Wyndham, John - The Day of the Triffids

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This book contains the complete text of the hardcover edition.
Spelling is British and mistakes by publisher are left in.
HAILED AS THE GREATEST SCIENCE-FICTION MASTERPIECE OF OUR TIME
The Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham
THE END BEGINS
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is
something seriously wrong somewhere.
I felt that from the moment I woke. And yet, when I started functioning a little more smartly, I
became doubtful. After all, the odds were that it was I who was wrong, and not everyone else-
though I did not see how that could be. I went on waiting, tinged with doubt. But presently I had
my first bit of objective evidence-a distant clock stuck what sounded to me just like eight. I
listened hard and suspiciously. Soon another clock began, on a hard, decisive note. In a leisurely
fashion it gave an indisputable eight. Then I knew things were awry.
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: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it. 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. At the time, however, I was only peevish, wondering what in thunder went on, for I had
been in the place long enough to know that, next to the matron, the clock is the most sacred thing
in a hospital.
Without a clock the place simply couldn't work. Each second there's someone consulting it on
births, deaths, doses, meals, lights, talking, working, sleeping, resting, visiting, dressing,
washing-and hitherto it had decreed that someone should begin to wash and tidy me up at exactly
three minutes after 7 A.M. That was one of the best reasons I had for appreciating a private room.
In a public ward the messy proceeding would have taken place a whole unnecessary hour earlier. But
here, today, clocks of varying reliability were continuing to strike eight in all directions-and
still nobody had shown up.
Much as I disliked the sponging process, and useless as it had been to suggest that the help of a
guiding hand as far as the bathroom could eliminate it, its failure to occur was highly
disconcerting. Besides, it was normally a close forerunner of breakfast, and I was feeling hungry.
Probably I would have been aggrieved about it any morning, but today, this Wednesday, May 8, was
an occasion of particular personal importance. I was doubly anxious to get all the fuss and
routine over because this was the day they were going to take off my bandages.
I groped around a bit to find the bell push and let them have a full five seconds' clatter, just
to show what I was thinking of them.
While I was waiting for the pretty short-tempered response that such a peal ought to bring, I went
on listening.
The day outside, I realized now, was sounding even more wrong than I had thought. The noises it
made, or failed to make, were more like Sunday than Sunday itself-and I'd come round again to
being absolutely assured that it was Wednesday, whatever else had happened to it.
Why the founders of St. Merryn's Hospital chose to erect their institution at a main-road crossing
upon a valuable office site, and thus expose their patients' nerves to constant laceration, is a
foible that I never properly understood. But for those fortunate enough to be suffering from
complaints unaffected by the wear and tear of continuous traffic, it did have the advantage that
one could lie abed and still not be out of touch, so to speak, with the flow of life. Customarily
the west-bound busses thundered along trying to beat the lights at the corner; as often as not a
pig-squeal of brakes and a salvo of shots from the silencer would tell that they hadn't. Then the
released cross traffic would rev and roar as it started up the incline. And every now and then
there would be an interlude: a good grinding bump, followed by a general stoppage-exceedingly
tantalizing to one in my condition, where the extent of the contretemps had to be judged entirely
by the degree of profanity resulting. Certainly, neither by day nor during most of the night, was
there any chance of a St. Merryn patient being under the impression that the common round had
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stopped just because he, personally, was on the shelf for the moment.
But this morning was different. Disturbingly, because
mysteriously, different. No wheels rumbled, no busses roared, no sound of a car of any kind, in
fact, was to be heard; no brakes, no horns, not even the clopping of the few rare horses that
still occasionally passed; nor, as there should be at such an hour, the composite tramp of work-
bound feet.
The more I listened, the queerer it seemed-and the less I cared for it. In what I reckoned to be
ten minutes of careful listening I heard five sets of shuffling, hesitating footsteps, three
voices bawling unintelligibly in the distance, and the hysterical sobs of a woman. There was not
the cooing of a pigeon, not the chirp of a sparrow. Nothing but the humming of wires in the wind.
