John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos

'I can't imagine,' he admitted. 'Looks as if it might be some unusual kind of building – only it can't be. I was round by the Abbey ruins myself less than a week ago, and there was no sign of anything there then; besides, that's British Heritage Association property. They don't build, they just prop things up.'

One of the others looked from the photograph to the map, and back again.

'Whatever it is, it's in just about the mathematical centre of the trouble,' he pointed out. 'If it wasn't there a few days ago, it must be something that's landed there.'

'Unless it could be a rick, with a very bleached cover,' someone suggested.

The Chief Constable snorted. 'Look at the scale, man – and the shape. It'd have to be the size of a dozen ricks, at least.'

'Then what the devil is it?' inquired the Major.

One after another we studied it through the magnifier.

'You couldn't get a lower altitude picture?' suggested the Major.

'Trying that was how we lost the aircraft,' the Group Captain told him curtly.

'How far up does the whatsit – this affected area – extend?' someone asked.

The Group Captain shrugged. 'You could find that out by flying into it,' he said. 'This,' he added, tapping the photograph, 'was taken at ten thousand. The crew noticed no effect there.'

Colonel Latcher cleared his throat.

'Two of my officers suggest that the area may be hemispherical in form,' he remarked.

'So it may,' agreed the Group Captain, 'or it may be rhomboidal, or dodecahedral.'

'I gather,' said the Colonel mildly, 'that they observed birds flying into it; getting a fix on them at the moment they became affected. They claim to have established that the edge of the zone does not extend vertically like a wall – that it definitely is not a cylinder, in fact. The sides contract slightly. From that they argue that it must be either domed, or conical. They say their evidence favours a hemisphere, but they have had to work on too small a segment of too large an arc to be certain.'

'Well, that's the first contribution we've had for some time,' acknowledged the Group Captain. He pondered, 'If they're right about a hemisphere, that should give it a ceiling of about five thousand over the centre. I suppose they didn't have any helpful ideas on how we establish that without losing another aircraft?'

'As a matter of fact,' Colonel Latcher said, diffidently, 'one of them did. He suggested that perhaps a helicopter dangling a canary in a cage on a few hundred feet of line and slowly reducing height – Well, I know it sounds a bit -'

'No,' said the Group Captain. 'It's an idea. Sounds like the same fellow who got the perimeter taped.'

'It is.' Colonel Latcher nodded.

'Quite a line of his own in ornithological warfare,' commented the Group Captain. 'I think perhaps we can improve on the canary, but we're grateful for the idea. A bit too late for it today. I'll lay it on for early tomorrow, with pictures from the lowest safe altitude while there's a good cross-light.'

The Intelligence Major emerged from silence.

'Bombs, I think,' he said reflectively. 'Fragmentation, perhaps.'

'Bombs?' asked the Group Captain, with raised brows.

'Wouldn't do any harm to have some handy. Never know what these Ivans are up to. Might be a good idea to have a wham at it, anyway. Stop it getting away. Knock it out so that we can have a proper look at it.'

'Bit drastic at this stage,' suggested the Chief Constable. 'I mean, wouldn't it be better to take it intact, if possible.'

'Probably,' agreed the Major, 'but meanwhile we are just allowing it to go on doing whatever it came to do, while it holds us off with this whatever-it-is.'

'I don't see what it could have come to do in Midwich,' another officer put in, 'therefore I imagine that it force-landed, and is using this screen to prevent interference while it makes repairs.'

'There's The Grange...' someone said tentatively.

'In either case, the sooner we get authority to disable it further, the better,' said the Major. 'It had no business over our territory, anyway. Real point is, of course, that it mustn't get away. Much too interesting. Apart from the thing itself, that screen effect could be very useful indeed. I shall recommend taking any action necessary to secure it; intact if possible; but damaged if necessary.'

There was considerable discussion, but it came to little since almost everyone present seemed to hold no more than a watching and reporting brief. The only decisions I can recall were that parachute flares would be dropped every hour for observation purposes, and that the helicopter would attempt to get more informative photographs in the morning; beyond that nothing definite had been achieved when the conference broke up.

I did not see why I had been taken along there at all – or, for the matter of that, why Bernard had been there, for he had made not a single contribution to the conference. As we drove back I asked:

'Is it out of order for me to inquire where you come into this?'

'Not altogether. I have a professional interest.'

'The Grange?' I suggested.

'Yes. The Grange comes within my scope, and naturally anything untoward in its neighbourhood interests us. This, one might call very untoward, don't you think?'

'Us' I had already gathered from his self-introduction before the conference, could be either Military Intelligence in general, or his particular department of it.

'I thought,' I said, 'that the Special Branch looked after that kind of thing.'

'There are various angles,' he said, vaguely, and changed the subject.

We managed to get him a room at The Eagle, and the three of us dined together. I had hoped that after dinner he might make good his promise to 'explain later', but though we talked of a number of things, including Midwich, he was clearly avoiding any more mention of his professional interest in it. But for all that it was a good evening that left me wondering how one can be so careless as to let some people drift out of one's life.

Twice in the course of the evening I rang up the Trayne police to inquire whether there had been any change in the Midwich situation, and both times they reported that it was quite unaltered. After the second, we decided it was no good waiting up, and after a final round we retired.

'A nice man,' said Janet, as our door closed. 'I was afraid it might be old-warriors-together which is so boring for wives, but he didn't let it be a bit like that. Why did he take you along this afternoon?'

'That's what's puzzling me,' I confessed. 'He seemed to have second thoughts and become more reserved altogether once we actually got close to it.'

'It really is very queer,' Janet said, as if the whole thing had just struck her afresh. 'Didn't he have anything at all to say about what it is?'

'Neither he, nor any of the rest of them,' I assured her. 'About the one thing they've learnt is what we could tell them – that you don't know when it hits you, and there's no sign afterwards that it did.'

'And that at least is encouraging. Let's hope that no one in the village comes to any more harm than we did,' she said.

While we were still sleeping, on the morning of the 28th, a met. officer gave it as his opinion that ground mist in Midwich would clear early, and a crew of two boarded a helicopter. A wire cage containing a pair of lively but perplexed ferrets was handed in after them. Presently the machine took off, and whimmered noisily upwards.

'They reckon,' remarked the pilot, 'that six thousand will be dead safe, so we'll try at seven thou. for luck. If that's okay, we'll bring her down slowly.'

The observer settled his gear, and occupied himself with teasing the ferrets until the pilot told him: