 CHAPTER 2 CONSEQUENCES OF A DISCOVERY But it's got to be stopped, exclaimed Goots. Miss Francis turned silently back to her flower-pot as though she'd forgotten us. Goots coursed the kitchen floor like a puzzled, yet anxious hound. Damn it, it's got to be stopped! He halfway extracted his pack of cards, then hastily withdrew his hand as though guarding the moment's gravity. Otherwise it'll swallow the house! He decided on the cards, after all, and balanced four of them edgewise in the back of his hand. Miss Francis immediately abandoned the flower-pot to stare childishly at the feet. In fact, if what you say is true, it will literally swallow up the house. Digest it! Convert it into devil-grass! Cynodon dactylon, what I say is true. How much elementary physics is involved in that trick? But that's terrible, protested Goots. He regarded a bowl of algae as if about to make it disappear. Mentally, I agreed. One of the greatest potential money-makers of the age, lost and valueless. Yes, she agreed. It is terrible. Terrible is the starvation in a hive when the apiarist takes out the winter honey. Terrible is the daily business in an abattoir. Terrible is the appetite of grown fish at spawning time. Pooh, fate, kismet, nature. Ah, you are unconcerned with catastrophes which don't affect man. Local man, substituted Goots. Los Angeles man. Pith the cancer-best moviensis. Stiffs and Constantinople are strictly AP stuff. It seems to me, I broke in, that you are both assuming too much. I don't know of anything that calls for the word catastrophe. I'm sure I'm sorry if the Dinkman's house is swallowed up as Goots suggests, but it hasn't been, and I'm sure the possibility is exaggerated. The authorities will do something where the grass will stop growing. I don't see any point in looking at the blackest side of things. Goots opened his mouth and pretended astonishment. While I swan, boz a philosopher. You are not particularly concerned, Weiner. I don't know any reason why I should be, I retorted. I sold your product in good faith, and I am not responsible. Oh, blind, blind. Do you imagine one man can suffer and you not suffer? Is your name Simeon's delighties? Do you think for an instant what happens to any man doesn't happen to every man? Are you not your brother's keeper? She twisted her hands together. Not responsible. Why, you are responsible for every brutality, execution, meanness, and calamity in the world today. I had often heard that the borderline between profundity and insanity was thin and inexact, and it was now clear on which side she stood. I looked at Goots to see how he was taking her hysterical outburst, but he had found a batch of empty test tubes which he was building into a perilously swaying structure. Of course, of course, I agreed soothingly, backing away. You're quite right. She walked the floor as if her awkward body were a burden. Is the instant response to an obvious truth platitude even, always a diagnosis of lunacy? I stayed a thought so old no one knows who first expressed it, and a hearer feels bound to choose between offense to himself and contempt for the speaker. Believe me, Wiener, I was offering no exclusive indictment. I, too, am guilty, infinitely culpable, even if I had devoted my life to pure science, perhaps even more certainly then, patterning myself in a medieval monastic, faithful to boughs of poverty and singleness of purpose, even if I had not for an apparently laudable end but trade my efforts to a base creed, even if I had never picked for a moment's use such an unworthy, do not be insulted again, Wiener, unworthiness is a fact insofar as there are any facts at all such an unworthy tool as yourself, even if I had never compounded the metamorphizer, even if I had been a biologist or an astronomer, even then I should be guilty of ruining the dinkments and making them homeless, just as you are guilty, and the reporter here is guilty, and the garbage man is guilty, and the pastor in his pulpit is guilty. Guilty, exclaimed Goetz suddenly. Guilty. What kind of a lousy newspaper man am I, worrying about guilt and solutions in the face of impending calamity, instead of serving it red hot to a palpitating public? Guilty. Hell, I ought to be fired, or anyway, shot. Where's the phone? I manage a minimum of privacy in spite of inquiring reporters and unemployed canvassers. I have no telephone. Okay, hold everything, I return immediate. I followed him, for I had no desire to be left alone with someone who might prove dangerous. But his long legs took him quickly out of sight before I could catch him, even by running, and so I fell into a more sedate pace. Oh, Miss Francis's metaphysical talk was beyond me, but what little I could make of it was pure nonsense. Guilty. Why, I had never done anything illegal in my life, unless taking a glass of beer and dry territory be so accounted. All this talk about guilt suggested some sort of inverted delusions of persecution. How sad it was, the eccentricity of genius so often turned its possessors into cranks. I was thankful to be of mere normal intelligence. But I wasted no more thought on her, putting the whole episode of the metamorphizer behind me. For now I had some liquid capital. It was true it didn't amount to much, but it existed, crinkled in my pocket, and I was sure with my experience and native ability I could turn the daily intelligenceers forty dollars into a much larger sum. But resolve to forget the metamorphizer didn't enable me to escape Mrs. Dinkman's lawn. Walking down Hollywood Boulevard, formulating, rejecting, and reshaping plants for my future, I passed a radio shop, and from a loudspeaker hung over the door with the evident purpose of inducing suggestible pedestrians to rush in and purchase sets. The latest report of the Devil Grass's advance was blared out at me. Station K-P-A-R, the voice of Edendale, reaching you from a portable transmitter located in the street in front of what was formerly the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Dinkman. I guess you've all heard the story of how their lawn was allegedly sprinkled with some chemical which made the grass run wild. I don't know anything about that, but I want to tell you this grass is certainly running wild. It must be fifteen or sixteen feet high. Think of that, folks. Nearly as high as three men standing on each other's shoulders. It's covered the roof halfway to the peak, and it's choking the windows and doorways of the houses on either side. It's all over the sidewalk, looks like an enormous green woolly rug. No, that's not quite right. Anyway, it's all over the sidewalk, and it would be right out here in the street where I'm talking to you from if the fire department wasn't on the job constantly chopping off the creeping ends as they come over the curb. I want to tell you, folks, it's a frightening sight to see grass, the same kind of grass growing in your backyard or mine magnified, or maybe I mean multiplied, a hundred times or maybe more, and coming at you as if it was an enemy. Only the cold steel of the fireman's axe saving you from it. While we're waiting for some action, folks, well, not exactly that. The grass is giving us plenty of action, all right. I'll try to bring you some impressions of the people in the street, literally in the street because the sidewalk is covered with grass. Pardon me, sir. Would you like to say a few words to the unseen audience of Station K-P-A-R? Speak right into the microphone, sir. Let's have your name first. Don't be bashful. Gentlemen doesn't care to give his name. Well, that's all right. Quite all right. Just what do you think of this phenomenon? How does it impress you? Are you disturbed by the sight of this riot of vegetation? Right into the microphone. Uh, hello? Well, I guess I haven't anything much to say. Pretty color. Bad stuff, I guess. Glad's not growing my yarn. Yes, go right on, sir. Oh, the gentleman is through. Very interesting and thank you. They're bringing up a whole crew of weed-burners now, going to try and get this thing under control. The men all have tanks of oil or kerosene on their backs. Wait a minute, folks. I want to find out for sure whether it's oil or kerosene. Mumble, mumble. Well, folks, I'm sorry, but this gentleman doesn't know exactly what's in the tanks. Anyway, it's kerosene or oil, and there are long hoses with wide nozzles at the end. Something like vacuum cleaners. Well, that's not quite right. Anyway, they're lighting the nozzles now. Makes a big whoosh. Now I'll bring the microphone closer, and maybe you can catch the noise of the flame. Hear it? That's quite a roar. I guess old Mr. Grass is cooked now. Now these boys are advancing in a straight line from the street up over the curb, holding their fury torches in front of them. The devil grass is shriveling up. Yes, sir, it's shriveling right up, like a gob of tobacco juice on a hot stove. They've burned about two feet of it away already. Nothing left but some smoking stems. Quite a lot of smoking stems. A regular compact mass of them. But all the green stuff has been burned right off. Yes, folks, burned clean off. I wish we had television here, so I could show you how that thick pad of stems lies there without a bit of life left in it. Now they're uncovering the sidewalk. I'm following right behind with the microphone. Maybe you can hear the roar of the weed burners again. Now I'd like to have you keep in mind the height of this grass. You never saw grass as tall as this unless you've been in the jungle or South America or someplace where grass grows this high. I mean high. Even here at the sidewalk, it's well over a man's head, seven or eight feet, and this crew is carving right into it, cutting it like steel with an acetylene torch. They're making