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 the mirror. Wash good of mirrors, anyway?’
Another cork popped.
‘’S’ damned 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 greying walrus moustache stood there clad only in trousers and a collarless shirt. He was fairly drunk. He seemed undecided whether to open the bottle he held in his hand, 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! B— 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.
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 towards 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, b— it! Thash what done it. Green shootin’ shtarsh – an’ now everyone’s blind’s a bat. 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. B— 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 am – ’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?’ he 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 back the last of my brandy, and went out into the silent street.
2
The Coming of the Triffids
This is a personal record. It involves a great deal that has vanished for ever, 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 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 I would shake my head, conscious of my sad inadequacy, and admit that I did not know.
My father would then shake his head.
For him the world was divided sharply into desk-men who worked with their brains, and non-desk-men who didn’t, and got dirty. How he contrived to maintain this view which was already a century or so out of date I do not know, but it pervaded my early years to such an extent that I was late in perceiving that a weakness in figures did not of necessity condemn me to the life of a street-sweeper or a scullion. It did not occur to me that the subject which interested me most could lead to a career – and my father failed either to notice, or, if he did, to care that reports on my biology were consistently good.
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 life might assume upon other, less favoured 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 it 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 then 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 travelled by aeroplane. 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 ploughshares 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 – ninety-five per cent of it wanting to live in peace; and the other five 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 five per cent to relax a while 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 round the earth. 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 back-firing 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. 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, anyway? 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. However, the laced-company system 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 be untangled from time to time. Hardly anyone heard of even the existence of Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, for instance. I only heard of him myself years later in the course of my work.
Umberto was of assorted Latin descent, and something South American by nationality. 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 and European Fish-Oil Company, and produced a bottle of pale pink oil in which he proposed to interest them.
Arctic and European displayed no eagerness. The trade was pretty well tied up. However, they did in the course of time get around to analysing the sample he had left with them.
The first thing they discovered about it was that it was not a fish-oil, anyway: 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, they sent out what remained of the sample for intensive study, and put round hurried inquiries to know if Mr Palanguez had made other approaches.
When Umberto called again the managing director received him with flattering attention.
‘That is a very remarkable oil you brought us, Mr Palanguez,’ he said.
Umberto nodded his sleek, dark head. He was well aware of the fact.
‘I have never seen anything quite like it,’ the managing director admitted.
Umberto nodded again.
‘No?’ he said, politely. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, he added: ‘But I think you will, señor. A very great deal of it.’ He appeared to ponder. ‘It will, I think, come on the market seven, maybe eight, years from now.’ He smiled.
The managing director thought that unlikely. He said, with a frank air:
‘It is better than our fish-oils.’
‘So I am told, señor,’ agreed Umberto.
‘You are proposing to market it yourself, Mr Palanguez?’
Umberto smiled again.
‘Would I being showing it to you if I did?’
‘We might reinforce one of our own oils synthetically,’ observed the managing director, reflectively.
‘With some of the vitamins – but it would be costly to synthesize all of them: even if you could,’ Umberto said gently. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I am told that this oil will easily undersell your best fish-oils, anyway.’
‘H’m,’ said the managing director. ‘Well, I suppose you have a proposition, Mr Palanguez. Shall we come to it?’
Umberto explained: ‘There are two ways of dealing with such an unfortunate matter. The usual one is to prevent it happening – or at least to delay it until the capital sunk in present equipment has been paid off. That is, of course, the desirable way.’
The managing director nodded. He knew plenty about that.
‘But this time I am so sorry for you, because, you see, it is not possible.’
The managing director had his doubts. His inclination was to say, ‘You’d be surprised,’ but he resisted it, and contented himself with a non-committal: ‘Oh?’
‘The other way,’ suggested Umberto, ‘is to produce the thing yourself before the trouble starts.’
‘Ah!’ said the managing director.
