The Day of the Triffids

2. THE COMING OF THE TRIFFIDS-1

2. THE COMING OF THE TRIFFIDSThis 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 How he contrived to maintain this view which was already a century or so out of date I do not know, but it pervaded my early years to such an extent that I was late in perceiving that a weakness in figures did not of necessity condemn me to the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.’