John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos

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. There 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.