“I never thought——” I began doubtfully.
“You try thinking of it a bit, and watching them——I’d be interested to hear your conclusions,” he said.
It was a curious thing that in all my dealings with triffids such a possibility had never occurred to me. I’d been prejudiced, I suppose, by the love-call theory. But once he had put the idea into my mind, it stuck. I couldn’t get away from the feeling that they might indeed be rattling out secret messages to one another.
Up to then I’d fancied I’d watched triffids pretty closely, but when Walter was talking about them I felt that I’d noticed practically nothing. He could, when he was in the mood, talk on about them for hours, advancing theories that were sometimes wild but sometimes not impossible.
The public had by this time grown out of thinking triffids freakish. They were clumsily amusing, but not greatly interesting. The company found them interesting, however. It took the view that their existence was a piece of benevolence for everyone—particularly for itself. Walter shared neither view. At times, listening to him, I began to have some misgivings myself.
He had become quite certain that they “talked.”
“And that,” he argued, “means that somewhere in them is intelligence. It can’t be seated in a brain, because dissection shows nothing like a brain—but that doesn’t prove there isn’t something there that does a brain’s job.
“And there’s certainly intelligence there, of a kind. Have you noticed that when they attack they always go for the unprotected parts? Almost always the head—but sometimes the hands. And another thing: if you look at the statistics of casualties, just take notice of the proportion that has been stung across the eyes and blinded. It’s remarkable—and significant.”
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of the fact that they know what is the surest way to put a man out of action—in other words, they know what they’re doing. Look at it this way. Granted that they do have intelligence; then that would leave us with only one important superiority—sight. We can see, and they can’t. Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone. Worse than that—our position becomes inferior to theirs, because they are adapted to a sightless existence and we are not.”
“But even if that were so, they can’t do things. They can’t handle things. There’s very little muscular strength in that sting lash,” I pointed out.
“True, but what’s the good of our ability to handle things if we can’t see what to do with them? Anyway, they don’t need to handle things—not in the way we do. They can get their nourishment direct from the soil, or from insects and bits of raw meat. They don’t have to go through all the complicated business of growing things, distributing them, and usually cooking them as well. In fact, if it were a choice for survival between a triffid and a blind man, I know which I’d put my money on.”
“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 gathered more material.
“Had?” I repeated. “What’s stopping you?”
“Just this.” He waved his hand to include the farm generally. “It’s a vested interest now. It wouldn’t pay anyone to put out disturbing thoughts about it. Anyway, we have the triffids controlled well enough so it’s an academic point and scarcely worth raising.”