Wyndham, John (15 page)

WILTS.

That was something, at least.

I looked at it, and thought. In another hour or less it
would be dusk. Devizes I guessed at a hundred miles distant, probably more. I
went outside again and examined the trucks. One of them was the last that I had
driven in—the one in which I had stowed my despised anti-triffid gear. I
recalled that the rest of its load was a useful assortment of food, supplies,
and tools. It would be much better to arrive with that than empty-handed in a
car. Nevertheless, if there were no urgent reason for it, I did not fancy
driving anything, much less a large, heavily loaded truck, by night along roads
which might reasonably be expected to produce a number of hazards. If I were
to pile it up, and the odds were that I should, I would lose a lot more time in
finding another and transferring the load than I would by spending the night
here. An early start in the morning offered much better prospects. I moved my
boxes of cartridges from the car to the cab of the truck in readiness. The gun
I kept with me.

I found the room from which I had rushed to the fake fire
alarm exactly as I had left it: my clothes on a chair, even the cigarette case
and lighter where I had placed them beside my improvised bed.

It was still too early to think of sleep. I lit a cigarette,
put the case in my pocket, and decided to go out.

Before I went into the Russell Square garden I looked it
over carefully. I had already begun to become suspicious of open spaces. Sure
enough, I spotted one triffid. It was in the northwest corner, standing
perfectly still, but considerably taller than the bushes that surrounded it. I
went closer, and blew the top of it to bits with a single shot. The noise in
the silent square could scarcely have been more alarming if I had let off a
howitzer. When I was sure that there were no others lurking I went into the
garden and sat down with my back against a tree.

I stayed there perhaps twenty minutes. The sun was low, end
half the square thrown into shadow. Soon I would have to go in. While there was
light I could sustain myself; in the dark, things could steal quietly upon me.
Already I was on my way back to the primitive. Before long, perhaps, I should
be spending the hours of darkness in fear as my remote ancestors must have
done, watching, ever distrustfully, the night outside their cave. I delayed to
take one more look around the square, as if it were a page of history I would
learn before it was turned. And as I stood there I heard the gritting of
footsteps on the road—a slight sound but as loud in the silence as a grinding
millstone.

I turned, with my gun ready. Crusoe was no more startled at
the sight of a footprint than I at the sound of a footfall, for it had not the
hesitancy of a blind man’s. I caught a glimpse in the dim light of the moving
figure. As it left the road and entered the garden II saw that it was a man.
Evidently he had seen me before I heard him, for he was coming straight toward
me.

“You don’t need to shoot,” he said, holding empty hands wide
apart.

I did not know him until he came within a few yards. Simultaneously,
he recognized me.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said. I kept the gun raised.

“Hullo, Coker. What are you after? Wanting me to go on
another of your little parties?” I asked him.

“No. You can put that thing down. Makes too much noise,
anyway. That’s how I found you. No,” he repeated, “I’ve had enough. I’m getting
to hell out of here.”

“So am I,” I said, and lowered the gun.

“What happened to your bunch?” he asked. I told him. He
nodded.

“Same with mine. Same with the rest, I expect. Still, we tried

“The wrong way,” I said. He nodded again.

“Yes,” he admitted. “I reckon your lot did have the right
idea from the start—only it didn’t
look
right and it didn’t sound right
a week ago.”

“Six days ago,” I corrected him.

“A week,” said he.

“No, I’m sure— Oh well, what the hell’s it matter, anyway?”
I said. “In the circumstances,” I went on, “what do you say to declaring an
amnesty and starting over again?”

He agreed.

“I’d got it wrong,” he repeated. “I thought I was the one
who was taking it seriously—but I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. I couldn’t
believe that it would last, or that some kind of help wouldn’t show up. But now
look at it! And it must be like this everywhere. Europe, Asia, America—think of
America smitten like this! But they must be. If they weren’t, they’d have been
over here, helping out and getting the place straight that’s the way it’d take
them. No, I reckon your lot understood it better from the start.”

We ruminated for some moments, then I asked:

“This disease, plague—what do you reckon it is?”

“Search me, chum. I thought it must be typhoid, but someone
said typhoid takes longer to develop—so I don’t know. I don’t know why I’ve not
caught it myself—except that I’ve been able to keep away from those that have
and to see that what I was eating
was
clean. I’ve been keeping to cans
I’ve opened myself, and I’ve drunk bottle beer. Anyway, though I’ve been lucky
so far, I don’t fancy hanging around here much longer. Where do
you
go
now?”

I told him of the address chalked on the wall. He bad not
seen it. He had been on his way to the University Building when the sound of my
shot had caused him to scout round with some caution.

