“I never can be quite sure with you,” I told him. “I’m never certain how far you are serious and how far beyond your facts you allow your imagination to lead you. Do you honestly think there is a danger in the things?”
He puffed a bit at his pipe before he answered.
“That’s fair enough,” he admitted, “because—well, I’m by no means sure myself. But I’m pretty certain of one thing, and that is that there could be danger in them. I’d feel a lot nearer giving you a real answer if I could get a line on what it means when they patter. Somehow I don’t care for that. There they sit, with everyone thinking no more of them than they might of a pretty odd lot of cabbages, yet half the time they’re pattering and clattering away at one another. Why? What is it they patter about? That’s what I want to know.”
I think Walter rarely gave a hint of his ideas to anyone else, and I kept them confidential, partly because I knew no one who wouldn’t be more skeptical than I was myself and partly because it wouldn’t do either of us any good to get a reputation in the firm as crackpots.
For a year or so more we were working fairly close together. But with the opening of new nurseries and the need for studying methods abroad, I began to travel a lot. He gave up the field work and went into the research department. It suited him there, doing his own searching as well as the company’s. I used to drop in to see him from time to time. He was forever making experiments with his triffids, but the results weren’t clearing his general ideas as much as he had hoped. He had proved, to his own satisfaction at least, the existence of a well-developed intelligence—and even I had to admit that his results seemed to show something more than instinct. He was still convinced that the pattering of the sticks was a form of communication. For public consumption he had shown that the sticks were something more, and that a triffid deprived of them gradually deteriorated. He had also established that the infertility rate of triffid seeds was something like 95 per cent.
“Which,” he remarked, “is a damned good thing. If they all germinated, there’d soon be standing room only, for triffids only, on this planet.”
With that, too, I agreed. Triffid-seed time was quite a sight. The dark green pod just below the cup was glistening and distended, about half as big again as a large apple. When it burst, it did it with a pop that was audible twenty yards away. The white seeds shot into the air like steam and began drifting away on the lightest of breezes. Looking down on a field of triffids late in August, you could well get the idea that some kind of desultory bombardment was going on.
It was Walter’s discovery again that the quality of the extracts was improved if the plants retained their stings. In consequence, the practice of docking was discontinued on farms throughout the trade, and we had to wear protective devices when working among the plants.
At the time of the accident that had landed me in hospital I was actually with Walter. We were examining some specimens which were showing unusual deviations. Both of us were wearing wire-mesh masks. I did not see exactly what happened. All I know is that as I bent forward a sting slashed viciously at my face and smacked against the wire of the mask. Ninety-nine times in a hundred it would not have mattered; that was what the masks were for. But this one came with such force that some of the little poison sacs were burst open, and a few drops from them went into my eyes.
Walter got me back into his lab and administered the antidote in a few seconds. It was entirely due to his quick work that they had the chance of saving my sight at all. But even so it had meant over a week in bed, in the dark.
While I lay there I had quite decided that when—and if—I had my sight back I was going to apply for a transfer to another side of the business. And if that did not go through, I’d quit the job altogether.
I had built up a considerable resistance to triffid poison since my first sting in the garden. I could take, and had taken, without very much harm, stings which would have laid an inexperienced man out very cold indeed. But an old saying about a pitcher and a well kept on recurring to me. I was taking my warning.