Wyndham, John (4 page)

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 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 neighborhood of the equator.

This time they got into print, all right. 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, flying saucers, 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.

The newsreel men were quickly off the mark. Possibly they
got some good and interesting pictures for their trouble of flying to
outlandish places. but there was a current theory among cutters that more than
a few seconds of any one news subject—except a boxing match—could not fail to
paralyze an audience with boredom. My first view, therefore, of a development
which was to play such an important part in my future, as well as in so many
other people’s, was a glimpse sandwiched between a hula contest in Honolulu and
the First Lady launching a battleship. (No, that is no anachronism.)

They were still building them: even admirals have to live.)
I was permitted to see a few triffids sway across the screen to the kind of
accompaniment supposed to be on the level of the great movie-going public:

“And now, folks, get a load of what our cameraman found in
Ecuador. Vegetables on vacation!
You’ve
only seen this kind of thing
after a party, but down in sunny Ecuador they see it any time—and no hangover
to follow! Monster plants on the march! Say, now, that’s given me a big idea!
Maybe if we can educate our potatoes right we can fix it so they’ll walk right
into the pot. How’d that be, Momma?”

For the short time the scene was on I stared at it, fascinated.
There was our mysterious rubbish-heap plant grown to a height of seven feet or
more. There was no mistaking it and it was “walking”!

The bole, which I now saw for the first time, was shaggy
with little rootlet hairs, It would have been almost spherical but for three
bluntly tapered projections extending from the lower part. Supported on these,
the main body was lifted about a foot clear of the ground.

When it “walked” it moved rather like a man on crutches. Two
of the blunt “legs” slid forward, then the whole thing lurched as the rear one
drew almost level with them, then the two in front slid forward again. At each
“step” the long stem whipped violently back and forth; it gave one a kind of
seasick feeling to watch it. As a method of progress it looked both strenuous
and clumsy—faintly reminiscent of young elephants at play. One felt that if it
were to go on lurching for long in that fashion it would be bound to strip all
its leaves if it did not actually break its stem. Nevertheless, ungainly
though it looked, it was contriving to cover the round at something like an
average walking pace.

That was about all I had time to see before the battleship
launching began. It was not a lot, but it was enough to incite an investigating
spirit in a boy. For if that thing in Ecuador could do a trick like that, why
not the one in our garden? Admittedly ours was a good deal smaller, but it did
look
the same.

About ten minutes after I got home I was digging round our
triffid. carefully loosening the earth near it to encourage it to “walk.”

Unfortunately there was an aspect of this self-propelled
plant discovery which the newsreel people either had not experienced or had
chosen for some reason of their own not to reveal. There was no warning,
either. I was bending down, intent on clearing the earth without harming the
plant, when something from nowhere hit me one terrific slam and knocked me
out...

I woke up to find myself in bed, with my mother, my father,
and the doctor watching me anxiously. My head felt as if it were split open. I
was aching all over, and, as I later discovered, one side of my face was
decorated with a blotchy red raised weal, The insistent questions as to how I
came to be lying unconscious in the garden were quite useless; I had no
faintest idea what it was that had hit mc. 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 bad 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.

Now that walking plants were established facts, the press
lost its former tepidity and bathed them in publicity. So a name had to be
found for them. Already there were botanists wallowing, after their custom, in
polysyllabic dog Latin and Greek to produce variants on
ambulans
and
pseudopodia,
but what the newspapers and the public wanted was something easy on the
tongue and not too heavy on the headlines for general use. If you could see the
papers of that time you would find them referring to:

TRICHOTS TRINITS

TRICUSPS TRIPEDALS

TRIGENATES TRIPEDS

TRIGONS TRIQUETS

TRILOGS TRIPODS

TRIDENTATES TRIPPETS

and a number of other mysterious things not even beginning
with “tri”—though almost all centered on the feature of that active,
three-pronged root.

There was argument, public, private, and bar-parlor, with
heated championship of one term or another on near-scientific,
quasi-etymological, and a number of other grounds, but gradually one term began
to dominate this philological gymkhana, in its first form it was not quite
acceptable, but common usage modified the original lone first “i,” and custom
quickly wrote in a second ”f,” to leave no doubt about it.

And so emerged the standard term. A catchy little name
originating in some newspaper office as a handy label for an oddity—but
destined one day to be associated with pain, fear, and misery—TRIFFID. ...

