The Midwich Cuckoos

by John Wyndham

  ‘Serious business last night,’ he observed. ‘Our job to clear it up and find out what really happened – who was responsible for the trouble, and so forth. People keep on telling me that you and the others here were – now, what do you say to that?’

  ‘No,’ said the boy promptly.

  The Chief Constable nodded. One would scarcely expect an immediate admission, in any case.

  ‘What happened, exactly?’ he asked.

  ‘The village people came here to burn The Grange down,’ said the boy.

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘It was what they said, and there was no other reason to bring them here at that time,’ said the boy.

  ‘All right, we’ll not go into the whys and wherefores just now. Let’s take it from there. You say some of them came intending to burn the place. Then I suppose others came to stop them doing it, and the fighting started?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the boy, but less definitely.

  ‘Then, in point of fact, you and your friends had nothing to do with it. You were just spectators?’

  ‘No,’ said the boy. ‘We had to defend ourselves. It was necessary, or they would have burnt the house.’

  ‘You mean you called out to some of them to stop the rest, something like that?’

  ‘No,’ the boy told him patiently. ‘We made them fight one another. We could simply have sent them away, but if we had they would very likely have come back some other time. Now they will not, they understand it is better for them to leave us alone.’

  The Chief Constable paused, a little nonplussed.

  ‘You say you “made” them fight one another. How did you do that?’

  ‘It is too difficult to explain. I don’t think you could understand,’ said the boy, judicially.

  Sir John pinked a little.

  ‘Nevertheless, I’d like to hear,’ he said, with an air of generous restraint that was wasted.

  ‘It wouldn’t be any use,’ the boy told him. He spoke simply, and without innuendo, as one stating a fact.

  The Chief Constable’s face became a deeper pink. Dr Torrance put in hurriedly:

  ‘This is an extremely abstruse matter, Sir John, and one which all of us here have been trying to understand, with very little headway, for some years now. One can really get little nearer to it than to say that the Children “willed” the people in the crowd to attack one another.’

  Sir John looked at him and then at the boy. He muttered, but held himself in check. Presently, after two or three deep breaths, he spoke to the boy again, but now with his tone a little ruffled.

  ‘However it was done – and we’ll have to go into that later – you are admitting that you were responsible for what happened?’

  ‘We are responsible for defending ourselves,’ the boy said.

  ‘To the extent of four lives and thirteen serious injuries – when you could, you say, have simply sent them away.’

  ‘They wanted to kill us,’ the boy told him, indifferently.

  The Chief Constable looked lengthily at him.

  ‘I don’t understand how you can have done it, but I take your word for it that you did, for the present; also your word that it was unnecessary.’

  ‘They would have come again. It would have been necessary then,’ replied the boy.

  ‘You can’t be sure of that. Your whole attitude is monstrous. Don’t you feel the least compunction for these unfortunate people?’

  ‘No,’ the boy told him. ‘Why should we? Yesterday afternoon one of them shot one of us. Now we must protect ourselves.’

  ‘But not by private vengeance. The law is for your protection, and for everyone’s –’

  ‘The law did not protect Wilfred from being shot; it would not have protected us last night. The law punishes the criminal after he has been successful: it is no use to us, we intend to stay alive.’

  ‘But you don’t mind being responsible – so you tell me – for the deaths of other people.’

  ‘Do we have to go round in circles?’ asked the boy. ‘I have answered your questions because we thought it better that you should understand the situation. As you apparently have, not grasped it, I will put it more plainly. It is that if there is any attempt to interfere with us or molest us, by anybody, we shall defend ourselves. We have shown that we can, and we hope that that will be warning enough to prevent further trouble.’

  Sir John stared at the boy speechlessly while his knuckles whitened and his face empurpled. He half rose from his chair as if he meant to attack the boy, and then sank back, thinking better of it. Some seconds passed before he could trust himself to speak. Presently, in a half-choked voice he addressed the boy who was watching him with a kind of critically detached interest.

  ‘You damned young blackguard! You insufferable little prig! How dare you speak to me like that! Do you understand that I represent the police force of this county ? If you don’t, it’s time you learnt it, and I’ll see that you do, b’God. Talking to your elders like that, you swollen-headed little upstart! So you’re not to be “molested”; you’ll defend yourselves, will you! Where do you think you are ? You’ve got a lot to learn, m’lad, a whole –’

  He broke off suddenly, and sat staring at the boy.

  Dr Torrance leant forward over his desk.

  ‘Eric –’ he began in protest, but made no move to interfere.

  Bernard Westcott remained carefully still in his chair, watching.

  The Chief Constable’s mouth went slack, his jaws fell a little, his eyes widened, and seemed to go on widening. His hair rose slightly. Sweat burst out on his forehead, at his temples, and came trickling down his face. Inarticulate gobblings came from his mouth. Tears ran down the sides of his nose. He began to tremble, but seemed unable to move. Then, after long rigid seconds, he did move. He lifted hands that fluttered, and fumbled them to his face. Behind them, he gave queer thin screams. He slid out of the chair to his knees on the floor, and fell forward. He lay there grovelling, and trembling, making high whinnying sounds as he clawed at the carpet, trying to dig himself into it. Suddenly he vomited.

