The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

  “Why, he brings them,” she said.

  “Don’t point” Josella told her automatically. “What do you mean? I’m sure Bill doesn’t bring them.”

  “But he does. He makes all the noises, and they just come.”

  “Look here,” I said. “What are you talking about? Am I supposed to be whistling them here in my sleep or something?”

  Susan looked huffy.

  “All right. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you after breakfast,” she announced, and withdrew into an offended silence.

  When we had finished she slipped from the table, returning with my twelve-bore and field glasses. We went out onto the lawn. She scoured the view until she found a triffid on the move well beyond our fences and then handed the glasses to me. I watched the thing lurching slowly across a field. It was more than a mile away from us and heading east.

  “Now keep on watching it,” she said.

  She fired the gun into the air.

  A few seconds later the triffid perceptibly altered course toward the south.

  “See?” she inquired, rubbing her shoulder.

  “Well, it did look—Are you sure? Try again,” I suggested. She shook her head.

  “It wouldn’t be any good. All the triffids that heard it are coming this way now. In about ten minutes they’ll stop and listen. If they’re near enough then to hear the ones by the fence clattering, they’ll come on. Or if they’re too far away for that, and we make another noise, then they’ll come. But if they can’t hear anything at all, they’ll wait a bit and then just go on wherever they were going before.”

  I admit that I was somewhat taken aback by this revelation.

  “Well—er,” I said. “You must have been watching them very closely, Susan.”

  “I always watch them. I hate them,” she said, as if that were explanation enough.

  Dennis had joined us as we stood there.

  “I’m with you, Susan,” he said. “I don’t like it. I’ve not liked it for some time. Those damn things have the drop on us.”

  “Oh, come—” I began.

  “I tell you, there’s more to them than we think. How did they know? They started to break loose the moment there was no one to stop them. They were around this house the very next day. Can you account for that?”

  “That’s not new for them,” I said. “In jungle country they used to hang around near the tracks. Quite often they would surround a small village and invade it if they weren’t beaten off. They were a dangerous kind of pest in quite a lot of places.”

  “But not here—that’s my point. They couldn’t do that here until conditions made it possible. They didn’t even try. But when they could, they did it at once—almost as if they knew they could.”

  “Come now, be reasonable, Dennis. Just think what you’re implying,” I told him.

  “I’m quite aware of what I’m implying—some of it, at any rate. I’m making no definite theory, but I do say this: they took advantage of our disadvantages with remarkable speed. I also say that there is something perceptibly like method going on among them right now. You’ve been so wrapped up in your jobs that you’ve not noticed how they’ve been massing up and waiting out there beyond the fence, but Susan has—I’ve heard her talking about it. And just what do you think they’re waiting for?”

  I did not try to answer that just then. I said:

  “You think I’d better lay off using the twelve-bore, which attracts them, and use a triffid gun instead?”

  “It’s not just the gun, it’s all noises,” said Susan. “The tractor’s the worst because it is a loud noise, and it keeps on, so that they can easily find where it comes from. But they can hear the lighting-plant engine quite a long way too. I’ve seen them turn this way when it starts up.”

  “I wish,” I told her irritably, “you’d not keep on saying ‘they hear,’ as if they were animals. They’re not. They don’t ‘hear.’ They’re just plants.”

  “All the same, they do hear, somehow,” Susan retorted stubbornly.

  “Well—anyway, we’ll do something about them,” I promised.

  We did. The first trap was a crude kind of windmill which produced a hearty hammering noise. We fixed it up about half a mile away. It worked. It drew them away from our fence, and from elsewhere. When there were several hundreds of them clustered about it, Susan and I drove over there and turned the flame throwers on them. It worked fairly well a second time too—but after that only a very few of them paid any attention to it. Our next move was to build a kind of stout bay inward from the fence, and then remove part ot the main fence itself, replacing it by a gate. We had chosen a point within earshot of the lighting engine, and we left the gate open. After a couple of days we dropped the gate and destroyed the couple of hundred or so that had come into the pen. That, too, was fairly successful to begin with, but not if we tried it twice in the same place, and even in other places the numbers we netted dropped steadily.

  A tour of the boundaries every few days with a flame thrower could have kept the numbers down effectively, but it would have taken a lot of time and soon have run us out of fuel. A flame thrower’s consumption is high, and the stocks held for it in the arms depots were not large. Once we finished it, our valuable flame throwers would become little better than junk, for I knew neither the formula for an efficient fuel nor the method of producing it.

  On the two or three occasions we tried mortar bombs on concentrations of triffids the results were disappointing. Triffids share with trees the ability to take a lot of damage without lethal harm.

  As time went on, the numbers collected along the fence continued to increase in spite of our traps and occasional holocausts. They didn’t try anything, or do anything there. They simply settled down, wriggled their roots into the soil, and remained. At a distance they looked as inactive as any other hedge, and but for the pattering that some few of them were sure to be making, they might have been no more remarkable. But if one doubted their alertness, it was necessary only to take a car down the lane. To do so was to run a gantlet of such viciously slashing stings that it was necessary to stop the car at the main road and wipe the windscreen clear of poison.

