Wyndham, John – The Day of the Triffids

“That’s not new for them,” I said. “In jungle country they used to hang around near the tracks. Quite often they would surround a small village and invade it if they weren’t beaten off. They were a dangerous kind of pest in quite a lot of places.”

“But not here-that’s my point. They couldn’t do that here until conditions made it possible. They didn’t even fly. But when they could, they did it at once-almost as if they knew they could.”

“Come now, be reasonable, Dennis. Just think what you’re implying,” I told him.

“I’m quite aware of what I’m implying-some of it, at any rate. I’m making no definite theory, but I do say this: they took advantage of our disadvantages with remarkable speed. I also say that there is something perceptibly like method going on among them right now. You’ve been so wrapped up in your jobs that you’ve not noticed how they’ve been massing up and waiting out there beyond the fence, but Swan has-rye heard her talking about it. And just what do you think they’re waiting for?”

I did not try to answer that just then. I said:

“You think I’d better lay off using the twelve-bore, which attracts them, and use a triffid gun instead?”

“It’s not just the gun, it’s all noises,” said Susan “The tractor’s the worst because it is a loud noise, and it keeps on, so that they can easily find where it comes from. But they can hear the lighting-plant engine quite a long way too. I’ve seen them turn this way when it starts up.”

“I wish,” I told her irritably, “you’d not keep on saying ‘they hear,’ as if they were animals. They’re not They don’t ‘hear.’ They’re just plants.”

“All the same, they do hear, somehow,” Susan retorted stubbornly.

“Well-anyway, we’ll do something about them,” I promised.

We did. The first trap was a crude kind of windmill which produced a hearty hammering noise. We fixed it up about half a mile away. It worked. It drew them away from our fence, and from elsewhere. When there were several hundreds of them clustered about it, Susan and I drove over there and turned the flame throwers on them. It worked fairly well a second time too-but after that only a very few of them paid any attention to it. Our next move was to build a kind of stout bay inward from the fence, and then remove part of the main fence itself, replacing it by a gate. We had chosen a point within earshot of the lighting engine, and we left the gate open. Alter a couple of days we dropped the gate and destroyed the couple of hundred or so that had come into the pen. That, too, was fairly successful to begin with, but not if we tried it twice in the same place, and even in other places the numbers we netted dropped steadily.

A tour of the boundaries every few days with a flame thrower could have kept the numbers down effectively, but it would have taken a lot of time and soon have run us out of fuel. A flame thrower’s consumption is high, and the stocks held for it in the arms depots were not large. Once we finished it, our valuable flame throwers would become little better than junk’ for I knew neither the formula for an efficient fuel nor the method of producing it.

On the two or three occasions we tried mortar bombs on concentrations of triffids the results were disappointing. Triffid share with trees the ability to take a lot of damage without lethal harm.

As time went on, the numbers collected along the fence continued to increase in spite of our traps and occasional holocausts. They didn’t try anything, or do anything there. They simply settled down, wriggled their roots into the soil, and remained. At a distance they looked as inactive as any other hedge, and but for the pattering that some few of them were sure to be making, they might have been no more remarkable. But if one doubted their alertness, it was necessary only to take a car down the lane. To do so was to run a gantlet of such viciously slashing stings that it was necessary to stop the car at the main road and wipe the windscreen clear of poison.

Now and then one of us would have a new idea for their discouragement, such as spraying the ground beyond the fence with a strong arsenical solution, but the retreats we caused were only temporary.

We’d been trying out a variety of such dodges for a year or more before the day when Susan came running into our room early one morning to tell us that the things had broken in and were all round the house. She had got up early to do the milking, as usual. The sky outside her bedroom window was gray, but when she went downstairs she found everything there in complete darkness. She realized that should not be so and turned on the light. The moment she saw leathery green leaves pressed against the windows she guessed what had happened.

I crossed the bedroom on tiptoe and pulled the window shut sharply. Even as it closed, a sting whipped up from below and smacked against the glass. We looked down on a thicket of triffids standing ten or twelve deep against the wall of the house. The flame throwers were in one of the outhouses. I took no risks when I went to fetch them. In thick clothing and gloves, with a leather helmet and goggles beneath the mesh mask, I hacked a way through the throng of triffids with the largest carving knife I could find. The stings whipped and slapped at the wire mesh so frequently that they wet it, and the poison began to come through in a fine spray. It misted the goggles, and the first thing I did in the outhouse was to wash it off my face. I dared not use more than a brief, low-aimed jet from one of the throwers to clear my way back, for fear of setting the door and window frames alight, but it moved and agitated them enough for me to get back unmolested.

Josella and Susan stood by with fire extinguishers while I, still looking like a cross between a deep-sea diver and a man from Mars, leaned from the upper windows on each side of the house in turn and played the thrower over the besieging mob of the brutes. It did not take very long to incinerate a number of them and get the rest on the move. Susan, now dressed for the job, took the second thrower and started on the, to her, highly congenial task of hunting them down while I set off across the field to find the source of the trouble. That was not difficult. From the first rise I was able to see the spot where triffids were still lurching into our enclosure in a stream of tossing stems and waving leaves. They fanned out a little on the nearer side, but all of them were bound in the direction of the house. It was simple to head them off. A jet in front stopped them; one to either side started them back on the way they had come. An occasional spurt over them, and dripping down among them, hurried them up and turned back later comers. Twenty yards or so of the fence was lying flat, with the posts snapped off. I rigged it up temporarily there and then and played the thrower back and forth, giving the things enough of a scorching to prevent more trouble for a few hours at least.

Josella, Susan, and I spent most of the day repairing the breach. Two more days passed before Susan and I could be sure that we had searched every corner of the enclosure and accounted for the very last of the intruders. We followed that up with an inspection of the whole length of the fence and a reinforcement of all doubtful sections. Four months later they broke in again.

This time a number of broken triffids lay in the gap. Our impression was that they had been crushed in the pressure that had been built up against the fence before it gave way, and that, falling with it, they had been trampled by the rest.

It was clear that we should have to take new defensive measures. No part of our fence was any stronger than that which had given way. Electrification seemed the most likely means of keeping them at a distance. To power it, I found an army generator mounted on a trailer and towed it home. Susan and I set to work on the wiring. Before we had completed it the brutes were through again in another place.

I believe that system would have been completely effective if we could have kept it in action all the time-or even most of the time. But against that there was the fuel consumption. Gas was one of the most valuable of our stores. Food of some kind we could always hope to grow, but when gasoline and Diesel oil were no longer available, much more than our mere convenience would be gone with them. There would be no more expeditions, and consequently no more replenishment-s of supplies. The primitive life would start in earnest So, from motives of conservation, the barrier wire was charged for only a few minutes two or three times a day. It caused the triffids to recoil a few yards, and thereby stopped them building up pressure against the fence. As an additional guard we ran an alarm wire on the inner fence to enable us to deal with any breaks before they became serious.

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