 CHAPTER V PART C The world took the extension of the grass to South America with a philosophic calm which can only be described as amazing. Even the Latins themselves seemed more concerned with how the grass had jumped the gap than with the impending fate of their continent. The generally accepted theory was that it had somehow mysteriously come by way of the West Indies, although as yet the grass had not appeared on any of those islands, and even Cuba, within sight of the submerged Florida Keys, was apparently safe behind her protective super-cyclone fans. But the fact the grass had appeared first at Medellin in Columbia rather than in the tiny bit of Panama remaining seemed to show it had not come directly from the dagger-pointed mass poised above the continent. Friends of Buenos Aires said in a long editorial entitled Does Humanity Betray Itself? When the Colossus of the North was evilly enchanted many Americans, except possibly our friends across the River Plate, breathed more easily. Now it would seem their rejoicing was premature, and the doom of the Yankee is also to be the doom of our older civilization. How did this verdant disease spread from one continent to another? That is the question which tortures every human heart from the Antarctic to the Caribbean. It is believed the cordon around North America has not been generally respected. Scientists with the noblest motives and adventures urged on by the basest are alike believed to have visited the forbidden continent. It may well be that on one of these trips the seeds of the gigantic synodon dactylum were brought back. It is well known that the agents of a certain Yankee capitalist have been accustomed to taking off on mysterious journeys near the very spot now afflicted by the Emerald Plague. It was a dastardly hint, and the sort of thing I had long come to look upon as inseparable from my position. Of all peoples the Latin Americans have long been known as the most notoriously ungrateful for the work we did in developing their countries. Why in some backwards parts the natives have been content to live by hunting and fishing till we furnished them with employment and paid them enough so they could buy saltfish and canned meats. Fortunately Leprenza's innuendo so obviously inspired by envy was not taken up, and attention soon turned from the insoluble problem of bridging the gap to the southward progress of the weed itself. From the very first everyone took for granted the victory of the grass. No concerted efforts were made either to confine or to destroy it. The World Congress to combat the grass, far from being inactive, worked heroically, but it got little cooperation from the peoples most closely affected. When at one time it seemed as though the Congress had got hold of a possible weapon the Venezuelans refused them the necessary sites and Brazil would not allow passage of foreign soldiers over its soil. Nationalism suddenly became rampant. We will die as Ecuadorians descendants of the Incas exclaimed the leading newspaper of Quito. El Gaucho of Lima pointed out costically that most of Ecuador's area really belonged to Peru and the Peruvians were the true descendants of the Incas anyway. We shall all die as unashamed Peruvians thundered El Gaucho. In vain the church pointed out the difference between Christian resignation and simple suicide. The reply of most South Americans when they bothered to reply at all was either that the coming of the grass expressed God's will toward them or else to scorn the church entirely. Imitations of Brother Paul's movement flourished with additions and refinements suited to the Latin temperament. So the efforts of the World Congress were almost entirely limited to searching each ship, plane and individual, leaving the doomed continent to be sure none of the fatal seeds were transported. Even this precaution was resented as an infringement on national sovereignty, but the resentment was limited to bellicose pronouncements in the newspapers. The republics looked on sullenly while their honor was systematically violated by phlegmatic inspectors. The grass grew to unheard of heights in the tropical valley of the Amazon. It washed the slopes of the Andes as it had the Cordilleras and the Rockies, leaving only the highest peaks free of its presence. It raced across the Llanos, the Savanas and the Pampas, and covered the high plateaus in a slow, relentless growth. The people ran from the grass, not in a straight line from north to south, but by indirection, seeking first the sea coasts and then escape from the afflicted land. Those North Americans who had eluded the grass once did not satisfy themselves with half measures when their sanctuary was lost, but bought passage on any bottom capable, however dubiously, of keeping out the sea and embarked for the farthest regions. In point of time I am now about halfway through my narrative. It is hard to believe that only eleven years have passed since the grass conquered South America. Indeed, it is extraordinarily difficult for me to reconstruct these middle years at all. Not because they were hard or unpleasant. On the contrary, they carried me from one success to another, but because they have in memory the dreamlike quality of unreality elusive, vague, and tantalizing. Like a dream too was the actual progress of the grass, we were all, I think, impressed by the sense of repetition of a scene enacted over and over again. It was this quality which gives my story now that I look back upon it a certain distortion, for no one hearing it for the first time, and not as any reader of these words must be thoroughly familiar with the events, could believe in the efforts made to combat the grass. These efforts existed. We did not yield without struggles. We fought for South America as we had fought for North America. But it was a nightmare fight. Our endeavors seemed retrospectively those of the paralyzed. The grass gripped the continent's great northern bulge, squeezed it into submission, and worked its way southward to the slender tip, driving the inhabitants before it, duplicating previous acts by sending an influx from sparsely to thickly settled areas, creating despair, terror, disruption, and confusion, pestilence, hysteria, and famine. The drama was not played through in one act but many, to a world waiting the conclusion it dragged on through interminable months and years, offering no change, no sudden twists of fortune, no elusive hopes. At last, mercifully, the tragedy ended. The green curtain came down and covered the continent to the Strait of Magellan. The grass looked wistfully across at Tierra del Fuego, the land of ice and fire, but even its veracity balked momentarily at any rate at the inhospitable island and left it to whatever refugees chose its shores as a slower, but still certain death. South America finally gone. The rest of the globe breathed easier. It would be a slander on humanity to say there was actual rejoicing when the World Congress sealed off this continent too, but whatever sorrow was felt for its loss was balanced by the feeling that at long last the peril of the grass was finally ended. No longer would speculative Germans, thoughtful Chinese, or wakeful Englishmen wonder if the super cyclone fans were indeed an effective barrier. No longer would Cubans, Colombians, or Venezuelans look northward apprehensively. Oceanic barriers now confined the peril, and though the world was shrunken and hurt, it was yet alive. More, it was free from fear for the first time since the mutated seeds had blown over the salt-band. I must not give the impression that a wiping off of the grass from the account books of humanity was universal and complete. The World Congress periodically considered proposals for countermeasures. On the top of Mount Whitney, Miss Francis still labored. New assistants were flown to her as the old ones wandered down the great rock slide from the old stone weather-house off into the grass during fits of despondency, went mad from the realization that except for problematical survivors on the polar caps, they were alone in an abandoned hemisphere or died of simple homesickness. In the research laboratories of consolidated Pemmican formulas for utilizing the grass were still tinkered with, and the death of almost every public-spirited man of fortune revealed a will containing bequests to aid those seeking means of controlling the weed. It is not, after all, a detached history of the past 21 years I am writing. Contemporaries are only too well aware of the facts and posterity will find them dehydrated in textbooks. I started out to tell of my own personal part in the coming of the grass, not to take an Olympian and a loof view on the passion of man. The very mention of a personal part brings to mind a subject which might be painful where I have a petty nature. There were people who, willfully blind to the facts, held me responsible in the face of all reason for the grass itself. Although it is difficult to believe, there have been many occasions when I have been denounced by demagogues and my blood called for by vicious mobs. But enough of morbid retrospection. I think I can say at this time there was, with the exception of certain Indian Nabobs, hardly a wealthy man left in the world who did not in some way the retention of his riches to me. I controlled more than half the steel industry. I owned outright the majority stocks of the world oil cartel. Coal, iron, copper, tin, and other mines either belong directly to me or to tributary companies in which I held large interests. Along with the demagoguery of attributing the grass to Albert Wiener, there was the agitation for socialism and the expropriation of all private property, the attempt to deprive men of the fruit of their endeavor and reduce everyone to a regimented, miserable level. It is hardly necessary to say that I spared no effort to combat the insidious agents of the Fourth International. Fortunately for the preservation of the free enterprise system I had tools ready to hand. The overrunning of the United States wiped out the gangs, which operated so freely there, but remnants made their escape, taking with them to the older continents their philosophy of life and property. Gathering native recruits, they began following the familiar patterns and would in time no doubt have divided the world into