One of the early corners was my friend Walter Lucknor. There had been some doubt at first about taking Walter on. He knew little of agriculture, less of business, and lacked the qualifications for lab work. On the other hand, he did know a lot about triffids-he had a kind of inspired knack with them.
What happened to Walter that fatal May years later I do not know-though I can guess. It is a sad thing that he did not escape. He might have been immensely valuable later on. I don’t think anybody really understands triffids, or ever will, but Walter came nearer to beginning to understand them than any man I have known. Or should I say that he was given to intuitive feelings about them?
It was a year or two after the job had begun that he first surprised me.
The sun was close to setting. We had knocked off for the day and were looking with a sense of satisfaction at three new fields of nearly fully grown triffids. In those days we didn’t simply corral them as we did later. They were arranged across the fields roughly in rows-at least the steel stakes to which each was tethered by a chain were in rows, though the plants themselves had no sense of tidy regimentation. We reckoned that in another month or so we’d be able to start tapping them for juice. The evening was peaceful; almost the only sounds that broke it were the occasional rattlings of the triffids’ little sticks against their stems. Walter regarded them with his head slightly on one side. He removed his pipe.
“They’re talkative tonight,” he observed.
I took that as anyone else would, metaphorically.
“Maybe it’s the weather,” I suggested “I fancy they do it more when it’s dry.”
He looked sidelong at me, with a smile.
“Do you talk more when it’s dry?”
“Why should-” I began, and then broke off. “You don’t really mean you think they’re talking?” I said, noticing his expression.
“Well, why not?”
“But it’s absurd. Plants talking!”
“So much more absurd than plants walking?” he asked.
I stared at them, and then back at him.
“I never thought-” I began doubtfully.
“You try thinking of it a bit, and watching them. I’d be interested to hear your conclusions,” he said.
It was a curious thing that in all my dealings with triffids such a possibility had never occurred to me. Pd been prejudiced, I suppose. by the love-call theory. But once he had put the idea into my mind, it stuck. I couldn’t get away from the feeling that they might indeed be rattling out secret messages to one another.
Up to then I’d fancied I’d watched triffids pretty closely, but when Walter was talking about them I felt that Ed noticed practically nothing. He could, when he was in the mood, talk on about them for hours, advancing theories that were sometimes wild but sometimes not impossible.
The public had by this time grown out of thinking triffids freakish. They were clumsily amusing, but not greatly interesting. The company found them interesting, however, It took the view that their existence was a piece of benevolence for everyone particularly for itself. Walter shared neither view. At times, listening to him, I began to have some misgivings myself.
He bad become quite certain that they “talked,”
“And that,” he argued, “means that somewhere in them is intelligence. It can’t be seated in a brain, because dissection shows nothing like a brain-but that doesn’t prove there isn’t something there that does a brain’s job.
“And there’s certainly intelligence there, of a kind. Have you noticed that when they attack they always go for the unprotected parts? Almost always the head-but sometimes the hands. And another thing: if you look at the statistics of casualties, just take notice of the proportion that has been stung across the eyes and blinded. It’s remarkable-and significant.”
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of the fact that they know what is the surest way to put a man out of action-in other words, they know what they’re doing. Look at it this way. Granted that they do have intelligence; then that would leave us with only one important superiority-sight. We can see, and they can’t. Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone. Worse than that-our position becomes inferior to theirs, because they are adapted to a sightless existence and we are not.”
“But even if that were so, they can’t do things. They can’t handle things. There’s very little muscular strength in that sting lash,” I pointed out,
“True, but what’s the good of our ability to handle things if we can’t see what to do with them? Anyway, they don’t need to handle things-not in the way we do. They can get their nourishment direct from the soil, or from insects and bits of raw meat. They don’t have to go through all the complicated business of growing things, distributing them, and usually cooking them as well. In fact, if it were a choice for survival between a triffid and a blind man, I know which I’d put my money on.
“You’re assuming equal intelligence,” I said.
“Not at all. I don’t need to. I should imagine it’s likely to be an altogether different type of intelligence, U only because their needs are so much simpler. Look at the complex processes we have to use to get an assimilable extract from a triffid. Now reverse that. What does the triffid have to do? Just sting us, wait a few days. and then begin to assimilate us. The simple, natural course of things
He would go on like that by the hour until listening to him would have me getting things out of proportion and I’d find myself thinking of the triffids as though they were some kind of competitor. Walter himself never pretended to think otherwise. He had, he admitted, thought of writing a book on that very aspect of the subject when he had gathered more material.
“Had?” I repeated. “What’s stopping you?”
“Just this.” He waved his hand to include the farm generally. “It’s a vested interest now. It wouldn’t pay anyone to put out disturbing thoughts about it. Anyway, we have the triffids controlled well enough so it’s an academic point and scarcely worth raising.
“I never can be quite sure with you,” I told him. “I’m never certain how far you are serious and how far beyond your facts you allow your imagination to lead you. Do you honestly think there is a danger in the things?”
He puffed a bit at his pipe before he answered.
“That’s fair enough he admitted. Because – well, I’m by no means sure myself. But I’m pretty certain of one thing and that is that there could be danger in them. I’d feel a lot nearer giving you a real answer if I could get a line on what it means when they patter. Somehow I don’t care for that. There they sit, with everyone thinking no more of them than they might of a pretty odd lot or cabbages, yet half the dine they’re pattering and clattering away at one another, Why? What is it they patter about? That’s what I want to know.”
I think Walter rarely gave a hint of his ideas to anyone else, and I kept them confidential, partly because I knew no one who wouldn’t be more skeptical than I was myself and partly because it wouldn’t do either of us any good to get a reputation in the firm as crackpots.
For a year or so more we were working fairly close together. But with the opening of new nurseries and the need for studying methods abroad, I began to travel a lot. He gave up the field work and went into the research department. It suited him there, doing his own searching as well as the company’s I used to drop in to see him from time to time. He was forever making experiments with his triffids, but the results weren’t clearing his general ideas as much as he had hoped. He had proved to his own satisfaction at least, the existence of a well-developed intelligence and even I had to admit that his results seemed to show something more than instinct. He was still convinced that the pattering of the sticks was a form or communication. For public consumption he had shown that the sticks were something more, and that a triffid deprived of them gradually deteriorated. He had also established that the infertility rate of triffid seeds was something like 95 per cent.
“Which.” he remarked. “is a damned good thing. If they all germinated, there’d soon be standing room only, for triffids only, on this planet.”
With that, too, I agreed. Triffid-seed time was quite a sight. The dark green pod just below the cup was glistening and distended, about half as big again as large apple-When it burst, it did it with a pop that was audible twenty yards away. The white seeds shot into the air like steam and began drifting away on the lightest of breezes. Looking down on a field of triffids late in August, you could well get the idea that some kind of desultory bombardment was going on.