to the table in front of the Colonel.

'There you are, gentlemen,' he said grimly. 'That cost two good men in one good aircraft, and we were lucky not to lose another. I hope it was worth it.'

We crowded round to study the photograph, and compare it with the map.

'What's that ?' asked a Major of Intelligence, pointing.

The object he indicated showed as a pale oval outline, with a shape, judging by the shadows, not unlike the inverted bowl of a spoon. The Chief Constable bent down, peering more closely.

'I can't imagine,' he admitted. 'Looks as if it might be some unusual kind of building – only it can't be. I was round by the Abbey ruins myself less than a week ago, and there was no sign of anything there then; besides, that's British Heritage Association property. They don't build, they just prop things up.'

One of the others looked from the photograph to the map, and back again.

'Whatever it is, it's in just about the mathematical centre of the trouble,' he pointed out. 'If it wasn't there a few days ago, it must be something that's landed there.'

'Unless it could be a rick, with a very bleached cover,' someone suggested.

The Chief Constable snorted. 'Look at the scale, man – and the shape. It'd have to be the size of a dozen ricks, at least.'

'Then what the devil is it?' inquired the Major.

One after another we studied it through the magnifier.

'You couldn't get a lower altitude picture?' suggested the Major.

'Trying that was how we lost the aircraft,' the Group Captain told him curtly.

'How far up does the whatsit – this affected area – extend?' someone asked.

The Group Captain shrugged. 'You could find that out by flying into it,' he said. 'This,' he added, tapping the photograph, 'was taken at ten thousand. The crew noticed no effect there.'

Colonel Latcher cleared his throat.

'Two of my officers suggest that the area may be hemispherical in form,' he remarked.

'So it may,' agreed the Group Captain, 'or it may be rhomboidal, or dodecahedral.'

'I gather,' said the Colonel mildly, 'that they observed birds flying into it; getting a fix on them at the moment they became affected. They claim to have established that the edge of the zone does not extend vertically like a wall – that it definitely is not a cylinder, in fact. The sides contract slightly. From that they argue that it must be either domed, or conical. They say their evidence favours a hemisphere, but they have had to work on too small a segment of too large an arc to be certain.'

'Well, that's the first contribution we've had for some time,' acknowledged the Group Captain. He pondered, 'If they're right about a hemisphere, that should give it a ceiling of about five thousand over the centre. I suppose they didn't have any helpful ideas on how we establish that without losing another aircraft?'

'As a matter of fact,' Colonel Latcher said, diffidently, 'one of them did. He suggested that perhaps a helicopter dangling a canary in a cage on a few hundred feet of line and slowly reducing height – Well, I know it sounds a bit -'

'No,' said the Group Captain. 'It's an idea. Sounds like the same fellow who got the perimeter taped.'

'It is.' Colonel Latcher nodded.

'Quite a line of his own in ornithological warfare,' commented the Group Captain. 'I think perhaps we can improve on the canary, but we're grateful for the idea. A bit too late for it today. I'll lay it on for early tomorrow, with pictures from the lowest safe altitude while there's a good cross-light.'

The Intelligence Major emerged from silence.

'Bombs, I think,' he said reflectively. 'Fragmentation, perhaps.'

'Bombs?' asked the Group Captain, with raised brows.

'Wouldn't do any harm to have some handy. Never know what these Ivans are up to. Might be a good idea to have a wham at it, anyway. Stop it getting away. Knock it out so that we can have a proper look at it.'

'Bit drastic at this stage,' suggested the Chief Constable. 'I mean, wouldn't it be better to take it intact, if possible.'

'Probably,' agreed the Major, 'but meanwhile we are just allowing it to go on doing whatever it came to do, while it holds us off with this whatever-it-is.'

'I don't see what it could have come to do in Midwich,' another officer put in, 'therefore I imagine that it force-landed, and is using this screen to prevent interference while it makes repairs.'

'There's The Grange...' someone said tentatively.

'In either case, the sooner we get authority to disable it further, the better,' said the Major. 'It had no business over our territory, anyway. Real point is, of course, that it mustn't get away. Much too interesting. Apart from the thing itself, that screen effect could be very useful indeed. I shall recommend taking any action necessary to secure it; intact if possible; but damaged if necessary.'

There was considerable discussion, but it came to little since almost everyone present seemed to hold no more than a watching and reporting brief. The only decisions I can recall were that parachute flares would be dropped every hour for observation purposes, and that the helicopter would attempt to get more informative photographs in the morning; beyond that nothing definite had been achieved when the conference broke up.

I did not see why I had been taken along there at all – or, for the matter of that, why Bernard had been there, for he had made not a single contribution to the conference. As we drove back I asked:

'Is it out of order for me to inquire where you come into this?'

'Not altogether. I have a professional interest.'

'The Grange?' I suggested.

'Yes. The Grange comes within my scope, and naturally anything untoward in its neighbourhood interests us. This, one might call very untoward, don't you think?'

'Us' I had already gathered from his self-introduction before the conference, could be either Military Intelligence in general, or his particular department of it.

'I thought,' I said, 'that the Special Branch looked after that kind of thing.'

'There are various angles,' he said, vaguely, and changed the subject.

We managed to get him a room at The Eagle, and the three of us dined together. I had hoped that after dinner he might make good his promise to 'explain later', but though we talked of a number of things, including Midwich, he was clearly avoiding any more mention of his professional interest in it. But for all that it was a good evening that left me wondering how one can be so careless as to let some people drift out of one's life.

Twice in the course of the evening I rang up the Trayne police to inquire whether there had been any change in the Midwich situation, and both times they reported that it was quite unaltered. After the second, we decided it was no good waiting up, and after a final round we retired.

'A nice man,' said Janet, as our door closed. 'I was afraid it might be old-warriors-together which is so boring for wives, but he didn't let it be a bit like that. Why did he take you along this afternoon?'

'That's what's puzzling me,' I confessed. 'He seemed to have second thoughts and become more reserved altogether once we actually got close to it.'

'It really is very queer,' Janet said, as if the whole thing had just struck her afresh. 'Didn't he have anything at all to say about what it is?'

'Neither he, nor any of the rest of them,' I assured her. 'About the one thing they've learnt is what we could tell them – that you don't know when it hits you, and there's no sign afterwards that it did.'

'And that at least is encouraging. Let's hope that no one in the village comes to any more harm than we did,' she said.

While we were still sleeping, on the morning of the 28th, a met. officer gave it as his opinion that ground mist in Midwich would clear early, and a crew of two boarded a helicopter. A wire cage containing a pair of lively but perplexed ferrets was handed in after them. Presently the machine took off, and whimmered noisily upwards.

'They reckon,' remarked the pilot, 'that six thousand will be dead safe, so we'll try at seven thou. for luck. If that's okay, we'll bring her down slowly.'

The observer settled his gear, and occupied himself with teasing the ferrets until the pilot told him:

'Right. You can lower away now, and we'll make the trial crossing at seven.'

The cage went through the door. The observer let three hundred feet of line unreel. The machine came round, and the pilot informed ground that he was about to make a preliminary run over Midwich. The observer lay on the floor, observing the ferrets, through glasses.

They were doing fine at present, clambering with non-stop sinuousness all round and over one another. He took the glasses off them for a moment, and turned towards the village ahead, then:

'Oy, Skipper,' he said.

'Uh?'

'That thing we're supposed to photograph, by the Abbey.'

'What about it?'

'Well, either it was a mirage, or it's flipped off,' said the observer.

Chapter 5. Midwich Reviviscit

At almost the same moment that the observer made his discovery, the picket at the Stouch-Midwich road was carrying out its routine test. The sergeant in charge threw a lump of sugar across the white line that had been drawn across the road, and watched while the dog, on its long lead, dashed after it. The dog snapped up the sugar, and crunched it.

The sergeant regarded the dog carefully for a moment, and walked close to the line himself. He hesitated there, and then stepped across it. Nothing happened. With increasing confidence, he took a few more paces. Half a dozen rooks cawed as they passed over his head. He watched them flap steadily away over Midwich.

'Hey, you there, Signals,' he called. 'Inform H. Q. Oppley. Affected area reduced, and believed clear. Will confirm after further tests.'

A few minutes earlier, in Kyle Manor, Gordon Zellaby had stirred with difficulty, and given out a sound like a half-groan. Presently he realized that he was lying on the floor; also, that the room which had been brightly lit and warm, perhaps a trifle over-warm, a moment ago, was now dark, and clammily cold.

He shivered. He did not think he had ever felt quite so cold. It went right through so that every fibre ached with it. There was a sound in the darkness of someone else stirring. Ferrelyn's voice said, shakily:

'What's happened...? Daddy...? Angela...? Where are you?'

Zellaby moved an aching and reluctant jaw to say:

'I'm here, nearly f-frozen. Angela, my dear...?'

'Just here, Gordon,' said her voice unsteadily, close behind him.

He put out a hand which encountered something, but his fingers were too numbed to tell him what it was.

There was a sound of movement across the room.

'Gosh, I'm stiff! Oo-oo-ooh! Oh, dear!' complained Ferrelyn's voice. 'Oo-ow-oo! I don't believe these are my legs at all.' She stopped moving for a moment. 'What's that rattling noise?'

'My t– teeth, I th-think,' said Zellaby, with an effort.

There was more movement, followed by a stumbling sound. Then a clatter of curtain-rings, and the room was revealed in a grey light.

Zellaby's eyes went to the grate. He stared at it in disbelief. A moment ago he had put a new log on the fire, now there was nothing there but a few ashes. Angela, sitting up on the carpet a yard away from him, and Ferrelyn by the window, were both staring at the grate, too.

'What on earth -?' began Ferrelyn.

'The ch– champagne?' suggested Zellaby.

'Oh, really, Daddy...!'

Against the protest of every joint Zellaby tried to get up. He found it too painful, and decided to stay where he was for a bit. Ferrelyn crossed unsteadily to the fireplace. She reached a hand towards it, and stood there, shivering.

'I think it's dead,' she said.

She tried to pick up The Times from the chair, but her fingers were too numb to hold it. She looked at it miserably, and then managed to scrumble it between her stiff hands, and stuff it into the grate. Still using both hands she succeeded in lifting some of the smaller bits of wood from the basket and dropping them on the paper.

Frustration with the matches almost made her weep.

'My fingers won't ,' she wailed miserably.

In her efforts she spilt the matches on the hearth. Somehow she managed to light one by rubbing the box on them. It caught another. She pushed them all closer to the paper bulging out of the grate. Presently it caught, too, and the flame blossomed up like a wonderful flower.

Angela got up, and staggered stiffly closer. Zellaby made his approach on all fours. The wood began to crackle. They crouched towards it, greedy for warmth. The numbness in their outstretched fingers began to give way to a tingling. After a while the Zellaby spirit began to show signs of revival.

'Odd,' he remarked through teeth that still showed a tendency to chatter, 'odd that I should have to live to my present age before appreciating the underlying soundness of fire-worship.'

On both the Oppley and Stouch roads there was a great starting up and warming of engines. Presently two streams of ambulances, fire appliances, police cars, jeeps, and military trucks started to converge on Midwich. They met at the Green. The civilian transport pulled up, and its occupants piled out. The military trucks for the most part headed for Hickham Lane, bound for the Abbey. An exception to both categories was a small red car that turned off by itself and went bouncing up the drive of Kyle Manor to stop in grooves of gravel by the front door.

Alan Hughes burst into the Zellaby study, pulled Ferrelyn out of the huddle by the fire, and clutched her firmly.

'Darling!' he exclaimed, still breathing hard. 'Darling! Are you all right?'

'Darling!' responded Ferrelyn, rather as if it were an answer.

After a considerate interval Gordon Zellaby remarked:

'We, also, are all right, we believe, though bewildered. We are also somewhat chilled. Do you think -?'

Alan seemed to become aware of them for the first time.

'The – ' he began, and then broke off as the lights came on. 'Good-oh,' he said. 'Hot drinks in a jiffy.' And departed, towing Ferrelyn after him.

' "Hot drinks in a jiffy," ' murmured Zellaby. 'Such music in a simple phrase!'

And so, when we came down to breakfast, eight miles away, it was to be greeted with the news that Colonel Westcott had gone out a couple of hours before; and that Midwich was as near awake again as was natural to it.

Chapter 6. Midwich Settles Down

There was still a police picket on the Stouch road, but as residents of Midwich we passed through promptly, to drive on through a scene which looked much as usual, and reach our cottage without further hindrance.

We had wondered more than once what state of affairs we might find there, but there proved to have been no need for alarm. The cottage was intact, and exactly as we had left it. We went in and resettled ourselves just as we had intended to on the previous day, with no inconvenience except that the milk in the refrigerator had gone off, on account of the cut in the electricity supply. Indeed, within half an hour of returning the happenings of the previous day were beginning to seem unreal; and when we went out and talked to our neighbours we found that for those who had actually been involved the feeling of unreality was even more pronounced.

Nor was that surprising, for, as Mr Zellaby pointed out, their knowledge of the affair was limited to an awareness that they had failed to go to bed one night and had awakened, feeling extremely cold, one morning: the rest was a matter of hearsay. One had to believe that they had during the interval missed a day, for it was improbable that the rest of the world could be collectively mistaken; but, speaking for himself, it had not even been an interesting experience, since the prime requisite of interest was, after all, consciousness. He therefore proposed to disregard the whole matter, and do his best to forget that he had been cheated out of one of the days which he found to be passing, in proper sequence, far too quickly.

Such a dismissal turned out for a time to be surprisingly easy, for it is doubtful whether the affair – even had it not lain beneath the intimidating muzzles of the Official Secrets Act – could at this stage have made a really useful newspaper sensation. As a dish, it had a number of promising aromas, but it proved short on substance. There were, in all, eleven casualties, and something might have been made of them, but even they lacked the details to excite a blas readership, and the stories of the survivors were woefully undramatic, for they had nothing to tell but their recollections of a cold awakening.

We were able, therefore, to assess our losses, dress our wounds, and generally readjust ourselves from the experience which afterwards became known as the Dayout, with a quite unexpected degree of privacy.

Of our eleven fatalities: Mr William Trunk, a farm-hand, his wife, and their small son, had perished when their cottage burnt down. An elderly couple called Stagfield had been lost in the other house that caught fire. Another farm-hand, Herbert Flagg, had been discovered dead from exposure in close, and not easily explained, proximity to the cottage occupied by Mrs Harriman, whose husband was at work in his bakery at the time. Harry Crankhart, one of the two men whom the Oppley church-tower observers had been able to see lying in front of the Scythe and Stone had also been found dead from exposure. The other four were all elderly persons in whom neither the sulfas nor the mycetes had been able to check the progress of pneumonia.

Mr Leebody preached a thanksgiving sermon on behalf of the rest of us at an unusually well-attended service the following Sunday, and with that, and his conduct of the last of the funerals, the dream-like quality of the whole affair became established.

It is true that for a week or so there were a few soldiers about, and there was quite a deal of coming and going in official cars, but the centre of this interest did not lie within the village itself, and so disturbed it little. The visible focus of attention was close to the Abbey ruins where a guard was posted to protect a large dent in the ground which certainly looked as if something massive had rested there for a while. Engineers had measured this phenomenon, made sketches, and taken photographs of it. Technicians of various kinds had then tramped back and forth across it, carrying mine-detectors, geiger-counters, and other subtle gear. Then, abruptly, the military lost all interest in it, and withdrew.

Investigations at The Grange went on a little longer, and among those occupied with them was Bernard Westcott. He dropped in to see us several times, but he told us nothing of what was going on, and we asked no details. We knew no more than the rest of the village did – that there was a security check in progress. Not until the evening of the day it was finished, and after he had announced his departure for London the following day, did he speak much of the Dayout and its consequences. Then, following a lull in conversation, he said:

'I've got a proposition to make to you two. If you'd care to hear it.'

'Let's hear it and see,' I told him.

'Essentially it is this: we feel that it is rather important for us to keep an eye on this village for a time, and know what goes on here. We could introduce one of our own men to help keep us posted, but there are points against that. For one thing, he would have to start from scratch; and it takes time for any stranger to work into the life of any village, and, for another, it is doubtful whether we could justify the detachment of a good man to full-time work here at present – and if he were not full-time it is equally doubtful whether he could be of much use. If, on the other hand, we could get someone reliable who already knows the place and the people to keep us posted on possible developments it would be more satisfactory all round. What do you think?'

