The Day of the Triffids

by John Wyndham

  “That’s a queer thing to make your first essential,” he remarked.

  I told them the reasons. Possibly I made a bad job of it, for neither of them looked much impressed. He nodded casually and went on:

  “Well, if you’re coming in with us, here’s what I suggest Bring in your car, dump your stuff, then drive off and swap it for a good big truck. Then—Oh, does either of you know anything about doctoring?” he broke off to ask.

  We shook our heads.

  He frowned a little. “That’s a pity. So far we’ve got no one who does. It’ll surprise me if we’re not needing a doctor before long—and, anyway, we ought all of us to have inoculations…. Still, it’s not much good sending you two off on a medical supplies scrounge. What about food and general stores? Suit you?”

  He flipped through some pages on a clip, detached one of them and handed it to me. It was headed No. 15, and below was a typed list of canned goods, pots and pans, and some bedding.

  “Not rigid,” he said, “but keep reasonably close to it and we’ll avoid too many duplications. Stick to best quality. With the food, concentrate on value for bulk—I mean, even if corn flakes are your leading passion in life, forget ’em. I suggest you keep to warehouses and big wholesalers.” He took back the list and scribbled two or three addresses on it. “Cans and packets are your food line—don’t get led away by sacks of flour, for instance; there’s another party on that sort of stuff.” He looked thoughtfully at Josella. “Heavyish work, I’m afraid, but it’s the most useful job we can give you at present. Do as much as you can before dark. There’ll be a general meeting and discussion here about nine-thirty this evening.”

  As we turned to go:

  “Got a pistol?” he asked.

  “I didn’t think of it,” I admitted.

  “Better—just in case. Quite effective simply fired into the air,” he said. He took two pistols from a drawer in the table and pushed them across. “Less messy than that,” he added, with a look at Josella’s handsome knife. “Good scrounging to you.”

  Even by the time we set out after unloading the station wagon we found that there were still fewer people about than on the previous day. The ones that were showed an inclination to get on the sidewalks at the sound of the engine rather than to molest us.

  The first truck to take our fancy proved useless, being filled with wooden cases too heavy for us to remove. Our next find was luckier—a five-tonner, almost new, and empty. We transshipped, and left the station wagon to its fate.

  At the first address on my list the shutters of the loading bay were down, but they gave way without much difficulty to the persuasions of a crowbar from a neighboring shop and rolled up easily. Inside, we made a find. Three trucks stood backed up to the platform. One of them was fully loaded with cases of canned meat.

  “Can you drive one of these things?” I asked Josella.

  She looked at it.

  “Well, I don’t see why not. The general idea’s the same, isn’t it? And there’s certainly no traffic problem.”

  We decided to come back and fetch it later, and took the empty truck on to another warehouse, where we loaded in parcels of blankets, rugs, and quilts, and then went on farther to acquire a noisy miscellany of pots, pans, caldrons, and kettles. When we had the truck filled we felt we had put in a good morning’s work on a job that was heavier than we had thought. We satisfied the appetite it had given us at a small pub hitherto untouched.

  The mood which filled the business and commercial districts was gloomy—though it was a gloom that still had more the style of a normal Sunday or public holiday than of collapse. Very few people at all were to be seen in those parts. Had the catastrophe come by day, instead of by night after the workers had gone home, it would have been a hideously different scene.

  When we had refreshed ourselves we collected the already loaded truck from the food warehouse and drove the two of them slowly and uneventfully back to the university. We parked them in the forecourt there and set off again. About six-thirty we returned once more with another pair of well-loaded trucks and a feeling of useful accomplishment

  Michael Beadley emerged from the building to inspect our contributions. He approved of it all save half a dozen cases that I had added to my second load.

  “What are they?” he asked.

  “Triffid guns, and bolts for them,” I told him.

  He looked at me thoughtfully.

  “Oh yes. You arrived with a lot of anti-triffid stuff,” he remarked.

  “I think it’s likely we’ll need it” I said.

  He considered. I could see that I was being put down as a bit unsound on the subject of triffids. Most likely he was accounting for that by the bias my job might be expected to give—aggravated by a phobia resulting from my recent sting—and wondering whether it might connote other, perhaps less harmless, unsoundnesses.

  “Look here,” I suggested, “we’ve brought in four full truck-loads between us. I just want enough space in one of them for these cases. If you think we can’t spare that I’ll go out and find a trailer, or another truck.”

  “No, leave ’em where they are. They don’t take a lot of room,” he decided.

  We went into the building and had some tea at an improvised canteen which a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman had competently set up there.

  “He thinks,” I said to Josella, “that I’ve got a bee in my bonnet over triffids.”

  “He’ll learn—I’m afraid,” she replied. “It’s queer that no one else seems to have seen them about.”

  “These people have all been keeping pretty much to the center, so it’s not very surprising. After all, we’ve seen none ourselves today.”

  “Do you think they’ll come right down here among the streets?”

