Wyndham, John (5 page)

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 to his 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.

Nevertheless, it was hard to persuade oneself to do that. I
was not yet ready to admit, after nearly thirty years of a reasonably
right-respecting existence and law-abiding life, that things had changed in any
fundamental way. There was, too, a feeling that as long as I remained
my
normal
self things might even yet, in some inconceivable way, return to
their
normal,
Absurd it undoubtedly was, but I had a very strong sense that the moment I
should stove in one of those sheets of plate glass I would leave the old order
behind me forever: I should become a looter, a sacker, a low scavenger upon the
dead body of the system that had nourished me. Such a foolish niceness of
sensibility in a stricken world! And yet it still pleases me to remember that
civilized usage did not slide off me at once, and that for a time, at least, I
wandered along past displays which made my mouth water while my already
obsolete conventions kept me hungry.

The problem resolved itself in a sophistical way after perhaps
half a mile. A taxi, after mounting the sidewalk, had finished up with its
radiator buried in a pile of delicatessen. That made it seem different from
doing my own breaking in. I climbed past the taxi and collected the makings of
a good meal. But even then something of the old standards still clung:

I conscientiously left a fair price for what I had taken
lying on the counter.

Almost across the road there was a garden. It was the kind
that had once been the graveyard of a vanished church. The old headstones had
been taken up and set back against the surrounding brick wall, the cleared
space turfed over and laid out with graveled paths. It looked pleasant under
the freshly leafed trees, and to one of the seats there I took my lunch.

The place was withdrawn and peaceful. No one else came in,
though occasionally a figure would shuffle past the railings at the entrance. I
threw some crumbs to a few sparrows, the first birds I had seen that day, and
felt all the better for watching their perky indifference to calamity.

When I had finished eating I lit a cigarette. While I sat
there smoking it, wondering where I should go and what I should do, the quiet
was broken by the sound of a piano played somewhere in a block of apartments
that overlooked the garden. Presently a girl’s voice began to sing. The song
was Byron’s ballad;

So we’ll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast.

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

Arid the day returns too soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon.

I listened, looking up at the pattern that the tender young
leaves and the branches made against the fresh blue sky. The song finished. The
notes of the piano died away. Then there was a sound of sobbing. No passion:
softly, helplessly, forlorn, heartbroken. Who she was, whether it was the
singer or another weeping her hopes away, I do not know. But to listen longer
was more than I could endure. I went quietly back into the street, unable to
see anything more than mistily for a while.

Even Hyde Park Corner, when I reached it, was almost
deserted. A few derelict cars and trucks stood about on the roads. Very little,
it seemed, had gone out of control when it was in motion. One bus had run
across the path and come to rest in the Green Park; a runaway horse with shafts
still attached to it lay beside the artillery memorial against which it had
cracked its skull. The only moving things were a few men and a lesser number of
women feeling their way carefully with hands and feet where there were
railings and shuffling forward with protectively outstretched arms where there
were not. Also, and rather unexpectedly, there were one or two cats, apparently
intact visually and treating the whole situation with that self-possession
common to cats. They had poor prowling through the eerie quietness—the sparrows
were few, and the pigeons had vanished.

Still magnetically drawn toward the old center of things, I
crossed in the direction of Piccadilly. I was just about to start along it when
I noticed a sharp new sound—a steady tapping not far away, and coming closer.
Looking up Park Lane, I discovered its source. A man, more neatly dressed than
any other I had seen that morning, was walking rapidly toward me, hitting the
wall beside him with a white stick. As he caught the sound of my steps he
stopped, listening alertly.

“It’s all right,” I told him. “Come on.”

I felt relieved to see him. He was, so to speak, normally
blind. His dark glasses were much less disturbing than the staring but useless
eyes of the others.

“Stand still, then,” he said. “I’ve already been bumped into
by God knows how many fools today. What the devil’s happened? Why is it so
quiet? I know it isn’t night—I can feel the sunlight. What’s gone wrong with
everything?”

I told him as much as I knew of what had happened.

When I had finished he said nothing for almost a minute,
then he gave a short, bitter laugh.

“There’s one thing,” he said. “They’ll be needing all their
damned patronage for themselves now.”

With that he straightened up, a little defiantly.

“Thank you. Good luck,” he said to me, and set off westward
wearing an exaggerated air of independence.

The sound of his briskly confident tapping gradually died
away behind me as I made my way up Piccadilly.

There were more people to be seen now, and I walked among
the scatter of stranded vehicles in the road. Out there I was much less
disturbing to those who were feeling their way along the fronts of the
buildings, for every time they heard a step close by they would stop and brace
themselves against a possible collision. Such collisions were taking place
every now and then all down the street, but there was one that I found
significant. The subjects of it had been groping along a shop front from
opposite directions until they met with a bump. One was a young man in a
well-cut suit, but wearing a tie obviously selected by touch alone; the other,
a woman who carried a small child. The child whined something inaudible.

