 CHAPTER III PART F. Do either till a fascist's perverse sense of humor, or what is more likely his excess of meanness with money, my collect telegram asking for funds to return from humor received the following ridiculous reply. No, no sanguinary wiener. Intelligencer, no elemosinary institution. Eat cake. The meaning of the last two words escaped me, and it was possible they were added purely to make the requisite ten. At all events, the fascist's parsimony made a very inconvenient and unpleasant trip back for me, milestoneed by my few valuable possessions pawned with suspicious and grasping service-station owners. When I left, a map of the downtown district would have resembled the profile of a bowl. Now it was a bottle with only a narrow neck still clear. The weed had flung itself upon Pasadena and was curving back along Huntington Drive, while to the south the opposing pincer was feeling its way along Soto Street into Boyle Heights. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I passed through the police lines into the doomed district. If I had thought deserted Beverly Boulevard a sad sight only three days before, what can I say about my impression of the city's nerve center in its last hours? Abandoned automobiles stood in the streets at the spot where they had run out of gas, or some minor mechanical failure had halted them. Dead streetcars, like big games stopped short by the hunter's bullet, stayed where the failure of electric power caught them. The tall buildings reeked of desertion as if their emptying had doled some superficial gloss and made them dim and colorless. But contrast the dying city with a wall of living green, northwest and south, towering ever higher and preparing to carry out the sentence already passed, and the victim becomes insignificant in the presence of the executioner. I was reminded of the well where Goots died, for here except on one small side the grass rose like the inside of a stovepipe to the sky. But I suffered neither the same despair nor the unaccountable elation I had upon that hill, perhaps because the trough was so much bigger or because the animate thing was not beneath my feet to communicate those feelings directly. There had evidently been some looting, not so much from greed as from the natural impulse of human nature to steal and act lawlessly as soon as police vigilance is relaxed. Here and there stores were opened nakedly to the street their content spilled about. But such scenes were surprisingly rare, the hopelessness of transporting stolen or any other possessions acting as a greater deterrent than morality. One way or another as the saying has it, crime does not pay. New people were visible and these were divided sharply into two categories. Those clearly intend upon concluding some business rushing furiously, papers, briefcases or articles of worth in their hands, and those obviously without purpose, dazed, listless, stumbling against the curb stones as they shambled along, casting furtive glances toward the green glacier in the background. The newspaper office contained only people of the first type. The fascist he had come out of his sanctuary for the first time with him memory of anybody on the staff. Still colorless, snuff box in hand, he napoleonically directed the removal of those valuables without which the newspaper could not continue. He was cool, efficient, seemed to have eyes everywhere and know everything going on in the entire building. He spent neither greetings nor reproaches on me, indeed was not looking in my direction, but somehow sensed my presence through his back, for he said without turning round, Weiner, if you have concluded your unaccountable peregrinations, remove the two files marked E1925 and E1926 to Pomona. If you miss way one scrap of paper they contain, the bartering of a thousand Weiner's being an inadequate equivalent, your miserable substance will be attached to four tractors headed in divergent directions. Don't come back here but attempt for once to palliate the offense of your birth and go interview that Francis female. Interview her, not yourself. Bring back a story, complete and terse, or commit the first sensible act of your life with any weapon you choose and charge the instrument to the intelligentser. I haven't the slightest idea where Miss Francis is to be found. He took a pinch of snuff, issued orders to four or five other people and continued calmly, I am not conducting a school of journalism. If I were, I should have a special dunce cap imported solely for your use. The lowest copy boy knows better than to utter such an inanity. You will find the Francis and interview her. I'm busy. Get the hell out of here and handle those files carefully if you value that cadaver you probably think of as the repository of your soul. I am not a drayman and I resented the menial duty of sliding those heavy file cases down four flights of stairs. But at a time like this I thought philosophically a man has duties he cannot shirk. Besides the fastest he was old I could afford to humor him even if it meant demeaning myself. With one of the cases in back I sadly regarded the other one occupying most of the front seat. If she had at least given me her name I would have searched and searched until I found her. This train of thought reminded me of Lafacici's command to find Miss Francis and so I concentrated my attention on getting away from the intelligentser office. It was no light labor. The stalled streetcars and automobiles presented grave hazards to the unwary. The air smelled of death and nervously I pressed the accelerator to get away quickly from this tomb. I crossed the dry riverbed and made my way slowly to Pomona, delivered the files, and reluctantly began seeking Miss Francis. It was practically impossible to discover any one person among so many scattered and disorganized people, but chance aided my native intelligence and perseverance. Only a day before she had been involved with an indignant group of the homeless who attributed their misfortunes to her and overcoming their natural American chivalry toward the weaker sex had tried to revenge themselves. I was therefore able to locate her, not ten miles from the temporary headquarters of the daily intelligentser. Her laboratory was an abandoned chicken-house which must have reminded her constantly of her lost kitchen. She looked almost jaunty as she greeted me, a cobweb from the roof of the decaying shag caught in her hair. I have no profitable secrets to market, Wiener. You're wasting your time with me. I'm not here as a salesman, Miss Francis, I said. The daily intelligentser would like to tell its readers how you are getting on with your search for some cure for the grass. You talk as if Synodon Dactylam were a disease. There is no cure for life but death. Since she was going to be so touchy about the grass as if it were a personal possession, why I thought it's as much mine as hers. I substituted a more diplomatic form of words. Well, I have made an interesting discovery, she conceded grudgingly, and pointed to a row of flower pots, her eyes lighting as she scanned the single blades of grass, perhaps an inch and a half high growing in each. The sight meant nothing to me, and she must have gathered as much from my expression. Synodon Dactylam, she explained, germinated from seeds borne by the inoculated plant. Obviously the omnivorous capacity has not been transmitted to offspring. This was probably fascinating to her, or a gardener, or botanist, but I couldn't see how it concerned me or the daily intelligentser. It could be a vitamin deficiency, she muttered incomprehensibly, or evasion of the laws regarding compulsory education. These plants indicate the effect of grass may propagate its abnormal condition only through the extension of the already changed stolons or rhizomes. It means that only the parent, which is presumably not immortal, is a barrant. The offspring is no different from the weed householders have been cursing ever since the mission fathers enslaved the digger Indians. Why then, I exclaimed, suddenly enlightened, all we have to do is wait until the grass dies. Or until it meets some insuperable object, supplemented Miss Francis. My faith in insuperable objects have been somewhat shaken. How long do you think it will be before the grass dies? I asked her. She regarded me gravely, as though I had been a child asking an absurd question. Possibly a thousand years. My enthusiasm was dampened. But after leaving her, I remembered how certain types of people always look for the dark side of things. It costs no more to be an optimist than a pessimist. It is sunshine grows flowers, not clouds. And if Miss Francis chose to think the grass might live a thousand years, I was equally free to think it might die next week. Thus heartened by this bit of homely philosophy, just as valid as any of the stuff entombed in wordy books, I wrote up my interview. Careful to guide myself by all the stifling strictures and adjurations impressed upon me by the tyrannically narrow-minded editor. If I may anticipate the order of events, it appeared next day in almost recognizable form under the heading, abnormal grass to die soon, says originator. End of chapter three, part F. Chapter three, 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. Chapter three, part G. The small city of Pomona was swollen to boomtown sized by the excursion there of so many enterprises forced from Los Angeles. Ordinary citizens without heavy responsibilities went uprooted thought only of putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their persecutor. But the officials, the industrialists, the businessmen, the staffs of great newspapers hovered close by, like small boys near the knothole in the ballpark fence from which they'd been banished by an officious cop. The intelligencer was lodged over the print shop of a local tributary which had agreed to the ousting with the most hypocritical assurances of joy at the honor done them, and payment in the smallest possible type by the addition to the great newspaper's mast head of the words and Pomona Post Telegram. Packed into this inadequate space were the entire staff and files of the Metropolitan Daily. No wonder the confusion obviated all possibility of normal routine. In addition, the disruption of railroad schedules made the delivery of mail a hazard rather than a certainty. Perhaps this was why weeks after they were due, it was only upon my return from interviewing Miss Francis I received my checks from the weekly ruminant and the honeycomb. It may have been the boomtown atmosphere I have already mentioned, or because at the same time I got my weekly salary. At any event, moved by an unaccountable impulse, I took the two checks to a barber shop where, perhaps incongruously, a well-known firm of Los Angeles stockbrokers had quartered themselves. I forced