countless minute baronies. However, I was able to subsidize and reason with enough of their leaders to persuade them that their livelihood and very existence rested on a basis of private property, and that their great danger came not from each other but from the advocates of socialism. They saw the point, and though they did not cease from mooring on each other or molting the general public, they were ruthless in exterminating the socialists, and they left the goods and adjuncts of consolidated pemmican and allied industries scrupulously unmolested. Strange as it sounds, it was not my part in protecting the world from the philosophy of equality nor my ramified properties which gave me my unique position. Unbelievably, because the change had occurred so gradually, industry, though still a vital factor, no longer played the dominant role in the world, but had given the position back to an earlier occupant. Food was once more paramount in global economy. Loss of the Americas had cut the supply in half without reducing the population correspondingly. The Socialist Union remained self-sufficient and uninterested, while Australia, New Zealand, and the cultivated portions of Africa strove to feed the millions of Europeans and Asiatics whose lands could not grow enough for their own use. The slightest falling off of the harvest produced famine. At this point consolidated pemmican practically took over the entire business of agriculture. Utilizing byproducts and crops otherwise not worth gathering, waste materials and growths inedible without processing, with plants strung out all over the four continents and with tremendously reduced shipping costs because of the small compass in which so much food could be contained, we were able to let our customers earn their daily concentrates by gathering the raw materials which went into them. I was not only the wealthiest, most powerful man in the world, but its saviour and providence as well. With the new feeling of security bathing the world, tension dissolved into somnolence, and the tempo of daily life slackened until it scarcely seemed to move at all. The waves of anxiety, suspicion, and distrust of an earlier decade calmed into peaceful ripples, hardly noticeable in a pond-like existence. No longer be set by thoughts or fears of wars, nations relaxed their pride. Armies were reduced a little more than palace guards, brass bands, and parade units, while navies were kept up. If periodic painting and retaining and commission a few obsolete cruisers and destroyers be so termed, only to patrol the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the lost hemisphere. The struggle for existence almost disappeared. The wage scales set by consolidated pemicam were enough to sustain life, and in a world of limited horizons men became content with that. The bickering characteristic of industrial dispute vanished. Along with it went the outmoded weapon of the trades union. It was a hellsy unworld, and if as cranks complained illiteracy increased rapidly, it could only be because with every man's livelihood assured his natural indolence took the upper hand, and he not only lost refinement superficially acquired, but was uninterested in teaching them to his children. I don't know how I can express the golden, sunlit quality of this period. It was not in a roic age. No great deeds were performed, no conflicts resolved, no fundaments shaking ideas broached. Quiet, peace, content. These were the keywords of the era. Preoccupation with politics and panaceas gave place to healthier interests. Sports and pageants, and giant fares. Men became satisfied with their lot, and if they to a great extent discarded speculation and disquieting philosophies they found a useful substitute in quiet meditation. Until now I had never had the time to live in a manner befitting my station, but with my affairs running so smoothly that even Stuart Thario and Tony Preblescham found idle time I began to turn my attention to the easier side of life. Of course I never considered making my permanent home anywhere but in England. For all its parochialism and oddities it was the nearest I could come to approximating my own country. I bought a gentleman's park in Hampshire and had the outmoded house torn down. It had been built in Elizabethan times and was cold, drafty, and uncomfortable, with not one modern convenience. For a time I considered preserving it intact as a sort of museum piece and building another home for myself on the grounds. But when I was assured by experts that tutor architecture was not considered to be of surpassing merit and I could find in addition no other advantageous sight I ordered its removal. I called in the best architects for consultation, but my own artistic and practical senses they themselves were quick to acknowledge furnished the basis for the beautiful mansion I put up. Moved by nostalgic memories of my lost Southland, I built a great and ample bungalow of some 60 rooms, stucco topped with asbestos tile. Since a Spanish motif natural to this form would have been out of place in England and therefore in bad taste, I had timbers set in the stucco, although of course they performed no function but that of decoration, the supports being framework which was not visible. It was delightful and satisfying to come into this spacious and cozy living room filled with overstuffed easy chairs and comfortable couches warmed by the most efficient of central heating systems or to use one of the perfectly appointed bathrooms whose every fixture was the best money could buy and recall the dank stone floors and walls leading up to a mammoth and from a thermal point of view perfectly useless fireplace flanked by the coats of arms of dead and gone gentry who were content to shuffle out on inclement mornings to answer nature's calls in chilly outhouses. So large and commodious an establishment required an enormous staff of servants which in turn called for a housekeeper and a steward to supervise their activities. For as I have observed many times the farther down one goes on the wage scale the more it is necessary to hire a high salaried executive to see that the wage is earned. I cannot say in general that I ever learned to distinguish between one retainer and another except of course my personal man-servant and Burlitt the headbuttler whom I hired right from under the nose of the Marquis of Arpers his lordship being unable to match my offer but in spite of the confusion caused by such a multiplicity of menials I one day noticed an under-gardener whose face was tantalizingly familiar. He touched his cap respectfully as I approached but I had the curious feeling that it was a taut gesture and not one which came naturally to him. Have you been here long my good man? I asked still trying to place him. No sir he answered about two weeks. Funny I'm almost certain I've noticed you before. He shook his head and made a tentative gesture with the hoe or a rake or whatever the tool was in his hand as though he would now with my permission resume his labors. What is your name? I inquired not believing it would jog my memory but out of a natural politeness toward inferiors who always feel flattered by such attention. Dinkman he muttered. Adam Dinkman at incredibly dilapidated front lawn overrun with sickly devil grass and spotted with bald patches. Mrs. Dinkman's meme bargaining with a tired man who was doing no more than trying to make a living and her later domineering harshness toward someone who was in no way responsible for the misfortune which overcame her. I wondered if she were still alive or had lost her life in the grass while an indigent on public charity. It is indeed a small world I thought and how far we have both come since I humbled myself in order to put food in my stomach and keep a roof over my head. Thank you Dinkman I said turning away. A warm feeling for a fellow American caused me to call him my steward and bid him give Dinkman one hundred pounds a small fortune to an undergardener and let him go. Though he might not realize it immediately I was doing him a tremendous favor. For an American with one hundred pounds in England was bound to do better for himself in some small business than he could hope to do as a mere servant. Looking back upon this too brief time of tranquility and satisfaction I cannot help but sigh for its passing. Preceded and followed by periods of turbulence and stress it stands out in my life as an incredible moment, a soothing dream. Perhaps a faint defect so small as to be almost unnoticed was a feeling of solitariness, an inevitable concomitant of my position, but this was so slight that I could not even define it as loneliness and like many another defect it merely heightened the charm of the whole. I had wealth, power, the respect of the world. The unavoidable detachment from the mob was mitigated by simple pleasures. My estate was a constant delight. The quaint survivals of feudalism among the tenantry amused me and though I could not bring myself to pretend an interest in the absurd affectation of fox-hunting I was well received by the county people whose insularity and aloofness I found greatly exaggerated, perhaps by outsiders not as cosmopolitan as myself. Excursions to London and other cities where my presence was demanded or could be helpful afforded me a frequent change of scene and visits by important people as well as more intimate ones by preblesham and etharios prevented the ivies for so my place was called from ever becoming dull to me. The general fell in love with a certain ale which was brewed on the premises and declared in spite of his lifelong rule to the contrary that it could be mixed with Irish whiskey to make a drink so agreeable that no sane man would want a better. The girls, particularly Winifred, were enchanted with my private woods, the gardens and the deer park, but mamma throughout their visits remained almost entirely silent and aloof except for the rare remarks which seemed to burst from her as though by an inescapable inward compulsion. These were always insulting and always directed at me, but I overlooked them knowing her to be deranged. End of Chapter 5 Part C. Chapter 5 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 5 Part D. Perhaps one of the things I most enjoyed about the ivies was wandering through its acres breathing through my pores as