by John Wyndham
“You don’t think they’ll come?”
“I’m darned sure they won’t.” He regarded the three. “Do you belong to Beadley’s lot?” he asked.
The response was convincingly blank.
“Pity,” said Coker. “That’d have been our first real stroke of luck in quite a time.”
“What is, or are, Beadley’s lot?” inquired the fair man.
I was feeling wilted and dry after some hours in the driving cab with the sun on it. I suggested that we might remove discussion from the middle of the street to some more congenial spot. We passed round their trucks through a familiar litter of cases of biscuits, chests of tea, sides of bacon, sacks of sugar, blocks of salt, and all the rest of it to a small bar parlor next door. Over pint pots Coker and I gave them a short résumé of what we’d done and what we knew.
They were an oddly assorted trio. The fair-haired man turned out to be a member of the Stock Exchange by the name of Stephen Brennell. His companion was a good-looking, well-built girl with an occasional superficial petulance but no real surprise over whatever life might hand her next. She had led one of those fringe careers—modeling dresses, selling them, putting in movie-extra work, missing opportunities of going to Hollywood, hostessing for obscure clubs, and helping out these activities by such other means as offered themselves. She had an utterly unshakable conviction that nothing serious could have happened to America, and that it was only a matter of holding out for a while until the Americans arrived to put everything in order. She was quite the least troubled person I had encountered since the catastrophe took place. Though just occasionally she pined a little for the bright lights which she hoped the Americans would hurry up and restore.
The third member, the dark young man, nursed a grudge. He had worked hard and saved hard in order to start his small radio store, and he had ambitions. “Look at Ford,” he told us, “and look at Lord Nuffield—he started with a bike shop no bigger than my radio store, and see where he got to! That’s the kind of thing I was going to do. And now look at the damned mess things are in! It ain’t fair!” Fate, as he saw it, didn’t want any more Fords or Nuffields—but he didn’t intend to take that lying down. This was only an interval sent to try him—one day would see him back in his radio store with his foot set firmly on the first rung to millionairedom.
The most disappointing thing about them was to find that they knew nothing of the Michael Beadley party. Indeed, the only group they had encountered was in a village just over the Devon border, where a couple of men with shotguns had advised them not to come that way again. Those men, they said, were obviously local. Coker suggested that that meant a small group.
“If they had belonged to a large one they’d have shown less nervousness and more curiosity,” he maintained. “But if the Beadley lot are round here, we ought to be able to find them somehow.” He put it to the fair man: “Look here, suppose we come along with you? We can do our whack, and when we do find them it will make things easier for all of us.”
The three of them looked questioningly at one another and then nodded.
“All right. Give us a hand with the loading, and we’ll be getting along,” the man agreed.
By the look of Charcott Old House, it had once been a fortified manor. Refortification was now under way. At some time in the past the encircling moat had been drained. Stephen, however, was of the opinion that he had successfully ruined the drainage system so that it would fill up again by degrees. It was his plan to blow out such parts as had been filled in, and thus complete the reencirclement. Our news, suggesting that this might not be necessary, induced a slight wistfulness in him, and a look of disappointment. The stone walls of the house were thick. At least three of the windows in the front displayed machine guns, and he pointed out two more mounted on the roof. Inside the main door was stacked a small arsenal of mortars and bombs, and, as he proudly pointed out, several flame throwers.
“We found an arms depot,” he explained, “and spent a day getting this lot together.”
As I looked over the stuff I realized for the first time that the catastrophe, by its very thoroughness, had been more merciful than the things that would have followed a slightly lesser disaster. Had 10 or 15 per cent of the population remained unharmed, it was very likely that little communities like this would indeed have found themselves fighting off starving gangs in order to preserve their own lives. As things were, however, Stephen had probably made his warlike preparations in vain. But there was one appliance that could be put to good use. I pointed to the flame throwers.
“Those might be handy for triffids,” I said.
He grinned.
“You’re right. Very effective. The one thing we’ve used them for. And, incidentally, the one thing I know that really makes a triffid beat it. You can go on firing at them until they’re shot to bits, and they don’t budge. I suppose they don’t know where the destruction’s coming from. But one warm lick from this and they’re plunging off fit to bust themselves.”
“Have you had a lot of trouble with them?” I asked.
It seemed that they had not. From time to time one, perhaps two or three, would approach, and be scorched away. On their expeditions they had had several lucky escapes, but usually they were out of their vehicles only in built-up areas where there was little likelihood of prowling triffids.
That night, after dark, we all went up to the roof. It was too early for the moon. We looked out upon an utterly black landscape. Search it as we would, not one of us was able to discover the least pin point of a telltale light. Nor could any of the party recall ever having seen a trace of smoke by day. I was feeling depressed when we descended again to the lamp-lit living room.
“There’s only one thing for it, then,” Coker said. “We’ll have to divide the district up into areas and search them.”
