John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids

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 sam-pie Umberso had shown them, and that it was the seeds of

the triffid be 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 gasses, 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 tip 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”!