it were the sense of possession. I was walking through the cow slips and violets punctuating the meadow bordering one of the many little streams when I came upon a fellow roughly dressed, the pockets of his shooting jacket bulging and a fishing line in his hand. For a moment I thought him one of the gamekeepers and nodded, but his quick-look infertive gestures instantly revealed him as a poacher. You're trespassing, you know, I said, with some severity. Oh, I know, Governor, he admitted readily, but I wasn't doing no harm. Just looking at this bit of water here and listening to the bird. With a fishing line in your hands? We're not, good know, that's by way of being a precaution. You see, when I go out on a little expedition like this to inspect the beauties of nature, which I admit I have no right to do they be an own someone else's line, I always say to myself, suppose you're rolling into some gent looking at a lovely fat trout and a brook and he hasn't got no fishing line with him. What could be more philanthropic than I produce more bitter string and help him out? Ain't that a proper Christian attitude, good know? Possibly, but what may I ask makes your pockets bold so suspiciously? Is that another philanthropy? Accidents, good know, sheer accident. Walking along like this with my head down, I always seem to come upon two or three dead hairs, or now and then I'll portrait your gross, natural mortality you'll understand. Well, what could be more humane than to stuff them in my pockets and take them home for a proper burial? You know, in spite of all the labour governments and strange doings in parliament, there are still pretty strict laws against poaching. Poaching, good know, I wouldn't poach, or respect what's yours just as I'll respect what's my own. Traspessa maybe, or likes to look at a little bit of sky or hear a meadowlark or smell a flower or two, but poaching. Really, good know you hadn't ought to take away a month's character. I thought it is shame so sturdy and amusing a fellow should have to eke out his living so precariously. I'll tell you what I'll do, I said. I'll give you a note right now to my head gamekeeper and have him put you on as an assistant. Thirty shillings a week, I think it pays. Well, no, thank you, Governor, but really, I don't want it. Thirty bob a week? What should I do with it? Nothing but go down to the holy train, get drunk every night. On much better off as I am. Total abstinence, in a manner of speaking. No, no, Governor, I appreciate your big heart, but I'm happy with my little bit of fish and I'll wrap it in the pot. Why should I set up to be an honest working man and get dissatisfied with my life? His refusal of my well-intentioned offer did not irk me. In a large and tolerant view you could almost say we were both parasites upon the ivies, and it would not hurt me if he stole a little of my game to keep himself alive. I gave him a note to protect him against any of the keepers who might come upon him as I had, and we parted with mutual liking. I, remembering for my part that I was an American, and all men, poacher and landlord alike, were created equal, no matter how far each had come from his beginnings. Shortly after, Miss Francis ended her long sojourn at Mount Whitney and returned to England. Viewer deal of living surrounded by the grass which had destroyed her assistance seemed to have made no other change in her than the fading of her hair, which was now completely white, and a loss of weight, giving her a deceptive appearance of fragility at variance with the forthrightness of her manner. I put down her immunity to agoraphobia as just another evidence that she was already mad. Her refusal to accept the limitations of her sex and her complete indifference to our respective stations were mere confirmations. With her usual disregard of realities, she assumed I would go on financing her indefinitely, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of pounds I had paid out without visible result. I've really got it now, Wiener. She assured me in a tone hardly befitting a suppliant for funds. In spite of the incompetence you kept sending, in spite of mistakes and blind alleys, the work on Whitney is done and successfully. The rest is routine laboratory work, a matter of quantities and methods of application. I don't know that I can spare you any more money, Miss Francis. She laughed. What the devil's a matter with you, Wiener? Are your millions melting away? Or do you think any of the spies you set on me capable of carrying on? Or are you just trying to crack the whip? I set no spies and I have no whip. I merely feel it may not be profitable to waste any more money on fruitless experiments. She snorted. Time has streamlined and inflated your platitudes. When I am too old to work and ready for euthanasia I shall have you come and talk me to death. To hear you one would almost think you had no interest in finding a method to counter the grass. Her egomania and impertinence were really insufferable. Her notion of her own importance was ludicrous. Interested or not, I have no reason to believe you alone are capable of scientific discovery. Anyway, the world seems pretty well off as it is. She tugged at her hair, as if it were false and would come off if she jerked hard enough. Of course it's well enough off from your point of view. It offers you more food than you could eat if you had a million bellies, more clothes than you could wear out in a million years, more houses than you could live in, if the million contradictions which go to make up any single human were suddenly made corporeal. Of course you're satisfied. Why shouldn't you be? If the grass were to be pushed back in the world once more enlarged, if hope and dissatisfaction were again to replace despair and content, you might not find yourself such a big toad in a small puddle. And you wouldn't like that, would you? I had intended all along to give her a small pension to keep her from want and allow her to puddle around, but her irrational accusations and insults only showed her to be the kind from whom no gratitude could be expected. I'm afraid we can be of no further use to each other. Look here, Weiner. You can't do this. The life of civilization depends on countering the grass. Don't tell me the world can go on only half alive. Look around you and notice the recession every day. Outside of your own subservient laboratories, what scientific work is being done? Since Palomar and Mount Wilson and Flagstaff went, what has happened in astronomy? If you pick up the shrunken pages of your times or Tatler, do you wonder at the reason for their shrinkage, or do you realize there are fewer literates in the world than there were ten years ago? The Americas were upstart continents, weren't they? I'm not speaking sarcastically. My point is not a chauvinistic one, not even hemispherically prideful. And the old world, the womb of culture. But how much culture has that womb born since the Americas disappeared? Without a doubt there are exactly the same number of composers and painters, writers and sculptors alive on the four continents today as there were when there were six, but in this drowsy half-world, how many books of importance are being produced? There are plenty of books already in existence, besides those things go by cycles. God, give me patience. This is the man who has humanity prostrate. Humanity seems quite content in the position you ascribe to it. Of course. Of course. That's the tragedy. It's content the same way a man who has just had his legs cut off is content. Suffering from shock and loss of blood, he enters a merciful coma from which he may never emerge. The legs do not write the books or think the thoughts, whether these activities wait for the cyclical moment or not, but the brain, dependent on the circulation of the blood and the well-being of the rest of the body for proper functioning. And who are you, little man, to stand in the way of assisting the patient? I shall not argue with you any further, Miss Francis. If mankind is really a subject to your efforts as your conceit leads you to believe, then I am sure you will find some way to continue them. I am sure I will, she said, and we left it at that. To say her accusations have been gravely unjust would be to defend myself where no defense is called for. I merely remark in passing that I gave orders to set aside a still greater fund toward finding a reagent against the grass and to put those who had lately assisted Miss Francis in charge. I did this not because I swallowed her strained analogy about a sufferer with his legs cut off, but for purely practical reasons. The world was very well as it was, but an effective weapon against the grass might at last make possible the never discarded vision of utilizing it beneficially. Meanwhile life went on with a smoothness, strange, and gratifying to those of us born into a period of strife and restlessness. No more wars, strikes, riots, agitation for higher wages, or social experiments by wild-eyed fanatics. Those whose limitations laid out a career of toil performed their function with as much efficiency as one could expect, and we others who had risen and separated ourselves from the herd carried our responsibilities and accepted the rewards which went with them. The ships of the World Congress continued patrolling the coasts of the deserted continents, and restrictions were so far relaxed as to permit plane flights over the area to take motion pictures and confirm the grass had lost none of its vigor. Beyond this the generality of mankind forgot the weed and the regions it covered, living geographically as though Columbus had never set foot from Palos. It was at this time a new philosophic idea was advanced, giving the lie to Miss Francis' dictum that no new thoughts were being thought, which was briefly that the grass was essentially a good thing in itself, that the world had not merely made the best of a bad situation but had been brought to a beneficent condition through the loss of the Western Hemisphere. Mankind had desperately needed a break upon its heedless course, some instrumentality to limit it and bring it to realization of its proper province. The grass had acted as such an agent, and now, rightly chastised, man could go about his fit business. This concept gained almost immediate popular support so