36. 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 brokenwindowed
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 had 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 Gwynnet Fles. In appearance
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
forbore, generously, to press my advantage, but made him
vicepresident 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 1/2,
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 1/16. We made no fortunes on this transaction,
but I was enabled 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 Gootes and myself, parachute landings had 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 snail's pace, tramped wonderingly
over the tamed menace.
My thought then, as I explained to Fles, 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 candybar. We made no profit,
but we suffered no loss and the factory was in 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, its theaters
and its great human drama. Give me the old Times Square
and the East Fifties any day and you can keep Death Valley and
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 Le ffaçasé 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 didnt 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 Intelligencer I doubt if I gave it
more than a minute's thought a day.
37. The band of salt remained an impregnable
bulwark. Where the winter rains leached it, new tons
of the mineral replaced those washed away. Constant observation
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 rains 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, Mar 7. (AP) An unusual patch of
Bermuda grass discovered growing in one of the
city parks' 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 over ran 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 LEFFACASE.
I knew from the fact he had only used nine of the ten
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; a succession
of petty annoyances had driven me almost to a nervous
breakdown and a 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 pemmican 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
pouterpigeoned 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 acknowledgment
that no further consignments of pemmican
would be accepted until the situation became more settled.
I left their offices in a thoughtful mood. Pausing only to wire
Fles 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 Le ffaçasé 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.
"Ah, Weener, as you yourself would undoubtedly put it in
your inimitable way, a bad penny always turns up. I could not
say canis revertit suam vomitem, for it would invert a relationship—the
puke has returned to the dog.
"It is a sad thought that the listless exercise which eventuated
in your begetting was indulged in by two whose genes and
chromosomes united to produce a male rather than a female
child. For think, Weener, if you had been born a woman, with
what gusto would you have peddled your flaccid flesh upon the
city streets and offered your miserable dogsbody to the reluctant
use of undiscriminating customers. You are the paradigmatic
whore, Weener, and I weep for the physiological accident
which condemns you to sell your servility rather than
your vulva. Ah, Weener, 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 triplelock the pettycash,
to count the stampmoney diligently, to watch all checks for
inept forgery. Welcome back to the Intelligencer 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 unwholesomelooking
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 expensemoney
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 little doubt the new grass was
an extension of the old and it didnt 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 Intelligencer.
The first question which occurred to those of us calm enough
to escape panic was, how had the weed jumped the saltband?
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 voracity 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 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 stockmarket crashed, and I congratulated myself on
having sent Fles 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 threequarters of a century the
farmer was topdog; 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 citydwellers his appetite
for manufactured articles and for luxuries was insatiable; their
automobiles, furcoats, costumejewelry, washingmachines, files
of the National Geographic, and their periodfurniture left the
city flat for the farm, to come back in the more acceptable form
of steaks, butter, fowl, and turnips. The whole elaborate structure
of money and credit seemed to disappear overnight like
some tenuous dream.
The frenzied actions of the humanbeings had no effect on
the grass. The saltband still stood inviolate, as did smaller
counterparts hastily laid around the earlier of the seedborne
growths, but everywhere else the grass swept ahead like a tidalwave,
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 fifthcolumnists; 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, Le ffaçasé characteristically demanded
the burden fall upon the employees of the paper, paying
them off in scrip 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—Fles 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 realestate was declared forfeit and opened
to homesteading. Prices were pegged and farmers forced to
pay taxes in produce.
Although these measures restored a similitude of life to the
nation, it remained but a feeble imitation 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
installments? 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
labor 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 the few operating industries were easily and
quickly crushed by starving strikebreakers 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
wellfed and the arms wielding the blackjacks which
crushed the skulls of the undernourished rioters were stout.
There was a sweeping revival of organized religion and men
too broke to afford the neighborhood movie flocked to the
churches. Brother Paul, now on a national hookup, repeated
his exhortations to all Christians, urging them to join their
Savior 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 harbored 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 temporize with the clamor 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 pressconference that as soon as
arrangements could be made the most fearful of all weapons
would be employed.
38. No one doubted the atomicbomb
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 clearthinking person
of vision with his feet on the ground who didnt 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 had 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 atom
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—and
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 illconsidered
venture.
You speak strongly, Miss Francis. None of the rather fantastic
things you predict followed Hiroshima, 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 aftereffects 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
Chicagku earthquake, the Bikini; for I didnt. I only point out
that they followed at roughly equal intervals.
Then you are opposed to the bomb?
Common sense is. Not that that will be a deterrent.
What would you substitute for it?
If I had a counteragent 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 counteragent,
changing the very structure and habit of Cynodon dactylon
as the 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 condescended
to answer her at all and didnt treat her views with dignified
silence quickly demonstrated the absurdity of her objections.
Chainreactions and radioactive advanceguard! Sundaysupplement
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 behaviorpatterns through judicious sessions with
psychoanalysts stationed along its periphery?
Whether because of Miss Francis' prophesies 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 catalogue.
Just a little bomb—hardly more than a toy, a plaything,
the very smallest practicable—ought to allay all 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 in 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
newspaperman, 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 had 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 oftentold story. The flash, the chaos,
the mushroomcloud, 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 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 riven, the grass
there torn and mangled—in all probability deprived of life.
Successive reconnoitering showed no changes in the annihilated
center, but on the tenth 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, jewellike blaze.
The strange color was strictly confined to the devastated
edge of the bombcrater; 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 Cynodon dactylon; 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 mushroomcloud 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, isthmuses 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 aftereffect. Though attention
had naturally been diverted from the orange band to the eccentric
behavior of the contiguous grass, it did not go unobserved
and 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 devilgrass. It was a green unknown in living
plant before; a glassy, translucent green, the green of a cathedral
window in the moonlight. By contrast, the widening circle
about it seemed 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 redviolet, brilliant and
clear. The period of generation was abnormally shortened;
seed was borne 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 seed or thistledown,
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 devilgrass.
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 plantlife observed in Hiroshima. Why hadnt the
allwise 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 surging 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 welldeserved
punishment. Grudgingly, one or two papers recalled
Miss Francis' 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 had been used; the grass would wear itself out in
good time; meanwhile, they were thankful the effect of the
atomicbomb 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 Fles. 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
1/6 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, Suvarov
and Imperialist Slyness." Twentyfour 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.
39. At first the people were incredulous.
They could not believe the radio reports were anything but a
ghastly mistake, an accidental garbling produced by atmospheric
conditions. Historians had told them from their schooldays
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 hymntune 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
wasnt—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.
Congressmen and senators shredded the air of their respective
chambers with screams of outrage. In every speech, "Stab
in the back" found an honorable if monotonous place. Zhadanov,
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 Czar 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 Heinze in whatever
portion of the anatomy they present to us."
As usual, the recurring prophets who hold their seances
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—were proved wrong.
They had been overweeningly 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 Palmolive Building, the Mark Hopkins—all still
intact? Only when commentators, rummaging nervously
among old manuscripts, recalled the solemn gentlemen's
agreement never to use heavierthanaircraft 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 recruitingstations, but selectiveservice,
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 fiftyfivehour workweek
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.
40. In the socialistic orgy of nationalizing
business, I was fortunate; Consolidated Pemmican and
Allied Concentrates was left in the hands of private initiative.
Better than that, it had not been tied down and made helpless
by the multiplicity of regulations hampering the few types of
endeavor remaining nominally free of regimenting bureaucracy.
Opportunity, long prepared for and not, I trust, undeserved,
was before me.
In the pass to which our country had come it seemed to me
I could be of most service supplying our armed forces with
fieldrations. Such an unselfish and patriotic desire one would
think easy of realization—as I so innocently did—and I immediately
began interviewing numberless officers of the Quartermaster's
Department to further this worthy aim.
I certainly believe every corporation must have its rules,
otherwise executives would be besieged all day by timewasters.
The United States government is surely a corporation, as I
always used to say in advocating election of a business administration,
and standard procedures and regulations are essential.
Still, there ought to be a limit to the number and length
of questionnaires to fill out and the number of underlings to
interview before a serious businessman can get to see a responsible
official.
After making three fruitless trips to Washington and getting
exhaustively familiar with countless tantalizing waitingrooms,
I became impatient. The man I needed to see was a Brigadier
General Thario, but after wasting valuable days and hours I
was no nearer reaching him than in the beginning. I had filled
out the necessary forms and stated the nature of my business
so often I began to be alarmed lest my hand refuse to write
anything else and I be condemned for the rest of my life to
repeat the idiotic phrases called for in the blank spaces.
I am afraid I must have raised my voice in expressing my
exasperation to the young lady who acted as receptionist and
barrier. At any rate she looked startled, and I think pressed
a button on her desk. A pinkfaced, whitemustached gentleman
came hastily through the door behind her. The jacket of his
uniform fitted snugly at the waist and his bald head was sunburnt
and shiny.
"What's this? What's this? ... going on here?"
I saw the single star on his shoulderstraps and ventured,
"General Thario?"
He hid his white mustache with a forefinger pink as his
cheeks. "Yes. Yes. But you must have an appointment to speak
to me. That's the rule, you know. Must have an appointment."
He appeared extremely nervous and harassed, his eyes darting
back to the refuge of his office, but he was evidently held to the
spot by whatever distress animated his receptionist.
"General Thario," I persisted firmly, "I quite appreciate
your viewpoint, but I have been trying for days to get such an
appointment with you on a matter of vital concern and I have
been put off every time by what I can only describe as redtape.
I am sorry to say so, General Thario, but I must repeat, redtape."
He looked more worried than before and his eyes ranged
over the room for some escape. "Know just how you feel," he
muttered, "Know just how you feel. Horrible stuff. Swaddled
in it here. Simply swaddled in it. Strangled." He cleared his
throat as though to disembarrass it of a garrote. "But, uh, hang
it, Mr—"
"Weener. Albert Weener. President of Consolidated Pemmican
and Allied Concentrates Incorporated."
"—Well, you know, Mr. Weener ... man your position
... appreciate absolute necessity certain amount of routine
... keep the cranks out, otherwise swarming with
them, simply swarming ... wartime precautions ... must
excuse me now ... terribly rushed ... glad to have met—"
Swallowing the rest of the sentence and putting his hand
over his mouth lest he should inadvertently regurgitate it, he
started for his office. "General Thario," I pleaded, "a moment.
Consider our positions reversed. I have long since established
my identity, my responsibility. I want nothing for myself; I am
here doing a patriotic duty. Surely enough of the routine you
mention has been complied with to permit me to speak to you
for five or ten minutes. Do for one moment as I say, General,
and put yourself in my place. Think of the discouragement
you as a citizen would feel to be hampered, perhaps more than
is necessary."
He took his hand down from his mouth and looked at me
out of blue eyes so pale as to be almost colorless. "But hang it,
you know, Mr Weener ... highly irregular. Sympathize
completely, but consider ... don't like being put in such a
position ... why don't you come back in the morning?"
"General," I urged, flushed with victory, "give me ten minutes
now."
He collapsed. "Know just how you feel ... wanted to be
out in the field myself ... no desk soldier ... lot of nonsense
if you ask me. Come in, come in."
In his office I explained the sort of contract I was anxious
to secure and assured him of my ability to fulfill its terms. But
I could see his mind was not intent upon the specifications for
fieldrations. Looking up occasionally from a dejected study of
his knees, he kept inquiring, in elliptical, practically verbless
questions, how many men my plant employed, whether I had
a satisfactory manager and if a knowledge of chemistry was
essential to the manufacture of concentrates; evading or discussing
in the vaguest terms the actual business in hand.
However, he seemed very friendly and affable toward me
personally once the chill air of the waitingroom had been left
behind and as Button Fles had advised me insistently to entertain
without regard to expense any officials with whom I came
in contact, I thought it politic to invite him to dinner. He
demurred at first, but at length accepted, instructing his secretary
to phone his wife not to expect him home early. I suggested
Mrs Thario join us, but he shook his head, muttering,
"No place for women, Mr Weener, no place for women."
Whether this referred to Washington or the restaurant where
we were going or to his life largely was not clear.
Wartime Washington was in its usual chaotic turmoil and
it was impossible to get a taxi, so we had to walk. But the general
did not seem at all averse to the exercise. It seemed to me
he rather enjoyed returning the salutes with the greatest
punctilio and flourish. On our way we came to one of the
capital's most famous taverns and I thought I detected a hesitancy
in his stride.
Now I am not a drinking man myself. I limit my imbibing
to an occasional glass of beer on account of the yeast it contains,
which I consider beneficial. I hope, however, I am no
prig or puritan and so I asked casually if he would care to stop
in for an appetizer.
"Well, now you mention it, Mr Weener ... hum ...
fact is ... don't mind if I do."
While I confined myself to my medicinal beverage the general
conducted a most remarkable raid on the bar. As I have
hinted, he was in demeanor a mild appearing, if not indeed a
timid man. In the course of an hour's conversation no word of
profanity, such as is affected by many military men, had crossed
his lips. The framed photograph of his wife and daughters on
his desk and his respectful references to women indicated he
was not the type of soldier who lusts for rapine. But seated
before that dull mahogany bar, whatever inhibitions, whatever
conventional shackles, whatever selfdenials and repressions
had been inculcated fell from him swiftly and completely. He
barked his orders at the bartender, who seemed to know him
very well, as though he were addressing a parade formation of
badly disciplined troops.
Not only did General Thario drink enormously, but he
broke all the rules I had ever heard laid down about drinking.
He began with a small, squat glass, which I believe is called an
Oldfashioned glass, containing half cognac and half ryewhisky.
He followed this with a tall tumbler—"twelve full ounces ...
none of your eightounce thimbles ... not trifled with"—of
champagne into which the bartender, upon his instructions
and under his critical eye, poured two jiggers of tropical rum.
Then he wiped his lips with a handkerchief pulled from his
sleeve and began with a serious air on a combination of benedictine
and tequila. The more he imbibed, the longer, more
complete and more coherent his sentences became. He dropped
his harassed air; his abdomen receded, his chest expanded,
bringing to my notice for the first time the rows of ribbons
which confirmed his earlier assertion that he was not a desk
soldier.
He was sipping curaçao liberally laced with applejack when
he suggested we have our dinner sent in rather than leave
this comfortable spot. "The fact of the matter is, Mr Weener—I'm
going to call you Albert if you don't mind—"
I said I didnt mind with all the heartiness at my command.
"The fact of the matter is, Albert, I have devoted my unfortunate
life to two arts: the military and the potatory. As you
may have noticed, most of the miserable creatures on the
wrong side of a bar adopt one of two reprehensible courses:
either they treat drinking as though the aim of blending liquids
were to imitate some French chef's fiddlefaddle—a dash
of bitters, a squirt of orange, an olive, cherry, or onion
wrenched from its proper place in the saladbowl, a twist of
lemonpeel, sprig of mint or lump of sugar and an eyedropperful
of whisky; or else they embrace the opposite extreme of
vulgarity and gulp whatever rotgut is thrust at them to addle
their undiscerning brains and atrophy their undiscriminating
palates. Either practice is foreign to my nature and philosophy.
I believe the happiest combinations of liquors are simple ones,
containing no more than two ingredients, each of which
should be noble—that is to say, drinkable in its own right."
He raised his fresh glass, containing brandy and arrack. "No
doubt you have observed a catholicity in my taste; I range
through the whole gamut from usquebaugh to sake, though
during the present conflict for obvious patriotic reasons, I
cross vodka from my list, while as a man born south of the
Mason-Dixon Line, sir, I leave gin to Nigras."
I must say, though somewhat startled by his manner of
imbibing, I was inclined to like General Thario, but I was
impatient to discuss the matter of a contract for Consolidated
Pemmican. Every time I attempted to bring the subject round
to it he waved me grandly aside. "Dinner," he confirmed,
when the waiters brought in their trays. "Yes; no drink is complete
without a little bit of the right food to garnish it. Eating
in moderation I approve of; but mark my words, Albert, the
man who takes a meal on an empty stomach is digging his grave
with his teeth."
If he would not talk business I could only hope his amiability
would carry over till I saw him again in his office tomorrow.
I settled down as far as I could, simply to enjoy his company.
"You may have been surprised at my referring to my life as
unfortunate, Albert, but it is a judicious adjective. Vilely
unfortunate. I come of a military family, you know; you will
find footnotes mentioning the Tharios in the history of every
war this country has had."
He finished what was in his glass. "My misfortunes, like
Tristram Shandy's, began before my birth—and in the same
way, exactly the same way. My father was a scholar and a gentleman
who dreamed his life away over the campaigns of the
great captains instead of attempting to become a great captain
himself. I do not condemn him for this: the organization of
the army is such as to encourage impracticality and inadvertence,
but the consequences were unfortunate for me. He
named me after his favorite heroes, Stuart Hannibal Ireton
Thario, and so aloof was he from the vulgarities of everyday
life that it was not until my monogram was ordered painted
upon my first piece of luggage that the unfortunate combination
of my initials was noted. Hannibal and Ireton promptly
suppressed in the interests of decency, nevertheless at West
Point my surname was twisted by fellow classmates into Lothario,
giving it a connotation quite foreign to my nature.