I considered for a moment.

'Not, at first hearing, very much,' I told him. 'It rather depends, I suppose, what is involved.' I glanced across at Janet. She said, somewhat coldly:

'It rather sounds as if we are being invited to spy on our friends, and neighbours. I think perhaps a professional spy might suit you better.'

'This,' I backed her up, 'is our home.'

He nodded, rather as if that were what he had expected.

'You consider yourselves a part of this community?' he said.

'We are trying to be, and, I think, beginning to be,' I told him.

He nodded again. 'Good – At least, good if you feel that you have begun to have an obligation towards it. That's what's needed. It can well do with someone who has its welfare at heart to keep an eye on it.'

'I don't see quite why. It seems to have got along very well without for a number of centuries... or, at least, should I say that the attentions of its own inhabitants have served it well enough.'

'Yes,' he admitted. 'True enough – until now. Now, however, it needs, and is getting, some outside protection. It seems to me that the best chance of giving it that protection depends quite largely on our having adequate information on what goes on inside it.'

'What sort of protection? – and from what?'

'Chiefly, at present, from busybodies,' he said. 'My dear fellow, surely you don't think it was an accident that the Midwich Dayout wasn't splashed across the papers on the Dayout? Or that there wasn't a rush of journalists of all kinds pestering the life out of everyone here the moment it lifted?'

'Of course not,' I said. 'Naturally I knew there was the security angle – you told me as much yourself – and I was not surprised at that. I don't know what goes on at The Grange, but I do know it is very hush.'

'It wasn't simply The Grange that was put to sleep,' he pointed out. 'It was everything for a mile around.'

'But it included The Grange. That must have been the focal point. Quite possibly the influence, whatever it is, doesn't have less than that range – or perhaps the people, whoever they were, thought it safer to have that much elbow room for safety.'

'That's what the village thinks?' he asked.

'Most of it – with a few variations.'

'That's the sort of thing I want to know. They all pin it on The Grange, do they?'

'Naturally. What other reason could there be – in Midwich?'

'Well then, suppose I tell you I have reason to believe that The Grange had nothing whatever to do with it. And that our very careful investigations do no more than confirm that?'

'But that would make nonsense of the whole thing,' I protested.

'Surely not – not, that is, any more than any accident can be regarded as a form of nonsense.'

'Accident? You mean a forced landing?'

Bernard shrugged. 'That I can't tell you. It's possible that the accident lay more in the fact that The Grange happened to be located where the landing was made. But my point is this: almost everyone in this village has been exposed to a curious and quite unfamiliar phenomenon. And now you, and all the rest of the place, are assuming it is over and finished with. Why?'

Both Janet and I stared at him.

'Well,' she said, 'it's come, and it's gone, so why not?'

'And it simply came, and did nothing, and went away again, and had no effect on anything?'

'I don't know. No visible effect – beyond the casualties, of course, and they mercifully can't have known anything about it,' Janet replied.

'No visible effect,' he repeated. 'That means rather little nowadays, doesn't it? You can, for instance, have quite a serious dose of X-rays, gamma-rays, and others, without immediate visible effect. You needn't be alarmed, it is just an instance. If any of them had been present we should have detected them. They were not. But something that we were unable to detect was present. Something quite unknown to us that is capable of inducing – let's call it artificial sleep. Now, that is a very remarkable phenomenon – quite inexplicable to us, and not a little alarming. Do you really think one is justified in airily assuming that such a peculiar incident can just happen and then cease to happen, and have no effect? It may be so, of course, it may have no more effect than an aspirin tablet; but surely one should keep an eye on things to see whether that is so or not?'

Janet weakened a little.

'You mean, you want us, or someone, to do that for you. To watch for, and note, any effects?'

'What I'm after is a reliable source of information on Midwich as a whole. I want to be kept posted and up to date on how things are here so that if it should become necessary to take any steps I shall be aware of the circumstances, and be better able to take them in good time.'

'Now you're making it sound like a kind of welfare work,' Janet said.

'In a way, that's what it is. I want a regular report on Midwich's state of health, mind, and morale so that I can keep a fatherly eye on it. There's no question of spying. I want it so that I can act for Midwich's benefit, should it be necessary.'

Janet looked at him steadily for a moment.

'Just what are you expecting to happen here, Bernard?' she asked.

'Would I have to make this suggestion to you if I knew?' he countered. 'I'm taking precautions. We don't know what this thing is, or does. We can't slap on a quarantine order without evidence. But we can watch for evidence. At least, you can. So what do you say?'

'I'm not sure,' I told him. 'Give us a day or two to think it over, and I'll let you know.'

'Good,' he said. And we went on to talk of other things.

Janet and I discussed the matter several times in the next few days. Her attitude had modified considerably.

'He's got something up his sleeve, I'm sure,' she said. 'But what?'

I did not know. And:

'It isn't as if we were being asked to watch a particular person, is it?'

I agree that it was not. And:

'It wouldn't be really different in principle from what a Medical Officer of Health does, would it?'

Not very different, I thought. And:

'If we don't do it for him, he'd have to find someone else to do it. I don't really see who he'd get, in the village. It wouldn't be very nice, or efficient, if he did have to introduce a stranger, would it?'

I supposed not.

So, mindful of Miss Ogle's strategic situation in the post office, I wrote, instead of telephoning, to Bernard telling him that we thought we saw our way clear to cooperation provided we could be satisfied over one or two details, and received a reply suggesting that we should arrange a meeting when we next came to London. The letter showed no feeling of urgency, and merely asked us to keep our eyes open in the meantime.

We did. But there was little for them to perceive. A fortnight after the Dayout, only very small rumples remained in Midwich's placidity.

The small minority who felt that Security had cheated them of national fame and pictures in the newspapers had become resigned: the rest were glad that the interruption of their ways had been no greater. Another division of local opinion concerned The Grange and its occupants. One school held that the place must have some connexion with the event, and but for its mysterious activities the phenomenon would never have visited Midwich. The other considered its influence as something of a blessing.

Mr Arthur Crimm, OBE, the Director of the Station, was the tenant of one of Zellaby's cottages, and Zellaby, encountering him one day, expressed the majority view that the village was indebted to the researchers.

'But for your presence, and the consequent Security interest,' he said, 'we should without doubt have suffered a visitation far worse than that of the Dayout. Our privacy would have been ravaged, our susceptibilities outraged by the three modern Furies, the awful sisterhood of the printed word, the recorded word, and the picture. So, against your inconveniences, which I am sure have been considerable, you can at least set our gratitude that the Midwich way of life has been preserved, largely intact.'

Miss Polly Rushton, almost the only visitor to the district to be involved, concluded her holiday with her uncle and aunt, and returned home to London. Alan Hughes found himself, to his disgust, not only inexplicably posted to the north of Scotland, but also listed for release several weeks later than he had expected, and was spending much of his time up there in documentary argument with his regimental record office, and most of the rest of it, seemingly, in correspondence with Miss Zellaby. Mrs Harriman, the baker's wife, after thinking up a series of not very convincing circumstances which could have led to the discovery of Herbert Flagg's body in her front garden, had taken refuge in attack and was belabouring her husband with the whole of his known and suspected past. Almost everyone else went on as usual.

Thus, in three weeks the affair was nearly an historical incident. Even the new tombstones that marked it might – or, at any rate, quite half of them might – have been expected so to stand in a short time, from natural causes. The only newly created widow, Mrs Crankhart, rallied well, and showed no intention of letting her state depress her, nor indeed harden.

Midwich had, in fact, simply twitched – curiously, perhaps, but only very slightly – for the third or fourth time in its thousand-year doze.

And now I come to a technical difficulty, for this, as I have explained, is not my story; it is Midwich's story. If I were to set down my information in the order it came to me I should be flitting back and forth in the account, producing an almost incomprehensible hotchpotch of incidents out of order, and effects preceding causes. Therefore it is necessary that I rearrange my information, disregarding entirely the dates and times when I acquired it, and put it into chronological order. If this method of approach should result in the suggestion of uncanny perception, or disquieting multi-science, in the writer, the reader must bear with it the assurance that it is entirely the product of hindsight.

It was, for instance, not current observation, but later inquiry which revealed that a little while after the village had seemingly returned to normal there began to be small swirls of localized uneasiness in its corporative peace; certain disquiets that were, as yet, isolated and unacknowledged. This would be somewhere about late November, even early December – though perhaps in some quarters slightly earlier. Approximately, that is, about the time that Miss Ferrelyn Zellaby mentioned in the course of her almost daily correspondence with Mr Hughes that a tenuous suspicion had perturbingly solidified.

In what appears to have been a not very coherent letter, she explained – or, perhaps one should say, intimated – that she did not see how it could be, and, in fact, according to all she had learnt, it couldn't be, so she did not understand it at all, but the fact was that, in some mysterious way, she seemed to have started a baby – well, actually 'seemed' wasn't quite the right word because she was pretty sure about it, really. So did he think he could manage a weekend leave, because one did rather feel that it was the sort of thing that needed some talking over...?

Chapter 7. Coming Events

In point of fact, investigations have shown that Alan was not the first to hear Ferrelyn's news. She had been worried and puzzled for some little time, and two or three days before she wrote to him had made up her mind that the time had come for the matter to be known in the family circle: for one thing, she badly needed advice and explanation that none of the books she consulted seemed able to give her; and, for another, it struck her as more dignified than just going on until somebody should guess. Angela, she decided, would be the best person to tell first – Mother, too, of course, but a little later on, when the organizing was already done; it looked like one of those occasions when Mother might get terribly executive about everything.

Decision, however, had been rather easier to take than action. On the Wednesday morning Ferrelyn's mind was fully made up. At some time in that day, some relaxed hour, she would draw Angela quietly aside and explain how things were...

Unfortunately, there hadn't seemed to be any part of Wednesday when people were really relaxed. Thursday morning did not feel suitable somehow, either, and in the afternoon Angela had had a Women's Institute meeting which made her look tired in the evening. There was a moment on Friday afternoon that might have done – and yet it did not seem quite the kind of thing one could raise while Daddy showed his lunch visitor the garden, preparatory to bringing him back for tea. So, what with one thing and another, Ferrelyn arose on Saturday morning with her secret still unshared.

'I'll really have to tell her today – even if everything doesn't seem absolutely right for it. A person could go on this way for weeks,' she told herself firmly, as she finished dressing.

Gordon Zellaby was at the last stage of his breakfast when she reached the table. He accepted her good-morning kiss absent-mindedly, and presently took himself off to his routine – once briskly round the garden, then to the study, and the Work in progress.

Ferrelyn ate some cornflakes, drank some coffee, and accepted a fried egg and bacon. After two nibbles she pushed the plate away decisively enough to arouse Angela from her reflections.

'What's the matter?' Angela inquired from her end of the table. 'Isn't it fresh?'

'Oh, there's nothing wrong with it,' Ferrelyn told her. 'I just don't happen to feel eggy this morning, that's all.'

Angela seemed uninterested, when one had half-hoped she would ask why. An inside voice seemed to prompt Ferrelyn: 'Why not now? After all, it can't really make much difference when , can it?' So she took a breath. By way of introducing the matter gently she said:

'As a matter of fact, Angela, I was sick this morning.'

'Oh, indeed,' said her stepmother, and paused while she helped herself to butter. In the act of raising her marmaladed toast, she added: 'So was I. Horrid, isn't it?'

Now she had taxied on to the runway, Ferrelyn was going through with it. She squashed the opportunity of diverting, forthwith:

'I think,' she said, steadily, 'that mine was rather special kind of being sick. The sort,' she added, in order that it should be perfectly clear, 'that happens when a person might be going to have a baby, if you see what I mean.'

Angela regarded her for a moment with thoughtful interest, and nodded slowly.

'I do,' she agreed. With careful attention she buttered a further area of toast, and added marmalade. Then she looked up again.

'So was mine,' she said.

Ferrelyn's mouth fell a little open as she stared. To her astonishment, and to her confusion, she found herself feeling slightly shocked... But... Well, after all, why not? Angela was only sixteen years older than herself, so it was all very natural really, only... well, somehow one just hadn't expected it... It didn't seem quite... After all, Daddy was a triple grandfather by his first marriage...

Besides, it was all so unexpected... It somehow hadn't seemed likely... Not that Angela wasn't a wonderful person, and one was very fond of her... but, sort, of as a capable elder sister... It needed a bit of readjusting to...

She went on staring at Angela, unable to find the right-sounding thing to say, because everything had somehow turned the wrong way round...

Angela was not seeing Ferrelyn. She was looking straight down the table, out of the window at something much further away than the bare, swaying branches of the chestnut. Her dark eyes were bright and shiny.

The shininess increased and sparkled into two drops sparkling on her lower lashes. They welled, overflowed, and ran down Angela's cheeks.

A kind of paralysis still held Ferrelyn. She had never seen Angela cry. Angela wasn't that kind of person...

Angela bent forward, and put her face in her hands. Ferrelyn jumped up as if she had been suddenly released. She ran to Angela, put her arms round her, and felt her trembling. She held her close, and stroked her hair, and made small, comforting sounds.

In the pause that followed Ferrelyn could not help feeling that a curious element of miscasting had intruded. It was not an exact reversal of roles, for she had had no intention of weeping on Angela's shoulder; but it was near enough to it to make one wonder if one were fully awake.

Quite soon, however, Angela ceased to shake. She drew longer, calmer breaths, and presently sought for a handkerchief.

'Phew!' she said. 'Sorry to be such a fool, but I'm so happy.'

'Oh' Ferrelyn responded, uncertainly.

Angela blew, blinked, and dabbed.

'You see,' she explained, 'I've not really dared to believe it myself. Telling it to somebody else suddenly made it real. And I've always wanted to, so much, you see. But then nothing happened, and went on not happening, so I began to think -'well, I'd just about decided I'd have to try to forget about it, and make the best of things. And now it's really happening after all, I – I -' She began to weep again, quietly and comfortably.

A few minutes later she pulled herself together, gave a final pat with the bunched handkerchief, and decisively put it away.

'There,' she said, 'that's over. I never thought I was one to enjoy a good cry, but it does seem to help.' She looked at Ferrelyn. 'Makes one thoroughly selfish, too – I'm sorry, my dear.'

'Oh, that's all right. I'm glad for you,' Ferrelyn said, generously she thought because, after all, one had been a bit anti-climaxed. After a pause, she went on:

'Actually, I don't feel weepy about it myself. But I do feel a bit frightened...'

The word caught Angela's attention, and dragged her thoughts from self-contemplation. It was not a response she expected from Ferrelyn. She looked at her step-daughter for a thoughtful moment, as if the full import of the situation were only just reaching her.

'Frightened, my dear?' she repeated. 'I don't think you need feel that. It isn't very proper, of course, but – well, we shan't get anywhere by being puritanical about it. The first thing to do is to make sure you're right.'

'I am right,' Ferrelyn said, gloomily. 'But I don't understand it. It's different for you, being married, and so on.'

Angela disregarded that. She went on:

'Well, then, the next thing must be to let Alan know.'

'Yes, I suppose so,' agreed Ferrelyn, without eagerness.

'Of course it is. And you don't need to be frightened of that. Alan won't let you down. He adores you.'

'Are you sure of that, Angela?' doubtfully.

'Why, yes, you silly. One only has to look at him. Of course, it's all quite reprehensible, but I shouldn't be surprised if you find he's delighted. Naturally, it will – Why, Ferrelyn, what's the matter?' She broke off, startled by Ferrelyn's expression.

'But – but you don't understand, Angela. It wasn't Alan.'

The look of sympathy died from Angela's face. Her expression went cold. She started to get up.

'No!' exclaimed Ferrelyn, desperately, 'you don't understand, Angela. It isn't that. It wasn't anybody! That's why I'm frightened...'

In the course of the next fortnight, three of the Midwich young women sought confidential interviews with Mr Leebody. He had baptized them when they were babies; he knew them, and their parents, well. All of them were good, intelligent, and certainly not ignorant, girls. Yet each of them told him, in effect: 'It wasn't anybody , Vicar. That's why I'm frightened...'