A nasty, empty feeling began to crawl up inside me. It was the same sensation I used to have
sometimes as a child when I got to fancying that horrors were lurking in the shadowy corners of
the bedroom; when I daren't put a foot out for fear that something should reach from under the bed
and grab my ankle; daren't even reach for the switch lest the movement should cause something to
leap at me. I had to fight down the feeling, just as I had had to when I was a kid in the dark.
And it was no easier. It's surprising how much you don't grow out of when it comes to the test.
The elemental fears were still marching along with me, waiting their chance, and pretty nearly
getting it-just because my eyes were bandaged and the traffic had stopped. .
When I had pulled myself together a bit, I tried the reasonable approach. Why does traffic stop?
Well, usually because the road is closed for repairs. Perfectly simple. Any time now they'd be
along with pneumatic drills as another touch of aural variety for the long-suffering patients. But
the trouble with the reasonable line was that it went further. It pointed out that there was not
even the distant hum of traffic, not the whistle of a train, not the hoot of a tugboat. Just
nothing-until the clocks began chiming a quarter past eight.
The temptation to take a peep-not more than a peep, of course; just enough to get some idea of
what on earth could be happening-was immense. But I restrained it. For one thing, a peep was a far
less simple matter than it sounded. It wasn't just a case of lifting a blindfold: there were a lot
of pads and bandages. But, more important, I was scared to try. Over a week's complete blindness
can do a lot to frighten you out of taking chances with your sight. It was true that they intended
to remove the bandages today, but that would be done in a special dim light, and they would allow
them to stay off only if the inspection of my eyes were satisfactory.
I did not know whether it would be. It might be that my sight was permanently impaired. Or that I
would not be able to see at all. I did not know yet.
I swore and laid hold of the bell push again. It helped to relieve my feelings a bit.
No one, it seemed, was interested in bells. I began to get as much sore as worried. It's
humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's a still poorer pass to have no one to depend on. My
patience was whittling down. Something, I decided, had got to be done about it.
If I were to bawl down the passage and generally raise hell, somebody ought to show up if only to
tell me what they thought of me. I turned back the sheet and got out of bed. I'd never seen the
room I was in, and though I had a fairly good idea by ear of the position of the door, it wasn't
all that easy to find. There seemed to be several puzzling and unnecessary obstacles, but I got
across at the cost of a stubbed toe and minor damage to my shin. I shoved out into the passage.
"Hey!" I shouted. "I want some breakfast. Room forty-eight!"
For a moment nothing happened. Then came voices all shouting together. It sounded like hundreds of
them, and not a word coming through clearly. It was as though I'd put on a record of crowd noises-
and an ill-disposed crowd, at that. I had a nightmarish flash, wondering whether I had been
transferred to a mental home while I was sleeping and that this was not St. Merryn's Hospital at
all. The sound of those voices simply didn't sound normal to me. I closed the door hurriedly on
the babel and groped my way back to bed. At that moment bed seemed to be the one safe, comforting
thing in my whole baffling environment. As if to underline that, there came a sound which checked
me in the act of pulling up the sheets. From the street below rose a scream, wildly distraught and
contagiously terrifying. It came three times, and when it had died away it seemed still to tingle
in the air.
I shuddered. I could feel the sweat prickle my forehead under the bandages. I knew now that
something fearful and horrible was happening. I could not stand my isolation and helplessness any
longer. I had to know what was going on around me. My hands went up to my bandages; then, with my
fingers on the safety pins, I stopped.
Suppose the treatment had not been successful? Suppose that when I took the bandages off I were to
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find that I still could not see? That would be worse still-a hundred times worse....I lacked the
courage to be alone and find out that they had not saved my sight. And even if they had, would it
be safe yet to keep my eyes uncovered?
I dropped my hands and lay back. I was mad at myself and the place, and I did some silly, weak
cursing.
Some little while must have passed before I got a proper hold on things again, but after a bit I
found myself churning round in my mind once more after a possible explanation. I did not find it.
