Greener Than You Think Part 39

"Yes, sir. I believe sites should be selected near bodies of fresh water and tremendous excavations made. The walls and floor of the excavations should be lined with concrete, through which the water is piped. The cities could be on many levels, the topmost peraps several miles in the air--gla.s.s enclosed--and with pipes reaching still igher to bring air in, and completely tight against the Gra.s.s. They should be selfcontained, generating their own power and providing their food by ydroponic farming. Such cities could hold millions of people now doomed until a way is found to kill the Gra.s.s."

There was a faintly familiar ring to the scheme.

"You seem to have worked it out thoroughly, Burlet."

"Polis.h.i.+ng the plate, sir."

"Polis.h.i.+ng the plate?"

"It leaves the mind free for cerebration. I ave a full set of blueprints and specifications, if youd like to inspect them, sir."

It was fantastic, I thought, and probably quite impractical, but I promised to submit his plans to those with more technical knowledge than I possessed. I sent his carefully written papers to an undersecretary of the World Congress and forgot the matter. Idleness certainly led to queer occupations. Vertical cities--and who in the world had the money to erect these nightmare structures? Only Albert Weener--that was probably why Burlet took advantage of his position to approach me with the scheme. Completely absurd....

_86._ Probably the complaints of the Australians gave final impetus to the Congress to Combat the Gra.s.s. They met in extraordinary session in Budapest and declared themselves the executive body of a world government, which did not of course include the Socialist Union. All qualified scientists were immediately ordered to leave whatever employment they had and place themselves at the disposition of the World Government. Affluence for life, guaranteed against any fluctuations of currency, was promised to anyone who could offer, not necessarily an answer, but an idea which should lead to the solution of the problem in hand. While they were issuing their first edicts the Gra.s.s finished off the East Indies, covered threequarters of Australia and attacked the southern Philippines.

Millions of Indonesians traveling the comparatively short distances in anything floatable crowded the already overpopulated areas of Asia. As I had predicted to General Thario, these refugees carried nothing with which to purchase the concentrates to keep them alive, and conditions of famine in India and China, essentially due to the backwardness of these countries, offered no subsistence to the natives--much less to an influx from outside.

The Gra.s.s sped northward and westward through the Malay States and Siam, up into China and Burma. In the beginning the Orientals did not flee, but stood their ground, village by village and family by family, opposing the advance with scythes, stones, and pitiful bonfires of their household belongings, with hoes, flails, and finally with their bare hands. But the naked hand, no matter how often multiplied, was as unable to halt the green flow as the most uptodate weapons of modern science.

And the Chinese and the Hindus dying at their posts were no more an obstacle than mountain or desert or stretches of empty sea had been.

It was now deemed expedient, in order to keep public hysteria from rising to new selfdestructive heights, to tone down and modify the news.

This proved quite difficult at first, for the people in their shortsightedness clamored for the accounts of impending doom which they devoured with a dreadful fascination. But eventually, when the wildest rumors produced by the dearth of accurate reports were disproved, many of the people in Western Europe and Africa actually believed the Gra.s.s had somehow failed to make headway on the Asiatic continent and would have remained in their pleasant ignorance had it not been for the premature flight of ma.s.ses of Asiatics.

For the phenomenon contemporary with the close of the Roman Empire was repeated. A great, struggling, churning, sprawling, desperate efflux from east to west began; once more the Golden Horde was on the march.

They did not come, as had their ancestors, on wildly charging horses, threatening with lances and deadly scimitars, but on foot, wretched and begging. Even had I been as maudlin as Stuart Thario desired I could not have fed these people, for there were no longer railroads with rollingstock adequate to carry the freight, no fleets of trucks in good repair, nor was the fuel available had they existed. The world receded rapidly from the machineage, and as it did so famine and pestilence increased in evermounting spirals.

The mob of refugees might be likened to a beast with weak, almost atrophied legs, but with a great mouth and greater stomach. It moved with painful slowness, crawling over the face of southern Asia, finding little sustenance as it came, leaving none whatever after it left. The beast, only dimly aware of the Gra.s.s it was fleeing from, could formulate no thoughts of the refuge it sought. Without plan, hope, or malice, it was concerned only with hunger. Day and night its empty gut cried for food.

The starving men and women--the children died quickly--ate first all that was available in the stores and homes, then scrabbled in the fields for a forgotten grain of rice or wheat; they ate the bark and fungus from the trees and gleaned the pastures of their weeds and dung. As they ate they moved on, their faminedistended stomachs craving more to eat, driving the ones who were but one step further from starvation ever before them.