When Harriman, the baker, chanced to hear that his wife had been to see the doctor, he remembered that Herbert Flagg's body had been found in his front garden, and he beat her up, while she tearfully protested that Herbert hadn't come in, and that she'd not had anything to do with him, or with any other man.

Young Tom Dorry returned home on leave from the navy after eighteen months' foreign service. When he learned of his wife's condition, he picked up his traps and went over to his mother's cottage. But she told him to go back and stand by the girl because she was frightened. And when that didn't move him, she told him that she herself, respectable widow for years was – well, not exactly frightened, but she couldn't for the life of her say how it had happened. In a bemused state Tom Dorry did go back. He found his wife lying on the kitchen floor, with an empty aspirin bottle beside her, and he pelted for the doctor.

One not– so-young woman suddenly bought a bicycle, and pedalled it madly for astonishing distances, with fierce determination.

Two young women collapsed in over-hot baths.

Three inexplicably tripped, and fell downstairs.

A number suffered from unusual gastric upsets.

Even Miss Ogle, at the post office, was observed eating a curious meal which involved bloater-paste spread half an inch thick, and about half a pound of pickled gherkins.

A point was reached when Dr Willers' mounting anxiety drove him into urgent conference with Mr Leebody at the Vicarage, and, as if to underline the need for action, their talk was terminated by a caller in agitated need of the doctor.

It turned out less badly than it might have done. Luckily the word 'poison' appeared on the disinfectant bottle in conformity with regulations, and was not to be taken as literally as Rosie Platch had thought. But that did not alter the tragic intention. When he had finished, Dr Willers was trembling with an impotent, targetless anger. Poor little Rosie Platch was only seventeen...

Chapter 8. Heads Together

The tranquillity that Gordon Zellaby had been pleasantly regaining after the wedding of Alan and Ferrelyn two days before, was dissipated by the irruption of Dr Willers. The doctor, still upset by the near-tragedy of Rosie Platch, was in an agitated state which gave Zellaby some difficulty in grasping his purpose.

By stages, however, he discovered that the doctor and the vicar had agreed to ask for his help – or, more importantly, it seemed, Angela's help – over something that was far from clear, and that the misadventure to the Platch child had brought Willers on his mission earlier than he had intended.

'So far we've been lucky,' Willers said, 'but this is the second attempted suicide, in a week. At any moment there may be another; perhaps a successful one. We must get this thing out in the open, and relieve the tension. We cannot afford any more delay.'

'As far as I am concerned, it is certainly not in the open. What thing is this?' inquired Zellaby.

Willers stared at him for a moment, and then rubbed his forehead.

'Sorry,' he said. 'I've been so wound up with it lately; I forgot you mightn't know. It's all these inexplicable pregnancies.'

'Inexplicable?' Zellaby raised his eyebrows.

Willers did his best to explain why they were inexplicable.

'The whole thing is so incomprehensible,' he concluded, 'that the vicar and I have been driven back on to the theory that it must in some way be connected with the other incomprehensible thing we have had here – the Dayout.'

Zellaby regarded him thoughtfully for several moments. One thing about which there could be no doubt at all was the genuineness of the doctor's anxiety.

'It seems a curious theory,' he suggested, cautiously.

'It's a more than curious situation,' replied Willers. 'However, that can wait. What can't wait is a lot of women who are on the verge of hysteria. Some of them are my patients, more of them are going to be, and unless this state of tension is resolved quickly -' He left the sentence unfinished, with a shake of his head.

' "A lot of women"?' Zellaby repeated. 'Somewhat vague. How many?'

'I can't say for certain,' Willers admitted.

'Well, in round figures? We need some idea of what we have to deal with.'

'I should say – oh, about sixty-five to seventy.'

' What! ' Zellaby stared at him, incredulously.

'I told you it is the devil of a problem.'

'But, if you're not sure, why pitch on sixty-five?'

'Because that's my estimate – it's a pretty rough estimate, I admit – but I think you'll find it's about the number of women of childbearing age in the village,' Willers told him.

Later that evening, after Angela Zellaby, looking tired and shocked, had gone to bed, Willers said:

'I'm very sorry to have had to inflict this, Zellaby – but she would have had to know soon, in any case. My hope is that the others can take it only half as staunchly as your wife has.'

Zellaby gave a sombre nod.

'She is grand, isn't she? I wonder how you or I would have stood up to a shock like that?'

'It's a hell of a thing,' Willers agreed. 'So far, most of the married women will have been easy in their minds, but now, in order to stop the unmarried going neurotic, we've got to upset them, too. But there's no way round that, that I can see.'

'One thing that has been worrying me all the evening is how much we ought to tell them,' Zellaby said. 'Should we leave the thing a mystery, and let them draw conclusions eventually for themselves – or is there a better way?'

'Well, damn it, it is a mystery, isn't it?' the doctor pointed out.

'The how is a very mysterious mystery,' Zellaby admitted. 'But I don't think there can be much doubt as to what has happened. Nor, I imagine, do you – unless you're deliberately trying to avoid it.'

'You tell me,' suggested Willers. 'Your line of reasoning may be different. I hope it is.'

Zellaby shook his head.

'The conclusion -' he began, and then suddenly broke off, staring at the picture of his daughter.

'My God!' he exclaimed. 'Ferrelyn, too...?'

He turned his head slowly towards the doctor. 'I suppose the answer is that you just don't know?'

Willers hesitated.

'I can't be sure,' he said.

Zellaby pushed back his white hair, and lapsed back in his chair. He remained staring at the pattern of the carpet for a full minute, in silence. Then he roused himself. With a studied detachment of manner, he observed:

'There are three – no, perhaps four – possibilities that suggest themselves. You would, I think, have mentioned it had there been any evidence of the explanation that will at once occur to the more obvious-minded? Besides, there are other points against that which I shall come to shortly.'

'Quite so,' agreed the doctor.

Zellaby nodded. 'Then, it is possible, is it not, in some of the lower forms at any rate, to induce parthenogenesis?'

'But not, as far as is known, among any of the higher forms – certainly not among mammals.'

'Quite. Well then, there is artificial insemination.'

'There is,' admitted the doctor.

'But you don't think so.'

'I don't.'

'Nor do I. And that,' Zellaby went on, a little grimly, 'leaves the possibility of implantation, which could result in what someone – Huxley, I fancy – has called "xenogenesis". That is, the production of a form that could be unlike that of the parent – or, should one perhaps say, "host"? – It would not be the true parent.'

Dr Willers frowned.

I've been hoping that that might not occur to them,' he said.

Zellaby shook his head.

'A hope, my dear fellow, that you would do better to abandon. It may not occur to them straight away, but it is the explanation – if that is not too definite a word – that the intelligent ones are bound to arrive at before long. For, look here. We can agree, can we not, to dismiss parthenogenesis? – there has never been a reliably documented case?'

The doctor nodded.

'Well then, it will soon become as clear to them as it is to me, and must be to you, that both crude assault and a.i. are put right out of court by sheer mathematics. And this, incidentally, would seem to apply to parthenogenesis, too, if that were possible. By the law of averages it simply is not possible in any sizeable group of women taken at random, for more than twenty-five per cent of them to be in the same stage of pregnancy at the same time.'

'Well – ' began the doctor, doubtfully.

'All right, let us make a concession to, say, thirty-three and a third per cent – which is high. But then, if your estimate of the incidence is right, or anywhere near right, the present situation is still statistically quite impossible. Ergo, whether we like it or not, we are thrown back upon the fourth, and last possibility – that implantation of fertilized ova must have taken place during the Dayout.'

Willers was looking very unhappy, and still not altogether convinced.

'I'd question your "and last" – there could be other possibilities that have not occurred to us.'

With a touch of impatience, Zellaby said:

'Can you suggest any form of conception that does not come up against that mathematical barrier? – No? Very well. Then it follows that this cannot be conception: therefore it must be incubation.'

The doctor sighed.

'All right. I'll grant you that,' he said. 'For myself, I am only incidentally concerned about how it happened: my anxiety is for the welfare of those who are, and are going to be, my patients...'

'You will be concerned, later on,' Zellaby put in, 'because, since they are all at the same stage now, it follows that the births are going to occur – barring accidents – over a quite limited period later on. All round about the end of June, or the first week in July – everything else being normal, of course.'

'At present,' Willers continued firmly, 'my chief worry is to decrease their anxiety, not to increase it. And for that reason we must do our best to stop this implantation idea getting about, for as long as we can. It's panicky stuff. For their good I ask you to pooh-pooh, convincingly, any suggestion of the kind that may come your way.'

'Yes,' agreed Zellaby, after consideration. 'Yes. I agree. Here, we really do have a case for benign censorship, I think.' He frowned. 'It is difficult to appreciate how a woman sees these matters: all that I can say is that if I were to be called upon, even in the most propitious circumstances, to bring forth life, the prospect would awe me considerably: had I any reason to suspect that it might be some unexpected form of life, I should probably go quite mad. Most women wouldn't, of course; they are mentally tougher, but some might, so a convincing dismissal of the possibility will be best.'

He paused, considering.

'Now we ought to get down to giving my wife a line to work on. There are various angles to be covered. One of the most tricky is going to be publicity – or, rather, no publicity.'

'Lord, yes,' said Willers. 'Once the Press get hold of it -'

'I know. God help us if they do. Day-by-day commentary, with six months of gloriously mounting speculation to go. They certainly wouldn't miss the xenogenesis angle. More likely to run a forecasting competition. All right, then; MI managed to keep the Dayout out of the papers; we'll have to see what they can do about this.

'Now, let's rough out the approach for her...'

Chapter 9. Keep it Dark

The canvassing for attendance at what was not very informatively described as a 'Special Emergency Meeting of Great Importance to every Woman in Midwich' was intensive. We ourselves were visited by Gordon Zellaby who managed to convey a quite dramatic sense of urgency through a considerable wordage which gave practically nothing away. His parrying of attempts to pump him only added to the interest.

Once people had been convinced that it was not simply a matter of another Civil Defence drive, or any other of the hardy regulars, they developed a strong curiosity as to what it could possibly be that could put the doctor, the vicar, their wives, the district-nurse, and both the Zellabys, too, to the trouble of seeing that everyone was called on and given a personal invitation. The very evasiveness of the callers, backed by their reassurances that there would be nothing to pay, no collection, and a free tea for all, had caused inquisitiveness to triumph even in the naturally suspicious, and there were few empty seats.

The two chief convenors sat on the platform with Angela Zellaby, looking a little pale, between them. The doctor smoked, with a nervous intensity. The vicar seemed lost in an abstraction from which he would rouse himself now and then to make a remark to Mrs Zellaby who responded to it with an absent-minded air. They allowed ten minutes for laggards, then the doctor asked for the doors to be closed, and opened the proceedings with a brief, but still uninformative, insistence on their importance. The vicar then added his support. He concluded:

'I earnestly ask every one of you here to listen very carefully indeed to what Mrs Zellaby has to say. We are greatly indebted to her for her willingness to put the matter before you. And I want you to know in advance that she has the endorsement of Dr Willers and myself for everything she is going to tell you. It is, I assure you, only because we feel that this matter may come more acceptably and, I am sure, more ably, from a woman to women that we have burdened her with the task.

'Dr Willers and I will now leave the hall, but we shall remain on the premises. When Mrs Zellaby has finished we shall, if you wish, return to the platform, and do our best to answer questions. And now I ask you to give Mrs Zellaby your closest attention.'

He waved the doctor ahead of him, and they both went out by a door at the side of the platform. It swung-to behind them, but did not close entirely.

Angela Zellaby drank from a glass of water on the table before her. She looked down for a moment at her hands resting on her notes. Then she raised her head, waiting for the murmurs to die down. When they had, she looked her audience over carefully as if noticing every face there.

'First,' she said, 'I must warn you. What I have to tell you is going to be difficult for me to say, difficult for you to believe, too difficult for any of us to understand at present.' She paused, dropped her eyes, and then looked up once more.

'I,' she said, 'am going to have a baby. I am very, very glad, and happy about it. It is natural for women to want babies, and to be happy when they know they are coming. It is not natural, and it is not good to be afraid of them. Babies should be joy and fun. Unhappily, there are a number of women in Midwich who are not able to feel like that. Some of them are miserable, ashamed, and afraid. It is for their benefit we have called this meeting. To help the unhappy ones, and to assure them that they need be none of these things.'

She looked steadily round her audience again. There was a sound of caught breath here and there.

'Something very, very strange has happened here. And it has not happened just to one or two of us, but to almost all of us – to almost all the women in Midwich who are capable of bearing children.'

The audience sat motionless and silent, every eye fixed upon her as she put the situation before them. Before she had finished, however, she became aware of some disturbance and shushing going on on the right-hand side of the hall. Glancing over there, she saw Miss Latterly and her inseparable companion, Miss Lamb, in the middle of it.

Angela stopped speaking, in mid-sentence, and waited. She could hear the indignant tone of Miss Latterly's voice, but not its words.

'Miss Latterly,' she said clearly. 'Am I right in thinking that you do not find yourself personally concerned with the subject of this meeting?'

Miss Latterly stood up, she spoke in a voice trembling with indignation.

'You most certainly are, Mrs Zellaby. I have never in all my life -'

'Then, since this is a matter of the gravest importance to many people here, I hope you will refrain from further interruptions – Or perhaps you would prefer to leave us?'

Miss Latterly stood firm, looking back at Mrs Zellaby.

'This is -' she began, and then changed her mind. 'Very well, Mrs Zellaby,' she said. 'I shall make my protest against the extraordinary aspersions you have made on our community, at another time.'

She turned with dignity, and paused, clearly to allow Miss Lamb to accompany her exit.

But Miss Lamb did not move. Miss Latterly looked down at her, with an impatient frown. Miss Lamb continued to sit fast.

Miss Latterly opened her lips to speak, but something in Miss Lamb's expression checked her. Miss Lamb ceased to meet her eyes. She looked straight before her, while a tide of colour rose until her whole face was a burning flush.

An odd, small sound escaped from Miss Latterly. She put out a hand, and grasped a chair to steady herself. She stared down at her friend without speaking. In a few seconds she grew haggard, and looked ten years older. Her hand dropped from the chair back. With a great effort she pulled herself together. She lifted her head decisively, looking round with eyes that seemed to see nothing. Then, straight-backed, but a little uncertain in her steps, she made her way up the aisle to the back of the hall, alone.

Angela waited. She expected a buzz of comment, but there was none. The audience looked shocked and bewildered. Every face turned back to her, in expectation. In the silence she picked up where she had stopped, trying to reduce by matter-of-factness the emotional tension which Miss Latterly had increased. With an effort she continued factually to the end of her preliminary statement, and then broke off.

The expected buzz of comment rose quickly enough this time. Angela took a drink from her glass of water, and rolled her bunched handkerchief between her damp palms while she watched the audience carefully.

She could see Miss Lamb leaning forward with a handkerchief pressed to her eyes while kindly Mrs Brant beside her tried to comfort her. Nor was Miss Lamb by any means the only one finding relief in tears. Over those bent heads the sound of voices, incredulous, high-pitched with consternation and indignation, grew. Here and there, one or two were behaving a little hysterically, but there was nothing like the outburst she had feared. She wondered to what extent an inkling awareness had blunted the shock.

With a feeling of relief and rising confidence she went on observing them for several minutes. When she decided that the first impact had had long enough to register, she rapped the table. The murmurs died away, there were a few sniffs, and then rows of expectant faces turned towards her once more. Angela took a deep breath, and started in again.

'Nobody,' she said, 'nobody but a child, or a child-minded person, expects life to be fair. It is not, and this is going to be harder on some of us than on others. Nevertheless, fair or unfair, whether we like it or not, we are all of us, married and single alike, in the same boat. There is no ground for, and consequently no place for, disparagement of some of us by others. All of us have been placed outside the conventions, and if any married woman here is tempted to consider herself more virtuous than her unmarried neighbour, she might do well to consider how, if she were challenged, she could prove that the child she now carries is her husband's child.

'This is a thing that has happened to all of us. We must make it bind us together for the good of all. There is no blame upon any of us, so there must be no differentiation between us, except -' She paused, and then repeated: ' Except that those who have not the love of a husband to help them will have more need of our sympathy and care.'

She continued to elaborate that for a while until she hoped it had made its mark. Then she turned to another aspect.

