On a day in the summer of our sixth year Josella and I went down to the coast together, travelling there in the half-tracked vehicle that I customarily used now that the roads were growing so bad. It was a holiday for her. Months had passed since she had been outside the fence. The care of the place and the babies had kept her far too tied to make more than a few necessary trips, but now we had reached the stage where we felt that Susan could safely be left in charge sometimes, and we had a feeling of release as we climbed up and ran over the tops of the hills. On the lower southern slopes we stopped the car for a while, and sat there.
It was a perfect June day with only a few light clouds flecking a pure blue sky. The sun shone down on the beaches and the sea beyond just as brightly as it had in the days when those same beaches had been crowded with bathers, and the sea dotted with little boats. We looked down on it in silence for some minutes. Josella said:
‘Don’t you still feel sometimes that if you were to close your eyes for a bit you might open them again to find it all as it was, Bill? – I do.’
‘Not often now,’ I told her. ‘But I’ve had to see so much more of it than you have. All the same, sometimes…’
‘And look at the gulls – just as they used to be.’
‘There are many more birds this year,’ I agreed. ‘I’m glad of that.’
Viewed impressionistically from a distance the little town was still the same jumble of small red-roofed houses and bungalows populated mostly by a comfortably retired middle class – but it was an impression that could not last more than a few minutes. Though the tiles still showed, the walls were barely visible. The tidy gardens had vanished under an unchecked growth of green, patched in colour here and there by the descendants of carefully cultivated flowers. Even the roads looked like strips of green carpet from this distance. When we reached them we should find that the effect of soft verdure was illusory; they would be matted with coarse, tough weeds.
‘Only so few years ago,’ Josella said reflectively, ‘people were wailing about the way those bungalows were destroying the countryside. Now look at them.’
‘The countryside is having its revenge, all right,’ I said. ‘Nature seemed about finished then – “who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him”?’
‘It rather frightens me. It’s as if everything were breaking out. Rejoicing that we’re finished, and that it’s free to go its own way. I wonder…? Have we been just fooling ourselves since it happened? Do you think we really are finished with, Bill?’
I’d had plenty more time when I was out on my foragings to wonder about that than she had.
‘If you weren’t you, darling, I might make an answer out of the right heroic mould – the kind of wishful thinking that so often passes for faith and resolution.’
‘But as I am me?’
‘I’ll give you the honest answer – not quite. And while there’s life, there’s hope.’
We looked on the scene before us for some seconds in silence.
‘I think,’ I amplified, ‘only think, mind you, that we have a narrow chance – so narrow that it is going to take a long long time to get back. If it weren’t for the triffids, I’d say there was a very good chance indeed – though still taking a longish time. But the triffids are a real factor. They are something that no rising civilization has had to fight before. Are they going to take the world off us, or are we going to be able to stop them?
‘The real problem is to find some simple way of dealing with them. We aren’t so badly off – we can hold them away. But our grandchildren – what are they going to do about them? Are they going to have to spend all their lives in human reservations only kept free of triffids by unending toil?
‘I’m quite sure there is a simple way. The trouble is that simple ways come out of such complicated research. And we haven’t the resources.’
‘Surely we have all the resources there ever were, just for the taking,’ Josella put in.
‘Material, yes. But mental, no. What we need is a team, a team of experts really out to deal with the triffids for good and all. Something could be done. I’m sure. Something along the lines of a selective killer, perhaps. If we could produce the right hormones to create a state of imbalance in triffids, but not enough in other things…It must be possible – if you have enough brain power turned on to the job…’
‘If you think that, why don’t you try?’ she asked.
‘Too many reasons. First, I’m not up to it – a very mediocre biochemist, and there’s only one of me. There’d have to be a lab. and equipment. More than that, there’d have to be time, and there are too many things which I have to do as it is. But even if I had the ability, then there would have to be the means of producing synthetic hormones in huge quantities. It would be a job for a regular factory. But before that there must be the research team.’
‘People could be trained.’
