'Well,' he said, 'name another boy.'

We visited three, up and down the village. None of them showed the least puzzlement over the box. They opened it as if it were perfectly familiar to them, and made sure of the contents without delay.

'Interesting, isn't it?' remarked Zellaby. 'Now let's start on the girls.'

We went through the same procedure again, except that this time it was to the third, instead of to the second, Child that he showed the secret of opening the box. After that, matters went just as before.

'Fascinating, don't you think?' beamed Zellaby. 'Like to try them with the nail-puzzle?'

'Later, perhaps,' Janet told him. 'Just at present I should like some tea.' So we took him back with us to the cottage.

'That box idea was a good one,' Zellaby congratulated himself modestly, while wolfing a cucumber sandwich. 'Simple, incontestable, and went off without a hitch, too.'

'Does that mean you've been trying other ideas on them?' Janet inquired.

'Oh, quite a number. Some of them were a bit too complicated, though, and others not fully conclusive – besides, I hadn't got hold of the right end of the stick to begin with.'

'Are you quite sure you have now – because I'm not at all sure that I have?' Janet told him. He looked at her.

'I rather think you must have – and that Richard has, too. You don't need to be shy of admitting it.'

He helped himself to another sandwich, and looked inquiringly at me.

'I suppose,' I told him, 'that you are wanting me to say that your experiment has shown that what one of the boys knows, all the boys know, though the girls do not; and vice versa . All right then, that is what it appears to show – unless there is a catch somewhere.'

'My dear fellow -!'

'Well, you must admit that what it appears to show is a little more than anyone is likely to be able to swallow at one gulp.'

'I see. Yes. Of course, I myself arrived at it by stages,' he nodded.

'But,' I said, 'it is what we were intended to infer?'

'Of course, my dear fellow. Could it be clearer?' He took the linked nails from his pocket and dropped them on the table. 'Take these, and try for yourselves – or, better still, devise your own little test, and apply it. You'll find the inference – at least the preliminary inference – inescapable.'

'To appreciate takes longer than to grasp,' I said, 'but let's regard it as a hypothesis which I accept for the moment -'

'Wait a minute,' put in Janet. 'Mr Zellaby, are you claiming that if I were to tell anything to any one of the boys, all the rest would know it?'

'Certainly – provided, of course, that it was something simple enough for them to understand at this stage.'

Janet looked highly sceptical.

Zellaby sighed.

'The old trouble,' he said. 'Lynch Darwin, and you show the impossibility of evolution. But, as I said, you've only to apply your own tests.' He turned back to me. 'You were allowing the hypothesis...?' he suggested.

'Yes,' I agreed, 'and you said that was the preliminary inference. What is the next one?'

'I should have thought that just that one contained implications enough to capsize our social system.'

'Couldn't this be something like – I mean, a more developed form of the sort of sympathetic understanding that's sometimes found between twins?' Janet asked.

Zellaby shook his head.

'I think not – or else it has developed far enough to have acquired new features. Besides, we don't have here one single group en rapport ; we have two separate groups of rapport, apparently without cross-connexions. Now, if that is so, and we have seen that it is, a question that immediately presents itself is this: to what extent is any of these Children an individual? Each is physically an individual, as we can see – but is he so in other ways? If he is sharing consciousness with the rest of the group, instead of having to communicate with others with difficulty, as we do, can he be said to have a mind of his own, a separate personality as we understand it? I don't see that he can. It seems perfectly clear that if A, B, and C share a common consciousness, then what A expresses is also what B and C are thinking, and that way action taken by B in particular circumstances is exactly that which would be taken by A and C in those circumstances – subject only to modifications arising from physical differences between them, which may, in fact, be considerable in so far as conduct is very susceptible to conditions of the glands, and other factors in the physical individual.

'In other words if I ask a question to any of these boys I shall get exactly the same answer from whichever I choose to ask: if I ask him to perform an action, I shall get more or less the same result, but it is likely to be more successful with some who happen to have better physical coordination than others – though, in point of fact, with such close similarity as there is among the Children the variation will be small.

'But my point is this: it will not be an individual who answers me, or performs what I ask, it will be an item of the group. And in that alone lie plenty of further questions, and implications.'

Janet was frowning. 'I still don't quite -'

'Let me put it differently,' said Zellaby. 'What we have seemed to have here is fifty-eight little individual entities. But appearances have been deceptive, and we find that what we actually have are two entities only – a boy, and a girl: though the boy has thirty component parts each with the physical structure and appearance of individual boys; and the girl has twenty-eight component parts.'

There was a pause. Presently:

'I find that rather hard to take,' said Janet, with careful understatement.

'Yes, of course,' agreed Zellaby. 'So did I.'

'Look here,' I said, after a further pause. 'You are putting this forward as a serious proposition? I mean, it isn't just a dramatic manner of speaking?'

'I am stating a fact – having shown you the evidence first.'

I shook my head. 'All you showed us was that they are able to communicate in some way that I don't understand. To proceed from that to your theory of non-individualism is too much of a jump.'

'On that piece of evidence alone, perhaps so. But you must remember that, though this is the first you have seen, I have already conducted a number of tests, and not one of them has contradicted the idea of what I prefer to call collective-individualism. Moreover, it is not as strange, per se , as it appears at first sight. It is quite a well established evolutionary dodge for getting round a shortcoming. A number of forms that appear at first sight to be individuals turn out to be colonies – and many forms cannot survive at all unless they create colonies which operate as individuals. Admittedly the best examples are among the lower forms, but there's no reason why it should be confined to them. Many of the insects come pretty near it. The laws of physics prevent them increasing in size, so they contrive greater efficiency by acting as a group. We ourselves combine in groups consciously, instead of by instinct, for the same purposes. Very well, why shouldn't nature produce a more efficient version of the method by which we clumsily contrive to overcome our own weakness? Another case of nature copying art, perhaps?

'After all, we are up against the barriers to further development, and we have been for some time – unless we are to stagnate we must find some way of getting round them. G. B. S. proposed, you will remember, that the first step should be to extend the term of human life to three hundred years. That might be one way – and no doubt the extension of individual life would have a strong appeal to so determined an individualist – but there are others, and, though this is not perhaps a line of evolution one would expect to find among the higher animals, it is obviously not impracticable – though, of course, that is by no means to say that it is bound to be successful.'