  The boy looked up. To Dr Torrance he said, as if answering a question:

  ‘He is not hurt. He wanted to frighten us, so we have shown him what it means to be frightened. He’ll understand better now. He will be all right when his glands are in balance again.’

  Then he turned away and went out of the room, leaving the two men looking at one another.

  Bernard pulled out a handkerchief, and dabbed at the sweat that stood in drops on his own forehead. Dr Torrance sat motionless, his face a sickly grey. They turned to look at the Chief Constable. Sir John was lying slackly now, seemingly unconscious, drawing long, greedy breaths, shaken occasionally by a violent tremor.

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Bernard. He looked at Torrance again. ‘And you have been here three years!’

  ‘There’s never been anything remotely like this,’ the Doctor said. ‘We’ve suspected many possibilities, but there’s never been any enmity – and, after this, thank God for that!’

  ‘Yes, you could well do worse than that,’ Bernard told him. He looked at Sir John again.

  ‘This chap ought to be got away before he pulls round. We’d be better out of the way, too – it’s the sort of situation where a man can’t forgive witnesses. Send in a couple of his men to collect him. Tell them he’s had an attack of some kind.’

  Five minutes later they stood on the steps and watched the Chief Constable driven off, still only semi-conscious.

  ‘ “All right when his glands are in balance”!’ murmured Bernard. ‘They seem better at physiology than at psychology. They’ve broken that man, for the rest of his life.’

  CHAPTER 19

  Impasse

  AFTER a couple of strong whiskies Bernard began to lose some of the shaken look with which he had returned to Kyle Manor. When he had given us an account of the Chief Constable’s disastrous interview at The Grange, he went on:

  ‘
You know, one of the few childlike things about the Children, it strikes me, is their inability to judge their own strength. Except, perhaps for the corralling of the village, everything they have done has been overdone. What might be excusable in intent they contrive to make unforgivable in practice. They wanted to scare Sir John in order to convince him that it would be unwise to interfere with them; but they did not do simply what was necessary for that; they went so much farther that they brought the poor man to a state of grovelling fear near the brink of imbecility. They induced a degree of personal degradation that was sickening, and utterly unpardonable.’

  Zellaby asked, in his mild, reasonable tone:

  ‘Are we not perhaps looking at this from too narrow an angle? You, Colonel, say “unpardonable”, which assumes that they expect to be pardoned. But why should they? Do we concern ourselves whether jackals or wolves will pardon us for shooting them ? We do not. We are concerned only to make them innocuous.

  ‘In point of fact our ascendancy has been so complete that we are rarely called upon to kill wolves nowadays – in fact, most of us have quite forgotten what it means to have to fight in a personal way against another species. But, when the need arises we have no compunction in fully supporting those who slay the threat whether it is from wolves, insects, bacteria, or filterable viruses; we give no quarter, and certainly expect no pardon.

  ‘The situation vis-à-vis the Children would seem to be that we have not grasped that they represent a danger to our species, while they are in no doubt that we are a danger to theirs. And they intend to survive. We might do well to remind ourselves what that intention implies. We can watch it any day in a garden; it is a fight that goes perpetually, bitterly, lawlessly, without trace of mercy or compassion….’

  His manner was quiet, but there was no doubt that his intention was pointed; and yet, somehow, as so often with Zellaby, the gap between theory and practical circumstances seemed too inadequately bridged to carry conviction.

  Presently Bernard said:

  ‘Surely this is quite a change of front by the Children. They’ve exerted persuasion and pressure from time to time, but, apart from a few early incidents, almost no violence. Now we have this outbreak. Can you point to the start of it, or has it been working up?’

  ‘Decidedly,’ said Zellaby. ‘There was no sign whatever of anything in this category before the matter of Jimmy Pawle and his car.’

  ‘And that was – let me see – last Wednesday, the third of July. I wonder –’ he was beginning, but broke off as the gong called us to luncheon.

  ∗

  ‘My experience, hitherto, of interplanetary invasion,’ said Zellaby, as he concocted his own particular taste in salad-dressing, ‘has been vicarious – indeed, one might even say hypothetically vicarious, or do I mean vicariously hypothetical – ?’ He pondered that a moment, and resumed: ‘At any rate it has been quite extensive. Yet, oddly enough, I cannot recall a single account of one that is of the least help in our present dilemma. They were, almost without exception, unpleasant; but, also, they were almost always forthright, rather than insidious.

  ‘Take H. G. Wells’ Martians, for instance. As the original exponents of the death-ray they were formidable, but their behaviour was quite conventional: they simply conducted a straightforward campaign with this weapon which outclassed anything that could be brought against it. But at least we could try to fight back, whereas in this case –’

  ‘Not cayenne, dear,’ said his wife.

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Not cayenne. Hiccups,’ Angela reminded him.

  ‘So it does. Where is the sugar?’

