by John Wyndham
Zellaby and Bernard exchanged hopeless glances. Bernard decided to try once more.
‘These Children, Sir John, have strong willpower – quite remarkably strong – strong enough, when they exert it, to be considered a form of duress. Now, the law has not, so far, encountered this particular form of duress; consequently, having no knowledge of it, it cannot recognize it. Since, therefore, the form of duress has no legal existence, the Children cannot in law be said to be capable of exerting it. Therefore, in the eyes of the law, the crimes attributed by popular opinion to its exercise must (a) never have taken place at all, or (b) be attributable to other persons, or means. There cannot, within the knowledge of the law, be any connexion between the Children and the crimes.’
‘Except that they did ’em, or so you all tell me,’ said Sir John.
‘As far as the law is concerned they’ve done nothing at all. And, what is more, if you could find a formula to charge them under you’d not get anywhere. They would bring this duress to bear on your officers. You can neither arrest them, nor hold them, if you try to.’
‘We can leave those finer points to the lawyer fellows – that’s their job. All we need is enough evidence to justify a warrant,’ the Chief Constable assured him.
Zellaby gazed with innocent thoughtfulness at a corner of the ceiling. Bernard had the withdrawn air of a man who might be counting ten, not too quickly. I found myself troubled by a slight cough.
‘This schoolmaster fellow at The Grange – what’s his name – Torrance?’ the Chief Constable went on. ‘Director of the place. He must, hold the official responsibility for these children, if anyone does. Saw the chap last night. Struck me as evasive. Everybody round here’s evasive, of course.’ He studiedly met no eye. ‘But he definitely wasn’t helpful.’
‘Dr Torrance is an eminent psychiatrist, rather than a schoolmaster,’ Bernard explained. ‘I think he may be in considerable doubt as to his right course in the matter until he can take advice.’
‘Psychiatrist?’ repeated Sir John, suspiciously. ‘I thought you said this is not a place for backward children?’
‘It isn’t,’ Bernard repeated, patiently.
‘Don’t see what he has to be doubtful about. Nothing doubtful about the truth, is there? That’s all you’ve got to tell when the police make inquiries: if you don’t, you’re in for trouble – and so you ought to be.’
‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ Bernard responded. ‘He may not have felt himself at liberty to disclose some aspects of his work. I think that if you will let me come along with you and see him again he might be more willing to talk – and much better able to explain the situation than I am.’
He got to his feet as he finished. The rest of us rose, too. The Chief Constable’s leave-taking was gruff. There was a barely perceptible flicker to Bernard’s right eye as he said au revoir to the rest of us, and escorted him out of the room.
Zellaby collapsed into an easy chair, and sighed deeply. He searched absent-mindedly for his cigarette case.
‘I’ve not met Dr Torrance,’ I said, ‘but I already feel quite sorry for him.’
‘Unnecessary,’ said Zellaby. ‘Colonel Westcott’s discretion has been irritating, but passive. Torrance’s has always had an aggressive quality. If he has now got to make the situation lucid enough for Sir John, it’s simply poetic justice.
‘But what interests me more at the moment is your Colonel Westcott’s attitude. The barrier there is down quite a bit. If he could have got as far as a mutually understandable vocabulary with Sir John, I do believe he might have told us all something. I wonder why ? This seems to me just the kind of situation that he has been trying so hard to avoid all along. The Midwich bag is now very nearly too small for the cat. Why, then, doesn’t he appear more concerned?’ He lapsed into a reverie, tattooing gently on the chair-arm.
Presently Angela reappeared. Zellaby became aware of her from the far-off. It took him a moment or two to reestablish himself in the here and now, and observe her expression.
‘What’s the matter, my dear?’ he inquired, and added in recollection: ‘I thought you were bound for Trayne hospital, with a cornucopia.’
‘I started,’ she said. ‘Now I’ve come back. It seems that we’re not allowed to leave the village.’
Zellaby sat up.
‘That’s absurd. The old fool can’t put the whole place under arrest. As a J.P. –’ he began indignantly.