far as it filtered down to the masses at all. Prominent schoolmen endorsed it wholeheartedly, statesmen gave it qualified approval, in principle, and the Pope issued an encyclical calling for a return of Christian resignation and submission. Hardly was the ink dry up on the expressions of thanksgiving for the punishment which had brought about a new and better frame of mind than the philosophy was suddenly and dramatically tested by events. The island of Juan Fernandez, Robinson Caruso's island, a peak pushed out of the waters of the Pacific four hundred miles west of Chile, densely populated with refugees and a base for patrol boats, was overrun by the grass. It was an impossible happening. Every inhabitant had had personal experience of the grass and was fearfully alert against its apparent. The patrols covered the sea between it and the mainland constantly. The distance was too far for wind-borne seeds. The tenuous hypotheses that goals had acted as carriers was accepted simply for one of a better. But the World Congress wasted no time looking backward. Although between Juan Fernandez and the next land westward the distance was three times greater than between it and South America, the Congress seized upon the only island to which it could possibly spread, Sala e Gomez, and made of it a veritable fortress against the grass. Not only did ships guard its waters by day and keep it brilliantly lit with their searchlights at night, but swift pursuit planes bristling with machine guns brought down every bird in flight within a thousand miles. The island itself was sewn with salt a half-mile thick after being mined with enough explosives to blow it into the sea. The World, or that portion of it which had not fully accepted all the implications of the doctrine of submission, watched eagerly. But the ships patrolled in empty sea. The searchlights reflected only the glittering saline crystals the migrant birds never reached their destination. The outpost held impregnable. Again, everyone breathed easier. Five hundred miles beyond this focal point, its convict settlement long abandoned, was Easter Island, Rapa Nui, home of the great monoliths whose origin had ever been a puzzle. Erect or supine, these colossal statues were strewn all over the island. Anthropologists and archaeologists still came to give them cursory inspection, and it was on such a visit an unmistakable clump of grass was found. Immediately the ships were rushed from Salah E. Gomez, planes carrying tons of salt took off from Australia, and the whole machinery of the World Congress was swiftly put in operation. But it was too late. Easter Island was swamped. Uninhabited Ducey went next, and Pitcairn, home of the descendants of the bounty mutineers followed before even the slightest precautions could be taken. The grass was jumping gaps of thousands of miles in a breathless steeple chase. On Pitcairn there was nothing to do but rescue the inhabitants. Vessels stood by to carry them in their livestock off. The pale brown men and women left for the most part Ducey, but the last Adams and the last McCoy refused to go. Once before our people were forced to leave Pitcairn and found nothing but unhappiness. We will stay on the island to which our fathers brought their wives. There was no stopping the grass now, even if the means had been to hand. The gambiers, the Tuamotus and the Marquesas were swallowed up. Tahiti, dwelling place of beautiful if syphilitic women, disappeared under a green blanket, as did the Cook Island, Samoa, and the Fijis. The grass jumped southward to a foothold in New Zealand and northward into Micronesia. Panic infected the Australians and a mass migration to the central part of the country was begun, but with little hope the surrounding deserts would offer any effective barrier. My first thought when I heard the grass for the second time had broken its bounds was that I had perhaps been a little hasty with Miss Francis. It was not at all likely she would succeed where so many better trained and better equipped scientists had so far failed, but I felt a vicarious sympathy with her as being out of the picture when all her colleagues were striving with might and main to save the world, especially after the years she had spent on Mount Whitney. It would be an act of simple generosity on my part, I thought, to give her the wherewithal to entertain the illusion of importance. When all was said and done she was a woman and I could afford a chivalrous gesture even in the face of her overweening arrogance. I am sorry to say she responded with complete ill grace. I knew you'd eventually have to come crawling to me to save your hide. You mistake the situation entirely, Miss Francis. I informed her with dignity. I am conferring, not asking favors. I have every confidence in my research staff. My God, those guinea pig murderers, those discovery forgers, those white smocked acolytes in the temple of yes. You value your life or your person exactly what they're worth if you expect those drugstore clerks to preserve them for you. I doubt if either is in the slightest danger, I assured her confidently. Hysterics have lost perspective long before the grass becomes an immediate concern my drugstore clerks, with less exalted opinions of their talents than you, will have found the means to destroy it. A soothing fairy tale. Weiner, the truth is not in you. You know the reason you come to me is that you're frightened, scared, terrified. Well, strangely enough, I'm not going to reject your munificence. I'll accept it because to do God's work is more important than any personal pride of mine, or any knowledge that one of the best things Synodon Dactylon could do, if I do not take too much upon myself in judging a fellow creature, would be to bury Albert Weiner. I remained unmoved by her tirade. When you returned from Whitney, you told me there remained only details to be worked out about how long do you think it will be before you have a workable compound? She burst into a laugh and took out her toothpick to point it at me. Go and put your penny in another slot if you want an answer to an idiot question like that. How long? A day. A month. A year. Ten years. In ten years, I began. Exactly, she said, and put away the toothpick. End of Chapter 5, Part D. Chapter 5, 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 5, Part E. I phoned Stuart Thario to fly over right away for a conference. General, I began, will have to start looking ahead and making plans. He hid his mustache with the sight of his forefinger. Don't quite understand, Albert. Have details here of activities next three years. I pressed the buzzer for my secretary. Bring General Thario some refreshment I ordered. The command was not only familiar on the occasion of his visits, but evidently anticipated, for she appeared in a moment with a tray full of bottles. Bad habit of yours, Albert, tea totalism makes a brain cloudy and sitious. He took a long drink. Very little real bourbon left. European imitation vile. Learning to like Holland Gin, he drank again. To get back to the business of making plans, General, I urged gently. Not one of those people getting worried about the grass. Not worried, just trying to look ahead. I can't afford to be caught napping. Well, well, he said, can't pull another South American this time. No, no, and besides, I'm not concerned with money. Now, Albert, don't tell me you've finally got enough. This is not the time to be avaricious, I reproved him. If the grass continues to spread, and there seems to be little doubt it will. All the New Zealand's North Island was finished this morning, he interrupted. I heard it myself. Anyway, that's the point. As the grass advances, there will be new hordes of refugees. He was certainly in an impatient mood this morning, for he interrupted me again. New markets for concentrates, he suggested. I looked at him pityingly. Was the old man's mind slipping? I wondered if it would be necessary to replace him. General, I said gently. With rare exceptions, these people will have nothing but worthless currency. Good! Labor! Have you seen the previous batches of refugees foresighted enough to get out any goods of value before starting off? And as for labor, all our workers are now so heavily subsidized by the dole that the cut wage is another cent. Half penny, corrected General Thario. Centime, if you like, would be merely to increase our taxes. Well, well, he said, I see I have been hasty. What did you have in mind, Albert? Retrenchment. Cut production. Abandon the factories in the immediate path of the grass. Fix on reasonably safe spots to store depots of the finished concentrates, others for raw materials. Or perhaps they might be combined. What about the factories? Smaller, I said. Practically portable. Hmm, he frowned. You do intend to do business on a small scale. Minute, I confirmed. What about the mines, the steel mills, the oil fields, the airplane and automobile factories, the shipyards? Shut them down, I ordered, ruthlessly, except maybe a few in England. The countries where they're located will grab them. There isn't a government in existence who would dare touch anything belonging to consolidated Pemekin. If any should come into existence, our individualistic friends would take care of the situation. Pay gangsters to overturn government? They would hardly be legitimate government. Anyway, a man has a right to protect his property. Albert, he complained querilously. You're condemning civilization to death. General, I said. You're talking like a wild-eyed crackpot. A businessman's concern is with business. He leaves abstractions to visionaries. Our plants will be closed down because until the grass is stopped they can make a snow profit. Let some idealistic industrialists take care of civilization. Albert, you know very well no business of any size can operate today without your active support. Think again, Albert. Listen to me as a friend. We have been associated a long time and to some extent you have taken Joe's place in my mind. Consider the larger aspects. Suppose you don't make a profit. Suppose you even take a loss. You can afford to do it for common humanity. I certainly think I do my share for common humanity, General Thario, and it cuts me to the heart that you of all people should imply such a sentimental and unjust reproach against me. You