‘I think,’ Umberto told him, ‘I think that I might be able to supply you with seeds of this plant in, maybe, six months’ time. If you were to plant then you could begin production of oil in five years – or it might be six for full yield.’
‘Just nicely in time, in fact,’ observed the managing director.
Umberto nodded.
‘The other way would be simpler,’ remarked the managing director.
‘If it were possible at all,’ Umberto agreed. ‘But unfortunately your competitors are not approachable – or suppressible.’
He made the statement with a confidence which caused the managing director to study him thoughtfully for some moments.
‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘I wonder – er – you don’t happen to be a Soviet citizen, Mr Palanguez?’
‘No,’ said Umberto. ‘On the whole my life has been lucky – but I have very varied connections…’
That brings us to considering the other sixth of the world – that part which one could not visit with such facility as the rest. Indeed, permits to visit the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were almost unobtainable, and the movements of those who did achieve them were strictly circumscribed. It had deliberately organized itself into a land of mystery. Little of what went on behind the veiling secrecy which was almost pathological in the region was known to the rest of the world. What was, was usually suspect. Yet, behind the curious propaganda which distributed the laughable while concealing all likely to be of the least importance, achievements undoubtedly went on in many fields. One was biology. Russia, who shared with the rest of the world the problem of increasing food supplies, was known to have been intensively concerned with attempts to reclaim desert, steppe, and the northern tundra. In the days when information was still exchanged she had reported some successes. Later, however, a cleavage of methods and views had caused biology there, under a man called Lysenko, to take a different course. It, too, then succumbed to the endemic secrecy. The lines it had taken were unknown, and thought to be unsound – but it was anybody’s guess whether very successful, very silly, or very queer things were happening there – if not all three at once.
‘Sunflowers,’ said the managing director, speaking absentmindedly out of his own reflections. ‘I happen to know they were having another shot at improving the yield of sunflower-seed oil. But it isn’t that.’
‘No,’ agreed Umberto. ‘It is not that.’
The managing director doodled.
‘Seeds, you said. Do you mean that it is some new species? Because if it is merely some improved strain more easily processed – ’
‘I understand that it is a new species – something quite new.’
‘Then you haven’t actually seen it yourself? It may, in fact, be some modified kind of sunflower?’
‘I have seen a picture, señor. I do not say there is no sunflower there at all. I do not say there is no turnip there. I do not say that there is no nettle, or even no orchid there. But I do say that if they were all fathers to it they would none of them know their child. I do not think it would please them greatly, either.’
‘I see. Now what was the figure you had in mind for getting us the seeds of this thing?’
Umberto named a sum which stopped the managing director’s doodling quite abruptly. It made him take off his glasses to regard the speaker more closely. Umberto was unabashed.
‘Consider, señor,’ he said, ticking off points on his fingers. ‘It is difficult. And it is dangerous – very dangerous. I do not fear – but I do not go to danger to amuse myself. There is another man, a Russian. I shall have to bring him away, and he must be paid well. There will be others that he must pay first. Also I must buy an aeroplane – a jet aeroplane, very fast. All these things cost money.
‘And I tell you it is not easy. You must have seeds that are good. Many of the seeds of this plant are infertile. To make sure, I have to bring you seeds that have been sorted. They are valuable. And in Russia everything is a state secret and guarded. Certainly it will not be easy.’
‘I believe that. But all the same – ’
‘Is it so much, señor? What will you say in a few years when these Russians are selling their oil all over the world – and your company is finished?’
‘It will need thinking over, Mr Palanguez.’
‘But of course, señor!’ Umberto agreed, with a smile. ‘I can wait – a little while. But I’m afraid I cannot reduce my price.’
Nor did he.
The discoverer and the inventor are the bane of business. A little sand in the works is comparatively a mere nothing – you just replace the damaged parts, and go on. But the appearance of a new process, a new substance, when you are all organized and ticking nicely, is the very devil. Sometimes it is worse than that – it just cannot be allowed to occur. Too much is at stake. If you can’t use legal methods, you must try others.
