The Day of the Triffids

XV. World Narrowing

From then on I kept a journal. It is a mixture of diary, stock list, and commonplace book. In it there are notes of the places to which my expeditions took me, particulars of the supplies collected, estimates of quantities available, observations on the states of the premises, with memos on which should be cleared first to avoid deterioration. Foodstuffs, fuel, and seed were constant objects of search, but by no means the only ones. There are entries detailing loads of clothing, tools, household linen, harness, kitchenware, loads of stakes, and wire, wire, and more wire, also hooks.

I can see there that within a week of my return from Tynsham I had started on the work of erecting a wire fence to keep the triffids out. Already we had barriers to hold them away from the garden and the immediate neighborhood of the house. Now I began a more ambitious plan of making some hundred acres or so free from them. It involved a stout wire fence which took advantage of the natural features and standing barriers, and, inside it, a lighter fence to prevent either the stock or ourselves from coming inadvertently within sting range of the main fence. It was a heavy, tedious job which took me a number of months to complete.

At the same time I was endeavoring to learn the A B C of farming. It is not the kind of thing that is easily learned from books. For one thing, it has never occurred to any writer on the subject that any potential farmer could be starting from absolute zero. I found, therefore, that all works started, as it were, in the middle, taking for granted both a basis and a vocabulary that I did not have. My specialized biological knowledge was all but useless to me in the face of practical problems. Much of the theory called for materials and substances which were either unavailable to me or unrecognizable by inc if I could find them. I began to see quite soon that by the time I had dismissed the things that would shortly be unprocurable, such as chemical fertilizers, imported feeding stuffs, and all but the simpler kinds of machinery, there was going to be much expenditure of sweat for problematical returns.

Nor is book-installed knowledge of horse management, daisy work, or slaughterhouse procedure by any means an adequate groundwork for these arts. There are so many points where one cannot break off to consult the relevant chapter. Moreover, the realities persistently present baffling dissimilarities from the simplicities of print.

Luckily there was plenty of time to make mistakes, and to learn from them. The knowledge that several years could pass before we should be thrown anywhere near on our own resources saved us from desperation over our disappointments. There was the reassuring thought, too, that by living on preserved stores we were being quite provident reaUy in preventing them from being wasted.

For safety’s sake I let a whole year pass before I went to London again. It was the most profitable area for my forays, but it was the most depressing. The place still contrived to give the impression that a touch of a magic wand would bring it awake again, though many of the vehicles in the streets were beginning to turn rusty. A year later the change was more noticeable. Large patches of plaster detached from house fronts had begun to litter the sidewalks. Dislodged tiles and chimney pots could be found in the streets. Grass and weeds had a good hold in the gutters and were choking the drains. Leaves had blocked downspoutings so that more grass, and even small bushes, grew in cracks and in the silt in the roof gutterings. Almost every building was beginning to wear a green wig beneath which its roofs would damply rot. Through many a window one had glimpses of fallen ceilings, curves of peeling paper, and walls glistening with damp. The gardens of the parks and squares were wildernesses creeping out across the bordering streets. Growing things seemed, indeed, to press out everywhere, rooting in the crevices between the paving stones, springing from cracks in concrete, finding lodgments even in the seats of the abandoned cars. On all sides they were incroaching to repossess themselves of the arid spaces that man had created. And, curiously, as the living Things increasingly took charge, the effect of the place became less oppressive. As it passed beyond the scope of any magic wand, most of the ghosts were going with it, withdrawing slowly into history.

Once—not that year, not the next, but later on—I stood in Piccadilly Circus again, looking round at the desolation and trying to re-create in my mind’s eye the crowds that once swarmed there. I could no longer do it. Even in my memory they lacked reality. There was no tincture of them now. They had become as much a back cloth of history as the audiences in the Roman Colosseum or the army of the Assyrians, and, somehow, just as far removed from me. The nostalgia that crept over me sometimes in the quiet bours was able to move me to more regret than the crumbling scene itself. When I was by myself in the country I could recall the pleasantness of the former life: among the scabrous, slowly perishing buildings I seemed able to recall only the muddle, the frustration, the unaimed drive, the all-pervading clangor of empty vessels, and I became uncertain how much we bad lost…

My first tentative trip there I took alone, returning with cases of triffid bolts, paper, engine parts, the Braille books and writing machine that Dennis so much desired, the luxuries of drinks, candies, records, and yet more books for the rest of us. A week later Josella came with me an a more practical search for clothing, not only, or even chiefly, for the adults of the party so much as for Mary’s baby and the one she herself was now expecting. It upset her, and it remained the only visit she made.