‘It’s not Sir John. It’s the Children. They’re picketing all the roads, and won’t let us out.’
‘Are they indeed!’ exclaimed Zellaby. ‘That’s extremely interesting. I wonder if –’
‘Interesting be damned,’ said his wife. ‘It’s very unpleasant, and quite outrageous. It’s also rather alarming,’ she added, ‘because one can’t see just what’s behind it.’
Zellaby inquired how it was being done. She explained, concluding:
‘And it’s only us, you see – people who live in the village, I mean. They’re letting other people come and go as they like.’
‘But no violence?’ asked Zellaby, with a touch of anxiety.
‘No. You simply have to stop. Several people have appealed to the police, and they’ve looked into it. Hopeless, of course. The Children didn’t stop them, or bother them, so naturally they can’t understand what the fuss is about. The only result is that those who had merely heard that Midwich is half-witted are now sure of it.’
‘They must have some reason for it – the Children, I mean,’ said Zellaby.
Angela eyed him resentfully.
‘I daresay, and possibly it will be of great sociological interest, but that isn’t the point at the moment. What I want to know is what is to be done about it?’
‘My dear,’ said Zellaby soothingly. ‘One appreciates your feelings, but we’ve known for some time now that if it should suit the Children to interfere with us we have no way of stopping them. Well, now, for some reason that I confess I do not perceive, it evidently does suit them.’
‘But, Gordon, there are these people seriously hurt, in Trayne hospital. Their relatives want to visit them.’
‘My dear, I don’t see that there is anything you can do but find one of them, and put it to him on humane grounds. They might consider that, but it really depends on what their reason for doing it is, don’t you think?’
Angela regarded her husband with a frown of dissatisfaction. She started to reply, thought better of it, and took herself off with an air of reproof. Zellaby shook his head as the door closed.
‘Man’s arrogance is boastful,’ he observed, ‘woman’s is something in the fibre. We do occasionally contemplate the once lordly dinosaurs, and wonder when, and how, our little day will reach its end. But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever. She doesn’t believe in the dinosaurs: she doesn’t really believe the world ever existed until she was upon it. Men may build and destroy and play with all their toys; they are uncomfortable nuisances, ephemeral conveniences, mere scamperers-about, while woman, in mystical umbilical connexion with the great tree of life itself, knows that she is indispensable. One wonders whether the female dinosaur in her day was blessed with the same comfortable certainty.’
He paused, in such obvious need of prompting that I said: ‘And the relevance to the present?’
‘Is that while man finds the thought of his supersession abominable, she simply finds it unthinkable. And since she cannot think it, she must regard the hypothesis as frivolous.’
It seemed to be my service again.
‘If you are implying that we see something which Mrs Zellaby fails to see, I’m afraid I –’
‘But, my dear fellow, if one is not blinded by a sense of indispensability, one must take it that we, like the other lords of creation before us, will one day be replaced. Th
ere are two ways in which it can happen: either through ourselves, by our self-destruction, or by the incursion of some species which we lack the equipment to subdue. Well, here we are now, face to face with a superior will and mind. And what are we able to bring against it?’
‘That,’ I told him, ‘sounds defeatist. If, as I assume, you do mean it quite seriously, isn’t it rather a large conclusion from rather a small instance?’
‘Very much what my wife said to me when the instance was considerably smaller, and younger,’ Zellaby admitted. ‘She also went on to scout the proposition that such a remarkable thing could happen here, in a prosaic English village. In vain did I try to convince her that it would be no less remarkable wherever it should happen. She felt that it was decidedly a thing that would be less remarkable in more exotic places – a Balinese village, perhaps, or a Mexican pueblo; that it was essentially one of those sorts of things that happens to other people. Unfortunately, however, the instance has developed here – and with melancholy logic.’
‘It isn’t the locality that troubles me,’ I said. ‘It’s your assumptions. More particularly, your taking it for granted that the Children can do what they like, and there’s no way of stopping them.’