The young man had started to edge his way past the woman. He
stopped abruptly.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Can your child see?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I can’t.”

The young man turned. He put one finger on the plate glass
window, pointing.

“Look, Sonny, what’s in there?” he asked.

“Not Sonny,” the child objected.

“Go on, Mary. Tell the gentleman,” her mother encouraged
her.

“Pretty ladies,” said the child.

The man took the woman by the arm and felt his way to the
next window.

“And what’s in here?” he asked again.

“Apples and fings,” the child told him.

“Fine!” said the young man.

He pulled off his shoe and hit the window a smart smack with
the heel of it. He was inexperienced; the first blow did not do it, but the
second did. The crash reverberated up and down the street. He restored his
shoe, put an arm cautiously through the broken window, and felt about until he
found a couple of oranges. One he gave to the woman and one to the child. He
felt about again, found one for himself, and began to peel it. The woman
fingered hers.

“But—” she began.

“What’s the matter? Don’t like oranges?” he asked.

“But it isn’t right,” she said. “We didn’t ought to take
‘em. Not like this.”

“How else are you going to get food?” he inquired.

“I suppose—well, I don’t know,” she admitted doubtfully.

“Very well. That’s the answer. Eat it up now, and we’ll go
and find something more substantial.”

She still held the orange in her hand, head bent down as
though she were looking at it.

“All the same, it don’t seem right,” she said again, but
there was less conviction in her tone.

Presently she put the child down and began to peel the
orange....

Piccadilly Circus was the most populous place I had found so
far. It seemed crowded after the rest, though there were probably less than a
hundred people there, all told. Mostly they were wearing queer, ill-assorted
clothes and were prowling restlessly around as though still semi dazed.
Occasionally a mishap would bring an outburst of profanity and futile
rage—rather alarming to hear, because it was itself the product of fright, and
childish in temper. But with one exception there was little talk and little
noise. It seemed as though their blindness had shut people into themselves.

The exception had found himself a position out on one of the
traffic islands. He was a tall, elderly, gaunt man with a bush of wiry gray
hair, and he was holding forth emphatically about repentance, the wrath to
come, and the uncomfortable prospects for sinners. Nobody was paying him any
attention; for most of them the day of wrath had already arrived.

Then, from a distance, came a sound which caught everyones
attention: a gradually swelling chorus:

And when I die,

Don’t bury me at all,

Just pickle my bones

in alcohol.

Dreary and untuneful, it slurred through the empty streets,
echoing dismally back and forth. Every head in the Circus was turning now left,
now right, trying to place its direction. The prophet of doom raised his voice
against the competition. The song wailed discordantly closer:

Lay a bottle of booze

At my head and my feet,

And then I’m sure

My bones will keep.

and as an accompaniment to it there was the shuffle of feet
more or less in step.

From where I stood I could see them come in single file out of a side street into Shaftesbury Avenue and turn toward the Circus. The
second man had his hands on the shoulders of the leader, the third on his, and
so on, to the number of twenty-five or thirty. At the conclusion of that song
somebody started “Beer, Beer, Glorious Beer!” pitching it in such a high key
that it petered out in confusion.

They trudged steadily on until they reached the center of
the Circus, then the leader raised his voice, It was a considerable voice,
with parade-ground quality:

“Companee-ee-ee—
HALT!
”

Everybody else in the Circus was now struck motionless, all
with their faces turned toward him, nil trying to guess what was afoot. The
leader raised his voice again, mimicking the manner of a professional guide:

“‘Ere we are, gents one an’ all. Piccabloodydilly Circus.
The Center of the World. The ‘Ub of the Universe. Where all the nobs had their
wine, women, and song.”

He was not blind, far from it. His eyes were ranging round,
taking stock as he spoke, His sight must have been saved by some such accident
as mine, but he was pretty drunk, and so were the men behind him.

“An’ we’ll ‘ave it too,” he added. “Next stop, the
well-known Caffy Royal—an’ all drinks on the house,”

“Yus—but what abaht the women?” asked a voice, and there was
a laugh.

“Oh, women. ‘S’ that what you want?” said the leader.

He stepped forward and caught a girl by the arm. She screamed
as he dragged her toward the man who had spoken, but he took no notice of that.

“There y’are, chum. An’ don’t say I don’t treat you right.
It’s a peach, a smasher—if that makes any difference to you.”

“Hey, what about mc?” said the next man.

“You, mate? Well, let’s see. Like ‘em blond or dark?”

Considered later, I suppose I behaved like a fool. My head
was still full of standards and conventions that had ceased to apply. It did
not occur to me that if there was to be any survival, anyone adopted by this
gang would stand a far better chance than she would on her own. Fired with a
mixture of schoolboy heroics and noble sentiments, I waded in. He didn’t see me
coming until I was quite close, and then I slogged for his jaw. Unfortunately
he was a little quicker.