the checks upon a troubled-looking individual, too taciturn to be mistaken for the barber, and mumbling, by me all the shares of consolidated pemmican and allied concentrates this will cover, hurried out before sober thought could cause me to change my mind. For certainly this was no investment my cool judgment would approve, but the wildest hunch, causing me to embark on what was no less than a speculation. I went back to the desk I shared with 10 others, bitterly regretting the things I might have bought with the money and berating myself for my rashness. Only the abnormal pressure of events could have made me yield to so irrational an impulse. In the meantime, things happened fast. Barely had the tardiest intelligencer employees got away when the enveloping jaws of the weed closed tight, catching millions of dollars worth of property within. The project to bomb the grass out of existence, dormant for some weeks could no longer be denied. Even its most ardent advocates, however, now conceded reluctantly the ordinary explosives would be futile, more than futile, and assistance to the growth by scattering the propagating fragments. For the first time, people began talking openly of using the outlawed atomic bomb. The instant response to this suggestion was an overwhelming opposition. The President, Congress, the Army, Navy, and public opinion generally agreed that the weapon was too terrible to use and so comparatively trivial a cause. But the machinery for some type of bombing had been set in motion and had to be used. The fuel was stored, the airfields jammed, all available planes, new old obsolescent and obsolete assembled, and for three days and nights the great fleet shuttled back and forth over the jungle area, dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs. Following close behind, still more planes dropped cargoes of fuel to feed the colossal bonfire. Inverted lightning flashes leapt upward and after them great rolling white, yellow, red, and blue flames. The smoke, the smell of roasting vegetation, the roar and crackle of the conflagration and the heat engendered were all noticeable as far away as Capistrano and Santa Barbara. Down from the sky, through the surface of the grass, the incendiaries burned great patches clear to the earth. The weed, which had resisted fire so contemptuously before, suddenly became inflammable and burned like celluloid for days. Miles of twisted stems cleaned the blade in life, exposed tortured nakedness to aerial reconnoiter. Bald spots, the size of villages appeared, black and smoldering. The shape of the mass was altered and altered again. But when, long after, the last spark flickered out and the last ember grew dull, the grass itself torn and injured, but not defeated or even noticeably beaten back remained. It had been a brilliant performance and an ineffective one. The failure of the incendiary bombing not only produced roofily triumphant, I told you so, from disgruntled and doubly outraged property owners, but a new crop of bids for the intelligences reward to the developer of a saving agent. From suggested emigrations to Mars and giant magnifying glasses set up to wither the grass with the aid of the sun, they ranged to projects for cutting a canal clear around the weed from San Francisco Bay to the Colorado River and letting the Pacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all light from the grass by means of innumerable radio beams to interrupt the sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll and atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other grasses such as bamboo with a metamorphizer, expecting the two giants of vegetation like the Kilkenny cats would end by devouring each other. This proposal received such wide popular support, there is reason to believe it got some serious consideration in official quarters, but it was eventually abandoned on the ground that while it gave only a single slim chance of success, it certainly doubled the potential growth to contend with. The analogy of a backfire in forest conflagrations was deemed poetic but inapplicable. More comparatively prosaic courses included walling in the grass with concrete. The Great Wall of China was the only work of man visible from the moon. Were Americans to let backward China best them? A concrete wall only a mile high and half a mile thick could be seen by any curious astronomer on the planet Venus, assuming venerians to be afflicted with terrestrial vices and would cost no more than a very small ward. To say nothing of employing thousands who would otherwise dissipate the taxpayers' money on relief. A variant of this plan was to smother the weed with tons of dry cement and sand from airplanes. The rainy season due to begin in a few months would add the necessary water and the grass would then be encased in a presumably unbreakable tomb. But the most popular suggestion embodied the use of salt, ordinary table salt. From their own experience in backyard and garden eager men and women wrote in urging this common mineral be used to end the menace of the grass. It will kill anything, wrote an Imperial Valley farmer. Its lethal effect on plant life is instantaneous, agreed a former Beverly Hills resident. I know there is not anything like salt to destroy weeds was part of a long and rambling letter on blue-ruled tablet paper. In the June of 1926, or seven, I cannot remember exactly. It may have been 28. I accidentally dropped some salt on a beautiful plum bagel. It was proposed to spray the surface, to drive tunnels through the roots to conduct brine, to bombard sectors with 16 inch guns firing shrapnel loaded with salt, to isolate by means of a wide saline band the whole territory both occupied and threatened. Salt enthusiasts argued that nothing except a few million tons of an inexpensive mineral would be wasted if an improbable failure occurred. But if successful in stopping the advance the country could wait safely behind its rampart till some weapon to regain the overrun area was found. But the salt advocates didn't have everything their own way. There arose a bitter anti-salt faction taking pleasure at hurling sneers at these optimistic predictions and delight in demolishing the arguments. Miss Francis, they said, who ought to know more about it than anyone else, claimed the grass would break down even the most stable compound and take what it needed. Well, salt was a compound, wasn't it? If the pro-salt fanatics had their way they would just be offering food to a hungry plant. The salt supporters asked what proof Miss Francis had ever advanced that the plant absorbed everything, or indeed that her metamorphizer had anything to do with metabolism and had not merely induced some kind of botanical giantism. The anti-salt, jeering at their enemies as salinists and salinites, promptly threw away Miss Francis's hypothetical support and relied instead on the proposition that if the salt were to be efficacious and unlikely contingency it would have to reach the roots. And if crude oil poured on when the plant was young had not done so what possible hope could the pro-salt cranks offer for their panacea Now the rampant grass was grown to its present proportions. The salt argument cut society in half. Learned doctors battled in the columns of scientific journals. Businessmen dictated sputtering letters to their secretaries. Howe's wives wrote newspapers or argued heatedly in the corner grocery. Radio commentators cautiously skirted the edge of the controversy and more than one enthusiast had to be warned by his sponsor. Fist fight started in taverns over the question and judicious bartenders served beer without offering the objectionable seasoning with it. The intelligentser at the start was vehemently anti-salt. Is there an American Cato? Lafacici asked to call for the final ignominy suffered by Carthage to be applied not to the land of an enemy but to our own. Shortly after this editorial entitled Carthage, California, appeared the intelligentser swung to the opposite side and Lafacici offered the prosalt argument under the heading, lots wife. The daughters of the American Revolution declared themselves in favor of salt and refused the use of Constitution Hall to an anti-salt meeting. Stung, the central executive committee of the Communist Party, circulated a manifesto declaring the use of salt was an attempt to encircle not the grass for that was a mere sub-diffuse of imperialism but the Soviet Union and called upon all its peripheral fringe to write their congressmen and demonstrate against the saline project. From India, the aged Mohandas Gandhi asked in piping tones why such a valuable adjunct was to be wasted in rich America while impoverished riots paid a harsh tax on this necessity of life. And the Council of People's Commissars, careless of the action of the American Stalinists, offered to sell the United States all its surplus salt. The herring picklers of Hollins struck in a body while the American salt refiners bid as one to produce on a cost plus basis. This last was a clincher and the obscurantic anti-salt received the death blow they richly deserved. The Communist Party reversed themselves swiftly. All respectable and patriotic people lined up behind salt. With such popular unanimity apparent, the government could do no less than take heed. A band, 20 miles wide, stretching from Oceanside to the Salton Sea, from the Salton Sea to the little town of Mojave and from there to Ventura, was marked out on maps to be salt sown by the very same bomber command which had dropped the spectacular but futile incendiaries. The triumph of the salt people was ungenerous in its enthusiasm. The disgruntled anti-salt now a mere handful of die-hards publishing an esoteric press muttered everyone would be sorry, wait and see. The grass itself waited for nothing. It seemed to take new strength from the indignities inflicted upon it and it increased, if anything, its tempo of growth. It plunged into the ocean in a dozen spots at once. It swarmed over sand which had never known anything but cactus and the Sierra Madres became great humps of green against the skyline. This last conquest shocked those who had thought the mountains immune in their inhospitable heights. Synodon Dactylon, uninoculated, had always shunned the coldness, though it survived some degrees of frost. The giant growth, however, seemed to be less subject to this inhibition, though it too showed slower progress in the higher and colder regions. The intelligents are planned to move from Pomona to San Bernardino and, if necessary, to Victorville. Daily Lafacici became a sterner taskmaster, a more pettishly exacting employer. By the living guts of William Lloyd Garrison, he raged, had no one ever driven the simple elements of punctuation into my bloody head, had no schoolmaster in moments of heroic enthusiasm attempted to pound