“It—” I began, and then stopped abruptly. From one of the
streets west of us came the sound of a car starting up. It ran up its gears
quickly and then diminished into the distance.

“Well, at least there’s somebody else left,” said Coker.
“And
whoever wrote up that address. Have you any idea who it was?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It was a justifiable assumption
that it was a returned member of the group that Coker had raided—or possibly
some sighted person that his party had failed to catch. There was no telling
how long it had been there. He thought it over.

“It’ll be better
if
there’s two of us. I’ll tag along
with you and see what’s doing. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’m for turning in flaw, and an early
start tomorrow.”

He was still asleep when I awoke. I dressed myself much more
comfortably in the ski suit and heavy shoes than in the garments I had been
wearing since his party had provided them for me. By the time I returned with a
bag of assorted cans, he was up and dressed too. Over breakfast we decided to
improve our welcome at Tynsham by taking a loaded truck each rather than travel
together in one.

“And see that the cab window closes
,”
I suggested.
‘There are quite a lot
of
triffid nurseries around London, particularly
to the west.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve seen a few of the ugly brutes about,” he said
offhandedly.

“I’ve seen them about—and in action,” I told him.

At the first garage we came to we broke open a pump and
filled up. Then, sounding in the silent streets like a convoy of tanks, we set
off westward with my truck in the lead.

The going was wearisome. Every few dozen yards one had to
weave round some derelict vehicle. Occasionally two or three together would
block the road entirely so that it was necessary to go dead slow and nudge one
of them out of the way. Very few of them were wrecked. The blindness seemed to
have come upon the drivers swiftly, but not too suddenly for them to keep
control. Usually they had been able to draw in to the side of the road before
they stopped. Had the catastrophe occurred by day, the main reads would have
been quite impassable, and to work our way clear from the center by side
streets might have taken days—spent mostly in reversing before impenetrable
thickets of vehicles and trying to find another way round. As it was, I found
that our overall progress was less slow than it seemed in detail, and when,
after a few miles, I noticed an overturned car beside the road I realized that
we were by this time on a route which others had traveled, and partially
cleared, ahead of us.

On the farther outskirts of Staines we could begin to feel
that London was behind us at last. I stopped, and went back to Coker. As he
switched off, the silence closed, thick and unnatural, with only the click of
cooling metal to break it. I realized suddenly that I bad not seen a single
living creature other than a few sparrows since we had started. Coker climbed
out of his cab. He stood in the middle of the road, listening and looking
around him.

“And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity,”

he murmured.

I looked bard at him. His grave, reflective expression
turned suddenly to a grin.

“Or do you prefer Shelley?” he asked.

“My name
is
Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Come on, let’s find some food.”

“Coker,” I said as we completed the meal sitting on a store
counter and spreading marmalade on crackers, “you beat me. What are you? The
first time I meet you I find you ranting— if you will forgive the appropriate
word—in a kind of dockside lingo. Now you quote Marvel to me. It doesn’t make
sense.”

He grinned. “It never did to me, either,” he said. “It comes
of being a hybrid—you never really know what you are. My mother never really
knew what I was, either—at least she never could prove it, and she always held
it against me that on account of that she could not get an allowance for me. It
made me kind of sour about things when I was a kid, and when I left school I
used to go to meetings—more or less any kind of meetings as long as they were
protesting against something. And that led to me getting mixed up with the lot
that used to come to them. I suppose they found me kind of amusing. Anyway,
they used to take me along to arty-political sorts of parties. After a bit I
got tired of being amusing and seeing them give a kind of double laugh, half
with me and half at me, whenever I said what I thought. I reckoned I needed
some of the background knowledge they had, and then I’d be able to laugh at
them a bit, maybe, so I started going to evening classes, and I practiced
talking the way they did, for use when necessary. There’s a whole lot of people
don’t seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language
before he’ll take you seriously. If you talk tough and quote Shelley they think
you’re cute, like a performing monkey or something, but they don’t pay any
at-tendon to what you say. You have to talk the kind of lingo they’re
accustomed to taking seriously. And it works the other way too. Half the
political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of
their stuff across— not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as
because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they
knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and
not like ordinary, normal talk. So I reckoned the thing to do was to make
myself bilingual, and use the right one in the right place—and occasionally the
wrong one in the wrong place, unexpectedly. Surprising how that jolts ‘em.
Wonderful thing, the English caste system. Since then I’ve made out quite
nicely in the orating business. Not what you’d call a steady job, but full of
interest and variety. . . .Wilfred Coker. Meetings addressed. Subject no
object. That’s me.”