The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

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The way I came to miss the end of the world—well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years—was sheer accident:

You’ll find it in the records that on Tuesday, May 7, the Earth’s orbit passed through a cloud of comet debris.

until the thing actually began, nobody had ever heard a word about this supposed comet, or its debris…. Why they broadcast it, considering that everyone who could walk, hobble, or be carried was either out of doors or at windows enjoying the greatest free firework display ever, I don’t know.

the nurse who brought me my supper had to tell me all about it. “The sky’s simply full of shooting stars,” she said. “All bright green. They make people’s faces look frightfully ghastly. Everybody’s out watching them, and sometimes it’s almost as light as day—only all the wrong color.

It is not easy to think oneself back to the outlook of those days. We have to be more self-reliant now. But then there was so much routine, things were so interlinked. 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.

The human spirit continued much as before—95 per cent of it wanting to live in peace, and the other 5 per cent considering its chances if it should risk starting anything.

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.

“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 the 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.

It was Walter’s discovery again that the quality of the extracts was improved if the plants retained their stings.

Then, from a distance, came a sound which caught everyone’s attention: a gradually swelling chorus: And when I die, Don’t bury me at all, Just pickle my bones In alcohol.

“Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence,”

all women everywhere

“Take away our sight,” he had said, “and our superiority to them is gone.”

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.

“If we face it squarely, there’s a simple choice,” I said. “Either we can set out to save what can be saved from the wreck—and that has to include ourselves—or we can devote ourselves to stretching the lives of these people a little longer. That is the most objective view I can take.