know as well as I do I have given more than half my fortune to charitable works. Albert, need there be this hypocrisy between you and me? I don't know what you mean. I only know I called you to evolve specific plans and you have embarked instead on windy platitudes and personal insult. He sat for a long time quietly, his drink untouched before him. I did not disturb his meditation but indulged in one on my own account, thinking of all I had done for him and his family. But only a foolish man expects gratitude, or for that matter any reward at all for his kindnesses. At last he broke his silence, speaking slowly, almost painfully. I have not had what could be called a successful life even though today I am a wealthy man. He resumed his drink again and I wondered what this remark had to do with the subject in hand. Perhaps nothing, I thought. He is just rambling along while he reconciles himself to the situation. I was glad he was going to be sensible after all. Not that it mattered. I could get many able lieutenants. But for old times sake I was pleased at the abandonment of his recalcitrant. He relaxed further into the chair while I waited to resume the practical discussion. When you first came to me in Washington, Albert, seeking war contracts for your microscopic business, I suppose there was even then a mark upon your forehead. But I was too heavy with the guilt of my own affairs to sit. We all have our price, Albert. Sometimes it is another star on the shoulder straps, or a peerage, or wealth, or the apparent safety of a son. I have come a long way with you since then, Albert, through shady deals and brilliant coos and dark passages which would not bear too much investigation. I am afraid I cannot go any further with you. You will have to get someone else to kill civilization. As you choose, General Thario, I agreed stiffily. Right, I am not finished. I have always tried however inadequately to do my duty. Articles of war, holding commission in the armies of the United States, emotion seemed to be sobering him rapidly. Duty to you, Consolidated Pamekin, Resigned Commission, must mention Spot. Try Sahara. He stood up. Thank you, General Thario, I said. I shall certainly consider the Sahara as location for depots. You won't change your mind about this whole thing, Albert. I shook my head. How could I fly in the face of common sense to gratify the silly whim of an old man whose intelligence was clearly not what it had once been? I was afraid not, he muttered. Afraid not. I don't blame you, Albert. Men are as God created them, or environment as the socialist fellers say. You didn't put the mark on your forehead. Not successful. Joe, I called him George, but he was Joe all the time, wanted to go to West Point after all. First symphony in the fire. I burned Joe's first symphony. Do you understand me, Albert? Though I refuse, I am still guilty. Cannibal Thario, they said. Cronus would be better. Classical illusion escapes the enlisted man. He walked out still mumbling inarticulately, and I sat there saddened that a man once alert and vigorous as a general should have come at last to senility and an enfeebled mind. The defection of General Thario threw a great burden of work upon my shoulders. Preblesham was able enough in his own sphere, but his vision was not sufficiently broad to operate at the highest levels. The process of closing down our plants was more complicated than had been anticipated, and Thario's military mind would have been more useful than Preblesham's theological one. The employees, conceiving through some fantastic logic that their jobs were as much their property as the mills or mines or factory buildings were mine, rioted and had to be pacified. The first time such a tactic was resorted to in years. In some places these misguided men actually took possession of the places where they worked and tried to operate them, but of course they were balked by their own inefficiency. Human nature being what it is, they tried to blame their helplessness on my control of their sources of raw material and their consequent inability to obtain vital supplies, as well as the cutting off of light and power from the seized plants, but this was mere buck-passing, always noticeable when some radical scheme fails. But the setting up of depots in the Sahara, as General Thario had suggested, and by extension in Arabia, was a different matter. Here, Preblesham's genius shone. He flew our whole Australian store of raw materials out without a loss. He recruited gangs of Chinese coolies with an efficiency which would have put an old-time Blackbirder to shame. He argued, cajoled, bullied, sweated for twenty-four hours a day, and when in six months he had completed his task, we had seven depots, two in Arabia and five in Africa, complete with four factories, with enough concentrates on hand to feed the world for a year, if the world had the means to pay, which it didn't, and to operate for five. During those six months the grass ravenously snatched morsel after morsel. New Zealand's South Island, New Caledonia, the Solomon's and the Marianas, were gobbled at the same moment. It gorged on New Guinea, and searched out the minor islands of the East Indies as a cat searches for baby field mice and a nest her paw has discovered. It took a bite of the Queensland coast just below the Great Barrier Reef. The next day it was reported near Townsville, and soon after on the Cape York Peninsula, the Australian finger pointing upwards to islands where lived little black men with woolly hair. The people of Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane took the coming of the grass with calm anger. Preparations for removal have been made months before, and this migration was distinguished from previous ones by its order and completeness. But although they moved calmly in accordance with clear plans, their anger was directed against all those in authority who had failed to take measures to protect their beloved land. Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania went. The grass swept southward like a sickle cutting through South Australia and biting deep with its point into western. Although we were amply provided with raw material, considering the curtailment of our activities, prebble shim on the spot could not resist buying up great herds of sheep for a penny on the pound and having them driven northward in the hope of finding somehow a means to ship them. I am sorry to say, though I'm afraid I could have predicted it, this venture was a total loss. Burlitt unfolding the times on my breakfast plate coughed respectfully. If I could speak to you at your convenience, sir. What is it, Burlitt? Lord Arpers finally come through with a higher offer. Not at all, sir. I consider the question of service closed as long as you find yourself quite satisfied, sir. Quite satisfied, Burlitt? I add in mind the discussion of quite another matter, sir. Not relating to domestic issues. Very well, Burlitt. Come into the library after breakfast. Very good, sir. With a world of problems on my mind I thought it would be riley amusing to resolve whatever difficulties troubled my butler. Promptly after I had settled myself at my desk and before I rang for my secretary, Burlitt appeared in the doorway, his striped vest smoothed down over his rounded abdomen every thin hair in place over the dome of his balding head. Come in, Burlitt. Sit down. What's on your mind? Thank you, sir. To my surprise he accepted my invitation and seated himself opposite me. I have been speculating, sir. Really, Burlitt? Silly thing to do. Lost all your wages, I suppose, and would like an advance? You misapprehend me, sir. Not speculating on change, speculating on the grass. Oh, and did you arrive at any conclusion, Burlitt? I believe I have, sir. As I understand it, scientists and statesmen are exerting their energies to fight the grass. That's right. I was beginning to be bored had the butler fallen prey to one of the grimenophile sex like brother Paul's and gone through all this rigmarole merely to give me notice previous to emulating himself. And so far they have achieved new success. Obviously, Burlitt. Well, then, sir, would it not be a sensible precaution to find some means of refuge until and if they find a way to kill the grass? There is no if, Burlitt. The means will be found, and shortly of that I am sure. As for temporary refuge until that time, no doubt it would be excellent, if practicable. What do you propose? Immigration to Mars or floating islands in the oceans? Both of these expedients had long ago been put forth by contestants in the intelligence, sir. Journeys to other planets would not solve things, sir. Assuming the construction of a vessel, an assumption so far unwarranted, if I may say so, sir. It would accommodate but a fraction of the affected populations. As for floating islands, they would be no more immune to airborne seeds than stationary ones. So it was discovered long ago, Burlitt. Quite so, sir. Then, if I may say so, protection must be afforded on the spot. And how do you propose to do that? Well, sir, by the building of vertical cities. Vertical cities? Yes, sir. I believe sites should be selected near bodies of fresh water and tremendous excavations made. The walls and floor of the excavation should be lined with concrete through which the water is piped. The cities could be on many levels, the topmost perhaps several miles in the air, glass enclosed, and with pipes reaching still higher to bring air in and completely tight against the grass. They should be self-contained, generating their own power and providing their food by hydroponic farming. Such cities could hold millions of people now doomed until away is found to kill the grass. There was a faintly familiar ring to the scheme. You seem to have worked it out thoroughly, Burlitt. Polishing the plate, sir. Polishing the plate? It leaves the mind free for celebration. I have a full set of blueprints and specifications, if you'd like to inspect them, sir. It was fantastic, I thought, and probably quite impractical, but I promised to submit his plans to those with more technical knowledge than I possessed. I sent his carefully written papers to an undersecretary of the World Congress and forgot the matter. Idleness certainly led to queer occupations. Vertical cities. And who in the world had the money