Josella, Susan, and I spent most of the day repairing the breach. Two more days passed before Susan and I could be sure that we had searched every corner of the enclosure and accounted for the very last of the intruders. We followed that up with an inspection of the whole length of the fence and a reinforcement of all doubtful sections. Four months later they broke in again.
This time a number of broken triffids lay in the gap. Our impression was that they had been crushed in the pressure that had been built up against the fence before it gave way, and that, falling with it, they had been trampled by the rest.
It was clear that we should have to take new defensive measures. No part of our fence was any stronger than that which had given way. Electrification seemed the most likely means of keeping them at a distance. To power it, I found an army generator mounted on a trailer and towed it home. Susan and I set to work on the wiring. Before we had completed it the brutes were through again in another place.
I believe that system would have been completely effective if we could have kept it in action all the time—or even most of the time. But against that there was the fuel consumption. Gas was one of the most valuable of our stores. Food of some kind we could always hope to grow, but when gasoline and Diesel oil were no longer available, much more than our mere convenience would be gone with them. There would be no more expeditions, and consequently no more replenishments of supplies. The primitive life would start in earnest. So, from motives of conservation, the barrier wire was charged for only a few minutes two or three times a day. It caused the triffids to recoil a few yards, and thereby stopped them building up pressure against the fence. As an additional guard we ran an alarm wire on the inner fence to enable us to deal with any breaks before they became serious.
The weakness lay in the triffids’ apparent ability to learn, in at least a limited way, from experience. We found, for instance, that they grew accustomed to our practice of charging the wire for a while night and morning. We began to notice that they were usually clear of the wire at our customary time for starting the engine, and they started to close in again soon after it had stopped. Whether they actually associated the charged condition of the wire with the sound of the engine was impossible to say then, but later we had little doubt that they did.
It was easy enough to make our running times erratic, but Susan, for whom they were continually a source of inimical study, soon began to maintain that the period for which the shock kept them clear was growing steadily shorter. Nevertheless, the electrified wire and occasional attacks upon them in the sections where they were densest kept us free of incursions for over a year, and of those that occurred later we had warning enough to stop them being more than a minor nuisance.
Within the safety of our compound we continued to learn about agriculture, and life settled gradually into a routine.
* * *
—
On a day in the summer which began our sixth year Josella and I went down to the coast together, traveling there in the half-tracked vehicle that I customarily used now that the roads were growing so bad. It was a holiday for her. Months had passed since she had been outside the fence. The cares of the place and the babies had kept her far too tied to make more than a few necessary trips, but now we had reached the stage where Susan could safely be left in charge sometimes, and we had a feeling of release as we climbed up and ran over the tops of the hills. On the lower southern slopes we stopped the car for a while, and sat there.
It was a perfect June day, with only a few light clouds flecking a pure blue sky. The sun shone down on the beaches and the sea beyond just as brightly as it had in the days when those same beaches had been crowded with bathers and the sea dotted with little boats. We looked on it in silence for some minutes. Josella said:
“Don’t you still feel sometimes that if you were to close your eyes for a bit you might open them again to find it all as it was, Bill?…I do.”
“Not often now,” I told her. “But I’ve had to see so much more of it than you have. All the same, sometimes——”