I lived down both vexations only to encounter a third. Though
Ireton remained successfully concealed, the Hannibal leaked
out and when, during the World War, I had the misfortune
to lead a company which was decimated"—his hand strayed to
the ribbons on his chest—"behind my back the enlistedmen
called me Cannibal Thario."
He began discussing another drink. "Of one thing I'm resolved:
my son shall not suffer as I have suffered. I did not send
him to West Point so he might win decorations on the field of
valor and then be shunted off to sit behind an unsoldierly
desk. I broke with tradition when I kept him from a military
career, quite on purpose, just as I was thinking of his welfare
and not some silly foible of my own when I called him by the
simplest name I could find."
"What is your son's name?" I was constrained to ask.
"George," he answered proudly, "George Thario. There is
no nickname for George as far as I know."
"And he's not in the army now?" I queried, more in politeness
than interest.
"No, and I don't intend he shall be." The general's pink
face grew pinker with his vehemence. "Albert, there are plenty
of dunderheads and duffers like me in the country who are
good for nothing better than cannonfodder. Let them go and
be killed. I'm willing enough—only an idiotic General Staff has
booted me into the Quartermaster Corps for which I am no
more fitted than to run an academy for lady marines—but I'm
not willing for a fine sensitive boy, a talented musician like
George to suffer the harsh brutalities of a trainingcamp and
battlefield."
"The draft ..." I began tentatively.
"If George had a civilian position in an essential industry—say
one holding a contract with the army for badly needed
fieldrations...."
"I should like to meet your son," I said. "I have been looking
around for some time for a reliable manager...."
"George might consider it." General Thario squinted his
glass against the light. "I'll have him stop by your hotel tomorrow."
The little radio behind the bar, which had been mumbling
to itself for hours, spoke loudly. "We interrupt this program
to bring you a newsflash: Eire has declared war on the Soviet
Union. I repeat, war has been declared on the Union of Soviet
Republics by Eire. Keep tuned to this station for further
details. We return you now to our regular program."
There was an absent pattering of applause and General
Thario stood up gravely, glass in hand. "Gallant little Eire—or,
if I may be permitted once the indulgence of using the good
old name we know and love so well—brave old Ireland. When
the world was at war, despite every provocation, she stayed
peaceful. Now that the world is disgracefully pacific—and you
have all heard foreign ministers unanimously declaring their
countries neutral—so fast did they rush to the microphones
that they were still panting when they went on the air—when
the whole world was cautious, Ireland, true to her traditions,
joined the just cause. Gentlemen, I give you our fighting ally,
Eire."
Departing from his usual custom, he drank the toast in one
gulp, but no one else in the room paid any attention. I considered
this lack of enthusiasm for a courageous gesture quite
unworthy and meditated for a moment on the insensitivity
into which our people seemed to have sunk.
As the evening went on, the general grew more and more
affable and, if possible, less and less reticent. He had, he assured
me, been the constant victim, either of men or of circumstances.
At the military academy he had trained for the cavalry
only to find himself assigned to the tank corps. He had reconciled
himself, pursued his duties with zeal, and was shunted
off to the infantry, where, swallowing chagrin, he had led his
men bravely into a crossfire from machineguns. For this he
got innumerable decorations and a transfer to the Quartermaster's
Department. His marriage to the daughter of an influential
politician should have assured peacetime promotion,
but the nuptials coincided with an election depriving the
family's party of power.
Now another war had come and he was a mere brigadier
pigeonholed in an unimportant office with juniors broadly
hinting at his retirement while classmates were leading divisions
and even army corps to glorious victory on the field of
battle. At least, they would have been leading them to glorious
victory if there had been any action at all.
"Invade," insisted General Thario, becoming sufficiently
stirred by his fervor to lapse into sober incoherence. "Invade
them before they invade us. Aircraft out ... gentlemen's
agreement ... quite understand ... well ... landingbarges
... Bering Sea ... strike south ... shuttle transports
... drive left wing TransSiberian ... holding operation
by right and center ... abc ..."
No doubt it was a pity he was deprived of the opportunity to
try these tactics. I was one of the few who had not become a
military theoretician upon the outbreak of the war, but to my
lay mind his plan sounded feasible. Nevertheless, I was more
interested in the possible contract for food concentrates than
in any strategy, no matter how brilliant. I'm afraid I showed
my boredom, for the general abruptly declared it was time to
go home.
41. I was a little dubious that after all
the drinking and confidences he would remember to send his
son around, and to tell the truth, in the calm morning, I felt
I would not be too sorry if he didnt, for he had not given me a
very high opinion of that young man. What on earth Consolidated
Pemmican could do with a musician and a draftevader
as generalmanager—even if the title, as it must be, were purely
honorary—I couldnt imagine.
I had been long up, shaved and breakfasted and had attended
to my correspondence, before the telephone rang and
George Thario announced himself at my disposal.
He was what people call a handsome young man. That is, he
was big and burly and slow and his eyelashes were perceptible.
His hair was short and he wore no hat, but lounged about the
room with his hands, thumbs out, in his jacketpockets, looking
at me vaguely through the curling smoke from a bent pipe.
I had never seen anyone look less like a musician and I began
to wonder if his father had been serious in so describing him.
"I don't like it," he announced abruptly.
"Don't like what, Mr Thario?" I inquired.
"Joe to you," he corrected. "Mister from you to me belies
our prospective relationship. Just call me Joe."
"I thought your name was George."
"Baptismal—whim of the Old Man's. But it's a stuffy label—no
shortening it, you know, so the fellows all call me Joe.
Chummier. Don't like the idea of evading the draft. Shows a
lack of moral courage. By rights I ought to be a conchie, but
that would just about kill the Old Lady. She's in a firstclass
uproar as it is—like to see me in the frontlines right now,
bursting with dulce et decorum. I don't believe it would bother
the Old Man any if I sat out the duration in a C O camp, but
it'd hurt his job like hell and the poor old boy is straining his
guts to get into the trenches and twirl a theoretical saber. So I
guess I'm slated to be your humble and obedient, Mr Weener."
"I'll be delighted to have you join our firm," I said wryly,
for I felt he would be a completely useless appendage. In this
I am glad to say I did him an injustice, for though he never
denied his essential lack of interest in concentrates and the
whole process of moneymaking, he proved nevertheless—at
such times as he chose to attend to his duties—a faithful and
conscientious employee, his only faults being lack of initiative
and a tendency to pamper the workers in the plant.
But I have anticipated; at the moment I looked upon him
only as a liability to be balanced in good time by the asset of
his father's position. It was therefore with irritation I listened
to his insistence on my coming to the Thario home that afternoon
to meet his mother and sisters. I had no desire for purely
social intercourse, last evening's outing being in the nature of
a business investment and it seemed superfluous to be forced
to extend courtesies to an entire family because of involvement
with one member.
However great my reluctance I felt I couldnt afford to risk
giving offense and so at fouroclock promptly I was in Georgetown,
using the knocker of a door looking like all the other
doors on both sides of the street.
"I'm Winifred Thario and youre the chewinggum man—no,
wait a minute, I'll get it—the food concentrate man who's
going to make Joe essential to the war effort. Do come in, and
excuse my rudeness. I'm the youngest, you know, except for
Joe, so everybody excuses me." Her straight, blond hair looked
dead. The vivacity which lit her windburned face seemed a
false vivacity and when she showed her large white teeth I
thought it was with a calculated effort.
She led me into a livingroom peopled like an Earlyvictorian
conversationpiece. Behind a low table, in a rockingchair, sat
a large, fullbosomed woman with the same dead hair and
weatherbeaten cheeks, the only difference being that the
blondness of her hair was mitigated by gray and in her face
were the tiny broken red lines which no doubt in time would
come to Winifred.
"This is Mama," said Winifred, accenting the second syllable
strongly and contriving at once to be vivacious and
reverent.
Mama inclined her head toward me without the faintest
smile, welcoming or otherwise, placing her hand as she did so
regally upon the teacozy, as upon a royal orb.
"Mrs Thario," I said, "I am delighted to meet you."
Mama found this beneath her condescension.
"And this is Constance, the general's firstborn," introduced
Winifred, still retaining her liveliness despite Mama's low
temperature. Constance was the perfect connectinglink between
Winifred and her mother, not yet gray but soon to be so,
without Winifred's animation, but with the same voluntary
smile showing the same white teeth. She rose and shook my
hand as she might have shaken a naughty puppy, with a vigorous
sidewise jerk, disengaging the clasp quickly.
"And this," announced Winifred brightly, "is Pauline."
To say that Pauline Thario was beautiful would be like saying
Mount Everest is high. In her, the blond hair sparkled like
newly threshed straw, the teeth were just as white and even,
but they did not seem too large for her mouth, and her complexion
was faultless as a cosmetic ad. She was an unbelievably
exquisite painting placed in an appropriate frame.
And yet ... and yet the painting had a quality of unreality
about it, as though it were the delineation of a madonna
without child, or of a nun. There was no vigor to her beauty,
no touch of the earthiness or of blemish necessary to make the
loveliness real and bring it home. She did not offer me her
hand, but bowed in a manner only slightly less distant than
her mother's.
I sat down on the edge of a petitpoint chair, thoroughly illatease.
"You must tell us about your pills, Mr Weener," urged
Winifred.
"Pills?" I asked, at a loss.
"Yes, the thingamyjigs youre going to have Joe make for
you," explained Constance.
Mama made a loud trumpeting noise which so startled me
I half rose from my seat. "Damned slacker!" she exclaimed,
looking fiercely right over my head.
"Now, Mama—bloodpressure," enjoined Pauline in a colorless
voice.
Mama relapsed into immobility and Winifred went on,
quite as if there had been no explosion. "Are you married,
Mr Weener?"
I said I was not.
"Then here's our chance for Pauline," decided Winifred.
"Mr Weener, how would you like to marry Pauline?"
I could do nothing but smile uncomfortably. Was this the
sort of conversation habitually carried on in their circle or
were they quite mad? Constance mentioned with apparent
irrelevance, "Winifred is so giddy," and Pauline smiled at me
understandingly.
But Winifred went on, "Weve been trying to marry Pauline
off for years, you know. She's wonderful to look at, but she
hasnt any sexappeal."
Mama snorted, "Damned vulgar thing to have."
"Would you like some tea, Mr Weener?" asked Constance.
"Tea! He looks like a secret cocacola guzzler to me! Are
you an American Mr Uh?" Mama demanded fiercely, deigning
for the first time to address me.
"I was born in California, Mrs Thario," I assured her.
"Pity. Pity. Damned shame," she muttered.
I was partially relieved from my uneasiness by the appearance
of George Thario, who bounded in, waved lightly at his
sisters and kissed his mother just below her hairline. "My
respectful duty, Mama," he greeted.
"Damned hypocrisy. You did your duty youd be in the
army."
"Bloodpressure," warned Constance.
"Have they made you thoroughly miserable, Mr Weener?
Don't mind them—there's something wrong with all the
Tharios except the Old Man. Blood gone thin from too much
intermarriage."
"Just like incest," exclaimed Winifred. "Don't you think
incest's fascinating, Mr Weener? Eugene O'Neill and all that
sort of thing?"
"Morbid," objected Constance.
"Damned nonsense," grunted Mama.
"Cream or lemon, Mr Weener?" inquired Constance.
Mama, moved by a hospitable reflex, filled a grudging cup.
"Cream, please," I requested.
"Turn it sour," muttered Mama, but she poured the cream
and handed the cup to Constance who passed it to Pauline
who gave it to me with a gracious smile.
"You just mustnt forget to keep Pauline in mind, Mr
Weener; she would be a terrific help when you become horribly
rich and have to do a lot of stuffy entertaining."
"Really, Winifred," protested Constance.
"Help him to the poorhouse and a damned good riddance."
I spent another uneasy fifteen minutes before I could decently
make my departure, wondering whether I hadnt made
a mistake in becoming involved with the Tharios at all. But
there being no question of the solidity of the general's position,
I decided, since it was not afterall incumbent upon me to continue
a social connection with them, to bear with it and confine
my acquaintance as far as possible to Joe and his father.
42. As soon as the contracts were awarded
the struggle began to obtain necessary labor and raw materials.
We were straining everything to do a patriotic service to
the country in time of war, but we came up against the competition
for these essentials by ruthless capitalists who had no
thought but to milk the government by selling them supplies
at an enormous profit. Even with the wholehearted assistance
of General Thario it was an endless and painful task to comply
with, break through, or evade the restrictions and regulations
thrown up by an uncertain and slowmoving administration,
restrictions designed to aid our competitors and hamper
us. Yet we got organized at last and by the time three Russian
marshals had been purged and the American highcommand
had been shaken up several times, we had doubled the capacity
of our plant and were negotiating the purchase of a new
factory in Florida.
I set aside a block of stock for the general, but its transfer
was a delicate matter on account of the indefatigable nosiness
of the government and I approached his son for advice. "Alberich!"
exclaimed Joe incomprehensibly. "Just wrap it up
and mail it to him. Mama, God bless her, takes care of all
financial transactions anyway." And doubtless with great force,
I thought.
Such directness, I pointed out, might have embarrassing
repercussions because of inevitably smallminded interpretation
if the facts ever became public. We finally solved the problem
by putting the gift in George Thario's name, he making
a will leaving it to the general. I informed his father in a
guarded letter of what we had done and he replied at great
length and somewhat indiscreetly, as the following quotation
may show:
"... In spite of pulling every handy and unhandy wire I
am still billeted on this ridiculous desk. The General Staff is
the most incompetent set of blunderers ever to wear military
uniform since Bull Run. They've never heard of Foch, much
less of Falkenhayn and Mackensen, to say nothing of Rommel,
Guderian or Montgomery. They rest idly behind their Washington
breastworks when the order of the day should be attack,
attack, and again attack; keeping the combat entirely verbal,
weakening the spirit of our forces and waiting supinely for the
enemy to bring the war to us...."
Although I was too much occupied with the press of business
to follow the daytoday progress of hostilities, there was little
doubt the general was justified in his strictures. The war was
entirely static. With fear of raids by marauding aircraft allayed,
the only remaining uneasiness of the public had been
whether the words "heavier than air craft" covered robot or
V bombs. But when weeks had passed without these dreadful
missiles whistling downward, this anxiety also went and the
country settled down to enjoy a wartime prosperity as pleasant,
notwithstanding the fiftyhour week, rationing, and the
exorbitant incometax, as the peacetime panic had been miserable.
In my own case Consolidated Pemmican was quoted
at 38 and I was on my way, in spite of all hampering circumstances,
to reap the benefits of foresight and industry. Unique
among great combats, not a shot had so far been exchanged
and everyone, except cranks, began to look upon the academic
conflict as an unalloyed benefit.
Gradually the war began leaving the frontpages, military
analysts found themselves next to either the chessproblems,
Today's Selected Recipe, or the weekly horoscope; people
once more began to concern themselves with the grass. It now
extended in a vast sweep from a point on the Mexican coast
below the town of Mazatlan, northward along the slope of the
Rocky Mountains up into Canada's Yukon Province. It was
wildest at its point of origin, covering Southern California and
Nevada, Arizona and part of New Mexico, and it was narrowest
in the north where it dabbled with delicate fingers at the
mouth of the Mackenzie River. It had spared practically all of
Alaska, nearly all of British Columbia, most of Washington,
western Oregon and the seacoast of northern California.
Why it surged up to the Rockies and not over them when it
had conquered individually higher mountains was not understood,
but people were quick once more to take hope and
remember the plant's normal distaste for cold or think there
was perhaps something in the rarefied atmosphere to paralyze
the seeds or inhibit the stolons, so preventing further progress.
Even through the comparatively low passes it came at such a
slow pace methods tried fruitlessly in Los Angeles were successful
in keeping it back. Everyone was quite ready to wipe
off the Far West if the grass were going to spare the rest of
the country.
General Thario's indiscreet letters kept coming. If anything,
they increased in frequency, indiscretion, and length as his
continued frustration in securing a field command was added
to his helpless wrath at the generalstaff's ineptitude. "... They
have got hold of that odd female scientist, Francis," he wrote,
"and have made her turn over her formula for making grass go
crazy. It's to be used as a war weapon, but how or where I don't
know. Just the sort of silly rot a lot of armchair theorists
would dream up...."
Later he wrote indignantly: "... They are sending a group
of picked men to Russia to inoculate the grasses on the steppes
with this Francis stuff. Sheer waste of trained men; bungling
incompetence. Why not send a specially selected group of hypnotists
to persuade the Russians to sue for peace? It would be
better to have given them Mills bombs and let them blow up
the Kremlin. Time and effort and good men thrown away ..."
Still later he wrote with unconcealed satisfaction: "... Well,
that silly business of inoculating the steppes came to exactly
nothing. Our fellows got through of course and did their job,
but nothing happened to the grass. Either Francis gave them
the wrong formula (possibly mislaid the right one in her
handbag) or else what worked in California wouldn't do elsewhere.
