John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos

'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.'

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– -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.