The Day of the Triffids

II. The Coming of the Triffids

This is a personal record. It involves a great deal that has vanished forever, but I can’t tell it in any other way than by using the words we used to use for those vanished things, so they have to stand. But even to make the setting intelligible I find that I shall have to go back farther than the point at which I started.

When I, William Masen, was a child we lived, my father, my mother, and myself, in a southern suburb of London. We had a small house which my father supported by conscientious daily “attendance at his desk in the Inland Revenue Department, and a small garden at which he worked rather harder during the summer. There was not a lot to distinguish us from the ten or twelve million other people who used to live in and around London in those days.

My father was one of those persons who could add a column of figures—even of the ridiculous coinage then in use locally—with a flick of the eye, so that it was natural for him to have in mind that I should become an accountant. As a result, my inability to make any column of figures reach the same total twice caused me to be something of a mystery as well as a disappointment to him. Still, there it was: just one of those things. And each of a succession of teachers who tried to show me that mathematical answers were derived logically and not through some form of esoteric inspiration was forced to give up with the assurance that I had no head for figures. My father ‘would read my school reports with a gloom which in other respects they scarcely warranted. His mind worked, I think, this way: no head for figures = no idea of finance = no money.

“I really don’t know what we shall do with you. What do you want to do?’ he would ask.

And until I was thirteen or fourteen T would shake my head, conscious of my sad inadequacy, and admit that I did not know.

It was the appearance of the triffids which really decided the matter for us. Indeed, they did a lot more than that for me. They provided me with a job and comfortably supported me. They also on several occasions almost took my life. On the other hand, I have to admit that they preserved it, too, for it was a triffid sting that had landed me in hospital on the critical occasion of the ‘comet debris.”

In the books there is quite a lot of loose speculation on the sudden occurrence of the triffids. Most of it is nonsense. Certainly they were not spontaneously generated, as many simple souls believed. Nor did most people endorse the theory that they were a kind of sample visitation—harbingers of worse to come if the world did not mend its ways and behave its troublesome self. Nor did their seeds float to us through space as specimens of the horrid forms fife might assume upon other, less favored worlds—at least I am satisfied that they did not.

I learned more about it than most people because triffids were my job, and the firm I worked for was intimately, if not very gracefully, concerned in their public appearance. Nevertheless, their true origin still remains obscure. My own belief, for what that is worth, is that they were the outcome of a series of ingenious biological meddlings—and very likely accidental, at that. Had they been evolved anywhere but in the region they were, we should doubtless have had a well-documented ancestry for them. As it was, no authoritative statement was ever published by those who must have been best qualified to know. The reason for this lay, no doubt, in the curious political conditions then prevailing.

The world we lived in was wide, and most of it was open to us with little trouble. Roads, railways, and shipping lines laced it, ready to carry one thousands of miles safely and in comfort. If we wanted to travel more swiftly still, and could afford it, we traveled by airplane. There was no need for anyone to take weapons or even precautions in those days. You could go just as you were to wherever you wished, with nothing to hinder you—other than a lot of forms and regulations. A world so tamed sounds utopian now. Nevertheless, it was so over five sixths of the globe—though the remaining sixth was something different again.

It must be difficult for young people who never knew it to envisage a world like that. Perhaps it sounds like a golden age—though it wasn’t quite that to those who lived in it. Or they may think that an Earth ordered and cultivated almost all over sounds dull—but it wasn’t that, either. It was rather an exciting place-—for a biologist, anyway. Every year we were pushing the northern limit of growth for food plants a little farther back. New fields were growing quick crops on what had historically been simply tundra or barren land. Every season, too, stretches of desert both old and recent were reclaimed and made to grow grass or food. For food was then our most pressing problem, and the progress of the regeneration schemes, and the advance of the cultivation lines on the maps, was followed with almost as much attention as an earlier generation had paid to battle fronts.