‘Yes – when enough of them can be spared from the mere business of keeping alive. I’ve collected a mass of biochemical books in the hope that perhaps some time there will be people who can make use of them – I shall teach David all I can, and he must hand it on. But unless there is leisure for work on it some time, I can see nothing ahead but the reservations.’
Josella frowned down on a group of four triffids ambling across a field below us.
‘They used to say that man’s really serious rivals were the insects. It seems to me that the triffids have something in common with some kinds of insects. Oh, I know that biologically they’re plants. What I mean is they don’t bother about their individuals, and the individuals don’t bother about themselves. Separately they have something which looks slightly like intelligence; collectively it looks a great deal more like it. They sort of work together for a purpose the way ants or bees do – yet you could say that not one of them is aware of any purpose or scheme although he’s part of it. It’s all very queer – probably impossible for us to understand, anyway. They’re so different. It seems to me to go against all our ideas of inheritable characteristics. Is there something in a bee or a triffid which is a gene of social organization, or does an ant have a gene of architecture? And if they have these things why haven’t we in all this time developed a gene for language, or cooking? Anyway, whatever it is, the triffids do seem to have something like it. It may be that no single individual knows why it keeps hanging around our fence, but the whole lot together knows that its purpose is to get us – and that sooner or later it will.’
‘There are still things that can happen to stop that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to make you feel quite despondent about it all.’
‘I don’t – except sometimes when I’m tired. Usually I’m much too busy to worry over what may happen years ahead. No, as a rule I don’t go much beyond getting a little sad – the sort of gentle melancholy that the eighteenth century thought so estimable. I go sentimental when you play records – there is something rather frightening about a great orchestra which has passed away still playing on to a little group of people hemmed in and gradually growing more primitive. It takes me back, and I begin to feel sad with thinking of all the things we can never do again – however things go now. Don’t you sometimes feel like that?
‘H’m,’ I admitted. ‘But I find that I accept the present more easily as it goes on. I suppose that if there were wishes that could be granted, I would wish the old world back – but there’d be a condition. You see, in spite of everything, I’m happier inside me than I ever was before. You know that, don’t you, Josie?’
She put her hand on mine.
‘I feel that too. No, what saddens me is not so much the things we’ve lost, as the things the babies will never have the chance to know.’
‘It’s going to be a problem to bring them up with hopes and ambitions,’ I acknowledged. ‘We can’t help being orientated backwards. But they mustn’t look back all the time. A tradition of a vanished golden age and ancestors who were magicians would be a most damning thing. Whole races have had that sort of inferiority complex which has sunk into lassitude on the tradition of a glorious past. But how are we going to stop that kind of thing from happening?’
‘If I were a child now,’ she said, reflectively, ‘I think I should want a reason of some kind. Unless I was given it – that is, if I were allowed to think that I had been born into a world which had been quite pointlessly destroyed, I should find living quite pointless, too. That does make it awfully difficult because it seems to be just what has happened…’
She paused, pondering, then she added:
‘Do you think we could – do you think we should be justified in starting a myth to help them? A story of a world that was wonderfully clever, but so wicked that it had to be destroyed – or destroyed itself by accident? Something like the Flood again. That wouldn’t crush them with inferiority – it could give the incentive to build, and this time to build something better.’
‘Yes…’ I said, considering it. ‘Yes. It’s often a good idea to tell children the truth. Kind of makes things easier for them later on – only why pretend it’s a myth?’
Josella demurred at that.
‘How do you mean? The triffids were – well, they were somebody’s fault, or mistake, I admit. But the rest…?’
‘I don’t think we can blame anyone too much for the triffids. The extracts they give were very valuable in the circumstances. Nobody can ever see what a major discovery is going to lead to – whether it is a new kind of engine or a triffid, and we coped with them all right in normal conditions. We benefited quite a lot from them, as long as the conditions were to their disadvantage.’