She is busy trying to explain herself to a military commission
right now. For my part they can either shoot her or
put her in charge of the WAC. It's of no moment. You can't
fight a determined enemy with sprayguns and formulas. Attack
with infantry by way of Siberia ..."
43. While everyone, except possibly General
Thario and others in similar position, was enjoying the
new comradeinarms atmosphere the abortive war had brought
on, a sudden series of submarine attacks on the Pacific Fleet
provided a disagreeable jolt and ended the bloodless stage of
the conflict. Tried and proved methods of detection and defense
became useless; the warships were nothing more than
targets for the enemy's torpedoes.
In quick succession the battleships Montana, Louisiana, Ohio,
and New Hampshire were sunk, as were the carriers Gettysburg,
Antietam, Guadalcanal, and Chapultepec as well as the
cruisers Manitowoc, Baton Rouge, Jackson, Yonkers, Long
Beach, Evanston and Portsmouth, to say nothing of the countless
destroyers and other craft. Never had the navy been so
crippled and the people, presaging correctly a forthcoming
invasion, suffered a new series of terrors which was only relieved
by the news of the Russian landings on the California
coast at Cambria, San Simeon and Big Sur.
"... What did I tell you? What did I tell them, the duffers
and dunderheads? We could have been halfway across
Asia by now; instead we waited and hemmed and hawed till
the enemy, from the sheer weight of our inertia, was forced to
attack. The whole crew should be courtmartialed and made
to study the campaigns of Generals Shafter and Wheeler as
punishment." General Thario's always precise handwriting
wavered and trembled with the violence of his disgust.
An impalpable war, pregnant with annihilating scientific
devices and other unseen bogies was one thing; actual invasion
of the sacred soil over which Old Glory flew, and by presumptuous
foreigners who couldnt even speak English, was quite
another. At once the will of the nation stiffened and for the
first time something approaching enthusiasm was manifest.
Cartoonists, moved by a common impulse, unanimously drew
pictures of Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeves and preparing to
give the pesky interlopers a good trouncing before hurling
them back into the Pacific.
Unfortunately the presence of the grass prevented quick
eviction of the unwelcome visitors. Only a small portion of the
armed forces was based on the Pacific coast, because of the
logistical problems presented by inadequacies of supply and
transportation. Of these only a fraction could be sent to the
threatened places for fear dispersions of the main body would
prove disastrous if the landings were feints. Thus the enemy
came ashore practically unopposed at his original landingpoints
and secured small additional beachheads at Gorda,
Lucia, Morro Bay and Carmel.
East of the grass there were whole armies who had completed
basic training, fit and supple. The obvious answer to the invasion
was to load them on transports and ship them to the theater
of operations. Unfortunately the agreement not to use
heavierthanaircraft was an insuperable bar to this action.
That the pact had never been designed to prevent nations
from defending their soil against an invader was certain; thousands
of voices urged that we keep the spirit of the treaty and
disregard the letter. No one could expect us to sit idly by and
let our homeland be invaded because of overfinicky interpretation
of a diplomatic document.
But in spite of this clear logic, the American people were
swept by a wave of timidity. "If we use airplanes," they argued,
"so will the Russians; airplanes mean bombs; bombs mean
atombombs. Better to let the Russians hold what advantage
their invasion has given them than to have our cities destroyed,
our population wiped out, our descendants—if any—born with
six heads or a dozen arms as a result of radioactivity."
According to General Thario, for a while it was touchandgo
whether the President would yield to the men of vision or the
others. But in the end apprehension and calculation ordained
that every effort must be made to reinforce the defense of the
West Coast—except the effective one.
Of course every dirigible was commandeered and work
speeded up on those under construction; troopships, heedless
of their vulnerability, rushed for the Panama Canal; while
negotiations were opened with Mexico, looking toward transporting
divisions over its territory to a point south of the weed.
While confusion and defeatism took as heavy a toll of the
country's spirit as an actual defeat on the battlefield, the Russians
slowly pushed their way inland and consolidated their
positions. The American units offered valiant resistance, but
little by little they were driven northward until a fairly fixed
front was established south of San Francisco from the ocean to
the bay and a more fluid one from the bay to the edge of the
grass. Army men, like the public, were suspicious of the enemy's
apparent contentment with this line, for they reasoned
it presaged further landings to the north.
General Thario's jubilation contrasted with the common
gloom. "At last the blunderers have given me active duty. I
have a brigade in the Third Army—finest of all. Can't write
exactly where I'm stationed, but it is not far from a wellknown
city noted for its altitude, located in a mining state. Brigade is
remarkably fit, considering, and the men are rearing to go.
Keep your ear open for some news—it won't be long...."
44. The news was of the heroic counterlandings.
The entire fleet, disdainful of possible submarine
action, stood off from the rear of the Russian positions, bombarding
them for fortyeight hours preliminary to landing
marines who fought their way inland to recapture nearly half
the invaded territory. Simultaneously the army below San
Francisco pushed the Russians back and made contact at some
points with the marines. The enemy was reduced to a mere
foothold.
But the whole operation proved no more than a rearguard
action. As General Thario wrote, "We are fighting on the
wrong continent." Joe was even broader and more emphatic.
"It's a putup job," he complained, "to keep costplus plants
like this operating. If they called off their silly war (Beethoven
down in the cellar during the siege of Vienna expresses the
right attitude) and went home, the country would fall back
into depression, we'd have some kind of revolution and everybody'd
be better off."
I had suspected him of being some kind of parlor radical and
although he would doubtless outgrow his youthful notions, it
made me uneasy to have a crank in my employ. But beyond
urging him to keep his ideas strictly to himself and not leave
any more memopads scribbled over with clef signs on his desk,
I could do nothing, for upon his retention depended his
father's goodwill—the general's assignment to a fieldcommand
hadnt altered the status of our contracts—and we had too many
unscrupulous competitors to rely solely upon merit for the
continuance of our sales.
George Thario's attitude was symptomatic of the demoralization
of the country, apparent even during our momentary
success. There was no will to victory, and the generalstaff, if
one could believe General Thario, was too unimaginative and
inflexible to meet the peculiar conditions of a war circumscribed
and shaped by the alien glacier dividing the country
and diverting normal operations into novel channels.
So the new landings at Astoria and Longview, though anticipated
and indeed precisely indicated by the flimsiness of the
Russian resistance to the counteroffensive, caught the highcommand
by surprise. "Never was a military operation more
certain," wrote General Thario, "and never was less done to
meet the certainty. Albert, if a businessman conducted himself
like the military college he would be bankrupt in six months."
Wherever the fault lay, the American gains were wiped out
and the invaders swept ahead to occupy all of the country west
of the grass.
Boastfully, they sent us newsreels of their entries into Portland
and Seattle. They established headquarters in San Francisco
and paraded forty abreast down Market Street—renamed
Krassny Prospekt. The Russians also renamed Montgomery
Street and Van Ness after Mooney and Billings respectively,
but for some reason abandoned these designations almost
immediately.
But for all their celebrations and 101 gun salutes, this was
as far as they could go; the monstrous growth which had
clogged our defense now sealed the invaders off and held them
in an evershrinking sector. Now came another period of quiescence
in the war, but a period radically different in temper
from the first. There were many, perhaps constituting a majority,
who like George Thario wanted a peace, almost any kind
of peace, to be made. Others attempted to ignore the presence
of a war entirely and to conduct their lives as though it did
not exist. Still others seemed to regard it as some kind of game,
a contest carried on in a bloodless vacuum, and from these to
the newspapers and the Wardepartment came the hundreds of
plans, nearly all of them entirely fantastic, for conquering an
enemy now unassailably entrenched.
But while pessimism and lassitude governed the United
States the intruders were taking energetic measures to increase
their successes. "I have been present at the questioning of two
spies," reported General Thario, "and I want to tell you the
enemy is not going to miss a single opportunity, unlike ourselves.
What they have in mind I cannot guess; they can't fly
over the grass any more than we can as long as they want to
conciliate world opinion and I doubt if they can tunnel under
it, but that they intend to do something is beyond question."
Often the obvious course is the surprising one; since the
Russians couldnt go over or under the grass they decided to
march on top of it. They had heard of our prewar snowshoe
excursions on its surface and so they equipped a vast army with
this clumsy footgear and set it in motion with supplytrains on
wide skis pulled by the men themselves. Russian ingenuity,
boasted the Kremlin, would succeed in conquering the grass
where the decadent imperialists had failed.
"It is unbelievable—you might even call it absurd, but at
least they are doing something, not sitting twiddling their
thumbs. My men would give six months' pay to be as active
as the enemy. To be sure they are grotesque and inefficient—so
was the Army of Italy. Imagine sending an army—or armies
if our reports are correct—on a six hundred mile march without
an airforce, without artillery, without any mechanized
equipment whatsoever. Unless, like the Army of Italy, they
have a Bonaparte concealed behind their lunacy they have no
chance at all of success, but by the military genius of Joseph
Eggleston Johnston, if I were a younger man and not an
American I would like to be with them just for the fun they
are having."
By its very nature the expedition was composed exclusively
of infantry divisions carrying the latest type of automatic rifle.
The field commissaries, the ambulances, the baggagetrains,
had to be cut to the barest minimum and General Thario
wrote that evidently because of the impossibility of taking
along artillery the enemy had also abandoned their light and
heavy machineguns. Against this determined threat, behind
the wall of the Rockies, the American army waited with field
artillery, railway guns, bazookas and flamethrowers. For the
first time there was belief in a Russian defeat if not in eventual
American victory.
But the waiting Americans were not to be given the opportunity
for handtohand combat. Since planes could not report
the progress of the snowshoers over the grass, dirigibles and
free balloons drifting with the wind gave minutetominute reports.
Though many of the airships were shot down and many
more of the balloons blown helplessly out of the area, enough
returned to give a picture of the rapid disintegration of the
invading force.
Nothing like it had happened to an army since 1812. The
snowshoes, adequate enough for short excursions over the edge
of the grass, became suicidal instruments on a march of weeks.
Starting eastward from their bases in northern California, Oregon
and Washington, in military formation, singing triumphantly
in minor keys, the Slavic steamroller had presented an
imposing sight. Americans in the occupied area, seeing column
after column of closely packed soldiers tramping endlessly
up and over the grass, said it reminded them of old prints
of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg.
The first day's march went well enough, though it covered
no more than a few miles. At night they camped upon great
squares of tarpaulin and in the morning resumed their webfooted
way. But the night had not proved restful, for over the
edges of every tarpaulin the eager grass had thrust impatient
runners and when the time came to decamp more than half the
canvases had been left in possession of the weed. The second
day's progress was slower than the first and it was clear to the
observers the men were tiring unduly. More than one threw
away his rifle to make the marching easier, some freed themselves
of their snowshoes and so after a few yards sank, inextricably
tangled into the grass; others lay down exhausted, to
rise no more. The men in the balloons could see by the way the
feet were raised that the inquisitive stolons were more and
more entangling themselves in the webbing.
Still the Soviet command poured fresh troops onto the grass.
Profiting perhaps by the American example, they transported
new supplies to the army by dirigibles, replacing the lost
tarpaulins and rifles, daringly sending whole divisions of
snowshoers by parachute almost to the eastern edge. This last
experiment proved too reckless, for enough of these adventurers
were located to permit their annihilation by longrange
artillery.
"Their endurance is incredible, magnificent," eulogized
General Thario enthusiastically. "They are contending not
only with the prospect of meeting fresh, unworn troops on our
side, but against a tireless enemy who cannot be awed or hurt
and even more against their own feelings of fear and despair
which must come upon them constantly as they get farther into
this green desert, farther from natural surroundings, deeper
into the silence and mystery of the abnormal barrier they have
undertaken to cross. They are supermen and only supernatural
means will defeat them."
But there was plenty of evidence that the general credited
the foe with a stronger spirit than they possessed. Their spirit
was undoubtedly high, but it could not stand up against the
relentless harassment of the grass. The weary, sodden advance
went on, slower and slower; the toll higher and higher. There
were signs of dissatisfaction, mutiny and madness. Some units
turned about to be shot down by those behind, some wandered
off helplessly until lost forever. The dwindling of the great
army accelerated, airborne replacements dependent on such
erratic transport failed to fill the gaps.
The marchers no longer fired at the airships overhead; they
moved their feet slowly, hopelessly, stood stockstill for hours
or faltered aimlessly. Occasional improvised white flags could
be seen, held apathetically up toward the balloonists. Long
after their brave start the crazed and starving survivors began
trickling into the American lines where they surrendered.
They were dull and listless except for one strange manifestation:
they shied away fearfully from every living plant or
growth, but did they see a bare patch of soil, a boulder or
stretch of sand, they clutched, kissed, mumbled and wept over
it in a very frenzy.
45. But the catastrophic loss of their
great armies was not all the enemy had to endure. As the grass
had stood our ally and swallowed the attackers, helping us in
a negative fashion as it were, it now turned and became a positive
force in our relief. Unnoticed for months, it had crept
northwestward, filching precious mile after mile of the hostile
foothold. Now it spurted ahead as it had sometimes done before,
at a furious pace, to take over the coast as far north as the
Russian River, which now doubled the irony of its name, and
added thousands of square miles to its area at the enemy's
expense. It surged directly westward too, making what was
left of the invader's foothold precarious in the extreme.
The stockmarket boomed and the country went wild with
joy at the news of the Soviet defeats. At the darkest moment we
had been delivered by forces outside ourselves, but still indubitably
American. Hymns of praise were sung to the grass
as the savior of the nation and in a burst of gratitude it was
declared a National Park, forever inviolate. Rationing restrictions
were eased and many industries were sensibly returned
to private ownership. Good old Uncle Sam was unbeatable
afterall.
But if the Americans were jubilant, the Russians were cast
into deepest gloom. Accustomed to tremendous wartime losses
of manpower, they had at first taken the news stoically, interpreting
it as just another defeat to be later redeemed by pouring
fresh troops and then more fresh troops after those which
had gone down. But when they realized they had lost not divisions
but whole armies, that they had suffered a greater blow
than any in their history, that their reserve power was little
greater than the armies remaining to the Americans, and
finally that the grass, the foe which had dealt all these grievous
blows, was rapidly wiping out what remained of their bridgehead,
they began to murmur against the war itself.
"Under our dear little Uncle Stalin," they said, "this would
never have taken place. Our sons and brothers would not have
been sent to die so far away from Holy Mother Russia. Down
with the enemies of Stalin. Down with the warmongering
bureaucracy."
The Kremlin hastened to assure the population it was carrying
out the wishes of the sainted Stalin. It convinced them of
the purity of its motives by machinegunning all demonstrators
and executing after public trials all Trotskyite-fascist-American
saboteurs and traitors. For some reason these arguments
failed to win over the people and on November 7 a new slogan
was heard, "Long live Stalin and Trotsky," which proved so
popular that in a short time the entire bureaucracy was liquidated,
the Soviet Union declared an unequivocal workers'
state, the army replaced by Redguards, the selling of Soviet
bonds decreed a contravention of socialist economy, wages of
all were equalized, and the word stakhanovism erased from all
Russian dictionaries.
No formal peace was ever made. Neither side had any further
appetite for war and though newspapers like the Daily
Intelligencer continued for months to clamor for the resumption
of hostilities, even to using aircraft now that there was less
danger of reprisal, both countries seemed content to return
quietly to the status quo. The only results of the war, aside
from the tremendous losses, was that in America the grass had
been unmolested for a year, and the Soviet Union had a new
constitution. One of the peculiar provisions of this constitution
was that political offenders—and the definition was now
severely limited, leaving out ninetynine percent of those formerly
jeoparded—should henceforth expiate their crimes by
spending the term of their sentence gazing at the colossal and
elaborate tomb of Stalin which occupied the center of Red
Square.
46. General Stuart Thario, rudely
treated by an ungrateful republic, had the choice of a permanent
colonelcy or retirement. I have always thought it was his
human vanity, making him cling to the title of general, which
caused him to retire. At any rate there was no difficulty in finding
a place for him in our organization, and if his son's salary
and position were reduced in consequence, it was all in the
family, as the saying goes.
One of the happy results of our unique system of free enterprise
was the rewarding of men in exact proportion to their
merits and abilities. The war, bringing disruption and bankruptcy
to so many shiftless and shortsighted people, made of
Consolidated Pemmican one of the country's great concerns.
The organization welcoming General Thario was far different
from the one which had hired his son. I now had fourteen factories,
stretching like a string of lustrous pearls from Quebec
down to Montevideo, and I was negotiating to open new
branches in Europe and the Far East. I had been elected to the
directorship of several important corporations and my material
possessions were enough to constitute a nuisance—for I have
always remained a simple, literary sort of fellow at heart—requiring
secretaries and stewards to look after them.
It is a depressing sidelight on human nature that the
achievement of eminence brings with it the malice and spite
of petty minds and no one of prominence can avoid becoming
the target of stupid and unscrupulous attack. It would be
pointless now to go into those carping and unjust accusations
directed at me by irresponsible newspaper columnists. Another
man might have ignored these mean assaults, but I am
naturally sensitive, and while it was beneath my dignity to
reply personally I thought it perhaps one of the best investments
I could make to add a newspaper to my other properties.