Such a swerve of interest from swords to plowshares was undoubtedly a social improvement, but, at the same time, it was a mistake for the optimistic to claim it as showing a change in the human spirit. The human spirit continued much as before—95 per cent of it wanting to live in peace, and the other S per cent considering its chances if it should risk starting anything. It was chiefly because no one’s chances looked too good that the lull continued.

Meanwhile, with something like twenty-five million new mouths bawling for food every year, the supply problem became steadily worse, and after years of ineffective propaganda a couple of atrocious harvests had at last made the people aware of its urgency.

The factor which had caused the militant 5 per cent to relax awhile from fomenting discord was the satellites. Sustained research in rocketry had at last succeeded in attaining one of its objectives. It had sent up a missile which stayed up. It was, in fact, possible to fire a rocket far enough up for it to fall into an orbit. Once there, it would continue to circle like a tiny moon, quite inactive and innocuous until the pressure on a button should give it the impulse to drop back, with devastating effect.

Great as was the public concern which followed the triumphant announcement of the first nation to establish a satellite weapon satisfactorily, a still greater concern was felt over the failure of others to make any announcement at all, even when they were known to have had similar successes. It was by no means pleasant to realize that there was an unknown number of menaces up there over your head, quietly circling and circling until someone should arrange for them to drop—and that there was nothing to be done about them. Still, life has to go on—and novelty is a wonderfully short-lived thing. One became used to the idea perforce. From time to time there would be a panicky flare-up of expostulation when reports circulated that as well as satellites with atomic heads there were others with such things as crop diseases, cattle diseases, radioactive dusts, viruses, and infections not only of familiar kinds but brand-new sorts recently thought up in laboratories, all floating around up there. Whether such uncertain and potentially backfiring weapons had actually been placed is hard to say. But then the limits of folly itself—particularly of folly with fear on its heels— are not easy to define, either. A virulent organism, unstable enough to become harmless in the course of a few days (and who is to say that such could not be bred?), could be considered to have strategic uses if dropped in suitable spots.

At least the United States Government took the suggestion seriously enough to deny emphatically that it controlled any satellites designed to conduct biological warfare directly upon human beings. One or two minor nations, whom no one suspected of controlling any satellites at all, hastened to make similar declarations. Other, and major, powers did not, In the face of this ominous reticence, the public began demanding to know why the United States had neglected to prepare for a form of warfare which others were ready to use—and just what did ”directly” mean. At this point all parties tacitly gave up denying or confirming anything about satellites, and an intensified effort was made to divert the public interest to the no less important, but far less acrimonious, matter of food scarcity.

The laws of supply and demand should have enabled the more enterprising to organize commodity monopolies, but the world at large had become antagonistic to declared monopolies. The interlaced-company system, however, really worked very smoothly without anything so imputable as Articles of Federation. The general public heard scarcely anything of such little difficulties within the pattern as had to he unsnarled from time to time. Hardly anyone heard of even the existence of one Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, for instance. I heard of him myself only years later in the course of my work.

Umberto was of assorted Latin descent, and by profession a pilot. His first appearance as a possibly disruptive spanner in the neat machinery of the edible-oil interests occurred when he walked into the offices of the Arctic &

European Fish Oil Company and produced a bottle of pale pink oil in which he proposed to interest them.

Arctic & European analyzed the sample. The first thing they discovered about it was that it was not a fish oil: it was vegetable, though they could not identify the source. The second revelation was that it made most of their best fish oils look like grease-box fillers.

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”!

The bole, which I now saw for the first time, was shaggy with little rootlet hairs, It would have been almost spherical but for three bluntly tapered projections extending from the lower part. Supported on these, the main body was lifted about a foot clear of the ground.

