The Honesty of Children
Young Mink Morris is absolutely brutal in her honesty. She holds nothing but, displaying no inherent desire or necessity to deceive or mislead. She is as honest with the 12-year-old boys in telling them they are too old to play as she is with her mother in answering questions about Drill. She makes no effort to undermine her mother’s trust her in her and the underlying, unwritten theme at play here is that children do not need to deceive. They can be as honest they wish because adults only half-listen anyway and only half-believe that which they do hear.
The Power of Imagination
The imagination exhibiting power in the story is not, as one would expect, that of seven-year-old Mink. The imagination which wields power here belongs to her mother. Mrs. Morris lives in a constructed suburban paradise of order and routine. Her world is one in which rockets flying overhead have made literal the long-promised dream of peace through strength. Mrs. Morris and her husband and her friend in New York live in an imagined world where pretty little seven year old girls could never possibly sit there telling a horrific truth about their own demise to arrive right on time at 5:00 that afternoon. The routine and conformity and power of imagination to withstand the potential of imagination is the cause of her doom.
Child Abduction
Lying beneath the detachment from reality afforded by the gloss of science fiction is a much darker theme that many readers likely do not want to confront, but which is unavoidable in a close analysis. The combination of the themes of how children can be honest and how parents can wrap themselves in a make-believe world of comfort and security collide to make this story a profoundly nightmarish parable about the real life world of children abducted by strangers promising candy. It is not by mere accident or whimsy that the game of Invasion! abides rigidly by its rules of age appropriateness. Creeps like Drill may target 12-year-old boys, but they target 7-year-old girls in greater numbers for the same reason they target 5-year-old children with greater frequency. Experience provides protection. Stripped of its façade of alien invasion, “Zero Hour” is really a terrifying warning to parents to listen more closely when their young children are being honest about new friends who it seems cannot be anything other than imaginary.