big holes in it. You hear that hissing? That noise like a steam hose? Well, that's the grass shriveling. Think of it, grass with so much sap inside it hisses. It's drying right up in a one, two, three. Now the top part is falling down, toppling forward, coming like a breaking wave. Oops. Hey, put out one of the torches by smothering it. Drowned it in grass. Nothing serious. The boys got it lit again. Progress is slow here, folks. You've got to realize this stuff's about 10 feet high. Further in it's anyway 16 feet. Fighting it's like battling an octopus with a million arms. The stuff rise around and grows all the time. It's terrific. Imagine tangles of barbed wire, hundreds and hundreds of bales or rolls, or however barbed wire comes, covering your front yard and house. Only it isn't barbed wire at all but green living grass. Just a minute, folks. I'm having a little trouble with my microphone cable. Nothing serious. You understand. Tangled a bit in the grass behind me. Those burnt stems. Stand by for just a minute. This is K-P-A-R, the voice of Edendale. Due to mechanical difficulties, there will be a brief musical interlude until contact is resumed with our portable transmitter, bringing you an on-the-spot account of the unusual grass. AR's portable transmitter. Here I am again, folks, in the street in front of the Dinkman residence. A little out of breath but none the worse off. Ready to resume the blow-by-blow story of the fight against the devil grass. There was a little trouble back there but it's all right now. Seems the weed burners hadn't quite finished off the grass in the parkway strip between the curb and the sidewalk and after I dragged my microphone cable across it it sort of well it sort of came to life again and tangled up the cable. It's all right now though. Everything's under control. The boys with the weed burners have come back and are going over the parkway strip again just to make sure. I want to tell you this stuff really can grow. It's amazing. Simply amazing. You've heard of plants growing while you look at them while this grows while you don't look at it. It grows while your back is turned. Just to give you an example why the boys have been busy a second time with the parkway strip. The grasses come back and grown again over all they burned up beyond the sidewalk and now it's starting to come back over the concrete. You can actually see it move. The creepers run out in front and crawl ahead like thousands of little green snakes. Imagine seeing grass traveling forward like an army of worms. An army you can't stop because it's alive. Alive and coming at you. It's alive. It's alive. It's a- This is station K-P-A-R. We will resume our regular programs immediately following the time signal. Now we bring you a message from the manufacturers of Chua Chalk, the candy laxative with the whole. I continued thoughtfully down the street. The daily intelligentser was spread on a newsstand, a smudgy black banner had fouling its pure bosom. City council meets to end grassmenace. I trusted so quickly. I was tired of Mrs. Dinkman's lawn. End of chapter 2 part A. Chapter 2 part B of Greener Than You Think. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore. Chapter 2 part B. Greener Sa'heeb. Fate has tied us together. I hoped not. I was wary of Goots and his phony accents. On account of your female Burbank, your scientist. Scientistess is a twister. Peter Piper at a peg of pickle peppers. Won't play ball with W.R. The chief offered her a fabulous sum. Much beer in little kegs. Many dozen hard-boiled eggs and goodies to a fabulous amount. Fabulous for W.R., that is, to act as special writer on the grass business. J.S. Francis. World-renowned chemist. Exclusively in the intelligentser. You know, suppress her unfortunate sex. Originator of wild grass tells all. Anyway, she didn't grasp her chance. Practically told W.R. to go to hell. Practically told him to go to hell, he repeated, evidently torn between reprehension at the sacrilege and admiration of the daring. Ms. Francis plainly had what might be described as talent that way. I debated whether to inform Goots of my discovery of her craziness and decided against it on the bare possibility it would be unwise to lower the value of my connection with the metamorphizer's discoverer. I was soon rewarded for my caution. Oh, Wiener O'Sahn, continued Goots evidently in an oriental vein traveling westward. Not too hard for you to be picking up a few yen. You did not hate fifty potatoes from Edith O'Sahn yesterday. Forty, I corrected. Forty, fifty. What's the difference so long as you're healthy? He produced a card, showed it, tore it in half, waved his hand, and exhibited it whole and unharmed. No kidding, Chum, the old man has the bug to make you a special correspondent on my advice, you understand. Always looking out for my pals. Well, why not? The Wheel of Fortune had been a long time turning before stopping at the proper spot. I had never had any doubt I'd someday be in a position to prove my writing ability. Now all those who had sneered at me years before, my English teachers and editors who have been too jealous to recognize my existence by anything more courteous than a printed rejection, would have to acknowledge their injustice. And in the meantime all my accumulated experience have been added to enhance my original talent. I'd sold everything that could be sold door to door, and a man acquires not only an ease with words but a wide knowledge of human nature this way. Certainly I was better equipped all around than many of these highly advertised magazine or newspaper authors. Well, I don't know if I could spare the time. Okay, big shot, let me know if the market goes down and I'll come around and put up more margin. How much will Mr. Love fascist see? How the hell do I know? More than your worth, more than I'm getting because you're a 90-day wonder, the guy who put the crap on the grass and sent it nuts, less than he'd have given Minerva Medusa come and get it straight from the horse's mouth. My only previous visits to newspaper offices had been to place advertisements, but I was prepared to find the daily intelligence or a veritable hive of activity. Perhaps some part of the big building which housed the paper did hum, but not the floor devoted to the editorial staff. That simply dozed. Goots led me from the elevator through an enormous room where men and an occasional woman sat indolently before typewriters, stared drugedly into space, or flew paper airplanes out of open windows. The only sign of animation I saw as we walked what might well have been a quarter mile was one reporter, I judged him such by the undersized hat on the back of his head, who enthusiastically munched a sandwich while perusing a magazine containing photographs of women with uncovered breasts. Even the nipples showed. Beyond the city room was a battery of private offices. I will certainly not conceal the existence of my extreme nervousness as we neared the proximity of the famous editor. I hung back from the ground glass door inscribed in shabby peeling letters in distinction to its neighbors newly and brightly painted W. R. LaFascissie. Goots, noting my trepidation, put on the brogue of a burlesque Irishman. Is it afraid of himself, your army boy? Shar, think no more of it. Faith and wasn't born, Billy Casey, no better than the rest of us for all his mother was a klancy and related to the Finnegans. He is written so often about coming from a noble Ugonauts stocky almost believes it himself, but thy Ugonauts were dirty protestants, and when his time comes W. Arleson for the praise to take the last sacraments like the true son of the church, he is in his heart. So buck up, me boy, and come in and view the biggest faker in journalism. But Goots' flippancy reassured me no more than did the bare sunlit office behind the door. I had somehow, perhaps from the movies, expected to see an editor's desk piled with copy paper, while he himself used half a dozen telephones at once, simultaneously making incomprehensible gestures at countless underlings. But Mr. LaFascissie's desk was nude except for an enameled snuff box and a signed photograph of a president whose administration had been subjected daily to the editor's bitterest jabs. On the walls hung framed originals of the more famous political cartoons of the last quarter century, but neither telephone nor scrap of manuscript was in evidence. But who could examine that office with detached scrutiny while William Rufus LaFascissie occupied it? Somniland in a leather arm chair, he opened tiny, sunken eyes to regard us with less than interest as we entered. Under a shiny alpaca coat he wore an old-fashioned collarless shirt whose neckband was fastened with a diamond stud. Neither collar nor tie competed with the brilliance of this flashing gem resting in a shaven stubble fold of his drape neck. His face was remarkably long, his upper lip stretching interminably from a mouth looking to have been freshly smeared with Vaseline to a nose not unlike a golf club in shape. From the snuff box on his desk, which I'd imagined a pretty ornament or receptacle for small objects, he scooped with a flat thumb a conical mound of gray brown dust, and this with a sweeping upward motion he pushed into a gaping nostril. Chief, this is Albert Wiener. How do, Mr. Wiener? Goots? Who the bloody hell is Wiener? Why, Chief, he's the guy who put the stuff on the grass. Oh, he surveyed me with the attention to a worthy but not particularly valuable specimen. You bit the dog, eh, Wiener? Goots burst into a high, appreciative cackle. Lafacici turned the death ray of his left eye on him. You're a sycophant, Goots, he stated flatly. A miserable, groveling, low liver, cringing, faunting