It was at the end of the fourth year that I made my last trip, and found that there were now risks which I was not justified in taking. The first intimation of that was a thunderous crash behind me somewhere in the inner suburbs. I stopped the truck, and looked back to see the dust rising from a heap of rubble which lay across the road. Evidently my rumbling passage bad given the last shake to a tottering house front. I brought no more buildings down that day, but I spent it in apprehension of a descending torrent of bricks and mortar. Thereafter II confined my attention to smaller towns, and usually went about them on foot.

Brighton, which should have been our largest convenient source of supplies, I let alone. By the time I had thought it fit for a visit, others were in charge there. Who or how many there were, I did not know. I simply found a rough wall of stones piled across the road and painted with the instruction:

The advice was backed up by the crack of a rifle and a spurt of dust just in front of me. There was no one in sight to argue with—besides, it arguing kind of gambit.

I turned the truck round and drove away thoughtfully. I wondered if a time might come when the man Stephen’s preparations for defense might turn out to be not so misplaced after all. Just to be on the safe side, I laid in several machine guns and mortars from the source which had already provided us with the flame throwers we used against the triffids.

In the November of that second year Josella’s first baby was born. We called him David. My pleasure in him was at times alloyed with misgivings over the state of things we had created him to face. But that worded Josella much less than it did me. She adored him. He seemed to be a compensation to her for much that she bad lost, and, paradoxically, she started to worry less over the condition of the bridges ahead than she had before. Anyway, he had a lustiness which argued well for his future capacity to take care of himself, so I repressed my misgivings and increased the work I was putting into that land which would one day have to support all of us.

It must have been not so very long after that that Josella turned my attention more closely to the triffids. I had for years been so used to taking precautions against them in my work that their becoming a regular part of the landscape was far less noticeable to me than it was to the others. I had been accustomed, too, to wearing meshed masks and gloves when I dealt with them, so that there was little novelty far me in donning these things whenever I drove out. I had, in fact, got into the habit of paying little more attention to them than one would to mosquitoes in a known malarial area. Josella mentioned it as we lay in bed one night when almost the only sound was the intermittent, distant rattling of their hard little sticks against their stems.

“They’re doing a lot more of that lately,” she said.

I did not grasp at first what she was talking about. It was a sound that had been a usual background to the places where I had lived and worked for so long that unless I deliberately listened for it I could not say whether it was going on or not. I listened now.

“It doesn’t sound any different to me,” I said.

“It’s not different. It’s just that there’s a lot more of it— because there are a lot more of them than there used to be.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said indifferently.

Once I had the fence fixed up, my interest had lain in the ground within it, and I had not bothered about what went on beyond it. My impression on my expeditions was that the incidence of Triffids in most parts was much the same as before. I recalled that their numbers locally had caught my at-tendon when I had first arrived, and I had supposed that there must have been several large triffid nurseries in the district.

“There certainly are. You take a look at them tomorrow,” she said.

I remembered in the morning, and looked out of the window as I was dressing. I saw that Josella was right. One could count over a hundred of them behind the quite small stretch visible from the window. I mentioned it at breakfast. Susan looked suprised.

“But they’ve been getting more all the time,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“I’ve got plenty of other things to bother about,” I said, a little irritated by her tone. “They don’t matter outside the fence, anyway. As long as we take care to pull up all the seeds that root in here, they can do what they like outside.”

“All the same,” Josella remarked with a trace of uneasiness, “is there any particular reason why they should come to just this part in such numbers? I’m sure they do—and I’d like to know just why it is.”

Susan’s face took on its irritating expression of surprise again.

“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 froa 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.

“Seer 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 then 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 fly. 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 Swan has— rye 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 of 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. Alter 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. Triffid 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 not 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 replenishment-s 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 in-stance, 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 be!”

“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 m 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 horn 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 Rood, 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 ori—only why pretend it’s a myth?”

Josella demurred at that.

“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 thin8s 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 our 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 happening 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 buzzing 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 towed 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 tan 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 be-longings, and, each occupied with our thoughts, we made our way back to the half-track and started for home.