A Summary and Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Zero Hour’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Zero Hour’ is a 1949 short story by the American author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), included in his 1953 collection The Illustrated Man. In the story, which is set in a future America, a young girl is befriended by an alien who needs her help to invade Earth and kill the adults.

You can read ‘Zero Hour’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Bradbury’s story below. The story takes around fifteen minutes to read.

Summary

In New York in the near future (for the time Bradbury was writing: the story takes place in the late twentieth century), world peace appears to have been achieved. A young girl named Mink runs inside her parents’ house and asks to borrow some kitchen utensils. When he mother, Mrs Morris, asks her daughter what she’s doing, Mink tells her she is playing an exciting new game called Invasion.

Young children all over the country appear to be playing the same game, but slightly older children do not take part. A boy of twelve named Joe wants to join Mink and her friends, but Mink tells him he isn’t welcome as he’d make fun of them. From inside her house, Mrs Morris watches her daughter apparently talking to the rosebush in the garden while her friend, a girl named Anna, makes notes on a pad.

When Mink comes in for lunch, she initially doesn’t want to stay for her soup, but Mrs Morris forces her to sit at the table and wait for it. Mink reluctantly complies, but argues that the game she is playing is a matter of life and death. She tells her mother that Drill is waiting for her.

When Mrs Morris quizzes her for more details, Mink claims that Drill is an alien from Mars – or possibly Jupiter or Saturn or another planet – who is part of a group who plan to invade Earth. Mink relates what Drill has told her: namely, that the aliens couldn’t find a way to invade Earth until they thought of getting small children on Earth to help them, because adults are too busy to look in the hiding places (such as in rosebushes) that the aliens use.

Mink also says that Drill has promised her that when the invasion happens, she won’t have to take baths and will be able to stay up late. Drill believes adults are dangerous as they don’t believe in Martians, but children will be spared. Mrs Morris humours her daughter but clearly thinks Mink has just invented an imaginary friend for her game.

Later that afternoon, Mrs Morris talks to her friend Helen in the town of Scranton via a kind of videophone device. She learns that Helen’s son is also playing the game of Invasion and has been befriended by someone named ‘Drill’ too. The two women reminisce about when they played games involving Japanese people and Nazis back in the late 1940s when they were children. While they are talking, Mink comes in and shows her mother a strange yo-yo which vanishes when it reaches the ground. Then she says she has to go out again as ‘zero hour’ is at five o’clock, less than an hour away.

As five o’clock approaches, Mrs Morris goes out into the garden when she sees one of Mink’s friends running away crying. Mink tells her mother that Peggy Ann suddenly grew too old for the game. Mrs Morris watches her daughter arranging the tools and utensils she has borrowed from the house onto the lawn, trying to make a particular shape. She claims that Drill and his associates will be able to come through once she gets the arrangement right.

Not long after Mr Morris gets home from work, a strange buzzing can be heard in the garden, followed by a loud explosion. Mrs Morris runs upstairs to the attic, her bewildered husband following her. She locks them inside, but shortly afterwards they can heard footsteps approaching. Then the lock to the attic door melts, and when the door opens, Mink peers inside, with ‘tall blue shadows’ behind her. She says, ‘Peekaboo.’

Analysis

In some respects, we can analyse ‘Zero Hour’ alongside the opening story in The Illustrated Man, ‘The Veldt’. Both stories are about children who conspire in the deaths of their parents, and unsettle readers because they show small children as having the potential to commit, or enable, horrific deeds. Bradbury’s story is so horrific because the children casually view the murder of their parents as a game and seem perfectly happy to let aliens take over.

In ‘The Veldt’, a new state-of-the-art nursery in a family home conjures lifelike lions and other animals from the African veldt. But the room also starts to encourage the two children to have destructive thoughts towards their parents. Eventually, the parents are (seemingly) destroyed by the lions in the room, the animals having gone from merely lifelike to actually alive. The children are the ones who trap their parents in the deadly nursery.

The parallels with ‘Zero Hour’ are obvious: the outside influence turning the children against their parents, the difference between how the children view something versus how adults perceive it, and the two parents taking refuge in a room together before shortly meeting their grisly fate. In both stories, the parents’ supposed deaths occur off the page, but this only adds to the chilling effect of the tales.

But ‘Zero Hour’ does two things which we don’t find in that other story from The Illustrated Man. First, Bradbury capitalises on the existing notion of the imaginary friend, a well-known psychological phenomenon which tends to be observed in small children but not in slightly older ones, who have presumably grown out of such things. This means that both Mink’s mother, and us as readers of the tale, can dismiss Mink’s stories of ‘Drill’ as mere childish fancy, at least at first.

The second thing Bradbury does in ‘Zero Hour’ is provide a new perspective on the already established science-fiction trope of alien invasion. Indeed, so well-worn was this plotline by the late 1940s – H. G. Wells having given the definitive version as early as 1898 in his novel The War of the Worlds – that Bradbury has Mink state that Drill is not a Martian (although she remains unsure of where he’s actually from). By involving young children in their invasion and making it into a kind of game, the aliens are able to wrongfoot the parents and succeed in their aim.

But the psychology of Mink is also worthy of close analysis. She is disdainful of older children, such as Joe (and even the younger Peggy Ann, as soon as she apparently outgrows the ‘game’), when they try to join in. She is also impatient with her mother’s questions, knowing that she won’t understand. If we wish to analyse ‘Zero Hour’ symbolically, as a kind of allegory, perhaps we could do worse than to suggest the story is about childhood attitudes to their parents which are usually repressed but which come out, if they come out at all, in destructive fantasies and games much like ‘Invasion’. In this story, the game turns out to be real, but it’s clear that the triumphant Mink still views it as a game, as her final word in the story, ‘Peekaboo’, reveals.

Sigmund Freud once theorised a phenomenon he called the family romance, whereby children fantasise that they will be whisked away from their own (ordinary) parents after it’s discovered they’re really the son or daughter of a king or emperor or some other exciting personage. One wonders if Bradbury was aware of this idea: it certainly maps onto Mink’s comment that she ‘might be queen’ in the new world order her replacement ‘parents’, the Martians (or whatever they are), usher into being.