The Day of the Triffids(71)

“Yes…” I said, considering it. “Yes. It’s often a good idea to tell children the truth. Kind of makes things easier for them later on—only why pretend it’s a myth?”

Josella demurred at that.

“How do you mean? The triffids were—well, they were somebody’s fault, or mistake, I admit. But the rest?”

“I don’t think we can blame anyone too much for the triffids. The extracts they give were very valuable in the circumstances. Nobody can ever see what a major discovery is going to lead to—whether it is a new kind of engine or a triffid—and we coped with them all right in normal conditions. We benefited quite a lot from them, as long as the conditions were to their disadvantage.”

“Well, it wasn’t our fault the conditions changed. It was—just one of those things. Like earthquakes or hurricanes—what an insurance company would call an act of God. Maybe that’s just what it was—a judgment. Certainly we never brought that comet.”

“Didn’t we, Josella? Are you quite sure of that?”

She turned to look at me.

“Are you trying to tell me that you don’t think it was a comet at all?”

“Just exactly that,” I agreed.

“But—I don’t understand. It must——What else could it have been?”

I opened a vacuum-packed can of cigarettes and lit one for each of us.

“You remember what Michael Beadley said about the tightrope we’d all been walking on for years?”

“Yes, but——”

“Well, I think that what happened was that we came off it—and that a few of us just managed to survive the crash.”

I drew on my cigarette, looking out at the sea and at the infinite blue sky above it.

“Up there,” I went on, “up there there were—and maybe there still are—unknown numbers of satellite weapons circling round and round the Earth. Just a lot of dormant menaces, touring around, waiting for someone, or something, to set them off. What was in them? You don’t know; I don’t know. Top-secret stuff. All we’ve heard is guesses—fissile materials, radioactive dusts, bacteria, viruses…Now suppose that one type happened to have been constructed especially to emit radiations that our eyes would not stand—something that would burn out or at least damage the optic nerve.”

Josella gripped my hand.

“Oh no, Bill! No, they couldn’t…. That’d be—diabolical…. Oh, I can’t believe——Oh no, Bill!”

“My sweet, all the things up there were diabolical…. Do you doubt that if it could be done, someone would do it?…Then suppose there were a mistake, or perhaps an accident—maybe such an accident as actually encountering a shower of comet debris, if you like—which starts some of these things popping….

“Somebody begins talking about comets. It might not be politic to deny that—and there turned out to be so little time, anyway.

“Well, naturally these things would have been intended to operate close to the ground, where the effect would be spread over a definitely calculable area. But they start going off out there in space, or maybe when they hit the atmosphere—either way, they’re operating so far up that people all round the world can receive direct radiations from them….

“Just what did happen is anyone’s guess now. But one thing I’m quite certain of—that somehow or other we brought this lot down on ourselves…. And there was that plague, too: it wasn’t typhoid, you know….

“I find that it’s just the wrong side of coincidence for me to believe that out of all the thousands of years in which a destructive comet could arrive, it happens to do so just a few years after we have succeeded in establishing satellite weapons—don’t you? No, I think that we kept on that tightrope quite a while, considering the things that might have happened—but sooner or later the foot had to slip.”

“Well, when you put it that way——” murmured Josella. She broke off and was lost in silence for quite a while. Then she said:

“I suppose, in a way, that should be more horrible than the idea of nature striking blindly at us. And yet I don’t think it is. It makes me feel less hopeless about things because it makes them at least comprehensible. If it was like that, then it is at least a thing that can be prevented from happening again—just one more of the mistakes our very great grandchildren are going to have to avoid. And, oh dear, there were so many, many mistakes! But we can warn them.”

“H’m—well,” I said. “Anyway, once they’ve beaten the triffids, and pulled themselves out of this mess, they’ll have plenty of scope for making brand-new mistakes of their very own.”

“Poor little things,” she said, as if she were gazing down increasingly great rows of grandchildren, “it’s not much that we’re offering them, is it?”

We sat there a little longer, looking at the empty sea, and then drove down to the town.

After a search which produced most of the things on our wants list, we went down to picnic on the shore in the sunshine—with a good stretch of shingle behind us over which no triffid could approach unheard.

“We must do more of this while we can,” Josella said. “Now that Susan’s growing up I needn’t be nearly so tied.”