John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids

“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, U 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 proportion 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 or cabbages, yet half the dine 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 tohis 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 or 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 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 or 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.

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 county; 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, if 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.