Wyndham, John (22 page)

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 instance,
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.”