a few rules of rhetoric through my incrasate skull. Had I never heard of taste was the word style outside my massilent vocabulary? What the devil did I mean by standing there with my mouth open exposing my unfortunate teeth for all the world to see? Was it possible for any allegedly human to be as adepated as I? And had I been thrust from my mother's womb, I suppress his horrible adjectives, only to torment and afflict his long-suffering editorial patience. A hundred times I was tempted to sever my connection with this journalistic autocrat. My column was widely read, and two publishing houses had approached me with the idea of putting out a book, any editorial revision and emendations to be taken care of by them without disturbing me at all. I could have allied myself with almost any paper in the country, undoubtedly at better than the meager stipend Lafacici doled out to me. But I think loyalty is one of the most admirable of virtues, and it was not in my nature to desert the intelligencer. Certainly not till I could secure a lengthy and ironclad contract, such as for some reason other papers seemed unwilling to offer me. In accord with this innate loyalty of mine, I take no credit for it, I was born that way. I did not balk at the assignments given me, though they ranged from the hazardous to the absurd. One of the more pleasant of these excursions sought up by Mr. Lafacici was to fly over the grass and to Catalina, embark on a chartered boat there, and survey the parts of the coast now overrun. A fresh point of observation. Accompanying me was a movie cameraman, rave slave, as uncommunicative and earnest in his medications as before. It was a sad sight to see neat rectangular patterns of roads and highways, cultivated fields and orange groves, checkered towns and sprawling suburbs come to an abrupt stop where they were blotted out by the regimented uniformity of the onrushing grass. For miles we flew above its dazzling green until our eyes ached from the sameness and our minds were dulled from the lack of variety below. On the sea far ahead, a frothing white cap broke the monotony of color. A flying fish jumped out of the water to glisten for a moment in the sun. A loose seaweed floated on the surface to change in some degree the intense blue. But here below no alien touch lightened the unnatural homogeneity. No solitary tree broke this endless pasture, now healed of the wounds inflicted by the incendiary bombing. No salt lick, wandering stream or struggling bush enlivened this prairie. There was not even an odd confirmation, a higher clump here or there, a dead patch to relieve the unimaginative symmetry. I have read of men going mad in solitary confinement from looking at the same unchanging walls. Well, here was a solitary cell hundreds of miles in area, and its power to destroy the mind was that much magnified. I got little consolation from the presence of the others, for the pilot was engaged in navigation while Slave was, as ever, single-mindedly recording mile after mile of the verdant map beneath, never pausing nor speaking, though how he justified the use of so much film when one foot was identical with what went before and the next I could not understand. At last we cleared the awful cancer and flew over the sea. A thousand variations I had never noticed before offered themselves to my suddenly refreshed eyes. Not for one split second was the water the same. Sleeping, tossing, spiraling, foaming back upon itself, making its own shadows and mirroring in an infinitely faceted glass the sunlight, it changed so constantly it was impossible to grasp even a fraction of its mutations. But Slave evidently did not share my blessed relief, for he turned his camera back to catch every last glimpse of the solid green I was so happy to leave behind. At the airport, on the way to the boat, on the little vessel itself, I expected Slave to relax, to indulge in a conversational word, to do something to mark him as more than an automaton. But his actions were confined to using the nasal syringe, to exchanging one camera for another, to quizzing the sun through that absurd lawn yet, and to muttering over cans of film, which he sorted and resorted, always to his inevitable discontent. While we waited to start, a perverse fog rolled between us and the mainland. It made a dramatic curtain over the object of our visit, and emphasized the normality and untouchedness of Avalon behind us. As the boat got under way, strained my eyes as I could eastward, not the faintest suggestion of the ominous outline showed. We sped toward it, cutting the purple sea into white foam. Slave was in the bow, customarily taciturn, the crew were busy. On a lone on-board I had no immediate occupation, and so I took out my copy of the Intelligencer. And after reading the column which went under my name, and noting the incredible bad taste which had diluted when it had not excluded everything I had written, I turned as for consolation to the market quotations. The Dow Jones average was down again, as might be expected since the spread of the wheat had unsettled the delicate balance of the stock market. My eyes automatically ran down the column and over to the corner where stocks were quoted in cents to reassure my faith in consolidated pemmican and allied concentrates. There it was, immovable through any storm or stress or injudicious investment by Albert Wiener, C.P. and A.C., one-sixteenth. I must have raised my eyes from the newspaper just about the time the fog lifted, before us like the smoke wreath accompanying the discharge of some giant cannon the green mass volleied into the sea. It did not slope gently like a beach or offer a rugged shoulder to be gnawed away as a rocky cliff, but thundered forward into the surging brine, yielding but invincible, a land force potent as the wave itself. Hundreds of feet into the air it towered, falling abruptly in a sharp wall, its ends and fringes merging with the surf and wallowing and happy freedom. The breakers did not batter it for it offered them no enmity to rage and boil upon, but giving way with each surge smothered the eternal anger of the ocean with its own placid surety. The seagulls, the hell-divers, pelicans, sea-pigeons had not been affected. Resting briefly on the weed, they winged up for their food and returned. It mattered no more to them that the man-made piers and wharves, the sea-coast towns, jip joints, roller coasters, whorehouses, cottages, hotels, streets, gas tanks, quarries, pottery kilns, oil fields, and factories had been swallowed up than if some old wreck in the sand once offering them foothold had been taken back by the sea. If I thought the grass awesome from the land, monotonous from the air, it seemed eternal from the water. But impressive as it was from any angle, there were just so many things I could say about it. My art, unlike slays, not permitting of endless repetition, I was glad to get back to the Pomona office, to pad what little copy I had, retire into the small tent I shared with six other sufferers from the housing shortage, and attempt some sleep. The course mapped for the salt-band caused almost as much controversy, anguish, and denunciation as the proposal itself. Cities and towns fought to have the salt-band laid between them and the approaching grass, understandably ignoring larger calculations and considerations. Cattle ranchers shot at surveying parties, and individual farmers or homeowners fought against having their particular piece of property covered with salt. The original plan had contemplated straight lines. Eventually the bands twisted and turned like a typewriter ribbon plagued by a kitten, avoiding not only natural obstacles, but the domains of those with proper influence. Recovery plants worked three shifts a day to pile up great mounds of the white crystals, which were hauled to the airfields by trains and trucks. The laden trucks moved over the highways bumper to bumper. The freight train's engines nosed the cabooses of those in front. All other goods were shunted on sightings, perishables rotted, valuables went undelivered. All transportation was reserved for this salt. Not only was the undertaking unprecedented for its magnitude, but the urgency and the breakdowns, bottlenecks, shortages, and disruptions caused by the grass itself added to the formidable accomplishment. But the people were aroused and aware of the danger, and they put almost the same effort behind the salt sowing as they would have in turning out instruments of war. The sowing itself was, in a way, anti-climactic. By the whim of lafacicy, I went in one of the planes on the first day of the task. My protests, as always, proving futile, I spent a very boresome time flying back and forth over the same patch of ground. That is, it would have been boresome had it not been for the dangers involved. For in order to sow the salt evenly and thickly, it was necessary to fly low to hedge hop, as the pilot called it. If the parachute jumped and unnerved me, the flying at terrific speed straight toward a tree, hill, or electric power line, and then curving upward at the last second to miss them by a whisper, must have put gray in my hair and taken years from my life. The rivers, washes, and creeks on the inner edge have been roughly dammed to lessen future erosion of the salt, and inappropriately gay flags marked the boundaries of the area. Owing to our speed, the salt billowed out behind us like powdery fumes. But beyond the evidence of this smoky trail, we might merely have been a group of madmen confusedly searching for some object lost upon the ground. In reporting for the intelligencer, it was impossible to dramatize the event. Even the rewrite men were baffled, for under the enormous head salt sown, they could not find enough copy to carry over from page one. End of chapter three, part G. Chapter three, part H, 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 three, part H. The sowing of the salt went on for weeks and the grass leaped forward as if to meet it. It raced southward through Long Beach, Seal Beach, and the deserted dunes to Newport and Balboa. It came east in a fury through Puente and Monrovia, northeastward it moved into Lancaster, Seemian, Piru. Only in its course north did the weeds show a slower pace. By the time we had been forced to leave Pomona for San Bernardino, it had gotten no farther than Calabasas and Malibu. The westward migration of the American people was abruptly reversed. Those actually displaced by the grass infected others through whose homes they passed in their flight with their own panic. Land values west of the Rockies dropped to practically nothing and the rich farms of the Great Plains were worth no more than they had been a hundred years before. People had seen directly, heard over the radio, or read in newspapers of the countless methods vainly used to stop