Now I am certainly not the sort of capitalist portrayed by
cartoonists in the early part of the century who would subvert
the freedom of the press by handpicking an editor and telling
him what to say. I think the proof of this as well as of my broadmindedness
is to be found in the fact that the paper I chose to
buy was the Daily Intelligencer and the editor I retained was
William Rufus Le ffaçasé. The Intelligencer had lost both circulation
and money since it had, so to speak, no home base.
But moved perhaps by sentiment, I was not deterred from
buying it for this reason, and anyway it was purchasable at a
more reasonable figure on this account.
Small circulation or no, it—or rather Le ffaçasé himself—still
possessed that intangible thing called prestige and I was satisfied
with my bargain. Le ffaçasé showed no reluctance—as why
indeed should he?—to continue as managingeditor and acted
toward me as though there had never been any previous association,
but I did not object to this harmless eccentricity as a
smallerminded person might have.
As publisher I named General Thario. I never knew exactly
what purpose a publisher serves, but it seemed necessary for
every newspaper to have one. Whatever the duties of the office,
it left the general plenty of time to attend to the concerns of
Consolidated Pemmican. I fed the paper judiciously with
money and it was not long before it regained most of the circulation
it had lost.
47. There was no doubt the grass, our
ally to such good purpose in the war, had definitely slowed
down; now it was looked upon as a fixture, a part of the American
heritage, a natural phenomenon which had outlived its
sensational period and come to be taken for granted. Botanists
pointed out that Cynodon dactylon, despite its ability to
sheathe itself against a chill, had never flourished in cold areas
and there was no reason to suppose the inoculated grass, even
with its abnormal metabolism, could withstand climates foreign
to its habit. It was true it had touched, in one place, the
arctic tundra, but it was confidently expected this excursion
would soon cease. The high peaks of the Rockies with the
heavy winter snowdrifts lying between them promised no permanent
hospitality, and what seeds blew through the passes
and lighted on the Great Plains were generally isolated by saltbands,
and since they were confined to comparatively small
clumps they were easily wiped out by salt or fire. To all appearance
the grass was satiated and content to remain crouching
over what it had won.
Only a minority argued that in its new form it might be
infinitely adaptable. Before, when stopped, it had produced
seeds capable of bearing the parent strain. So now, they
argued, it would in time acclimate itself to more rigorous temperatures.
Among these pessimists, Miss Francis, emerging
from welldeserved obscurity, hysterically ranged herself. She
prophesied new sudden and sweeping advances and demanded
money and effort equal to that expended in the late war be
turned to combating the grass. As if taxes were not already
outrageously high.
Those in authority, with a little judicious advice from persons
of standing, quite properly disregarded her querulous
importunities. The whole matter of dealing with the weed
was by now in the hands of a permanent body, the Federal Disruptions
Commission. This group had spent the first six
months of its existence exactly defining and asserting its jurisdiction,
which seemed to spread just as the vegetation calling it
into being did; and the second six months wrangling with the
Federal Trade Commission over certain "Cease and Desist"
orders issued to firms using allusions to the grass on the labels
of their products, thereby implying they were as vigorous, or
of as wide application, as the representation. The Disruptions
Commission had no objection in principle to this castigation;
they merely thought it should have come from their regulatory
hands.
But with the end of the war a new spirit animated the
honorable members of the commission and as a token of revived
energy they issued a stern directive that no two groups
engaged in antigraminous research were to pool their knowledge;
for competition, the commission argued in the sixtyseven
page order, spurred enthusiasm and the rivalry between
workers would the sooner produce a solution. Having settled
this basically important issue they turned their attention to
investigating the slower progress of the grass to determine
whether it was permanent or temporary and whether its present
sluggishness could be turned to good account. As a sort of
side project—perhaps to show the wideness of their scope—they
undertook as well to study the reasons for the failure of the
wartime inoculation of the steppes as contrasted with the original
too successful California one. They planned a compilation
of their findings, tentatively scheduled to cover a hundred
and fortyseven foliovolumes which would remain the
basic work for all approaching the problem of attacking the
grass; and as an important public figure who had some firsthand
knowledge of the subject they requested me to visit, at
my own expense, the newest outposts of the weed and favor
them with my observations. I was not averse to the suggestion,
for the authority of the commission would admit me to areas
closed to ordinary citizens and I was toying with the idea
it might be possible in some way to use the devilgrass as an
ingredient in our food products.
48. George Thario having shown in many
ways he was growing stale on the job and in need of a vacation,
I decided to take him with me. Besides, if the thought of using
the weed as a source of cheap rawmaterial came to anything,
the engagement of his interest at an early stage would increase
his usefulness. Before setting out for the field I read reports
of investigators on the spot and was disquieted to note a unanimous
mention of new stirrings on the edges of the green
glacier. I decided to lose no time and we set out at once in my
personal plane for a mountain lodge kindly offered by a business
acquaintance. Here, for the next few weeks, keeping in
touch with my manifold affairs only by telephone, Joe and
I devoted ourselves to observing the grass.
Or rather I did. George Thario's idea of gathering data differed
radically from mine—I feel safe to say, as well as from
that of almost any other intelligent man. In a way he reminded
me of the cameraman Slafe in his brooding obliviousness to
everything except the grass; but Slafe had been doing a job
for which he was being paid, whereas Joe was only yielding
to his own mood. For hours he lay flat on his belly, staring
through binoculars; at other times he wandered about the
edge, looking at, feeling, and smelling it and once I saw him
bend down and nibble at it like a sheep.
"You know, A W," he observed enthusiastically—he always
called me "A W" with just enough of a curious intonation to
make it doubtful whether the use of the initials was respectful
or satirical—"you know, A W, I understand those fellows
who went and chucked themselves into the grass. It's sublime;
it has never happened in nature before. Ive read newspaper
and magazine accounts and either the writers have no eyes or
else they lie for the hell of it. They talk about the 'dirty brown'
of the flowers, but A W, Ive seen the flowers myself and theyre
a vivid glorious purple. Have you noticed the iridescent
sparkle when the wind ripples the blades? All the colors of the
spectrum against the background of that marvelous green."
"There's nothing marvelous about it," I told him a little
irritably. "It used to be really green, a bright, even color, but
up here where it's high and cold it doesnt look much different
from ordinary devilgrass—dirty and ugly." I thought his enthusiasm
distinctly out of place in the circumstances.
He did not seem to hear me, but went on dreamily, "And
the sounds it makes! My God, A W, a composer'd give half the
years of his life to reproduce those sounds. High and piercing;
soft and muted; creating tonepoems and études there in
its lonely grandeur."
I have spoken before of the noise produced by the weed, a
thunderous crackling and snapping attributable to its extraordinary
rate of growth. During its dormancy the sound had
ceased and, in the mountains at least, was replaced by different
notes and combinations of notes as the wind blew through its
culms and scraped the tough stems against each other. Occasionally
these ululations produced reflections extremely pleasing,
more often it hurt the ears with a shrieking discordance;
but even at its best it fell far short, to my mind—and I suppose
I may say I'm as sensitive to beauty as anybody—of meriting
Joe's extravagant rhapsodies.
But he was entranced beyond the soberness of commonsense.
He filled notebooks, those thick pulppapered volumes
which children are supposed to use in school but never do,
with his reactions. In idle moments when he was away, I
glanced through them, but for the most part they were incoherent.
Meterless poems, lists of adjectives, strained interpretations
of the actions of the grass, and many musical notations
which seemed to get no farther than a repetitive and
faltering start.
I reproduce a few pages of the less chaotic material for what
it is worth: "The iceage drove the Cromagnon from the caves
which prophesied Cnossus and Pithom and the Temple of
Athena in the Acropolis. This grass, twentiethcentury ice,
drives magnates from their twentyroom villas to their twentyroom
duplexes. The loss was yesterday's. Walt Whitman.
"For it is the animals. Cows and pigs, horses, goats, sheep
and rabbits abandoned by the husbandman, startled, puzzled;
the clock with the broken mainspring running backward. The
small game: deer, antlered, striped, and spotted; wildsheep,
ovis poli, TeddyRooseveltshot and Audubonprinted, mountaingoats
leaping in terror to hazardous safety on babel's top,
upward to the pinpoint where no angels dance. But not alone.
"Meat and meateater, food and feeder, predator and prey;
foxes, lynx, coyotes, wolves, wildcats, mountainlion (the passengerpigeon's
gone, the dung they pecked from herds thick as
man born and man yet to be born lies no more on the plains,
night and day we traveled, but the birds overhead gave cover
from the sun and the buffalo before us stretched from the river
to the hills), driven by the ice not ice, but living green, up and
up. Pause here upon this little shelf to nibble bark, to mate
and bear; to snarl and claw and rend and suck hot blood from
moving jugularvein; and then move again upward with docile
hoof or else retreat with lashing tail and snarling fang. Biter
and bitten transfused with fear, the timberline behind, the
snow alone welcoming, ironically the glacier meets another
glacier and only glacier gives refuge to glacier's hunted.
"Here little islands on the peaks. Vegetation's sea is death
creeping upward to end at the beginning. The carnivores,
whippedtailed, seek the top, ambition's pinnacle, surveying
nothing. Tomorrow is for man, the lower mind is reasonable
and ponders food and dung and lust, so obstinate the padclaw
prowls higher till nothing's left but pedestal and would then
wing, but being not yet man can only turn again.
"The ruminants, resigned, nibble at the edges of their
death, converting death to life, chewing, swallowing, digesting,
regurgitating and digesting again inescapable fate. Reluctant
sustenance. Emptybellied, the pointed teeth descend
again to take their food at secondhand, to go back sated, brown
blood upon the snow and bits of hide and hair, gnawedat
bones, while fellows, forgetting fear, remaining stoic, eat,
stamp and stamp without impatience and eat again of that
which has condemned them.
"Learned doctor, your addingmachine gives you the answer:
so many carnivores, so many herbivores, the parallel
dashes introduce extinction. Confusedly the savor of Abel's
sacrifice was sweet to His nostrils, not Cain's fruits. So is the
mind confounded. Turning and devouring each other over
prostrate antlers the snarlers die, their furry hides bloat and
then collapse on rigid bones to make a place for curious sniffings
and quick retreat in trampled snow. There is no victory
without harshness, no hope in triumph. The placid ruminants
live—the conquerors have conquered nothing.
"The grass comes to the edge of the snow; they eat and fill
their meager bellies, they chew the cud and mate and calve and
live in wretched unawareness of the heat of glory and death.
So is justice done and mercy and yet not justice and yet not
mercy. Who was victor yesterday is not victor today, but
neither is he victim. Who was victim yesterday is not victor,
but neither is he victim...."
49. In all this confused rambling I
thought there might be a curious and interesting little observation
about animal migration—if one could trust the accuracy
of an imagination more romantic than factual—and I
reduced it to some kind of coherence and added it not only to
my report for the Federal Disruptions Commission, but for
the dispatches I found time to send in to the Intelligencer.
I hardly suppose it is necessary to mention that by now my
literary talents could no longer be denied or ignored and that
these items were not edited nor garbled but appeared exactly
as I had written them, boxed and doubleleaded on page one.
Though the matter was really trivial and in confessing it I
don't mind admitting all of us are subject to petty vanities
I was gratified to notice too that Le ffaçasé had the discernment
to realize how much the public appreciated my handling
the news about the grass, for he advertised my contributions
lavishly.
In my news stories I could tell no less than the full truth,
which was that the grass, after remaining patriotically dormant
throughout the war except for the spurt northward to destroy
the remnants of the invading host, had once more set out upon
the march. The loss of color I had pointed out to Joe was less
apparent each day of our stay as the old vividness revived with
its renewed energy and the sweet music which entranced him
gave place to the familiar crackling, growing louder with each
foot it advanced down the slope, culminating every so often in
thunderous explosions.
For down the thousand mile incline of the Mississippibasin
it was pouring with accelerating tempo, engulfing or driving
everything before it. It was the old story of the creeping stolons,
the steppedup tangled mass and the great, towering bulk
behind; the falling forward and then the continued headway.
Once more the eastbound trains and highways clogged with
refugees.
My affairs not permitting a longer stay, I returned to New
York, but I could not pry Joe from his preoccupation. "A W,"
he argued, "I'd be no more use to Consolidated Pemmican
right now than groundglass in a ham sandwich. My backside
might be in a swivelchair, but my soul would be right up here.
It's Whitman translated visibly and tangibly, A W, 'Come
lovely and soothing death, undulate round and round.' Besides,
youve got the Old Man now, he's worth more to you
than I ever will be; he loves business. It's just like the army—without
a doddering old generalstaff to pull him back every
time he gets enthusiastic."
If anyone else in my organization had talked like this I
would have fired him immediately, but I was sure down underneath
his aesthetic poses and artistic pretensions there was a
foundation of good commonsense inherited from the general.
Give the boy his head, I thought; let him stay here and rhapsodize
till he gets sick of it; he'll come back the better executive
for having got it out of his system. Also, as he himself pointed
out, I had his father to rely on and he was a man to whip up
production if ever there was one.
50. The chief purpose of my visit to the
grass was, at least momentarily, a failure. There was little
point sampling and analyzing the weed for its possible use as
an ingredient in a food concentrate if it were impossible to set
up a permanent place to gather and process it. I won't say I
considered my time wasted, but its employment had not been
profitable.
But even immersed in the everexpanding affairs of Consolidated
Pemmican and Allied Industries, as we now called the
parent company, I could not get away from the grass. Each
hour's eastward thrust was reported in detail by an hysterical
radio and every day the newspapers printed maps showing the
newly overrun territory. Once more the grass was the most
prominent thought in men's minds, not only over the land of
its being, but throughout the world. Scientists of every nationality
studied it at firsthand and only strict laws and rigid
searches by customs inspectors prevented the importation of
specimens for dissection in their own laboratories.
The formula of Miss Francis, now at length revealed in its
entirety, was discussed by everyone. There was hardly a man,
woman or child who did not dream of finding some means to
destroy or halt the grass and thereby make of himself an unparalleled
benefactor. A new crop of suggestions was harvested
by the Intelligencer; in addition to the old they included such
expedients as reinoculating the grass with the Metamorphizer
in the hope either of its cannibalistically feeding upon itself
or becoming so infected with giantism as to blow up and burst—the
failure of the experiment on the Russian steppes was
ignored or forgotten by these contributors; building barriers
of dryice; and the use of infrared lamps.
One of the proposals which tickled the popular imagination
was a plan for vast areas to be roofed and glassenclosed, giant
greenhouses to offer refuge for mankind in the very teeth of
the grass. Artesian wells could be sunk, it was argued, power
harnessed to the tides of the sea and piped underground, the
populace fed by means of concentrates or hydroponic farming.
Everyone—except those in authority, the ones who would
have to approve the expenditure of the vast sums necessary—thought
there was something in the idea, but nothing was done
about it.
Many, believing physical means could be of little avail, suggested
metaphysical ones, and these were always punctiliously
printed by the Intelligencer. They ranged from disregarding
the existence of the weed and carrying on ordinary life as
though it presented no threat, through Holding the Correct
Thought, praying daily for its miraculous disappearance, preferably
at a simultaneous moment, to reorganizing the spiritual
concepts of the human totality.
51. But even without the newspapers
George Thario would have kept me informed. "Piteous if not
too comprehensive for small emotions," he wrote in a letter
only a little more intelligible than the stuff in his notebooks.
"Yesterday I stopped by a small farm or ranch as local grandiloquence
everseeking purple justification has it here. Submarginal
land the tabulating minds of governmentofficials
(spectacles precise on nosebridge, daily ration of exlax safe
in briefcase) would have labeled it, sitting in expectant unease
on hilltops and the uncomfortable slopes between. Dryfarming;
the place illegally acquired from cattlerange (more proper
and more profitable) by nester grandsire; surviving drought
and duststorm, locust, weevil, and straying herds; feeding
rachitic kids, dull women and helpless men for halfacentury.
"The Farm Resettlement Administration would have
moved them to fatter ground a hundred times, but blindly
obstinate they held to what was theirs and yet not theirs. In
the frontseat the man and wife and what remained of quick
moments of dropjawed ecstasy, in back unwieldly chickencoop,
slats patched with bits of applebox and wire, weathered gray;
astonished cocks crowing out of time and hens heads down.
Hitched behind, the family cow, stiffribbed and emptyuddered.
The grass, deaf lover, had seized the shack, its fingers
curled the solid door, body pressed forward for joyful rape.
The nesters don't look back but pant ahead; the bumping of
the car accommodates the cow.
"Ive had to leave the lodge of course and spend my nights in
a thin house with a roof shaped like two playingcards, with the
misleading sign, in punishment crippled, half fallen from its
support, 'Tourists Accommodated' (if accommodation be
empty spaces with mottoes and porcelain pisspots then punishment
was unrighteous). I shall move on soon, perhaps for the
worse since there is green now, beneath the blue.
"If I can ever come away I shall, but I'd not miss this gladiator
show, this retiarii swing.