  ‘By your left hand, dear.’

  ‘Oh, yes… where was I?’

  ‘With H. G.’s Martians,’ I told him.

  ‘Of course. Well, there you have the prototype of innumerable invasions. A super-weapon which man fights valiantly with his own puny armoury until he is saved by one of several possible kinds of bell. Naturally, in America it is all rather bigger and better. Something descends, and something comes out of it. Within ten minutes, owing no doubt to the excellent communications in that country, there is a coast-to-coast panic, and all highways out of all cities are crammed, in all lanes, by the fleeing populace – except in Washington. There, by contrast, enormous crowds stretching as far as the eye can reach, stand grave and silent, white-faced but trusting, with their eyes upon the White House, while somewhere in the Catskills a hitherto ignored professor and his daughter, with their rugged young assistant strive like demented midwives to assist the birth of the dea ex laboritoria which will save the world at the last moment, minus one.

  ‘Over here, one feels, the report of such an invasion would be received in at least some quarters with a tinge of preliminary scepticism, but we must allow the Americans to know their own people best.

  ‘Yet, overall, what do we have? Just another war. The motivations are simplified, the armaments complicated, but the pattern is the same, and, as a result, not one of the prognostications, speculations, or extrapolations turns out to be of the least use to us when the thing actually happens. It really does seem a pity when one thinks of all the cerebration the prognosticators have spent on it, doesn’t it?’

  He busied himself with eating his salad.

  ‘It is still one of my problems to know when you are to be taken literally, and when metaphorically,’ I told him.

  ‘This time you can take him literally, with assurance,’ Bernard put in.

  Zellaby cocked a sideways look at him.

  ‘Just like that? Not even reflex opposition?’ he inquired. ‘Tell me, Colonel, how long have you accepted this invasion as a fact?’

  ‘For about eight years,’ Bernard told him. ‘And you?’

  ‘About the same time – perhaps a little before. I did not like it, I do not like it, I am probably going to like it even less. But I had to accept it. The old Holmes axiom, you know: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I had not known, however, that that was recognized in official circles. What did you decide to do about it?’

  ‘Well, we did our best to preserve their isolation here, and to see to their education.’

  ‘And a fine, helpful thing that turns out to have been, if I may say so. Why?’

  ‘Just a minute,’ I put in, ‘I’m in between the literal and figurative again. You are both of you seriously accepting as a fact that these Children are – a kind of invaders ? That they do originate somewhere outside the Earth?’

  ‘See?’ said Zellaby. ‘No coast-to-coast panic. Just scepticism. I told you.’

  ‘We are,’ Bernard told me. ‘It is the only hypothesis that my department has not been forced to abandon – though, of course, there are some who still won’t accept it, even though we had the help of a little more evidence than Mr Zellaby did.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Zellaby, brought to sudden attention, with a forkful of greenstuff in mid-air. ‘Are we getting closer to the mysterious M.I. interest in us?’

  ‘There’s no longer any reason now, I think, why it should not have a restricted circulation,’ Bernard admitted. ‘I know that in the early stages you did quite a little inquiring into our interest on your own account, Zellaby, but I don’t believe you ever discovered the clue.’

  ‘Which was?’ inquired Zellaby.

  ‘Simply that Midwich was not the only, nor even the first place to have a Dayout. Also, that during the three weeks around that time there was a marked rise in the radar detection of unidentified flying objects.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Zellaby. ‘Oh, vanity, vanity…! There are other groups of Children beside ours, then ? Where?’

  But Bernard was not to be hurried, he continued deliberately:

  ‘One Dayout took place at a small township in the Northern Territory of Australia. Something apparently went badly wrong there. There were thirty-three pregnancies, but for some reason the Children all died; most of them a few hours after b
irth, the eldest at a week old.

  ‘There was another Dayout at an Eskimo settlement on Victoria Island, north of Canada. The inhabitants are cagey about what happened there, but it is believed that they were so outraged, or perhaps alarmed, at the arrival of babies so unlike their own kind that they exposed them almost at once. At any rate, none survived. And that, by the way, taken in conjunction with the time of the Midwich babies’ return here, suggests that the power of duress does not develop until they are a week or two old, and that they may be truly individuals until then. Still another Dayout –’

  Zellaby held up his hand.

  ‘Let me guess. There was one behind the Iron Curtain.’

  ‘There were two known ones behind the Curtain,’ Bernard corrected him. ‘One of them was in the Irkutsk region, near the border of Outer Mongolia – a very grim affair. It was assumed that the women had been lying with devils, and they perished, as well as the Children. The other was right away to the east, a place called Gizhinsk, in the mountains northeast of Okhotsk. There may have been others that we didn’t hear of. It’s pretty certain it happened in some places in South America and in Africa, too, but it’s difficult to check. The inhabitants tend to be secretive. It’s even possible that an isolated village would miss a day and not know it – in which case the babies would be even more of a puzzle. In most of the instances we do know of, the babies were regarded as freaks, and were killed, but we suspect that in some they may have been hidden away.’