Long ago they had chewed on the leather of their footgear and devoured all cats, dogs and rodents. They ate the stiffened and putrid carca.s.ses of draft animals which had been pushed to the last extremity; they turned upon the corpses of the newly dead and fed on them, and at length did not wait for death from hunger to make a new cadaver, but mercifully slew the weak and ate the still warm bodies.

The Asiatic influx was a social accordion. The pulledout end, the high notes, as it were, the Indian princes, Chinese warlords, arrived quickly and settled into a welcoming obscurity. They came by plane, with gold and jewels and government bonds and shares of Consolidated Pemmican. The middle creases of the accordion came later, more slowly, but as quickly as money could speed their way. Men of wealth when they began their journey, they arrived little more than penniless and were looked upon with suspicion, tolerated only so long as they did not become a public charge.

The low notes, the thick and heavy pleats, took not days nor weeks nor months, but years to make the trek. They kept but a step ahead of the Gra.s.s, traveling at the same pace. They came not alone, but with accretions, pus.h.i.+ng ahead of them millions of their same dispossessed, hungry, penniless kind. These were not greeted with suspicion, but with hatred; machineguns were turned upon the advancing mobs, the few airplanes in service were commandeered to bomb them, and only lack of fuel and explosives allowed them to sweep into Europe and overwhelm most of it as the barbarians had overwhelmed Rome.

But I antic.i.p.ate. While the bulk of the Orientals was still beyond the Himalayas and the Gobi, Europe indulged in a wild saturnalia to celebrate its own doom. All pretense of s.e.xual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small illprinted newspapers carried advertis.e.m.e.nts promising the gratification of strange l.u.s.ts. A new cult of Priapus sprang up and virgins were ceremoniously deflowered at his shrine. Those beyond the age of concupiscence attended celebrations of the Black Ma.s.s, although I was told by one communicant that partic.i.p.ation lacked the necessary zest, since none possessed a faith to which blasphemy could give a shocking thrill.

Murder was indulged in purely for the pleasure. Men and women, hearing of the cannibalism raging among the refugees, adopted and refined it for their own amus.e.m.e.nt. Small promiscuous groups, at the end of orgies, chose the man and woman tiring soonest; the two victims were thereupon killed and devoured by their late paramours.

As there was a cult to Priapus, so there was an equally strong cult to Diana. The monasteries and convents overflowed. But in the tension of the moment many were not satisfied with mere vows of celibacy. In secret and impressive ceremonies women scarified their tenderest parts with redhot irons, thus proving themselves forever beyond the l.u.s.ts of the flesh; men solemnly castrated themselves and threw the symbols of their manhood into a consuming fire.

I wouldnt want to give the impression b.e.s.t.i.a.l madness of one kind or another overtook everyone. There were plenty of normal people like myself who were able to maintain their selfcontrol and ca.n.a.lize those energies promoting crimes and beastly exhibitions in the unrestrained into looking forward to the day when the Gra.s.s would be gone and sanity return.

Nor would I like anyone to think law and order had completely abdicated its function. As offenses multiplied, laws grew more severe, misdemeanors became felonies, felonies capital offenses. When death by hanging became the prescribed sentence for any type of theft it was necessary to make the punishment for murder more drastic. Drawing and quartering were reinst.i.tuted; this not proving an efficient deterrent, many jurists advocated a return to the Roman practice of spreadeagling a man to death; but the churches vigorously objected to this suggestion as blasphemous, believing the ordinary sight of crucified murderers would tend to debase the central symbol of Christianity. A less common Roman usage was adopted in its stead, that of being torn by hungry dogs, and to this the Christians did not object.

But the utmost severity of local and national officials, even when backed by the might of World Government, could not cope with the waves of migrants from the East nor the heedlessness of law they brought with them. As the Gra.s.s pushed the Indians and Chinese westward, they in turn sent the Mongols, the Afghans and the Persians ahead of them. These naturally warlike peoples were displaced, not by force of arms, but by sheer weight of numbers; and so, doubly overcome by being dispossessed of their homes--and by pacifists at that--they vented their pique upon those to the west.

As the starving and dest.i.tute trickled into Europe and North Africa, giving a hint of the flood to follow, I congratulated myself on the foresight which led to our retrenchment, for I know these ravening hordes would have devoured the property of Consolidated Pemmican with as little respect as they did the scant store of Ah Que, Ram Singh or Mohammed Ali. My chief concern was now to keep my industrial and organizational machinery intact against the day when a stable market could again be established. To this end I kept our vast staff of researchworkers--exempt from the draft of the World Government which had been quite reasonable in the matter--constantly busy, for every day's delay in the arresting of the Gra.s.s meant a dead loss of profits.

_87._ Josephine Francis alone, and as always, proved completely uncooperative. Undoubtedly much of her stubbornness was due to her s.e.x; the residue, to her unorthodox approach to the mysteries of science.

