by John Wyndham
Such a swerve of interest from swords to plowshares was undoubtedly a social improvement, but, at the same time, it was a mistake for the optimistic to claim it as showing a change in the human spirit. The human spirit continued much as before—95 per cent of it wanting to live in peace, and the other 5 per cent considering its chances if it should risk starting anything. It was chiefly because no one’s chances looked too good that the lull continued.
Meanwhile, with something like twenty-five million new mouths bawling for food every year, the supply problem became steadily worse, and after years of ineffective propaganda a couple of atrocious harvests had at last made the people aware of its urgency.
The factor which had caused the militant 5 per cent to relax awhile from fomenting discord was the satellites. Sustained research in rocketry had at last succeeded in attaining one of its objectives. It had sent up a missile which stayed up. It was, in fact, possible to fire a rocket far enough up for it to fall into an orbit. Once there, it would continue to circle like a tiny moon, quite inactive and innocuous—until the pressure on a button should give it the impulse to drop back, with devastating effect.
Great as was the public concern which followed the triumphant announcement of the first nation to establish a satellite weapon satisfactorily, a still greater concern was felt over the failure of others to make any announcement at all, even when they were known to have had similar successes. It was by no means pleasant to realize that there was an unknown number of menaces up there over your head, quietly circling and circling until someone should arrange for them to drop—and that there was nothing to be done about them. Still, life has to go on—and novelty is a wonderfully short-lived thing. One became used to the idea perforce. From time to time there would be a panicky flare-up of expostulation when reports circulated that as well as satellites with atomic heads there were others with such things as crop diseases, cattle diseases, radioactive dusts, viruses, and infections not only of familiar kinds but brand-new sorts recently thought up in laboratories, all floating around up there. Whether such uncertain and potentially backfiring weapons had actually been placed is hard to say. But then the limits of folly itself—particularly of folly with fear on its heels—are not easy to define, either. A virulent organism, unstable enough to become harmless in the course of a few days (and who is to say that such could not be bred?), could be considered to have strategic uses if dropped in suitable spots.
At least the United States Government took the suggestion seriously enough to deny emphatically that it controlled any satellites designed to conduct biological warfare directly upon human beings. One or two minor nations, whom no one suspected of controlling any satellites at all, hastened to make similar declarations. Other, and major, powers did not. In the face of this ominous reticence, the public began demanding to know why the United States had neglected to prepare for a form of warfare which others were ready to use—and just what did “directly” mean, anyway? At this point all parties tacitly gave up denying or confirming anything about satellites, and an intensified effort was made to divert the public interest to the no less important, but far less acrimonious, matter of food scarcity.
The laws of supply and demand should have enabled the more enterprising to organize commodity monopolies, but the world at large had become antagonistic to declared monopolies. The interlaced-company system, however, really worked very smoothly without anything so imputable as Articles of Federation. The general public heard scarcely anything of such little difficulties within the pattern as had to be unsnarled from time to time. Hardly anyone heard of even the existence of one Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, for instance. I heard of him myself only years later in the course of my work.
Umberto was of assorted Latin descent, and by profession a pilot. His first appearance as a possibly disruptive spanner in the neat machinery of the edible-oil interests occurred when he walked into the offices of the Arctic & European Fish Oil Company and produced a bottle of pale pink oil in which he proposed to interest them.
Arctic & European analyzed the sample. The first thing they discovered about it was that it was not a fish oil: it was vegetable, though they could not identify the source. The second revelation was that it made most of their best fish oils look like grease-box fillers.
Alarmed at the effect this potent oil would have on their trade, Arctic & European summoned Umberto and questioned him at length. He was not communicative. He told them that the oil came from Russia (which still hid behind a curtain of suspicion and secrecy) and that for an enormous sum of money he would endeavor to fly out the seeds. Terms were agreed on, and then Umberto vanished.
Arctic & European had not at first connected the appearance of the triffids with Umberto, and the police of several countries went on keeping an eye open for him on the company’s behalf for several years. It was not until some investigator produced a specimen of triffid oil for their inspection that they realized that it corresponded exactly with the sample Umberto had shown them, and that it was the seeds of the triffiid he had set out to bring.
What happened to Umberto himself will never be definitely known. It is my guess that over the Pacific Ocean, somewhere high up in the stratosphere, he found himself attacked by Russian planes. It may be that the first he knew of it was when cannon shells from Russian fighters started to break up his craft.
Perhaps Umberto’s plane exploded, perhaps it just fell to pieces. Whichever it was, I am sure that when the fragments began their long, long fall toward the sea they left behind them something which looked at first like a white vapor.
It was not vapor. It was a cloud of seeds, floating, so infinitely light they were, even in the rarefied air. Millions of gossamer-slung triffid seeds, free now to drift wherever the winds of the world should take them….