the grass and there was little confidence in the salt band succeeding where other devices had failed. True, there were here and there individuals or whole families or even entire communities obstinate enough to scorn flight. But in the opinion of most, they were like pig-headedly trustful peasants who cling in the face of all warning to homes on the slopes of an active volcano. It was generally thought the government itself in creating the salt band was making no more than a gesture. Whatever the validity of this pessimism, the work itself was impressive. Viewed from high in the air only a month after the start it was already visible. After two months it was a thick glistening river winding over mountain desert and what had been green fields, a white crystalline barrier behind which the country waited nervously. When the salt had been first proposed, batches had been dumped in proximity to the grass, but the quantity had been too small to demonstrate any conclusion and observers had been immediately driven from the scene of the experiments by the grass. Nevertheless, the very inconclusiveness of these trials confirmed the doubts of the waiting country as the narrow gap before the salt was closed and the weed rolled to it near Capistrano. I would like to think of the meeting as dramatic, heightened by inaudible drum rolls and flashes of invisible lightning. Actually the conflict was pedestrian. Manipulated once more by my tyrant, I was stationed like other reporters and radio men in a captive balloon. For the utmost in discomfort and lack of dignity, let me recommend this ludicrous invention. Cramped, seasickened, inconvenienced, I don't like to mention this, but provisions for answering the calls of nature were to say the least inadequate. I swayed and rocked in that inconsiderable basket, chilled, blinded by the dazzle of the salt, knocked about by gusts of irresponsible wind and generally disgusted by the uselessness of my pursuit. A telescope to the eye and constant radio reports from shuttling planes told of the approaching grass, but under the circumstances, weariness rather than excitement or anxiety was the prevailing emotion. At last the collision came. The long runners, curiously flat from the air, pushed their way ahead. The salt seemed no more to them than bare ground concrete vegetation or any of the hundred obstacles they had traveled. Unstutteringly, the vine-like stolons went forward. A foot, two, six, 10. No recoil, no hesitation, no recognition they were traversing a wall erected against them. Behind these first outposts, the higher growth came on and still farther off the great bulk itself reared skyward, blotting out the horizon behind, threatening and exhaustible. It seemed to prod its precursors to demand hungrily ever more and more room to expand, but the creeping of the runners over the first few feet of salt dwindled to a stop. This caused experienced observers like myself no elation. We had seen it happen many times before at the encountering of any novel obstacle and its only effect had been to make the weed change its tactics in order to overcome the obstruction as it did now. A second rank moved forward on top of the halted first, a third upon the second and so on till a living wall frowned down upon the salt, throwing its shadow across it for hundreds of ominous yards. It towered erect and then, repeating the tactic invariably successful, it toppled forward to create a bridgehead from which to launch new assaults. The next day, new stolons emerged from the mass, but now for the first time, excitement seized us up in our bobbing post of observation. Not only were the new runners visibly shorter in length, but they crept forward more slowly, haltingly, as though hurt. This impression was generally discredited. People were surfited with optimism. They felt our reports were wishful thinking. Their pessimism seemed to be confirmed when the weed repeated its action of the day before, falling ahead of itself upon the salt, and few took stock in our excited announcements that the grass had covered only half the previous distance. Again the probing fingers poked out, again the reserves piled up, again the mass fell. But it fell far short of a normal leap. There could no longer be any doubt about it. The advance had been slowed, almost stopped. The salt was working. Everywhere along the entire band, the story was the same. The grass rushed confidently in, bit off great chunks, then smaller, then smaller, until its movement ceased entirely. That part which embedded itself in the salt lost the dazzling green color so characteristic and turned piebald, from dirty gray through brown and yellow, an appearance so familiar in its normal counterpart on lawns and vacant lot. The encircled area filled up and choked with a balked weed, time after time it essayed the deadly band only to be thwarted. The glistening fortification, hardly battered, stood triumphant, imprisoning the invader within. Commentators in trembling voices broke the joyful news over every receiving set, and even the stogiest newspapers brought out their blackest type to announce, grass stopped. The president of the United States, as befitted a farmer knowing something of grasses on his own account, issued a proclamation of thanksgiving for the end of the peril which had beset the country. The stock market recovered from funereal depths and jumped upward. In all the great city's hysterical rapture, so heeded the blood of the people that all restraints withered. In frantic joy, women were raped in the streets, dozens of banks were looted, thousands of plate glass windows were smashed, while millions of celebrants wept tears of 86 proof ecstasy. Torn ticker tapes made Broadway impassable and the smallest whistle stops spontaneously revived the old custom of uprooting outhouses and perching them on the church steeple. I had my own particular reason to rejoice, coincident with the stoppage of the grass. It was so unreal, so dreamlike, that for many days I had trouble convincing myself of its actuality. It began with a series of agitated telephone messages from a firm of stockbrokers, asking for my immediate presence, which because of my assignments failed to reach me for some time. So engrossed was I in the events surrounding the victory over the grass, I could not conceive why any broker would want to see me and so put off my visit several times till the urgency of the calls began to peak my curiosity. The man who greeted me was runcible with little strands of sickly hair twisted mop-wise over his bald head. His striped suit was rumpled, the collar of his shirt was wrinkled and dots of perspiration stood out in his upper lip and forehead. Mr. Wiener, he asked, oh, thank God, thank God. Completely at a loss, I followed him into his private office. You recall commissioning us when we were located in Pomona to purchase some shares of consolidated pemmican and allied concentrates for your account? To tell the truth, while I had not forgotten the event, I had been sufficiently ashamed of my rashness to have pushed all recollection of the transaction to the back of my mind, but I nodded confirmingly. No doubt you would be willing to sell it a handsome profit. Aha, I thought. The rise of the market has sent consolidated pemmican up for once beyond its usual one-eighth. I am probably a rich man and this fellow wants to cheat me of the fruits of my foresight. You bought the stock outright? Of course, Mr. Wiener, he affirmed, in a hurt tone. Good, then I will take immediate delivery. He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his lip and forehead with evident inefficiency for the perspiration either remained or started afresh. Mr. Wiener, he said, I am authorized to offer you six times. Six times, he echoed impressively, the amount of your original investment. This is an amazing return. If it was worth it to him, it was worth it to me. I will take immediate delivery, I repeated firmly. And no brokerage fees involved, he added, as one making an unbelievable concession. I shook my head. Mr. Wiener, he said, I have been empowered to make you an incredible tender for your stock. Not only will the board of directors have consolidated pemmican return to you six times the amount of your investment, but they will assign to you over and above this price 49% of the company's voting stock. It is a magnificent and unparalleled bid and I sincerely advise you to take it. I pressed my palms into the back of the chair. I, Albert Wiener, was a capitalist. The money involved already seemed negligible for it was a mere matter of a few thousand dollars, but to own what amounted to a controlling interest, even in a defunct or somnolent corporation made me an important person. Only a reflex made me gasp, I will take immediate delivery. The broker dropped his hands against his thighs. Mr. Wiener, you are an acute man. Mr. Wiener, I must confess the truth. You have bought more shares of consolidated pemmican than there are in existence. You not only own the firm lock, stock, and barrel, but you owe yourself money. He gave a weak laugh above and beyond this, Mr. Wiener, through an unfortunate series of events due to the confusion of the times without it such an absurd situation would never have occurred. Several people, our own firm, our New York correspondence, and the present heads of consolidated pemmican are liable to prosecution by the Securities Exchange Commission. We can only throw ourselves on your mercy. I waved this aside magnanimously. Where is my property located? Well, I believe consolidated pemmican has an office in New York. Yes, but the factory, the works, where is the product made? Strictly speaking, I understand active operations seized back in 1919. However, there is a plant somewhere in New Jersey, I think. I'll look it up for you. My dream of wealth began fading as the whole situation became clear and suspicions implicit in the peculiar behavior of the stock were confirmed. The corporation had evidently fallen into the hands of unscrupulous promoters who manipulated for the small but steady take its fluctuations on the market afforded. Without attempting to operate the factory, my reasoning ran they had taken advantage of the stock's low price to double whatever they cared to invest twice yearly. It was a neat and well-shaped little racket and discovery, as the broker admitted, would have exposed them to legal action. Only my recklessness with the checks from the weekly ruminant and the honeycomb had broken the routine. But they had offered me several thousand dollars, evidently in cold cash. Defunct or not then, the business was presumably worth at least that. And if they had employed the stock to maintain some sort of income, why, I could certainly learn to do the same. I was an independent man after all. Except for the slightly embarrassing detail of being