When I prodded her for results she snarled she was not a slotmachine.

When I pointed out tactfully that only my money made possible the continuation of her efforts, she told me rudely to seek the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem before it was covered by the Gra.s.s. Again and again I urged her to give me some idea how long it would be before she could produce a chemical even for experimental use against the Gra.s.s and each time she turned me aside with insult or rude jest.

I had set her up in--or rather, to be more accurate, she had insisted upon--a completely equipped and isolated laboratory in Surrey. As it was convenient to my Hamps.h.i.+re place I dropped in almost daily upon her; but I cannot say my visits perceptibly quickened her lethargy.

"Worried, Weener?" she asked me, absently putting down a coffeepot on a stack of microscope slides. "_Cynodon dactylon_'ll eat gold and banknotes, drillpresses and openhearths as readily as quartz and mica, dead bodies and abandoned household goods."

I couldnt resist the opening. "Anything in fact," I pointed out, "except salt."

"A Daniel!" she exclaimed. "A Daniel come to judgment. Oh, Weener, thou shouldst have been born a chemist. And what is the other mistake? Give me leave to throw away my retorts and testtubes and bunsen burners by revealing the other element besides sodium _Cynodon dactylon_ refuses.

For every mistake there is another mistake which supplements it. Sodium was the blindspot in the Metamorphizer; when I find the balancing blindspot I shall know not only the second element which the Gra.s.s cannot absorb but one which will be poison to it."

"I'm not a chemist, Miss Francis," I said, "but it seems to me Ive heard there are a limited number of elements."

"There are. And three states for each element. And an infinite number of conditions governing their application. What's the matter--arent your trained seals performing?"

"All the research laboratories of Consolidated Pemmican are going night and day."

"Then what the devil are you hounding me for? Let them find the counteragent."

"Two heads are better than one."

"Nonsense. Two blockheads are worse than one insofar as they tend to regard each other as a source of wisdom. I shall conquer the Gra.s.s, I alone, I, Josephine Spencer Francis--and as soon as possible. Now you have all the data in its most specific form. And I shall accomplish this because I must and not because I love Albert Weener or care a litmuspaper whether or not his offal is swallowed up. I have done what I have done (G.o.d forgive me) and I shall undo it, but the matter is between me and a Larger Accountant than the clerk who signs your monthly checks."

"What do you think about temporary protective measures in the meanwhile?"

"What the devil do you mean, Weener? 'Temporary protective measures'?

What euphuistic gibberish is this?"

I outlined briefly my butler's plan of vertical cities. Miss Francis startled me with a laugh resembling the burst of machinegun fire.

"Someone's been pulling your leg, poor terrified Maecenas. Or else youre befuddled with too many _Thrilling Wonder Scientifictions_. Pipes into the stratosphere! Watersupply piped in through concrete walls! Doesnt your mad inventor know the seeds would find these apertures in an instant?"

"Oh, those are possibly minor flaws which could be remedied."

"Well, go and remedy them and leave me to my work. Or pin your faith on substantialities instead of flights of fancy."

I went up to London, my mind full of a thousand problems. I had caught the economical British habit of using the trains, conserving the petrol and tyres on my car. The first thing I saw on the Marylebone platform was the crude picture in green chalk of a stolon of _Cynodon dactylon_.

What idiot, I thought as I irritably rubbed at it with the sole of my shoe, what feebleminded creature has been let loose to do a thing like this? The brittle chalk smeared beneath my foot, but the representation remained, almost recognizable. On my way to the Savoy I saw it again, defacing a h.o.a.rding, and as I paid off my driver I thought I caught another glimpse of the nonsensical drawing on the side of a lorry going by.

Perhaps my sensitivity perceived these signs before they were common property, but in a few days they were spread all over Europe, through what insane impulse I do not know. For whatever reason, symbols of the Gra.s.s blossomed on the Arc de Triomphe, on the Brandenburger Tor, on the pavement of the Ringstra.s.se and on the bridges spanning the Danube between Buda and Pesth.

_88._ I find myself, in retrospect, involuntarily telescoping the time of events. Looking backward, years become days, and months minutes. At the time I saw the first reproductions of the Gra.s.s in London the thing itself was continents away, busy absorbing the fringes of Asia. But its heralds and victims went before it, changing the life of man as it had itself changed the face of the world.

The breakdown of civilization beyond the Channel was almost complete.

Only Consolidated Pemmican and the World Government still maintained communication facilities; and with the blocking of the normal ways of commerce the World Government found it difficult to spread either news or decrees to the general public. The most fantastic and contradictory ideas about the Gra.s.s were held by the ma.s.ses.