It might be weeks, perhaps months, before they would sink to Earth at last, many of them thousands of miles from their starting place.
That is, I repeat, conjecture. But I cannot see a more probable way in which that plant, intended to be kept secret, could come, quite suddenly, to be found in almost every part of the world.
My introduction to a triffid came early. It so happened that we had one of the first in the locality growing in our own garden. The plant was quite well developed before any of us bothered to notice it, for it had taken root along with a number of other casuals behind the bit of hedge that screened the rubbish heap. It wasn’t doing any harm there, and it wasn’t in anyone’s way. So when we did notice it later on, we’d just take a look at it now and then to see how it was getting along, and let it be.
However, a triffid is certainly distinctive, and we couldn’t help getting a bit curious about it after a time. Not, perhaps, very actively, for there are always a few unfamiliar things that somehow or other manage to lodge in the neglected corners of a garden, but enough to mention to one another that it was beginning to look a pretty queer sort of thing.
Nowadays, when everyone knows only too well what a triffid looks like, it is difficult to recall how odd and somehow foreign the first ones appeared to us. Nobody, as far as I know, felt any misgiving or alarm about them then. I imagine that most people thought of them—when they thought of them at all—in much the same way that my father did.
I have a picture in my memory now of him examining ours and puzzling over it at a time when it must have been about a year old. In almost every detail it was a half-size replica of a fully grown triffid—only it didn’t have a name yet, and no one had seen one fully grown. My father leaned over, peering at it through his horn-rimmed glasses, fingering its stalk, and blowing gently through his gingery mustache, as was his habit when thoughtful. He inspected the straight stem, and the woody bole from which it sprang. He gave curious, if not very penetrative, attention to the three small, bare sticks which grew straight up beside the stem. He smoothed the short sprays of leathery green leaves between his finger and thumb as if their texture might tell him something. Then he peered into the curious, funnel-
like formation at the top of the stem, still puffing reflectively, but inconclusively, through his mustache. I remember the first time he lifted me up to look inside that conical cup and see the tightly wrapped whorl within. It looked not unlike the new, close-rolled frond of a fern, emerging a couple of inches from a sticky mess in the base of the cup. I did not touch it, but I knew the stuff must be sticky because there were flies and other small insects struggling in it.
More than once my father ruminated that it was pretty queer, and observed that one of these days he really must try to find out what it was. I don’t think he ever made the effort, nor, at that stage, was he likely to have learned much if he had tried.
The thing would be about four feet high then. There must have been plenty of them about, growing up quietly and inoffensively, with nobody taking any particular notice of them—at least it seemed so, for if the biological or botanical experts were excited over them, no news of their interest percolated to the general public. And so the one in our garden continued its growth peacefully, as did thousands like it in neglected spots all over the world.
It was some little time later that the first one picked up its roots and walked.
That improbable achievement must, of course, have been known for some time in Russia, where it was doubtless classified as a state secret, but, as far as I have been able to confirm, its first occurrence in the outside world took place in Indo-China—which meant that people went on taking practically no notice. Indo-China was one of these regions from which such curious and unlikely yarns might be expected to drift in, and frequently did—the kind of thing an editor might conceivably use if news were scarce and a touch of the “mysterious East” would liven the paper up a bit. But in any case the Indo-Chinese specimen can have had no great lead. Within a few weeks reports of walking plants were pouring in from Sumatra, Borneo, Belgian Congo, Colombia, Brazil, and most places in the neighborhood of the equator.
This time they got into print, all right. But the much-handled stories, written up with that blend of cautiously defensive frivolity which the press habitually employed to cover themselves in matters regarding sea serpents, flying saucers, thought transference, and other irregular phenomena, prevented anyone from realizing that these accomplished plants at all resembled the quiet, respectable weed beside our rubbish heap. Not until the pictures began to appear did we realize that they were identical with it save in size.
The newsreel men were quickly off the mark. Possibly they got some good and interesting pictures for their trouble of flying to outlandish places, but there was a current theory among cutters that more than a few seconds of any one news subject—except a boxing match—could not fail to paralyze an audience with boredom. My first view, therefore, of a development which was to play such an important part in my future, as well as in so many other people’s, was a glimpse sandwiched between a hula contest in Honolulu and the First Lady launching a battleship. (No, that is no anachronism. They were still building them: even admirals have to live.) I was permitted to see a few triffids sway across the screen to the kind of accompaniment supposed to be on the level of the great movie-going public:
“And now, folks, get a load of what our cameraman found in Ecuador. Vegetables on vacation! You’ve only seen this kind of thing after a party, but down in sunny Ecuador they see it any time—and no hangover to follow! Monster plants on the march! Say, now, that’s given me a big idea! Maybe if we can educate our potatoes right we can fix it so they’ll walk right into the pot. How’d that be, Momma?”