When it “walked” it moved rather like a man on crutches. Two of the blunt “legs” slid forward, then the whole thing lurched as the rear one drew almost level with them, then the two in front slid forward again. At each “step” the long stem whipped violently back and forth; it gave one a kind of seasick feeling to watch it. As a method of progress it looked both strenuous and clumsy—faintly reminiscent of young elephants at play. One felt that if it were to go on lurching for long in that fashion it would be bound to strip all its leaves if it did not actually break its stem. Nevertheless, ungainly though it looked, it was contriving to cover the round at something like an average walking pace.

That was about all I had time to see before the battleship launching began. It was not a lot, but it was enough to incite an investigating spirit in a boy. For if that thing in Ecuador could do a trick like that, why not the one in our garden? Admittedly ours was a good deal smaller, but it did look the same.

About ten minutes after I got home I was digging round our triffid. carefully loosening the earth near it to encourage it to “walk.”

Unfortunately there was an aspect of this self-propelled plant discovery which the newsreel people either had not experienced or had chosen for some reason of their own not to reveal. There was no warning, either. I was bending down, intent on clearing the earth without harming the plant, when something from nowhere hit me one terrific slam and knocked me out…

I woke up to find myself in bed, with my mother, my father, and the doctor watching me anxiously. My head felt as if it were split open. I was aching all over, and, as I later discovered, one side of my face was decorated with a blotchy red raised weal, The insistent questions as to how I came to be lying unconscious in the garden were quite useless; I had no faintest idea what it was that had hit mc. And some little time passed before I learned that I must have been one of the first persons in England to be stung by a triffid and get away with it. The triffid was, of course, immature. But before I had fully recovered my father bad found out what had undoubtedly happened to me, and by the time I went into the garden again he had wreaked stern vengeance on our triffid and disposed of the remains on a bonfire.

Now that walking plants were established facts, the press lost its former tepidity and bathed them in publicity. So a name had to be found for them. Already there were botanists wallowing, after their custom, in polysyllabic dog Latin and Greek to produce variants on ambulans and pseudopodia, but what the newspapers and the public wanted was something easy on the tongue and not too heavy on the headlines for general use. If you could see the papers of that time you would find them referring to:

and a number of other mysterious things not even beginning with “tri”—though almost all centered on the feature of that active, three-pronged root.

There was argument, public, private, and bar-parlor, with heated championship of one term or another on near-scientific, quasi-etymological, and a number of other grounds, but gradually one term began to dominate this philological gymkhana, in its first form it was not quite acceptable, but common usage modified the original lone first “i,” and custom quickly wrote in a second ”f,” to leave no doubt about it.

And so emerged the standard term. A catchy little name originating in some newspaper office as a handy label for an oddity—but destined one day to be associated with pain, fear, and misery—TRIFFID…

The first wave of public interest soon ebbed away. Triffids were, admittedly, a bit weird—but that was, after all, just because they were a novelty. People had felt the same about novelties of other days: about kangaroos, giant lizards, black swans. And when you came to think of it, were triffids all that much queerer than mudfish, ostriches, polliwogs, and a hundred other things? The bar was an animal that had learned to fly; well, here was a plant that had learned to walk—what of that?

But there were features of it to be less casually dismissed. On its origins the Russians, true to type, lay low and said nothing. Even those who had heard of Umberto did not yet connect him with it. Its sudden appearance, and, even more, its wide distribution, promoted very puzzled speculation. For though it matured more rapidly in the tropics, specimens in various stages of development were reported from almost any region outside the polar circles and the deserts.

People were surprised, and a little disgusted, to learn that the species was carnivorous, and that the flies and other insects caught in the cups were actually digested by the sticky substance there. We in temperate zones were not ignorant of insectivorous plants, but we were unaccustomed to finding them outside special hothouses, and apt to consider them as in some way slightly indecent, or at least improper. But actually alarming was the discovery that the whorl topping a triffid’s stem could lash out as a slender stinging weapon ten feet long, capable of discharging enough poison to kill a man if it struck squarely on his unprotected skin.

