'I say, sir, this is a bit of a facer, isn't it?'

'I'm afraid it is,' Zellaby agreed. 'The best consolation I can offer is that we find the shock wears off. The most painful part is the opening assault on one's prejudices – I speak for our sex, of course. For the women that is, unfortunately, only the first hurdle.'

Alan shook his head.

'This is going to be a terrible blow for Ferrelyn, I'm afraid – as it must have been to Angela,' he added, a little hurriedly. 'Of course, one can't expect her, Ferrelyn, I mean, to take in all the implications at once. A thing like this needs a bit of absorbing...'

'My dear fellow,' said Zellaby, 'as Ferrelyn's husband you have the right to think all sorts of things about her, but one of the things you must not do, for your own peace of mind, is to underestimate her. Ferrelyn, I assure you, was away ahead of you. I doubt whether she's missed a trick. She was certainly far enough ahead to move in with a lightweight remark because she knew that if she seemed worried, you would worry about her.'

'Oh, do you think so?' said Alan, a little flatly.

'I do,' said Zellaby. 'Furthermore, it was sensible of her. A fruitlessly worrying male is a nuisance. The best thing he can do is to disguise his worry, and stand staunchly by, impersonating a pillar of strength while performing certain practical and organizational services. I offer you the fruit of somewhat intensive experience.

'Another thing he can do is represent Modern Knowledge and Commonsense – but tactfully. You can have no idea of the number of venerable saws, significant signs, old wives' sooths, gipsies' warnings, and general fiddle-faddle that has been thrown up by this in the village, lately. We have become a folklorist's treasure-chest. Did you know that in our circumstances it is dangerous to pass under a lych-gate on a Friday? Practically suicide to wear green? Very unwise indeed to eat seed-cake? Are you aware that if a dropped knife, or needle, sticks point down in the floor it will be a boy? No? I thought you might not be. But never mind. I am assembling a bouquet of these cauliflowers of human wisdom in the hope that they may keep my publishers quiet.'

Alan inquired with belated politeness after the progress of the Current Work. Zellaby sighed sadly.

'I am supposed to deliver the final draft of The British Twilight by the end of next month. So far I have written three chapters of this supposedly contemporary study. If I could remember what they deal with, I've no doubt I should find them obsolete by now. It ruins a man's concentration to have a cr che hanging over his head.'

'What is amazing me as much as anything is that you've managed to keep it quiet. I'd have said you hadn't a chance,' Alan told him.

'I did say it,' Zellaby admitted. 'And I'm still astonished. I think it must be a kind of variant on The Emperor's Clothes theme – either that, or an inversion of the Hitler Big Lie – a truth too big to be believed. But, mind you, both Oppley and Stouch are saying unneighbourly things about some of us that they've noticed, though they appear to have no idea of the real scale. I'm told that there is a theory current in both of them that we have all been indulging in one of those fine old uninhibited rustic frenzies on Hallowe'en. Anyway, several of the inhabitants almost gather their skirts aside as we pass. I must say that our people have restrained themselves commendably, under some provocation.'

'But do you mean that only a mile or two away they've no idea what's really happened?' Alan asked incredulously.

'I'd not say that, so much as that they don't want to believe it. They must have heard fairly fully I imagine, but they choose to believe that that is all a tale to cover up something more normal, but disgraceful. Willers was right when he said that a kind of self-protective reflex would defend the ordinary man and woman from disquieting beliefs – That is unless it should get into print. On the word of a newspaper, of course, eighty or ninety per cent would swing to the opposite extreme, and believe anything. The cynical attitude in the other villages really helps. It means that a newspaper is unlikely to get anything to go on unless it is directly informed by someone inside the village.

'Internal stresses were worst for the first week or two after our announcement. Several of the husbands were awkward to handle, but once we got it out of their heads that it was some elaborate system of whitewashing or spoofing, and when they discovered that none of the others was in a position to make a butt of them, they became more reasonable, and less conventional.

'The Lamb-Latterly breach was mended after a few days, when Miss Latterly got over the shock, and Miss Lamb is now being cosseted with a devotion scarcely to be distinguished from tyranny.

'Our leading rebel for some time was Tilly... Oh, you must have seen Tilly Foresham – jodhpurs, roll-neck, hacking-jacket, dragged hither and thither by the whim of fate in the form of three golden retrievers... She protested indignantly for some time that she would not mind much if she happened to like babies; but, as she much preferred puppies, the whole thing was particularly hard on her. However, she seems now to have given in, though grudgingly.'

Zellaby rambled on for a time with anecdotes of the emergency, concluding with the one in which Miss Ogle had been narrowly headed off from making the first payment, in her own name, for the most resplendent perambulator that Trayne could offer.

After a pause, Alan prompted:

'You did say that about ten who might be expected to be involved actually are not?'

'Yes. And five of those were in the bus on the Oppley road, and therefore under observation during the Dayout – that has at least done something to dispel the idea of a fertilizing gas which some seemed to be inclined to adopt as one of the new scientific horrors of our age,' Zellaby told him.

'I am really sorry,' Bernard Westcott wrote to me early in May, 'that circumstances preclude well-deserved official congratulations to your village on the success of the operation to date. It has been conducted with a discretion and communal loyalty which, frankly, has astonished us; most of us here were of the opinion that it would prove necessary to take official action well before this. Now, with only some seven weeks to go before D-day, we are hopeful that we may get through without it.

'The matter which has given us the greatest concern so far was in connexion with Miss Frazer, on Mr Crimm's staff, and so, one might say, not the fault of the village proper – nor even of the lady herself.

'Her father, a naval commander, retired, and a fire-eater of some truculence, was bent on trouble – all set to get questions asked in the House about loose-living and orgiastic goings-on in government establishments. Anxious, apparently, to make a Fleet Street holiday of his daughter. Luckily we were able to arrange for suitably influential people to have a few effective words with him in time.

'What is your own opinion? Do you think Midwich will last it out?'

That was far from easy to answer. If there were no major upset, I thought it might stand a good chance: on the other hand, one could not fail to be anxiously aware of the unexpected, lurking round any corner – the small detonator that might set things off.

We had had our ups and downs, though, and managed to get through them. Sometimes, they seemed to come from nowhere and spread like an infection. The worst, which looked at one time like becoming a panic, was allayed by Dr Willers who hurriedly arranged X-ray facilities and was able to show that all appeared to be quite normal.

The general attitude in May one could describe as a bracing-up, with here and there an impatient desire to let battle commence. Dr Willers, normally an ardent advocate of having one's baby in Trayne hospital, had reversed his usual advice. For one thing, it would, particularly if there should be anything untoward about the babies, render all attempts to keep the matter quiet utterly useless. For another, Trayne did not have the beds to cope with such a phenomenon as a simultaneous application by the whole female population of Midwich – and that alone would certainly have been fuel for publicity – so he went on wearing and flogging himself to make the best local arrangements he could. Nurse Daniels, too, was tireless, and it was a matter for thanksgiving by the whole village that she had happened to be away from home at the critical time of the Dayout. Willers, it was understood, had a temporary assistant booked for the first week in June, and a sort of commando of midwives signed-up for later on. The small committee-room in the Village Hall had been requisitioned as a supply-base, and several large cartons from firms of manufacturing chemists had already arrived.