by John Wyndham
The traveler very easily failed to notice one among the normal bushes and undergrowth, and the moment he was in range the venomous sting would slash out. Even the regular inhabitant of such a district found it difficult to detect a motionless triffid cunningly lurking beside a jungle path. They were uncannily sensitive to any movement near them, and hard to take unawares.
Dealing with them became a serious problem in such regions. The most favored method was to shoot the top off the stem, and the sting with it. The jungle natives took to carrying long, light poles mounted with hooked knives, which they used effectively if they could get their blows in first—but not at all if the triffid had a chance to sway forward and increase its range by an unexpected four or five feet. Before long, however, these pikelike devices were mostly superseded by spring-operated guns of various types. Most of them shot spinning disks, crosses, or small boomerangs of thin steel. As a rule they were inaccurate above about twelve yards, though capable of slicing a triffid stem neatly at twenty-five if they hit it. Their invention pleased both the authorities—who had an almost unanimous distaste for the indiscriminate toting of rifles—and the users, who found the missiles of razor-blade steel far cheaper and lighter than cartridges, and admirably adaptable to silent banditry.
Elsewhere, immense research into the nature, habits, and constitution of the triffid went on. Earnest experimenters set out to determine, in the interests of science, how far and for how long it could walk; whether it could be said to have a front, or could perform its march in any direction with equal clumsiness; what proportion of its time it must spend with its roots in the ground; what reactions it showed to the presence of various chemicals in the soil; and a vast quantity of other questions, both useful and useless.
The largest specimen ever observed in the tropics stood nearly ten feet high. No European specimen over eight feet had been seen, and the average was little over seven. They appeared to adapt easily to a wide range of climate and soils. They had, it seemed, no natural enemies—other than man.
But there were a number of not unobvious characteristics which escaped comment for some little time. It was, for instance, quite a while before anyone drew attention to the uncanny accuracy with which they aimed their stings, and that they almost invariably struck for the head. Nor did anyone at first take notice of their habit of lurking near their fallen victims. The reason for that became clear only when it was shown that they fed upon flesh as well as upon insects. The stinging tendril did not have the muscular power to tear firm flesh, but it had strength enough to pull shreds from a decomposing body and lift them to the cup on its stem.
There was no great interest, either, in the three little leafless sticks at the base of the stem. There was a light notion that they might have something to do with the reproductive system—that system which tends to be a sort of botanical glory-hole for all parts of doubtful purpose until they can be sorted out and more specifically assigned later on. It was assumed, consequently, that their characteristic of suddenly losing their immobility and rattling a rapid tattoo against the main stem was some strange form of triffidian amatory exuberance.
Possibly my uncomfortable distinction of getting myself stung so early in the triffid era had the effect of stimulating my interest, for I seemed to have a sort of link with them from then on. I spent—or “wasted,” if you look at me through my father’s eyes—a great deal of fascinated time watching them.
One could not blame him for considering this a worthless pursuit, yet later the time turned out to have been better employed than either of us suspected, for it was just before I left school that the Artic & European Fish Oil Company reconstituted itself, dropping the word “Fish” in the process. The public learned that it and similar companies in other countries were about to farm triffids on a large scale, in order to extract valuable oils and juices and to press highly nutritious oil cake for stock feeding. Consequently, triffids moved into the realm of big business overnight.
Right away I decided my future. I applied to the Arctic & European, where my qualifications got me a job on the production side. My father’s disapproval was somewhat qualified by the rate of pay, which was good for my age. But when I spoke enthusiastically of the future he blew doubtfully through his mustache. He had real faith only in a type of work steadied by long tradition, but he let me have my way. “After all, if the thing isn’t a success, you’ll find out young enough to start in on something more solid,” he conceded.
There turned out to be no need for that. Before he and my mother were killed together in a holiday airbus crash five years later, they had seen the new companies drive all competing oils off the market and those of us who had been in at the beginning apparently well set for life.
One of the early comers was my friend Walter Lucknor.
There had been some doubt at first about taking Walter on. He knew little of agriculture, less of business, and lacked the qualifications for lab work. On the other hand, he did know a lot about triffids—he had a kind of inspired knack with them.
What happened to Walter that fatal May years later I do not know—though I can guess. It is a sad thing that he did not escape. He might have been immensely valuable later on. I don’t think anybody really understands triffids, or ever will, but Walter came nearer to beginning to understand them than any man I have known. Or should I say that he was given to intuitive feelings about them?
It was a year or two after the job had begun that he first surprised me.
The sun was close to setting. We had knocked off for the day and were looking with a sense of satisfaction at three new fields of nearly fully grown triffids. In those days we didn’t simply corral them as we did later. They were arranged across the fields roughly in rows—at least the steel stakes to which each was tethered by a chain were in rows, though the plants themselves had no sense of tidy regimentation. We reckoned that in another month or so we’d be able to start tapping them for juice. The evening was peaceful; almost the only sounds that broke it were the occasional rattlings of the triffids’ little sticks against their stems. Walter regarded them with his head slightly on one side. He removed his pipe.
