John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos

'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.'