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 that 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 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 traveled by airplane. 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 plowshares 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-95 per cent of it wanting to live in peace, and the other S 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 5 per cent to relax awhile 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. 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 backfiring 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, either. 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. 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. The interlaced-company system, however, 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 he unsnarled from time to time. Hardly anyone heard of even the existence of one Umberto Christoforo Palanguez, for instance. I heard of him myself only years later in the course of my work.
Umberto was of assorted Latin descent, and by profession a pilot. 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 &
European Fish Oil Company and produced a bottle of pale pink oil in which he proposed to interest them.
Arctic & European analyzed the sample. The first thing they discovered about it was that it was not a fish oil: 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 at the effect this potent oil would have on their trade, Arctic & European summoned Umberto and questioned him at length. He was not communicative. He told them that the oil came from Russia (which still hid behind a curtain of suspicion and secrecy) and that for an enormous sum of money he would endeavor to fly out the seeds. Terms were agreed on, and then Umberto vanished.
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 the company’s behalf for several years. It was not until some investigator produced a specimen of triffid oil for their inspection that they realized that it corresponded exactly with the sam-pie Umberso had shown them, and that it was the seeds of
the triffid be 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 found himself attacked by Russian planes. It may be that the first he knew of it was when cannon shells from Russian fighters started to break up his craft.
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 toward the sea they left behind them something which looked at first like a white vapor.
It was not vapor. 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.