by John Wyndham
‘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 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 corner 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 readjust 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 week-end 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 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.