  “I couldn’t say. Maybe lost ones would.”

  “How do you think they got loose?” she asked.

  “If they worry at a stake hard enough and long enough, it’ll usually come in the end. The breakouts we used to get sometimes on the farms were usually due to their all crowding up against one section of the fence until it gave way.”

  “But couldn’t you make the fences stronger?”

  “We could have done, but we didn’t want them fixed quite permanently. It didn’t happen very often, and when it did it was usually simply from one field to another, so we’d just drive them back and put up the fence again. I don’t think any of them will intentionally make this way. From a triffid point of view, a city must be much like a desert, so I should think they’ll be moving outward toward the open country on the whole. Have you ever used a triffid gun?” I added.

  She shook her head.

  “After I’ve done something about these clothes, I was thinking of putting in a bit of practice, if you’d like to try,” I suggested.

  I got back an hour or so later, feeling more suitably clad as a result of having infringed on her idea of a ski suit and heavy shoes, to find that she had changed into a becoming dress of spring green. We took a couple of the triffid guns and went out into the garden of Russell Square, close by. We had spent about half an hour snipping the topmost shoots off convenient bushes when a young woman in a brick-red lumber jacket and an elegant pair of green trousers strolled across the grass and leveled a small camera at us.

  “Who are you—the press?” inquired Josella.

  “More or less,” said the young woman. “At least, I’m the official record. Elspeth Cary.”

  “So soon?” I remarked. “I trace the hand of our order-conscious Colonel.”

  “You’re quite right,” she agreed. She turned to look at Josella. “And you are Miss Playton. I’ve often wondered—”

  “Now look here,” interrupted Josella. “Why should the one static thing in a collapsing world be my reputation? Can’t we forget it?”

  “Um,” said Miss Cary thoughtfully. “Uh-huh.” She turned to another subject. “What’s all this about triffids?” she asked.

  We told her.

&nbs
p; “They think,” added Josella, “that Bill here is either scary or scatty on the subject.”

  Miss Cary turned a straight look at me. Her face was interesting rather than good-looking, with a complexion browned by stronger suns than ours. Her eyes were steady, observant, and dark brown.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “Well, I think they’re troublesome enough to be taken seriously when they get out of hand,” I told her.

  She nodded. “True enough. I’ve been in places where they are out of hand. Quite nasty. But in England—well, it’s hard to imagine that here.”

  “There’ll not be a lot to stop them here now,” I said.

  Her reply, if she had been about to make one, was forestalled by the sound of an engine overhead. We looked up and presently saw a helicopter come drifting across the roof of the British Museum.

  “That’ll be Ivan,” said Miss Cary. “He thought he might manage to find one. I must go and get a picture of him landing. See you later.” And she hurried off across the grass.

  Josella lay down, clasped her hands behind her head, and gazed up into the depths of the sky. When the helicopter’s engine ceased, things sounded very much quieter than before we had heard it.

  Josella lay facing upward with a faraway look in her eyes. I thought perhaps I could guess something of what was passing in her mind, but I said nothing. She did not speak for a little while, then she said:

  “You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain.”

  She was quite right. It was that simplicity that seemed somehow to be the nucleus of the shock. From very familiarity one forgets all the forces which keep the balance, and thinks of security as normal. It is not. I don’t think it had ever before occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain’s capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost. I saw for a moment the true tenuousness of his hold on his power, the miracles that he had wrought with such a fragile instrument….

  Josella had been pursuing her own line of thought.

  “It’s going to be a very queer sort of world—what’s left of it. I don’t think we’re going to like it a lot,” she said reflectively.

  It seemed to me an odd view to take—rather as if one should protest that one did not like the idea of dying or being born. I preferred the notion of finding out first how it would be, and then doing what one could about the parts of it one disliked most, but I let it pass.

  From time to time we had heard the sound of trucks driving up to the far side of the building. It was evident that most of the foraging parties must have returned by this hour. I looked at my watch and reached for the triffid guns lying on the grass beside me.

  “If we’re going to get any supper before we hear what other people feel about all this, it’s time we went in,” I said.

  CONFERENCE

  I fancy all of us had expected the meeting to be simply a kind of briefing talk. Just the timetable, course instructions, the day’s objective—that kind of thing. Certainly I had no expectation of the food for thought that we received.

  It was held in a small lecture theater, lit for the occasion by an arrangement of car headlamps and batteries. When we went in, some half dozen men and two women, who appeared to have constituted themselves a committee, were conferring behind the lecturer’s desk. To our surprise we found nearly a hundred people seated in the body of the hall. Young women predominated at a ratio of about four to one. I had not realized until Josella pointed it out to me how few of them were able to see.

  Michael Beadley dominated the consulting group by his height. I recognized the Colonel beside him. The other faces were new to me, save that of Elspeth Cary, who had now exchanged her camera for a notebook, presumably for the benefit of posterity. Most of their interest was centered round an elderly man of ugly but benign aspect who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and had fine white hair trimmed to a rather political length. They all had an air of being a little worried about him.

