When we had finished she slipped from the table, returning with my twelve-bore and field glasses. We went out onto the lawn. She scoured the view until she found a triffid on the move well beyond our fences and then handed the glasses to me. I watched the thing lurching slowly across a field. It was more than a mile away from us and heading east.
“Now keep on watching it,” she said.
She fired the gun into the air.
A few seconds later the triffid perceptibly altered course toward the south.
“See?” she inquired, rubbing her shoulder.
“Well, it did look——Are you sure? Try again,” I suggested. She shook her head.
“It wouldn’t be any good. All the triffids that heard it are coming this way now. In about ten minutes they’ll stop and listen. If they’re near enough then to hear the ones by the fence clattering, they’ll come on. Or if they’re too far away for that, and we make another noise, then they’ll come. But if they can’t hear anything at all, they’ll wait a bit and then just go on wherever they were going before.”
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.