'This,' she told them forcefully, 'is our affair – there could not well be any matter more personal to each of us. I am sure, and I think you will agree with me, that it should remain so. It is for us to handle, ourselves; without outside interference.

'You must all know how the cheap papers seize upon anything to do with birth, particularly anything unusual. They make a peepshow of it, as if the people concerned were freaks in a fairground. The parents' lives, their homes, their children, are no longer their own.

'We have all read of one instance of a multiple birth where the papers took it up, then the medical profession backed by the government, with the result that the parents were virtually deprived of their own children quite soon after they were born.

'Well I, for one, do not intend to lose my child that way, and I expect and hope that all of you will feel the same. Therefore, unless we want to have, first, a great deal of unpleasantness – for I warn you that if this should become generally known it will be argued in every club and pub, with a great many nasty insinuations – unless then, we want to be exposed to that, and then to the very real probability that our babies will be taken away from us on one excuse or another by doctors and scientists, we must, every one of us, resolve not to mention, or even hint outside the village, at the present state of affairs. It is in our power to see that it remains Midwich's affair, to be managed, not as some newspaper, or Ministry, decides, but as the people of Midwich themselves wish it decided.

'If people in Trayne, or elsewhere, are inquisitive, or strangers come here asking questions, we must, for our babies' sakes, and our own, tell them nothing. But we must not simply be silent and secretive, as if we were concealing something. We must make it seem that there is nothing unusual in Midwich at all. If we all cooperate, and our men are made to understand that they must cooperate too, no interest will be aroused, and people will leave us alone – as they should do. It is not their business, it is ours . There is no one, no one at all who has a better right, or a higher duty, to protect our children from exploitation than we who are to be their mothers.'

She surveyed them steadily, almost individually once more, as she had at the start. Then she concluded:

'I shall now ask the Vicar and Dr Willers to come back. If you will excuse me for a few minutes I will join them here later. I know there must be a great many questions you are wanting to ask.'

She slipped off into the little room at the side.

'Excellent, Mrs Zellaby. Really excellent,' said Mr Leebody.

Dr Willers took her hand, and pressed it.

'I think you've done it, my dear,' he told her, as he followed the vicar on to the platform.

Zellaby guided her to a chair. She sat down, and leant back with her eyes closed. Her face was pale, and she looked exhausted.

'I think you'd better come home,' he told her.

She shook her head.

'No, I'll be all right in a few minutes. I must go back.'

'They can manage. You've done your part, and very well, too.'

She shook her head again.

'I know what those women must be feeling. This is absolutely crucial, Gordon. We've got to let them ask questions and talk – talk as long as they like. Then they'll have got over the first shock by the time they go. They've got to get used to the idea. A feeling of mutual support is what they need. I know – I want it, too.'

She put a hand to her head, and pushed back her hair.

'You know, it isn't true, Gordon, what I said just now.'

'Which part, my dear? You said a lot, you know.'

'About my being glad and happy. Two days ago it was quite, quite true. I wanted the baby, yours and mine, so very much. Now I'm frightened about it – I'm frightened, Gordon.'

He tightened his arm round her shoulders. She rested her head against his, with a sigh.

'My dear, my dear,' he said, stroking her hair gently. 'It's going to be all right. We'll look after you.'

'Not to know ,' she exclaimed. 'To know there's something growing there – and not to be sure how, or what... It's so – so abasing, Gordon. It makes me feel like an animal.'

He kissed her cheek softly, and went on stroking her hair.

'You're not to worry,' he told her. 'I'm prepared to bet that when he or she comes you'll take one look and say: "Oh dear, there's that Zellaby nose." But, if not, we face it together. You're not alone, my dear, you must never feel that you are alone. I'm here, and Willers is here. We're here to help you, always, all the time.'

She turned her head, and kissed him.

'Gordon, darling,' she said. Then she pulled away and sat up. 'I must get back,' she announced.

Zellaby gazed after her a moment. Then he moved a chair closer to the unclosed door, lit a cigarette, and settled himself to listen critically to the mood of the village as it showed in its questions.

Chapter 10. Midwich Comes to Terms

The task for January was to cushion the shock and steer the reactions, and thus to establish an attitude. The initiation meeting could be considered a success. It let the air in, and a lot of anxiety out; and the audience, tackled while it was still in a semi-stunned condition, had for the most part accepted the suggestion of communal solidarity and responsibility.

It was only to be expected that a few individuals should hold aloof, but they were no more anxious than the rest to have their private lives invaded and exposed, and their roads jammed with motor-coaches while goggling loads of sightseers peered in at their windows. Moreover, it was not difficult for the two or three who hankered for limelight to perceive that the village was in a mood to subdue any active non-cooperator by boycott. And if Mr Wilfred Williams thought a little wistfully at times of the trade that might have come to The Scythe and Stone, he proved a staunch supporter – and sensitive to the requirements of longer-term goodwill.

Once the bewilderment of the first impact had been succeeded by the feeling that there were capable hands at the helm; when the pendulum-swing among the young unmarried women from frightened wretchedness to smug bumptiousness had settled down; and when an air of readiness to turn-to, not vastly dissimilar from that which preceded the annual f te and flower-show, began to be apparent, the self-appointed committee could feel that at least it had succeeded in getting things on to the right lines.

The original Committee of the Willers, the Leebodys, the Zellabys, and Nurse Daniels, had been augmented by ourselves, and also by Mr Arthur Crimm who had been co-opted to represent the interests of several indignant researchers at The Grange who now found themselves embroiled, willy-nilly, in the domestic life of Midwich.

But though the feeling at the committee meeting held some five days after the Village Hall meeting could be fairly summarized as 'so far, so good', members were well aware that the achievement could not be left to take care of itself. The attitude that had been successfully induced might, it was felt, slip back all too easily into normal conventional prejudices if it were not carefully tended. For some time, at least, it would have to be sustained and fortified.

'What we need to produce,' Angela summed up, 'is something like the companionship of adversity, but without suggesting that it is an adversity – which, indeed, as far as we know, it is not.'

The sentiment gained the approval of everyone but Mrs Leebody, who looked doubtful.

'But,' she said hesitantly, 'I think we ought to be honest , you know.'

The rest of us looked at her inquiringly. She went on:

'Well, I mean, it is an adversity, isn't it? After all, a thing like this wouldn't happen to us for no reason, would it? There must be a reason; so isn't it our duty to search for it?'

Angela regarded her with a small, puzzled frown.

'I don't think I quite understand...' she said.

'Well,' explained Mrs Leebody, 'when things – unusual things like this – suddenly happen to a community there is a reason. I mean, look at the plagues of Egypt, and Sodom and Gomorrah, and that kind of thing.'

There was a pause. Zellaby felt impelled to relieve the awkwardness.

'For my part,' he observed, 'I regard the plagues of Egypt as an unedifying example of celestial bullying; a technique now known as power-politics. As for Sodom -' He broke off and subsided as he caught his wife's eye.

'Er – ' said the vicar, since something seemed to be expected of him. 'Er -'

Angela came to his rescue.

'I really don't think you need worry about that, Mrs Leebody. Barrenness is, of course, a classical form of curse; but I really can't remember any instance where retribution took the form of fruitfulness. After all, it scarcely seems reasonable, does it?'

'That would depend on the fruit,' Mrs Leebody said, darkly.

Another uneasy silence followed. Everybody, except Mr Leebody, regarded Mrs Leebody. Dr Willers' eyes swivelled to catch those of Nurse Daniels, and then went back to Dora Leebody who showed no discomfort at being the centre of attention. She glanced round at all of us in an apologetic manner.

'I am sorry, but I am afraid I am the cause of it all,' she confided.

'Mrs Leebody -' the doctor began.

She raised her hand reprovingly.

'You are kind,' she said. 'I know you want to spare me. But there is a time for confession. I am a sinner, you see. If I had had my child twelve years ago, none of this would have happened. Now I must pay for my sin by bearing a child that is not my husband's. It is all quite clear. I am very sorry to have brought this down on the rest of you. But it is a judgement, you see. Just like the plagues...'

The vicar, flushed and troubled, broke in before she could continue: 'I think – er – perhaps if you will excuse us -'

There was a general pushing back of chairs. Nurse Daniels crossed quietly to Mrs Leebody's side, and began a conversation with her. Dr Willers watched them for a moment until he became aware of Mr Leebody beside him, mutely inquiring. He laid a hand reassuringly on the vicar's shoulder.

'It has been a shock to her. Not surprising at all. I fully expected a number of cases before this. I'll get Nurse Daniels to see her home and give her a sedative. Very likely a good sleep will make all the difference. I'll look in tomorrow morning.'

A few minutes later we dispersed, in a subdued and thoughtful mood.

The policy advocated by Angela Zellaby was carried out with considerable success. The latter part of January saw the introduction of such a programme of social activities and helpful neighbourliness as we felt would leave only the most determined non-cooperators with the isolation, or the time, to brood.

In late February I was able to report to Bernard that things were going, on the whole, smoothly – more smoothly, at any rate than we had dared to hope at first. There had been a few sags in the graph of local confidence, and would doubtless be others, but, so far, recoveries had been speedy. I gave him details of the happenings in the village since my last report, but information regarding the attitude and views prevailing at The Grange which he had asked for I could not supply. Either the researchers were of the opinion that the affair somehow came within the compass of their oaths of secrecy, or else they were of the opinion that it was safer to act as if it did.

Mr Crimm continued to be their only link with the village, and it seemed to me that to get any more information I must either have authority to reveal to him the official nature of my interest, or Bernard would have to tackle him himself. Bernard preferred the latter course, and a meeting was arranged for Mr Crimm's next visit to London.

He called in on us on the way back, feeling at liberty to spill some of his troubles, which seemed to be largely concerned with his Establishments Section.

'They do so worship tidiness,' he complained. 'I just don't know what we are going to do when my six problems start to raise matters of allowances and absences, and make an undisguisable mess of their nice tidy leave-rosters. And then, too, there'll be the effect on our work schedule. I put it to Colonel Westcott that if his Department really is seriously concerned to keep the matter quiet, they'll only be able to do it by stepping in officially, at a high level. Otherwise, we shall have to give explanations before long. I think he sees my point there. But, for the life of me, I can't see why that particular aspect should be of such interest to MI, can you?'

'Now that is a pity,' Janet told him. 'One of our hopes when we heard that you were going to see him was that you might learn enough to enlighten us .'

Life appeared to be going on smoothly enough in Midwich for the present, but it was only a little later that one of the undercurrents broke surface, and gave us a flutter of anxiety.

After the committee meeting which she had brought to a premature close, Mrs Leebody ceased, not altogether surprisingly, to play any further active part in the promotion of village harmony. When she did reappear after a few days' rest, she seemed to have recovered her balance by a decision to regard the whole unfortunate situation as a distasteful subject.

On one of the early days in March, however, the Vicar of St Mary's, in Trayne, accompanied by his wife, brought her home in their car. They had found her, he reported to Mr Leebody, with some embarrassment, preaching in Trayne market, from an upturned box.

'Er – preaching?' said Mr Leebody, a new uneasiness mingling with his concern. 'I – er – can you tell me what about?'

'Oh, well – well quite fantastical, I'm afraid,' the Vicar of St Mary's told him, evasively.

'But I think I ought to know. The doctor will be sure to ask about it when he arrives.'

'Well – er – it was in the nature of a call to repentance; on a note of – er – revivalist doom. The people of Trayne must repent and pray forgiveness for fear of wrath, retribution, and hellfire. Rather nonconformist, I'm afraid. Lurid, you know. And, it seems, they must particularly avoid having anything to do with the people of Midwich who are already suffering under divine disapproval. If the Trayne people do not take heed, and mend their ways, punishment will inevitably descend on them, too.'

'Oh,' said Mr Leebody, keeping his tone level. 'She did not say what form our suffering here is taking?'

'A visitation,' the Vicar of St Mary's told him. 'Specifically, the infliction of a plague of – er – babies. That, of course, was causing some degree of ribaldry. A lamentable business altogether. Of course, once my wife had drawn my attention to Mrs Leebody's – er – condition, the matter became more intelligible, though still more distressing. I – oh, here is Dr Willers, now.' He broke off with relief.

A week later, in the middle of the afternoon, Mrs Leebody took up a position on the lowest step of the War Memorial, and began to speak. She was dressed for the occasion in a garment of hessian, her feet were bare, and there was a smudge of ash on her forehead. Fortunately there were not many people about at the time, and she was persuaded home again by Mrs Brant before she had well begun. Word was all round the village in an hour, but her message, whatever it may have been, remained undelivered.

Midwich heard the quickly following news of Dr Willers' recommendation to rest in a nursing-home with sympathy rather than surprise.

About mid-March Alan and Ferrelyn made their first visit since their marriage. With Ferrelyn putting in the time until Alan's release in a small Scottish town entirely among strangers, Angela had been against causing her worry by attempting to explain the Midwich state of affairs in a letter; so, now, it had to be laid before them.

Alan's expression of concern deepened as the predicament was explained. Ferrelyn listened without interruption, but with a swift glance now and then at Alan's face. It was she who broke the silence that followed.

'You know,' she said, 'I had a sort of feeling all along that there was something funny. I mean, it oughtn't -' she broke off, struck apparently by an ancillary thought. 'Oh, how dreadful! I kind of shot-gunned poor Alan. This probably makes it coercion, or undue influence, or something heinous. Could it be grounds for divorce? Oh, dear. Do you want a divorce, darling?'

Zellaby's eyes crinkled a little at the corners as he watched his daughter.

Alan put his hand over hers.

'I think we ought to wait a bit, don't you?' he told her.

'Darling,' said Ferrelyn, twining her fingers in his. Turning her head after a long look at him, she caught her father's expression. Treating him to a determinedly unresponsive look, she turned to Angela, and asked for more details of the village's reactions. Half an hour later they went out, leaving the two men alone together. Alan barely waited for the door to latch before he broke out.

'I say, sir, this is a bit of a facer, isn't it?'

'I'm afraid it is,' Zellaby agreed. 'The best consolation I can offer is that we find the shock wears off. The most painful part is the opening assault on one's prejudices – I speak for our sex, of course. For the women that is, unfortunately, only the first hurdle.'

Alan shook his head.

'This is going to be a terrible blow for Ferrelyn, I'm afraid – as it must have been to Angela,' he added, a little hurriedly. 'Of course, one can't expect her, Ferrelyn, I mean, to take in all the implications at once. A thing like this needs a bit of absorbing...'

'My dear fellow,' said Zellaby, 'as Ferrelyn's husband you have the right to think all sorts of things about her, but one of the things you must not do, for your own peace of mind, is to underestimate her. Ferrelyn, I assure you, was away ahead of you. I doubt whether she's missed a trick. She was certainly far enough ahead to move in with a lightweight remark because she knew that if she seemed worried, you would worry about her.'

'Oh, do you think so?' said Alan, a little flatly.

'I do,' said Zellaby. 'Furthermore, it was sensible of her. A fruitlessly worrying male is a nuisance. The best thing he can do is to disguise his worry, and stand staunchly by, impersonating a pillar of strength while performing certain practical and organizational services. I offer you the fruit of somewhat intensive experience.

'Another thing he can do is represent Modern Knowledge and Commonsense – but tactfully. You can have no idea of the number of venerable saws, significant signs, old wives' sooths, gipsies' warnings, and general fiddle-faddle that has been thrown up by this in the village, lately. We have become a folklorist's treasure-chest. Did you know that in our circumstances it is dangerous to pass under a lych-gate on a Friday? Practically suicide to wear green? Very unwise indeed to eat seed-cake? Are you aware that if a dropped knife, or needle, sticks point down in the floor it will be a boy? No? I thought you might not be. But never mind. I am assembling a bouquet of these cauliflowers of human wisdom in the hope that they may keep my publishers quiet.'

Alan inquired with belated politeness after the progress of the Current Work. Zellaby sighed sadly.

'I am supposed to deliver the final draft of The British Twilight by the end of next month. So far I have written three chapters of this supposedly contemporary study. If I could remember what they deal with, I've no doubt I should find them obsolete by now. It ruins a man's concentration to have a cr che hanging over his head.'

'What is amazing me as much as anything is that you've managed to keep it quiet. I'd have said you hadn't a chance,' Alan told him.