‘Well, it wasn’t our fault the conditions changed. It was – just one of those things: like earthquakes or hurricanes – what an insurance company would call an Act of God. Maybe that’s just what it was – a judgement. Certainly we never brought that comet.’
‘Didn’t we, Josella? Are you quite sure of that?’
She turned to look at me.
‘What do you mean, Bill? How could we?’
‘What I mean, my dear is – was it a comet at all? You see, there’s an old superstitious distrust of comets pretty well grained in. I know we were modern enough not to kneel down in the streets to pray to them – but all the same, it’s a phobia with centuries of standing. They’ve been portents and symbols of heavenly wrath and warnings that the end is at hand, and used in any amount of stories and prophecies. So, when you get an astonishing celestial phenomenon, what more natural than to attribute it straight off to a comet? A denial would take time to get around – and time was just what there was not. And when utter disaster follows, it just confirms it for everyone that it must have been a comet.’
Josella was looking at me very hard.
‘Bill, are you trying to tell me that you don’t think it was a comet at all?’
‘Just exactly that,’ I agreed.
‘But – I don’t understand. It must – What else could it have been?’
I opened a vacuum-packed tin of cigarettes, and lit one for each of us.
‘You remember what Michael Beadley said about the tight-rope we’d all been walking on for years?’
‘Yes, but – ’
‘Well, I think that what happened was that we came off it – and that a few of us just managed to survive the crash.’
I drew on my cigarette, looking out at the sea and at the infinite blue sky above it.
‘Up there,’ I went on, ‘up there, there were – and maybe there still are – unknown numbers of satellite weapons circling round and round the Earth. Just a lot of dormant menaces, touring around, waiting for someone, or something, to set them off. What was in them? You don’t know; I don’t know. Top-secret stuff. All we’ve heard is guesses – fissile materials, radio-active dusts, bacteria, viruses…Now suppose that one type happened to have been constructed especially to emit radiations that our eyes would not stand – something that would burn out, or at least damage, the optic nerve…?’
Josella gripped my hand.
‘Oh, no, Bill! No, they couldn’t…That’d be – diabolical…Oh, I can’t believe…Oh, no, Bill!’
‘My sweet, all the things up there were diabolical…Then suppose there were a mistake, or perhaps an accident – maybe such an accident as actually encountering a shower of comet debris, if you like – which starts some of these things popping…
‘Somebody starts talking about comets. It might not be politic to deny that – and there turned out to be so little time, anyway.
‘Well, naturally these things would have been intended to operate close to the ground where the effect would be spread over a definitely calculable area. But they start going off out there in space, or maybe when they hit the atmosphere – either way they’re operating so far up that people all round the world can receive direct radiations from them…
‘Just what did happen is anyone’s guess now. But one thing I’m quite certain of – that somehow or other we brought this lot down on ourselves. And there was that plague, too: it wasn’t typhoid, you know…
‘I find that it’s just the wrong side of coincidence for me to believe that out of all the thousands of years in which a destructive comet could arrive, it happens to do so just a few years after we have succeeded in establishing satellite weapons – don’t you? No, I think that we kept on that tight-rope quite a while, considering the things that might have happened – but sooner or later the foot had to slip.’
‘Well, when you put it that way – ’ murmured Josella. She broke off, and was lost in silence for quite a while. Then she said:
‘I suppose in a way that should be more horrible than the idea of nature striking blindly at us. And yet I don’t think it is. It makes me feel less hopeless about things because it makes them at least comprehensible. If it was like that, then it is at least a thing that can be prevented from happening again – just one more of the mistakes our very great-grandchildren are going to have to avoid. And, oh dear, there were so many, many mistakes! But we can warn them.’
‘H’m – well – ’ I said. ‘Anyway, once they’ve beaten the triffids and pulled themselves out of this mess they’ll have plenty of scope for making brand-new mistakes of their very own.’
‘Poor little things,’ she said, as if she were gazing down rows of increasingly great-grandchildren, ‘it’s not much that we’re offering them, is it?’
