Wyndham, John (3 page)

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.

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 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 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 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.