'I did say it,' Zellaby admitted. 'And I'm still astonished. I think it must be a kind of variant on The Emperor's Clothes theme – either that, or an inversion of the Hitler Big Lie – a truth too big to be believed. But, mind you, both Oppley and Stouch are saying unneighbourly things about some of us that they've noticed, though they appear to have no idea of the real scale. I'm told that there is a theory current in both of them that we have all been indulging in one of those fine old uninhibited rustic frenzies on Hallowe'en. Anyway, several of the inhabitants almost gather their skirts aside as we pass. I must say that our people have restrained themselves commendably, under some provocation.'

'But do you mean that only a mile or two away they've no idea what's really happened?' Alan asked incredulously.

'I'd not say that, so much as that they don't want to believe it. They must have heard fairly fully I imagine, but they choose to believe that that is all a tale to cover up something more normal, but disgraceful. Willers was right when he said that a kind of self-protective reflex would defend the ordinary man and woman from disquieting beliefs – That is unless it should get into print. On the word of a newspaper, of course, eighty or ninety per cent would swing to the opposite extreme, and believe anything. The cynical attitude in the other villages really helps. It means that a newspaper is unlikely to get anything to go on unless it is directly informed by someone inside the village.

'Internal stresses were worst for the first week or two after our announcement. Several of the husbands were awkward to handle, but once we got it out of their heads that it was some elaborate system of whitewashing or spoofing, and when they discovered that none of the others was in a position to make a butt of them, they became more reasonable, and less conventional.

'The Lamb-Latterly breach was mended after a few days, when Miss Latterly got over the shock, and Miss Lamb is now being cosseted with a devotion scarcely to be distinguished from tyranny.

'Our leading rebel for some time was Tilly... Oh, you must have seen Tilly Foresham – jodhpurs, roll-neck, hacking-jacket, dragged hither and thither by the whim of fate in the form of three golden retrievers... She protested indignantly for some time that she would not mind much if she happened to like babies; but, as she much preferred puppies, the whole thing was particularly hard on her. However, she seems now to have given in, though grudgingly.'

Zellaby rambled on for a time with anecdotes of the emergency, concluding with the one in which Miss Ogle had been narrowly headed off from making the first payment, in her own name, for the most resplendent perambulator that Trayne could offer.

After a pause, Alan prompted:

'You did say that about ten who might be expected to be involved actually are not?'

'Yes. And five of those were in the bus on the Oppley road, and therefore under observation during the Dayout – that has at least done something to dispel the idea of a fertilizing gas which some seemed to be inclined to adopt as one of the new scientific horrors of our age,' Zellaby told him.

Chapter 11. Well Played, Midwich

'I am really sorry,' Bernard Westcott wrote to me early in May, 'that circumstances preclude well-deserved official congratulations to your village on the success of the operation to date. It has been conducted with a discretion and communal loyalty which, frankly, has astonished us; most of us here were of the opinion that it would prove necessary to take official action well before this. Now, with only some seven weeks to go before D-day, we are hopeful that we may get through without it.

'The matter which has given us the greatest concern so far was in connexion with Miss Frazer, on Mr Crimm's staff, and so, one might say, not the fault of the village proper – nor even of the lady herself.

'Her father, a naval commander, retired, and a fire-eater of some truculence, was bent on trouble – all set to get questions asked in the House about loose-living and orgiastic goings-on in government establishments. Anxious, apparently, to make a Fleet Street holiday of his daughter. Luckily we were able to arrange for suitably influential people to have a few effective words with him in time.

'What is your own opinion? Do you think Midwich will last it out?'

That was far from easy to answer. If there were no major upset, I thought it might stand a good chance: on the other hand, one could not fail to be anxiously aware of the unexpected, lurking round any corner – the small detonator that might set things off.

We had had our ups and downs, though, and managed to get through them. Sometimes, they seemed to come from nowhere and spread like an infection. The worst, which looked at one time like becoming a panic, was allayed by Dr Willers who hurriedly arranged X-ray facilities and was able to show that all appeared to be quite normal.

The general attitude in May one could describe as a bracing-up, with here and there an impatient desire to let battle commence. Dr Willers, normally an ardent advocate of having one's baby in Trayne hospital, had reversed his usual advice. For one thing, it would, particularly if there should be anything untoward about the babies, render all attempts to keep the matter quiet utterly useless. For another, Trayne did not have the beds to cope with such a phenomenon as a simultaneous application by the whole female population of Midwich – and that alone would certainly have been fuel for publicity – so he went on wearing and flogging himself to make the best local arrangements he could. Nurse Daniels, too, was tireless, and it was a matter for thanksgiving by the whole village that she had happened to be away from home at the critical time of the Dayout. Willers, it was understood, had a temporary assistant booked for the first week in June, and a sort of commando of midwives signed-up for later on. The small committee-room in the Village Hall had been requisitioned as a supply-base, and several large cartons from firms of manufacturing chemists had already arrived.

Mr Leebody was working himself dead tired, too. There was much sympathy for him on account of Mrs Leebody, and he was more regarded in the village than he ever had been before. Mrs Zellaby was holding resolutely to her solidarity line, and, aided by Janet, continued to proclaim that Midwich would meet whatever was to come with a united front, and unafraid. It was, I think, chiefly on account of their work that we had come so far with – except in the matter of Mrs Leebody and one or two others – so little psychosomatic trouble.

Zellaby had operated, as might be expected, in less definable capacities, one of which he described as chief liquidator of the all-my-eye-and-crystal-balls division, and he had shown a pretty knack of causing nonsense to wilt, without putting backs up. One suspected that he was also supplying quite a little help where there was need and hardship.

Mr Crimm's worries with his Establishments Branch continued. He had been making increasingly urgent appeals to Bernard Westcott, and reached the point of saying that the only thing that would save a scandal throughout the Civil Service soon would be for his research project to be switched, and quickly, from ministerial to War Office control. Bernard, it seemed, was trying to achieve that, insisting the while that the whole affair must be kept quiet for just as long as it was possible to hold it.

'Which, from the Midwich point of view,' said Mr Crimm, with a shrug, 'is all to the good. But what the devil it can matter to MI I still don't begin to see...'

By mid– May there was a perceptible change. Hitherto, the spirit of Midwich had been not ill-attuned with that of the burgeoning season all around. It would be too much to say that it now went out of tune, but there was a certain muting of its strings. It acquired an air of abstraction; a more pensive mien.

'This,' remarked Willers to Zellaby, one day, 'is where we begin to stiffen the sinews.'

'Some quotations,' said Zellaby, 'are greatly improved by lack of context, but I take your meaning. One of the things that isn't helping is the nattering of stupid old women. What with one thing and another, it is such an exceptionally good wicket for beldames. I wish they could be stopped.'

'They're only one of the hazards. There are plenty more.'

Zellaby pondered glumly for a little, then he said:

'Well, we can only keep on trying. I suppose we have done pretty well not to have more trouble with it some time ago.'

'A lot better than one thought possible – and nearly all of it due to Mrs Zellaby,' the doctor told him.

Zellaby hesitated, and then made up his mind.

'I'm rather concerned about her, Willers. I wonder if you could – well, have a talk with her.'

'A talk?'

'She's more worried than she has let us see. It came out a bit a couple of nights ago. Nothing particular to start it. I happened to look up and found her staring at me, as though she were hating me. She doesn't you know... Then, as if I had said something, she broke out: "It's all very well for a man. He doesn't have to go through this sort of thing, and he knows he never will have to. How can he understand? He may mean as well as a saint, but he's always on the outside. He can never know what it's like, even in a normal way – so what sort of an idea can he have of this ? – Of how it feels to lie awake at night with the humiliating knowledge that one is simply being used? – As if one were not a person at all, but just a kind of mechanism, a sort of incubator... And then go on wondering, hour after hour, night after night, what – just what it may be that one is being forced to incubate. Of course you can't understand how that feels – how could you! It's degrading, it's intolerable. I shall crack soon. I know I shall. I can't go on like this much longer." '

Zellaby paused, and shook his head.

'There's so damned little one can do. I didn't try to stop her. I thought it would be better for her to let it out. But I'd be glad if you would talk to her, convince her. She knows that all the tests and X-rays show normal development – but she's got it into her head that it would be professionally necessary for you to say that, in any case. And I suppose it would.'

'It's true – thank heaven,' the doctor told him. 'I don't know what the devil I'd have done if it weren't – but I know we couldn't have just gone on as we have. I assure you the patients can't be more relieved that it is so than I am. So don't you worry, I'll set her mind at rest on that point, at any rate. She's not the first to think it, and she'll certainly not be the last. But, as soon as we get one thing nailed, they'll find others to worry themselves with.

'This is going to be a very, very dodgy time all round...'

In a week, it began to look as if Willers' prophecy would prove a pale understatement. The feeling of tension was contagious, and almost palpably increasing day by day. At the end of another week Midwich's united front had weakened sadly. With self-help beginning to show inadequacy, Mr Leebody had to bear more and more of the weight of communal anxiety. He did not spare any pains. He arranged special daily services, and for the rest of the day drove himself on from one parishioner to another, giving what encouragement he could.

Zellaby found himself quite superfluous. Rationalism was in disfavour. He maintained an unusual silence, and would have accepted invisibility, too, had it been offered.

'Have you noticed,' he inquired, dropping in one evening at Mr Crimm's cottage, 'have you noticed the way they glare at one? Rather as if one had been currying favour with the Creator in order to be given the other sex. Quite unnerving at times. Is it the same at The Grange?'

'It began to be,' Mr Crimm admitted, 'but we got them away on leave a day or two ago. Those who wanted to go home have gone there. The rest are in billets arranged by the doctor. We are getting more work done, as a result. It was becoming a little difficult.'

'Understatement,' said Zellaby. 'As it happens, I have never worked in a fireworks factory, but I know just what it must be like. I feel that at any moment something ungoverned, and rather horrible, may break out. And there's nothing one can do but wait, and hope it doesn't happen. Frankly, how we are going to get through another month or so of it, I don't know.' He shrugged and shook his head.

At the very moment of that despondent shake, however, the situation was in the process of being unexpectedly improved.

For Miss Lamb, who had adopted the custom of a quiet evening stroll, carefully supervised by Miss Latterly, that evening underwent a misadventure. One of the milk-bottles neatly arranged outside the back door of their cottage had somehow been overturned, and, as they left, Miss Lamb stepped on it. It rolled beneath her foot, and she fell...

Miss Latterly carried her back indoors, and rushed to the telephone...

Mrs Willers was still waiting up for her husband when he came back, five hours later. She heard the car drive up, and when she opened the door he was standing on the threshold, dishevelled, and blinking at the light. She had seen him like that only once or twice in their married life, and caught his arm anxiously.

'Charley. Charley, my dear, what is it? Not -?'

'Rather drunk, Milly. Sorry. Take no notice,' he said.

'Oh, Charley! Was the baby -?'

'Reaction, m'dear. Jus' reaction. Baby's perfect, you see. Nothing wrong with the baby. Nothing 't all. Perfect.'

'Oh, thank God for that,' exclaimed Mrs Willers, meaning it as fervently as she had ever meant any prayer.

'Got golden eyes,' said her husband. 'Funny – but nothing against having golden eyes, is there?'

'No, dear, of course not.'

'Perfect, 'cept for golden eyes. Not wrong at all.'

Mrs Willers helped him out of his coat, and steered him into the sitting-room. He dropped into a chair and sat there slackly, staring before him.

'S– so s-silly, isn't it?' he said. 'All that worrying. And now it's perfect. I -I – I -' He burst suddenly into tears, and covered his face with his hands.

Mrs Willers sat down on the arm of his chair, and laid her arm round his shoulders.

'There, there, my darling. It's all right, dear. It's over now.' She turned his face towards her own, and kissed him.

'Might've been black, or yellow, or green, or like a monkey. X-rays no good to tell that,' he said. "F the women of Midwich do the right thing by Miss Lamb, should be window to her, in the church.'

'I know, my dear, I know. But you don't need to worry about that any more. You said it's perfect.'

Dr Willers nodded emphatically several times.

'That's right. Perfect,' he repeated, with another nod. "Cept for golden eyes. Golden eyes are all right. Perfect... Lambs, my dear, lambs may safely graze... safely graze... Oh, God, I'm tired, Milly...'

A month later Gordon Zellaby found himself pacing the floor of the waiting-room in Trayne's best nursing-home, and forced himself to stop it and sit down. It was a ridiculous way to behave at his age, he told himself. Very proper in a young man, no doubt, but the last few weeks had brought the fact that he was no longer a young man rather forcibly to his notice. He felt about twice the age he had a year ago. Nevertheless, when, ten minutes later, a nurse rustled starchily in, she found him pacing the room again.

'It is a boy, Mr Zellaby,' she said. 'And I have Mrs Zellaby's special instructions to tell you he has the Zellaby nose.'

Chapter 12. Harvest Home

On a fine afternoon in the last week of July, Gordon Zellaby, emerging from the post office, encountered a small family-party coming from the church. It centred about a girl who carried a baby wrapped in a white woollen shawl. She looked very young to be the baby's mother; scarcely more than a schoolgirl. Zellaby beamed benevolently upon the group and received their smiles in return, but when they had passed his eyes followed the child carrying her child, a little sadly.

As he approached the lych-gate, the Reverend Hubert Leebody came down the path.

'Hullo, Vicar. Still signing up the recruits, I see,' he said.

Mr Leebody greeted him, nodded, and fell into step beside him.

'It's easing off now, though,' he said. 'Only two or three more to come.'

'Making it one hundred per cent?'

'Very nearly. I must confess I had scarcely expected that, but I fancy they feel that though it can't exactly regularize matters, it does go some way towards it. I'm glad they do.' He paused reflectively. 'This one,' he went on, 'young Mary Histon, she's chosen the name Theodore. Chose it all on her own, I gather. And I must say I rather like that.'

Zellaby considered for a moment, and nodded.

'So do I, Vicar. I like it very much. And, you know, that embodies no mean tribute to you.'

Mr Leebody looked pleased, but shook his head.

'Not to me,' he said. 'That a child like Mary should want to call her baby "the gift of God" instead of being ashamed of it is a tribute to the whole village.'

'But the village had to be shown how, in the name of humanity, it ought to behave.'

'Teamwork,' said the Vicar. 'Teamwork, with a fine captain in Mrs Zellaby.'

They continued for a few paces in silence, then Zellaby said:

'Nevertheless, the fact remains that, however the girl takes it, she has been robbed. She has been swept suddenly from childhood into womanhood. I find that saddening. No chance to stretch her wings. She has to miss the age of true poetry.'

'One would like to agree – but, in point of fact, I doubt it,' said Mr Leebody. 'Not only are poets, active or passive, rather rare, but it suits more temperaments than our times like to pretend to go straight from dolls to babies.'

Zellaby shook his head regretfully.

'I expect you're right. All my life I have deplored the Teutonic view of women, and all my life ninety per cent of them have been showing me that they don't mind it a bit.'

'There are some who certainly have not been robbed of anything,' Mr Leebody pointed out.

'You're right. I've just been looking in on Miss Ogle. She hasn't. Still a bit bewildered, perhaps, but delighted too. You'd think it was all some kind of conjuring trick she had invented for herself, without knowing how.'

He paused, and then went on: 'My wife tells me that Mrs Leebody will be home in a few days. We were most happy to hear that.'

'Yes. The doctors are very pleased. She's made a wonderful recovery.'

'And the baby is doing well?'

'Yes,' said Mr Leebody, a shade unhappily. 'She adores the baby.'

He paused at a gate which gave entrance to the garden of a large cottage set well back from the road.

'Ah, yes,' Zellaby nodded. 'And how is Miss Foresham?'

'Very busy at the moment. A new litter. She still maintains that a baby is less interesting than puppies, but I think I notice a weakening of conviction.'

'There are signs of that even in the most indignant,' Zellaby agreed. 'For my part, however, that is as a male, I must admit to finding things a bit flat and after-the-battle.'

'It has been a battle,' agreed Mr Leebody, 'but battles, after all, are just the highlights of a campaign. There are more to come.'

