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In the nature of things a good many somebodies are always in hospital, and the law of averages had picked on me to be one of them a week or so before. It might just as easily have been the week before that – in which case I’d not be writing now: I’d not be here at all. But chance played it not only that I should be in hospital at that particular time, but that my eyes, and indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages – and that’s why I have to be grateful to whoever orders these averages.
However, such a lot of things did happen in California that no one could be expected to get greatly worked up over that,
Accounts arrived from all over the Pacific of a night made brilliant by green meteors said to be ‘sometimes in such numerous showers that the whole sky appeared to be wheeling about us.’
Each one of us so steadily did his little part in the right place that it was easy to mistake habit and custom for the natural law – and all the more disturbing, therefore, when the routine was in any way upset.
When getting on for half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business. Looking back at the shape of things then, the amount we did not know and did not care to know about our daily lives is not only astonishing, but somehow a bit shocking. I knew practically nothing, for instance, of such ordinary things as how my food reached me, where the fresh water came from, how the clothes I wore were woven and made, how the drainage of cities kept them healthy. Our life had become a complexity of specialists all attending to their own jobs with more or
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The place looked – well, you’ll have seen some of Doré’s pictures of sinners in hell. But Doré couldn’t include the sounds: the sobbing, the murmurous moaning, and occasionally a forlorn cry.
This is a personal record. It involves a great deal that has vanished for ever, 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:
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’.
My own belief, for what it 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.
Such a swerve of interest from swords to ploughshares 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 – ninety-five per cent of it wanting to live in peace; and the other five per cent considering its chances if it should risk starting anything.
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.
acrimonious,
produced a bottle of pale pink oil in which he proposed to interest them.
The first thing they discovered about it was that it was not a fish-oil, anyway: 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, they sent out what remained of the sample for intensive study, and put round hurried inquiries to know if Mr Palanguez had made other approaches.
Little of what went on behind the veiling secrecy which was almost pathological in the region was known to the rest of the world. What was, was usually suspect. Yet, behind the curious propaganda which distributed the laughable while concealing all likely to be of the least importance, achievements undoubtedly went on in many fields.
to reclaim desert, steppe, and the northern tundra.
have seen a picture, señor. I do not say there is no sunflower there at all. I do not say there is no turnip there. I do not say that there is no nettle, or even no orchid there. But I do say that if they were all fathers to it they would none of them know their child. I do not think it would please them greatly, either.’
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.
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 moustache. I remember the first time he lifted me up to look inside that conical cup and see the tightly-wrapped whorl within. It looked
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It was some little time later that the first one picked up its roots, and walked.
Indo-China was one of those 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 neighbourhood of the equator.
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, elementals, 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.
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 had 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.
gymkhana.
And, when you came to think of it, were triffids all that much queerer than mudfish, ostriches, tadpoles, and a hundred other things? The bat was an animal that had learned to fly: well, here was a plant that had learned to walk – what of that?
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 find them outside special hothouses, and apt to consider them as in some way slightly indecent, or at least improper.
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 only became clear 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.
triffidian amatory exuberance.
Up to then I’d fancied I’d watched triffids pretty closely, but when Walter was talking about them I felt that I’d 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.
‘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.’
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.’
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.
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.
And when I die, Don’t bury me at all, Just pickle my bones In alcohol.
Put a bottle of booze At my head and my feet, And then, I’m sure My bones will keep.
And, curiously, what I found that I did feel – with a consciousness that it was against what I ought to be feeling – was release …
It wasn’t just the brandy, for it persisted. I think it may have come from the sense of facing something quite fresh and new to me. All the old problems, the stale ones, both personal and general, had been solved by one mighty slash. Heaven alone knew as yet what others might arise – and it looked as though there would be plenty of them – but they would be new. I was emerging as my own master, and no longer a cog. It might well be a world full of horrors and dangers that I should have to face, but I could take my own steps to deal with it – I would no longer be shoved hither and thither by
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I began to become uneasy. Fighting with my civilized urge to be of some help to these people was an instinct that told me to keep clear. They were already fast losing ordinary restraints. I felt, too, an irrational sense of guilt at being able to see while they could not. It gave me an odd feeling that I was hiding from them even while I moved among them. Later on, I found how right the instinct was.
was starting to see things in another new light. The sense of release was tempered with a growing realization of the grimness that might lie ahead of us. It had been impossible at first not to feel some superiority, and, therefore, confidence. Our chances of surviving the catastrophe were a million times greater than those of the rest. Where they must fumble, grope, and guess, we had simply to walk in and take. But there were going to be a lot of things beyond that
My father once told me that before Hitler’s war he used to go around London with his eyes more widely open than ever before, seeing the beauties of buildings that he had never noticed before – and saying goodbye to them. And now I had a similar feeling. But this was something worse. Much more than anyone could have hoped for had survived that war – but this was an enemy they would not survive. It was not wanton smashing and wilful burning that they waited for this time: it was simply the long, slow, inevitable course of decay and collapse.
Even yet I had the feeling that it was all something too big, too unnatural really to happen. Yet I knew that it was by no means the first time that it had happened. The corpses of other great cities are lying buried in deserts, and obliterated by the jungles of Asia. Some of them fell so long ago that even their names have gone with them. But to those who lived there their dissolution can have seemed no more probable or possible than the necrosis of a great modern city seemed to me …
It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that ‘it can’t happen here’ – that one’s own little time and place is beyond cataclysms.
She shook her head: ‘It was to be called Here the Forsaken.’ ‘H’m – well, it certainly lacks the snap of the other,’ I said. ‘Quotation?’ ‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Mr Congreve: “Here the forsaken Virgin rests from Love.” ’ ‘Er – oh,’ I said, and thought that one over for a bit.
‘Now, I mean. It was bound to happen some time in some way. It’s an unnatural thought that one type of creature should dominate perpetually.’ ‘I don’t see why.’ ‘Why, is a heck of a question. But it is an inescapable conclusion that life has to be dynamic and not static. Change is bound to come one way or another.
‘You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain.’
don’t think it had ever before occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain’s capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he has achieved or might achieve hangs upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he is lost. I saw for a moment the true tenuousness of his hold on his power, the miracles that he had wrought with such a fragile instrument
‘Man remains physically adaptable to a remarkable degree. But it is the custom of each community to form the minds of its young in a mould, introducing a binding agent of prejudice. The result is a remarkably tough substance capable of withstanding successfully even the pressure of many innate tendencies and instincts. In this way it has been possible to produce a man who against all his basic sense of self-preservation will voluntarily risk death for an ideal – but also in this way is produced the dolt who is sure of everything and knows what is “right