‘People used to say: “life is what you make it.” ’
‘That, my dear Bill, outside very narrow limits is just a load of – well, I don’t want to be rude. But I believe my Uncle Ted used to say that – until somebody dropped a bomb which took both his legs off. It changed his mind. And nothing that I personally did caused me to be living at all now.’ She threw away the remains of her cigarette. ‘Bill, what have we done to be the lucky ones in all this? Every now and then – when I stop feeling overworked and selfish, that is – I think how lucky we really have been, and I want to give thanks to something or other. But then I find I feel if there were anybody or anything to give thanks to they’d have chosen such a much more deserving case than me. It’s all very confusing to a simple girl.’
‘And I,’ I said, ‘feel that if there were anybody or anything at all in the driving-seat quite a lot of the things in history could not have happened. But I don’t let it worry me a lot. We’ve had luck, my sweet. If it changes tomorrow, well, it changes. Whatever it does, it can’t take away the time we’ve had together. That’s been more than I ever deserved, and more than most men get in a lifetime.’
We sat there a little longer, looking at the empty sea, and then drove down to the little town.
After a search which produced most of the things on our wants list we went down to picnic on the shore in the sunshine – with a good stretch of shingle behind us over which no triffid could approach unheard.
‘We must do more of this while we can,’ Josella said. ‘Now that Susan’s growing up I needn’t be nearly so tied.’
‘If anybody ever earned the right to let up a bit, you have,’ I agreed.
I said it with a feeling that I would like us to go together and say a last farewell to places and things we had known while it was still possible. Every year now the prospect of imprisonment would grow closer. Already to get northward from Shirning it was necessary to make a detour of many miles to pass the country that had reverted to marshland. All the roads were rapidly becoming worse with the erosion by rain and streams, and the roots that broke up the surfaces. The time in which one would still be able to get an oil-tanker back to the house was already becoming measurable. One day one of them would fail to make its way along the lane, and very likely block it for good. A half-track would continue to run over ground that was dry enough, but as time went on it would be increasingly difficult to find a route open enough even for that.
‘And we must have one real last fling,’ I said. ‘You shall dress up again, and we’ll go to – ’
‘Sh-sh!’ interrupted Josella, holding up one finger, and turning her ear to the wind.
I held my breath, and strained my ears. There was a feeling rather than a sound of throbbing in the air. It was faint, but gradually swelling.
‘It is – it’s a plane!’ Josella said.
We looked to the west, shading our eyes with our hands. The humming was still little more than the buzzing of an insect. The sound increased so slowly that it could come from nothing but a helicopter, any other kind of craft would have passed over us or out of hearing in the time it was taking.
Josella saw it first. A dot, a little out from the coast, and apparently coming our way, parallel with the shore. We stood up, and started to wave. As the dot grew larger, we waved more wildly, and, not very sensibly, shouted at the tops of our voices. The pilot could not have failed to see us there on the open beach had he come on, but that was what he did not do. A few miles short of us he turned abruptly north to pass inland. We went on waving madly, hoping that he might yet catch sight of us. But there was no indecision in the machine’s course, no variation of the engine note. Deliberately and imperturbably it droned away towards the hills.
We lowered our arms, and looked at one another.
‘If it can come once, it can come again,’ said Josella sturdily, but not very convincingly.
But the sight of the machine had changed our day for us. It destroyed quite a lot of resignation we had carefully built up. We had been saying to ourselves that there must be other groups, but they wouldn’t be in any better position than we were, more likely in a worse. But when a helicopter could come sailing in like a sight and sound from the past, it raised more than memories: it suggested that someone somewhere was managing to make out better than we were. – Was there a tinge of jealousy there? – And it also made us aware that lucky as we had been, we were still gregarious creatures by nature.
The restless feeling that the machine left behind destroyed our mood and the lines along which our thoughts had been running. In unspoken agreement we began to pack up our belongings, and, each occupied with our thoughts, we made our way back to the half-track, and started for home.