As soon as this danger was appreciated there followed a nervous smashing and chopping of triffids everywhere, until it occurred to someone that all that was necessary to make them harmless was the removal of the actual stinging weapon. At this, the slightly hysterical assault upon the plants declined, with their numbers considerably thinned. A little later it began to be a fashion to have a safely docked triffid or two about one’s garden. It was found that it took about two years for the lost sting to be dangerously replaced, so that an annual pruning assured that they were in a state of safety where they could provide vast amusement for the children.

In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.

The traveler very easily failed to notice one among the normal bushes and undergrowth, and the moment he was in range the venomous sting would slash out. Even the regular inhabitant of such a district found it difficult to detect a motionless triffid cunningly lurking beside a jungle path. They were uncannily sensitive to any movement near them, and hard to take unawares.

Dealing with them became a serious problem in such regions. The most favored method was to shoot the top off the stem, and the sting with it. The jungle natives took to carrying long, light poles mounted with hooked knives, which they used effectively if they could get their blows in first— but not at all if the triffid had a chance to sway forward and increase its range by an unexpected four or five feet. Before long, however, these pike like devices were mostly superseded by spring-operated guns of various types. Most of them shot spinning disks, crosses, or small boomerangs of thin steel. As a rule they were inaccurate above about twelve yards, though capable of slicing a triffid stern neatly at twenty-five if they hit it. Their invention pleased both the authorities—who had an almost unanimous distaste for the indiscriminate toting of rifles—and the users, who found the missiles of razor-blade steel f at cheaper and lighter than cartridges, and admirably adaptable to silent banditry.

Elsewhere, immense research into the nature, habits, and constitution of the triffid went on. Earnest experimenters set out to determine, in the interests of science, how far and for how long it could walk; whether it could be said to have a front, or could perform its march in any direction with equal clumsiness; what proportion of its rime it must spend with its roots in the ground; what reactions it showed to the presence of various chemicals in the soil; and a vast quantity of other questions, both useful and useless.

The largest specimen ever observed in the tropics stood nearly ten feet high. No European specimen over eight feet had been seen, and the average was little over seven. They appeared to adapt easily to a wide range of climate and soils. They had, it seemed, no natural enemies—other than man.

But there were a number of not unobvious characteristics which escaped comment for some little time. It was, for instance, quite a while before anyone drew attention to the uncanny accuracy with which they aimed their stings, and that they almost invariably struck for the head. Nor did anyone at first take notice of their habit of lurking near their fallen victims. The reason for that became clear only when it was shown that they fed upon flesh as well as upon insects. The stinging tendril did not have the muscular power to tear firm flesh, but it had strength enough to pull shreds from a decomposing body and lift them to the cup on its stem.

There was no great interest, either, in the three little leafless sticks at the base of the stem. There was a light notion that they might have something to do with the reproductive system—that system which tends to be a sort of botanical glory-hole for all parts of doubtful purpose until they can be sorted out and more specifically assigned later on. It was assumed, consequently, that their characteristic of suddenly losing their immobility and rattling a rapid tattoo against the main stem was some strange form of triffidian amatory exuberance.

Possibly my uncomfortable distinction of getting myself stung so early in the triffid era had the effect of stimulating my interest, for I seemed to have a sort of link with them from then on. I spent—or “wasted,” if you look at me through my father’s eyes—a great deal of fascinated time watching them.

One could not blame him for considering this a worthless pursuit, yet later the time turned out to have been better employed than either of us suspected, for it was just before I left school that the Attic & European Fish Oil Company reconstituted itself, dropping the word “Fish” in the process. The public learned that it and similar companies in other countries were about to farm triffids on a large scale, in order to extract valuable oils and juices and to press highly nutritious oil cake for stock feeding. Consequently, triffids moved into the realm of big business overnight.