But he did not say it with conviction. I suspected that he was thinking it likely, as I was, that the Beadley party would continue to show a deliberate light by night and some other sign—probably a smoke column—by day.
However, no one had any better suggestion to make, so we got down to the business of dividing the map up into sections, doing our best to contrive that each should include some high ground to give an extensive view beyond it.
The following day we went into the town in a truck, and from there dispersed in smaller cars for the search.
That was, without a doubt, the most melancholy day I had spent since I had wandered about Westminster searching for traces of Josella there.
Just at first it wasn’t too bad. There was the open road in the sunlight, the fresh green of early summer. There were signposts which pointed to “Exeter & The West,” and other places, as if they still pursued their habitual lives. There were sometimes, though rarely, birds to be seen. And there were wild flowers beside the lanes, looking as they had always looked.
But the other side of the picture was not as good. There were fields in which cattle lay dead or wandered blindly, and untended cows lowed in pain. Where sheep in their easy discouragement had stood resignedly to die rather than pull themselves free from bramble or barbed wire, and other sheep grazed erratically or starved helplessly with looks of reproach in their blind eyes.
Farms were becoming unpleasant places to pass closely. For safety’s sake I was giving myself only an inch of ventilation at the top of the window, but I closed even that whenever I saw a farm beside the road ahead.
Triffids were at large. Sometimes I saw them crossing fields or noticed them inactive against hedges. In more than one farmyard they had found the middens to their liking and enthroned themselves there while they waited for the dead stock to attain the right stage of putrescence. I saw them now with a disgust that they had never roused in me before. Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our careless greed, had cultured all over the world. One could not even blame nature for them. Somehow they had been bred—just as we had bred for ourselves beautiful f
lowers or grotesque parodies of dogs…. I began to loathe them now on account of more than their carrion-eating habits—for they, more than anything else, seemed able to profit and flourish on our disaster….
As the day went on, my sense of loneliness grew. On any hill or rise I stopped to examine the country as far as field glasses would show me. Once I saw smoke and went to the source to find a small railway train burned out on the line—I still do not know how that could be, for there was no one near it. Another time a flag upon a staff sent me hurrying to a house to find it silent—though not empty. Yet another time a white flutter of movement on a distant hillside caught my eye, but when I turned the glasses on it I found it to be half a dozen sheep milling in panic while a triffid struck continually and ineffectively across their woolly backs. Nowhere could I see a sign of living human beings.
When I stopped for food I did not linger longer than I need. I ate it quickly, listening to a silence that was beginning to get on my nerves, and anxious to be on my way again with at least the sound of the car for company.
One began to fancy things. Once I saw an arm waving from a window, but when I got there it was only a branch swaying in front of the window. I saw a man stop in the middle of a field and turn to watch me go by; but the glasses showed me that he couldn’t have stopped or turned: he was a scarecrow. I heard voices calling to me, just discernible above the engine noise; I stopped, and switched off. There were no voices, nothing, but far, far away the plaint of an unmilked cow.
It came to me that here and there, dotted about the country, there must be men and women who were believing themselves to be utterly alone, sole survivors. I felt as sorry for them as for anyone else in the disaster.
During the afternoon, with lowered spirits and little hope, I kept doggedly on, quartering my section of the map, because I dared not risk failing to make my inner certainty sure. At last, however, I satisfied myself that if any sizable party did exist in the area I had been allotted, it was deliberately hiding. It had not been possible for me to cover every lane and by-road, but I was willing to swear that the sound of my by no means feeble horn had been heard in every acre of my sector. I finished up and drove back to the place where we had parked the truck in the gloomiest mood I had yet known. I found that none of the others had shown up yet, so to pass the time, and because I needed it to keep out the spiritual cold, I turned into the nearby pub and poured myself a good brandy.
Stephen was the next to return. The expedition seemed to have affected him much as it had me, for he shook his head in answer to my questioning look and made straight for the bottle I had opened. Ten minutes later the radio ambitionist joined us. He brought with him a disheveled, wild-eyed young man who appeared not to have washed or shaved for several weeks. This person had been on the road; it was, it seemed, his only profession. One evening, he could not say for certain of what day, he had found a fine comfortable barn in which to spend the night. Having done somewhat more than his usual quota of miles that day, he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he lay down. The next morning he had awakened in a nightmare, and he still seemed a little uncertain whether it was the world or himself that was crazy. We reckoned he was, a little, anyway, but he still retained a clear knowledge of the use of beer.
Another half hour or so passed, and then Coker arrived. He had had no better luck than Stephen and I.
Back in Charcott Old House that evening we gathered again around the map. Coker started to mark out new areas of search. We watched him without enthusiasm. It was Stephen who said what all of us, including, I think, Coker himself, were thinking:
“Look here, we’ve been over all the ground for a circle of some fifteen miles between us. It’s clear they aren’t in the immediate neighborhood. Either your information is wrong or they decided not to stop here and went on. In my view it would be a waste of time to go on searching the way we did today.”