16
Contact
We had covered perhaps half the distance back to Shirning when Josella noticed the smoke. At first sight it might have been a cloud, but as we neared the top of the hill we could see the grey column beneath the more diffused upper layer. She pointed to it, and looked at me without a word. The only fires we had seen in years had been a few spontaneous outbreaks in later summer. We both knew at once that the plume ahead was rising from the neighbourhood of Shirning.
I forced the half-track along at a greater speed than it had ever done on the deteriorated roads. We were thrown about inside it, and yet still seemed to be crawling. Josella sat silent all the time, her lips pressed together and her eyes fixed on the smoke. I knew that she was searching for some indication that the source was nearer or further away, anywhere but at Shirning itself. But the closer we came, the less room there was for doubt. We tore up the final lane quite oblivious of the stings whipping at the vehicle as it passed. Then, at the turn, we were able to see that it was not the house itself, but the wood-pile that was ablaze.
At the sound of the horn Susan came running out to pull on the rope which opened the gate from a safe distance. She shouted something which was drowned in the rattle of our driving in. Her free hand was pointing, not to the fire, but towards the front of the house. As we ran further into the yard we could see the reason. Skilfully landed in the middle of our lawn stood the helicopter.
By the time we were out of the half-track a man in a leather jacket and breeches had come out of the house. He was tall, fair, and sunburned. At the first glance I had a feeling I had seen him somewhere before. He waved and grinned cheerfully as we hurried across.
‘Mr Bill Masen, I presume. My name is Simpson – Ivan Simpson.’
‘I remember,’ said Josella. ‘You brought in a helicopter that night at the University Buildings.’
‘That’s right. Clever of you to remember. But just to show you you’re not the only one with a memory: you are Josella Playton, author of – ’
‘You’re quite wrong,’ she interrupted him, firmly. ‘I’m Josella Masen, author of “David Masen”.’
‘Ah, yes. I’ve just been looking at the original edition, and a very creditable bit of craftsmanship too, if I may say so.’
‘Hold on a bit,’ I said. ‘That fire – ?’
‘It’s safe enough. Blowing away from the house. Though I’m afraid most of your stock of wood has gone up.’
‘What happened?’
‘That was Susan. She didn’t mean me to miss the place. When she heard my engine she grabbed a flame-thrower, and bounded out to start a signal as quickly as she could. The wood-pile was handiest – no one could have missed what she did to that.’
We went inside, and joined the others.
‘By the way,’ Simpson said to me, ‘Michael told me I was to be sure to start off with his apologies.’
‘To me?’ I said, wondering.
‘You were the only one who saw any danger in the triffids, and he didn’t believe you.’
‘But – do you mean to say you knew I was here?’
‘We found out very roughly your probable location a few days ago – from a fellow we all have cause to remember: one Coker.’
‘So Coker came through, too,’ I said. ‘After the shambles I saw at Tynsham I’d an idea the plague had got him.’
Later on, when we had had a meal and produced our best brandy, we got the story out of him.
When Michael Beadley and his party had gone on, leaving Tynsham to the mercies and principles of Miss Durrant, they had not made for Beaminster, nor anywhere near it. They had gone north-east, into Oxfordshire. Miss Durrant’s misdirection to us must have been deliberate, for Beaminster had never been mentioned.
They had found there an estate which seemed at first to offer the group all it required, and no doubt they could have entrenched themselves there as we had entrenched ourselves at Shirning, but as the menace of the triffids increased, the disadvantages of the place became more obvious. In a year, both Michael and the Colonel were highly dissatisfied with the longer-term prospects there. A great deal of work had already been put into the place, but by the end of the second summer there was general agreement that it would be better to cut their losses. To build a community they had to think in terms of years – a considerable number of years. They also had to bear in mind that the longer they delayed, the more difficult any move would be. What they needed was a place where they would have room to expand and develop; an area with natural defences which, once it had been cleared of triffids, could economically be kept clear of them. Where they now were a high proportion of their labour was occupied with maintaining fences. And as their numbers increased, the length of fence line would have to be increased. Clearly, the best self-maintaining defence line would be water. To that end they had held a discussion on the relative merits of various islands. It had been chiefly climate that had decided them in favour of the Isle of Wight, despite some misgivings over the area that would have to be cleared. Accordingly, in the following March they had packed up again, and moved on.