“They’re talkative tonight,” he observed.
I took that as anyone else would, metaphorically.
“Maybe it’s the weather,” I suggested. “I fancy they do it more when it’s dry.”
He looked sidelong at me, with a smile.
“Do you talk more when it’s dry?”
“Why should—” I began, and then broke off. “You don’t really mean you think they’re talking?” I said, noticing his expression.
“Well, why not?”
“But it’s absurd. Plants talking!”
“So much more absurd than plants walking?” he asked.
I stared at them, and then back at him.
“I never thought—” I began doubtfully.
“You try thinking of it a bit, and watching them—I’d be interested to hear your conclusions,” he said.
It was a curious thing that in all my dealings with triffids such a possibility had never occurrred to me. I’d been prejudiced, I suppose, by the love-call theory. But once he had put the idea into my mind, it stuck. I couldn’t get away from the feeling that they might indeed be rattling out secret messages to one another.
Up to then I’d fancied I’d watched triffids pretty closely, but when Walter was talking about them I felt that I’d noticed practically nothing. He could, when he was in the mood, talk on about them for hours, advancing theories that were sometimes wild but sometimes not impossible.
The public had by this time grown out of thinking triffids freakish. They were clumsily amusing, but not greatly interesting. The company found them interesting, however, It took the view that their existence was a piece of benevolence for everyone—particularly for itself. Walter shared neither view. At times, listening to him, I began to have some misgivings myself.
He had become quite certain that they “talked.”
“And there’s certainly intelligence there, of a kind. Have you noticed that when they attack they always go for the unprotected parts? Almost always the head—but sometimes the hands. And another thing: if you look at the statistics of casualties, just take notice of the proportion that has been stung across the eyes and blinded. It’s remarkable—and significant.”
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of the fact that they know what is the surest way to put a man out of action—in other words, they know what they’re doing. Look at it this way. Granted that they do have intelligence; then that would leave us with only one important superiority—sight. We can see, and they can’t. Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone. Worse than that—our position becomes inferior to theirs, because they are adapted to a sightless existence and we are not.”
“But even if that were so, they can’t do things. They can’t handle things. There’s very little muscular strength in that sting lash,” I pointed out.
“True, but what’s the good of our ability to handle things if we can’t see what to do with them? Anyway, they don’t need to handle things—not in the way we do. They can get their nourishment direct from the soil, or from insects and bits of raw meat. They don’t have to go through all the complicated business of growing things, distributing them, and usually cooking them as well. In fact, if it were a choice for survival between a triffid and a blind man, I know which I’d put my money on.”
“You’re assuming equal intelligence,” I said.
“Not at all. I don’t need to. I should imagine it’s likely to be an altogether different type of intelligence, if only because their needs are so much simpler. Look at the complex processes we have to use to get an assimilable extract from a triffid. Now reverse that. What does the triffid have to do? Just sting us, wait a few days, and then begin to assimilate us. The simple, natural course of things.”
He would go on like that by the hour until listening to him would have me getting things out of porportion and I’d find myself thinking of the triffids as though they were some kind of competitor. Walter himself never pretended to think otherwise. He had, he admitted, thought of writing a book on that very aspect of the subject when he had gathered more material.
“Had?” I repeated. “What’s stopping you?”
“Just this.” He waved his hand to include the farm generally. “It’s a vested interest now. It wouldn’t pay anyone to put out disturbing thoughts about it. Anyway, we have the triffids controlled well enough so it’s an academic point and scarcely worth raising.”
“I never can be quite sure with you,” I told him. “I’m never certain how far you are serious and how far beyond your facts you allow your imagination to lead you. Do you honestly think there is a danger in the things?”
He puffed a bit at his pipe before he answered.
“That’s fair enough,” he admitted, “because—well, I’m by no means sure myself. But I’m pretty certain of one thing, and that is that there could be danger in them. I’d feel a lot nearer giving you a real answer if I could get a line on what it means when they patter. Somehow I don’t care for that. There they sit, with everyone thinking no more of them than they might of a pretty odd lot of cabbages, yet half the time they’re pattering and clattering away at one another. Why? What is it they patter about? That’s what I want to know.”
I think Walter rarely gave a hint of his ideas to anyone else, and I kept them confidential, partly because I knew no one who wouldn’t be more skeptical than I was myself and partly because it wouldn’t do either of us any good to get a reputation in the firm as crackpots.