"Give my best to the Old Boy—tell him I'd write direct, but
family feeling makes it hard. Joe."
I showed the letter to the general, expecting him perhaps to
be annoyed by Joe's instability, but he merely said, "Boy
shouldnt be wasting his talents ... put it in sound ...
orchestrate it."
Just as Joe's enthusiasm covered only one aspect of the grass
so his retreat from lodge to wayside hostel, to city hotel, embraced
only a minute sector of the great advance. Neither
moral nor brute force slowed the weed. It clutched the upper
reaches of the Rio Grande and ran down its course to the Gulf
of Mexico like quicksilver in a broken thermometer. It went
through Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas; it nibbled at the
forks of the Platte; it left behind the Great Salt Lake like a
chip diamond lost in an enormous setting.
There is no benefit to be derived from looking at the darker
side of things and indeed it is a universal observation that
there is no misfortune without its compensation. The loss of
the great cattlegrazing areas of the West increased the demand
for our concentrated foods by the hundredfold. We paid no
duty on the products shipped in from our South American
factories for they competed only with ourselves and we did the
country the humanitarian service of preventing a famine by
rushing carload after carload westward, rising above all
thoughts of petty gain by making no increase whatever in our
prices despite the expanding demand.
52. About this time it became indisputable
that Button Gwynnet Fles was no longer of value to Consolidated
Pemmican. His Yankee shrewdness and caution
which enabled him to run the corporation when it was merely
a name and a quotation on the stockmarket had the limits of
its virtues. He was extraordinarily provincial in outlook and
quite unable to see the concern on a world scale. In view of our
vast expansion such narrowness had become an unbearable
hindrance.
I had permitted him to hold a limited number of shares and
to act nominally as secretary in order to comply with the regulations
of the Security and Exchange Commission, but now it
was expedient to add to our officers directors of other companies
whose fields were complementary to ours. Besides, in
General Thario I had a much abler assistant and so, perhaps
reluctantly because of my oversensitivity, I displaced Fles and
making the general president of the corporation I accepted the
post of chairman of the board.
I must say he took a perfectly natural business move with
unbecoming illgrace. "It was mine, Mr Weener, you know it
was mine and I did not protest when you stole it; I worked
loyally and unselfishly for you. It isnt the money, Mr Weener,
really it isnt—it's the idea of being thrown out of my own
business. At least let me stay on the Board of Directors; youll
never have any trouble from me, I promise you that."
It distressed me to reject his abject plea, but my hands were
tied by my devotion to the welfare of the company. Besides,
he annoyed me by his palpably untrue reference to what had
been a legitimate transaction, never giving a thought to my
generosity in not exposing his chicanery, nor the fact that the
dummy he manipulated bore no resemblance whatever to the
firm I had brought by my own effort to its present size.
Leaving matters in the able hands of General Thario, after
warning Joe he had better soon return to his father's assistance,
I went abroad to arrange for wider European representation.
There I found a curious eagerness to be of help to me and
almost fawning servility antipathetic to my democratic American
notions. Oddly enough, the Europeans looked upon the
United States as a doomed country, thinking I, like some members
of our wealthier classes, had come to escape disruption
and dislocation at home. Only in England did I find the belief
prevalent that the Americans would somehow muddle through
because afterall theyre the same sort of chaps we are, you know.
After a highly successful trip I returned home the same day
the Grass reached the headwaters of the Mississippi.
53. William Rufus Le ffaçasé astonished
me, as well as every newspaperman in the country by resigning
as editor of the Daily Intelligencer, a post he had held before
many of its reporters were born. When I phoned him to come
to my office and explain himself he refused, in tones and manner
I had not heard from any man since the days when I had
wasted my talents as a subordinate. Having none of the pettiness
of pride which makes some men fearful of their position,
since he would not come to my office, I went to his. There he
shocked me for the third time: a high, glossy collar, a flowing
and figured cravat concealed the famous diamond stud, while
instead of the snuffbox his hands hovered over a package of
cheap cigarettes.
"Weener," he rasped, jettisoning all those courtesies to
which I had become accustomed, "I never thought I'd be glad
to see your vapid face again, unless on a marble slab in some
city morgue, but now youre here, moneybags slapping the insides
of your thighs in place of the scrotum for which you could
have no possible use, I am delighted to tell you in person to
take my paper—my paper, sir, note that well, for all your dirty
pawings could not make it anything but mine—and supposit it.
I hope it frets you, Weener, for the sake of your sniveling but
immortal soul, I sincerely hope it rasps you like a misplaced
hairshirt. You will get some miserable lickspittle to take my
place, some mangy bookkeeping pimp with a permanentwaved
wife and three snottynosed brats, but the spirit and guts
of the Intelligencer depart with W R Le ffaçasé."
I disregarded both his illmanners and his bombast. "What's
the matter, Bill?" I asked kindly, "Is it more money? You can
write your own ticket, you know. Within reason, of course."
His fingers looked for the snuffbox, but found only the cigarettes
which he inspected puzzledly. "Weener, no man could
do you justice. You are the bloody prototype of all the arselickers,
panders, arsonists, kidnapers, cutthroats, pickpockets,
abortionists, pilferers, cheats, forgers, sneakthieves, sharpers
and blackmailers since Jacob swindled his brother. Do not
fawn upon me little man, I am too old to want women or
money. The sands are running out and I shall never now read
the immortable Hobbes, but I'll not die in your bloody harness.
In me you do not see the man who picked up the torch of
Franklin and Greeley and Dana where Henry Watterson
dropped it. Loose of your gangrenous chains, you behold the
freelance correspondent of the North American Newspaper
Alliance, the man who will devote his declining years to reporting
in the terse and vivid prose for which he is justly
famous the progress of the grass which strangles the country
as you have tried to strangle me."
Again I put personal feelings aside. "If your mind is really
made up, we'll want your stuff for the Intelligencer, Bill."
"Sir, you may want. I hope the condition persists."
There being no profit in arguing with a madman, I made
arrangements to replace him immediately. I reproduce here,
not for selfjustification, which would be superfluous, but
merely for what amusement it may afford, one of his accounts
which appeared in the columns of so many third and fourth
rate newspapers. I won't say it shows the decay of a once possibly
great mind, but it certainly reveals that the Intelligencer
suffered no irreparable loss.
"Today at Dubuque, Iowa, the Mississippi was crossed. Not
by redmen in canoes, nor white on logs or clumsy rafts, nor
yet by multiwheeled locomotives gliding over steel bridges nor
airplanes so high the wide stream was a thread below. Nature
and devastation, hand in hand, for the moment one and the
same, crossed it today as Quantrell or Kirby Smith or Nathan
Bedford Forrest crossed it, sabers glittering, so many forgotten
years ago. But if the men in gray and butternut raided a store
or burned a tavern they thought it a mighty victory and went
home rejoicing; the green invader is an occupier and colonizer,
come to remain for all time, leaving no town, no road, no farm
where it has passed.
"A few weeks ago Dubuque was still here, quiet, old and
pleasant, the butt of affectionate jokes, the Grass still miles
away, the population still hopeful of salvation. And then, because
of the panic, the frantic scurry to save things once valuable
and now only valued, no one noticed when a betraying
wind blew seeds beyond the town, over the river, to find receptive
soil on the Wisconsin side. The seeds germinated, the
clump flourished. It cut the highway and reached down the
banks into the Mississippi, waiting. And while it waited it
built up greater bulk for itself, behind and beside. Each day it
pushed a little farther toward midstream, drowning its own
foremost runners so those behind might have solidity to advance
upon.
"Meanwhile from the west the continent imposed upon a
continent came closer. The other day Dubuque went, its
weathered bricks and immature stucco alike obliterated. The
Grass ran out like a bather on a cold morning, hastening to the
water before timidity halts him. Although I was watching I
could not tell you at what exact instant the gap was closed, at
what moment the runners from one clump intertwined with
those of the other. But such a moment did occur, and shedding
water like a surfacing whale the united bodies rose from the
riverbed to form a verdant bridge.
"You could not walk across it, at least no man I know would
want to try, but it gives the illusion of permanency no work of
man, stone or steel or concrete, has ever given and it is a dismaying
thing to see man's trade taken over by nature in this
fashion.
"The bridge is a dam also. All the debris from the upper
reaches collects against it and soon there will be floods to add
to the other distress the Grass has brought. More than half
the country is gone now: the territories pillaged from Mexico,
argued from Britain, bought from France, have all been lost.
Only the original states and Florida remain. Shall we be more
successful in defending our basic land than all the acquisitions
of a century and a half?"
But why add any more? Dry, senile, without feeling, my
only wonder was that his stuff was printed, even in the obscure
media where it appeared.
54. With twothirds of the country absorbed
and a hundred fifty million people squeezed into what
was left, economic conditions became worse than ever. No
European ghetto was as crowded as our cities and no overpopulated
countryside farmed so intensively to so little purpose.
An almost complete cessation of employment except in
the remnant of the export trade, valueless money—English
shillings and poundnotes illegally circulated being the prized
medium of exchange—starvation only irritated rather than
relieved by the doles of food seized from the farmers and
grudgingly handed out to the urban dwellers.
Each election saw another party in power, the sole demand
of the voters being for an administration capable of stopping
the Grass. Since none was successful, the dissatisfaction and
anger grew together with the panic and dislocation. Messiahs
and fuehrers sprang up thickly. Riots in all cities were daily
occurrences, rating no more than obscure paragraphs, while
in many areas gangs of hoodlums actually maintained themselves
in power for weeks at a time, ruling their possessions
like feudal baronies and exacting tribute from all travelers
through their domain.
Immigration had long ago been stopped, but now the government,
in order to preserve what space was left for genuine
Americans, canceled the naturalization of all foreignborn and
ordered them immediately deported. All Jews who had been
in the country less than three generations were shipped to Palestine
and the others deprived of political rights in order to
encourage them to leave also. The Negroes, who except for a
period less than a decade in length had never had any political
or civil rights, planned a mass migration to Africa, a project
enthusiastically spurred by such elder statesmen as the learned
Maybank and the judicious Rankin. This movement proved
abortive when statisticians showed there were not enough
liquid assets among the colored population to pay a profit on
their transportation.
An attempt to oust all Catholics failed also, for the rather
odd reason that many of the minor Protestant sects joined in
a body to oppose it. The Latterday Saints—now busy building
New Deseret in Central Australia—and the Church of Christ,
Scientist, as well as the Episcopalians, Doweyites, Shakers,
Christadelphians, and the congregation of the Chapel of the
Former and Latter Rains presented a united front for tolerance
and equity.
An astonishing byproduct of the national despair and turmoil
was the feverish activity in all fields of creative endeavor.
Novels streamed from the presses, volumes of poetry became
substantial items on publishers' lists and those which failed to
find a publisher were mimeographed and peddled to a receptive
public, while painters working with Renascence enthusiasm
turned out great canvases as fast as their brushes could
spread the oils. We had suddenly become a nation madly devoted
to the arts. When Orpheus Crisodd's Devilgrass Symphony
was first played in Carnegie Hall an audience three
times as great as that admitted had to be accommodated outside
with loudspeakers and when the awesome crescendo of
horns, drums, and broken crockery rubbed over slate surfaces
announced the climax of the sixth movement, the crowds
wept. Even for Mozart the hall was full, or practically full.
In the lively arts the impact of the Grass was more overt.
On the comicpage, Superman daily pushed it back and there
was great regret his activities were limited to a fourcolor process,
while Terry Lee and Flash Gordon, everinspirited by the
sharp outlines of mammaryglands, also saved the country.
Even Lil Abner and Snuffy Smith battled the vegetation while
no one but Jiggs remained absolutely impervious. The Greengrass
Blues was heard on every radio and came from every adolescent's
phonograph until it was succeeded by Itty Bitty Seed
Made Awfoo Nasty Weed.
Perhaps the most notable feature of this period was a preoccupation
with permanency. Jerrybuilding, architectural
mode since the first falsefront was erected over the first smalltown
store, practically disappeared. The skyscrapers were no
longer steel skeletons with thin facings of stone hung upon
them like a slattern's apron, while the practice of daubing mud
on chickenwire hastily laid over paper was discontinued.
Everyone wanted to build for all time, even though the Grass
might seize upon their effort next week. In New York the
Cathedral of St John the Divine was finally completed and a
new one dedicated to St George begun. The demand for
enduring woods replaced the market for green pine and men
planned homes to accommodate their greatgrandchildren and
not to attract prospective buyers before the plaster cracked.
Naturally, forwardlooking men like Stuart Thario and
myself, though we had every respect for culture, were not
swamped by this sudden urge to encourage the effervescent
side of life. Our feet were still upon the ground and though
we knew symphonies and novels and cathedrals had their
place, it was important not to lose sight of fundamentals; while
we approved in principle the desire for permanency, we took
reality into account. We had every faith in the future of the
country, being certain a way would be found before long to
stop the encroachments of the weed; nevertheless, as a proper
precaution—a safeguarding counterbalance to our own enthusiastic
patriotism—we invested our surplus funds in Consols
and European bonds, while hastening our plans for new factories
on other continents.
I'm sure George Thario must have been a great cross to his
father although the general never spoke of him save in the
most affectionate terms. Living like a tramp—he sent a snapshot
once showing him with a long starveling beard, dressed in
careless overalls, his arm over the shoulder of a slovenly looking
girl—he stayed always on the edge of the advancing weed,
moving eastward only when forced. He wrote from Galena:
"Eagle forgotten. The rejected accepted, for yesterday's
eagle is today's, the hero is man and man his own hero. I was
with him when he died and when he died again and a hundred
miles to the south is another eagle forgotten and all the prairies,
green once more, will be as they were before men insulted
them. O eagle forgotten. O stained prairie, O gallows, thirsty
mob, knife, torch, revolver. Contumely, parochialism, the
shortvision forever gone; and the long vision too, the eagle
forgotten is the national bird, the great merging with the
greater, so gained too late a vision and saw the hope that was
despair.
"I named the catalogue of states and the great syllables
rolled from my tongue to echo silence. My sister, my bride.
Gone and gone; the Conestoga wagons have no more faint ruts
to follow, the Little Big Horn is a combination of letters, the
marking sunflowers exist no more. We destroyed, we preempted;
we are destroyed and we have been thrust out. Illinois
admitted to the Union on suchandsuch a date, the Little Giant
rubbed stubby fingers through pompous hair heavy with beargrease,
the Honorable Abe in Springfield's most expensive
broadcloth, necktie in the latest mode but pulled aside to free
an eager adamsapple; the drunken tanner, punctual with the
small man's virtues, betrayed and dying painfully with so much
blood upon his hands; and the eagle himself, forgotten and
now again forgotten.
"I move once more. Step by step I give it up, the land we
took and the land we made. Each foot I resign leaves the rest
more precious. O precious land, O dear and fruitful soil. Its
clods are me, I eat them, give them back; the bond is indissoluble.
Even the land gone is still mine, my bones rest in it,
I have eaten of its fruits and laid my mark on it...."
All of which was a longwinded way of saying the Grass was
overrunning Illinois. In contrast I cannot forbear to quote
Le ffaçasé, though his faults, at the opposite end of the scale,
were just as glaring: "It is in Kentucky now, birthstate of
Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States,
a country which once stretched south of the Forty-ninth Parallel
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I have been traveling
extensively in what is left of Lincoln's nation. 'Dukes,' remarked
Chesterton, 'don't emigrate.' This country was settled
by the poor and thriftless and now few more than the poor and
thriftless remain in it.
"Let me try to present an overall picture: What is left of the
country has become a nineteenth century Ireland, with all
economic power in the hands of absentees. It is not that everyone
below the level of a millionaire is too stupid to foresee
possibility of complete destruction; or the middle and lower
classes virtuously imbued with such fanatical patriotism they
are prepared for mass suicide rather than leave. Because dukes
are emigrating and sending the price of shippingspace into
brackets which make the export of any commodity but diamonds
or their own hides a dubious investment, even the
pawning of all the family assets would not buy steerage passage
for a year old baby. Besides there are not enough bottoms
in the world to transport a hundred and fifty million people.
If the Grass is not stopped, except for a negligible few, it will
cover Americans when it covers America.
"No wonder a strange and conflicting spirit animates our
people. Apathy? Yes, there is apathy; you can see it on the
faces in a line of relief clients wondering how long an industrially
stagnant country can continue their dole—even though
now it consists of nothing but unpalatable chemicals—socalled
'Concentrates.' Despair? Certainly. The riots and lootings,
especially the intensified ones recently in Cleveland and Pittsburgh,
are symptoms of it. The overcrowded churches, the terrific
increase in drugging and drinking, the sex orgies which
have been taking place practically in the open in Baltimore
and Philadelphia and Boston are stigmata of desperation.
"Hope? I suppose there is hope. Congress sits in uninterrupted
session and senators lend their voices night and day to
the destruction of the Grass. The Federal Disruptions Commission
has published the eleventh volume of its report and is
currently holding hearings to determine how closely the extinct
buffalograss is related to Cynodon dactylon. Every research
laboratory in the country, except those whose staffs and
equipment have been moved with their proprietary industries,
is expending its energies in seeking a salvation.