But I did become absolutely convinced that, come all the paradoxes of hell, it was Wednesday. For
the previous day had been notable, and I could swear that no more than a single night had passed
since then.
You'll find it in the records that on Tuesday, May 7, the Earth's orbit passed through a cloud of
comet debris. You can even believe it, if you like-millions did. Maybe it was so. I can't prove
anything either way. II was in no state to see what happened myself; but I do have my own ideas.
All that I actually know of the occasion is that I had to spend the evening in my bed listening to
eyewitness accounts of what was constantly claimed to be the most remarkable celestial spectacle
on record.
And yet, 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. But
they did, and it helped to impress on me still more heavily what it meant to be sightless. I got
around to feeling that if the treatment had not been successful I'd rather end the whole thing
than go on that way.
It was reported in the news bulletins during the day that mysterious bright green flashes had been
seen in the Californian skies the previous night. However, such a lot of things did happen in
California that no one could be expected to get greatly worked up over that, but as further
reports came in, this comet-debris motif made its appearance, and it stuck.
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." And so
it was, when you come to think of it.
As the nightline moved westward the brilliance of the display was in no way decreased. Occasional
green flashes became visible even before darkness fell. The announcer, giving an account of the
phenomenon in the six o'clock news, advised everyone that it was an amazing scene and one not to
he missed. He mentioned also that it seemed to be interfering seriously with short-wave reception
at long distances, but that the medium waves on which there would be a running commentary were
unaffected, as, at present, was television. He need not have troubled with the advice. By the way
everyone in the hospital got excited about it, it seemed to me that there was not the least
likelihood of anybody missing it-except myself.
And as if the radio's comments were not enough, 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. Even' now and then there's a big one so bright that it hurts to look at
it. It's a marvelous sight. 'They say there's never been anything like it before. It is such a
pity you can't see it, isn't it?"
"It is," I agreed somewhat shortly.
"We've drawn back the curtains in the wards so that they can all see it," she went on. "If only
you hadn't those bandages you'd have a wonderful view of it from here."
"Oh," I said.
"But it must be better still outside, though. They say thousands of people are out in the parks
and on the heath watching it all. And on all the flat roofs you can see people standing and
looking up."
"How long do they expect it to go on?" I asked patiently.
"I don't know, but they say it's not so bright now as it was in other places. Still, even if you'd
had your bandages off today, I don't expect they'd have let you watch it. You'll have to take
things gently at first, and some of the flashes are very bright. "They----Ooooh!"
"Why 'oooh'?" I inquired.
"That was such a brilliant one then-it made the whole room look green. What a pity you couldn't
see it."
"Isn't it?' I agreed. "Now do go away, there's a good girl." I tried listening to the radio, but
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it was making the same "ooohs" and "aaahs," helped out by gentlemanly tones which blathered about
this "magnificent spectacle" and "unique phenomenon" until I began to feel that there was a parry
for all the world going on, with me as the only person not invited.
I didn't have any choice of entertainment, for the hospital radio system gave only one program,
take it or leave it. After a bit I gathered that the show had begun to wane. The announcer advised
everyone who had not yet seen it to hurry up and do so, or regret all his life that he had missed
it.
The general idea seemed to be to convince me that I was passing up the very thing I was born for.
In the end I got sick of it and switched off. The last thing I heard was that the display was
diminishing fast now and that we'd probably be out of the debris area in a few hours.
There could be no doubt in my mind that all this had taken place the previous evening-for one
thing, I should have been a great deal hungrier even than I was had it been longer ago. Very well,
what was this, then? Had the whole hospital, the whole city made such a night of it that they'd
not pulled round yet?
About which point I was interrupted as the chorus of clocks, near and far, started announcing
nine.
For the third time I played hell with the bell. As I lay waiting I could hear a sort of
murmurousness beyond the door. It seemed composed of whimperings, slitherings, and shufflings,
punctuated occasionally by a raised voice in the distance.
But still no one came to my room.