For a year or so more we were working fairly close together. But with the opening of new nurseries and the need for studying methods abroad, I began to travel a lot. He gave up the field work and went into the research department It suited him there, doing his own searching as well as the company’s. I used to drop in to see him from time to time. He was forever making experiments with his triffids, but the results weren’t clearing his general ideas as much as he had hoped. He had proved, to his own satisfaction at least, the existence of a well-developed intelligence—and even I had to admit that his results seemed to show something more than instinct. He was still convinced that the pattering of the sticks was a form of communication. For public consumption he had shown that the sticks were something more, and that a triffid deprived of them gradually deteriorated. He had also established that the infertility rate of triffid seeds was something like 95 per cent.
“Which,” he remarked, “is a damned good thing. If they all germinated, there’d soon be standing room only, for triffids only, on this planet.”
With that, too, I agreed. Triffid-seed time was quite a sight. The dark green pod just below the cup was glistening and distended, about half as big again as a large apple. When it burst, it did it with a pop that was audible twenty yards away. The white seeds shot into the air like steam and began drifting away on the lightest of breezes. Looking down on a field of triffids late in August, you could well get the idea that some kind of desultory bombardment was going on.
It was Walter’s discovery again that the quality of the extracts was improved if the plants retained their stings. In consequence, the practice of docking was discontinued on farms throughout the trade, and we had to wear protective devices when working among the plants.
At the time of the accident that had landed me in hospital I was actually with Walter. We were examining some specimens which were showing unusual deviations. Both of us were wearing wire-mesh masks. I did not see exactly what happened. All I know is that as I bent forward a sting slashed viciously at my face and smacked against the wire of the mask. Ninety-nine times in a hundred it would not have mattered; that was what the masks were for. But this one came with such force that some of the little poison sacs were burst open, and a few drops from them went into my eyes.
Walter got me back into his lab and administered the antidote in a few seconds. It was entirely due to his quick work that they had the chance of saving my sight at all. But even so it had meant over a week in bed, in the dark.
While I lay there I had quite decided that when—and if—I had my sight back I was going to apply for a transfer to another side of the business. And if that did not go through, I’d quit the job altogether.
I had built up a considerable resistance to triffid poison since my first sting in the garden. I could take, and had taken, without very much harm, stings which would have laid an inexperienced man out very cold indeed. But an old saying about a pitcher and a well kept on recurring to me. I was taking my warning.
I spent, I remember, a good many of my enforcedly dark hours deciding what kind of job I would try for if they would not give me that transfer.
Considering what was just around the corner for us all, I could scarcely have found a contemplation more idle.
THE GROPING CITY
I left the pub door swinging behind me as I made my way to the corner of the main road. There I hesitated.
To the left, through miles of suburban streets, lay the open country; to the right, the West End of London, with the City beyond. I was feeling somewhat restored, but curiously detached now, and rudderless. I had no glimmering of a plan, and in the face of what I had at last begun to perceive as a vast and not merely local catastrophe, I was still too stunned to begin to reason one out. What plan could there be to deal with such a thing? I felt forlorn, cast into desolation, and yet not quite real, not quite myself here and now. In no direction was there any traffic, nor any sound of it. The only signs of life were a few people here and there cautiously groping their way along the shop fronts.
The day was perfect for early summer. The sun poured down from a deep blue sky set with tufts of
white woolly clouds. All of it was clean and fresh save for a smear made by a single column of greasy smoke coming from somewhere behind the houses to the north.
I stood there indecisively for a few minutes. Then I turned east, Londonward….
To this day I cannot say quite why. Perhaps it was an instinct to seek familiar places, or the feeling that if there were authority anywhere it must be somewhere in that direction.
The brandy had made me feel more hungry than ever, but I did not find the problem of feeding as easy to deal with as it should have been. And yet there were the shops, untenanted and unguarded, with food in the windows—and here was I, with hunger and the means to pay. Or, if I did not wish to pay, I had only to smash a window and take what I wanted.
Nevertheless, it was hard to persuade oneself to do that. I was not yet ready to admit, after nearly thirty years of a reasonably right-respecting existence and law-abiding life, that things had changed in any fundamental way. There was, too, a feeling that as long as I remained my normal self things might even yet, in some inconceivable way, return to their normal. Absurd it undoubtedly was, but I had a very strong sense that the moment I should stove in one of those sheets of plate glass I would leave the old order behind me forever: I should become a looter, a sacker, a low scavenger upon the dead body of the system that had nourished me. Such a foolish niceness of sensibility in a stricken world! And yet it still pleases me to remember that civilized usage did not slide off me at once, and that for a time, at least, I wandered along past displays which made my mouth water while my already obsolete conventions kept me hungry.
The problem resolved itself in a sophistical way after perhaps half a mile. A taxi, after mounting the sidewalk, had finished up with its radiator buried in a pile of delicatessen. That made it seem different from doing my own breaking in. I climbed past the taxi and collected the makings of a good meal. But even then something of the old standards still clung: I conscientiously left a fair price for what I had taken lying on the counter.