The first wave of public interest soon ebbed away. Triffids
were, admittedly, a bit weird—but that was, after all, just because they were
a novelty. People had felt the same about novelties of other days: about
kangaroos, giant lizards, black swans. And when you came to think of it, were
triffids all that much queerer than mudfish, ostriches, polliwogs, and a
hundred other things? The bar was an animal that had learned to fly; well, here
was a plant that had learned to walk—what of that?

But there were features of it to be less casually dismissed.
On its origins the Russians, true to type, lay low and said nothing. Even those
who had heard of Umberto did not yet connect him with it. Its sudden
appearance, and, even more, its wide distribution, promoted very puzzled
speculation. For though it matured more rapidly in the tropics, specimens in
various stages of development were reported from almost any region outside the
polar circles and the deserts.

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
finding them outside special hothouses, and apt to consider them as in some way
slightly indecent, or at least improper. But actually alarming was the
discovery that the whorl topping a triffid’s stem could lash out as a slender
stinging weapon ten feet long, capable of discharging enough poison to kill a
man if it struck squarely on his unprotected skin.

As soon as this danger was appreciated there followed a
nervous smashing and chopping of triffids everywhere, until it occurred to
someone that all that was necessary to make them harmless was the removal of
the actual stinging weapon. At this, the slightly hysterical assault upon the
plants declined, with their numbers considerably thinned. A little later it
began to be a fashion to have a safely docked triffid or two about one’s
garden. It was found that it took about two years for the lost sting to be
dangerously replaced, so that an annual pruning assured that they were in a
state of safety where they could provide vast amusement for the children.

In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting
most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the
status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics,
particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.

The traveler very easily failed to notice one among the
normal bushes and undergrowth, and the moment he was in range the venomous
sting would slash out. Even the regular inhabitant of such a district found it
difficult to detect a motionless triffid cunningly lurking beside a jungle
path. They were uncannily sensitive to any movement near them, and hard to take
unawares.

Dealing with them became a serious problem in such regions.
The most favored method was to shoot the top off the stem, and the sting with
it. The jungle natives took to carrying long, light poles mounted with hooked
knives, which they used effectively if they could get their blows in first— but
not at all if the triffid had a chance to sway forward and increase its range
by an unexpected four or five feet. Before long, however, these pike like
devices were mostly superseded by spring-operated guns of various types. Most
of them shot spinning disks, crosses, or small boomerangs of thin steel. As a
rule they were inaccurate above about twelve yards, though capable of slicing a
triffid stern neatly at twenty-five if they hit it. Their invention pleased
both the authorities—who had an almost unanimous distaste for the
indiscriminate toting of rifles—and the users, who found the missiles of
razor-blade steel f at cheaper and lighter than cartridges, and admirably
adaptable to silent banditry.

Elsewhere, immense research into the nature, habits, and
constitution of the triffid went on. Earnest experimenters set out to
determine, in the interests of science, how far and for how long it could walk;
whether it could be said to have a front, or could perform its march in any
direction with equal clumsiness; what proportion of its rime it must spend with
its roots in the ground; what reactions it showed to the presence of various
chemicals in the soil; and a vast quantity of other questions, both useful and
useless.

The largest specimen ever observed in the tropics stood
nearly ten feet high. No European specimen over eight feet had been seen, and
the average was little over seven. They appeared to adapt easily to a wide
range of climate and soils. They had, it seemed, no natural enemies—other than
man.

But there were a number of not unobvious characteristics
which escaped comment for some little time. 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 became clear only 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.

There was no great interest, either, in the three little
leafless sticks at the base of the stem. There was a light notion that they
might have something to do with the reproductive system—that system which tends
to be a sort of botanical glory-hole for all parts of doubtful purpose until
they can be sorted out and more specifically assigned later on. It was assumed,
consequently, that their characteristic of suddenly losing their immobility and
rattling a rapid tattoo against the main stem was some strange form of
triffidian amatory exuberance.

Possibly my uncomfortable distinction of getting myself
stung so early in the triffid era had the effect of stimulating my interest,
for I seemed to have a sort of link with them from then on. I spent—or “wasted,”
if you look at me through my father’s eyes—a great deal of fascinated time
watching them.

One could not blame him for considering this a worthless
pursuit, yet later the time turned out to have been better employed than
either of us suspected, for it was just before I left school that the Attic
& European Fish Oil Company reconstituted itself, dropping the word “Fish”
in the process. The public learned that it and similar companies in other
countries were about to farm triffids on a large scale, in order to extract
valuable oils and juices and to press highly nutritious oil cake for stock
feeding. Consequently, triffids moved into the realm of big business overnight.