By this time I was slipping back once more. The nasty, childish fancies were on me again. I found
myself waiting for the unseeable door to open and horrible things to come padding in-in fact, I
wasn't perfectly sure that somebody or something wasn't in already, and stealthily prowling round
the room. ...
Not that I'm given to that kind of thing really. - It was those damned bandages over my eyes, the
medley of voices that had shouted back at me down the corridor. But I certainly was getting the
willies-and once you get 'em, they grow. Already they were past the stage where you can shoo them
off by whistling or singing at yourself.
It came at last to the straight question: was I more scared of endangering my sight by taking off
the bandages or of staying in the dark with the willies growing every minute?
If it had been a day or two earlier, I don't know what I'd have done-very likely the same in the
end-but this day I could at least tell myself:
"Well, hang it, there can't be a lot of harm if I use common sense. After all, the bandages are
due to come off today. I'll risk it."
There's one thing II put to my credit. I was not far enough gone to tear them off wildly. I had
the sense and the self-control to get out of bed and pull the shade down before I started on the
safety pins.
Once I had the coverings off, and had found out that I could see in the dimness, I felt a relief
that I'd never known before. Nevertheless, the first thing I did after assuring myself that there
were indeed no malicious persons or things lurking under the bed or elsewhere was to slip a chair
back under the door handle. I could and did begin to get a better grip on myself then. I made
myself take a full hour gradually getting used to full daylight. At the end of it I knew that
thanks to swift first aid, followed by good doctoring, my eyes were as good as ever.
But still no one came.
On the lower shelf of the bedside table I discovered a pair of dark glasses thoughtfully put ready
against my need of them. Cautiously I put them on before I went right close to the window. The
lower pan of it was not made to open, so that the view was restricted. Squinting down and
sideways, I could see one or two people who appeared to be wandering in an odd, kind of aimless
way farther up the street. But what struck me most, and at once, was the sharpness, the clear
definition of everything-even the distant housetops view across the opposite roofs. And then I
noticed that no chimney, large or small, was smoking. ...
I found my clothes hung tidily in a cupboard. I began to feel more normal once I had them on.
There were some cigarettes still in the case. I lit one and began to get into the state of mind
where, though everything was still undeniably queer, I could no longer understand why I had been
quite so near panic.
It is not easy to think oneself back to the outlook of those days. We have to he more self-reliant
now. But then there was so much routine, things were so interlinked. Each one of us so steadily
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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 almost 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, bow 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 less efficiency and expecting others to do the same. That made it incredible to me,
therefore, that complete disorganization could have overtaken the hospital. Somebody somewhere, I
was sure, must have it in hand- unfortunately it was a somebody who had forgotten all about Room
48.
Nevertheless, when I did go to the door again and peer into the corridor I was forced to realize
that, whatever bad happened, it was affecting a great deal more than the single inhabitant of Room
48.
Just then there was no one in sight, though in the distance I could hear a pervasive murmur of
voices. There was a sound of shuffling footsteps, too, and occasionally a louder voice echoing
hollowly in the corridors, but nothing like the din I had shut out before. This time I did not
shout. I stepped out cautiously-why cautiously? I don't know. There was just something that
induced it.
It was difficult in that reverberating building to tell where the sounds were coming from, but one
way the passage finished at an obscured French window, with the shadow of a balcony rail upon it,
so I went the other. Rounding a corner, I found myself out of the private-room wing and on a
broader corridor.
At the far end of the wide corridor were the doors of a ward. The panels were frosted save for
ovals of clear glass at face level,
I opened the door. It was pretty dark in there. The curtains had evidently been drawn after the
previous night's display was over-and they were still drawn.
"Sister?" I inquired.
"She ain't 'ere," a man's voice said. "What's more," it went on,
"she ain't been 'ere' for ruddy hours, neither. Can't you pull them ruddy curtains, mate, and
let's 'ave some flippin' light? Don't know what's come over the bloody place this morning."
"Okay," I agreed.
Even if the whole place were disorganized, it didn't seem to be any good reason why the
unfortunate patients should have to lie in the dark.