Right away I decided my future. I applied to the Arctic & European, where my qualifications got me a job on the production side. My father’s disapproval was somewhat qualified by the rate of pay, which was good for my age. But when I spoke enthusiastically of the future he blew doubtfully through his mustache. He had real faith only in a type of work steadied by long tradition, but he let me have my way. “After all, if the thing isn’t a success, you’ll find out young enough to start in on something more solid,” he conceded.

There turned out to be no need for that. Before he and my mother were killed together in a holiday airbus crash five years later, they had seen [he new companies drive all competing oils off the market and those of us who had been in at the beginning apparently well set for life.

One of the early corners was my friend Walter Lucknor. There had been some doubt at first about taking Walter on. He knew little of agriculture, less of business, and lacked the qualifications for lab work. On the other hand, he did know a lot about triffids—he had a kind of inspired knack with them.

What happened to Walter that fatal May years later I do not know—though I can guess. It is a sad thing that he did not escape. He might have been immensely valuable later on. I don’t think anybody really understands triffids, or ever will, but Walter came nearer to beginning to understand them than any man I have known. Or should I say that he was given to intuitive feelings about them?

It was a year or two after the job had begun that he first surprised me.

The sun was close to setting. We had knocked off for the day and were looking with a sense of satisfaction at three new fields of nearly fully grown triffids. In those days we didn’t simply corral them as we did later. They were arranged across the fields roughly in rows—at least the steel stakes to which each was tethered by a chain were in rows, though the plants themselves had no sense of tidy regimentation. We reckoned that in another month or so we’d be able to start tapping them for juice. The evening was peaceful; almost the only sounds that broke it were the occasional rattlings of the triffids’ little sticks against their stems. Walter regarded them with his head slightly on one side. He removed his pipe.

“They’re talkative tonight,” he observed.

I took that as anyone else would, metaphorically.

“Maybe it’s the weather,” I suggested “I fancy they do it more when it’s dry.”

He looked sidelong at me, with a smile.

“Do you talk more when it’s dry?”

“Why should—” I began, and then broke off. “You don’t really mean you think they’re talking?” I said, noticing his expression.

“Well, why not?”

“But it’s absurd. Plants talking!”

“So much more absurd than plants walking?” he asked.

I stared at them, and then back at him.

“I never thought—” I began doubtfully.

“You try thinking of it a bit, and watching them. I’d be interested to hear your conclusions,” he said.

It was a curious thing that in all my dealings with triffids such a possibility had never occurred to me. Pd been prejudiced, I suppose. by the love-call theory. But once he had put the idea into my mind, it stuck. I couldn’t get away from the feeling that they might indeed be rattling out secret messages to one another.

Up to then I’d fancied I’d watched triffids pretty closely, but when Walter was talking about them I felt that Ed noticed practically nothing. He could, when he was in the mood, talk on about them for hours, advancing theories that were sometimes wild but sometimes not impossible.

The public had by this time grown out of thinking triffids freakish. They were clumsily amusing, but not greatly interesting. The company found them interesting, however, It took the view that their existence was a piece of benevolence for everyone particularly for itself. Walter shared neither view. At times, listening to him, I began to have some misgivings myself.

He bad become quite certain that they “talked,”

“And that,” he argued, “means that somewhere in them is intelligence. It can’t be seated in a brain, because dissection shows nothing like a brain—but that doesn’t prove there isn’t something there that does a brain’s job.

“And there’s certainly intelligence there, of a kind. Have you noticed that when they attack they always go for the unprotected parts? Almost always the head—but sometimes the hands. And another thing: if you look at the statistics of casualties, just take notice of the proportion that has been stung across the eyes and blinded. It’s remarkable—and significant.”

“Of what?” I asked.

“Of the fact that they know what is the surest way to put a man out of action—in other words, they know what they’re doing. Look at it this way. Granted that they do have intelligence; then that would leave us with only one important superiority—sight. We can see, and they can’t. Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone. Worse than that— our position becomes inferior to theirs, because they are adapted to a sightless existence and we are not.”

“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.