"Perhaps only in the Deep South, as yet protected by the
width of the lower Mississippi, is there something approaching
a genuine hope, although ironically that may be the product
of ignorance. Here the overlords have gone and the poor
whites, unsupported by an explicit kinship, have withdrawn
into complete listlessness. Some black men have fled, but to
most the Grass is a mere bogey, incapable of frightening those
who have survived so much. Now, for the first time since 1877
the polls are open to all and there are again Negro governors,
and black legislatures. And they are legislating as if forever.
Farm tenancy has been abolished, the great plantations have
been expropriated and made cooperative, the Homestead Act
of 1862 has been applied in the South and every citizen is entitled
to claim a quartersection. There is a great deal of laughter
at this childish lawmaking, but it goes on, changing the face
of the region, the lawmakers themselves not at all averse to the
joke."
Everything Le ffaçasé wrote was not only dull, but biased
and unjust as well. It was true capital was leaving the country
rapidly, but what other course had it? To stay and attempt to
carry on industry in the midst of the demoralization was obviously
impractical. The plants remained and when a way was
found to conquer the Grass we would be glad to reopen them,
for this would be a practical course, just as the flight of capital
was a practical course; standards of living were now so reduced
in the United States it would be more profitable to employ
cheap American labor than overpaid Latin or European.
55. I had now no fixed abode, dividing my
time between Rio and Buenos Aires, Melbourne and Manchester.
General Thario and his family lived in Copenhagen,
overseeing our continental properties, now of equal importance
with the South American holdings. Before leaving, and
indeed on every trip back home, he visited his son—no easy
thing to do, what with the young man's constant movement
and the extreme difficulty of going from east to west against
the torrent pouring in the opposite direction. Joe had married
the female of the snapshot, or contracted some sort of permanent
alliance with her—I never got it quite straight and the
Tharios were deplorably careless about such details; and she
proved as eccentric as he was. No appeal to selfinterest, no
pleading he forgo his morbid preoccupation with the Grass for
the sake of his family, could move them.
"A W—you have seen it, heard it, smelled it. Can't you
explain—miraculously touched with the gift of lucidity for
fact as you are for the fictions of production, overhead and
dividends? Oh, not to Mama—either she understands better
than I or not at all—but to the Old Man or Connie?
"As a child you learn for the first time of death: the heart is
shuttered in a little cell, too cruel for breathing; the sun is
gray. In an instant you forget; the sky is bright; the blood
pounds. Years later the adolescent falls in love with death;
primps his spirit for it; recalls in unpresumptuous brotherhood
Shelley and Keats and Chatterton. Afterward the flush
fades; we are reconciled to life, but the promise is still implicit.
Now, however, it must be earned, awaited. Haste would destroy
the savor. The award assured, pace becomes dignified.
"But death is not death; life is never mocked. The Grass is
not death any more than it is evil. The Grass is the Grass. It
is me and I am it; 'in my father's house there are many mansions,
if it were not so I would not have told you.'
"No, I suppose not; yet it hurts my liver to offer the old boy
incomprehensible reasons or verbiage like 'compulsion neurosis'
when all he wants is to protect me from my own impulses
as he protected me from the army. Florence and I delight in
him—he comes again next week if possible—but we cannot convey
to him the unthinkableness of leaving...."
I heard about this visit later from the general. Joe had
scoured Chicago for the alcoholic commodities now practically
unprocurable, and returned in triumph to the couple's furnished
room. There they entertained him with two bottles of
cointreau and a stone demijohn of cornwhisky. "Touched
... filial affection ... even drank the cointreau—fiddling
stuff, no wonder it was still available in the drought ... better
son a man never had....
"Girl's all right. Moved in circles ... perhaps not accustomed
... bit rough in speech, but heart of gold ... give
you the shirt right off her back ... hum ... manner of
speaking ... know what I mean...."
But she would not add her persuasions to those of the general.
"Joe's got to stay. It's not something he sat down and
thought up, the way you plan dinner or whether blue goes
good with your new permanent. He's got to stay because he's
got to stay. And of course, so do I. We couldnt be satisfied
anywhere we couldnt see the Grass. Life's too dull away from
it ... but of course that's only part—it's too big to explain...."
"But George—Joe as you call him ... highly talented ...
sensitive ... shouldnt be allowed to decay," the general
argued. "Fascination ... understand, but effort of will ...
break the spell. Europe ... birthplace of culture ... reflection
... give him a proper perspective ... chance to
do things...."
Even when the evening lengthened and he became more
lucid under the stimulus of cornwhisky and cointreau he could
not shake them. "Judicious retreat, especially in the face of
overwhelming superiority, has always been a military weapon
and no captain, no matter how valiant, has ever feared to
use it."
"Pop," George Thario had retorted goodhumoredly, "you
dragged in the metaphor, not I. Youve heard of the Alamo and
Vicksburg and Corregidor? Well, this is them—all rolled into
one."
56. The first snows of this ominous winter
halted progress of the Grass. It went sluggish and then
dormant first in the far north, where only the quick growingseason,
once producing cabbages big as hogsheads, had allowed
it to spread at a rate at all comparable to its progress farther
south. But by now there could be no doubt left that Cynodon
dactylon, once so sensitive to cold that it had covered itself,
even in the indistinguishable Southern California winter,
with a protective sheath, had become inured to frost and chill,
hibernating throughout the severest cold and coming back
vigorously in the spring.
It now extended from Alaska to Hudson Bay, covering all
Manitoba and parts of Ontario. It had taken to itself Minnesota,
the northern peninsula of Michigan, Wisconsin, a great
chunk of Illinois, and stood baffled on the western bank of the
Mississippi from Cairo to its mouth. The northwestern, underpopulated
half of Mexico was overrun, the Grass moving but
sluggishly into the estados bordering the Gulf Coast.
I cannot say this delusive safety was enjoyed, for there was
unbelievable hardship. In spite of the great bulk of the country's
coalfields lying east of the Grass and the vast quantities
of oil and natural gas from Texas, there was a fuel famine,
due largely to the breakdown of the transportation system.
People warmed themselves after a fashion by burning furniture
and rubbish in improvised stoves. Of course this put an
additional strain on firedepartments, themselves suffering
from the same lack of new equipment, tires, and gasoline,
afflicting the general public and great conflagrations swept
through Akron, Buffalo and Hartford. Garbage collection systems
broke down and no attempt was made to clear the streets
of snow. Broken watermains, gaspipes and sewers were followed
by typhus and typhoid and smallpox, flux, cholera and
bubonic plague. The hundreds of thousands of deaths relieved
only in small degree the overcrowding; for the epidemics displaced
those refugees sheltered in the schoolhouses, long since
closed, when these were made auxiliary to the inadequate hospitals.
The strangely inappropriate flowering of culture, so profuse
the year before, no longer bloomed. A few invincible enthusiasts,
mufflered and raincoated, still bore the icy chill of the
concert hall, a quorum of painters besieged the artist supply
stores for the precious remaining tubes of burntumber and
scarletlake, while it was presumed that in traditionally unheated
garrets orthodox poets nourished their muse on pencil
erasers. But all enthusiasm was individual property, the reaction
of single persons with excess adrenalin. No common
interests united doctor and stockbroker, steelworker and
truckdriver, laborer and laundryman, except common fear of
the Grass, briefly dormant but ever in the background of all
minds. The stream of novels, plays, and poems dried up; publishers,
amazed that what had been profitable the year before
was no longer so, were finally convinced and stopped printing
anything remotely literate; even the newspapers limped along
crippledly, their presses breaking down hourly, their circulation
and coverage alike dubious.
The streets were no more safe at night than in sixteenth
century London. Even in the greatest cities the lighting was
erratic and in the smaller ones it had been abandoned entirely.
Holdups by individuals had been practically given up, perhaps
because of the uncertainty of any footpad getting away
with his loot before being hijacked by another, but small compact
gangs made life and property unsafe at night. Tempers
were extraordinarily short; a surprised housebreaker was
likely to add battery, mayhem and arson to his crimes, and
altercations which commonly would have terminated in nothing
more violent than lurid epithets now frequently ended in
murder.
Since too many of the homeless took advantage of the law to
commit petty offenses and so secure some kind of shelter for
themselves, all law enforcement below the level of capital
crimes went by default. Prisoners were tried quickly, often in
batches, rarely acquitted; and sentences of death were executed
before nightfall so as to conserve both prison space and rations.
In rural life the descent was neither so fast nor so far. There
was no gasoline to run cars or tractors, but carefully husbanded
storagebatteries still provided enough electricity to catch the
news on the radio or allow the washingmachine to do the
week's laundry. To a great extent the farmer gave up his dependence
on manufactured goods, except when he could barter
his surplus eggs or milk for them, and instead went back
to the practices of his forefather, becoming for all intents and
purposes practically selfsufficient. Soap from woodashes and
leftover kitchen grease might scratch his skin and a jacket of
rabbit or wolverine hide make him selfconscious, but he went
neither cold nor hungry nor dirty while his urban counterpart,
for the most part, did.
One contingency the countrydweller prepared grimly
against: roaming hordes of the hungry from the towns, driven
to plunder by starvation which they were too shiftless to alleviate
by purchasing concentrates, for sale everywhere. Shotguns
were loaded, corncribs made tight, stock zealously
guarded. But except rarely the danger had been overestimated.
The undernourished proletariat lacked the initiative to go
out where the food came from. Generations had conditioned
them to an instinctive belief that bread came from the bakery,
meat from the butcher, butter from the grocer. Driven by desperation
they broke into scantily supplied food depots, but
seldom ventured beyond the familiar pavements. Famine took
its victims in the streets; the farmers continued to eat.
I arrived in New York on the clipper from London in mid-January
of this dreadful winter. I had boarded the plane at
Croydon, only subconsciously aware of the drive from London
through the traditionally neat hedgerows, of the completely
placid and lawabiding England around me, the pleasant officials,
the helpful yet not servile porters. Long Island shocked
me by contrast. It had come to its present condition by slow
degrees, but to the returning traveler the collapse was so woefully
abrupt it seemed to have happened overnight.
Tension and hysteria made everyone volatile. The customs
officials, careless of the position of those whom they dealt with,
either inspected every cubic inch of luggage with boorish suspicion
and resultant damage or else waved the proffered handbags
airily aside with false geniality. The highways, repeating
a pattern I had cause to know so well, were nearly impassable
with brokendown cars and other litter. The streets of Queens,
cluttered with wreckage and refuse, were bounded by houses
in a state of apathetic disrepair whose filthy windows refused
to look upon the scene before them. The great bridges over
the East River were not being properly maintained as an occasional
snapped cable, hanging over the water like a drunken
snake, showed; it was dangerous to cross them, but there was
no other way. The ferryboats had long since broken down.
At the door of my hotel, where I had long been accustomed
to just the right degree of courteous attention, a screaming
mob of men and boys wrapped in careless rags to keep out the
cold, their unwashed skins showing where the coverings had
slipped, begged abjectly for the privilege of carrying my bags.
The carpet in the lobby was wrinkled and soiled and in the
great chandeliers half the bulbs were blackened. Though the
building was served by its own powerstation, the elevators no
longer ran, and the hot water was rationed, as in a fifthrate
French pension. The coverlet on the bed was far from fresh,
the window was dusty and there was but one towel in the bathroom.
I was glad I had not brought my man along for him to
sneer silently at an American luxury hotel.
I picked up the telephone, but it was dead. I think nothing
gave me the feeling that civilization as we knew it had ended
so much as the blank silence coming from the dull black earpiece.
This, even more than the automobile, had been the
symbol of American life and activity, the essential means of
communication which had promoted every business deal, every
social function, every romance; it had been the first palliation
of the sickbed and the last admission of the mourner. Without
telephones we were not even in the horse and buggy days—we
had returned to the oxcart. I replaced the receiver slowly in its
cradle and looked at it a long minute before going back downstairs.
57. I had come home on a quixotic and
more or less unbusinesslike mission. It had long been the belief
of Consolidated Pemmican's chemists that the Grass might
possibly furnish raw material for food concentrates and we
had come to modify our opinion about the necessity for a
processing plant in close proximity. However, at secondhand,
no practicable formula had been evolved. Strict laws against
the transportation of any specimens and even stricter ones
barring them from every foreign country made experiment in
our main research laboratories infeasible; but we still maintained
a skeleton staff in our Jacksonville plant and I had come
to arrange the collection of a large enough sample for them to
get to work in earnest. It was a tricky business and I had no one
beside myself whom I could trust to undertake it except General
Thario, and he was fully occupied.
In addition to being illegal it also promised little profit, for
while dislocation of the normal foodsupply made the United
States our main market for concentrates, American currency
had fallen so low—the franc stood at $5, the pound sterling at
$250—it was hardly worthwhile to import our products. Of
course, as a good citizen, I didnt send American money abroad,
content to purchase Rembrandts, Botticellis, Titians or El
Grecos; or when I couldnt find masterpieces holding a stable
price on the world market, to change my dollars into some of
the gold from Fort Knox, now only a useless bulk of heavy
metal.
My first thought was Miss Francis. Though she had more or
less dropped from public sight, my staff had ascertained she
was living in a small South Carolina town. My telegrams
remaining unanswered, there was nothing for me to do but
undertake a trip there.
Despite strict instructions my planes had not been kept in
proper condition and I had great difficulty getting mechanics
to service them. There were plenty of skilled men unemployed
and though they were not eager to earn dollars they were willing
to work for other rewards. But the pervading atmosphere
of tension and anxiety made concentration difficult; they bungled
out of impatience, committed stupidities they would normally
be incapable of; they quit without cause, flew into rages
at the machines, the tools, their fellows, fate, at or without the
slightest provocation.
My pilot was surly and hilarious by turn and I suspected
him of drinking, which didnt add to my confidence in our
safety. We flew low over railroadtracks stretching an empty
length to the horizon, over smokeless factorychimneys, airports
whose runways were broken and whose landinglights
were dark. The land was green and rich, the industrial life
imposed upon it till yesterday had vanished, leaving behind it
the bleaching skeleton of its being.
The field upon which we came down seemed in slightly
better repair than others we had sighted. The only other ship
was an antique biplane which deserved housing in a museum.
As I looked around the deserted landingstrip a tall Negro
emerged leisurely from one of the buildings and walked toward
us.
"Where are the airport officials?" I asked rather sharply, for
I didnt relish being greeted by a janitor.
"I am the chief dispatcher. In fact, I am the entire personnel
at the moment."
My pilot, standing behind me, broke in. "Boy, where're the
white folks around here?"
The chief dispatcher looked at him steadily a long moment
before answering. "I imagine you will find people of various
shades all over town, including those allegedly white. Was
there anyone in particular you were interested in or are you
solely concerned with pigmentation?"
"Why, you goddam—"
I thought it advisable to prevent a possible altercation. I
recalled Le ffaçasé's articles on the Black South which I had
considered vastly overdrawn. Evidently they were not, for the
chocolatecolored man spoke with all the ease and assurance of
unquestioned authority. "I want to get to a Miss Francis at—"
I consulted my notes and gave him the address. "Can you get
me a taxi or car?"
He smiled gravely. "We are without such luxuries at present,
I regret to say. But there will be a bus along in about
twenty minutes."
It had been a long time since I suffered the wasted time and
inconvenience of public transportation. However, there was
no help for it and I resigned myself philosophically. I walked
with the chief dispatcher into the airport waitingroom, dull
with the listless air, not of unoccupancy, but disuse.
"Not much air travel," I remarked idly.
"Yours is the first plane in a month."
"I wonder you bother to keep the airport open at all."
"We do what we can to preserve the forms of civilization.
The substance, unfortunately, cannot be affected by transportation,
production, distribution, education or any other such
niceties."
I smiled inwardly. What children these black people were,
afterall. I was relieved from further ramblings by the arrival
of the bus which was as laughable as the chief dispatcher's
philosophizing. The dented and rusty vehicle had been disencumbered
of its motor and was hitched to four mules who
seemed less than enthusiastic over their lot. I got in and seated
myself gingerly on one of the dilapidated seats, noting that the
warning signs "For White" and "For Colored" had been
smeared over with just enough paint to make the intent of
obliteration clear without actually doing so.
58. How Miss Francis contrived to make
every place she lived in, apartment, chickenhouse or cottage,
look exactly alike was remarkable. Nothing is more absurd
than the notion that socalled intellectual workers are always
alert—as Miss Francis demonstrated by her greeting to me.
"Well, Weener, what is it this time? Selling on commission
or an interview?"
It was inconceivable any literate person in the United States
could be ignorant of my position. "It is neither," I returned
with some dignity. "I am here to do you a favor. To help you
in your work." And I explained my proposition.
She squatted back on her heels and gave me that old, familiar,
searching look. "So you have made a good thing out
of the Metamorphizer afterall," she said irrelevantly and untruthfully.
"Weener, you are a consistent character—a beautifully
consistent character."
"Please come to the point, Miss Francis. I am a busy man
and I have come down here simply to see you. Will you accept?"