to erect these nightmare structures? Only Albert Weiner. That was probably why Burlitt took advantage of his position to approach me with the scheme. Completely absurd. are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore. Chapter 5 Part F Probably the complaints of the Australians gave final impetus to the Congress to combat the grass. They met an extraordinary session in Budapest and declared themselves the executive body of a world government which did not, of course, include the Socialist Union. All qualified scientists were immediately ordered to leave whatever employment they had and place themselves at the disposition of the world government. Affluence for life guaranteed against any fluctuations of currency was promised to anyone who could offer, not necessarily an answer, but an idea which should lead to the solution of the problem in hand. While they were issuing their first edicts, the grass finished off the East Indies, covered three quarters of Australia, and attacked the southern Philippines. Millions of Indonesians traveling the comparatively short distances in anything floatable crowded the already overpopulated areas of Asia. As I had predicted to General Thario, these refugees carried nothing with which to purchase the concentrates to keep them alive, and conditions of famine in India and China, essentially due to the backwardness of these countries, offered no subsistence to the natives, much less to an inflex from outside. The grass sped northward and westward through the Malay states and Siam up into China and Burma. In the beginning the Orientals did not flee, but stood their ground, village by village and family by family, opposing the advance with scythes, stones and pitiful bonfires of their household belongings, with hoes, flails, and finally with their bare hands. But the naked hand, no matter how often multiplied, was as unable to halt the green flow as the most up-to-date weapons of modern science, and the Chinese and the Hindus, dying at their posts, were no more an obstacle than mountain or desert or stretches of empty sea had been. It was now deemed expedient in order to keep public hysteria from rising to new self-destructive heights to tone down and modify the news. This proved quite difficult at first, for the people in their short-sightedness clamored for the accounts of impending doom which they devoured with a dreadful fascination. But eventually, when the wildest rumors produced by the Darth of Accurate reports were disproved, many of the people in Western Europe and Africa actually believed the grass had somehow failed to make headway on the Asiatic continent, and would have remained in their pleasant ignorance had it not been for the premature flight of masses of Asiatics. For the phenomenon contemporary with the close of the Roman Empire was repeated. A great struggling, churning, sprawling desperate efflux from east to west began. Once more the golden horde was on the march. They did not come as had their ancestors on wildly charging horses, threatening with lances and deadly scimitars, but on foot, wretched and begging. Even had I been as maudlin as Stuart Thario desired, I could not have fed these people, for there were no longer railroads with rolling stock adequate to carry the freight, no fleets of trucks in good repair, nor was the fuel available had they existed. The world receded rapidly from the machine age, and as it did so, famine and pestilence increased in ever-mounting spirals. The mob of refugees might be likened to a beast with weak, almost atrophied legs, but with a great mouth and greater stomach. It moved with painful slowness, crawling over the face of southern Asia, finding little sustenance as it came, leaving none whatever after it left. The beast, only dimly aware of the grass it was fleeing from, could formulate no thoughts of the refuge it sought. Without plan, hope, or malice, it was concerned only with hunger. Day and night its empty gut cried for food. The starving men and women, the children died quickly, ate first all that was available in the stores and homes, then scrabbled in the fields for a forgotten grain of rice or wheat. They ate the bark and fungus from the trees, and gleaned the pastures of their weeds and dung. As they ate they moved on, their famine distended stomachs craving more to eat, driving the ones who were but one step further from starvation ever before them. Long ago they had chewed on the leather of their foot gear and devoured all cats, dogs, and rodents. They ate the stiffened and putrid carcasses of draft animals, which had been pushed to the last extremity. They turned upon the corpses of the newly dead and fed on them, and at length did not wait for death from hunger to make a new cadaver, but mercifully slew the weak and ate the still warm bodies. The Asiatic influx was a social accordion. The pulled-out end, the high notes as it were, the Indian princes, Chinese warlords, arrived quickly and settled into a welcoming obscurity. They came by plane with gold and jewels and government bonds and shares of consolidated pemmican. The middle creases of the accordion came later, more slowly, but as quickly as money could speed their way. Men of wealth when they began their journey, they arrived a little more than penniless and were looked upon with suspicion, tolerated only so long as they did not become a public charge. The low notes, the thick and heavy pleats, took not days nor weeks nor months, but years to make the trek. They kept but a step ahead of the grass traveling at the same pace. They came not alone, but with accretions, pushing ahead of them millions of their same dispossessed, hungry, penniless kind. These were not greeted with suspicion, but with hatred. Machine guns were turned upon the advancing mobs. The few airplanes in service were commandeered to bomb them, and only lack of fuel and explosives allowed them to sweep into Europe and overwhelm most of it as the barbarians had overwhelmed Rome. But I anticipate. While the bulk of the Orientals was still beyond the Himalayas in the Gobi, Europe indulged in a wild Saturnalia to celebrate its own doom. All pretense of sexual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small ill-printed newspapers carried advertisements promising the gratification of strange lusts. A new cold of Priapus sprang up, and virgins were ceremoniously deflowered at his shrine. Those beyond the age of concupiscence attended celebrations of the Black Mass. Although I was told by one communicant that participation lacked the necessary zest, since none possessed a faith to which blasphemy could give a shocking thrill. Murder was indulged in purely for the pleasure. Men and women, hearing of the cannibalism raging among the refugees, adopted and refined it for their own amusement. Small promiscuous groups at the end of orgies chose the men and women tiring soonest. The two victims were there upon killed and devoured by their late paramours. As there was a cult of Priapus, so there was an equally strong cult to Diana. The monasteries and convents overflowed. But in the tension of the moment many were not satisfied with mere vows of celibacy. In secret and impressive ceremonies, women scarified their tenderest parts with red-hot irons, thus proving themselves forever beyond the lusts of the flesh. Men solemnly castrated themselves and threw the symbols of their manhood into a consuming fire. I wouldn't want to give the impression bestial madness of one kind or another overtook everyone. There were plenty of normal people, like myself, who were able to maintain their self-control and cannilize those energies promoting crimes and beastly exhibitions in the unrestrained into looking forward to the day when the grass would be gone and sanity return. Nor would I like anyone to think law and order had completely abdicated its function. As offenses multiplied, laws grew more severe, misdemeanors became felonies, felonies, capital offenses. When death by hanging became the prescribed sentence for any type of theft, it was necessary to make the punishment for murder more drastic. Drawing and quartering were reinstituted. This not proving an efficient deterrent, many jurists advocated a return to the Roman practice of spread eagling a man to death. But the churches vigorously objected to this suggestion as blasphemous, believing the ordinary sight of crucified murderers would tend to debase the central symbol of Christianity. A less common Roman usage was adopted in its stead, that of being torn by hungry dogs, and to this the Christians did not object. But the utmost severity of local and national officials, even when backed by the might of world government, could not cope with the waves of migrants from the east, nor the heedlessness of law they brought with them. As the grass pushed the Indians and Chinese westward, they in turn sent the Mongols, the Afghans, and the Persians ahead of them. These naturally warlike peoples were displaced not by force of arms, but by sheer weight of numbers, and so doubly overcome by being dispossessed of their homes and by pacifists at that, they vented their peak upon those to the west. As the starving and destitute trickled into Europe and North Africa, giving a hint of the flood to follow, I congratulated myself on the foresight which led to our retrenchment. For I know these ravening hordes would have devoured the property of consolidated Pemekin with as little respect as they did the scant store of Akku, Ram Singh, or Muhammad Ali. My chief concern was now to keep my industrial and organizational machinery intact against the day when a stable market could again be established. To this end I kept our vast staff of research workers, exempt from the draft of the world government, which had been quite reasonable in the matter, constantly busy, for every day's delay in the arresting of the grass, meant a dead loss of profits. Josephine Francis alone, and as always, proved completely uncooperative. Undoubtedly much of her stubbornness was due to her sex, the residue to her unorthodox approach to the mysteries of science. When I prodded her for results, she snarled she was not a slot machine. When I pointed out, tactfully, that only my money made possible the continuation of her efforts, she told me, rudely, to seek the wailing wall in Jerusalem before it was covered