Zellaby looked at him more attentively. Mr Leebody went on:

'Who are these children? There's something about the way they look at one with those curious eyes. They are – strangers, you know.' He hesitated, and added: 'I realize it is not a way of thinking that will commend itself to you, but I find myself continually returning to the idea that this must be some kind of test.'

'But by whom, of whom?' said Zellaby.

Mr Leebody shook his head.

'Possibly we shall never know. Though it has already shown itself something of a test of us here. We could have rejected the situation that was thrust upon us, but we accepted it as our own concern.'

'One hopes,' said Zellaby, 'one hopes that we did right.'

Mr Leebody looked startled.

'But what else -?'

'I don't know. How is one to know with – strangers?'

Presently they parted; Mr Leebody to make his call, Zellaby to continue his stroll, with a thoughtful air. Not until he was approaching the Green did his attention turn outward, and then it was caught by Mrs Brinkman, still at some distance. One moment she was hurrying along towards him behind a new and shiny perambulator; the next, she had stopped dead, and was looking down into it in a helpless, troubled fashion. Then she picked the baby up and carried it the few yards to the War Memorial. There she sat down on the second step, unbuttoned her blouse, and held the baby to her.

Zellaby continued his stroll. As he drew near he raised his somewhat ramshackle hat. An expression of annoyance came over Mrs Brinkman's face, and a suffusion of pink, but she did not move. Then, as if he had spoken, she said defensively:

'Well, it's natural enough, isn't it?'

'My dear lady, it's classical. One of the great symbols.' Zellaby assured her.

'Then go away,' she told him, and abruptly began to weep.

Zellaby hesitated. 'Is there anything I can -?'

'Yes. Go away ,' she repeated. 'You don't think I want to make an exhibition of myself, do you?' she added, tearfully.

Zellaby was still irresolute.

'She's hungry,' Mrs Brinkman said. 'You'd understand if yours was one of the Dayout babies. Now, will you please go away! '

It did not seem the moment to pursue the matter further. Zellaby lifted his hat once more, and did as he was required. He went on, with a puzzled frown on his brow as he realized that somewhere he had missed a trick; something had been kept from him.

Half– way up the drive to Kyle Manor the sound of a car behind made him draw in to the side for it to pass. It did not pass, however. It drew up beside him. Turning, he saw not the tradesman's van he had assumed it to be, but a small black car with Ferrelyn at the wheel.

'My dear,' he said, 'how nice to see you. I had no idea you were coming. I wish they wouldn't forget to tell me things.'

But Ferrelyn did not give him smile for smile. Her face, a little pale, remained tired-looking.

'Nobody had any idea I was coming – not even me. I didn't intend to come.' She looked down at the baby in the carry-cot on the passenger seat beside her. 'He made me come,' she said.

Chapter 13. Midwich Centrocline

On the following day there returned to Midwich, first, Dr Margaret Haxby from Norwich, with baby. Miss Haxby was no longer on the staff of The Grange, having resigned two months before, nevertheless it was to The Grange she went, demanding accommodation. Two hours later came Miss Diana Dawson, from the neighbourhood of Gloucester, also with baby, also demanding accommodation. She presented slightly less of a problem than Miss Haxby since she was still a member of the staff, though not due to return from leave for some weeks yet. Third, came Miss Polly Rushton from London, with baby, in a state of distress and confused emotions, asking help and shelter of her uncle, the Reverend Hubert Leebody.

The day after that, two more ex-staff from The Grange arrived, with their babies, admitting their resignations from the Service, but at the same time making it perfectly clear that it was The Grange's duty to find them a room of some kind in Midwich. In the afternoon, young Mrs Dorry, who had been staying in Devonport to be near her husband in his latest posting, arrived unexpectedly, with her baby, and opened up her cottage.

And on the next day there showed up from Durham, with baby, the remaining member of The Grange staff involved. She, too, was technically on leave, but insisted that a place must be found for her. Finally appeared Miss Latterly, with Miss Lamb's baby, urgently returning from Eastbourne whither she had taken Miss Lamb for recuperation.

This influx was observed with varying emotions. Mr Leebody welcomed his niece warmly, as though she were putting it within his power to make some amends. Dr Willers was perplexed and disconcerted – as was Mrs Willers, who feared it might cause him to postpone the much-needed holiday she had arranged for him. Gordon Zellaby had the air of one regarding an interesting phenomenon with judicial reserve. The person upon whom the development pressed most immediately was, without doubt, Mr Crimm. He was beginning to wear a distraught look.

A number of urgent reports went in to Bernard. Janet's and mine was to the effect that the first, and probably the worst, hurdle had been crossed, and the babies had arrived without nationwide obstetrical interest, BUT if he still wished to avoid publicity the new situation must be dealt with promptly. Plans for the care and support of the children would have to be established on a sound, official footing.

Mr Crimm urged that the irregularities appearing in his personnel records were now on a scale that had taken them beyond his control, and that unless there was swift intervention at a higher level, there was soon going to be an almighty rumpus.

Dr Willers felt it necessary to turn in three reports. The first was in medical language, for the record. The second expressed his opinions in more colloquial terms, for the lay. Among the points he made were these:

'The survival rate of one hundred per cent – resulting in 31 males and 30 females of this special type – means that only superficial study has been possible, but of the characteristics observed, the following are common to them all:

'Most striking are the eyes. These appear to be quite normal in structure; the iris, however, is, to the best of my knowledge, unique in its colouring, being of a bright, almost fluorescent-looking gold, and is the same shade of gold in all.

'The hair, noticeably soft and fine, is, as well as I can describe it, of a slightly darkened blond shade. In section, under the microscope, it is almost flat on one side, while the other is an arc; the shape being close to that of a narrow D. Specimens taken from eight of the babies are precisely similar. I can find no record of such a hair-type being observed hitherto. The finger and toe nails are a trifle narrower than is usual, but there is no suggestion of claw formation – indeed, one would judge them to be slightly flatter than the average. The shape of the occiput may be a little unusual, but it is too early to be definite about that.

'In a former report it was surmised that the origin might be attributable to some process of xenogenesis. The very remarkable similarity of the children; the fact that they are certainly not hybrids of any known species, as well as all the circumstances attending gestation, tend, in my view to support this opinion. Additional evidence may accrue when the blood-groups can be determined – that is to say, when the blood circulating ceases to be that of the mother's group, and becomes that of the individual.

'I have been unable to find any record of a case of human xenogenesis, but I know of no reason why it should not be possible. This explanation has naturally occurred to those involved. The more educated women entirely accept the thesis that they are host-mothers, rather than true mothers; the less educated find in it an element of humiliation, and so tend to ignore it.

'In general: the babies all appear to be perfectly healthy although they do not show the degree of "chubbiness" one expects at their age: the size of the head in relation to the body is that normally found in a somewhat older child: a curious, but slight, silvery sheen on the skin has given concern to some of the mothers, but is common to all, and would appear to be normal to the type.'

After reading through the rest of his report, Janet took him up on it severely.

'Look here,' she said. 'What about the return of all the mothers and babies – all this compulsion business? You can't just skip that altogether.'

'A form of hysteria giving rise to collective hallucination – probably quite temporary,' said Willers.

'But all the mothers, educated or not, agree that the babies can, and do , exert a form of compulsion. Those who were away didn't want to come back here; they came because they had to. I've talked to all of them, and what they all say is that they suddenly became aware of a feeling of distress – a sense of need which they somehow knew could only be relieved by coming back here. Their attempts to describe it vary because it seems to have affected them in different ways – one felt stifled, another said it was like hunger or thirst, and another, that it was like having a great noise battering at one. Ferrelyn says she simply suffered from intolerable jitters. But, whichever way it took them, they felt it was associated with the babies, and that the only way to relieve it was to bring them back here.

'And that even goes for Miss Lamb, too. She felt just the same, but she was ill in bed at the time, and couldn't possibly come. So what happened? The compulsion switched on to Miss Latterly, and she was unable to rest until she had acted as Miss Lamb's proxy and brought the baby back here. Once she had parked it here with Mrs Brant she felt free of the compulsion, and was able to return to Miss Lamb, in Eastbourne.'

'If,' said Doctor Willers, heavily, ' if we take all old wives' – or young wives' – tales at face value; if we remember that the majority of feminine tasks are deadly dull, and leave the mind so empty that the most trifling seed that falls there can grow into a riotous tangle, we shall not be surprised by an outlook on life which has the disproportion and the illogical inconsequence of a nightmare, where values are symbolic rather than literal.

'Now, what do we have here? A number of women who are the victims of an improbable, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon: and a number of resultant babies which are not quite like other babies. By a dichotomy familiar to us all, a woman requires her own baby to be perfectly normal, and at the same time superior to all other babies. Well, when any of these women concerned is isolated from the rest with her own baby, it is bound to become more strongly borne in upon her that her golden-eyed baby is not, in relation to the other babies she sees, quite normal. Her subconscious becomes defensive, and keeps it up until a point is reached where the facts must either be admitted, or somehow sublimated. The easiest way to sublimate the situation is to transfer the irregularity into an environment where it no longer appears irregular – if there is such a place. In this case there is one, and one only – Midwich. So they pick up their babies, and back they come, and everything is comfortably rationalized for the time being.'

'It seems to me that there is certainly some rationalizing going on,' Janet said. 'What about Mrs Welt?'

On the occasion she was referring to, Mrs Brant had gone into Mrs Welt's shop one morning to find her engaged in jabbing a pin into herself again and again, and weeping as she did it. This had not seemed good to Mrs Brant, so she had dragged her off to see Willers. He gave Mrs Welt some kind of sedative, and when she felt better she had explained that in changing the baby's napkin she had pricked him with a pin. Whereupon, by her account, the baby had just looked steadily at her with its golden eyes, and made her start jabbing the pin into herself.

'Well, really!' objected Willers. 'If you can cite me a plainer case of hysterical remorse – hair-shirts, and all that – I shall be interested to hear it.'

'And Harriman, too?' Janet persisted.

For Harriman had one day made his appearance in Willers' surgery in a shocking mess. Nose broken, couple of teeth knocked out, both eyes blacked. He had been set on, so he said, by three unknown men – but no one else had seen these men. On the other hand, two of the village boys claimed that through his window they had seen Harriman furiously bashing himself with his own fists. – And the next day someone noticed a bruise on the side of the Harriman baby's face.

Dr Willers shrugged.

'If Harriman were to complain of being set upon by a troupe of pink elephants, it would not greatly surprise me,' he said.

'Well, if you aren't going to put it in, I shall write an additional report,' said Janet.

And she did. She concluded it:

'This is not , in my opinion, or in anyone's opinion but Dr Willers', a matter of hysteria, but of simple fact.

'The situation should, in my view, be recognized, not explained away. It needs to be examined and understood. There is a tendency among the weaker-willed to become superstitious about it, and to credit the babies with magical powers. This sort of nonsense does no one any good, and invites exploitation by what Zellaby calls "the beldame underground". There ought to be an unbiased investigation.'

An investigation, though on more general lines, was also the theme of Dr Willers' third report which was in the form of a protest that wound up:

'In the first place, I do not see why MI is concerned in this at all: in the second, that it should be, apparently, an exclusive concern of theirs is outrageous.

'It is disgracefully wrong . Somebody should be making a thorough study of these children – I am keeping notes, of course, but they are only an ordinary GP's observations. There ought to be a team of experts on the job. I kept quiet before the births because I thought, and still think, that it was better for everyone, and for the mothers in particular, but now that need is over.

'One has got used to the idea of military interference with science in a number of fields – a lot of it totally unnecessary – but this is really preposterous! It is nothing less than a scandal that such a phenomenon as this should continue to be hushed up so that it is going practically unobserved.

'If it is not simply a piece of obstructionism, it is still a scandal. It must be possible for something to be done, within the provisions of the Official Secrets Act, if necessary. A wonderful opportunity for the study of comparative development is simply being thrown away.

'Think of all the trouble that has been taken to observe mere quins and quads, and then look at the material for study that we have here. Sixty-one similars – so similar that most of their ostensible mothers cannot tell them apart. (They will deny that, but it is true.) Think of the work that should be taking place on the comparative effects of environment, conditioning, association, diet, and all the rest of it. What is going on here is a burning of books before they have been written. Something must be done about it before more chances are lost.'

All these representations resulted in a prompt visit from Bernard, and an afternoon of rather acrimonious discussion. The discussion broke up only partly mollified by his promises to stir the Ministry of Health into swift, practical action.

After the others had left, he said:

'Now that official interest in Midwich is bound to become more overt, it might be very useful – and, indeed, might help to avoid awkwardness later on – if we could enlist Zellaby's sympathy. Do you think you could arrange for me to meet him?'

I rang up Zellaby who agreed at once, so after dinner I took Bernard up to Kyle Manor, and left him there to talk. He returned to our cottage about a couple of hours later, looking thoughtful.

'Well,' asked Janet, 'and what do you make of the sage of Midwich?'

Bernard shook his head, and looked at me.

'He's got me wondering,' he said. 'Most of your reports have been excellent, Richard, but I doubt whether you got him quite right. Oh, there is a lot of chatter which sounds like hot air, I know, but what you gave me was too much of the manner, and too little of the matter.'

'I'm sorry if I misled you,' I admitted. 'The trouble about Zellaby is that his matter is frequently elusive, and often allusive. Not much that he says is reportable fact; he is given to mentioning things en passant , and by the time you've thought it over you don't know whether he followed them up with serious deductions, or was simply playing with hypotheses – nor, for that matter, are you at all sure how much he implied, and how much you inferred. It makes things difficult.'

Bernard nodded, understandingly.

'I appreciate that now. I've just had some of it. He spent quite ten minutes towards the end telling me that it is only recently that he has come to wonder whether civilization is not, biologically speaking, a form of decadence. From that he went on to wonder whether the gap between homo sapiens and the rest was not too wide; with the suggestion that it might have been better for our development had we had to contend with the conditions of some other sapient, or at least semi-sapient, species. I'm sure he wasn't being altogether irrelevant – but I'm hanged if I can really pin down the relevance. One thing seems pretty clear though; erratic as he seems, he doesn't miss a lot... Incidentally, he is strong on the same line as the doctor concerning expert observation – particularly on this "compulsion", but in his case for the opposite reason: he doesn't consider it hysterical, and is anxious to know what it is.

'By the way, you seem to have missed one trick – did you know his daughter tried to take her baby for a drive in her car the other day?'

'No,' I said, 'what do you mean, "tried"?'

'Just that after about six miles she had to give up, and come back again. He doesn't like it. As he put it: for a child to be tied to its mother's apron strings is bad, but for a mother to be tied to a baby's apron strings is serious. He feels it is time he took some steps about it.'

Chapter 14. Matters Arising

For various reasons almost three weeks went by before Alan Hughes was free to come for a week-end visit, so that Zellaby's expressed intention of taking steps had to be postponed until then.

By this time the disinclination of the Children (now beginning to acquire an implied capital C, to distinguish them from other children) to be removed from the immediate neighbourhood had become a phenomenon generally recognized in the village. It was a nuisance, since it involved finding someone to look after the baby when its mother went to Trayne, or elsewhere, but not regarded with any great seriousness – more, indeed, as a foible; just another inconvenience added to the inconveniences inevitable with babies, anyway.

Zellaby took a less casual view of it, but waited until the Sunday afternoon before putting the matter to his son-in-law. Reasonably certain, then, of a spell without interruption he led Alan to deck-chairs under the cedar tree on the lawn where they would not be overheard. Once they were seated he came to the point with quite unusual directness.

'What I want to say, my boy, is this: I'd feel happier if you can get Ferrelyn away from here. And the sooner, I think, the better.'

Alan looked at him with an expression of surprise which became changed into a slight frown.

'I should have thought it fairly clear that there is nothing I want more than to have her with me.'

'Of course it is, my dear fellow. One could not fail to realize that. But at the moment I am concerned with something more important than interfering in your private affairs; I am not thinking of what either of you wants, or would like, so much as what needs to be done – for Ferrelyn's sake, not for yours.'

'She wants to come away. She set out to come once,' Alan reminded him.

'I know. But she tried to take the baby with her: it brought her back, just as it brought her here before, and just, it appears, as it will if she tries again. Therefore you must take her away without the baby. If you can persuade her to that, we can arrange to have it excellently looked after here. The indications are that if it is not actually with her it will not – probably cannot – exert any influence stronger than that of natural affection.'

