'Excuse?' I put in. 'I don't quite see -?'

'Cuckoos,' explained Zellaby. 'You don't think the men have ever honestly liked these Children do you? The fair face they've put on it has been mostly for their wives' sakes. Considering the sense of outrage that must be abiding in their subconsciouses, it does them great credit – a little mitigated perhaps by one or two examples like Harriman's which made them scared to touch the Children.

'The women – most of them, at any rate – don't feel like that. They all know well enough now that, biologically speaking, they are not even their own children, but they did have the trouble and pain of bearing them – and that, even if they resent the imposition deeply, which some of them do, still isn't the kind of link they can just snip and forget. Then there are others who – well, take Miss Ogle, for instance. If they had horns, tails, and cloven hooves Miss Ogle, Miss Lamb, and a number of others would still dote on them. But the most one can expect of the best of the men is toleration.'

'It has been very difficult,' added Mr Leebody. 'It cuts right across a proper family relationship. There's scarcely a man who doesn't resent their existence. We've kept on smoothing over the consequences, but that is the best we've been able to do. It's been like something always smouldering...'

'And you think this Pawle business will supply the fatal draught?' Bernard asked.

'It could do. If not, something else will,' Mr Leebody said forlornly. 'If only there were something one could do , before it's too late.'

'There isn't, my dear fellow,' Zellaby said decisively. 'I've told you that before, and it's time you began to believe me. You've done marvels of patching-up and pacifying, but there's nothing fundamental that you or any of us can do because the initiative is not ours; it lies with the Children themselves. I suppose I know them as well as anybody. I've been teaching them, and doing my best to get to know them since they were babies, and I've got practically nowhere – nor have The Grange people done any better, however pompously they may cover it up. We can't even anticipate the Children because we don't understand, on any but the broadest lines, what they want, or how they think. What's happened to that boy who was shot, by the way? His condition could have some effect on developments.'

'The rest of them wouldn't let him go. They sent the ambulance away. Dr Anderby up there is looking after him. There are quite a number of pellets to be removed, but he thinks he'll be all right,' said the Vicar.

'I hope he's right. If not, I can see us having a real feud on our hands,' said Zellaby.

'It is my impression that we already have,' Mr Leebody remarked unhappily.

'Not yet,' Zellaby maintained. 'It takes two parties to make a feud. So far the aggression has been by the village.'

'You're not going to deny that the Children murdered the two Pawle boys?'

'No, but it wasn't aggressive. I do have some experience of the Children. In the first case their action was a spontaneous hitting-back when one of them was hurt; in the second, too, it was defensive – don't forget there was a second barrel, loaded, and ready to be fired at someone. In both cases the response was over-drastic, I'll grant that, but in intent it was manslaughter, rather than murder. Both times they were the provoked, not the provokers. In fact, the one deliberate attempt at murder was by David Pawle.'

'If someone hits you with a car, and you kill him for it,' said the Vicar, 'it seems to me to be murder, and that seems to me to be provocation. And to David Pawle it was provocation. He waited for the law to administer justice, and the law failed him, so he took the matter into his own hands. Was that intended murder? – or was it intended justice?'

'The one thing it certainly was not, was justice,' Zellaby said firmly. 'It was feuding. He attempted to kill one of the Children, chosen at random, for an act they had committed collectively. What these incidents really make clear, my dear fellow, is that the laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species – against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable.'

The Vicar shook his head despondently.

'I don't know, Zellaby... I simply don't know... I'm in a morass. I don't even know for certain whether these Children are imputable for murder.'

Zellaby raised his eyebrows.

' "And God said," ' quoted Mr Leebody, ' "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Very well, then, what are these Children? What are they? The image does not mean the outer image, or every statue would be man. It means the inner image, the spirit and the soul. But you have told me, and, on the evidence, I came to believe it, that the Children do not have individual spirits – that they have one man-spirit, and one woman-spirit, each far more powerful than we understand, that they share between them. What, then, are they? They cannot be what we know as man, for this inner image is on a different pattern – its likeness is to something else. They have the look of the genus homo , but not the nature. And since they are of another kind, and murder is, by definition, the killing of one of one's own kind, can the killing of one of them by us be, in fact, murder? It would appear not.

'And from that one must go further. For, since they do not come under the prohibition of murder, what is our attitude to them to be? At present, we are conceding them all the privileges of the true homo sapiens . Are we right to do this? Since they are another species, are we not fully entitled – indeed, have we not perhaps a duty? – to fight them in order to protect our own species? After all, if we were to discover dangerous wild animals in our midst our duty would be clear. I don't know... I am, as I said, in a morass...'

'You are, my dear fellow, you are indeed,' agreed Zellaby. 'Only a few minutes ago you were telling me, with some heat, that the Children had murdered both the Pawle boys. Taking that in conjunction with your later proposition, it would appear that if they kill us it is murder, but if we were to kill them it would be something else. One cannot help feeling that a jurist, lay or ecclesiastical, would find such a proposition ethically unsatisfactory.

'Nor do I altogether follow your argument concerning the "likeness". If your God is a purely terrestrial God, you are no doubt right – for in spite of one's opposition to the idea it can no longer be denied that the Children have in some way been introduced among us from "outside"; there is nowhere else they can have come from. But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?

'Our two approaches to such a problem are bound to differ greatly, but -'

He broke off at the sound of raised voices in the hall outside, and looked questioningly at his wife. Before either could move, however, the door was abruptly thrust open, and Mrs Brant appeared on the threshold. With a perfunctory 'Scuse me' to the Zellabys, she made for Mr Leebody, and grasped his sleeve.

'Oh, sir. You must come quick,' she told him breathlessly.

'My dear Mrs Brant -' he began.

'You must come, sir,' she repeated. 'They're all going up to The Grange. They're going to burn it down. You must come and stop them.'

Mr Leebody stared at her while she continued to pull at his sleeve.

'They're starting now,' she said desperately. 'You can stop them, Vicar. You must. They want to burn the Children. Oh, hurry. Please. Please hurry!'