without current funds, I was also free of la facetie and a daily intelligencer. Mr. Blank, I said, I need some money for immediate expenses. I knew you'd see things in a sensible light, Wiener. I'll have your check in a minute. You misunderstand me. I have no intention of giving up any part of consolidated Pemmican. Ah, no. He looked at me intently. Mr. Wiener, I am not a wealthy man. Above and beyond that, since his grasp business started, I assure you any common laborer has made more money than I. Any common laborer, he repeated sadly. Oh, I only need about a thousand dollars for immediate outlays. Just write me a check for that much, like a good fellow. Mr. Wiener, how can we be sure you won't call upon us again for more expense money? I drew myself up indignantly. Mr. Blank, no one has ever questioned my integrity before. When I say a thousand dollars is all the expense money I require, why it is all the expense money I require. To doubt it is to insult me. Ah, he said, ah, I agreed. Reluctantly he wrote the check and handed it to me. Then more amicably we settled the details of the stock transfer and he gave me the location of my property. I went back to the intelligencer office with the springy step of a man who acknowledges no master. In my mind I prepared a triumph. I would wait, even if it took days, for the first bullying word from Lafacic, and then I would magnificently fling my resignation in his face. When the grasp was thought to be invincible, Miss Francis as a discoverer of the compound which started it on its course was the recipient of a universal, if grudging, respect. Those whom the grass had made homeless hated her and would have overcome their natural feeling of protection towards a woman sufficiently to lyncher if they could. Men like Senator Jones instinctively disliked her, others like Dr. Johnson detested her, but no one thought of her lightly, even when they glibly coupled the word nut with her name. When it was found the salt-band worked, Miss Francis immediately became the butt of all the ridicule and contumely which could be heaped upon her head. What could you expect of a woman who meddled with things outside her province? Since she had asserted the grass would absorb everything, its failure to absorb the salt proved beyond all doubt she was an ignoramus, a dangerous charlatan, and a crazy woman better locked up who had destroyed Southern California to her own obscure benefit. The victory over the grass became a victory over Miss Francis, of the ordinary gum-chewing movie-going man in the street over the pretentious highbrow. She was ignominiously ejected from her chicken-house laboratory on the ground that it was more needed for its original use, and she was jeered at in every vehicle of public expression. In spite of my natural chivalry, I cannot say I pitied her in her fall which she took with an unbecoming humility, amounting to arrogance. It was amazing how quickly viewpoints returned to an apparent normality as soon as the grass stopped at the salt-band. That it still existed in undisputed possession of nearly all Southern California after dispersing and scattering millions of people all over the country, disturbing by its very being a large part of the national economy, was only something read in newspapers, and accepted fact to be pushed into the farthest background of awareness now the immediate threat was gone. The salt patrol, vigilant for erosions or leachings, a select corps, was alert night and day to keep the saline wall intact. The general attitude, if it concerned itself at all with the events of the past half-year, looked upon it merely as one of those setbacks periodically afflicting the country like depressions, epidemics, floods, earthquakes, or other man-made or natural misfortunes. The United States had been a great nation when Los Angeles was a Pueblo of 5,000 people. The movies could set up business elsewhere. Iowans find another spot for senescence. The country go on much as usual. One of the first results of the defeat of the grass was the building almost overnight, it seemed, of a great city on the east bank of the Salton Sea. Displaced realtors from the metropolis found the surrounding mountains ideally suited for subdivision and laid out romantically named suburbs large enough to contain the entire population of California before the site of the city had been completely surveyed. Beyond their claims the memorial parks, columbariums, homes of eternal rest and Elysian lawns offered choice lot with a special discount on caskets on the installment plan. Magnificent brochures were printed, a skeletal biographical dictionary, $5 for notice, $50 for a portrait planned. Advertisements in leading magazines urged the migration of industry, contented labor and all local taxes remitted for 10 years. These essential preliminaries accomplished, the city itself was laid out, water mains installed and paving and grading begun. It was no great feat to divert the now aimless Colorado River Aqueduct to the site nor to erect thousands of prefabricated houses. The climate was declared to be unequaled, salubrious, equal, pleasant and bracing. Factories were erected, airports laid out, hospitals, prisons and insane asylums built. The Imperial and Coachella valleys shipped their products in at low cost and as a gesture to those who might suffer from homesickness it was called New Los Angeles. Perhaps in relief from the fear and despair so recently dispelled, New Los Angeles began to boom from the moment the mayor first handed the key to a passing distinguished visitor. It grew and spread as the grass had grown and spread. The embryonic skeletons of its unborn skyline rivaled the height of the green mass now triumphant in its namesake, presenting as news photographers were quick to see an aspect from the West not entirely dissimilar to Manhattan's. To New Los Angeles, of course, the Daily Intelligencer moved as soon as a tent large enough to house its presses could be set up. But I did not move with it. For some reason, perhaps intuitively forewarned of my intention, the fascist never gave me the opportunity to humiliate him as I planned. On the contrary, I received from him a few days before the paper's removal a silly and characteristic note. Since the freak grass has been stopped, it seems indicated other abnormalities be terminated also. Your usefulness to this paper always debatable is now clearly at an end. As of this moment, your putative services will be no longer required. WRL. Bitter vexation came over me at having lost the opportunity to give this bully a piece of my mind and my impulse was to go immediately to his office and tell him I scorned his petty paycheck. But I reflected. A man of his nature would merely find some tricky way of turning the interview to his malicious satisfaction and he would know soon enough it was the paper which was suffering a loss and not I. I started next morning and drove eastward toward my property quite satisfied to leave behind forever the scenes of my early struggles. The West had given me only petty irritations. In the East, with its older culture and higher level of intelligence, I looked forward to having my worth appreciated. End of chapter three. Chapter four, part A, 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 four, part A, Man Triumphant Two. Everything I had visualized in the broker's office turned out too pessimistically accurate. Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates was nothing but a mailing address in one of the most forlorn of Manhattan buildings long before jettisoned by the tide of commerce. The factory, no bigger than a very small house, was a broken windowed affair whose solid brick construction alone saved it from total demolition at the playful hands of the local children. The roof had long since fallen in and symbolical grass and weeds have pushed their way through cracks in the floor to flourish in a sickly and surreptitious way. The whole concern, until my stock purchase had been the chattel and creature of one button when it flees. Inappearance he was such a genuine Yankee, lean and sharp with a slight stoop and prying eyes that one quite expected a straw to protrude from between his thin lips or have him draw from his pocket a wooden nutmeg and offer it for sale. After getting to know him, I learned this apparent shrewdness was a pure defense mechanism, that he was really an artless and ingenuous soul who had been taught by other hands the swindle he practiced for many years and had merely continued it because he knew no way of making an honest living. He was, like myself, unattached and disarmed whatever lingering suspicions of him I might have by offering to share his quarters with me until I should have found suitable accommodations. The poor fellow was completely at my mercy and I not only forebored generously to press my advantage, but made him vice-president of the newly reorganized concern permitting him to buy back a portion of the stock he had sold. The boom in the market, having sent our shares up to an abnormal one-half, we flooded our brokers with selling offers at the same time spreading rumors by no means exaggerated of the firm's instability buying back control when Consolidated Pemmican reached its norm of one-sixteenth. We made no fortunes on this transaction, but I wasn't able to look ahead to a year on a more comfortable economic level than ever before. But it was by no means in my plans merely to continue to milk the corporation. I am, I hope not without vision and I saw Consolidated Pemmican under my direction turned into an active and flourishing industry. Its very decrepitude, I reasoned, was my opportunity. Starting from scratch and working with nothing, I would build a substantial structure. One of the new businesses which had sprung up was that of personally conducted tours of the grass. After the experience of Goots and myself, parachute landings have been ruled out as too hazardous, but someone happily thought of the use of snowshoes and it was on these clumsy means that tourists at a high cost and at less-than-snales pace tramped wonderingly over the tamed menace. My thought then, as I explained to fleas, was to reactivate the factory and sell my product to the sightseers. Food, high in calories and small in bulk was a necessity on their excursions and nourishing Pemmican high in protein quickly replaced the cloying and messy candy bar. We made no profit, but we suffered no loss and the factory was an actual operation so that no snoopers could ever accuse us of selling stock in an enterprise with a purely imaginary existence. I liked New York. It accorded well with my temperament and I wondered how I had ever endured those weary years far from the center of the country's financial life. It's theaters and it's great human drama. Give me the old Times Square in the East 50s