‘It would be foolish to be quite so didactic as that. It may be possible, but it will not be easy. Physically we are poor weak creatures compared with many animals, but we overcome them because we have better brains. The only thing that can beat us is something with a still better brain. That has scarcely seemed a threat: for one thing, its occurrence appeared to be improbable, and, for another, it seemed even more improbable that we should allow it to survive to become a menace.
‘Yet here it is – another little gimmick out of Pandora’s infinite evolutionary box: the contesserate mind – two mosaics, one of thirty, the other of twenty-eight, tiles. What can we, with our separate brains only in clumsily fumbling touch with one another, expect to do against thirty brains working almost as one?’
I protested that, even so, the Children could scarcely have accumulated enough knowledge in a mere nine years to oppose successfully the whole mass of human knowledge, but Zellaby shook his head.
‘The government has for reasons of its own provided them with some excellent teachers, so that the sum of their knowledge should be considerable – indeed, I know it is, for I lecture to them myself sometimes, you know – that has importance, but it is not the source of the threat. One is not unaware that Francis Bacon wrote: nam et ipsa scientia potestas est – knowledge itself is power – and one must regret that so eminent a scholar should, at times, talk through his hat. The encyclopedia is crammed full of knowledge, and can do nothing with it; we all know of people who have amazing memories for facts, with no ability to use them; a computing-engine can roll out knowledge by the ream in multiplicate; but none of this knowledge is of the least use until it is informed by understanding. Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.
‘Now, what frightens me is the thought of the power producible by an understanding working on even a small quantity of knowledge-fuel when it has an extraction-efficiency thirty times that of our own. What it may produce when the Children are mature I cannot begin to imagine.’
I frowned. As always, I was a little unsure of Zellaby.
‘You are quite seriously maintaining that we have no means of preventing this group of fifty-eight Children from taking what course they choose?’ I insisted.
‘I am.’ He nodded. ‘What do you suggest we could do? You know what happened to that crowd last night; they intended to attack the Children – instead, they were induced to fight one another. Send police, and they would do the same. Send soldiers against them, and they would be induced to shoot one another.’
‘Possibly,’ I conceded. ‘But there must be other ways of tackling them. From what you’ve told me, nobody knows nearly enough about them. They appear to have detached themselves emotionally from their host-mothers quite early – if, indeed, they ever had the emotions we normally expect. Most of them chose to adopt progressive segregation as soon as it was offered. As a result the village knows extremely little of them. In quite a short time most people seem scarcely to have thought of them as individuals. They found them difficult to tell apart, got into the habit of regarding them collectively so that they have tended to become two-dimensional figures with only a limited kind of reality.’
Zellaby looked appreciative of the point.
‘You’re perfectly right, my dear fellow. There is a lack of normal contacts and sympathies. But that is not entirely our shortcoming. I have myself kept as close to them as I can, but I am still at a distance. In spite of all my efforts I still find them, as you excellently put it, two-dimensional. And it is strongly my impression that the people at The Grange have done no better.’
‘Then the question remains,’ I said, ‘how do we get more data?’
We contemplated that for a while until Zellaby emerged from his reverie to say:
‘Has it occurred to you to wonder what your own status here is, my dear fellow? If you were thinking of leaving today it might be as well to find out whether the Children regard you as one of us, or not?’
That was an aspect that had not occurred to me, and I found it a little startling. I decided to find out.
Bernard had, it appeared, gone off in the Chief Constable’s car, so I borrowed his for the test.
I found the answer a little way along the Oppley road. A very odd sensation. My hand and foot were guided to bring the car to a halt by no volition of my own. One of the girl Children was sitting by the roadside, nibbling at a stalk of grass, and looking at me without expression. I tried to put the gear in again. My hand wouldn’t do it. Nor could I bring my foot on the clutch pedal. I looked at the girl, and told her that I did not live in Midwich, and wanted to get home. She simply shook her head. I tried the gear lever again, and found that the only way I could move it was into reverse.
