by John Wyndham
“How do you mean? The triffids were—well, they were somebody’s fault, or mistake, I admit. But the rest?”
“I don’t think we can blame anyone too much for the triffids. The extracts they give were very valuable in the circumstances. Nobody can ever see what a major discovery is going to lead to—whether it is a new kind of engine or a triffid—and we coped with them all right in normal conditions. We benefited quite a lot from them, as long as the conditions were to their disadvantage.”
“Well, it wasn’t our fault the conditions changed. It was—just one of those things. Like earthquakes or hurricanes—what an insurance company would call an act of God. Maybe that’s just what it was—a judgment. Certainly we never brought that comet.”
“Didn’t we, Josella? Are you quite sure of that?”
She turned to look at me.
“Are you trying to tell me that you don’t think it was a comet at all?”
“Just exactly that,” I agreed.
“But—I don’t understand. It must—What else could it have been?”
I opened a vacuum-packed can of cigarettes and lit one for each of us.
“You remember what Michael Beadley said about the tightrope we’d all been walking on for years?”
“Yes, but—”
“Well, I think that what happened was that we came off it—and that a few of us just managed to survive the crash.”
I drew on my cigarette, looking out at the sea and at the infinite blue sky above it.
“Up there,” I went on, “up there there were—and maybe there still are—unknown numbers of satellite weapons circling round and round the Earth. Just a lot of dormant menaces, touring around, waiting for someone, or something, to set them off. What was in them? You don’t know; I don’t know. Top-secret stuff. All we’ve heard is guesses—fissile materials, radioactive dusts, bacteria, viruses … Now suppose that one type happened to have been constructed especially to emit radiations that our eyes would not stand—something that would burn out or at least damage the optic nerve.”
Josella gripped my hand.
“Oh no, Bill! No, they couldn’t…. That’d be—diabolical. … Oh, I can’t believe—Oh no, Bill!”
“My sweet, all the things up there were diabolical…. Do you doubt that if it could be done, someone would do it? … Then suppose there were a mistake, or perhaps an accident—maybe such an accident as actually encountering a shower of comet debris, if you like—which starts some of these things popping….
“Somebody begins talking about comets. It might not be politic to deny that—and there turned out to be so little time, anyway.
“Well, naturally these things would have been intended to operate close to the ground, where the effect would be spread over a definitely calculable area. But they start going off out there in space, or maybe when they hit the atmosphere—either way, they’re operating so far up that people all round the world can receive direct radiations from them….
“Just what did happen is anyone’s guess now. But one thing I’m quite certain of—that somehow or other we brought this lot down on ourselves…. And there was that plague, too: it wasn’t typhoid, you know….
“I find that it’s just the wrong side of coincidence for me to believe that out of all the thousands of years in which a destructive comet could arrive, it happens to do so just a few years after we have succeeded in establishing satellite weapons—don’t you? No, I think that we kept on that tightrope quite a while, considering the things that might have happened—but sooner or later the foot had to slip.”
“Well, when you put it that way—” murmured Josella. She broke off and was lost in silence for quite a while. Then she said:
“I suppose, in a way, that should be more horrible than the idea of nature striking blindly at us. And yet I don’t think it is. It makes me feel less hopeless about things because it makes them at least comprehensible. If it was like that, then it is at least a thing that can be prevented from happpening again—just one more of the mistakes our very great grandchildren are going to have to avoid. And, oh dear, there were so many, many mistakes! But we can warn them.”
“H’m—well,” I said. “Anyway, once they’ve beaten the triffids, and pulled themselves out of this mess, they’ll have plenty of scope for making brand-new mistakes of their very own.”
“Poor little things,” she said, as if she were gazing down increasingly great rows of grandchildren, “it’s not much that we’re offering them, is it?”
We sat there a little longer, looking at the empty sea, and then drove down to the town.
After a search which produced most of the things on our wants list, we went down to picnic on the shore in the sunshine—with a good stretch of shingle behind us over which no triffid could approach unheard.
“We must do more of this while we can,” Josella said. “Now that Susan’s growing up I needn’t be nearly so tied.”
“If anybody ever earned the right to let up a bit, you have,” I agreed.
I said it with a feeling that I would like us to go together and say a last farewell to places and things we had known, while it was still possible. Every year now the prospect of imprisonment would grow closer. Already, to go northward from Shirning, it was necessary to make a detour of many miles to by-pass the country that had reverted to marshland. All the roads were rapidly growing worse with the erosion by rain and streams, and the roots that broke up the surfaces. The time in which one would still be able to get an oil tanker back to the house was already becoming measurable. One day one of them would fail to make its way along the lane, and very likely block it for good. A half-track would continue to run over ground that was dry enough, but as time went on it would be increasingly difficult to find a route open enough even for that.
“And we must have one real last fling,” I said. “You shall dress up again, and we’ll go to—”
“Sh-sh!” interrupted Josella, holding up one finger and turning her ear to the wind.
I held my breath and strained my ears. There was a feeling, rather than a sound, of throbbing in the air. It was faint, but gradually swelling.