Coker laid down the compasses he was using.
“Then what do you suggest?”
“Well, it seems to me we could cover a lot of ground pretty quickly from the air, and well enough. You can bet your life that anyone who hears an aircraft engine is going to turn out and make a sign of some kind.”
Coker shook his head. “Now why didn’t we think of that before? It ought to be a helicopter, of course—but where do we get one, and who’s going to fly it?”
“Oh, I can make one of them things go, all right,” said the radioman confidently.
There was something in his tone.
“Have you ever flown one?” asked Coker.
“No,” admitted the radioman, “but I reckon there’d not be a lot to it, once you got the knack.”
“H’m,” said Coker, looking at him with reserve.
Stephen recalled the locations of two R.A.F. stations not far away, and that there had been an air-taxi business operating from Yeovil.
In spite of our doubts, the radioman was as good as his word. He seemed to have complete confidence that his instinct for mechanism would not let him down. After practicing for half an hour, he took the helicopter off and flew it back to Charcott.
For four days the machine hovered around in widening circles. On two of them Coker observed; on the other two I replaced him. In all, we discovered ten little groups of people. None of them knew anything of the Beadley party, and none of them contained Josella. As we found each lot, we landed. Usually they were in twos and threes. The largest was seven. They would greet us in hopeful excitement, but soon, when they found that we represented only a group similar to their own, and were not the spearhead of a rescue party on the grand scale, their interest would lapse. We could offer them little that they had not got already. Some of them became irrationally abusive and threatening in their disappointment, but most simply dropped back into despondency. As a rule they showed little wish to join up with other parties and were inclined rather to lay hands on what they could, building themselves into refuges as comfortably as possible while they waited for the arrival of the Americans, who were bound to find a way. There seemed to be a widespread and fixed idea about this. Our suggestions that any surviving Americans would be likely to have their hands more than full at home was received as so much wet-blanketry. The Americans, they assured us, would never have allowed such a thing to happen in their country. Nevertheless, and in spite of this Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers, we left each party with a map showing them the approximate positions of groups we had already discovered, in case they should change their minds and think about getting together for self-help.
As a task, the flights were far from enjoyable, but at least they were to be preferred to lonely scouting on the ground. However, at the end of the fruitless fourth day it was decided to abandon the search.
At least that was what the rest of them decided. I did not feel the same way about it. My quest was personal; theirs was not. Whoever they found, now or eventually, would be strangers to them. I was searching for Beadley’s party as a means, not an end in itself. If I should find them and discover that Josella was not with them, then I should go on searching. But I could not expect the rest to devote any more time to searching purely on my behalf.
Curiously I realized that in all this I had met no other person who was searching for someone else. Every one of them had been, save for the accident of Stephen and his girl friend, snapped clean away from friends or relatives to link him with the past, and was beginning a new life with people who were strangers. Only I, as far as I could see, had promptly formed a new link—and that so briefly that I had scarcely been aware how important it was to me at the time….
Once the decision to abandon the search had been taken, Coker said:
“All right. Then that brings us to thinking about what we are going to do for ourselves.”
“Which means laying in stores against the winter, and just going on as we are. What else should we do?” asked Stephen.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Coker told him. “Maybe it’d be al
l right for a while—but what happens afterward?”
“If we do run short of stocks—well, there’s plenty more lying around,” said the radioman.
“The Americans will be here before Christmas,” said Stephen’s girl friend.
“Listen,” Coker told her patiently. “Just put the Americans in the jam-tomorrow-pie-in-the-sky department awhile, will you. Try to imagine a world in which there aren’t any Americans—can you do that?”
The girl stared at him.
“But there must be,” she said.
Coker sighed sadly. He turned his attention to the radioman.
“There won’t always be those stores. The way I see it, we’ve been given a flying start in a new kind of world. We’re endowed with a capital of enough of everything to begin with, but that isn’t going to last forever. We couldn’t eat up all the stuff that’s there for the taking, not in generations—if it would keep. But it isn’t going to keep. A lot of it is going to go bad pretty rapidly. And not only food. Everything is going, more slowly but quite surely, to drop to pieces. If we want fresh stuff to eat next year, we shall have to grow it ourselves; and it may seem a long way off now, but there’s going to come a time when we shall have to grow everything ourselves. There’ll come a time, too, when all the tractors are worn out or rusted, and there’s no more gas to run them, anyway—when we’ll come right down to nature and bless horses—if we’ve got ’em.
“This is a pause—just a heaven-sent pause—while we get over the first shock and start to collect ourselves, but it’s no more than a pause. Later we’ll have to plow; still later we’ll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than that we’ll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we can—if we can—make good all that we wear out. Not until then shall we be able to stop ourselves on the trail that’s leading down to savagery. But once we can do that, then maybe we’ll begin to crawl slowly up again.”