‘H’m,’ said Zellaby, on my return. ‘So you are an honorary villager, are you ? I rather thought you might be. Just remind me to tell Angela to let the cook know, there’s a good fellow.’
∗
At the same time that Zellaby and I were talking at Kyle Manor, more talk, similar in matter but different in manner, was going on at The Grange. Dr Torrance, feeling some sanction in the presence of Colonel Westcott, had endeavoured to answer the Chief Constable’s questions more explicitly than before. A stage had been reached, however, when lack of coordination between the parties could no longer be disguised, and a noticeably off-beat query caused the doctor to say, a little forlornly:
‘I am afraid I cannot have made the situation quite clear to you, Sir John.’
The Chief Constable grunted impatiently.
‘Everybody keeps on telling me that, and I’m not denying it; nobody round here seems to be capable of making anything clear. Everybody keeps on telling me, too – and without producing a scrap of evidence that I can understand – that these infernal children are in some way responsible for last night’s affair – even you, who I am given to understand are in charge of them. I agree that I do not understand a situation in which young children are allowed to get so thoroughly out of hand that they can cause a breach of the peace amounting to a riot. I don’t see why I should be expected to understand it. It is as a Constable that I wish to see one of the ringleaders, and find out what he has to say about it.’
‘But, Sir John, I have already explained to you that there are no ringleaders….’
‘I know – I know. I heard you. Everyone is equal here, and all that – all very well perhaps in theory, but you know as well as I do that in every group there are fellers that stand out, and that those are the chaps you’ve got to get hold of. Manage them, and you can manage the rest.’ He paused expectantly.
Dr Torrance exchanged a helpless look with Colonel Westcott. Bernard gave a slight shrug, and the faintest of nods. Dr Torrance’s look of unhappin
ess increased. He said uneasily:
‘Very well, Sir John, since you make it virtually a police order I have no alternative, but I must ask you to watch your words carefully. The Children are very – er – sensitive.’
His choice of the final word was unfortunate. In his own vocabulary it had a somewhat technical meaning; in the Chief Constable’s it was a word used by doting mothers about spoilt sons, and did nothing to make him feel more sympathetically disposed towards the Children. He made a vowelless sound of disapproval as Dr Torrance got up and left the room. Bernard half opened his mouth to reinforce the Doctor’s warning, and then decided that it would only increase the Chief Constable’s irritation, thus doing more harm than good. The cussedness of commonsense, Bernard reflected, was that, invaluable as it might be in the right soils, it could turn into a pestiferous kind of bind-weed in others. So the two waited in silence until the Doctor presently returned, bringing one of the boy-Children with him.
‘This is Eric,’ he said, by way of introduction. To the boy he added, ‘Sir John Tenby wishes to ask you some questions. It is his duty as Chief Constable, you see, to make a report on the trouble last night.’
The boy nodded, and turned to look at Sir John. Dr Torrance resumed his seat at his desk, and watched the two of them intently, and uneasily.
The boy’s regard was steady, careful, but quite neutral; it gave no trace of feeling. Sir John met it with equal steadiness. A healthy-looking boy, he thought. A bit thin – well, not exactly thin in the sense of being scraggy, slight would be a better word. It was difficult to make much of a judgement from the features; the face was good-looking, though without weakness which often accompanies male good looks; on the other hand, it did not show strength – the mouth, indeed, was a little small, though not petulant. There was not a lot to be learnt from the face as a whole. The eyes, however, were even more remarkable than he had been led to expect. He had been told of the curious golden colour of the irises, but no one had succeeded in conveying to him their striking lambency, their strange effect of being softly lit from within. For a moment it disquieted him, then he took himself in hand; reminded himself that he had some kind of freak to deal with; a boy only nine years old, yet looking every bit of sixteen, brought up, moreover, on some of these fiddle-faddling theories of self-expression, non-inhibition, and so on. He decided to treat the boy as if he were the age he looked, and constrained himself into that man-to-boy attitude that is represented by its practitioners as man-to-man.