“It is—it’s a plane!” Josella said.
We looked to the west, shading our eyes with our hands. The humming was still little more than the buzzzing of an insect. The sound increased so slowly that it could come from nothing but a helicopter; any other kind of craft would have passed over us or out of hearing in the time it was taking.
Josella saw it first. A dot a little out from the coast, and apparently coming our way, parallel with the shore. We stood up and started to wave. As the dot grew larger, we waved more wildly, and, not very sensibly, shouted at the tops of our voices. The pilot could not have failed to see us there on the open beach had he come on, but that was what he did not do. A few miles short of us he turned abruptly north to pass inland. We went on waving madly, hoping that he might yet catch sight of us. But there was no indecision in the machine’s course, no variation of the engine note. Deliberately and imperturbably it droned away toward the hills.
We lowed our arms and looked at one another.
“If it can come once, it can come again,” said Josella sturdily, but not very convincingly.
But the sight of the machine had changed our day for us. It destroyed quite a lot of the resignation we had carefully built up. We had been saying to ourselves that there must be other groups but they wouldn’t be in any better position han we were, more likely in a worse. But when a helicopter could come sailing in like a sight and sound from the past, it raised more than memories: it suggested that someone somewhere was managing to make out better than we were…. Was there a tinge of jealousy there? … And it also made us aware that, lucky as we had been, we were still gregarious creatures by nature.
The restless feeling that the machine left behind destroyed our mood and the lines along which our thoughts had been running. In unspoken agreement, we began to pack up our belongings, and, each occupied with ou
r thoughts, we made our way back to the half-track and started for home.
CONTACT
We had covered perhaps half the distance back to Shirning when Josella noticed the smoke. At first sight it might have been a cloud, but as we neared the top of the hill we could see the gray column beneath the more diffused upper layer. She pointed to it, and looked at me without a word. The only fires we had seen in years had been a few spontaneous outbreaks in later summer. We both knew at once that the plume ahead was rising from the neighborhood of Shirning.
I forced the half-track along at a greater speed than it had ever done on the deteriorated roads. We were thrown about inside it, and yet still seemed to be crawling. Josella sat silent all the time, her lips pressed together and her eyes fixed on the smoke. I knew that she was searching for some indication that the source was nearer or farther away, anywhere but at Shirning itself. But the closer we came, the less room there was for doubt. We tore up the final lane quite oblivious of the stings whipping at the vehicle as it passed. Then, at the turn, we were able to see that it was not the house itself but the woodpile that was ablaze.
A the sound of the horn Susan came running out to pull on the rope which opened the gate from a safe distance. She shouted something which was drowned in the rattle of our driving in. Her free hand was pointing, not to the fire, but toward the front of the house. As we ran farther into the yard we could see the reason. Skillfully landed in the middle of our lawn stood the helicopter.
By the time we were out of the half-track a man in a leather jacket and breeches had come out of the house. He was tall, fair, and sunburned. At first glance I had a feeling I had seen him somewhere before. He waved, and grinned cheerfully as we hurried across.
“Mr. Bill Masen, I presume. My name is Simpson—Ivan Simpson.”
“I remember,” said Josella. “You brought in a helicopter that night at the University Building.”
“That’s right. Clever of you to remember. But just to show you’re not the only one with a memory: you are Josella Playton, author of—”
“You’re quite wrong,” she interrupted him firmly. “I’m Josella Masen, author of David Masen.”
“Ah, yes. I’ve been looking at the original edition, and a very creditable bit of craftsmanship, too, if I may say so.”
“Hold on a bit,” I said. “That fire—”
“It’s safe enough. Blowing away from the house. Though I’m afraid most of your stock of wood has gone up.”
“What happened?”
“That was Susan. She didn’t mean me to miss the place. When she heard my engine she grabbed a flame thrower and bounded out to start a signal as quickly as she could. The woodpile was handiest—no one could have missed what she did to that.”
We went inside and joined the others.
“By the way,” Simpson said to me, “Michael said I was to be sure to start off with his apologies.”
“To me?” I said, wondering.
“You were the only one who saw any danger in the triffids, and he didn’t believe you.”
“But—do you mean to say you knew I was here?”
“We found out very roughly your probable location a few days ago—from a fellow we all have cause to remember: one Coker.”
“So Coker came through too,” I said. “After the shambles I saw at Tynsham, I’d an idea the plague might have got him.”
Later on, when we had had a meal and produced our best brandy, we got the story out of him.
When Michael Beadley and his party had gone on, leaving Tynsham to the mercies and principles of Miss Durrant, they had not made for Beaminster, nor anywhere near it. They had gone northeast, into Oxfordshire. Miss Durrant’s misdirection to us must have been deliberate, for Beaminster had never been mentioned.