  The other woman in the party was not much more than a girl—perhaps twenty-two or-three. She did not appear happy at finding herself where she was. She cast occasional looks of nervous uncertainty at the audience.

  Sandra Telmont came in, carrying a sheet of foolscap. She studied it a moment, then briskly broke the group up and sorted it into chairs. With a wave of her hand she directed Michael to the desk, and the meeting began.

  He stood there, a little bent, watching the audience from somber eyes as he waited for the murmuring to die down. When he spoke, it was in a pleasant, practiced voice and with a fireside manner.

  “Many of us here,” he began, “must still be feeling numbed under this catastrophe. The world we knew has ended in a flash. Some of us may be feeling that it is the end of everything. It is not. But to all of you I will say at once that it can be the end of everything—if we let it.

  “Stupendous as this disaster is, there is, however, still a margin of survival. It may be worth remembering just now that we are not unique in looking upon vast calamity. Whatever the myths that have grown up about it, there can be no doubt that somewhere far back in our history there was a Great Flood. Those who survived that must have looked upon a disaster comparable in scale with this and, in some ways, more formidable. But they cannot have despaired; they must have begun again—as we can begin again.

  “Self-pity and a sense of high tragedy are going to build nothing at all. So we had better throw them out at once, for it is builders that we must become.

  “And further to deflate any romantic dramatization, I would like to point out to you that this, even now, is not the worst that could have happened. I, and quite likely many of you, have spent most of my life in expectation of something worse. And I still believe that if this had not happened to us, that worse thing would.

  “From August 6, 1945, the margin of survival has narrowed appallingly. Indeed, two days ago it was narrower than it is at this moment. If you need to dramatize, you could well take for your material the years succeeding 1945, when the path of safety started to shrink to a tightrope along which we had to walk with our eyes deliberately closed to the depths beneath us.

  “In any single moment of the years since then the fatal slip might have been made. It is a miracle that it was not. It is a double miracle that can go on happening for years.

  “But sooner or later that slip must have occurred. It would not have mattered whether it came through malice, carelessness, or sheer accident: the balance would have been lost and the destruction let loose.

  “How bad it would have been, we cannot say. How bad it could have been—well, there might have been no survivors; there might possibly have been no planet….

  “And now contrast our situation. The Earth is intact, un-scarred, still fruitful. It can provide us with food and raw materials. We have repositories of knowledge that can teach us to do anything that has been done before—though there are some things that may be better unremembered. And we have the means, the health, and the strength to begin to build again.”

  He did not make a long speech, but it had effect. It must have made quite a number of the members of bis audience begin to feel that perhaps they were at the beginning of something, after all, rather than at the end of everything. In spite of his offering little but generalities, there was a more alert air in the place when he sat down.

  The Colonel, who followed him, was practical and factual. He reminded us that for reasons of health it would be advisable for us to get away from all built-up areas as soon as practicable—which was expected to be at about 1200 hours on the following day. Almost all the primary necessities, as well as extras enough to give a reasonable standard of comfort, had now been colle
cted. In considering our stocks, our aim must be to make ourselves as nearly independent of outside sources as possible for a minimum of one year. We should spend that period in virtually a state of siege. There were, no doubt, many things we should all like to take besides those on our lists, but they would have to wait until the medical staff (and here the girl on the committee blushed deeply) considered it safe for parties to leave isolation and fetch them. As for the scene of our isolation, the committee had given it considerable thought, and, bearing in mind the desiderata of compactness, self-sufficiency, and detachment, had come to the conclusion that a country boarding school, or, failing that, some large country mansion, would best serve our purposes.

  Whether the committee had, in fact, not yet decided on any particular place, or whether the military notion that secrecy has some intrinsic value persisted in the Colonel’s mind, I cannot say, but I have no doubt that his failure to name the place, or even the probable locality, was the gravest mistake made that evening. At the time, however, his practical manner had a further reassuring effect.

  As he sat down, Michael rose again. He spoke encouragingly to the girl and then introduced her. It had, he said, been one of our greatest worries that we had no one among us with medical knowledge; therefore it was with great relief that he welcomed Miss Berr. It was true that she did not hold medical degrees with impressive letters, but she did have high nursing qualifications. For himself, he thought that knowledge recently attained might be worth more than degrees acquired years ago.

  The girl, blushing again, said a little piece about her determination to carry the job through, and ended a trifle abruptly with the information that she would inoculate us all against a variety of things before we left the hall.

  A small, sparrowlike man whose name I did not catch rubbed it in that the health of each was the concern of all, and that any suspicion of illness should be reported at once, since the effects of a contagious disease among us would be serious.

  When he had finished, Sandra rose and introduced the last speaker of the group: Dr. E. H. Vorless, D.Sc, of Edinburgh, professor of sociology at the University of Kingston.