‘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, if 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 ga