For Umberto had understated the case. It was not simply that the competition of a cheap new oil would send Arctic and European and their associates out of business. The effects would be widespread. It might not be fatal to the groundnut, the olive, the whale, and a number of other oil industries, but it would be a nasty knock. Moreover, there would be violent repercussions in dependent industries, in margarine, soap, and a hundred more products from face-creams to house-paints, and beyond. Indeed, once a few of the more influential concerns had grasped the quality of the menace Umberto’s terms came to seem almost modest.
He got his agreement, for his samples were convincing, if the rest was somewhat vague.
In point of fact it cost those interested quite a lot less than they had undertaken to pay, for after Umberto went off with his aeroplane and his advance he was never seen again.
But that is not to say he was altogether unheard of.
Some years later an indeterminate individual giving simply the name Fedor turned up at the offices of Arctic and European Oils. (They had dropped ‘Fish’ from both their title and activities then.) He was, he said, a Russian. He would like, he said, some money, if the kind capitalists would be good enough to spare some.
His story was that he had been employed in the first experimental triffid station in the district of Elovsk in Kamchatka. It was a forlorn place, and he greatly disliked it. His desire to get away had caused him to listen to a suggestion from another worker there, to be specific, one Tovarich Nikolai Alexandrovich Baltinoff, and the suggestion had been backed up by several thousand roubles.
It did not require a great deal of earning. He had simply to remove a box of sorted fertile triffid seeds from its rack, and substitute a similar box of infertile seeds. The purloined box was to be left at a certain place at a certain time. There was practically no risk. It might be years before the substitution was discovered.
A further requirement, however, was a little more tricky. He was to see that a pattern of lights was laid out on a large field a mile or two from the plantation. He was to be there himself on a certain night. He would hear an aeroplane flying directly above. He would switch on the lights. The plane would land. The best thing he could do then would be to get away from the neighbourhood as soon as possible before anyone should arrive to investigate.
For these services he would receive not only the comfortable wad of roubles, but if he should succeed in leaving Russia he would find more money waiting for him at the offices of Arctic and European, in England.
By his account the operation had gone entirely to plan. Fedor had not waited once the plane was down. He had switched off the lights, and beat it.
The plane had stopped only a short time, perhaps not ten minutes, before it took off again. From the sound of the jets he judged that it was climbing steeply as it went. A minute or so after the noise had died away he heard the sound of engines again. Some more planes went over headed east, after the other. There might have been two, or more, he could not tell. But they were travelling very fast, with their jets shrieking…
The next day Comrade Baltinoff was missing. There had been a lot of trouble, but in the end it was decided that Baltinoff must have been working alone. So it had all passed off safely for Fedor.
He had cautiously waited for a year before he made a move. It had cost him almost the last of his roubles by the time he had bought his way through the final obstacles. Then he had had to take various jobs to live, so that he had spent a long time in reaching England. But now he had, could he have some money, please?
Something had been heard about Elovsk by that time. And the date he gave for the plane landing was within probability. So they gave him some money. They also gave him a job, and told him to keep his mouth shut. For it was clear that though Umberto had not personally delivered the goods, he had at least saved the situation by broadcasting them.
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 their behalf. It was not until some investigator produced a specimen of triffid oil for their inspection that they realized that it corresponded exactly with the sample Umberto had shown them, and that it was the seeds of the triffid he 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 and Comrade Baltinoff found themselves attacked by the planes that Fedor had heard in pursuit. It may be that the first they knew of it was when cannon-shells from Russian fighters started to break up their craft.
And I think, too, that one of those shells blew to pieces a certain twelve-inch cube of plywood – the receptacle like a small tea-chest in which, according to Fedor, the seeds were packed.
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 towards the sea they left behind them something which looked at first like a white vapour.
It was not vapour. 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.