Once-not that year, not the next, but later on-I stood in Piccadilly Circus again, looking round at the desolation and trying to re-create in my mind’s eye the crowds that once swarmed there. I could no longer do it. Even in my memory they lacked reality. There was no tincture of them now. They had become as much a back cloth of history as the audiences in the Roman Colosseum or the army of the Assyrians, and, somehow, just as far removed from me. The nostalgia that crept over me sometimes in the quiet bours was able to move me to more regret than the crumbling scene itself. When I was by myself in the country I could recall the pleasantness of the former life: among the scabrous, slowly perishing buildings I seemed able to recall only the muddle, the frustration, the unaimed drive, the all-pervading clangor of empty vessels, and I became uncertain how much we bad lost….
My first tentative trip there I took alone, returning with cases of triffid bolts, paper, engine parts, the Braille books and writing machine that Dennis so much desired, the luxuries of drinks, candies, records, and yet more books for the rest of us. A week later Josella came with me an a more practical search for clothing, not only, or even chiefly, for the adults of the party so much as for Mary’s baby and the one she herself was now expecting. It upset her, and it remained the only visit she made.
It was at the end of the fourth year that I made my last trip, and found that there were now risks which I was not justified in taking. The first intimation of that was a thunderous crash behind me somewhere in the inner suburbs. I stopped the truck, and looked back to see the dust rising from a heap of rubble which lay across the road. Evidently my rumbling passage bad given the last shake to a tottering house front. I brought no more buildings down that day, but I spent it in apprehension of a descending torrent of bricks and mortar. Thereafter II confined my attention to smaller towns, and usually went about them on foot.
Brighton, which should have been our largest convenient source of supplies, I let alone. By the time I had thought it fit for a visit, others were in charge there. Who or how many there were, I did not know. I simply found a rough wall of stones piled across the road and painted with the instruction:
KEEP OUT!
The advice was backed up by the crack of a rifle and a spurt of dust just in front of me. There was no one in sight to argue with-besides, it arguing kind of gambit.
I turned the truck round and drove away thoughtfully. I wondered if a time might come when the man Stephen’s preparations for defense might turn out to be not so misplaced after all. Just to be on the safe side, I laid in several machine guns and mortars from the source which had already provided us with the flame throwers we used against the triffids.
In the November of that second year Josella’s first baby was born. We called him David. My pleasure in him was at times alloyed with misgivings over the state of things we had created him to face. But that worded Josella much less than it did me. She adored him. He seemed to be a compensation to her for much that she bad lost, and, paradoxically, she started to worry less over the condition of the bridges ahead than she had before. Anyway, he had a lustiness which argued well for his future capacity to take care of himself, so I repressed my misgivings and increased the work I was putting into that land which would one day have to support all of us.
It must have been not so very long after that that Josella turned my attention more closely to the triffids. I had for years been so used to taking precautions against them in my work that their becoming a regular part of the landscape was far less noticeable to me than it was to the others. I had been accustomed, too, to wearing meshed masks and gloves when I dealt with them, so that there was little novelty far me in donning these things whenever I drove out. I had, in fact, got into the habit of paying little more attention to them than one would to mosquitoes in a known malarial area. Josella mentioned it as we lay in bed one night when almost the only sound was the intermittent, distant rattling of their hard little sticks against their stems.
“They’re doing a lot more of that lately,” she said.
I did not grasp at first what she was talking about. It was a sound that had been a usual background to the places where I had lived and worked for so long that unless I deliberately listened for it I could not say whether it was going on or not. I listened now.
“It doesn’t sound any different to me,” I said.
“It’s not different. It’s just that there’s a lot more of it-because there are a lot more of them than there used to be.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” I said indifferently.
Once I had the fence fixed up, my interest had lain in the ground within it, and I had not bothered about what went on beyond it. My impression on my expeditions was that the incidence of Triffids in most parts was much the same as before. I recalled that their numbers locally had caught my at-tendon when I had first arrived, and I had supposed that there must have been several large triffid nurseries in the district.
“There certainly are. You take a look at them tomorrow,” she said.
I remembered in the morning, and looked out of the window as I was dressing. I saw that Josella was right. One could count over a hundred of them behind the quite small stretch visible from the window. I mentioned it at breakfast. Susan looked suprised.
“But they’ve been getting more all the time,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“I’ve got plenty of other things to bother about,” I said, a little irritated by her tone. “They don’t matter outside the fence, anyway. As long as we take care to pull up all the seeds that root in here, they can do what they like outside.”
“All the same,” Josella remarked with a trace of uneasiness, “is there any particular reason why they should come to just this part in such numbers? I’m sure they do-and I’d like to know just why it is.”
Susan’s face took on its irritating expression of surprise again.
“Why’ he brings them,” she said.
“Don’t point,” Josella told her automatically. “What do you mean? I’m sure Bill doesn’t bring them.”
“But he does. He makes all the noises, and they just come.”
“Look here,” I said. “What are you talking about? Am I supposed to be whistling them here in my sleep or something?”
Susan looked huffy.
“All right. If you don’t believe me, I’ll show you after breakfast,” she announced, and withdrew into an offended silence.
When we had finished she slipped from the table, returning with my twelve-bore and field glasses. We went out onto the lawn. She scoured the view until she found a triffid on the move well beyond our fences and then handed the glasses to me. I watched the thing lurching slowly across a field. It was more than a mile away froa us and heading east.
“Now keep on watching it,” she said.
She fired the gun into the air.
A few seconds later the triffid perceptibly altered course toward the south.
“Seer she inquired, rubbing her shoulder.
“Well, it did look-Are you sure? Try again,” I suggested. She shook her head.
“It wouldn’t be any good. All the triffids that heard it are coming this way now. In about ten minutes they’ll stop and listen. If they’re near enough then to hear the ones by the fence clattering, they’ll come on. Or if they’re too far away for that, and we make another noise, then they’ll come. But if they can’t hear anything at all, they’ll wait a bit and then just go on wherever they were going before.”
I admit that I was somewhat taken aback by this revelation.
“Well-er,” I said. “You must have been watching them very closely, Susan.”
“I always watch them. I hate them,” she said, as if that were explanation enough.
Dennis had joined us as we stood there.
“I’m with you, Susan,” he said. “I don’t like it. I’ve not liked it for some time. Those damn things have the drop on us.”
“Oh, come-” I began.
“I tell you, there’s more to them than we think. How did they know? They started to break loose the moment then was no one to stop them. They were around this house the very next day. Can you account for that?”