any day and you can keep Death Valley in functional architecture. I was at home at last and I foresaw a future of slow but sure progress toward a position of eminence and respectability. The undignified days of Miss Francis and La Facice faded from my mind and I was aware of the grass only as a cause for selling our excellent Pemmican. I won't say I didn't read the occasional accounts of the weed appearing in Time or the newspapers or watch films of it in the movies with more than common interest but it was no longer an engrossing factor in my life. I was now taken up with larger concerns working furiously to expand my success and for a year after leaving the intelligence I identified I gave it more than a minute's thought a day. The band of salt remained an impregnable bulwark. Where the winter rains leached it new tons of the mineral replaced those washed away. Constant observations showed no advance. If anything the edge of the grass impinging directly on the salt was sullenly retreating. The central bulk remained a vast obstinate mass but most people thought it would somehow end by consuming itself if indeed this doom were not anticipated by fresh scatterings of salt striking at its vitals as soon as the rain ceased. No more than any other reader then was I disquieted by the following small item in my morning paper. Freak weed stirs speculation. San Diego, March 7th, AP. An unusual patch of Bermuda grass discovered growing in one of the city park's flower beds here today caused an excited flurry among observers. Reaching to a height of nearly four feet and defying all efforts of the park gardeners to uproot it, the vivid green interloper reminded fearful spectators of the plague which overran Los Angeles two years ago. Scientists were reassuring however as they pointed out that the giantism of the Los Angeles devil grass was not transmissible by seed and that no stolons or rhizomes of the abnormal plant had any means of traveling to San Diego protected as it is by the band of salt confining the Los Angeles growth. I was even more confident for I had seen with my own eyes the shoots grown by Miss Francis from seeds of the inoculated plant, a genuine freak this time I thought and promptly forgot the item. Would have forgotten it I should say had I not an hour later received a telegram return instantly can use your impressions of new grass, Lafacici. I knew from the fact he had used only nine of the 10 words paid for he considered the situation serious. The answer prompted by impulse would I knew not be transmitted by the telegraph company and on second thought I saw no reason why I should not take advantage of the editor's need. Business was slack and I was overworked the succession of petty annoyances that driven me almost to a nervous breakdown and the vacation at the expense of the new Los Angeles Daily Intelligencer sounded pleasantly restful after the serious work of grappling with industrial affairs. Of course I did not need their paltry few dollars but at the moment some of my assets were frozen and a weekly paycheck would be temporarily convenient saving me the bother of liquidating a portion of my smaller investments. Besides, if as was barely possible this new growth was in some unbelievable way an extension of the old it would of course ruin our sales of Pemicon to the tourists and it behooved me to be on the spot. I therefore answered consider double former salary wire transportation. Next day the great transcontinental plane powder pigeons along the runway of the magnificent new Los Angeles airport. I was in no great hurry to see the editor but took a taxi instead to the headquarters of the American Alpinists Incorporated where there was frank worry over the news and acknowledgement that no further consignments of Pemicon would be accepted until the situation became more settled. I left their offices in a thoughtful mood pausing only to wire fleas to unload as much stock as he could for even if this were only a temporary scare it would undoubtedly affect the market. I finally drove to the Intelligencer. Knowing Lafacici I hardly expected to be received with either cordiality or politeness but I was not quite prepared for the actual salute. A replica of his original office had been devised even to the shabby letters on the door and he was seated in his chair beneath the gallery of cartoons. He began calmly enough when I entered speaking in a low almost gentle tone helping himself to snuff between sentences but gradually working up into a quite artistic crescendo. Weiner, as you yourself would undoubtedly put it in your inimitable way a bad penny always turns up. I could not say Canis reverted Suomevomitim for it would invert a relationship. The puke has returned to the dog. It is a sad thought that the listless exercise which you ventuated in your beginning was indulged in by two who's genes and chromosomes united to produce a male rather than a female child. For thank Weiner if you have been born a woman with what gusto would you have pedaled your flacid flesh up on the city streets and offered your miserable dogs body to the reluctant use of undiscriminating customers. You are the paradigmatic whore Weiner and I weep for the physiological accident which condemns you to sell your servility rather than your vulva. Weiner, it restores my faith in human depravity to have you around to attempt your petty confidence tricks on me once more. I rejoice to find I had not overestimated mankind as long as I can see one aspect of it embodied in your homely face and bad complexion as the great Gilbert so mildly put it. I shall give orders to triple lock the petty cash to count the stamp money diligently to watch all checks for inept forgery. Welcome back to the intelligentser and be grateful for nature's mistakes since they afford you employment as well as existence. But enough of the friendly garrulousness of an old man whose powers are failing. Remove your unwholesome looking person from my sight and convey the decrepit vehicle of your spirit to San Diego. It is but a gesture. I expect no coherent words from your clogged and sputtery pen but while I am sufficiently like yourself to deceive the public into thinking you have written what they read, I am not yet great enough scoundrel to do so without your visiting the scene of your presumed labors. Go and do not stop on the way to draw expense money from the cashier for she has strict orders not to pay it. Jealousy, nothing but jealousy I thought first of my literary ability and now of my independence of his crazy whims. I turned my back deliberately and walked slowly out to show my contempt for his rantings. In my heart now, there was a little doubt the new grass was an extension of the old and it didn't take more than a single look at the overrun park to confirm this. The same creeping runners growing perceptibly from instant to instant, the same brilliant color, the same towering central mass gorged with food. I could have described it line by line and blade by blade in my sleep. I wasted no more time gazing at it but hurried away after hardly more than a minute's inspection. I could take no credit for my perceptivity since everyone in San Diego knew as well as I that this was no duplicate freak but the same, the identical, the fearsome grass. But a quite understandable conspiracy had been tacitly entered into. The knowledge was successfully hushed until property could be disposed of before it became quite worthless. The conspiracy defeated itself however with so many frantic sellers competing against each other and the news was out by the time the first of my new columns appeared in the intelligentser. The first question which occurred to those of us calm enough to escape panic was, how had the weed jumped the salt-band? It was answered simultaneously by many learned professors whose desire to break into print and share the front page with the terrible grass overcame their natural academic reticence. There was no doubt that originally the peculiar veracity of the inoculated plant had not been inherited but it was equally uncontroverted that somehow during the period it had been halted by the salt, a mutation had happened and now every wind blowing over the weed carried seeds no longer innocent but bearing embryos of the destroyer. Terror ran before the grass like a herald. The shock felt when Los Angeles went down was a multiplied tenfold. Now there was no predictable course men could shape their actions to avoid. No longer was it possible to watch and chart the daily advance of a single body so a partially accurate picture could be formed of what might be expected tomorrow. Instead of one mass there were countless ones. At the whim of a chance wind or bird, seeds might alight in an area apparently safe and overwhelm a community miles away from the living glacier. No place was out of range of the attack. No square foot of land kept any value. The stock market crashed and I congratulated myself on having sent fleas orders to sell. A day or two later the exchanges were closed and shortly after the banks, business came to a practical standstill. The great industries shut down and all normal transactions of daily life were conducted by means of barter. For the first time in three quarters of a century the farmer was top dog. His eggs and milk, his wheat and corn and potatoes he could exchange for whatever he fancied and on his own terms. Fortunately for starving city dwellers his appetite for manufactured articles and for luxuries was insatiable. Their automobiles, fur coats, costume jewelry, washing machines, files of the National Geographic and their period furniture left the city flat for the farm to come back in the more acceptable form of steaks, butter, foul and turnips. The whole elaborate structure of money and credit seemed to disappear overnight like some tenuous stream. The frenzied actions of the human beings had no effect on the grass. The salt bands still stood in violet as did smaller counterparts hastily laid around the earlier of the seed-borne growth but everywhere else the grass swept ahead like a tidal wave. Its speed seemingly increased by the months of repression behind. It swallowed San Diego in a gulp and leaped beyond the United States to take in Baja California in one swift downward lick. It sprang upon the deserts whose lack of water was no deterrent, now always sending little groups ahead like paratroopers or fifth columnists. They established positions till the main body came up and consolidated them. It curled up the high mountains leaving only the snow on their peaks unmolested and it jumped over struggling rivers with the dexterity of a girl playing hopscotch. It lunged eastward into Arizona and Nevada. It swarmed north up the San Joaquin Valley through Fresno and spilled over the lip of the High Sierras toward Lake Tahoe. New Los Angeles, its back