mealymouth, chicken-hearted, toe-deeding, arse-looking, slobbering sycophant. I couldn't see how we were ever going to reach the point this way, so I ventured. I understand in view of the fact that I inoculated Mrs. Dinkman's lawn you want me to contribute. Desires grow smaller as intelligence expands, growled Lafacici. I want nothing except to find a few undisturbed moments in which to read the work of the immortal Hobbes. I'm sorry, I said. I understood you wished me to report the progress of the wildly growing grass. City editor's province, he declared uninterestedly. No such thing on the intelligencer, Goots informed me in a loud whisper. Lafacici, who evidently heard him, glared, reached down and retrieved the telephone from his concealment under the desk and snarled into the mouthpiece. I hate to interrupt your crap game with the trivial concerns of this organ men called a newspaper till you got on the payroll. I'm sending you a man who knows something about the crazy grass. Divorce yourself from whatever pornography you're gloating over at the moment to see if we can use him. His immediate obliviousness to our presence was so insulting that if Goots had not made the first move to leave, I should have done so myself. I don't know what vast speculation swept upon him as he hung up the telephone, but I thought he might at least have had the courtesy to not a dismissal. You're hired be Jesus, proclaimed Goots, and of course I was. For there was no doubt a brilliantly successful figure like Lafacici, whatever my opinion of his intemperate language or failure in the niceties of deportment, he was a forceful man, had sized me up in a flash and sensed my ability before I'd written a single line for his paper. The wage offered by the Daily Intelligencer, even assuming as they undoubtedly did that the affair of the grass would be over shortly, and my service ended, was high enough to warrant my buying a second-hand car. A previous unpleasantness with a finance company made the transaction difficult, with as little cash as I had on hand, but a phone call to the paper established my bona fides, and I was soon driving out Sunset Boulevard in a tomato-colored roadster, meditating on the long-delayed upsurge of my fortunes. The street was closed off by a road barrier quite some distance away, and tightly parked cars testified to the attraction of the expanding grass. Scorning these idle sightseers, I pushed and shoved my way forward to what had now become the focus of all my interests. The Dinkmans had lived in a city block, an urban entity. It was no pretentious group of houses, nor was it a repetitive design out of some subdividing contractors' greedy mind. Moderate-sized, medium-priced, middle-class bungalows. These were the homes of the Dinkmans and their neighbors, a sample from a pattern which varied but was basically the same here and in Oakland, Seattle and St. Louis, in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Cleveland. But now I looked upon no city scene, no picture built upon the substantial foundation of Daddy at the office all day, fixing a leaky faucet of an evening, painting the woodwork during his summer vacation, or Mom after a pleasant afternoon with the girls, unstintedly opening cans for supper and harassedly watching the cleaning woman who came in once a week. An alien presence, a rude fist through the canvas negated the convention that this was a picture of reality. A cone-shaped hill rose to a blurred point, marking the burial-place of the Dinkmans house. It was a child's drawing of a cone-shaped hill done in green crayon, too symmetrical, too evenly and heavily green to be a spontaneous product of nature. Man's unimaginative hand was apparent in its composition. The sides of the cone flowed past the doors and windows of the adjacent houses, blocking them as it had previously blocked the Dinkmans, but their inhabitants forewarned had gone. More than mere desertion was implied in their going, there was an implicit surrender, abandonment to the invader. The base of the cone, accepting capitulation and still aggressive, had reached to the lawns beyond, warning these householders too to be ready for flight, over back fences to dwellings fronting another street and establishing itself firmly over the concrete pavement before the Dinkmans door. I would be suppressing part of the truth if I did not admit that for the smallest moment some perverted pride made me cherish this hill as my work, my creation, but for me it would not have existed. I had done something notable, I had caused a stir. It was the same kind of sensation I imagine which makes criminals boast of their crimes. I quickly dismissed this morbid thought, but it was succeeded by one almost equally unhealthy, for I was ridden by a sudden wild impulse to touch, feel, walk on, roll in the encroaching grass. I tried to control myself, but no willing of mine could prevent me from going up and letting the long runners slip through my half-open hands. It was like receiving some sort of electric shock. Though the blades were soft and tender, the stems communicated to my palms a feeling of surging vitality, implacable life, and ineluctable strength. I drew back from the green masses, though I had been doing something venturesome. For no matter what botanists or naturalists may tell us to the contrary, we habitually think of plant life as fixed and stolid, insensate and quiescent. But this abnormal growth was no passive lawn, no sleepy patch of vegetation. As I stood there with fascinated attention, the thing moved and kept on moving, not in one place but in thousands, not in one direction, but toward all points of the compass. It rived and twisted and nightmarish on ease, expanding, extending, increasing, spreading, spreading, spreading. Its movement by human standards was slow, but it was so monstrous to see this great mass of verjure move at all that it appeared to be going with express speed inexorably enveloping everything in its path. A crack in the roadway disappeared under it, a shrub was swallowed up, a patch of wall vanished. The eyes shifted from hole to detail and back again. The overrun crack was duplicated by an untouched one a few inches away. It too went. The fine tentacles on top of the mound reached upward shimmering like the air on a hot summer's day, and near my feet hundreds of runners crept ever closer, the pale, stolen, shiny and brittle, supporting the ominously bristling green leaves. I hope I've not given the impression there was no human activity all this while, that nothing was being done to combat the living glacier. On the contrary, there was tremendous bustle and industry. The weed-burning crew was still fighting a rear-guard action, gaining momentary successes here and there, driving back the invading tendrils as they wriggled over concrete sidewalk and roadway, only to be defeated as the main mass, piling higher and ever higher, toppled forward on the temporarily redeemed areas. For on this vastly thicker bulk, the smoky fingers of flame had no more effect than did the exertions of the sithemen, hacking futilely away at the tough intricacies or the rattling reapers entangling themselves to become like waterlogged ships. But greatest hopes were now being pinned on a new weapon. A dozen black and sooty-looking tank trucks had come up, and from them, like the arms of a squid, thick hoses lazily uncoiled. Hundreds of gallons of dark crude oil were being poured upon the grass. At least ten bystanders eagerly explained to any who would listen the purpose and value of this maneuver. Petroleum, deadly enemy of all-rooted things, would unquestionably kill the weed. They might as well call off all the other silly efforts, for in a day or two, as soon as the oil soaked into the ground, the roots would die, the monster collapse and wither away. I wanted with all my heart to believe in this hope, but when I compared the feeble brown trickle to the vast green body, I was gravely doubtful. Shaken and thoughtful, I went back to my car and drove homeward, reflecting on the fortuitousness of human actions. Had I not answered Miss Francis's ad, someone else would have been the agent of calamity. Had Mrs. Dinkman been away from home that day another place than hers, or perhaps no place at all might have been engulfed. On the other hand, I might still be searching for a chance to prove my merit to the world. It seemed to me suddenly man was but a helpless creature after all. CHAPTER II PART C It wasn't until I was almost at my own front door I remembered the purpose of my visit, which was not to draw philosophic conclusions, but to order my impressions so the columns of the Daily Intelligencer might benefit by the reactions of one so closely connected with the spread of the devil-grass. I began tentatively putting sentences together, and by the time I got to my room and sat down with pencil and paper, I was in a ferment of creative activity. Now, I cannot account for this, but the instant I took the pencil in my fingers all thought of the grass left my mind. No effort to summon back those fine rolling sentences was of the least avail. I slapped my forehead and muttered, grass, grass, Bermuda. Cynodon Dactilon, allowed, varying it with such key words as, Dinkman, Swallowing Up, Green Hill, and the like, but all I could think of was buying a tire, 700x16, for the left rear wheel, paying my overdue rent, Goots, infuriating buffoonery, the possibilities for a man of my caliber in Florida or New York, and with a couple of thousand dollars, a nice mail order business could be established to bring in a comfortable income. I left the chair and walked up and down the cramped room until the lodger below wrapped spitefully on his ceiling. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. I came back and inspected my teeth in the mirror. Then I resumed my seat and wrote, the grass. After a moment I crossed this out and substituted, today, the grass. I decided the whole approach was unimaginative and unworthy of me. I turned the paper over and began like a dragon springing. Good. Good. This was the way to start. It would show the readers at once they were dealing with a man of imagination. Like a dragon springing. Springing from what? What did dragon spring from anyway? Eggs, like snakes? Dragons were reptiles, weren't they? Or weren't they? Give up the metaphor. I set my teeth with determination and began again. Not unlike a fearsome, belligerently furious dragon, or some other ferocious, blustery and furious chimerical creature, a menacing and combinatorial debacle is burning fairly in the heart of our fair and increasingly populous city. As one with an innocent yet cardinal part in the unleashing of this dire menace, I want to describe how the exposure of this threatening menace affected me as I looked upon its menacing and malevolent advance today. I sat back, not dissatisfied with my beginning, and thought about the neat little bachelor apartment I could rent on what the intelligentser was paying me. Of course, in a few days this hella blue would be all over. For though I had little faith in the efficacy of the crude oil, I knew really drastic measures would be taken soon, and the whole business stopped. But even in so short a time there could be no doubt Mr. Lafacici would realize he needed me permanently on his staff, and I would be a shirt of a living in my own proper sphere. Thus fired with the thoughts of accomplishment, I returned to my task, but I cannot say it went easily. I remembered many great writers indulged in stimulants in the throes of composition, but I decided such a course might blunt the keen edge of my mind, and after all there was no better stimulant than plain old-fashioned perseverance. I picked up the pencil again and doggedly went on to the next sentence. What the hell's this? Demanded the city editor looking at my neatly rolled pile of manuscript. I disdained to bandy words with an underling too lazy to make an effort to get at what was probably the finest piece of writing ever brought to him, so I unrolled my story, flattening it out so he might read it the more easily. By the balls of Benjamin Franklin and the little white fringe on Horace Greeley's chin, this goddamn thing's been rote by hand. Aren't there any typewriters any more? Did Mr. Remington commit suicide unbeknownst to me? I'm sorry, I said stiffly. I didn't think you'd have any difficulty in reading my handwriting. And in fact the whole business was absurd, for if there's anything I pride myself on, it's the gracefulness and legibility of my penmanship. Typewriters might well be mandatory for the ephemeral news item, but I had been hired as a special correspondent, and someday my manuscript would be valuable property. The city editor eyed me in a most disagreeable fashion. I'm an educated man, he stated. Groton, Harvard, and the WPA. No doubt with time and care I could decipher this bid for next year's Pulitzer Prize, but I must consider the more handicapped members of the staff. Compositors, layout men, and proofreaders. Without my advantages and broad-mindedness, they might be so sterile by this innovation as to have their usefulness permanently crippled. No, I'm afraid, Mr. Wiener, I must ask you to put this in more orthodox form and type it up. Just another example of pettish bureaucracy, the officiousness of the jack-in-office. Except for the nuisance, it didn't particularly matter. When Mr. Lafacici read my contribution, I knew there would be no concern in future whether it was handwritten, typewritten, or engraved in Babylonic cuneiform on a freshly baked brick. Nevertheless, I went over to one of the unoccupied desks and began to copy what I had written on the machine. I must say I was favorably impressed by the appearance of my words in this form, for they somehow looked more important and enduring. While still engaged in this task, I was slapped so hardily on the back, I was knocked forward against the typewriter and Goots perched himself on a corner of the desk. Working the jolly old mill, what? I say the old bugger wants to know where your stuff is. Fuck to the matter, he wants to know with quite a bit of dos and bad language. Not a soft-spoken chop, you know, W.R. I'll be through in a minute or two. He gathered his pipe apparently out of my left ear and his tobacco pouch from the air and very rudely, without asking my permission, picked up the top sheet and started to read it. A thick eyebrow shut up immediately and he allowed his pipe to hang slackly from his mouth. Purple, he exclaimed. Magenta violet lavender mauve. Smaltz. Real copper riveted brass-bound steeljacketed cast iron smaltz. I haven't seen such a genuine sample since my kid sister wrote up Jack the Ripper back in 1889. The manifest discrepancy in these remarks so confused me my fingers stumbled over the typewriter keys. Evidently he intended some kind of humor or sarcasm, but I could make nothing of it. How could his younger sister? Birdy boy, he said, after I had struggled to get another paragraph down. It breaks my heart to see you toil, so let's take in as much as you've done to the chief, and either he'll be so impressed to put a stenographer to transcribing the rest or else. Or else, I prompted. Or else he won't. Come on. Mr. LaFascissie had apparently not stirred since last we were in his office. He opened his eyes, thumbed a pinch of snuff and asked Goots, where the bloody hell is that stuff on the grass? Here it is, chief. No date, no who, what, when, and where, but very literary, very, very literary. The editor picked up my copy, and I could not help but watch him anxiously for some sign of his reaction. It came forth promptly and explosively. What the ingenious and delightfully painful hell is this, Goots? As reported by our special writer, Albert Wiener, the man who inoculated the loony grass. Goots, you are the end product of a long line of incestuous idiots, the winner of the booby prize and any intelligence test, but you have outdone yourself in bringing me this verminous and maggoty orger, said LaFascissie, throwing my efforts to the floor and kicking at them. The outrage made me boil, and if he had not been an older man, I might have done him an injury. As for you, Wiener, I doubt if you will ever be elevated to the ranks of idiocy, get the sanguinary hell out of here, and do humanity the favor to step in front of the first ten-ton truck driving by. One minute, chief, urge Goots. Don't be hasty. Seen the latest on the grass? Well, the mayors asked the governor to call out the National Guard. The times will have an interview with Einstein tomorrow, and the examiner is going to run a symposium of what Herbert Hoover, Bernard Shaw, and General MacArthur think of the situation. Don't suppose perhaps we could afford to ghost Bertie here. Was I never to escape from the malice inspired by the envy my literary talent aroused? I had certainly expected that a man of the famous editor's reputation would be above such pettiness. I was too dismayed and downcast by the meanness of human nature to speak. The fascist he snuffed again and looked malevolently at the wall. A framed caricature of himself returned the stare. Very well. He grudgingly conceded at length. You're on the grass anyway, so you might as well take this on, too. Leave you only twenty-two hours a day to sleep in. You, Wiener, are still on the payroll. At half the agreed-upon figure. I opened my mouth to protest, but he turned on me with a snarl, bearing yellow and twisted teeth unpleasant to see. Wiener, you look like a criminal type to me. Lombrozo could have used you for a model to advantage. Have you a police record, or have you so far evaded the law? Let me tell you, the intelligentser is the evil doer's nemesis. Is your conscience clear? Your past unsullied as a virgin's bed, your every deed open to search? Do you know what a penitentiary's like? Did you ever hear the clang of a cell door as the turnkey slammed it behind him and left you to think and stew and weep in a silence accented and made more wretched by a yellow electric bulb and the stink of corrosive sublimit? Back to the city room, you dabbling booby, you precious simpleton. It'll pay to dunce and be thankful my boundless generosity permits you to draw a weekly paycheck at all and doesn't condemn you to labor forever unrewarded in the subterranean vaults where the old files are kept. First, Miss Francis, and now LaFascissie, were all these great intelligences touched? Was the world piloted by unbalanced minds? It seemed incredible, impossible it should be so, but two such similar experiences in so short a time apparently supported this gloomy view. Horrible, I thought as I precede Goots out of the maniac's office. Unbelievably horrible. Son, advised Goots, never argue with the chief. He has the makings of a first-class apoplexy, I hope. You just keep squawking to the bookkeeping department and you'll get further than coming up against the old man. Now, let's go out and look at Nature in the Raw. But my copy, I protested. Oh, that, he said airily. I'll run that off when we come back. Deadlines mean nothing to Jackson Goots, the compositor's companion, the proofreader's partner, the layout man's love. Come, Signor Wiener, we take a look at El Grasso Grosso by the moonlight. End of Chapter Two, Part C. Chapter Two, Part D, of Greener Than You Think. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore. Chapter Two, Part D. However, it was not moonlight illuminating the weird tumulus, but the glare of a battery of searchlights suggesting, as Goots irreverently remarked, the opening of a new supermarket. During my absence the National Guard had arrived, and focused the great incandescent beams on the mound, which now covered five houses, and whose threat had driven the inhabitants from as many more. The powdery blue lights gave the grass an uncanny yellowish look, as though it had been stricken by a disease. The rays, directed low, were constantly being interrupted by the bodies of the militiamen, hurrying back and forth to accomplish some definite task. What goes on, inquired Goots. The officer addressed had two gleaming silver bars on his shoulder. He seemed very young and nervous. Sorry, no one allowed this far without special authorization. Working press. Goots produced a reporter's badge from the captain's bars. Oh, excuse me. Say, that was a sharp little stump, Mr. Name of Jackson Goots. Intelligencer. Captain Elkwiss. How did you learn stuff like that? I looked at him for the name was somehow vaguely familiar, but to the best of my knowledge I had never seen that smooth boyish face before. Talent. Natural talent. What did you say all the shooting was about? Getting ready to tunnel under, answered the officer affably. Blow the thing sky high from the middle and get rid of it right now. Not going to let any grass grow under our feet. But I read an article saying neither dynamite, TNT, nor nitroglycerin would be effective against the grass. Might even do more harm than good. Riders. Captain Elkwiss dismissed literature without even resorting to an exclamation point. Riders. To underline his confidence, the bone-shaking chatter of pneumatic chisels began a syncopated rattle. Military directness would accomplish in one swift, decisive stroke at the heart of things what civilian fumbling around the edges had failed to do. I looked with almost sentimental regret at the great conical heap. I had brought it into being. In a few hours it would be gone and whatever fame its brief existence had given me would be gone with it. With swift method the guardsmen started burrowing. In ordered relays fresh workers replaced tired and the pile of excavated dirt grew. Since their activity, except for its urgency and the strangeness of the situation, didn't differ from labor's observable any time a street was repaired or a foundation laid, I saw no point in watching hour after hour. I thought Goot's persistence less a devotion to duty than the idle curiosity which makes grown men gape at a steam shovel. My hints being lost on him, I ascertained the hour they expected to be finished and went home. Excitement or no excitement, I saw no reason to abandon all routine. My forethought was proven when I returned refreshed in mid-morning as the last shovelfuls of dirt came from the tunnel and the explosive charges were hurried to their place. There was reason for haste. While the tunneling had been going on all the grass-fighting activity had ceased for the militia had ordered weed-burners, reapers, bulldozers, and the rest off the scene. The weed, unhampered for the first time since Mrs. Dinkman attacked it with her lawnmower, responded by growing and growing, until more and more guardsmen had to be detached to the duty of keeping it back from the excavation by the very means they had scorned so recently. Even their most frantic efforts could not prevent the grass from sending its most advanced tendrils down into the gaping hole where the wires were being laid to detonate the charge. There was so much dashing to and fro, so many orders relayed, so many dispatches delivered that I thought I might have been witnessing an out-of-date civil war play instead of a peacetime action of the California National Guard. Captain Elthuis, I kept wondering where I'd heard the name, was constantly being interrupted in what was apparently a very friendly conversation with Goots by the arrival of official-looking envelopes, which he immediately stuffed into his pocket with every indication of vexation. Silly old fools he muttered each time the incident happened. Quick inspections made, plans checked, and order was rasped to clear the vicinity. Goots agonized protests that he had to report the occasion for the intelligences readers was ignored. Can't start making exceptions, explained Captain Elthuis. Everyone, working press, militia, sightseers and all, had to move back a couple of blocks where intervening trees and houses cut us off from any view of the green hill. This is terrible, exclaimed Goots frantically. Tragic! How'll I live it down? How am I gonna face W.R.? Godlike wrath. What pool hall were you dozing in Goots? A sleep on your bloody feet, eh? Some nambulistic offspring of a three-toed sloth. Wait all night for a story and then not get it like a star legman on the Jackson Junior High School jive jitterbug. I'll never be able to hold my head up again. Say something, say something, Wiener. I've got to get this. We'll be able to hear the explosion from here, I remarked to console him, for his distress was genuine. Oh, he groaned. Hear the explosion. Albert, Albert, you have a fertile mind. Why didn't I hide myself before they told us to clear out? Why didn't I get W.R. to hire a plane? Why didn't I foresee this and do any of a hundred things? A microphone and automatic movie camera. Goonie Goots, they called him the man who missed all bets. A captive balloon now. Hey, what about a roof? Trees, I objected with a mental picture of him bursting into the nearest house and demanding entrance to the roof. It wasn't till he had urged me inside and up a flight of stairs that I realized the box was Miss Francis' apartment house. It had been a logical choice, since its height and ugliness distinguished it even from its unhandsome neighbors. Less than a week had gone by since I had come here for the first time. As I followed Goots' grasshopper leaps upward at a more dignified pace, I reflected how strangely my circumstances had changed. The shoddily carpeted halls were musty and still as we climbed, except for the unheating squeak of a radio someone had forgotten to turn off. You could always tell when a radio was being listened to, for when disregarded it socally gave off painfully listless noises in frustration and loneliness. I wasn't at all surprised to find Miss Francis among the spectators crowded on the roof in evidence of having no more important occupation. I somehow expected you. Have you any new tricks? She asked Goots coaxingly. He cuddled your worship. What time have I for ledger domain? If you're out now, I'd be a fine gentleman journalist instead of an overworked ak. Ha! she said genially busy with the toothpick. You'll find enough respectable laboratory mechanics eager to cooperate. How long will it be before they shoot, do you know? Goots shook his head and I strained my eyes toward the grass. Symmetrical and shimmeringly green, removed as it now was from all connotations of danger by distance and the promise of immediate destruction, it showed serenely beautiful and unaffected by the machinations of its attackers. I could almost have wept as I traced its sloping sides upward to the rounded peak on top. Reversing all previous impressions, it now appeared to be the natural inhabitant and all the houses, roadways, pavements, fences, automobiles, light poles, and the rest of the evidences of civilization, the intruders. But even as I looked at it so eagerly, it moved and wavered, and I heard the muffled boom of explosion. The roof trembled and windows rattled with diminishing echoes. The noise was neither a great nor terrifying one, and I distinctly remember thinking it quite inadequate to the occasion. I believe all of us there when we heard the report expected to see a vast hole where the grass had been. I'm sure I did. When it was clear this hadn't happened, I continued to stare hard, thinking, since my high school physics was so hazy, I had somehow reversed the relative speed of sight and sound, and we had heard the noise before seeing the destruction. But the green bulk was still there. Oh, not unchanged by any means. The smooth picture-book slope had become jagged and bruised, while the regular, evenly rounded apex had turned into a sort of fridging cap with its pinnacle woundedly askew. The outlines which had been sharp were now blurred. Its evenness had become scraggly. The placid surface was vexed. The attempt on its being had hurt. But not mortally, for even with outline altered, it remained defiant, certain, inexorable. The air was filled with small green particles, whirling and floating downward. Feathery, yet clumsy, they refused to obey gravity and seek the earth urgently, but instead shifted and changed direction, coily spiraling upward and sideways before yielding to the inevitable attraction. At least there is less of it, observed Goots. This much anyway, he added, holding a broken stolen in his fingers. Synodon dactylon, said Miss Francis, like most of the family Grimminia, is propagated not only by seed, but by cuttings as well. That is to say, any part of the plant, except the leaves or flowers, separated from the parent whole upon receiving water and nourishment will root itself and become a new parent or entity. The dispersion of the mass, far from making the whole less, as our literary friend so ingeniously assumes, increases it to what mathematicians call the nth power, because each particle finding a new resting place unhampered by the competition for food it encountered when integrated with the parent mass, now becomes capable of spreading infinitely itself, unless checked by factors which deprive it of sustenance. These facts have been repeated a hundred times in letters, telegrams, and newspaper articles since the project of attempting