They had found there an estate which seemed at first to offer the group all it required, and no doubt they could have entrenched themselves there as we had entrenched ourselves at Shirning; but as the menace of the triffids increased, the disadvantages of the place became more obvious. In a year both Michael and the Colonel were highly dissatisfied with the longer-term prospects there. A great deal of work had already been put into the place, but by the end of the second summer there was general agreement that it would be better to cut their losses. To build a community they had to think in terms of years—a considerable number of years. They also had to bear in mind that the longer they delayed, the more difficult any move would be. What they needed was a place where they would have room to expand and develop: an area with natural defenses, which, once it had been cleared of triffids, could economically be kept clear of them. Where they now were a high proportion of their labor was occupied with maintaining fences. And as their numbers increased, the length of fence line would have to be increased. Clearly, the best self-maintaining defense line would be water. To that end they had held a discussion on the relative merits of various islands. It had been chiefly climate that had decided them in favor of the Isle of Wight, despite some misgivings over the area that would have to be cleared. Accordingly, in the following March they had packed up again and moved on.
“When we got there,” Ivan said, “the triffids seemed even thicker than where we’d left. No sooner had we begun to settle ourselves into a big country house near Godshill than they started collecting along the walls in thousands. We let ’em come for a couple of weeks or so, then we went for ’em with the flame throwers.
“After we’d wiped that lot out, we let them accumulate again, and then we blitzed ’em once more—and so on. We could afford to do it properly there, because once we were clear of them we’d not need to use the throwers any more. There could only be a limited number on the island, and the more of them that came round us to be wiped out, the better we liked it.
“We had to do it a dozen times before there was any appreciable effect. All round the walls we had a belt of charred stumps before they began to get shy. There were a devil of a lot more of them than we had expected.”
“There used to be at least half a dozen nurseries breeding high quality triffids on the island—not to mention the private and park ones,” I said.
“That doesn’t surprise me. There might have been a hundred nurseries by the look of it. Before all this began I’d have said there were only a few thousand of the things in the whole country, if anyone had asked me, but there must have been hundreds of thousands.”
“There were,” I said. “They’ll grow practically anywhere, and they were pretty profitable. There didn’t seem to be so many when they were penned up in farms and nurseries. All the same, judging from the amount round here, there must be whole tracts of country practically free of them now.”
“That’s so,” he agreed. “But go and live there, and they’ll start collecting in a few days. You can see that from the air. I’d have known there was someone here without Susan’s fire. They make a dark border round any inhabited place.
“Still, we managed to thin down the crowd round our walls after a bit. Maybe they got to find it unhealthy, or maybe they didn’t care a lot for walking about on the charred remains of their relatives—and, of course, there were fewer of them. So then we started going out to hunt them instead of just letting them come to us. It was our main job for months. Between us we covered every inch of the island—or thought we did. By the time we were through we reckoned we’d put paid to every one in the place, big and small. Even so, some managed to appear the next year, and the year after that. Now we have an intensive search every spring, on account of seeds blowing over from the mainland, and settle with them right away.
“While that was going on, we were getting organized. There were some fifty or sixty of us to begin with. I took flips in the helicopter, and when I saw signs of a group anywhere, I’d go down and issue a general invitation to come along. Some did—but a surprising number simply weren’t interested: they’d escaped from being governed, and in spite of all their troubles they didn’t want any more of it. There are some lots in South
Wales that have started sorts of tribal communities and resent the idea of any organization except the minimum they’ve set up for themselves. You’ll find similar lots near the other coal fields too. Usually the leaders are the men who happened to be on the shift below ground, so that they never saw the green stars—though God knows how they ever got up the shafts again.
“Some of them so definitely don’t want to be interfered with that they shoot at the aircraft—there’s one lot like that at Brighton—”
“I know,” I said. “They warned me off too.”
“Recently there are more like that. There’s one at Maidstone, another at Guildford, and other places. They’re the real reason why we hadn’t spotted you hidden away here before. The district didn’t seem too healthy when one got close to it. I don’t know what they think they’re doing—probably got some good food dumps and are scared of anyone else wanting some of it. Anyway, there’s no sense in taking risks, so I just let ’em stew.
“Still, quite a lot did come along. In a year we’d gone up to three hundred or so—not all sighted, of course.
“It wasn’t until about a month ago that I came across Coker and his lot—and one of the first things he asked, by the way, was whether you’d shown up. They had a bad time, particularly at first.
“A few days after he got back to Tynsham, a couple of women came along from London, and brought the plague with them. Coker quarantined them at the first symptoms, but it was too late. He decided on a quick move. Miss Durrant wouldn’t budge. She decided to stay and look after the sick, and follow later if she could. But she never did.
“They took the infection with them. There were three more hurried moves before they succeeded in shaking free of it. By then they had gone as far west as Devonshire, and they were all right for a bit there. But soon they began to find the same difficulties as we had—and you have. Coker stuck it out there for nearly three years, and then reasoned along much the same lines as we did. Only he didn’t think of an island. Instead he decided on a river boundary and a fence to cut off the toe of Cornwall. When they got there they spent the first months building their barrier, then they went for the triffids inside, much as we had on the island. They had more difficult country to work with, though, and they never did succeed in clearing them out completely. The fence was fairly successful to begin with, but they never could depend on it as we could trust to the sea, and too much of their man power had to be wasted on patrols.