  Now and then one of us would have a new idea for their discouragement, such as spraying the ground beyond the fence with a strong arsenical solution, but the retreats we caused were only temporary.

  We’d been trying out a variety of such dodges for a year or more before the day when Susan came running into our room early one morning to tell us that the things had broken in and were all round the house. She had got up early to do the milking, as usual. The sky outside her bedroom window was gray, but when she went downstairs she found everything there in complete darkness. She realized that should not be so and turned on the light. The moment she saw leathery green leaves pressed against the windows she guessed what had happened.

  I crossed the bedroom on tiptoe and pulled the window shut sharply. Even as it closed, a sting whipped up from below and smacked against the glass. We looked down on a thicket of triffids standing ten or twelve deep against the wall of the house. The flame throwers were in one of the outhouses. I took no risks when I went to fetch them. In thick clothing and gloves, with a leather helmet and goggles beneath the mesh mask, I hacked a way through the throng of triffids with the largest carving knife I could find. The stings whipped and slapped at the wire mesh so frequently that they wet it, and the poison began to come through in a fine spray. It misted the goggles, and the first thing I did in the outhouse was to wash it off my face. I dared not use more than a brief, low-aimed jet from one of the throwers to clear my way back, for fear of setting the door and window frames alight, but it moved and agitated them enough for me to get back unmolested.

  Josella and Susan stood by with fire extinguishers while I, still looking like a cross between a deep-sea diver and a man from Mars, leaned from the upper windows on each side of the house in turn and played the thrower over the besieging mob of the brutes. It did n
ot take very long to incinerate a number of them and get the rest on the move. Susan, now dressed for the job, took the second thrower and started on the, to her, highly congenial task of hunting them down while I set off across the field to find the source of the trouble. That was not difficult. From the first rise I was able to see the spot where triffids were still lurching into our enclosure in a stream of tossing stems and waving leaves. They fanned out a little on the nearer side, but all of them were bound in the direction of the house. It was simple to head them off. A jet in front stopped them; one to either side started them back on the way they had come. An occasional spurt over them, and dripping down among them, hurried them up and turned back later comers. Twenty yards or so of the fence was lying flat, with the posts snapped off. I rigged it up temporarily there and then and played the thrower back and forth, giving the things enough of a scorching to prevent more trouble for a few hours at least.

  Josella, Susan, and I spent most of the day repairing the breach. Two more days passed before Susan and I could be sure that we had searched every corner of the enclosure and accounted for the very last of the intruders. We followed that up with an inspection of the whole length of the fence and a reinforcement of all doubtful sections. Four months later they broke in again.

  This time a number of broken triffids lay in the gap. Our impression was that they had been crushed in the pressure that had been built up against the fence before it gave way, and that, falling with it, they had been trampled by the rest.

  It was clear that we should have to take new defensive measures. No part of our fence was any stronger than that which had given way. Electrification seemed the most likely means of keeping them at a distance. To power it, I found an army generator mounted on a trailer and towed it home. Susan and I set to work on the wiring. Before we had completed it the brutes were through again in another place.

  I believe that system would have been completely effective if we could have kept it in action all the time—or even most of the time. But against that there was the fuel consumption. Gas was one of the most valuable of our stores. Food of some kind we could always hope to grow, but when gasoline and Diesel oil were no longer available, much more than our mere convenience would be gone with them. There would be no more expeditions, and consequently no more replenishments of supplies. The primitive life would start in earnest. So, from motives of conservation, the barrier wire was charged for only a few minutes two or three times a day. It caused the triffids to recoil a few yards, and thereby stopped them building up pressure against the fence. As an additional guard we ran an alarm wire on the inner fence to enable us to deal with any breaks before they became serious.

  The weakness lay in the triffids’ apparent ability to learn, in at least a limited way, from experience. We found, for instance, that they grew accustomed to our practice of charging the wire for a while night and morning. We began to notice that they were usually clear of the wire at our customary time for starting the engine, and they started to close in again soon after it had stopped. Whether they actually associated the charged condition of the wire with the sound of the engine was impossible to say then, but later we had little doubt that they did.

  It was easy enough to make our running times erratic, but Susan, for whom they were continually a source of inimical study, soon began to maintain that the period for which the shock kept them clear was growing steadily shorter. Nevertheless, the electrified wire and occasional attacks upon them in the sections where they were densest kept us free of incursions for over a year, and of those that occurred later we had warning enough to stop them being more than a minor nuisance.

  Within the safety of our compound we continued to learn about agriculture, and life settled gradually into a routine.