to blow up the inoculated batch was known in spite of warnings the authorities chose to go ahead. No, make no mistake, this fiasco has not set synodon dactylon back a millimetre, rather it has advanced it tremendously. There was silence while we absorbed this unpleasant bit of information. Goetz was the first to regain his usual cockiness and he asked, you say fiasco professor, okay can you tell us just why it was a fiasco? I know they stuck enough soup under it to blow the whole works and when it went off it gave out with a good bang. Certainly synodon dactylon spreads in what may be called jumps, that is the stems are short and jointed, those above ground the true stems are called stolons, and those below from which the root spread are rhizomes. Conceive if you will two inch lengths of stiff wire, and this plant is vulgarly called wire grass in some regions just as it is called devil grass here, bent on either end at right angles. Now take these bits and weave them horizontally into a thick mass, then add vertically more of the wires breaking the pattern occasionally and putting in more and odd places just to be sure there are no logical fracture points. Cover this involved web, not forgetting it has three dimensions despite my instructions treating it as a plane with earth, eight, ten or twelve inches deep, then try to blow it up with dynamite or try nitrotoluene and see if you haven't in a much lesser degree, duplicated and accounted for the situation in hand. Everything now seemed unusually and perhaps because of the contrast, unreasonably quiet. Downstairs the radio which had been monotonously soothing a presumptive audience of unsatisfied housewives with languid ballads raised its pitch several tones as though for the first time it had become interested in what it pervade. Yes unseen friends, God is preparing his vengeance for wickedness and sin even as you are listening. You have been warned many times of the wrath to come but I say to you the wrath is at hand even now God is giving you a sign of his displeasure, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand but oh my unseen friends that cloud has within it all the storms, cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes and tornadoes necessary to destroy you and yours unless you repent of your pride and sloth judgment will surely come upon you. The Lord has taken a simple and despised weed and caused it to multiply in defiance of all your puny powers and efforts. Oh my friends do not fight this grass but cherish it. Do not allow it to be cut down for it is full of significance for you. Call off all your minions and repent lest if the holy messenger be injured a more terrible one is sent. But now my friends I see my time is up. Please send your contributions so urgently needed to carry on the divine work to Brother Paul care of the station to which you are listening. That's one way of looking at it sagutes, adios amigos. He went down the stairs at an even more breakneck pace than he had come up. Almost in front of the apartment house we nearly collided with two officers in angry dispute. You mean to tell me captain that not one of the urgent orders to suspend operations came through to you? Colonel I haven't seen a thing against the project except some full articles in a newspaper. Suddenly I remembered where I'd seen the name Eltwis. It was on the financial page not far away from the elusive quotation on consolidated Pemicon and allied concentrates for which I'd been idly searching. Eltwis explosives cut melon. Funny how things come back to you as soon as you put them out of your mind. Miss Francis, who had followed us down, was busy collecting some of the stolen's which were still floating lazily downward. Chapter 2 Part E of Greener Than You Think. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore. Chapter 2 Part E. An illiterate patchwork of lifeless and uninteresting scribbling appeared under my byline day after day in the intelligentser. Not a word, not a thought of my own was left. I was not restrained from protest by the absurd threats of lofascisy, but prude and stictated not throwing away dirty water before I got clean, and the money from the paper, while negligible of course, yet provided my most pressing needs. As I was being paid for my name while my talents went to waste, I was free to go anywhere I pleased, but I had little desire to leave the vicinity of the grass. It exerted upon me, more understandably, the same fascination as on the merely curious. But I was not permitted unmolested access to the phenomenon with which I was so closely concerned. An officious young guardsman warned me away brusquely, and I was not allowed to come near until I swallowed my pride and claimed connection with the intelligentser. Even then it was necessary for me to explain myself to several nervous soldiers on pain of being ordered from the spot. I was struck, as I had not been before, by the dynamic quality of the grass, never the same for successive instance. Constant movement and struggle as the expanding parts fought for room among themselves, pushing upward and outward, seemed to indicate perceptible sentience permeating the whole body. Preparing, brooding, it was disturbed, searching, alert. Its external aspect reflected the change. The proportions of height to breadth had altered since the explosion. The peak had disappeared, flattening out into an irregular plateau. Its progress across the ground, however, had been vastly accelerated. It had crossed the streets on all sides of the block and was spreading with great rapidity over the whole district. For the moment no new effort was apparently being made to halt its progress, the activities of the militia being confined to patrolling the area and shooing decent citizens away. I wondered if a new strategy contemplated allowing the thing to exhaust itself. Since it looked more vigorous with each passing hour, I saw myself on the payroll of the intelligentser for a long time to come. Captain Elpis walked by and I asked him if this were so. Don't worry, he reassured me. We're happy now with the actual unbeatable McCoy. Park the body and watch what happens to old Mr. Grass. I had every intention of staying and I thought it advisable to remain close to the Captain in order if his boast were well founded to be in on the kill. He was in excellent spirits, and although I did not think it tactful to refer to it, it was evident his little difference with the colonel about the unreceived orders had not affected him. We chatted amiably. I mentioned what Miss Francis had said about the weeds springing up in new places from each of the shreds dispersed by the explosion, but he merely shrugged and laughed. I know these long-bearded scientific nuts. They can find calamity around the corner quicker than a drunk can find a bar. The discoverer of the metamorphizer is a woman, so her long beard is doubtful, I told him, just a little irritated by his cock-surness. He laughed with as much ease at himself as at anything else. A woman scientist, eh? Funny things women'll do when they can't get a man. But long-bearded or flat-chested, it's all the same. Gruesome, that's what they are. Gruesome. Forget it. After we get this cleaned up we'll take care of any others that start, but personally I don't think there'll be any. Sounds like a lot of theory to me. I looked contemptuously at him, for he had that unimaginative approach which disdains science and so holds civilization back on its upward path. If the world's future rested with people like this I thought, we should never have had dynamite or germ theories or airplanes capable of destroying whole cities at a blow. But Captain Elkwiss was a servant to the science he looked down on. The answer he had bragged about now appeared, and it was a scientific contribution if ever there was one. A division of tanks, twenty or thirty of them, with what appeared to be sled runners, invertedly attached to their fronts, rolled into sight. Wire cutters, he explained with pride, same equipment used for barbed wire on the Normandy beachhead. Go through anything like cheese. The tanks drew up in a semi-circle, and the drivers came out of their vehicles for last-minute preparations. A final check was made of gas, oil, and the positions of the wire cutters. Maps, showing the location of each house now covered by the grass, were studied, and compass points checked against them. I admired the thoroughness and efficiency of the arrangements, so did the Captain. The idea is simple. These tanks are shock troops. They'll cut their way into the middle of the stuff. This will give us entranceways in a central operating point, besides hitting the grass where its strength is greatest. From there, he paused impressively, from there we'll throw everything in the book at it and a few that aren't. All the stuff they used before we came, only we'll use it efficiently, and everything else, even hush-hush stuff. We just got the release from Washington. The minute one of these stem shows will stamp it out, we'll fight it and fight it until we beat it, and we won't leave a bit of it. No sir, not one bit of it alive. He looked at me triumphantly. Behind his triumph was a hint of the vast resources and the slow-moving but unassailable force his uniform represented. It sounded as though he had been correct in his boast, and something drastic indeed would happen to Mr. Grass. The tanks were ready to go at last, and the drivers climbed back into them and disappeared, leaving the steel monsters looking as though they'd swallowed the men. Like bubbles of air in a narrow glass tube, they began to jerk backward and forward, until at some signal, I presume given by radio, they jumped ahead, their exhausts bellowing defiance of