"No."
"No?"
"I doubt if I could combine my research with your attempt
to process the inoculated Cynodon dactylon. However, that
would not prevent me from taking you up and using you in
order to further a good cause. But I am not yet ready—I shall
not be ready for some time, to go directly to the Grass. That
must come later. No, Weener."
I was exasperated at the softness of my impulse which had
made me seek out this madwoman to do her a favor. I could
not regret my charitable nature, but I mentally resolved to be
more discriminating in future. Besides, the thought of Miss
Francis for the work had been sheer sentimentality, the sort of
false reasoning which would make of every mother an obstetrician
or every hen an oologist.
As I sauntered through the drowsy streets, killing time till
the driver of the ridiculous "bus" should decide to guide his
mules back to the airport, I was struck by the lack of tension,
of apprehension and anxiety, so apparent in New York. Evidently
the Black South suffered little from the brooding fear
and terror; I put it down to their childish thoughtlessness.
Walking thus reflectively, head down, I looked up suddenly—straight
into the face of the Strange Lady I had driven from
Los Angeles to Yuma.
I'm sure I opened my mouth, but no words came out. She
was hurrying rapidly along, paying no attention either to me
or to her surroundings, aloof and exquisite. I think I put out
my hand, or made some other reflexive gesture to stop her, but
either she failed to notice or misunderstood. When I finally
recovered myself and set out after her, she had vanished.
I waited for the bus, wondering if I had been victim of an
hallucination....
59. In spite of Miss Francis' blindness to
her own interest I still had a prospective superintendent for
the gathering and shipping of the grass: George Thario. Unless
his obsession had sent him down into Mississippi or Louisiana,
I expected to find him in Indianapolis.
The short journey west was tedious and uncomfortable,
repeating the pattern of the one southward. At the end of it
there was no garrulous chief dispatcher, for the airport was
completely deserted, and I was thankful for an ample stock of
gas for the return flight.
I had no difficulty locating Joe in an immense, highceilinged
furnishedroom in one of the ugliest gray weatherboarded
houses, of which the city, never celebrated for its architecture,
could boast. The first thing to impress me was the room's
warmth. For the first time since landing I did not shiver. A
woodfire burned in an open grate and a kerosene heater
smelled obstinately in an opposite corner. A grandpiano stood
in front of the long narrow windows and on it slouched several
thick piles of curlyedged paper.
He greeted me with something resembling affection. "The
tycoon himself! Workers of the world—resume your chains.
A W, it's a pleasure to see you. And looking so smooth and
ordinary and unharassed too, at the moment everyone else is
tearing himself with panic or anguish. How do you do it?"
"I look on the bright side of things, Joe," I answered.
"Worry never helped anybody accomplish anything—and it
takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown."
"You hear that, Florence?"
I had not noticed her when I came in, the original of the
snapshot, sitting placidly in a corner darning socks. I must say
the photograph had done her less than justice, for though she
was undoubtedly commonlooking and sloppy, with heavy
breasts and coarse red cheeks and unconcealedly dyed hair,
there was yet about her an air of great vitality, kindness, and
good nature. Parenthetically she acknowledged my presence
with a pleasant smile.
"You hear that? Remind me the next time I am troubled
by a transposition or a solopassage that it takes less muscles to
smile than to frown. For I have got to work at last, A W; the
loafing and inviting of my soul is past, my soul has responded
to my invitation. You remember Crisodd's Devilgrass Symphony?
A horrible misconception if ever there was one, a
personal insult to anyone who ever saw the Grass; a dull, unintentional
joke; bad Schoenberg—if that isnt a tautology—combined
with faint memories of the most vulgar Wagner—if that
isnt another tautology—threaded together on Mighty Like a
Rose and Alexander's Ragtime Band. But what am I saying,
A W, to you who are so free from the virus of culture? What
the hell interest have you in Crisodd's symphony or my symphony
or anybody's symphony, except the polyphony of
profits?"
"I hope no one thinks I'm a narrowminded man, Joe," I
reproved him. "I venture to say I have as much interest in Art
as the next person. Ive done a bit of writing myself, you know,
and literature—"
"Oh sure. I didnt mean to hurt your feelings."
"You did not. But while I believe Music is a fine thing in its
place, I came to discuss a different subject."
"If you mean taking Joe back to Europe with you, youre
out of luck, Mr Weener," put in Florence placidly. "He's
almost finished the first movement and we'll never leave the
Grass till it's all done."
"You mistake me, Mrs Thario. I have a proposition for your
husband, but far from taking him away from the Grass, it
will bring him closer to it."
"Impossible," exclaimed Joe. "I am the Grass and the Grass
is me; in mystical union we have become a single entity. I
speak with its voice and in the great cadences which come from
its heart you can hear Thario's first, transfigured and magnified
a hundred thousand times."
I was sorry to note his speech, always so simple and unaffected
in contrast to his letters, was infected with an unbecoming
pomposity. Looking at him closely I saw he had lost
weight. His flesh had shrunk closer to his big frame and the
lines of his skull stood out sharply in his cheek and jaw. There
was the faintest touch of gray in his hair and his fingers played
nervously with the ragged and illadvised beard on his chin.
He hardly looked the man who had evaded serious work in
order to encourage a silly obsession, comfortably supported
all the while by a sizable remittance from his father.
I outlined to them my plans for gathering samples of the
weed. Florence tucked her stillthreaded needle between her
teeth and inspected the current pair of socks critically. Joe
walked over to the piano and struck several discordant notes.
"I understand there are several parties making expeditions
onto the Grass," I said.
"Lots," confirmed Joe. "There's a group sent out by Brother
Paul on some very mysterious mission. It's called the Sanctification
of the Forerunner. God knows how many thousands
he's made his suckers cough up, for theyre equipped with all
the latest gadgets for polar exploration, skis and dogsleds,
moompitcher cameras, radios and unheardof quantities of
your very best pemmican. They started as soon as the snow was
thick enough to bear their weight and if we have an untimely
thaw theyll go to join the Russians.
"Then there's the government bunch, the Disruptions
Commission having finally and reluctantly produced an idea,
but exactly what it is they havent confided to an eager citizenry.
Smaller groups too: scientists and nearscientists, enthusiasts
who have got the notion somehow that animals or migratory
game are roaming the snow on top of the grass—exactly
how they got there is not explained—planning to photograph,
hunt or trap; and just plain folk making the trip for the hell
of it. We might have gone ourselves if it hadnt been for the
symphony."
"Your symphony is concerned with the Grass?" I asked
politely.
"It's concerned with combinations of sound." He looked at
me sharply and banged out harsher discords. "With life, if
you want to talk like a programnote."
"If you go on this expedition it will give you an opportunity
to gather new material," I pointed out.
"If I look out the window or consult my navel or 'meditate
while at stool' or cut my finger I will get new material with
much less hardship. The last thing a composer or writer or
painter needs is material; it is from excess of material he is the
besotted creature he is. He may lack leisure or energy or ability
or an active colon, but no masterpiece ever was or conceivably
could be thwarted from lack of material."
"Yet you have tied yourself to the Grass."
"Not to prostitute it to whatever talents I have, but because
it is the most magnificent thing on earth."
"Then of course youll go," I said.
"Why don't you go yourself, A W? Do you good to live out
in the open."
"I can't afford the time, Joe; I have too many things that
need my personal attention."
He struck a series of great thumping notes. "And so have I,
A W, so have I. I'm afraid youll have to get somebody else."
I could neither understand nor shake his obstinacy and
when I left them I had almost determined to abandon the
whole project, for I could not think whom else trustworthy
I could get. His idea of my own participation was fantastic; I
had long since come to the point where it was necessary to delegate
all such duties to subordinates.
60. Perhaps it was Joe's sly remark about
it doing me good to be out in the open, or the difficulty of
getting a conveyance, but I decided to walk to my hotel. Taxis
of course disappeared with gasoline, but ingenious men, unwilling
to be pauperized by accepting the dole, had devised
rickshaws and bicycle carriages which were the only means of
local transportation. The night was clear and cold, the stars
gleaming in distant purity, but all around, the offensive smell
of the disheveled city played on my disgusted nostrils.
"In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. Brother, are you
saved?"
When the figure had come out from the shadow of a building
to accost me my first thought had been of a holdup, but the
odd salutation made this seem unlikely. "What do you want?"
I asked.
"Brother, are you a Christian man?"
I resented the impertinence and started to walk on; he followed
close beside me. "Harden not your heart, miserable
sinner, but let Jesus dissolve your pride as he washes away
your other sins. Be not high and mighty for the high shall be
low and the mighty powerless; in a short time you will be food
for grass. The Grass is food for the Ox, the divine Ox with
seven horns which shall come upon the world with a great
trumpeting and bellowing soon after the Forerunner."
I knew of the great multiplication of insanity and hoped I
could reach the hotel before he grew violent. "What is your
name?" I temporized.
"Call me Brother Paul, for I was once Saul the worldly; now
I am your brother in Christ."
"Brother Paul! The radio preacher?"
"We are all members one of another and He who watches
the sparrow fall makes no distinction between one manmade
label and another. All of us who have found Christ Jesus with
the help of Brother Paul are called Brother Paul. Come to the
Loving Arms, O miserable sinner, and be Brother Paul also."
I thought it might be very confusing. "I have always been
interested in religion."
"O puny man. Interested in life and interested in death,
interested in being and interested in begetting, interested in
religion and interested in dung. Turn from those interests
which the devil pays upon your soul's mortgage; your Savior
resides in the heart of the Grass—withhold not your precious
soul from Him. At this very moment the Forerunner is being
sanctified and after her there will come the Ox to eat the Grass
and then the end of the world. Give Brother Paul your worthless
earthly possessions, give your soul to Jesus and hasten that
glorious day. Hallelujah!"
The fervid jumble ended in a near scream. What a waste of
oratorical and perhaps organizational energy, I mused as I
strode along rapidly, still intent on escaping the fanatic. Under
different circumstances, I thought, a man like this might turn
out to be a capable clerk or minor executive. Suddenly I had
a hunch.
"Mr—?"
"Brother Paul. I have no earthly name."
"I wish youd come with me for a few minutes; I have a proposition
which might interest you."
In the darkness I could see him peering at me suspiciously.
"Is this some worldly seduction from the Christian path?"
"I think you will find what I have to offer a material aid to
your church."
"I have no church," he said. "We are Christians and recognize
no manmade institution."
"Well, then, to your movement or whatever you call it." In
spite of his reluctance, which was now as great as mine had
been originally, I persuaded him to accompany me. He sat
uneasily forward while I told him who I was and sketched the
plan for collecting some of the Grass.
"What is this to me? I have long ago put aside all material
thoughts and now care only for the life of the spirit."
This must be true, I thought, noting his shabby clothes,
sweatgreasy muffler at once hiding and revealing lack of necktie,
and cracked shoes, one sock brown, the other black. "It is
this to you: if you don't want the salary and bonus attached to
organizing and superintending the expedition—and I am prepared
to be generous—you can turn it over to Brother Paul.
I imagine it will be acceptable."
He shook his head, muttering, "Satan, Satan." The lower
part of his face was wide and divided horizontally, like an inverted
jellymold. It tapered up into bracketing ears, supporting
gingery eaves. I pressed home my arguments.
"I will put your proposition to Brother Paul," he conceded
at length.
"I thought distinctions between one man and another were
worldly and trivial," I prodded him. "Arent you Brother
Paul?"
"Satan, Satan," he repeated.
I'm sure it could have been nothing but one of those flashes
of intuition for which successful executives are noted which
caused me to pick this man in spite of his absurd ranting and
illfavored appearance. Not intuition really, but an ability to
evaluate and classify personalities instantly. I always had this
faculty; it helped me in my early experiences as a salesman
and blossomed out when I entered my proper field.
Anthony Preblesham—for that was his worldly name—did
not disappoint my judgment for he proved one of the most
aggressive men I ever hired. The Brother Paul hocuspocus,
which he quickly dropped, had merely caught and canalized
an abounding energy that would otherwise have flowed aimlessly
in a stagnant world. In Consolidated Pemmican he found
his true faith; his zeal for our products proved as great if not
greater than his former hysteria for the salvation of mankind.
It was no fault of his that the expedition he led proved fruitless.
The men Tony Preblesham took with him were all Brother
Pauls who—since they disdained them—had not been told of
material rewards but given the impression they were furthering
their fanatical creed. They built a camp upon the Grass,
or rather upon the snow which overlay the Grass, near what
had once been Springfield, Illinois. Digging down through the
snow to the weed, they discovered it to have lost most of its
rubbery qualities of resistance in dormancy, and cut with comparative
ease more than four tons which were transported with
the greatest difficulty to the Florida plant. Here, to anticipate,
their work came to nothing, for no practicable method was
found for reducing the grass to a form in which its nutritive
elements could be economically extracted.
61. The secrecy surrounding the government
expedition could not be maintained and it was soon
learned that what was planned was nothing less than an attempt
to burn great areas of the weed while in its dormant
state. All previous attempts to fire the Grass had been made
when the sap was running and it was thought that in its dryer
condition some measure of success might be obtained. The
public instantly translated possibility into probability and
probability into virtual certainty, their enthusiastic optimism
making the winter more bearable.
The party proceeded not more than a couple of miles beyond
the eastern edge, dragging with them a flexible pipeline
through which was pumped fueloil, now priceless in the freezing
cities. Methodically they sprayed a square mile and set it
afire, feeding the flames with the oil. The burning area sank
neatly through the snow, exposing the grass beneath: dry, yellow
and brittle. The stiff, interwoven stolons caught; oil was
applied unstintedly; the crackling and roaring and snapping
could be heard by those well beyond the perimeter of the Grass
and the terrific heat forced the temporary abandonment of the
work.
The spotbroadcasters in emotional voices gave the news to
those whose radios still functioned. Reporters flashed their
editors, BURNING SUCCESSFUL. WILL STOP GRASS
IF MULTIPLIED. All over the country volunteer crews were
instantly formed to repeat the experiment.
When the flames died down the men crept closer to inspect
the results. The heat had melted the snow for many yards outside
the orbit of fire, revealing a border of dull and sodden
grass. Beyond this border a blackened crater had eaten its way
straight down to the reclaimed earth below. Shouting and
rejoicing greeted this evidence of triumph. What if the Grass
could advance at will in summer? It could be subdued in winter
and thus kept in check till the ingenuity which devised this
one victory could win another.
Working furiously, the oil was again sprayed, this time over
a still larger piece and again the flames lit the sky. The President
issued a Proclamation of Thanksgiving; the American
dollar rose to $175 to the pound, and several prominent expatriates
began to think seriously of returning home.
The second fire burned through the night and aided by a
slight change in the weather thawed the snow over a great
area. Eagerly the expedition, now swollen into a small army,
returned to continue their triumphant labors. The bright sun
shone upon the dirtied snow, upon naked muddy earth in the
center of the crater, upon the network of burnt and blackened
stems and upon the wide band of grayishgreen grass the retreating
snow had laid open to its rays. Grayishgreen, but
changing in color at every moment as the work of spraying
began again.
Changing color, becoming more verdant, thrusting blades
into the air, moving its long runners upward and sideways and
downward toward the destroyed part. Revived by the heat,
relieved of the snow, the Grass, fighting for its life with the
same intensity which animated its attackers, burst into a fury
of growth. It covered the evidences of destruction in less time
than the burning had taken. It tore the pipeline from its tormentors'
hands and drove them away with threats of swift
immolation. Defiantly it rose to a pinnacle, hiding its mutilation,
and flaunted its vivid tendrils to bear witness to its invulnerability
till a killing frost followed by another snowfall
covered it again.
Since the delusive hope had been so high, the disappointment
threw the public into a despair greater than ever before.
The nervous tension of anxiety was replaced by a listlessness
of resignation and the suicide rate, high before, now doubled.
For the first time a general admission was to be heard that no
solution would be found and in another season the end would
come for the United States. Facing the prospect squarely, an
exodus of the little people, as distinguished from the earlier
flight of men of wealth and foresight, from the country began.
This was the first countermeasure attempted since the Grass
crossed the Mississippi, and in reaction to its collapse, the
return of Brother Paul's expedition passed almost unnoticed.
Only Time, now published in Paris, bothered to report it for
general circulation: "Last week from some undisclosed spot
in mid U.S. returned Mother, 'The Forerunner' Joan (real
name: unknown), and party. Dispatched Grassward by Brother
Paul, doom-predicting, advent-prophesying graminophile
evangelist, the purpose of Mother Joan's expedition had been
her 'Sanctification,' above the exact spot where the Savior was
waiting in the midst of the Grass to receive His faithful disciples.
Said Brother Paul to reporters after embracing The
Forerunner enthusiastically, 'The expedition has been successful.'
Said Mother Joan, off the record, 'My feet hurt.'"
