'And that even goes for Miss Lamb, too. She felt just the same, but she was ill in bed at the time, and couldn't possibly come. So what happened? The compulsion switched on to Miss Latterly, and she was unable to rest until she had acted as Miss Lamb's proxy and brought the baby back here. Once she had parked it here with Mrs Brant she felt free of the compulsion, and was able to return to Miss Lamb, in Eastbourne.'

'If,' said Doctor Willers, heavily, ' if we take all old wives' – or young wives' – tales at face value; if we remember that the majority of feminine tasks are deadly dull, and leave the mind so empty that the most trifling seed that falls there can grow into a riotous tangle, we shall not be surprised by an outlook on life which has the disproportion and the illogical inconsequence of a nightmare, where values are symbolic rather than literal.

'Now, what do we have here? A number of women who are the victims of an improbable, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon: and a number of resultant babies which are not quite like other babies. By a dichotomy familiar to us all, a woman requires her own baby to be perfectly normal, and at the same time superior to all other babies. Well, when any of these women concerned is isolated from the rest with her own baby, it is bound to become more strongly borne in upon her that her golden-eyed baby is not, in relation to the other babies she sees, quite normal. Her subconscious becomes defensive, and keeps it up until a point is reached where the facts must either be admitted, or somehow sublimated. The easiest way to sublimate the situation is to transfer the irregularity into an environment where it no longer appears irregular – if there is such a place. In this case there is one, and one only – Midwich. So they pick up their babies, and back they come, and everything is comfortably rationalized for the time being.'

'It seems to me that there is certainly some rationalizing going on,' Janet said. 'What about Mrs Welt?'

On the occasion she was referring to, Mrs Brant had gone into Mrs Welt's shop one morning to find her engaged in jabbing a pin into herself again and again, and weeping as she did it. This had not seemed good to Mrs Brant, so she had dragged her off to see Willers. He gave Mrs Welt some kind of sedative, and when she felt better she had explained that in changing the baby's napkin she had pricked him with a pin. Whereupon, by her account, the baby had just looked steadily at her with its golden eyes, and made her start jabbing the pin into herself.

'Well, really!' objected Willers. 'If you can cite me a plainer case of hysterical remorse – hair-shirts, and all that – I shall be interested to hear it.'

'And Harriman, too?' Janet persisted.

For Harriman had one day made his appearance in Willers' surgery in a shocking mess. Nose broken, couple of teeth knocked out, both eyes blacked. He had been set on, so he said, by three unknown men – but no one else had seen these men. On the other hand, two of the village boys claimed that through his window they had seen Harriman furiously bashing himself with his own fists. – And the next day someone noticed a bruise on the side of the Harriman baby's face.

Dr Willers shrugged.

'If Harriman were to complain of being set upon by a troupe of pink elephants, it would not greatly surprise me,' he said.

'Well, if you aren't going to put it in, I shall write an additional report,' said Janet.

And she did. She concluded it:

'This is not , in my opinion, or in anyone's opinion but Dr Willers', a matter of hysteria, but of simple fact.

'The situation should, in my view, be recognized, not explained away. It needs to be examined and understood. There is a tendency among the weaker-willed to become superstitious about it, and to credit the babies with magical powers. This sort of nonsense does no one any good, and invites exploitation by what Zellaby calls "the beldame underground". There ought to be an unbiased investigation.'

An investigation, though on more general lines, was also the theme of Dr Willers' third report which was in the form of a protest that wound up:

'In the first place, I do not see why MI is concerned in this at all: in the second, that it should be, apparently, an exclusive concern of theirs is outrageous.

'It is disgracefully wrong . Somebody should be making a thorough study of these children – I am keeping notes, of course, but they are only an ordinary GP's observations. There ought to be a team of experts on the job. I kept quiet before the births because I thought, and still think, that it was better for everyone, and for the mothers in particular, but now that need is over.

'One has got used to the idea of military interference with science in a number of fields – a lot of it totally unnecessary – but this is really preposterous! It is nothing less than a scandal that such a phenomenon as this should continue to be hushed up so that it is going practically unobserved.

'If it is not simply a piece of obstructionism, it is still a scandal. It must be possible for something to be done, within the provisions of the Official Secrets Act, if necessary. A wonderful opportunity for the study of comparative development is simply being thrown away.

'Think of all the trouble that has been taken to observe mere quins and quads, and then look at the material for study that we have here. Sixty-one similars – so similar that most of their ostensible mothers cannot tell them apart. (They will deny that, but it is true.) Think of the work that should be taking place on the comparative effects of environment, conditioning, association, diet, and all the rest of it. What is going on here is a burning of books before they have been written. Something must be done about it before more chances are lost.'

All these representations resulted in a prompt visit from Bernard, and an afternoon of rather acrimonious discussion. The discussion broke up only partly mollified by his promises to stir the Ministry of Health into swift, practical action.

After the others had left, he said:

'Now that official interest in Midwich is bound to become more overt, it might be very useful – and, indeed, might help to avoid awkwardness later on – if we could enlist Zellaby's sympathy. Do you think you could arrange for me to meet him?'

I rang up Zellaby who agreed at once, so after dinner I took Bernard up to Kyle Manor, and left him there to talk. He returned to our cottage about a couple of hours later, looking thoughtful.

'Well,' asked Janet, 'and what do you make of the sage of Midwich?'

Bernard shook his head, and looked at me.

'He's got me wondering,' he said. 'Most of your reports have been excellent, Richard, but I doubt whether you got him quite right. Oh, there is a lot of chatter which sounds like hot air, I know, but what you gave me was too much of the manner, and too little of the matter.'

'I'm sorry if I misled you,' I admitted. 'The trouble about Zellaby is that his matter is frequently elusive, and often allusive. Not much that he says is reportable fact; he is given to mentioning things en passant , and by the time you've thought it over you don't know whether he followed them up with serious deductions, or was simply playing with hypotheses – nor, for that matter, are you at all sure how much he implied, and how much you inferred. It makes things difficult.'

Bernard nodded, understandingly.

'I appreciate that now. I've just had some of it. He spent quite ten minutes towards the end telling me that it is only recently that he has come to wonder whether civilization is not, biologically speaking, a form of decadence. From that he went on to wonder whether the gap between homo sapiens and the rest was not too wide; with the suggestion that it might have been better for our development had we had to contend with the conditions of some other sapient, or at least semi-sapient, species. I'm sure he wasn't being altogether irrelevant – but I'm hanged if I can really pin down the relevance. One thing seems pretty clear though; erratic as he seems, he doesn't miss a lot... Incidentally, he is strong on the same line as the doctor concerning expert observation – particularly on this "compulsion", but in his case for the opposite reason: he doesn't consider it hysterical, and is anxious to know what it is.