the grass mauled and torn by their treads. They went onward with careless scorn, leaving behind a bruised and trampled pathway. The captain followed in the track and I after him, though I must admit it was not without some trepidation I put my feet upon the battered and now lifeless mass packed into a hard roadbed, for I recalled clearly how the grass had wrenched the ladder from the firemen and how it had impishly attacked the broadcaster's equipment. The tanks moved ahead steadily until the slope of the mound began to rise sharply, and the runners of grass, instead of flattening obediently behind, curled and twisted grotesquely as the tracks passed over them, lightly slapping at the impervious steel sides. Small bunches, mutilated and crushed, sprang back into erectness. Larger ones flopped limply as their props were pushed aside. Then, suddenly, the tank we were trailing disappeared. There was no warning. One second it was pursuing its way, an implacable executioner. The next it had plunged into the wheat and was lost to sight. The ends of the grass came together spitefully behind it, weaving themselves together, knitting as we watched, an opaque blanket. It closed over and around so that the smooth track ended abruptly, bitten by a wiry green pork cullus. I was dismayed, but the captain seemed happy. Now we're getting somewhere, he exclaimed. The little devils are eating right into the heart of the old son of a bitch. We stood there gaping stupidly after our lost champion, but the grass mound was enigmatic and offered us no information as to its progress. A survey of the other tracks showed their tanks too had burrowed into the heart of the wheat like so many hounds after a rabbit. Well, said the captain, who by now had apparently accepted me as his confidant, let's go and see what's coming in over the radio. I was glad to be reminded the tanks weren't lost even temporarily and that we would soon learn of their advance. Field headquarters had been set up in a house about two blocks away and there, after exchanging salutes, passwords, and a sort of badenage, the captain led. The men in contact with the tanks, shoulders hunched, fingers rapid with pad and pencil, were sitting in a row by a wall on which had been tacked a large and detailed map of the district. In addition to their earphones, a loudspeaker had also been thoughtfully set up, apparently to take care of any such curious visitors as ourselves. The disadvantage soon manifest was that no plan had been devised to unscramble the reports from the various tanks. As a consequence, whenever two or three came in together, the reports overlapped, resulting in a jumble of unintelligible sounds from the loudspeaker. It was saying, as we entered the room, about 300 meters, north by northeast. Can you hear me, FHQ? Come in, FHQ. There was a further muddle of words then. I think my motor is going to conk out. Shall I backtrack, FHQ? Come in, FHQ. Rugged place to stall, commented Captain Elkwist sympathetically, but we can pull him out in half a shake as soon as we get things under control. The loudspeaker, after a great deal of gibberish, condescended to clarity again. About 500 meters, supposed to join SMT-5 at this point. Can't raise him by radio. What do you have on SMT-5, FHQ? Come in, FHQ. I was still speculating as to what had happened to SMT-5 when the loudspeaker once more became intelligible. And the goings getting tougher all the time. I don't believe these goddamn wire cutters are worth a piss in a snow hole. Just fouled up, that's what they are, just fouled up. Got further if they'd been left off. His grumbling was blotted out. For a moment there was complete babble then. If I can guess it, somehow got in the motor and shorted the ignition. I've got to take a chance and get out to look at it. This is SMT-3 reporting to FHQ, now leaving the transmitter. Stalled so I turned on my lights. Can you hear me, FHQ? Come in, FHQ. Okay, okay, don't get sore. So I turned on my lights. I'm not going to do a bob trap, but I want to tell you, it's pretty creepy. I guess this stuff looks pretty and green enough on top, especially in daylight. But from where I am now, it's like an illustration out of Grimm's fairy tales. Something about the place where the wicked ogre lived. Not a bit of green. Not a bit of light, except for my own, which penetrate about two feet ahead and stop. Dead. Yellow and reddish brown stems thick, interlaced. How the hell I ever got this far, I'd like to know. But not as much as how I'm gonna get out. I'm sticking my head out of the turret now. As far as these stems will let me, which isn't far. They're a solid mass on top of the machine and beside it. I'm going to take a few tools to make for the engine. Only thing to do. Can't sit here and describe grassroots to you dog robbers all day long. See if I can't get her running and back out. Then I resign from the state of California. Right then. This is SMT-7, leaving the transmitter for essential repairs and signing off. For hours, the reports kept coming in. All in identically the same vein. Rapid progress followed by a slowdown. Then either engine trouble or a failure to keep rendezvous by another tank. All messages concluding alike, now leaving transmitter. It was no use for field headquarters frantically to order them to stay in their tanks, no matter what happened. They were young, able-bodied, impatient men, and when something went wrong, they crawled out to fight their way through a few feet of grass to fix it. After all, they were in the heart of a great city. Their machines had burrowed straightforwardly into the grass, and no threats of court-martial could make them sit and look silly till help arrived and they were tamely rescued. So, one by one, they wormed their way out to fix the ignition, adjust the carburetor, or hack-free the cogs which moved the tracks. And one by one, their radios became silent and were not heard again. The captain went from cockiness to doubt, from doubt to anxiety, and then to anguish fury. He had been so completely confident of the maneuver's outcome that its failure drove him not to despair, but to anger. He knew most of the tank drivers personally, and the picture of these friends trapped in their tiny, ever-narrowing pockets of green sent him into a frenzy. SMT-1, that's Lou Brown. Don't get out, Lou! Stay where you are, you jackass! Stay where you are, Lou! He bellowed into the unresponsive loudspeaker. Jake White, Jake White's in four, said I buy him a drink afterwards. Joke, he's a Coca-Cola boy. Why can't you stay inside, Jake? Why can't you stay put? Unable to bear it longer, he rushed from field headquarters shouting, Let's get him out, boys! Let's get him out! and would personally have led a volunteer party charging on foot into the grass if he had not been forcibly restrained and sympathetically led away sobbing hysterically toward hospitalization and calming treatment. The captain's impulse, though impractical, was shared by all his comrades. For the moment the destruction of the grass became secondary to the rescue of the trapped tankmen. If field headquarters had bustled before, it now turned into a veritable beehive with officers shouting, exhorting, complaining, and men running backwards and forwards as though there were no specific for the situation except unlimited quantities of their own sweat. It would be futile to relate, even if I could recall them, all the various methods and devices which were suggested and rejected or tried improved failures in the attempt to rescue the tank drivers. Press and radio followed every daring essay and carefully planned endeavor until the last vicarious quiver had been wrung from a fascinated public. For 24 hours there was no room on the front pages of the newspapers for anything but the latest on the prisoners of the grass as they were at first called. Later when hope for their rescue had diminished and they were forced from the limelight to make way for later developments, they were known simply as heroes in the fight against the weird enemy. For the grass had not paused chivalrously during the interval. On the contrary, it seemed to take renewed vigor from the victims it had entombed. House after house, block after block were engulfed. The names of those forced from their homes were no longer treated individually and written up as separate stories but listed in alphabetical order like battle casualties. Miss Frances frantically trying to get all her specimens and equipment moved from her kitchen in time had been ousted from the peeling stucco and joined those who were finding shelter with some difficulty in other parts of the city. The southernmost runners crept down toward Hollywood Boulevard where every effort was being marshaled to combat them and the northernmost wandered around and seemingly lost themselves in the desert of sagebrush and grease wood about Hollywood Boule. Traffic through Cuenca Pass, the great artery between Los Angeles and its tributary valley, was threatened with disruption. But while the parent body was spreading out, its offspring, as Miss Frances foresaw, had come into existence. Dozens of nuclei were reported, some close at hand, others far away as the sunset strip in Hollywood land. These smaller bodies were vigorously attacked as soon as discovered, but of course they had in every case made progress too great to be countered, for they were at first naturally indistinguishable from ordinary devil-grass, and by the time their true character was determined so rapid was their growth they were already beyond all possibility of control. The grass was now everyone's primary thought, replacing the moon among lovers, the income tax among individuals of importance, the weather among strangers, and illness among