'But according to Willers -'

'Willers is making a loud blustering noise to prevent himself from being frightened. He's refusing to see what he doesn't want to see. I don't suppose it matters very much what casuistries he uses to comfort himself, as long as they don't take in the rest of us.'

'You mean that this hysteria he talks about isn't the real reason for Ferrelyn and the rest coming back here?'

'Well, what is hysteria? A functional disorder of the nervous system. Naturally there has been considerable strain upon the nervous systems of many of them, but the trouble with Willers is that he stops before he ought to begin. Instead of facing it, and honestly inquiring why the reaction should take this particular form, he hides in a smoke-screen of generalities about a long period of sustained anxiety, and so on. I don't blame the man. He's had enough for the time being; he's tired out, and he deserves a rest. But that doesn't mean we must let him obscure the facts, which is what he is trying to do. For instance, even if he has observed it, he has not admitted that none of this "hysteria" has ever been known to manifest itself without one of the babies being present.'

'Is that so?' Alan asked, surprised.

'Without exception. This sense of compulsion occurs only in the vicinity of one of the babies. Separate the baby from the mother – or perhaps one should say remove the mother from the neighbourhood of any of the babies – and the compulsion at once begins to lessen, and gradually dies away. It takes longer to fade in some than in others, but that is what happens.'

'But I don't see – I mean, how is it done?'

'I've no idea. There could, one supposes, be an element akin to hypnotism, perhaps, but, whatever the mechanism, I am perfectly satisfied that it is exerted wilfully and with purpose by the child. One would instance the case of Miss Lamb: when it was physically impossible for her to comply, the compulsion was promptly switched to Miss Latterly, who had previously felt none of it, with the result that the baby had its way, and got back here, as did the rest.

'And since they got back, no one has managed to take one of them more than six miles from Midwich.

'Hysteria, says Willers. One woman starts it, the rest subconsciously accept it, and so exhibit the same symptoms. But if the baby is parked with a neighbour here the mother is able to go to Trayne, or anywhere else she wants to, without any hindrance. That, according to Willers, is simply because her subconscious hasn't been led to expect anything to happen when she is on her own, so it doesn't.

'But my point is this: Ferrelyn cannot take the baby; but if she makes up her mind to go, and leave it here, there's nothing to stop her. Your job is to help to make up her mind for her.'

Alan considered.

'Sort of put out an ultimatum – make her choose between baby and me? That's a bit tough and – er – fundamental, isn't it?' he suggested.

'My dear fellow, the baby's put the ultimatum already. What you have to do is to clarify the situation. The only possible compromise would be for you to surrender to the baby's challenge, and come to live here, too.'

'Which I couldn't, anyway.'

'Very well, then. Ferrelyn has been dodging the issue for some weeks now, but sooner or later she must face it. Your job is first to make her recognize the hurdle, and then help her over it.'

Alan said slowly:

'It's quite a thing to ask, though, isn't it?'

'Isn't the other quite a thing to ask of a man – when it isn't his baby?'

'H'm,' Alan remarked. Zellaby went on:

'And it isn't really her baby, either, or I'd not be talking quite like this. Ferrelyn and the rest are the victims of an imposition: they have been cheated into an utterly false position. Some kind of elaborate confidence trick has made them into what the veterinary fellows call host-mothers; a relationship more intimate than that of the foster-mother, but similar in kind. This baby has absolutely nothing to do with either of you – except that, by some process not yet explained, she was placed in a situation which forced her to nourish it. So far is it from belonging to either of you that it doesn't correspond to any known racial classification. Even Willers has to admit that.

'But if the type is unknown, the phenomenon is not – our ancestors, who did not have Willers' blind faith in the articles of science – had a word for it: they called such beings changelings. None of this business would have seemed as strange to them as it does to us because they had only to suffer religious dogmatism, which was not so dogmatic as scientific dogmatism.

'The idea of the changeling, therefore, far from being novel, is both old and so widely distributed that it is unlikely to have arisen, or to have persisted, without cause, and occasional support. True, one has not encountered the idea of it taking place on such a scale as this, but quantity does not, in this case, affect the quality of the event; it simply confirms it. All these sixty-one golden-eyed children we have here are intruders, changelings: they are cuckoo-children.

'Now, the important thing about the cuckoo is not how the egg got into the nest, nor why that nest was chosen; the real matter for concern comes after it has been hatched – what, in fact, it will attempt to do next. And that, whatever it may be, will be motivated by its instinct for survival, an instinct characterized chiefly by utter ruthlessness.'

Alan pondered a little.

'You really think you've got a sound analogy there?' he asked, uneasily.

'I'm perfectly certain of it,' Zellaby asserted.

The two of them fell silent for some little time, Zellaby lying back in his chair with his hands behind his head, Alan staring unseeingly across the lawn. At length:

'All right,' he said. 'I suppose most of us have been hoping that once the babies arrived things would straighten out. I admit that it doesn't look like it now. But what are you expecting to happen?'

'I'm just being expectant, not specific – except that I don't think it will be anything pleasant,' Zellaby replied. 'The cuckoo survives because it is tough and single-purposed. That is why I hope you will take Ferrelyn away – and keep her away.

'Nothing satisfactory can come of this, at best. Do your utmost to make her forget this changeling in order that she may have a normal life. It will be difficult at first, no doubt, but not so hard if she has a child that is really her own.'

Alan rubbed the furrows on his forehead.

'It is difficult,' he said. 'In spite of the way it happened, she does have a maternal feeling for it – a well, a sort of physical affection, and a sense of obligation, you know.'

'But of course. That's how it works. That's why the poor hen works herself to death feeding the greedy cuckoo-chick. It's a form of confidence-trick, as I told you – the callous exploitation of a natural proclivity. The existence of such a proclivity is important to the continuation of a species, but, after all, in a civilized society we cannot afford to give way to all the natural urges, can we? In this case, Ferrelyn must simply refuse to be blackmailed through her better instincts.'

'If,' said Alan slowly, 'if Angela's child had turned out to be one of them, what would you have done?'

'I should have done what I am advising you to do for Ferrelyn. Taken her away. I should also have cut off our connexion with Midwich by selling this house, fond as we both are of it. I may have to do that yet, even though she is not directly involved. It depends how the situation develops. One waits to see. The potentialities are unknown, but I don't care for the logical implications. Therefore the sooner Ferrelyn is out of it, the happier I shall be. I don't propose to say anything about it to her myself. For one thing it is a matter for you to settle between you; for another, there is the risk that by crystallizing a not very clear misgiving I might do the wrong thing – make it appear as a challenge to be met, for instance. You have a positive alternative to offer. However, if it is difficult, and you need something to tip the balance, Angela and I will back you up quite fully.'

Alan nodded slowly.

'I hope that won't be necessary – I don't think it will be. We both know really that we can't just go on like this. Now you've given me a push, we'll get it settled.'

They continued to sit, in silent contemplation. Alan was aware of some relief that his fragmentary feelings and suspicions had been collected for him into a form which warranted action. He was also considerably impressed, for he could recall no previous conversation with his father-in-law in which Zellaby, spurning one tempting diversion after another, had held so stoutly to his course. Moreover, the speculations which could arise were interesting and numerous. He was on the point of raising one or two of them himself when he was checked by the sight of Angela crossing the lawn towards them.

She sat down in the chair on the other side of her husband, and demanded a cigarette. Zellaby gave her one and held out the match. He watched her take the first few puffs.

'Trouble?' he inquired.

'I'm not quite sure. I've just had Margaret Haxby on the telephone. She's gone.'

Zellaby lifted his eyebrows.

'You mean, cleared out?'

'Yes. She was speaking from London.'

'Oh,' said Zellaby, and lapsed into thought. Alan asked who Margaret Haxby was.

'Oh, I'm sorry. You probably don't know her. She's one of Mr Crimm's young ladies – or was. One of the brightest of them, I understand. Academically Dr Margaret Haxby – Ph.D., London.'

'One of the – er – afflicted?' Alan inquired.

'Yes. And one of the most resentful,' Angela said. 'Now she's made up her mind to beat it, and gone – leaving Midwich holding the baby. Literally.'

'But where do you come in, my dear?' Zellaby inquired.

'Oh, she just decided I was a reliable subject for official notification. She said she'd have rung Mr Crimm, but he's away today. She wanted to arrange about the baby.'

'Where is it now?'

'Where she was staying. In the older Mrs Dorry's cottage.'

'And she's just walked out on it?'

'That's it. Mrs Dorry doesn't know yet. I'll have to go and tell her.'

'This could be awkward,' Zellaby said. 'I can see a pretty panic starting up among the other women who've taken these girls in. They'll all be throwing them out overnight before they get left in the cart, too. Can't we stall? Give Crimm time to get back and do something? After all, his girls aren't a village responsibility – not primarily, anyway. Besides, she might change her mind.'

Angela shook her head.

'Not this one, I think. She's not done it on the spur of the moment. She's been over it pretty carefully, in fact. Her line is: She never asked to come to Midwich, she was simply posted here. If they'd posted her to a yellow-fever area they'd be responsible for the consequences; well, they posted her here, and through no fault of her own she caught this instead; now it's up to them to deal with it.'

'H'm,' said Zellaby. 'One has a feeling that that parallelism is not going to be accepted in government circles nem. con. However...?'

'Anyway, that's her contention. She repudiates the child entirely. She says she is no more responsible for it than if it had been left on her doorstep, and there is, therefore, no reason why she should put up with, or be expected to put up with, the wrecking of her life, or her work, on account of it.'

'With the upshot that it is now thrown on the parish – unless she intends to pay for it, of course.'

'Naturally, I asked about that. She said that the village and The Grange could fight out the responsibility between them; it certainly was not hers. She will refuse to pay anything, since payment might be legally construed as admission of liability. Nevertheless, Mrs Dorry, or any other person of good character who cares to take the baby on, will receive a rate of two pounds a week, sent anonymously and irregularly.'

'You're right, my dear. She has been thinking it out; this is going to need looking into. What is the effect if this repudiation is allowed to go unchallenged? I imagine legal responsibility for the child has to be established somewhere. How is that done? Get the Relieving Officer in, and slap a court order on her, do you suppose?'

'I don't know, but she's thought of something of the kind happening. If it does, she intends to fight it in court. She claims that medical evidence will establish that the child cannot possibly be hers; from this it will be argued that as she was placed in loco parentis without her knowledge or consent, she cannot be held responsible. Failing this, it is still open to her to bring an action against the Ministry for negligence resulting in her being placed in a position of jeopardy; or it might be for conniving at assault; or, possibly, procuring. She isn't sure.'

'I should think not,' said Zellaby. 'It ought to be an interesting indictment to frame.'

'Well, she didn't seem to think it was likely to come to that,' Angela admitted.

'I imagine she's perfectly right there,' agreed Zellaby. 'We have made our own efforts, but the unperceived official machinations to keep all this quiet must have been quite considerable. Even the evidence brought to dispute a court order would be manna to journalists of all nations. In fact, the issue of such an order would probably bring Dr Haxby a considerable fortune, one way and another. Poor Mr Crimm – and poor Colonel Westcott. They are going to be worried, I'm afraid. I wonder just what their powers in the matter are...?' He lapsed into thought for some moments before he went on:

'My dear, I've just been talking to Alan about getting Ferrelyn away. This seems to make it a little more urgent. Once it becomes generally known, others may decide to follow Margaret Haxby's example, don't you think?'

'It may make up their minds for some of them,' Angela agreed.

'In which case, and supposing an inconvenient number should take the same course, don't you think there is a possibility of some counter-move to stop more desertions.'

'But if, as you say, they don't want publicity -?'

'Not by the authorities, my dear. No, I was wondering what would happen if it were to turn out that the children are as opposed to being deserted as they are to being removed.'

'But you don't really think -?'

'I don't know. I'm simply doing my best to place myself in the situation of a young cuckoo. As such, I fancy I should resent anything that appeared likely to lessen attention to my comfort and well-being. Indeed, one does not even have to be a cuckoo to feel so. I just air the suggestion, you understand, but I do feel that it is worth making sure that Ferrelyn is not trapped here if something of the sort should happen.'

'Whether it does or not, she'll be better away,' Angela agreed. 'You could start by suggesting two or three weeks away while we see what happens,' she told Alan.

'Very well,' Alan said. 'It does give me a handle to start with. Where is she?'

'I left her on the veranda.'

The Zellabys watched him cross the lawn and disappear round a comer of the house. Gordon Zellaby lifted an eyebrow at his wife.

'Not very difficult, I think,' Angela said. 'Naturally she's longing to be with him. The obstacle is her sense of obligation. The conflict is doing her harm, wearing her out.'

'How much affection does she really have for the baby?'

'It's hard to say. There is so much social and traditional pressure on a woman in these things. One's self-defensive instinct is to conform to the approved pattern. Personal honesty takes time to assert itself – if it is ever allowed to.'

'Not with Ferrelyn, surely?' Zellaby looked hurt.

'Oh, it will with her, I'm sure. But she hasn't got there yet. It's a bit much to face, you know. She's had all the inconvenience and discomfort of bearing the baby, as much as if it were her own – and now, after all that, she has to re-adjust to the biological fact that it is not, that she is only what you call a "host-mother" to it. That must take a lot of doing.'

She paused, looking thoughtfully across the lawn. 'I now say a little prayer of thanksgiving every night,' she added. 'I don't know where it goes to, but I just want it to be known somewhere how grateful I am.'

Zellaby reached out, and took her hand. After some minutes, he observed:

'I wonder if a sillier and more ignorant catachresis than "Mother Nature" was ever perpetrated? It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by "Mother Nature". Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul – unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.'

Angela seized the pause to put in, with a touch of impatience:

'I've no doubt you are gradually working round to something, Gordon.'

'Yes,' Zellaby owned. 'I am working round again to cuckoos. Cuckoos are very determined survivors. So determined that there is really only one thing to be done with them once one's nest is infested. I am, as you know, a humane man; I think I may even say a kindly man, by disposition.'

'You may, Gordon.'

'As a further disadvantage, I am a civilized man. For these reasons I shall not be able to bring myself to approve of what ought to be done. Nor, even when we perceive its advisability, will the rest of us. So, like the poor hen-thrush we shall feed and nurture the monster, and betray our own species...

'Odd, don't you think? We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us – but these creatures we shall carefully rear.'

Angela sat motionless for some moments. Then she turned her head and looked at him, long and steadily.

'You mean that – about what ought to be done, don't you, Gordon?'

'I do, my dear.'

'It isn't like you.'

'As I pointed out. But then, it is a situation I have never been in before. It has occurred to me that "live and let live" is a piece of patronage which can only be afforded by the consciously secure. I now find, when I feel – as I never expected to feel – my situation at the summit of creation to be threatened, that I don't like it a bit.'

'But, Gordon, dear, surely this is all a little exaggerated. After all, a few unusual babies...'

'Who can at will produce a neurotic condition in mature women – and don't forget Harriman, too – in order to enforce their wishes.'

'It may wear off as they get older. One has heard sometimes of odd understanding, a kind of psychic sympathy...'

'In isolated cases, perhaps. But in sixty-one inter-connected cases! No, there's no tender sympathy with these, and they trail no clouds of glory, either. They are the most practical, sensible, self-contained babies anyone ever saw – they are also quite the smuggest, and no wonder – they can get anything they want. Just at present they are still at a stage where they do not want very much, but later on – well, we shall see...'

'Dr Willers says -' his wife began, but Zellaby cut her short impatiently.

'Willers rose to the occasion magnificently – so well that it's not surprising that he's addled himself into behaving like a damned ostrich now. His faith in hysteria has become practically pathological. I hope his holiday will do him good.'

'But, Gordon, he does at least try to explain it.'

'My dear, I am a patient man, but don't try me too far. Willers has never tried to explain any of it. He has accepted certain facts when they became inescapable; the rest he has attempted to explain away – which is quite different.'

'But there must be an explanation.'

'Of course.'

'Then what do you think it is?'

'We shall have to wait until the children are old enough to give us some evidence.'

'But you do have some ideas?'

'Nothing very cheering, I'm afraid.'

'But what?'