62. The coming of spring was awaited
with grim foreboding, but the Grass was not bound by any
manmade almanac and unable to contain itself till the melting
of the snow, again leaped the barrier of the Mississippi, this
time near Natchez, and ran through the South like water from
a sloshed dishpan. The prized reforms of the black legislatures
were wiped out more quickly even than their greatgrandfathers'
had been in 1877. The wornout cotton and tobacco
lands offered hospitable soil while cypress swamps and winter-swollen
creeks pumped vitality into the questing runners.
Southward and eastward it spread, waiting only the opening of
the first pussywillow and the showing of the first crocus to
jump northward and meet the western advance there.
The dwindling remnants of cohesion and selfcontrol existing
before now disappeared completely. The capital was
moved to Portland, Maine. Local law and order vanished. The
great gangs took over the cities and extracted what tribute
they could from the impoverished inhabitants. Utilities ceased
functioning entirely, what little goods remained were obtainable
only by barter, and epidemic after epidemic decreased the
population to fit the shrinking boundaries.
Brother Paul, deprived of the radio, now multiplied himself
infinitely in the person of his disciples, preaching unremittingly
against resistance, even by thought, to the oncoming
Grass. Mother Joan's infrequent public appearances attracted
enormous crowds as she proclaimed, "O be joyful; give your
souls to Jesus and your bodies to the Grass. I am The Forerunner
and after me will come the Ox. Rejoice, brothers and
sisters, for this is the end of all your suffering and misery."
On foot or rarely with the aid of a horse or mule, the panicstricken
population marched northward and eastward. Canadian
officials, anxious to apply immigration controls with the
greatest possible latitude, were thrust aside as though their
existence were an irrelevance. Along the lower reaches of the
St Lawrence the refugees came like locusts to devour the substance
of the habitants. Into empty Ungava and almost equally
empty Labrador the hardier ones pushed, armed like their
forebears with only ax and shotgun. Northward and eastward,
beyond the Arctic Circle and onto the polar ice they trickled,
seeking some place which promised security from the Grass.
Passenger rates to Europe or South America, formerly at a
premium, now shot to unparalleled heights.
I wound up my own affairs, disappointed at the failure to
find a use for the Grass, but still keeping it in view as a future
objective, and arranged for the removal of the Florida factory
to Brazzaville. Heeding the cabled importunities of Stuart
Thario I risked my life to travel once more into the interior to
see Joe and persuade him to come back with me. I found them
in a small Pennsylvania town in the Alleghenies, once a company
owned miningvillage. The Grass, advancing rapidly, was
just beyond the nearest mountainridge, replacing the jagged
Appalachian horizon with a softer and more ominous one.
They appeared serene and content, Joe's haggard look of
the winter erased. "I'm in the middle of the third movement,
A W," he told me, like a man who had no time to waste on
preliminaries or indirections. "Here." He thrust an enormous
manila envelope at me. "Here are the first two movements.
There are no copies and I cannot trust the mails or any other
messenger to get them out. If possible I'll send the Old Man
the third movement as soon as it's finished—and the fourth, if
I have time. But take the first two anyway; at least I'll know
theyre preserved."
"Joe, Florence!" I exclaimed. "This is ridiculous. Insane.
Come back with me."
Silence.
"You can compose just as well in Europe, if it is so important
to you. In France, say, or England, away from this danger
and discomfort. There is no doubt the country is finished;
come to safety while you can."
Florence was busy with a stack of musicpaper and offered no
comment. Joe put his hand for a second on my shoulder and
then turned away, talking with his eyes fixed out the window
in the direction of the Grass.
"General Herkimer had both legs shot off at the battle of
Oriskany. He made his men put his back to a treestump and
with a flintlock rifle fired at the enemy until he bled to death.
Commodore Lawrence, mortally wounded, had only one
order. Schoolbooks hold the words of John Paul, selfnamed
Jones, and of Hiram Ulysses Grant. Even yesterday, the old
tradition was alive: 'Enemy landing; issue in doubt.' If I
finish my symphony—"
"When you finish your symphony—" I encouraged.
"If you finish your symphony—" said Florence quietly.
"If I finish my symphony, it must be in Maine, New Hampshire,
Vermont." His speech took on a hushed, abstracted tone.
"Massachusetts, Rhode Island or Connecticut. New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania—" his voice rose higher— "Maryland,
Virginia or West Virginia—" his shoulders shook and he
seemed to be crying— "North Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, Florida ..."
I left them, convinced the madness of the country had found
still another victim. That night I thankfully boarded the
European Clipper for the last time. The next day I sank back
into civilization as into a comfortable bed.
63. "The United States, July 4 (N.A.N.A.)—'A
decent respect for the opinion of mankind' dictates the
content of this summary. Less than two centuries past, a small
group of smugglers, merchants and planters united in an insurrection
which in its course gathered to itself such an accreta
of riffraff—debtors, convicts, adventurers, careerists, foreigners,
theoreticians, idealists, revolutionaries, soldiers of fortune
and restless men, that at the height of their numbers they composed,
with their sympathizers, perhaps a third of the people
in the country. After seven years of inept war in which they
had all the breaks, including that of a halfhearted enemy, they
established 'upon this continent a new nation.' Some of the
phrases thrown off in the heat of propaganda were taken seriously
and despite shocked opposition written into basic law.
"The cryptogram is readable backward or forward, straightaway
or upside down. Unparalleled resources, the fortuitous
historical moment, the tide of immigration drawing on the
best of the world, the implicit good in conception necessarily
resultant in the explicit best of being; high purpose, inventive
genius, exploratory urge, competitive spirit, fraternal enthusiasm,
what does the ascription matter if the end product was
clear for all to see?
"Is it not fitting that a nation calling itself lightly 'God's
Country,' meaning a land abundantly favored by nature,
should find its dispatch through an act of the benefactor become
understandably irritable? This is not to pose the editorial
question of justice, but to remember in passing the girdled
forests, abused prairies, gullied lands, the stupidly harnessed
plains, wasted coal, gas, petroleum; the millions of tons
of rich mud denied hungry soil by Mississippi levees and
forced profitlessly into the salt sea.
"A small part, a heartbreakingly small part of the United
States remains at this moment. In a matter of weeks even this
little must be overrun, stilled and covered green as all graves
are. Scattered through the world there will be Americans, participants
in a bitter diaspora. For them—and for their children
to be instructed zealously in the formalities of an antique civilization—there
can be no Fourth of July, no Thanksgiving;
only one holiday will remain, and that continue through all
the year. Its name, of course, is Memorial Day. W.R.L."
64. This was the last dispatch from the
once great editor. It was assumed generally that he had perished
with so many others. It was only some time later I heard
a curious story, for whose authenticity I cannot vouch.
True to the flippant prediction of Jacson Gootes, Le ffaçasé
returned to the Church into which he had been born. He went
further and became a lay brother, taking upon himself the
obligation of silence. Though an old man, he stayed close to
the advancing Grass, giving what assistance and comfort he
could to the refugees. The anecdotes of his sudden appearance
in typhusridden camps, mute and gaunt, hastening with water
for the feverish, quieting the terrified with a light touch, praying
silently beside the dying, sound improbable to me, but I
mention them for what they are worth.
65. When winter came again, the Canadian
government petitioned the Parliament at Westminster
for crowncolony status and the assent of the Queen's Privy
Council was given to the ending of the premier Dominion. All
that was left of the largest landmass within the British Commonwealth
was eastern and northern Quebec, the Maritime
Provinces and part of the Northwest Territories.
The United States and more than half of Mexico had been
wiped from the map. From the Pacific to the Atlantic, from
Nome to Veracruz stretched a new Sargasso Sea of Cynodon
dactylon. A hundred and eighty million men, women, and
children had been thrust from their homes by a despised weed.
I cannot say life on the other continents—and I could call
any of them, except possibly Africa, my home—was undisturbed
by the disappearance of the United States. American
competition gone, the tempo of businesslife seemed to run
slower and slower. Production dwindled, prices rose; luxury
articles were made in abundance, but manufacturers hesitated
to adopt American methods of massproduction for
necessities.
Russia, after her new revolution, was a quiet backwater economically,
although politically she caused turmoil by giving
a home to the Fourth International. Germany became the
leading iron and steel country, but it was not an aggressive
leadership, rather it was a lackadaisical acceptance of a fortuitous
role; while Britain, often on deathbed but never a corpse,
without question took the lead in international affairs.
Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Industries was now, if
not the largest, certainly one of the largest companies in the
world. We purchased sheep in Australia, beef and wheat and
corn in South America, rice and millet and eggs in Asia, fruit
and sugar and milo in Africa, and what the farmers of Europe
could spare, to process and ship back in palatable, concentrated
form to a world which now constituted our market.
Besides all this we had of course our auxiliary concerns, many
of which dominated their respective fields. Ministers of finance
consulted me before proposing new budgets and there was not
a statesman—outside the Socialist Union—who didnt listen
respectfully to my suggestions.
Tony Preblesham had proved an invaluable find. Never the
type to whom authority in the largest matters could be delegated,
nevertheless he was extremely handy as troubleshooter,
exploiter of new territory or negotiator with competitors or
troublesome laborleaders. The pioneers who had fled to the
north had little to offer in payment for the vast quantities of
food concentrates they required, but the land was rich in furs,
timber, and other resources. With permission of the Danish
authorities I sent Preblesham to Julianthaab. There he established
our headquarters for Greenland, Iceland, and all that
was left of North America. From Julianthaab immediately
radiated a network of posts where our products were traded for
whatever the refugees could bring in.
But the Americans who had gone into the icy wastes were
not seeking subsistence. They were striving mightily to reach
some place of sanctuary where they could no longer be menaced
by the Grass. Beyond the Arctic Circle? Here they might
learn to imitate the Innuit, living on fish and seals and an occasional
obligingly beached whale. But could they be sure, on
territory contiguous or very nearly contiguous to that supporting
the weed, that they could count on immunity? They did
not believe so. They filled up Newfoundland in the hope that
the narrow Gulf of St Lawrence and the narrower Straits of
Belle Isle might offer protective barriers. They crossed on sleds
to Baffin Island and in homemade boats to Greenland. Before
the Grass had wiped out their families, and their less hardy
compatriots left behind in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward
Island, these pioneers abandoned the continent of their origin;
the only effect of their passage having been to exterminate the
last of the Innuit by the propagation of the manifold diseases
they had brought with them.
In the south the tempo was slower, the striving for escape
less hysterical and more philosophic. When the Mexican peon
heard the Grass was in the next village he packed his few belongings
and moved farther away. From Tampico to Chiapas
the nation journeyed easily south, not regretting too loudly
the lands left behind, not crowding or jostling rudely on the
highways, not failing to pause for siestas when the sun was hot,
but traveling steadily in a quiet resignation that seemed beyond
resignation—the extension of a gracious will.
66. But the rest of the world, even in
the lethargy which had come upon it in viewing the loss of
most of North America, could not afford to leave the Grass to
its own devices, content to receive the refugees it drove out or
watch them die. A World Congress to Combat the Grass was
hastily called in London. It was a distinguished body of representatives
from all the nations and resembled at its best the
now functionless Federal Disruptions Committee.
At the opening sitting a delegation with credentials from
the President of the United States attempted to join in the
proceedings. One of the French members rose to inquire of
the chairman, Where was the United States? He, the delegate,
had read of such a country, had heard it spoken of—and none
too favorably—but did it exist, de facto?
The delegate from Haiti asked for the floor and wished to
assure his distinguished colleague from the motherland of
culture—especially did he wish to assure this learned gentleman,
bound as they were by the same beautiful and meticulous
language—that his country had good reason to know the
United States actually existed—or had done so at one time.
His glorious land bore scars inflicted by the barbarians. His
own grandfather, a great patriot, had been hunted down by
the United States Marines as a bandit. He implored a congress
with humanitarian designs to refuse admission to the delegates
of the socalled United States.
One of the German delegates, after wiping the perspiration
from the three folds on the back of his neck, said he spoke with
great diffidence for fear of being misunderstood. The formerly
existent country had twice defeated, or apparently defeated,
his own in a war and his distinguished colleagues might misinterpret
the spirit which moved him. Nevertheless, he could
not refrain from remarking that it appeared to him that a
Just Providence had wiped out the United States and therefore
it would be illogical if not blasphemous for this august body
to admit a delegation from a nonexistent country.
The American delegation attempted to point out feebly
that Hawaii still remained and Puerto Rico and Guam. The
members from the various sections of the British Commonwealth,
arguing the precedents of the governmentsinexile,
urged the acceptance of their credentials. The representative
of Switzerland called for a vote and the credentials were
rejected.
This controversy being settled, the body, in high good
humor, selected a governing committee to take whatever measures
it deemed necessary to protect the rest of the world from
the menace. After lengthy debate and much conflicting testimony
from experts a bold plan was endorsed. It was decided
to complete the digging of the Nicaragua Canal and blow up
that part of Central America lying between it and the Isthmus
of Panama. It was a colossal feat of engineering which would
cost billions of pounds and untold manpower, but the nations
of the world, not without some grumbling, finally agreed to
the expenditure.
While technicians from all over the world directed laborgangs
and steamshovels, ammunitionships loaded with tons of
explosives sailed from every port for Panama and Colon.
Though at first reluctant with their contributions, the countries
had reconsidered and poured forth their shares without
stint. All obsolete warmaterials were shipped to the scene of
action. Prisons were emptied to supply the needed manpower
and when this measure fell short all without visible means of
support were added to the roll.
Shortsightedly Costa Rica protested vigorously the proposed
destruction of its entire territory and there were even
momentary uprisings of patriots who proposed to defend their
nation with the last drop of blood, but commonsense and international
amity prevailed, especially when Costa Ricans
were promised a territory twice as big as their native country
in the hinterland between Colombia and Venezuela, a valueless
tract both nations had been trying in vain to settle for
decades.
Night and day the detonations of highexplosives killed fish
on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of Central America and
brought stunned birds plummeting down from the skies to
their death. The coastal plains fell into the sea, great mountains
were reduced to powder and little by little the gap between
North and South America widened.
But the progress of the work was infinitesimal compared
with the advance of the Grass. It swept over the ancient Aztec
empire down to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The ruins of
Mayan civilization, excavated once, were buried anew. The
demolition engineers measured their daily progress in feet,
the Grass in miles. When the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific
met in Lake Nicaragua, the Grass was in Yucatan. When the
first green runners invaded Guatemala, a bare twenty miles of
northern Panama had been demolished and hardly a start had
been made in the destruction of Costa Rica.
Fleets of airplanes bombed the connecting strip in the area
left by engineers to the last, but as their flights went on the
Grass crept into British Honduras. The workers sent another
twenty miles of Panama into nothingness and the Grass completed
the conquest of Guatemala. They blew up another ten
miles and the Grass took over El Salvador. Dynamite widened
the Nicaragua Canal to a ridiculously thin barrier as the Grass
overran Honduras.
They stood now almost facetoface, the width of one pitiful
little Banana Republic between them. On one hand the Grass,
funneled and constricted to a strip of land absurdly inadequate
to support its gargantuan might, on the other the combined
resources of man, desperately determined to destroy the
bridge before the invader. In tropic heat the work was kept up
at superhuman pace. Gangs of native laborers fainting under
their loads were blown skyhigh by impatient technicians unwilling
to waste the time necessary to revive them. In selfdefense
the South American states doubled their contributions.
At the edge of the weed all the offensive weapons of the
world were massed to stay it as long as possible, for even a
day's—even an hour's delay might be invaluable.
But the Grass overbore the heavy artillery, the flamethrowers,
the bombs, the radium, and all the devices in its path. The
inventions of war whose constant improvement was the pride
of the human race offered no more obstacle to the Grass than
a few anthills might to a herd of stampeding elephants. It
swept down to the edge of the ditch and paused at the fiftymile
stretch of saltwater between it and the shapeless island still
offering the temptation of a foothold in front of the now vastly
enlarged Panama Canal.
If those engaged in the task, from coordinator-in-chief
down to the sweating waterboys, had worked like madmen
before, they worked like triple madmen now, for the wind
might blow a single seed onto what had been Costa Rica and
undo all they had so far accomplished. The explosions were
continuous, rocking the diminishing territory with ceaseless
earthquakes. After an hour on the job men reeled away, deafened,
blinded and shocked.
On the South American side, as had been planned, great
supercyclone fans were set up to blow back any errant seed.
Fed by vast hydroelectric plants in the Colombian highlands,
the noise of their revolving blades drowned out the sounds of
the explosions for all those nearby. The oceans became interested
participants and enormously high tides possibly caused
by the difference in level between the Atlantic and Pacific,
clawed away great hunks of land. The great island became a
small island, the small island an islet. At last nothing but ruffling
blue water lay between the Grass and South America.
Over this stretch of sea the great fans blew their steady breath,
protecting the continent behind from the fate of its northern
twin.
The passage between was forbidden to all ships for fear they
might inadvertently act as carriers of the seed. The lost continent
was not only isolated, it was sealed off. From the sharp
apex of the inverted triangle to its broad base in the arctic ice
the Grass flourished in one undisputed prairie, the sole legatee
of all the hopes, trials, afflictions, dreams and victories of
the men and women who had lived there since the first alien
foot was set upon its soil.
