May Greene's unexpected pregnancy

May Greene's unexpected pregnancy is the decisive breach in the Greenes' long-maintained alien cover on Earth. The discovery turns their assignment from a controlled performance of terrestrial normality into an irreversible family commitment: May Greene refuses to surrender the child, while the pregnancy exposes the precariousness of their bodies, their marriage, their finances, and their loyalty to the Milotan Bureau.

Discovery Behind the Terrestrial Mask

The event is introduced through the contrast between May Greene's public behavior and her private condition. After an exhausted exchange with Mrs. Gottesmann in the apartment building's self-service elevator, May Greene returns to the sixth-floor apartment and removes the silk-thin plastomask from her face and the contact lenses that make her appear human. She tells Dan Greene that she has visited Dr. Robinson in New York City. Dan initially assumes that she is suffering from an Earth disease and moves toward her protectively, believing that Milotans are immune to all terrestrial illnesses. May Greene corrects him with the calm announcement that she is going to have a baby.

The pregnancy is startling not only because it is medically unexpected but because May Greene is considered past the age of childbearing. Dan Greene's immediate disbelief gives the disclosure its first shock: he tells her that she is past the age, while she answers, in effect, that the evidence has disproved that assumption. The domestic setting makes the revelation more consequential. Their apartment is furnished in deliberately banal department-store modern, and their altered household objects contain no visible Milotan artifacts; yet beneath that normality, both adults remain humanoid but not fully human. Pregnancy therefore makes a hidden biological difference impossible to treat as merely a matter of costume.

The Bureau, the Marriage, and the Refusal

May Greene and Dan Greene understand the pregnancy as a violation of the conditions under which they were posted to Earth. Their assignment was intended to be lifelong, and the Bureau had sent May Greene because she was believed to be sterile or presumably beyond childbearing. She predicts that the Bureau will blame both agents for failing to take proper precautions, and she explicitly refuses to place the entire burden on herself. Dan Greene must share the responsibility and the mental pain, even though the pregnancy is occurring in her body.

Their first practical alternative is to return to Milotis in disgrace. May Greene knows that the Bureau will not reassign them to an Earth post, while returning home would also be difficult because their adaptations cannot be reversed. Their disguise has involved bodily alterations, including amputations, so the agents would be as monstrous on Milotis as their natural forms would appear on Earth. The pregnancy thus traps them between two worlds: the assignment has physically remade them for Earth, while the child makes continued obedience to the assignment impossible.

Dr. Robinson offers a secret medical solution. He indicates that he could end May Greene's condition without reporting the matter to Milotis, and Dan Greene recognizes this as a considerate offer. May Greene nevertheless rejects it. She has wanted a child all her life, and she had accepted the Earth posting only after deciding that she was too old to have one. Her refusal is not a sudden sentimental impulse detached from the mission; it is a claim that the unexpected child has a value the Bureau's rules cannot erase. The choice changes the pregnancy from an embarrassing accident into an act of resistance against the organization that controls their posting and reproductive expectations.

Birth and the Redistribution of Labor

Eight months later, Terence Greene is born on Earth. Because Milotan gestation is roughly comparable to terrestrial gestation, the pregnancy follows a recognizable biological timetable, but the child's legal and cultural position is unprecedented. Terence Greene is born in the United States of America, holds a genuine birth certificate, and is technically not even a Milotan. His birth creates a contradiction at the center of the event: biologically he belongs to the hidden Milotan family, while legally his birthplace gives him an un forged Earth identity that no prior Milotan agent on Earth possessed.

The birth also reorganizes the Greenes' domestic life. Dr. Robinson fits the baby with small masks and lenses in a laboratory unusually complete for a New Jersey general practitioner. The disguises are expensive, and the Greenes already depend on terrestrial salaries to supplement allowances from their own government. May Greene stays home to care for Terence Greene while Dan Greene continues working, because Milotan robots that would have handled infant care on Milotis are unavailable in this technologically inferior environment. The physical indignities of childcare, which would have been delegated at home, fall primarily to May Greene under Earth customs.

May Greene's loss of income becomes a material consequence of her decision. Living on an alien planet is already tremendously expensive, so the family gives up luxuries and eventually begins cutting necessities. Dan Greene abandons the specially imported tobacco substitute from Milotis, while May Greene loses the table delicacies from home, repackaged as Rice Krispies and Coca Cola. The pregnancy therefore does not end with delivery: it converts a covert posting into an economically strained household whose resources are consumed by the child's care and concealment.

Motherhood Under Surveillance and Concealment

May Greene's motherhood is marked by both vigilance and ambivalence. She takes Terence Greene out daily in the pale yellow sunlight of Earth and exchanges evasive pleasantries with neighbors who form a constant gauntlet of perambulators and deck chairs outside the house. She once takes him to the roof at night so he can see the distant bright glimmer of Milotis, but stops when the neighbors grow curious. The child requires ordinary parental care while also generating extraordinary security risks.

The neighbors' suspicion gives the pregnancy a social afterlife. Mrs. Danko mutters about a changeling, and May Greene, whose hearing is keener than a human's, wonders whether the remark is directed at her baby. She can smile at the thought that the truth would be more terrible to the neighbors than their fantasy, but the suspicion unsettles her specifically as a mother. As a secret agent she can manage the danger through role-playing and concealment; as a mother she must confront the possibility that the child will be marked as alien by people who do not know what he is.

May Greene also spoils Terence Greene because she feels guilty that motherhood has not delivered the pleasure she confidently expected. At times she receives no pleasure from him at all and wonders whether he was worth the trouble she and Dan Greene have undertaken, including whether she should have accepted Dr. Robinson's original offer. Remorse follows these thoughts, and she gives Terence Greene something unhealthy simply because he wants it. The pregnancy's emotional consequence is therefore complex: the child is desired, protected, doubted, and overindulged within the same maternal relationship.

The Child's Belated Knowledge

The Greenes initially tell Terence Greene only that they come from a far-off place. They speak both Milotan and English at home, teach him both languages, warn him never to speak Milotan in public, and keep him away from other children as much as possible. Dan Greene argues that the truth should be told as soon as possible so that Terence Greene will not identify with the humans around him, but the parents also fear that a child cannot yet be trusted with a secret involving masks, lenses, and the family's actual origin.

The compromise delays rather than removes the pregnancy's central consequence. When Terence Greene is six, compulsory schooling makes sustained isolation impossible. May Greene enrolls him in a private day school and tells the principal that the family are Christian Scientists so that he will not undergo medical examinations. The cover draws on the school's willingness to accommodate paying parents, but it also transfers the pregnancy's original concealment into an institutional setting where Terence Greene's body may be exposed.

That exposure arrives through swimming lessons. Terence Greene realizes that he is different and directs the realization against May Greene, accusing her by implication of making him alien without telling him enough. The school principal then coldly points out that May Greene should have disclosed the issue. Afterward, Terence Greene clings tightly to his mother's hand on the way to the car, and May Greene experiences a closeness with him not felt since infancy. He finally asks, in halting Milotan, whether Milotis truly exists and whether everyone there is like them. The unexpected pregnancy thus culminates not simply in birth, but in the child's demand for an intelligible origin and the beginning of a more honest bond between mother and son.