I pulled back the curtains on the nearest window and let in a shaft of bright sunlight. It was a
surgical ward with about twenty patients, all bedridden. Leg injuries mostly; several amputations,
by the look of it.
"Stop foolin' about with 'em, mate, and pull 'em back," said the same voice.
I turned and looked at the man who spoke. He was a dark, burly fellow with a weather-beaten skin.
He was sitting up in bed, facing directly at me-and at the light. His eyes seemed to be gazing
into my own; so did his neighbor's, and the next man's.
For a few moments I stared back at them. It took that long to register. Then: "I-they-they seem to
be stuck," I said. "I'll find someone to see to them."
And with that I fled from the ward.
I was shaky again, and I could have done with a stiff drink. The thing was beginning to sink in.
But I found it difficult to believe that all the men in that ward could be blind, and yet...
The elevator wasn't working, so I started down the stairs. On the next floor I pulled myself
together and plucked up the courage to look into another ward. The beds there were all
disarranged. At first I thought the place was empty, but it wasn't-not quite. Two men in
nightclothes lay on the floor. One was soaked in blood from an unhealed incision, the other looked
as if some kind of congestion had seized him. They were both quite dead. The rest had gone.
Back on the stairs once more, I realized that most of the background voices I had been hearing all
the time were coming up from below, and that they were louder and closer now. I hesitated a
moment, but there seemed to be nothing for it but to go on making my way down.
On the next turn I nearly tripped over a man who lay across my way in the shadow. At the bottom of
the flight lay somebody who actually had tripped over him-and cracked his head on the stone steps
as he landed.
At last I reached the final turn where I could stand and look down into the main hail. Seemingly
everyone in the place who was able to move must have made instinctively for that spot, either with
the idea of finding help or of getting outside. Maybe some of them had got out. One of the main
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entrance doors was wide open, but most of them couldn't find it. There was a tight-packed mob of
men and women, nearly all of them in their hospital nightclothes, milling slowly and helplessly
around. The motion pressed those on the outskirts cruelly against marble corners or ornamental
projections. Some of them were crushed breathlessly against the walls. Now and then one would
trip. If the press of bodies allowed him to fall, there was little chance that it would let him
come up again.
The place looked-well, maybe you'll have seen some of Dore's pictures of sinners in hell. But Dore
couldn't include the sounds: the sobbing, the murmurous moaning, and occasionally a forlorn cry.
A minute or two of it was all I could stand. I fled back up the stairs.
There was the feeling that I ought to do something about it. Lead them out into the street,
perhaps, and at least put an end to that dreadful slow milling. But a glance had been enough to
show that I could not hope to make my way to the door to guide them there. Besides, if I were to,
if I did get them outside-what then?
I sat down on a step for a while to get over it, with my head in my hands and that awful
conglomerate sound in my ears all the time. Then I searched for, and found, another staircase. It
was a narrow service flight which led me out by a back way into the yard.
Maybe I'm not telling this part too well. The whole thing was so unexpected and shocking that for
a time I deliberately tried not to remember the details. Just then I was feeling much as though it
were a nightmare from which I was desperately but vainly seeking the relief of waking myself. As I
stepped out into the yard I still half refused to believe what I had seen.
But one thing I was perfectly certain about. Reality or nightmare, I needed a drink as I had
seldom needed one before.
There was nobody in sight in the little side street outside the yard gates, but almost opposite
stood a pub. I can recall its name now-the Alamein Arms. There was a board bearing a reputed
likeness of Viscount Montgomery hanging from an iron bracket, and below it one of the doors stood
open.
I made straight for it.
Stepping into the public bar gave me for the moment a comforting sense of normality. It was
prosaically and familiarly like dozens of others.
But although there was no one in that part, there was certainly something going on in the saloon
bar, round the corner.
I heard heavy breathing. A cork left its bottle with a pop. A pause. Then a voice remarked:
"Gin, blast it! T'hell with gin!"
There followed a shattering crash. The voice gave a sozzled chuckle.