protected by the Salton Sea was like the original one subjected to a pincer movement which strangled the promising life from it before it was two years old. Forced to move again, LaFascissie characteristically demanded the burden fall upon the employees of the paper, paying them off in script on the poor excuse that no money was available. I saw no future in staying with this sinking ship and eager to be back at the center of things. Flees wrote me that the large stock of Pemmican which had been accumulating without buyers could now be very profitably disposed of. I severed my connection for the second time with the intelligencer and returned to my proper sphere. This, of course, did not mean that I failed to follow each step of the grass. Such a course would have been quite impossible since its every move affected the life and fortune of every citizen. By some strange freak, it spared the entire coast north of Santa Barbara. Whether it had some disinclination to approach saltwater, it had been notably slow in its original advance westward, or whether it was sheer accident, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, and San Francisco remained untouched as the cities to the south and east were buried under grassy avalanches. This odd mercy raised queer hopes in some. Perhaps their town or their state would be saved. The prostration of the country which had begun with the first wave of panic could not be allowed to continue. The government moved in and seized first the banks and then the railroads. Abandoned real estate was declared forfeit and opened to homesteading. Prices were pegged and farmers forced to pay taxes and produce. Although these measures restored a similitude of life to the nation, it remained but a feeble limitation of its previous self. Many of the idle factories failed to reopen, others moved with painful caution. Goods, already scarce, disappeared almost completely and at the same time a reckless disregard of formerly sacred symbols seized upon the people. The grass was coming, so what good was the lot on which they were paying instalments? The grass was coming, so why gather together the dollars to meet the interest on the mortgage? The grass was coming. What was the use of depositing money in the bank which would probably go bust tomorrow? The inflation would have been worse had it not been for the pegged prices and other stern measures. The glut on the labour market was tremendous and wages reached the vanishing point in a currency which would buy little. Suddenly the United States which had so long boasted of being the richest country in the world found itself desperately poor. Government work projects did little to relieve the suffering of the proletariat. Deaths from malnutrition mounted and the feeble strikes in a few operating industries were easily and quickly crushed by starving strike breakers, ashamed of their deed yet desperately eager to feed their hungry families. Riots broke out in New York and Detroit, but the police were fortunately well fed and the arms wielding the blackjacks which crushed the skulls of the undernourished rioters were stout. There was a sweeping revival of organised religion and men too broke to afford the neighborhood movie flot to the churches. Brother Paul now on a national hookup repeated his exhortations to all Christians urging them to join their saviour in the midst of the grass. There was great agitation for restraining him. More reserved pastors pointed out that he was responsible for increasing the national suicide rate, but the Federal Communications Commission took no action against him, possibly because as some said, it was cheaper to let a percentage of the surplus population find an ecstatic death than to feed it. On political maps, the United States had lost not one foot of territory. Population statistics showed it harboured as many men, women and children as before. Not one tenth of the national wealth had been destroyed by the grass or a sixth of the country given up to it, yet it had done what seven wars and many vicissitudes had failed to do. It brought the country to the nadir of its existence to a hopeless despondency, unknown at Valley Forge. At this desperate point, the Federal Government decided it could no longer temporise with a clamour for using atomic power against the grass. All the arguments so weighty at first became insignificant against the insolent facts. It was announced in a Washington press conference that as soon as arrangements could be made, the most fearful of all weapons would be employed. End of Chapter 4 Part A. Chapter 4, 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 4, Part B. No one doubted the atomic bomb would do the trick finally and conclusively. The searing volcanic heat, irresistible penetration, efficient destructiveness, and the aftermath of apocalyptic radiation promised the end of the grass. When I say no one, of course I mean no clear-thinking person of vision with his feet on the ground who didn't go deliberately out of his way to look for the dark side of things. Naturally there were crackpots, as there always are, who opposed the use of the bomb for various untenable reasons, and among them I was not surprised to find Miss Francis. Though her pessimistic and unpopular opinions have been discredited time and again, the newspapers, possibly to enliven their now perpetually gloomy columns with a little humor, gave some space to interviews which, with variations predicated on editorial policy, ran something like this. Will you tell our readers what you think of using the atomic bomb against the grass? I think it at the very best a waste of time. At the worst, extremely dangerous. In what way, Miss Francis? In every way. Did you ever hear of a chain reaction young man or radioactivity? Can you conceive, among other possibilities, in mind this is merely a possibility, a quite unscientific guess merely advanced in the vain hope of avoiding one more folly of the whole mass becoming radioactive, squaring or cubing its speed of growth or perhaps throwing before it a lethal band miles wide? Mind you, I'm not anticipating any of this, not even saying it is a probability, but these or similar hazards may well attend this ill-considered venture. You speak strongly, Miss Francis. None of the rather fantastic things you predict follow to Roshima Nagasaki or Bikini. In the first place, I tried with apparent unsuccess to make it clear I'm not predicting. I am merely mentioning possibilities. In the second place, we don't know exactly what were the after-effects of the previous bombs because of a general inability to correlate cause and effect. I only know that in every case the use of the atomic bomb has been followed at greater or lesser intervals by tidal waves, earthquakes, and other natural phenomena. Now, do not quote me as saying the Hilo tidal wave was the result of the Nagasaki bomb or the Chicago earthquake, the Bikini, for I didn't. I only point out that they followed at roughly equal intervals. Then you are opposed to the bomb. Common senses, not that that will be a deterrent. What would you substitute for it? If I had a counter-agent to the grass ready, I would not be wasting time talking to reporters. I am working on one. When it is found by me or another, it will be a true counter-agent, changing the very structure and habit of synodondactylon as a metamorphizer changed it originally. External weapons, by definition, can at best, at the very best, merely stop the grass, not render it innocuous. Equals fighting equals produce only deadlocks. And so on, the few reputable scientists who contestended to answer her at all and didn't treat her views with dignified silence quickly demonstrated the absurdity of her objections. Chain reactions and radioactive advance guard, Sunday supplement stuff without the slightest basis of reasoning, not a mathematical symbol or laboratory experiment to back up these fictional nightmares, and not use external weapons, indeed. Was the grass to be hypnotized, then, or made to change its behavior patterns through judicious sessions with psychoanalysts stationed along its periphery? Whether because of Miss Francis' prophecies or not, it would be futile to deny that a certain amount of trepidation accompanied the decision to use the bomb. Residents of Arizona wanted it dropped in California. San Franciscans urged the poetic justice and great utility of applying it to the very spot where the growth originated. All were in favor of the devastation at the farthest possible distance from themselves. Partly in response to this pressure, and partly in consideration of other factors, including the possibility of international repercussions, the Commission to Combat Dangerous Vegetation decided on one of the least awesome bombs in the catalog. Just a little bomb, hardly more than a toy, a play thing, the very smallest practicable, ought to all lay off fears and set everyone's mind at rest. If it were effective, a bigger one could be employed, or numbers of smaller ones. This much being settled, there was still the question of where to initiate the attack, edge or heart. Once more there was controversy, but it lacked the enthusiasm remembered by veterans of the salt argument. A certain lassitude and debate was evident as though too much excitement had been dissipated on earlier hopes, leaving none for this one. There was little grumbling or soreness when the decision was finally confirmed to let fall the bomb on what had been Long Beach. When I read of the elaborate preparations being made to cover the great event of the special writers, experts, broadcasters, cameramen, I was thankful indeed I was no longer a newspaper man arbitrarily to be ordered aloft or sent aboard some erratic craft offshore on the bare chance I might catch a comprehensive or distinctive enough glance of the action to repay an editor for my discomfort. Instead, I sat contentedly in my apartment and listened to the radio. Whether our expectations have been too high or whether all the eyewitnesses became simultaneously inept, I must say the spot broadcast and later newspaper and magazine accounts were uniformly disappointing. It was like the hundredth repetition of an often told story. The flash, the chaos, the mushroom cloud, the reverberation were all in precise order, nothing new, nothing startling. And I imagine the rest of the country as I did turned away from the radio with a distinct feeling of having been let down. First observation through telescope and by airplanes keeping a necessarily cautious distance showed the bomb had destroyed a patch of vegetation about as large as had been expected. Though not spectacular, the bombing had apparently been effective on a comparatively small segment and it was anticipated that as soon as it was safe to come close and confirm this, the action would be repeated on a larger