“And look at the gulls—just as they used to be!”
“There are many more birds this year,” I agreed. “I’m glad of that.”
Viewed impressionistically from a distance, the little town was still the same jumble of small red-roofed houses and bungalows populated mostly by a comfortably retired middle class—but it was an impression that could not last more than a few minutes. Though the tiles still showed, the walls were barely visible. The tidy gardens had vanished under an unchecked growth of green, patched in color here and there by the descendants of carefully cultivated flowers. Even the roads looked like strips of green carpet from this distance. When we reached them we should find that the effect of soft verdure was illusory; they would be matted with coarse, tough weeds.
“Only so few years ago,” Josella said reflectively, “people were wailing about the way those bungalows were destroying the countryside. Now look at them!”
“The countryside is having its revenge, all right,” I said. “Nature seemed about finished then—‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’？”
“It rather frightens me. It’s as if everything were breaking out. Rejoicing that we’re finished, and that it’s free to go its own way. I wonder? Have we been just fooling ourselves since it happened? Do you think we really are finished with, Bill?”
I’d had plenty more time when I was out on my foragings to wonder about that than she had.
“If you weren’t you, darling, I might make an answer out of the right heroic mold—the kind of wishful thinking that so often passes for faith and resolution.”
“But I am me?”
“I’ll give you the honest answer—not quite. And while there’s life, there’s hope.”
We looked on the scene before us for some seconds in silence.
“I think,” I amplified, “only think, mind you, that we have a narrow chance—so narrow that it is going to take a long, long time to get back. If it weren’t for the triffids, I’d say there was a very good chance indeed—though still taking a longish time. But the triffids are a real factor. They are something that no rising civilization has had to fight before. Are they going to take the world from us, or are we going to be able to stop them?
“The real problem is to find some simple way of dealing with them. We aren’t so badly off—we can hold them away. But our grandchildren—what are they going to do about them? Are they going to have to spend all their lives in human reservations kept free of triffids only by unending toil?
“I’m quite sure there is a simple way. The trouble is that simple ways so often come out of such complicated research. And we haven’t the resources.”
“Surely we have all the resources there ever were, just for the taking,” Josella put in.
“Material, yes. But mental, no. What we need is a team, a team of experts really out to deal with the triffids for good and all. Something could be done, I’m sure. Something along the lines of a selective killer, perhaps. If we could produce the right hormones to create a state of imbalance in triffids but not in other things…It must be possible—if you have enough brain power turned on to the job.”
“If you think that, why don’t you try?” she asked.
“Too many reasons. First, I’m not up to it—a very mediocre biochemist, and there’s only one of me. There’d have to be a lab, and equipment. More than that, there’d have to be time, and there are too many things which I have to do as it is. But even if I had the ability, then there would have to be the means of producing synthetic hormones in huge quantities. It would be a job for a regular factory. But before that there must be the research team.”
“People could be trained.”