"Thash th'mirror. Wash good of mirrors anyway?"
Another cork popped.
"S'darnned gin again," complained the voice, offended.
"T'hell with gin."
This time the bottle hit something soft, thudded to the floor, and lay there gurgling away its
contents.
"Hey!" I called. "I want a drink." There was a silence. Then:
"Who're you?" the voice inquired cautiously.
"I'm from the hospital," I said. "I want a drink." "Don' 'member y'r voice. Can you see?"
"Yes," I told him.
"Well, then, for God's sake get over the bar, Doc, and find me a bottle of whisky."
"I'm doctor enough for that," I said
I climbed across and went round the corner. A large-bellied, red-faced man with a graying walrus
mustache stood there clad only in trousers and a collarless shirt. He was pretty drunk. He seemed
undecided whether to open the bottle he held in his band or to use it as a weapon.
"'F you're not a doctor, what are you?" he demanded suspiciously.
"I was a patient-but I need a drink as much as any doctor," I said. "That's gin again you've got
there," I added.
"Oh, is it! Damned gin," he said, and slung it away. It went through the window with a lively
crash.
"Give me that corkscrew," I told him.
I took down a bottle of whisky from the shelf, opened it, and handed it to him with a glass. For
myself I chose a stiff brandy with very little soda, and then another. After that my hand wasn't
shaking so much.
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I looked at my companion. He was taking his whisky neat, out of the bottle.
"You'll get drunk," I said.
He paused and turned his head toward me. I could have sworn that his eyes really saw me.
"Get drunk! Damn it, I am drunk," he said scornfully. He was so perfectly right that I didn't
comment. He brooded a moment before he announced:
"Gotta get drunker. Gotta get mush drunker." He leaned closer.
"D'you know what? I'm blind. Thash what I am- blind's a bat. Everybody's blind's a bat. 'Cept
you. Why aren't you blind's a bat?"
"I don't know," I told him.
"'S that bloody comet. Thash what done it. Green shootin' shtarsh-an' now everyone's blind's a
hat. D'ju shee green shootin' shtarsh?"
"No," I admitted.
"There you are. Proves it. You didn't see 'em: you aren't blind. Everyone else saw 'em"-he waved
an expressive arm
-"all's blind's bats. Bloody comets, I say."
I poured myself a third brandy, wondering whether there might not be something in what he was
saying.
"Everyone blind?" I repeated.
"Thash it. All of 'em. Prob'ly everyone in th'world-'cept you,' he added as an afterthought.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"'S'easy. Listen!" he said.
We stood side by side, leaning on the bar of the dingy pub, and listened. There was nothing to be
heard-nothing but the rustle of a dirty newspaper blown down the empty street. Such a quietness
held everything as cannot have been known in those parts for a thousand years and more.
"See what I mean? 'S'obvious," said the man.
"Yes," I said slowly. "Yes-I see what you mean."
I decided that I must get along. I did not know where to. But I must find out more about what was
happening.
"Are you the landlord?" I asked him.
"Wha' 'f I am?" he demanded defensively.
"Only that I've got to pay someone for three double brandies."
"Ah-forget it."
"But look here
"Forget it, I tell you. D'ju know why? 'Cause what's the good 'f money to a dead man? An' thash
what I ain-'s good as. Jus' a few more drinks."
He looked a pretty robust specimen for his age, and I said so.
"Wha's good of living blind's a bat?" be demanded aggressively. "Thash what my wife said. An' she
was right-only she's more guts than I have. When she found as the kids was blind too, what did she
do? Took 'em into our bed with her and turned on the gas. Thash what she done. An' I hadn't the
guts to stick with 'em. She's got pluck, my wife, more'n I have. But I will have soon. I'm goin'
back up there soon- when I'm drunk enough."
What was there to say? What I did say served no purpose, save to spoil his temper. In the end he
groped his way to the stairs and disappeared up them, bottle in hand. I didn't try to stop him or
follow him. I watched him go. Then I knocked off the last of my brandy and went out into the
silent street.
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
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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
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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
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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
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