The Day of the Triffids(68)

I admit that I was somewhat taken aback by this revelation.

“Well—er,” I said. “You must have been watching them very closely, Susan.”

“I always watch them. I hate them,” she said, as if that were explanation enough.

Dennis had joined us as we stood there.

“I’m with you, Susan,” he said. “I don’t like it. I’ve not liked it for some time. Those damn things have the drop on us.”

“Oh, come——” I began.

“I tell you, there’s more to them than we think. How did they know? They started to break loose the moment there was no one to stop them. They were around this house the very next day. Can you account for that?”

“That’s not new for them,” I said. “In jungle country they used to hang around near the tracks. Quite often they would surround a small village and invade it if they weren’t beaten off. They were a dangerous kind of pest in quite a lot of places.”

“But not here—that’s my point. They couldn’t do that here until conditions made it possible. They didn’t even try. But when they could, they did it at once—almost as if they knew they could.”

“Come now, be reasonable, Dennis. Just think what you’re implying,” I told him.

“I’m quite aware of what I’m implying—some of it, at any rate. I’m making no definite theory, but I do say this: they took advantage of our disadvantages with remarkable speed. I also say that there is something perceptibly like method going on among them right now. You’ve been so wrapped up in your jobs that you’ve not noticed how they’ve been massing up and waiting out there beyond the fence, but Susan has—I’ve heard her talking about it. And just what do you think they’re waiting for?”

I did not try to answer that just then. I said:

“You think I’d better lay off using the twelve-bore, which attracts them, and use a triffid gun instead?”

“It’s not just the gun, it’s all noises,” said Susan. “The tractor’s the worst because it is a loud noise, and it keeps on, so that they can easily find where it comes from. But they can hear the lighting-plant engine quite a long way too. I’ve seen them turn this way when it starts up.”

“I wish,” I told her irritably, “you’d not keep on saying ‘they hear,’ as if they were animals. They’re not. They don’t ‘hear.’ They’re just plants.”

“All the same, they do hear, somehow,” Susan retorted stubbornly.

“Well—anyway, we’ll do something about them,” I promised.



* * *



—

We did. The first trap was a crude kind of windmill which produced a hearty hammering noise. We fixed it up about half a mile away. It worked. It drew them away from our fence, and from elsewhere. When there were several hundreds of them clustered about it, Susan and I drove over there and turned the flame throwers on them. It worked fairly well a second time too—but after that only a very few of them paid any attention to it. Our next move was to build a kind of stout bay inward from the fence, and then remove part of the main fence itself, replacing it by a gate. We had chosen a point within earshot of the lighting engine, and we left the gate open. After a couple of days we dropped the gate and destroyed the couple of hundred or so that had come into the pen. That, too, was fairly successful to begin with, but not if we tried it twice in the same place, and even in other places the numbers we netted dropped steadily.

A tour of the boundaries every few days with a flame thrower could have kept the numbers down effectively, but it would have taken a lot of time and soon have run us out of fuel. A flame thrower’s consumption is high, and the stocks held for it in the arms depots were not large. Once we finished it, our valuable flame throwers would become little better than junk, for I knew neither the formula for an efficient fuel nor the method of producing it.

On the two or three occasions we tried mortar bombs on concentrations of triffids the results were disappointing. Triffids share with trees the ability to take a lot of damage without lethal harm.

As time went on, the numbers collected along the fence continued to increase in spite of our traps and occasional holocausts. They didn’t try anything, or do anything there. They simply settled down, wriggled their roots into the soil, and remained. At a distance they looked as inactive as any other hedge, and but for the pattering that some few of them were sure to be making, they might have been no more remarkable. But if one doubted their alertness, it was necessary only to take a car down the lane. To do so was to run a gantlet of such viciously slashing stings that it was necessary to stop the car at the main road and wipe the windscreen clear of poison.

Now and then one of us would have a new idea for their discouragement, such as spraying the ground beyond the fence with a strong arsenical solution, but the retreats we caused were only temporary.

We’d been trying out a variety of such dodges for a year or more before the day when Susan came running into our room early one morning to tell us that the things had broken in and were all round the house. She had got up early to do the milking, as usual. The sky outside her bedroom window was gray, but when she went downstairs she found everything there in complete darkness. She realized that should not be so and turned on the light. The moment she saw leathery green leaves pressed against the windows she guessed what had happened.