by the grass. Again and again I urged her to give me some idea how long it would be before she could produce a chemical even for experimental use against the grass, and each time she turned me aside with an insult or rude jest. I had set her up in, or rather to be more accurate, she had insisted upon, a completely equipped and isolated laboratory in Surrey. As it was convenient to my Hampshire place, I dropped in almost daily upon her, but I cannot say my visits perceptibly quickened her lethargy. Worried wiener, she asked me, absently putting down a coffee pot on a stack of microscope slides. Synodon d'Alanili, gold and bank notes, drill presses and open hearths, as readily as quartz and mica dead bodies and abandoned household goods. I couldn't resist the opening. Anything, in fact, I pointed out, except salt. A Daniel, she exclaimed. A Daniel come to judgment. Oh wiener, thou shouldst have been born a chemist. And what is the other mistake? Give me leave to throw away my retorts and test tubes and Bunsen burners by revealing the other element besides sodium synodon d'Alanili refuses. For every mistake, there is another mistake which supplements it. Sodium was the blind spot in the metamorphizer. When I find the balancing blind spot, I shall know not only the second element which the grass cannot absorb, but one which will be poisoned to it. I'm not a chemist, Miss Francis, I said, but it seems to me I've heard there are a limited number of elements. There are, and three states for each element, and an infinite number of conditions governing their application. What's the matter? Aren't your trains seals performing? All the research laboratories of Consolidated Pemmican are going night and day. Then what the devil are you hounding me for? Let them find the counter agent. Two heads are better than one. Nonsense. Two blockheads are worse than one, insofar as they tend to regard each other as a source of wisdom. I shall conquer the grass. I alone, I, Josephine Spencer Francis. And as soon as possible. Now you have all the data in its most specific form. And I shall accomplish this because I must, and not because I love Albert Weiner, or Carol Littmuss paper, whether or not his awful is swallowed up. I have done what I have done. God forgive me. And I shall undo it. But the matter is between me and a larger accountant than the clerk who signed your monthly checks. What do you think about temporary protective measures in the meanwhile? What the devil do you mean, Weiner? Temporary protective measures? What euphuistic gibberish is this? I outlined briefly my butler's plan of vertical cities. Miss Francis startled me with a laugh resembling the burst of machine gun fire. Someone's been pulling your leg, poor terrified miscellaneous. Or else you'll be fuddled with too many thrilling wonderer scientificians. Pipes into the stratosphere. Water supply piped in through concrete walls. Doesn't your mad inventor know the seeds would find these apertures in an instant? Oh, those are possibly minor flaws which could be remedied. Well go and remedy them, and leave me to my work. Or pin your faith on substantialities instead of flights of fancy. I went up to London, my mind full of a thousand problems. I had caught the economical British habit of using the trains, conserving the petrol and tires on my car. The first thing I saw on the Meribund platform was the crude picture and green chalk of a stolen of synodon dactylon. What idiot, I thought as I irritably rubbed at it with the sole of my shoe. What feeble minded creature has been let loose to do a thing like this. The brittle chalk smeared beneath my foot, but the representation remained almost recognizable. On my way to the Savoy, I saw it again, defacing a hoarding, and as I paid off my driver, I thought I caught another glimpse of the nonsensical drawing on the side of a lorry going by. Perhaps my sensitivity perceived these signs before they were common property, but in a few days they were spread all over Europe. Through what insane impulse I do not know. For whatever reason, symbols of the grass blossomed on the arc de Triumph, on the Brandenburger Tor, on the pavement of the Ringstrasse, and on the bridges spanning the Danube between Buda and Pest. End of Chapter 5 Part F Chapter 5 Part G 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 5 Part G I find myself, in retrospect, involuntarily telescoping the time of events. Looking backward, years become days and months minute. At the time I saw the first reproductions of the grass in London, the thing itself was continence away, busy absorbing the fringes of Asia. But its heralds and victims went before it, changing the life of man as it had itself changed the face of the world. The breakdown of civilization beyond the channel was almost complete. Only consolidated Pemicon and the world government still maintained communication facilities. And with the blocking of the normal ways of commerce, the world government found it difficult to spread either news or decrees to the general public. The most fantastic and contradictory ideas about the grass were held by the masses. When the grass was in the Deccan and still well below the Yangtze, the Athenians were thrown into panic by the rumor it had appeared in Salonica. At the same time there was wild rejoicing in the streets of Marseille, based on the belief large stretches of North America had become miraculously free. The cult of the grass idolaters flourished despite the strictest interdictions and great mass meetings were frequently held during which the worshippers turned their faces toward the southeast and prayed fervently for speedy emulation. It was quite useless for the world government to attempt to spread the actual facts. The earlier censorship, together with a public temper that preferred to believe the extremes of good or bad, rather than the truth of gradual yet relentless approach, made people heedless of broadcasts, rarely received even by state operated public address systems or of handbills which even the still literate could not bother to decipher. The idealization of the Socialist Union, once the Soviet Union, which had risen and fallen through the years, was quickened among those not enamored of the grass. There must be some intrinsic virtue in this land, which had not only been immune to inoculation by the metamorphizer, but kept the encroaching weed from invading its borders in spite of its long continued proximity across Bering Strait and the Aleutians. The grass had jumped gaps thousands of ocean miles, and yet it had not bridged that narrow strip of water. It would have been a shock to these people had they known, as I knew, and as the world government had vainly tried to tell them what Moscow had recently and reluctantly admitted. The grass had long since crossed into Siberia, and was now working its will from Kamchatka to the Lena River. The people of Japan, caught between the jaws of a closing vice, responded in a manner peculiar to themselves. The Christians, now forming a majority, declared the grass a punishment for the sins of the world and hoped by their steadfastness in the face of certain death to earn a national martyr's crown, and thus perhaps redeemed those still benighted. The Shintoists, on the other hand, agreed the grass was a punishment, but for a different crime. Had the doctrine of the eight corners of the world never been abandoned, the Japanese would never have permitted the grass to overwhelm the Yamaeta race. The new emperor's reign name, Sayiji, they argued, ought not to mean rule by the people, as it was usually interpreted, but rule of the people, and they called for an immediate Sayiji restoration, under which the subjects of the Mikado would welcome death on the battlefield in a manner compatible with Bushido, thus redeeming previous aberrations for which they were now being chastised. Both parties agreed that under no circumstances would any Japanese demean himself by leaving Nippon, and the world was therefore spared an additional influx from these islands. But the Japanese were the only ones who refused to join the westward stampede, plunging the world daily deeper into barbarism. We in England had caused to congratulate ourselves on our unique position. The channel might have been a thousand miles wide instead of twenty. The turmoil of the continent and of Africa was but dimly reflected. There was still a skeletal vestige of trade, the dull kept the lazy from starvation, railways still functioned, on greatly reduced schedules, and the wireless continued to operate from, Good morning everybody, this is London, to the last strains of God save the queen. Although I was constantly rasped by inactivity and by the slowness of the research workers to find a weapon against the grass, I was happy to be able to wait out this terrible period in so ameliorative a spot. True, our depots in the Arabian and Sahara deserts were unthreatened by either the grass or the horde, but I should have found it uncomfortable indeed to have lived in either place. In Hampshire or London I felt myself the center of what was left of the world, ready to jump into action the moment the great discovery was finally made and the grass began to reseed. Preblesham, my right hand, flew weakly to Africa and Asia Minor, weeding out those workers who threatened to become useless to us because of their reaction to the isolated and monotonous conditions at the depots, keeping the heavily armed guards about our clothes continental properties alert and seeing our curtailed activities in Great Britain were judiciously profitable. This period of quiescence suited his talents perfectly for it required of him little imagination but great industry and force. I had noticed for some time a slight error of preoccupation and constraint in his demeanor during his reports to me, but I put it down to his engrossment with our affairs and resolved to make him take an extended vacation as soon as he could be spared, never dreaming of disloyalty from him. I was shocked then and deeply wounded when at the close of one of our conferences he announced, Mr. Wiener, I'm leaving you. I begged him to tell me what was wrong, what had caused him to come to this decision. I knew I said that he was overworked and offered him the badly needed vacation. He shook his head. It ain't that, overwork? I don't believe