John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos

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?'