ladies no longer interested in the moon as topics of conversation. Old friends meeting casually after many years laps greeted each other with what's the latest on the grass? Radio comedians fired gagmen with weeks of service behind them for failure to provide botanical quips or, conversely, hired raw writers who had inhabited the fringes of Hollywood since max senate days on the strength of a single agri-stilogical illusion. Newspapers ran long articles on Synodon Dactylon, and the editors of their garden sections were roused from the somnolence into which they had sunk upon receiving their appointment and shoved into double-leaded, bold-faced position. Textbooks on botany began outselling popular novels, and a mere work of fiction having the accidental title, Greener Than You Think, was catapolded onto the bestseller list before anyone realized it wasn't an academic discussion of the family Grimminia. Contributors to science fiction magazines burst blood vessels happily turning out ten thousand words a day describing their hero's adventures amid the reg grass of Mars or the blue grass of Venus after they had single-handed, with the help of a death ray in the heroine's pure love, conquered the green grass of Telus. Professors, shy and otherwise, were lured from their classrooms to lecture before ladies' clubs, hitherto sacred to the accents of trans-oceanic celebrities, and Eleanor Roosevelt. There they competed on alternate forums with literate gardeners and stuttering horticultural amateurs. Stolen, rhizome, and comb became words replacing crankshaft and piston in the popular vocabulary. The purile reports, Goots fabricated under my name as the man responsible for the phenomenon, were syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast, and a query as to rates was received from the daily mail. Brother Paul's exhortations on the radio increased in both length and intensity as the grass spread. Pastors of other churches and conductors of similar programs denounced him as misled. Real estate operators, fearful of all this talk about the grass bringing doom and so depreciating the value of their properties, complained to the Federal Communications Commission. Sunday schools voted him man of the year, and hundreds of motherly ladies stored the studio with cakes baked by their own hands. Brother Paul's answer to endorser and detractor alike was to buy up more radio time. No one doubted the government would at length awaken from its apathy and counter the menace swiftly and efficiently, as always before in crises when the country was threatened. The nation with the highest rate of production per man hour, the greatest efficiency per machine, the greatest wealth per capita, and the greatest vision per mind's eye was not going to be defeated by a mere weed however overgrown. While waiting the inevitable action and equally inevitable solution, the public had all the excitement of war without suffering the accompanying privations and bereavements. The grass was a nuisance, but a nuisance with titillating compensations. Most people felt like children whose schoolhouse had burned down. They were sorry. They knew there'd be a new one. They were quite ready to help build it. But in the meantime it was fun. The Daily Intelligencer was gorged with letters from its readers on the subject of the grass. Many of them wanted to know what a newspaper of its standing meant by devoting so much space to an ephemeral happening, while many more asked indignantly why more space wasn't given to something affecting their very lives and fortunes. Communist party members, using improbable pen names, asked passionately if this was not a direct result of the country's failure to come to a thorough understanding with the Soviet Union. Terrified property holders, I rightly demanded that something—something—be dumb before real estate became as valueless in Southern California as it already was in red Russia. Technocrats demanded the government be immediately turned over to a committee of engineers and competent agronomists who would deal with the situation as it deserved after harnessing the wasted energy of the populace. Nationalists hinted darkly that the whole thing was the result of a plot by the elders of Zion and that Kaplan's delicatessen in conspiracy with A. Cohen notions was at the bottom of the grass. Brother Paul wrote, and his letter was printed for he now advertised his radio programs in the columns of the Intelligencer, that Caesar—presumably the State of California—had been chastened for arrogating to itself things not to be rendered unto Caesar and the tankmen had deservedly perished for their sacrilege. The letter aroused fury. The followers of Brother Paul either didn't read the Intelligencer or were satisfied their leader needed no championing if they did, and other letters poured in calling for various expressions of popular disapproval from simple boycott up through tarring and feathering to plain and elaborated with gasoline and castration lynching. The grass was a hot topic. With its acute perception of the popular taste Lafacici's paper printed not only most of the communications the unprintable ones were circulated among the staff till they wore out or disappeared mysteriously in the gents' room, but maps showing the daily progress of the weed guesses as to the duration of the plague by local prophets, learned articles by scientists, opinions of statesmen, views of popular entertainers—in fact, anything having any remote connection with the topic of the day. The paper even went further and offered a reward of ten thousand dollars to anyone advancing a suggestion leading to the destruction of the intruder. Its circulation jumped at the expense of less perspicacious rivals and the incoming mail already many times normal swelled to staggering proportions. The contest was taken with deadly seriousness, for the livelihood of many of the paper's readers was suddenly threatened by its subject and from a new quarter. In the same issue as the offered reward there appeared an interview with the accredited head of the organized motion picture producers. This retiring gentleman was rumored to be completely illiterate, an unquestionable slander, for he had written checks to support every cause dedicated to keeping wages where they belonged and seeing the wage earners didn't waste the money so benevolently supplied by their employers. I got the details of the interview from the interviewer himself. The magnet, he had no objection to the description, had been irritable and minced no words. The grass was bad alike for production and box office, taking everyone's mind off the prime business of making and viewing motion pictures. It was injuring the industry and he couldn't conceal the fact that the industry, speaking through his mouth and with his vocabulary, was annoyed. Unless this disgraceful episode ends within ten days, he had said sternly, the motion picture industry will move to Florida. It was an ultimatum. Southern Californians heard and trembled. The last time this dread interdiction had been invoked, in the midst of a bitter election fight, it had sent them scurrying to the polls to do their benefactors bidding. Now indeed the grassmenace would be taken seriously. The next day's paper had news of more immediate concern to me. The governor had appointed a special committee to investigate the situation, and the first two witnesses to be called were Josephine Spencer Francis and Albert Wiener. William Rufus Lafacici was as enthusiastic as his phlegmatic nature permitted. He called me into his office and half-raised the snuff box off the desk as though to offer me an unwelcome pinch. You're a made man now, Wiener, he said, thinking better of his generosity and putting the snuff box back. Your name will be in headlines from Alabama to Alberta, and all due to the intelligence, sir. I would have resented this as a gross misappropriation of credit, for surely all obligation was on the other side. Had I not been deeply disturbed by the prospect of being hailed before this committee like a criminal before the bar of justice, I'd much rather avoid this unpleasant notoriety, Mr. Lafacici, I protested. Since the intelligentser, for reasons best known to itself, chooses not to avail itself of my contributions, but prints my name over words I have not written, there could be no possible objection to my slipping away to Nevada until this investigation ends. His face became a pretty shade of plum. Wiener, you're a thief, a petty, caging, sly, larseness, pilfering, bloody thief! You take the daily intelligentser's honest dollars without a qualm, I with a smirk on your imbecile face, proposing with the cool impudence of the born embezzler to return no value for them. Wiener, you forget yourself. The intelligentser picked you out of a gutter, a nauseous thong spattered and thoroughly fitting gutter, and it pays you well, mark that you feeble-minded counterfeit of a confidence man pays you well, not for your futile lecherous pawlings at the chastity of the English language, but out of the boundless generosity which only a newspaper with a great soul can have. And what do you propose to do in gratitude? To run, to flee, to hide from the expression of authority, to bring disgrace upon the very newspaper whose munificence pumps life into your boneless, soulless, gutless carcass. Not another word, not a sound, not a ghoulish syllable from your ineffective vocabulary. Out of my presence before I lose my temper. Get down to whatever smoke-filled and tastelessly decorated room that committee is meeting in, and do not leave it while it is in session, neither to eat, sleep, nor move those bowels whose possession I gravely doubt. You hear me, Wiener? End of chapter two, part F.