there is such a thing. At least I've never suffered from it. No, Mr. Wiener. My trouble is something no amount of vacations can help, because I can't get away from a voice. Voice, Tony? Hallucinations were certainly a sign of overwork. I began mentally recalling names of prominent psychiatrists. A voice within, he repeated firmly. I am a sinful man, a miserable backslider. Maybe Brother Paul was not treading a true path. I doubt if he was or I would not have been led aside from following him so easily. But when I was doing his work I was at least trying to do the will of God and not the will of another man, no better, spiritually understand, Mr. Wiener, spiritually than myself. But now his voice has sought me out again and I must once more take up the cross. I feel a call to go on a mission to the poor heathens and urge on them submission to their father's rod. Among those savages across the channel, they will tear you limb from limb. Christ will make me whole again. Tony, you are not yourself. You're upset. I am not myself, Mr. Wiener. I have become as a little child again and do my father's bidding. I am upset, yes, turned upside down and inside out by a force, not content to leave men in wrong attitudes or simple states. But upset I stand upright and go about my father's business. God bless you, Mr. Wiener. Miss Francis and Preblesham at opposite ends of the intellectual scale, both maundering on about doing the will of God and General Thario talking about marks on foreheads. What sort of feeble-minded retrogressive world was I living in? All the outworn superstitions of religion taking hold of people and intruding themselves into otherwise normal conversation. A wave of madness akin to the plague of the grass must be sweeping over the earth was my conclusion. If General Thario's desertion had thrown an extra weight on my shoulders, Preblesham's burdened me with all the petty details of routine. It was now I who had to inspect our depots periodically and make constant trips into the dangerous regions across the channel to see that the shutdown plants were being properly cared for. I resented bitterly the trick of fate preventing me from finding for any length of time subordinates to whom I could delegate authority. Nor even on whom I could rely. What were Miss Francis and her well-paid staff doing all this time? Why had they produced nothing in return for the fat living they got from me? The grass was half way across Asia, lapping the high Pamirs from the south and from the north digesting Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, thrusting runners into Turkestan, and still no progress made against it. It would be a matter of mere months now until our Arabian depots would be in the danger zone. I could only conclude these so-called scientists were little better than fakers, completely incompetent when confronted by emergency. They were ready enough to announce useless and inapplicable discoveries and conclusions, byproducts of their research, they called them, with an obviously self-conscious attempt to speak the language of industry. The insects living in and below the grass were growing ever larger and more numerous. Expeditions have found worms the size of snakes and bugs big as birds happy in their environment. The oceans they announced were drying up due to the retention of moisture in the soil by the grass and added complacently that in a million years or so, assuming the grass in the meantime covered the earth, there would be no bodies of water left. Climates were equalizing themselves, the polar ice caps were melting, and spots previously too cold for synodon dactylomb are now covered. I felt it to be a clear case of embezzlement that they had used my money, paid for a specific purpose, to make these useless, if possibly interesting, deductions. For while they dawdled in red-learned papers to each other, the grass touched the Persian Gulf and the Caspian, paused before Lake Balkash, and reached the Yenisei at the Arctic Circle. Far to the south it jumped from India to the Maldives, from the Maldives to the Seychelles, and from the Seychelles, on to the great island of Madagascar. I hammered the theme of time, time at Miss Francis, but her only response was a helpless snare at my impatience. At intervals, Burlitt inquired of me what progress was being made with his plan for cities of refuge. I could only answer him truthfully that as far as I knew the world government had it under consideration. But if you will excuse my saying so, sir, in the meantime those people are dying. Quite so, Burlitt, but there is nothing you or I can do about it. For the first time since he entered my service, I caught him looking almost impertently at me. I faced him back, and he dropped his eyes. Very good, sir. Thank you. He had made an understatement when he talked about those people dying. Europe was a madhouse. In self-defense all strangers were instantly put to death, and in retaliation the invading throng spared no native. Peasants feared to stay their ground in terror of the oncoming orientals, and equally dared not move westward where certain killing awaited them at the hands of those who yesterday had been their neighbors. In an effort to cling to life, they formed small bands and fought impartially both the static and dynamic forces. Farming was practically abandoned, and the swollen population lived entirely on wild growth or upon human flesh. In Africa the situation was little better. Internessing wars and slavery made their reappearance. The South African whites mercilessly slaughtered the blacks against a possible uprising, and the kafers fleeing northward repeated the European pattern of overcrowding, famine, and pestilence. The day our Arabian depots were abandoned before the oncoming grass, I felt my heart would nearly break with anguish. All that labor, all that forethought, all those precious goods gone, and all because Miss Francis and those like her were too lazy or incompetent to do the work for which they were paid. I flew to the spot trying vainly to salvage something, but lack of planes and fuel made it impossible. During this trip I caught my first sight of the grass for years. I suppose no human eye sees anything abstractly, but only in relation to other things known and observed. With more than half the world in its grip, the towering wave of green bore no more resemblance to its California prototype than a brontosaurus to the harmless lizard scuttling over the sunny floor of an outhouse. Between the dirty sugar sands of the desert and the oleograph sky it was a third band of brilliant color, monstrously out of place. A tidal wave would have seemed less alien and awful. The distance was great enough so that no individual part stood out distinctly. Instead it presented itself as a flat belt of green menacing and obdurate. As my plane rose I looked back at it stretching northward, southward, and eastward to the horizon. A new invader in a land weary of many invaders, and I thought of the dead civilizations it covered. Bactria, Parthia, Babylon, the Empire of Lame Timur, Cathay, Cambodia, and the Dominions of the Great Mogul. The refuge of mankind narrowed continually and island diminished daily by a lapping surf. Africa was thrice beset in the south from Madagascar, in the center from the stepping stones in the Indian Ocean, and across the Red Sea where the grass sucked renewed life from the steaming jungles and grew with unbelievable rapidity. In the highlands of Rhodesia and Abyssinia it crept slowly over the plateaus toward the slopes of Kilimanjaro and the Drakensburg. Unless something were done quickly our Sahara depots would go the way of the Arabian ones, and we would be left with only our limited British facilities until the day when Africa and Asia would be reconquered. The violence and murder which had gone before were tame compared with a new fury that shook the fear-tortured people of Europe, helpless in the nightmare-ridden days, dreaming through twitching nights of an escape geographically non-existent. Dismembered corpses in the streets, arenas packed with dead bodies, fallow fields newly fertilized with human blood added their stench to that of an unwashed disease-riddled continent. A rumor was circulated that there were still Jews alive, and those who but yesterday had sought each other in mortal combat now happily united to hunt down a common prey. And sure enough in miserable caverns and cellars hitherto overlooked, shunning daylight, a few men in skull caps and praying shawls were found, dragged out into the disinterested sunlight with their families, and exterminated. It was at this time the grass crossed the Urals and leaped the Atlantic into Iceland. In England, George Bernard Shaw, whose reported deaths some years before had been mourned by those who had never read a word of his, rose apparently from the grave to deliver himself of a last message. If any who wept over my senile and useless carcass had taken the trouble to read back to Methuselah, they could have reassured themselves regarding my premature demise. If ever there was to be a long liver, that long liver would have to be me. This was determined by the life-force in the middle of the nineteenth century, that life-force could not afford to rob a squinting world of a man of perfect vision. Like Haslam, I forget his first name, see my complete works, if you're interested, I gave myself out as dead in order to avoid the gawking of a curious and idle multitude. I was recuperating from the labors of my first century in order to throw myself into the more arduous ones of the second. But as I have pointed out so many times, the race was between maturity and the petulant self-destruction of protracted adolescence. Mankind had either to take thought or to perish. And it is chosen, perhaps sensibly after all, to perish. I am too old now to protest against self-indulgence. Is it too late? Is it still possible to survive? The ship is now indeed upon the rocks and the skipper in his bunk below drinking bottled ditch-water. But perhaps the captain shot over, drunk on the milk of humankindness rather than rum, will emerge upon the quarter-deck and, blowing his whistle, call all hands on deck before the last rending crash. In that unlikely event, one of those emerging from the forecastle will be G. Bernard Shaw. End of chapter 5 part G.