scale. While hundreds more of the baby bombs as they were now affectionately called were ordered and preparations made systematically to blast the grass out of existence, the aerial observers kept swooping in closer and closer with their cameras trained to catch every aspect of the damage. There was no doubt an area of approximately four square miles had been utterly cleaned of the weed and a further zone nine times that size had been smashed and driven, the grass there torn and mangled in all probability deprived of life. Successive reconnoitering showed no changes in the annihilated center, but on the 10th day after the explosion a most startling observation of the peripheral region was made. It had turned a brilliant orange, not a brown or yellow or any of the various shades of decay which Bermuda in its original form took on at times but a glowing and unearthly jewel-like blaze. The strange color was strictly confined to the devastated edge of the bomb crater. Airmen flying low could see its distinction from the rest of the mass clear and sharp, in the center nothing, around it the weird orange and beyond the usual and accustomed green. But on second look, not quite usual, not quite accustomed. The inoculated grass had always been a shade or two more intense than ordinary synodondactylon. This, just beyond the orange, was still more brilliant. Not only that but it behaved unaccountably. It writhed and spumed upward in great clumps culminating in enormous overhanging caps inevitably suggesting the mushroom cloud of the bomb. The grass had always been cautious of the sea. Now the dazzling growth plunged into the saltwater with frenzy leaping and building upon itself. Great masses of vegetation, piers, causeways, and ismuses of grass offered the illusion of growing out of the ocean bottom linking themselves to the land extending too late the lost coast far out into the Pacific. But this was far from the last after effect. Though attention had naturally been diverted from the orange band to the eccentric behavior of the contiguous grass, it did not go unobserved in about a week after its first change of color it seemed to be losing its unnatural hue and turning green again. Not the green of the great mass nor of the queer periphery nor of uninspired devil grass. It was a green, unknown and living plant before. A glassy, translucent green. The green of a cathedral window in the moonlight. By contrast, the widening circle about it seems subdued and orderly. The fantastic shapes, the tortured writhings, the unnatural extensions into the ocean were no longer manifest. Instead, for miles around the ravaged spot where the bomb had been dropped the grass burst into bloom. Purple flowers appeared. Not the usual muddy brown faintly mauve but a red violet, brilliant and clear. The period of generation was abnormally shortened. Seed was born almost instantly. But the seed was a sport. It did not droop and detach itself and sink into the ground. Instead, tufted and fluffy like dandelion seeds or thistle down it floated upward in incredible quantities so that for hundreds of miles the sky was obscured by this cloud bearing the germ of the inoculated grass. It drifted easily and the winds blew it beyond the confines of the creeping parent. It lit on spots far from the threatening advance and sprouted overnight into great clumps of devil grass. All the anxiety and panic which had gone before was trivial in the face of this new threat. Now the advance was no longer calculable or predictable. At any moment a spot apparently beyond danger might be threatened and attacked. Immediately men remembered the exotic growth of flowers which came up to hide some of London's scars after the blitz and the lush plant life observed in Hiroshima. Why hadn't the all wise scientists remembered and taken them into account before the bomb was dropped? Why had they been blind to this obvious danger? Fortunately the anger and terror were assuaged. Observers soon discovered the mutants were sterile incapable of reproduction. More than that, though the new clumps spread and flourished and grew rapidly they lacked the tenacity and stamina of the parent. Eventually they withered and dwindled and were in the end no different from the uninoculated grass. Now a third change was seen in the color band. The green turned distinctly blue and the sharp line between it and the rest of the weed vanished as the blueness shaded out imperceptibly over miles into the green. The barren spot made by the bomb was covered. The whole mass of vegetation, thousands of square miles of it was animated by a searching new vigor so that eastward and southward the rampant tentacles jumped to capture and occupy great new swaths of territory. Triumphantly brother Paul castigated the bombardiers and urged repentance for the blasphemy to avert further well-deserved punishment. Grudgingly one or two papers recalled Miss Francis's warning. Churches opened their doors on special days of humiliation and fasting, but for most of the people there was a general feeling of relief. The ultimate in weapons have been used. The grass would wear itself out in good time. Meanwhile they were thankful the effect of the atomic bomb had been no worse. If anything the spirit of the country despite the great setback was better after the dropping of the bomb than before. I was so fascinated by the entire episode that I stayed by my radio practically all my waking hours much to the distress of button fleas. Every report, every scrap of news interested me. So it was that I caught an item in a newscast probably unheard by most or smiled aside if heard. Red egg, organ of the Russian poultry farmers editorialized, a certain imperialist nation unscrupulously pilfering the technical advance of Soviet science is using atomic power contrary to international law. This is intolerable to a peace loving people embracing one sixth of the earth's surface and the poultrymen of the collective little red father have unanimously protested against such capitalist aggression which can only be directed against the Soviet Union. The following day, red star agreed. On the next, Pravda reviewed the threatening situation. Two days later, Izvestia devoted a column to blackmail Peter the Great, Suvorov and imperialist slinus. 24 hours after the ministerial council of the Union of Soviet republics declared a state of war existed through no action of its own between the United States and the Soviet Union. At first the people were incredulous. They could not believe the radio reports were anything but a ghastly mistake and accidental garbling produced by atmospheric conditions. Historians had told them from their school days of traditional Russian American friendship. The Russian fleet came to the Atlantic coast in 1862 to escape revolutionary infection, but the Americans innocently took it as a gesture of solidarity in the Civil War. The Communist Party had repeated with the monotony of a popular hymn tune at a revival that the Soviet Union asked only to be let alone, that it had no belligerent designs, that it was, as Lincoln said of the modest farmer, desirous only of the land that jines mine. At no point were the two nations' territories contiguous. Agitators were promptly jailed for saying the Soviet Union wasn't, if it ever had been, a socialist country. Its imperialism stemming directly from its rejection of the socialist idea. As a great imperialist power bursting with natural resources, it must inevitably conflict with the other great imperialist power. In our might we had done what we could to thwart Russian ambition. Now they seized the opportunity to disable a rival. Congressman and senator shredded the air of their respective chambers with screams of outrage. In every speech, stab in the back found an honorable, if monotonous place. Zadanov, boss of the Soviet Union since the death of the sainted Stalin, answered gruffly, war is no minuet. We do not wait for the capitalist pigs to bow politely before we rise to defend the heritage of Tsar Ivan and our own dear, glorious, inspiring, venerated Stalin. Stab in the back. We will stab the fascist lackeys of Morgan Rockefeller and Jack and Hines in whatever portion of the anatomy they present to us. As usual, the recurring prophets who hold their sands as between hostilities and invariably predict a quick decisive war. In 1861 they gave it six weeks. In 1914 they gave it six weeks. In 1941 they gave it six weeks. We're proved wrong. They had been overwhelmingly sure this time. Rockets, guided missiles or great fleets of planes would sweep across the skies and devastate the belligerents within three hours of the declaration of war, which of course would be dispensed with. Not a building would remain intact in the great cities, nor hardly a civilian alive. But three hours after Elmer Davis, heading an immediately revived office of war information, announced the news in his famous monotone, New York and Chicago and Seattle, were still standing. And so three days later were Moscow and Leningrad and Vladivostok. Astonishment and unbelief were nationwide. The Empire State, the Palmolok building, the Mark Hopkins, all still intact? Only when commentators rummaging nervously among old manuscripts recalled the solemn gentleman's agreement never to use heavier than aircraft of any description should the unthinkable war come, did the public give a heartfelt sigh of relief. Of course. Both the Soviet Union and the United States were nations of unstained honor, and rather than recall their pledged word, would have suffered the loss of a dozen wars. Everyone breathed easier, necks relaxed from the strain of scanning the skies. There would be neither bombs, rockets, nor guided missiles in this war. As soon as the conviction was established that the country was safe from the memory of Hiroshima, panic gave place to relief, and for the first time some of the old spirit was manifest. There was no rush to recruiting stations, but selective service operating smoothly except in the extreme west, took care of mobilization and the war was accepted, if not with enthusiasm, at least as an inescapable fate. The coming of the grass had not depleted nor unbalanced the country's resources beyond readjustment, but it had upset the sensitive workings of the national economy. This was tolerable by a sick land and the grass had made the nation sick in peacetime, but war is the health of the state and the president moved quickly. All large industries were immediately seized as were the mines and means of transportation. A basic 55-hour work week was imposed, a new chief of staff and of naval operations was appointed and the young men went off to camp to train either for implementing or repelling invasion. Then came a period of quiet during which both countries attacked each other ferociously over the radio. End of chapter four, part B.