‘When we got there,’ Ivan said, ‘the triffids seemed even thicker than where we’d left. No sooner had we begun to settle ourselves into a big country house near Godshill than they started collecting along the walls in thousands. We let ’em come for a couple of weeks or so, then we went for ’em with the flame-throwers.
‘After we’d wiped that lot out, we let them accumulate again, and then we blitzed ’em once more – and so on. We could afford to do it properly there, because once we were clear of them, we’d not need to use the throwers any more. There could only be a limited number in the island, and the more of them that came round us to be wiped out, the better we liked it.
‘We had to do it a dozen times before there was any appreciable effect. All round the walls we had a belt of charred stumps before they began to get shy. There were a devil of a lot more of them than we had expected.’
‘There used to be at least half a dozen nurseries breeding high quality plants in the island – not to mention the private and park ones,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t surprise me. There might have been a hundred nurseries by the look of it. Before all this began I’d have said there were only a few thousand of the things in the whole country, if anyone had asked me, but there must have been hundreds of thousands.’
‘There were,’ I said. ‘They’ll grow practically anywhere, and they were pretty profitable. There didn’t seem to be so many when they were penned up in farms and nurseries. All the same, judging from the amount round here, there must be whole tracts of country practically free of them now.’
‘That’s so,’ he agreed. ‘But go and live there and they’ll start collecting in a few days. You can see that from the air. I’d have known there was someone here without Susan’s fire. They make a dark border round any inhabited place.
‘Still, we managed to thin down the crowd round our walls after a bit. Maybe they got to find it unhealthy, or maybe they didn’t care a lot for walking about on the charred remains of their relatives – and, of course, there were fewer of them. So then we started going out to hunt them instead of just letting them come to us. It was our main job for months. Between us we covered every inch of the island – or thought we did. By the time we were through, we reckoned we’d put paid to every one in the place, big and small. Even so, some managed to appear the next year, and the year after that. Now we have an intensive search every spring on account of seeds blowing over from the mainland, and settle with them right away.
‘While that was going on, we were getting organized. There were some fifty or sixty of us to begin with. I took flips in the helicopter, and when I saw signs of a group anywhere, I’d go down and issue a general invitation to come along. Some did – but a surprising number simply weren’t interested: they’d escaped from being governed, and in spite of all their troubles they didn’t want any more of it. There are some lots in South Wales that have made sorts of tribal communities, and resent the idea of any organization except the minimum they’ve set up for themselves. You’ll find similar lots near the other coalfields, too. Usually the leaders are the men who happened to be on the shift below ground so that they never saw the green stars – though God knows how they ever got up the shafts again.
‘Some of them so definitely don’t want to be interfered with that they shoot at the aircraft – there’s one lot of that sort at Brighton – ’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘they warned me off, too.’
‘Recently there are more like that. There’s one at Maidstone, another at Guildford, and other places. They’re the real reason why we hadn’t spotted you hidden away here before. The district didn’t seem too healthy when one got close to it. I don’t know what they think they’re doing – probably got some good food dumps and are scared of anyone else wanting some of it. Anyway, there’s no sense in taking risks, so I just let ’em stew.
‘Still, quite a lot did come along. In a year we’d gone up to three hundred or so – not all sighted, of course.
‘It wasn’t until about a month ago that I came across Coker and his lot – and one of the first things he asked, by the way, was whether you’d shown up. They had a bad time, particularly at first.
‘A few days after he got back to Tynsham, a couple of women came along from London, and brought the plague with them. Coker quarantined them at the first symptoms, but it was too late. He decided on a quick move. Miss Durrant wouldn’t budge. She elected to stay and look after the sick, and follow later if she could. She never did.