For the short time the scene was on I stared at it, fascinated. There was our mysterious rubbish-heap plant grown to a height of seven feet or more. There was no mistaking it—and it was “walking”!
The bole, which I now saw for the first time, was shaggy with little rootlet hairs. It would have been almost spherical but for three bluntly tapered projections extending from the lower part. Supported on these, the main body was lifted about a foot clear of the ground.
When it “walked” it moved rather like a man on crutches. Two of the blunt “legs” slid forward, then the whole thing lurched as the rear one drew almost level with them, then the two in front slid forward again. At each “step” the long stem whipped violently back and forth; it gave one a kind of seasick feeling to watch it. As a method of progress it looked both strenuous and clumsy—faintly reminiscent of young elephants at play. One felt that if it were to go on lurching for long in that fashion it would be bound to strip all its leaves if it did not actually break its stem. Nevertheless, ungainly though it looked, it was contriving to cover the ground at something like an average walking pace.
That was about all I had time to see before the battleship launching began. It was not a lot, but it was enough to incite an investigating spirit in a boy. For if that thing in Ecuador could do a trick like that, why not the one in our garden? Admittedly ours was a good deal smaller, but it did look the same….
About ten minutes after I got home I was digging round our triffid, carefully loosening the earth near it to encourage it to “walk.”
Unfortunately there was an aspect of this self-propelled plant discovery which the newsreel people either had not experienced or had chosen for some reason of their own not to reveal. There was no warning, either. I was bending down, intent on clearing the earth without harming the plant, when something from nowhere hit me one terrific slam and knocked me out….
I woke up to find myself in bed, with my mother, my father, and the doctor watching me anxiously. My head felt as if it were split open. I was aching all over, and, as I later discovered, one side of my face was decorated with a blotchy red raised weal. The insistent questions as to how I came to be lying unconscious in the garden were quite useless; I had no faintest idea what it was that had hit me. And some little time passed before I learned that I must have been one of the first persons in England to be stung by a triffid and get away with it. The triffid was, of course, immature. But before I had fully recovered my father had found out what had undoubtedly happened to me, and by the time I went into the garden again he had wreaked stern vengeance on our triffid and disposed of the remains on a bonfire.
Now that walking plants were established facts, the press lost its former tepidity and bathed them in publicity. So a name had to be found for them. Already there were botanists wallowing, after their custom, in polysyllabic dog Latin and Greek to produce variants on ambulans and pseudopodia, but what the newspapers and the public wanted was something easy on the tongue and not too heavy on the headlines for general use. If you could see the papers of that time you would find them referring to: and a number of other mysterious things not even beginning with “tri”—though almost all centered on the feature of that active, three-pronged root.
TRICHOTS TRINITS
TRICUSPS TRIPEDALS
TRIGENATES TRIPEDS
TRIGONS TRIQUETS
TRILOGS TRIPODS
TRIDENTATES TRIPPETS
There was argument, public, private, and bar-parlor, with heated championship of one term or another on near-scientific, quasi-etymological, and a number of other grounds, but gradually one term began to dominate this philological gymkhana. In its first form it was not quite acceptable, but common usage modified the original long first “i,” and custom quickly wrote in a second “f,” to leave no doubt about it And so emerged the standard term. A catchy little name originating in some newspaper office as a handy label for an oddity—but destined one day to be associated with pain, fear, and misery—TRIFFID….
The first wave of public interest soon ebbed away. Triffids were, admittedly, a bit weird—but that was, after all, just because they were a novelty. People had felt the same about novelties of other days; about kangaroos, giant lizards, black swans. And when you came to think of it, were triffids all that much queerer than mudfish, ostriches, polliwogs, and a hundred other things? The bat was an animal that had learned to fly; well, here was a plant that had learned to walk—what of that?
People were surprised, and a little disgusted, to learn that the species was carnivorous, and that the flies and other insects caught in the cups were actually digested by the sticky substance there. We in temperate zones were not ignorant of insectivorous plants, but we were unaccustomed to finding them outside special hothouses, and apt to consider them as in some way slightly indecent, or at least improper. But actually alarming was the discovery that the whorl topping a triffid’s stem could lash out as a slender stinging weapon ten feet long, capable of discharging enough poison to kill a man if it struck squarely on his unprotected skin.
As soon as this danger was appreciated there followed a nervous smashing and chopping of triffids everywhere, until it occurred to someone that all that was necessary to make them harmless was the removal of the actual stinging weapon. At this, the slightly hysterical assault upon the plants declined, with their numbers considerably thinned. A little later it began to be a fashion to have a safely docked triffid or two about one’s garden. It was found that it took about two years for the lost sting to be dangerously replaced, so that an annual pruning assured that they were in a state of safety where they could provide vast amusement for the children.
In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.