  On a day in the summer which began our sixth year Josella and I went down to the coast together, traveling there in the half-tracked vehicle that I customarily used now that the roads were growing so bad. It was a holiday for her. Months had passed since she had been outside the fence. The cares of the place and the babies had kept her far too tied to make more than a few necessary trips, but now we had reached the stage where Susan could safely be left in charge sometimes, and we had a feeling of release as we climbed up and ran over the tops of the hills. On the lower southern slopes we stopped the car for a while, and sat there.

  It was a perfect June day, with only a few light clouds flecking a pure blue sky. The sun shone down on the beaches and the sea beyond just as brightly as it had in the days when those same beaches had been crowded with bathers and the sea dotted with little boats. We looked on it in silence for some minutes. Josella said:

  “Don’t you still feel sometimes that if you were to close your eyes for a bit you might open them again to find it all as it was, Bill? … I do.”

  “Not often now,” I told her. “But I’ve had to see so much more of it than you have. All the same, sometimes—”

  “And look at the gulls—just as they used to bel”

  “There are many more birds this year,” I agreed. “I’m glad of that.”

  Viewed impressionistically from a distance, the little town was still the same jumble of small red-roofed houses and bungalows populated mostly by a comfortably retired middle class—but it was an impression that could not last more than a few minutes. Though the tiles still showed, the walls were barely visible. The tidy gardens had vanished under an unchecked growth of green, patched in color here and there by the descendants of carefully cultivated flowers. Even the roads looked like strips of green carpet from this distance. When we reached them we should find that the effect of soft verdure was illusory; they would be matted with coarse, tough weeds.

  “Only so few years ago,” Josella said reflectively, “people were wailing about the way those bungalows were destroying the countryside. Now look at them!”

  “The countryside is having its revenge, all right,” I said. “Nature seemed about finished then—‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’”

  “It rather frightens me. It’s as if everything were breaking out. Rejoicing that we’re finished, and that it’s free to go its own way. I wonder? Have we been just fooling ourselves since it happened? Do you think we really are finished with, Bill?”

  I’d had plenty more time when I was out on my foragings to wonder about that than she had.

  “If you weren’t you, darling, I might make an answer out of the right heroic mold—the kind of wishful thinking that so often passes for faith and resolution.”

  “But I am me?”

  “I’ll give you the honest answer—not quite. And while there’s life, there’s hope.”

  We looked on the scene before us for some seconds in silence.

  “I think,” I amplified, “only think, mind you, that we have a narrow chance—so narrow that it is going to take a long, long time to get back. If it weren’t for the triffids, I’d say there was a very good chance indeed—though still taking a longish time. But the triffids are a real factor. They are something that no rising civilization has had to fight before. Are they going to take the world from us, or are we going to be able to stop them?

  “The real problem is to find some simple way of dealing with them. We aren’t so badly off—we can hold them away. But our grandchildren—what are they going to do about them? Are they going to have to spend all their lives in human reservations kept free of triffids only by unending toil?

  “I’m quite sure there is a simple way. The trouble is that simple ways so often come out of such complicated research. And we haven’t the resources.”

  “Surely we have all the resources there ever were, just for the taking,” Josella put in.

  “Material, yes. But mental, no. What we need is a team, a team of experts really out to deal with the triffids for good and all. Something could be done, I’m sure. Something along the lines of a selective killer, perhaps. If we could produce the right hormones to create a state of imbalance in triffids
but not in other things … It must be possible—if you have enough brain power turned onto the job.”

  “If you think that, why don’t you try?” she asked.

  “Too many reasons. First, I’m not up to it—a very mediocre biochemist, and there’s only one of me. There’d have to be a lab, and equipment. More than that, there’d have to be time, and there are too many things which I have to do as it is. But even if I had the ability, then there would have to be the means of producing synthetic hormones in huge quantities. It would be a job for a regular factory. But before that there must be the research team.”

  “People could be trained.”

  “Yes—when enough of them can be spared from the mere business of keeping alive. I’ve collected a mass of biochemical books in the hope that perhaps sometime there will be people who can make use of them—I shall teach David all I can, and he must hand it on. Unless there is leisure for work on it sometime, I can see nothing ahead but the reservations.”

  Josella frowned down on a group of four triffids ambling across a field below us.

  “If I were a child now,” she said reflectively, “I think I should want a reason for what happened. Unless I was given it—that is, if I were allowed to think that I had been born into a world which had been quite pointlessly destroyed—I should find living quite pointless too. That does make it awfully difficult, because it seems to be just what has happened …”

  She paused, pondering, then she added:

  “Do you think we could—do you think we should be justified in starting a myth to help them? A story of a world that was wonderfully clever, but so wicked that it had to be destroyed—or destroyed itself by accident? Something like the Flood, again? That wouldn’t crush them with inferiority—it could give the incentive to build, and this time to build something better.”

  “Yes …” I said, considering it. “Yes. It’s often a good idea to tell children the truth. Kind of makes things easier for them later on—only why pretend it’s a myth?”

  Josella demurred at that.