'This,' Zellaby said reprovingly, to a golden-eyed girl who was sitting on the branch of a tree beside the path, 'this is a quite uncalled-for circumscription of my movements. You know perfectly well that I always take an afternoon stroll, and that I always return for tea. Tyranny easily becomes a very bad habit. Besides, you've got my wife as a hostage.'

The Child appeared to think it over, and presently pushed a large bullseye into one cheek.

'All right, Mr Zellaby,' she said.

Zellaby advanced a foot. This time it passed unobstructedly over an invisible barrier that had stopped it before.

'Thank you, my dear,' he said, with a polite inclination of his head. 'Come along, Gayford.'

We passed on into the woods, leaving the guardian of the path idly swinging her legs, and crunching her bullseye.

'A very interesting aspect of this affair is the demarcations between the individual and the collective,' Zellaby remarked. 'I've really made precious little progress in determining it. The Child's appreciation of her sweet is indubitably individual, it could scarcely be other; but her permission for us to go on was collective, as was the influence that stopped us. And since the mind is collective, what about the sensations it receives? Are the rest of the Children vicariously enjoying her bullseye, too? It would appear not, yet they must be aware of it, and perhaps of its flavour. A similar problem arises when I show them my films and lecture to them. In theory, if I had two of them only as my audience, all of them would share the experience – that's the way they learn their lessons, as I told you – but in practice I always have a full house when I go up to The Grange. As far as I can understand it, when I show a film they could get it from one representative of each sex, but, presumably, in the transmission of visual sensation something is lost, for they all very much prefer to see it with their own eyes. It is difficult to get them to talk about it much, but it does appear that individual experience of a picture is more satisfactory to them as, one must suppose, is individual experience of a bullseye. It is a reflection that sets off a whole train of questions.'

'I can believe that,' I agreed, 'but they are post-graduate questions. As far as I am concerned, the basic problem of their presence here at all gives me quite enough to be going on with.'

'Oh,' said Zellaby, 'I don't think there is much that's novel about that. Our presence here at all raises the same problem.'

'I don't see that. We evolved here – but where did the Children come from?'

'Aren't you taking a theory for an established fact, my dear fellow? It is widely supposed that we evolved here, and to support that supposition it is supposed that there once existed a creature who was the ancestor of ourselves, and of the apes – what our grandfathers used to call "the missing link". But there has never been any satisfactory proof that such a creature existed. And the missing link, why, bless my soul, the whole proposition is riddled with missing links – if that is an acceptable metaphor. Can you see the whole diversity of races evolving from this one link? I can't, however hard I try. Nor, at a later stage, can I see a nomadic creature segregating the strains which would give rise to such fixed and distinctive characteristics of race. On islands it is understandable, but not on the great land-masses. At first sight, climate might have some effect – until one considers the Mongolian characteristics apparently indigenous from the equator to the North Pole. Think, too, of the innumerable intermediary types there would have to be, and then of the few poor relics we have been able to find. Think of the number of generations we should have to go back to trace the blacks, the whites, the reds, and the yellows to a common ancestor, and consider that where there should be innumerable traces of this development left by millions of evolving ancestors there is practically nothing but a great blank. Why, we know more about the age of reptiles than we do about the age of supposedly evolving man. We had a complete evolutionary tree for the horse many years ago. If it were possible to do the same for man we should have done it by now. But what do we have? Just a few, remarkably few, isolated specimens. Nobody knows where, or if, they fit into an evolutionary picture because there is no picture – only supposition. The specimens are as unattached to us as we are to the Children...'

For half an hour or so I listened to a discourse on the erratic and unsatisfactory phylogeny of mankind, which Zellaby concluded with an apology for his inadequate coverage of a subject which was not susceptible to a condensation into half a dozen sentences, as he had attempted.

'However,' he added, 'you will have gathered that the conventional assumption has more lacunae than substance.'

'But if you invalidate it, what then?' I inquired.

'I don't know,' Zellaby admitted, 'but I do refuse to accept a bad theory simply on the grounds that there is not a better, and I take the lack of evidence that ought, if it were valid, to be plentiful, as an argument for the opposition – whatever that may be. As a result I find the occurrence of the Children scarcely more startling, objectively, than that of the various other races of mankind that have apparently popped into existence fully formed, or at least with no clear line of ancestral development.'

So dissolute a conclusion seemed unlike Zellaby. I suggested that he probably had a theory of his own.

Zellaby shook his head.

'No,' he admitted modestly. Then he added: 'One has to speculate, of course. Not very satisfactorily, I'm afraid, and sometimes uncomfortably. It is, for instance, disquieting for a good rationalist, such as myself, to find himself wondering whether perhaps there is not some Outside Power arranging things here. When I look round the world, it does sometimes seem to hold a suggestion of a rather disorderly testing-ground. The sort of place where someone might let loose a new strain now and then, and see how it will make out in our rough and tumble. Fascinating for an inventor to watch his creations acquitting themselves, don't you think? To discover whether this time he has produced a successful tearer-to-pieces, or just another torn-to-pieces and, too, to observe the progress of the earlier models, and see which of them have proved really competent at making life a form of hell for others... You don't think so? – Ah, well, as I told you, the speculations tend to be uncomfortable.'

I told him:

'As man to man, Zellaby, not only do you talk a great deal, but you talk a great deal of nonsense, and make some of it sound like sense. It is very confusing for a listener.'

Zellaby looked hurt.

'My dear fellow, I always talk sense. It is my primary social failing. One must distinguish between the content, and the container. Would you prefer me to talk with that monotonous dogmatic intensity which our simpler-minded brethren believe, God help them, to be a guarantee of sincerity? Even if I should, you would still have to evaluate the content.'

'What I want to know,' I said firmly, 'is whether, having disposed of human evolution, you have any serious hypothesis to put in its place?'

'You don't like my Inventor speculation? Nor do I, very much. But at least it has the merit of being no less improbable, and a lot more comprehensible than many religious suggestions. And when I say "Inventor", I don't necessarily mean an individual, of course. More probably a team. It seems to me that if a team of our own biologists and geneticists were to take a remote island for their testing-ground they would find great interest and instruction in observing their specimens there in ecological conflict. And, after all, what is a planet but an island in space? But a speculation is, as I said, far from being a theory.'