Zellaby shook his head. 'I'm not ready,' he said again. 'But as you are a discreet woman I will put a question to you. It is this: If you were wishful to challenge the supremacy of a society that was fairly stable, and quite well weaponed, what would you do? Would you meet it on its own terms by launching a probably costly, and certainly destructive, assault? Or, if time were of no great importance, would you prefer to employ a version of a more subtle tactic? Would you, in fact, try somehow to introduce a fifth column, to attack it from within?'

Chapter 15. Matters to Arise

The next few months saw a number of changes in Midwich.

Dr Willers handed over his practice to the care of a locum, the young man who had helped him during the crisis, and, accompanied by Mrs Willers, went off, in a state of mingled exhaustion and disgust with authority, on a holiday that was said to be taking him round the world.

In November we had an epidemic of influenza which carried off three elderly villagers, and also three of the Children. One of them was Ferrelyn's boy. She was sent for, and came hurrying home at once, but arrived too late to see him alive. The others were two of the girls.

Well before that, however, there had been the sensational evacuation of The Grange. A fine bit of service organization: the researchers first heard about it on the Monday, the vans arrived on Wednesday, and by the weekend the house and the expensive new laboratories stood blank-windowed and empty, leaving the villagers with the feeling that they had seen a piece of pantomime magic, for Mr Crimm and his staff had gone, too, and all that was left were four of the golden-eyed babies for whom foster-parents had to be found.

A week later a desiccated-looking couple called Freeman moved into the cottage vacated by Mr Crimm. Freeman introduced himself as a medical man specializing in social psychology, and his wife, too, it appeared, was a doctor of medicine. We were led to understand, in a cautious way, that their purpose was to study the development of the Children on behalf of an unspecified official body. This, after their own fashion, they presumably did, for they were continually lurking and peering about the village, often insinuating themselves into the cottages, and not infrequently to be found on one of the seats on the Green, pondering weightily and watchfully. They had an aggressive discretion which verged upon the conspiratorial, and tactics which, within a week of their arrival, caused them to be generally resented and referred to as the Noseys. Doggedness, however, was another of their characteristics, and they persisted in the face of discouragement until they gained the kind of acceptance accorded to the inevitable.

I checked on them with Bernard. He said they were nothing to do with his department, but their appointment was authentic. We felt that if they were to be the only outcome of Willers' anxiety for study of the Children, it was as well that he was away.

Zellaby offered, as indeed did all of us, a few cooperative overtures to them, but made no headway. Whatever department was employing them had picked winners for discretion, but we felt that, importantly as discretion might be regarded in the larger sphere, a little more sociability within the community could have brought them fuller information with less effort. Still, there it was: they might , for all we knew, be turning in useful reports somewhere. All we could do was let them prowl in their chosen fashion.

However interesting, scientifically, the Children may have been during the first year of their lives there was little about them during that time to cause further misgiving. Apart from their continued resistance to any attempt to remove any of them from Midwich, the reminders of their compulsive powers were mostly mild and infrequent. They were, as Zellaby had said, remarkably sensible and self-sufficient babies – as long as nobody neglected them, or crossed their wishes.

There was very little about them at this stage to support the ominous ruminations of the beldame group, or, for that matter, the differently cast, but scarcely less gloomy, prognostications of Zellaby himself, and, as the time passed with unexpected placidity, Janet and I were not the only ones who began to wonder whether we had not all been misled, and if the unusual qualities in the Children were not fading, perhaps to dwindle into insignificance as they should grow older.

And then, early in the following summer, Zellaby made a discovery which appeared to have escaped the Freemans, for all their conscientious watching.

He turned up at our cottage one sunny afternoon, and ruthlessly routed us out. I protested at having my work interrupted, but he was not to be put off.

'I know, my dear fellow, I know. I have a picture of my own publisher, with tears in his eyes. But this is important. I need reliable witnesses.'

'Of what?' inquired Janet, with little enthusiasm. But Zellaby shook his head.

'I am making no leading statements, incubating no germs. I am simply asking you to watch an experiment, and draw your own conclusions. Now here,' he fumbled in his pockets, 'is our apparatus.'

He laid on the table a small ornamental wooden box about half as big again as a matchbox, and one of those puzzles consisting of two large nails so bent that they are linked together, but will, when held in the right positions, slide easily apart. He picked up the wooden box, and shook it. Something rattled inside.

'Barley– sugar,' he explained. 'This is one of the products of feckless Nipponese ingenuity. It has no visible means of opening, but slide aside this bit of the marquetry here, and it opens without difficulty, and here's your barley-sugar. Why anybody should trouble himself to construct such a thing is known only to the Japanese, but, for us it will, I think, turn out to have a useful purpose, after all. Now, which of the Children, male, shall we try it on first?'

'None of these babies is quite one year old yet,' Janet pointed out, a little chillingly.

'In every respect, except that of actual duration, they are, as you very well know, quite well-developed two-year-olds,' Zellaby countered. 'And in any case, what I am proposing is not exactly an intelligence test... or, is it...?' He broke off uncertainly. 'I must admit that I'm not sure about that. However, it doesn't greatly matter. Just name the child.'

'All right. Mrs Brant's,' said Janet. So to Mrs Brant's we went.

Mrs Brant showed us through into her small back-garden where the child was in a play-pen on the lawn. He looked, as Zellaby had pointed out, every bit of two years old, and brightly intelligent at that. Zellaby gave him the little box. The boy took it, looked at it, found that it rattled, and shook it delightedly. We watched him decide that it must be a box, and try unsuccessfully to open it. Zellaby let him go on playing with it for a bit, and then produced a piece of barley-sugar, and traded it for the return of his box, still unopened.

'I don't see what that's supposed to show,' Janet said, as we left.

'Patience, my dear,' Zellaby said, reprovingly. 'Which shall we try next, male again?'

Janet suggested the Vicarage as convenient. Zellaby shook his head.

'No that won't do. Polly Rushton's baby girl would very likely be on hand, too.'

'Does that matter? It all seems very mysterious,' said Janet.

'I want my witnesses satisfied,' said Zellaby. 'Try another.'

We settled for the elder Mrs Dorry's. There, he went through the same performance, but, after playing with the box a little, the child offered it back to him, looking up expectantly. Zellaby, however, did not take it from him. Instead, he showed the child how to open the box, and then let him do it for himself, and take out the sweet. Zellaby thereupon put another piece of barley-sugar in the box, closed it, and presently handed it to him again.

'Try once more,' he suggested, and we watched the little boy open it easily, and achieve a second sweet.

'Now,' said Zellaby as we left, 'we go back to Exhibit One, the Brant child.'

In Mrs Brant's garden again, he presented the child in the play-pen with the box, just as he had before. The child took it eagerly. Without the least hesitation he found and slid back the movable bit of marquetry, and extracted the sweet, as if he had done it a dozen times before. Zellaby looked at our dumbfounded expressions with an amused twinkle. Once more he retrieved and reloaded the box.

'Well,' he said, 'name another boy.'

We visited three, up and down the village. None of them showed the least puzzlement over the box. They opened it as if it were perfectly familiar to them, and made sure of the contents without delay.

'Interesting, isn't it?' remarked Zellaby. 'Now let's start on the girls.'

We went through the same procedure again, except that this time it was to the third, instead of to the second, Child that he showed the secret of opening the box. After that, matters went just as before.

'Fascinating, don't you think?' beamed Zellaby. 'Like to try them with the nail-puzzle?'

'Later, perhaps,' Janet told him. 'Just at present I should like some tea.' So we took him back with us to the cottage.

'That box idea was a good one,' Zellaby congratulated himself modestly, while wolfing a cucumber sandwich. 'Simple, incontestable, and went off without a hitch, too.'

'Does that mean you've been trying other ideas on them?' Janet inquired.

'Oh, quite a number. Some of them were a bit too complicated, though, and others not fully conclusive – besides, I hadn't got hold of the right end of the stick to begin with.'

'Are you quite sure you have now – because I'm not at all sure that I have?' Janet told him. He looked at her.

'I rather think you must have – and that Richard has, too. You don't need to be shy of admitting it.'

He helped himself to another sandwich, and looked inquiringly at me.

'I suppose,' I told him, 'that you are wanting me to say that your experiment has shown that what one of the boys knows, all the boys know, though the girls do not; and vice versa . All right then, that is what it appears to show – unless there is a catch somewhere.'

'My dear fellow -!'

'Well, you must admit that what it appears to show is a little more than anyone is likely to be able to swallow at one gulp.'

'I see. Yes. Of course, I myself arrived at it by stages,' he nodded.

'But,' I said, 'it is what we were intended to infer?'

'Of course, my dear fellow. Could it be clearer?' He took the linked nails from his pocket and dropped them on the table. 'Take these, and try for yourselves – or, better still, devise your own little test, and apply it. You'll find the inference – at least the preliminary inference – inescapable.'

'To appreciate takes longer than to grasp,' I said, 'but let's regard it as a hypothesis which I accept for the moment -'

'Wait a minute,' put in Janet. 'Mr Zellaby, are you claiming that if I were to tell anything to any one of the boys, all the rest would know it?'

'Certainly – provided, of course, that it was something simple enough for them to understand at this stage.'

Janet looked highly sceptical.

Zellaby sighed.

'The old trouble,' he said. 'Lynch Darwin, and you show the impossibility of evolution. But, as I said, you've only to apply your own tests.' He turned back to me. 'You were allowing the hypothesis...?' he suggested.

'Yes,' I agreed, 'and you said that was the preliminary inference. What is the next one?'

'I should have thought that just that one contained implications enough to capsize our social system.'

'Couldn't this be something like – I mean, a more developed form of the sort of sympathetic understanding that's sometimes found between twins?' Janet asked.

Zellaby shook his head.

'I think not – or else it has developed far enough to have acquired new features. Besides, we don't have here one single group en rapport ; we have two separate groups of rapport, apparently without cross-connexions. Now, if that is so, and we have seen that it is, a question that immediately presents itself is this: to what extent is any of these Children an individual? Each is physically an individual, as we can see – but is he so in other ways? If he is sharing consciousness with the rest of the group, instead of having to communicate with others with difficulty, as we do, can he be said to have a mind of his own, a separate personality as we understand it? I don't see that he can. It seems perfectly clear that if A, B, and C share a common consciousness, then what A expresses is also what B and C are thinking, and that way action taken by B in particular circumstances is exactly that which would be taken by A and C in those circumstances – subject only to modifications arising from physical differences between them, which may, in fact, be considerable in so far as conduct is very susceptible to conditions of the glands, and other factors in the physical individual.

'In other words if I ask a question to any of these boys I shall get exactly the same answer from whichever I choose to ask: if I ask him to perform an action, I shall get more or less the same result, but it is likely to be more successful with some who happen to have better physical coordination than others – though, in point of fact, with such close similarity as there is among the Children the variation will be small.

'But my point is this: it will not be an individual who answers me, or performs what I ask, it will be an item of the group. And in that alone lie plenty of further questions, and implications.'

Janet was frowning. 'I still don't quite -'

'Let me put it differently,' said Zellaby. 'What we have seemed to have here is fifty-eight little individual entities. But appearances have been deceptive, and we find that what we actually have are two entities only – a boy, and a girl: though the boy has thirty component parts each with the physical structure and appearance of individual boys; and the girl has twenty-eight component parts.'

There was a pause. Presently:

'I find that rather hard to take,' said Janet, with careful understatement.

'Yes, of course,' agreed Zellaby. 'So did I.'

'Look here,' I said, after a further pause. 'You are putting this forward as a serious proposition? I mean, it isn't just a dramatic manner of speaking?'

'I am stating a fact – having shown you the evidence first.'

I shook my head. 'All you showed us was that they are able to communicate in some way that I don't understand. To proceed from that to your theory of non-individualism is too much of a jump.'

'On that piece of evidence alone, perhaps so. But you must remember that, though this is the first you have seen, I have already conducted a number of tests, and not one of them has contradicted the idea of what I prefer to call collective-individualism. Moreover, it is not as strange, per se , as it appears at first sight. It is quite a well established evolutionary dodge for getting round a shortcoming. A number of forms that appear at first sight to be individuals turn out to be colonies – and many forms cannot survive at all unless they create colonies which operate as individuals. Admittedly the best examples are among the lower forms, but there's no reason why it should be confined to them. Many of the insects come pretty near it. The laws of physics prevent them increasing in size, so they contrive greater efficiency by acting as a group. We ourselves combine in groups consciously, instead of by instinct, for the same purposes. Very well, why shouldn't nature produce a more efficient version of the method by which we clumsily contrive to overcome our own weakness? Another case of nature copying art, perhaps?

'After all, we are up against the barriers to further development, and we have been for some time – unless we are to stagnate we must find some way of getting round them. G. B. S. proposed, you will remember, that the first step should be to extend the term of human life to three hundred years. That might be one way – and no doubt the extension of individual life would have a strong appeal to so determined an individualist – but there are others, and, though this is not perhaps a line of evolution one would expect to find among the higher animals, it is obviously not impracticable – though, of course, that is by no means to say that it is bound to be successful.'

A quick glance at Janet's expression showed me that she had dropped out. When she has decided that someone is talking nonsense she makes a quick decision to waste no more effort upon it, and pulls down an impervious mental curtain. I went on pondering, looking out of the window.

'I feel, I think,' I said presently, 'rather like a chameleon placed on a colour it can't quite manage. If I have followed you, you are saying that in each of these two groups the minds are in some way – well – pooled. Would that imply that the boys have, collectively, a normal brain-power multiplied by thirty, and the girls have it multiplied by twenty-eight?'

'I think not,' said Zellaby, quite seriously, 'and it certainly does not mean normal abilities to the power of thirty, thank heaven – that would be beyond any comprehension. It does appear to mean multiplication of intelligence in some degree, but at their present stage I don't see how that can be estimated – if it ever could be. That may portend tremendous things. But what seems to me of more immediate importance is the degree of will-power that has been produced – the potentialities of that strike me as very serious indeed. One has no idea how these compulsions are exerted, but I fancy that if it can be explored we might find that when a certain degree of will is, so as to speak, concentrated in one vessel a Hegelian change takes place – that is, that in more than a critical quantity it begins to display a new quality. In this case, a power of direct imposition.

'That, however, I frankly admit is speculative – and I can now foresee a devil of a lot to speculate about and investigate.'

'The whole thing sounds incredibly complicated to me – if you are right.'

'In detail, in the mechanics, yes,' Zellaby admitted, 'but in principle, I think, not nearly so much as would appear at first sight. After all, you would agree that the essential quality of man is the embodiment of a spirit?'

'Certainly,' I nodded.

'Well, a spirit is a living force, therefore it is not static, therefore it is something which must either evolve, or atrophy. Evolution of a spirit assumes the eventual development of a greater spirit. Suppose, then, that this greater spirit, this super spirit, is attempting to make its appearance on the scene. Where is it to dwell? The ordinary man is not constructed to contain it; the superman does not exist to house it. Might it not, then, for lack of a suitable single vehicle, inform a group – rather like an encyclopedia grown too large for one volume? I don't know. But if it were so, then two super-spirits, residing in two groups, is no less probable.'

He paused, looking out of the open windows, watching a bumble-bee fly from one lavender-head to another, then he added reflectively:

'I have wondered about these two groups quite a lot. I have even felt that there ought to be names for these two super-spirits. One would imagine there were plenty of names to choose from, and yet I find just two, out of them all, persistently invading my mind. Somehow, I keep on thinking of – Adam – and Eve.'

Two or three days later I had a letter telling me that the job I had been angling for in Canada could be mine if I sailed without delay. I did, leaving Janet to clear things up, and follow me.

When she arrived she had little more news of Midwich except on a rather one-sided feud which had broken out between the Freemans and Zellaby.

Zellaby, it appeared, had told Bernard Westcott of his findings. An inquiry for further particulars had reached the Freemans to whom the whole idea came as a novelty, and one which they instinctively opposed. They at once instituted tests of their own, and were seen to be growing gloomier as they proceeded.

'But at least I imagine they'll stop short of Adam and Eve,' she added. 'Really, old Zellaby! The thing I shall never cease to be thankful for was that we happened to go to London when we did. Just fancy if I'd become the mother of a thirty-first part of an Adam, or a twenty-ninth part of an Eve. It's been bad enough as it is, and thank goodness we're out of it. I've had enough of Midwich, and I don't care if I never hear of the place again.'