He stood up.
"Thank you, General Thario," I said. "I shall certainly consider the Sahara as location for depots."
"You won't change your mind about this whole thing, Albert?"
I shook my head. How could I fly in the face of commonsense to gratify the silly whim of an old man whose intelligence was clearly not what it had once been?
"I was afraid not," he muttered, "afraid not. I don't blameyou, Albert. Men are as God created them ... or environment, as the socialist fellers say ... you didnt put the mark on your forehead ... Not successful ... Joe (I called him George but he was Joe all the time) wanted to go to West Point afterall ... First Symphony in the fire ...Iburned Joe's First Symphony ... Do you understand me, Albert? Though I refuse, I am still guilty ... Cannibal Thario, they said ... Chronos would be better ... classical allusion escapes the enlistedman...."
He walked out, still mumbling inarticulately and I sat there saddened that a man once alert and vigorous as the general should have come at last to senility and an enfeebled mind.
84.The defection of General Thario threw a great burden of work upon my shoulders. Preblesham was able enough in his own sphere, but his vision was not sufficiently broad to operate at the highest levels. The process of closing down our plants was more complicated than had been anticipated and Thario's military mind would have been more useful than Preblesham's theological one. The employees, conceiving through some fantastic logic that their jobs were as much their property as the mills or mines or factorybuildings were mine, rioted and had to be pacified—the first time such a tactic was resorted to in years. In some places these misguided men actually took possession of the places where they worked and tried to operate them, but of course they were balked by their own inefficiency. Human nature being what it is, they tried to blame their helplessness on my control of their sources of raw material and their consequent inability to obtain vital supplies; as well as the cutting off of light and power from the seized plants, but this was mere buckpassing, always noticeable when some radical scheme fails.
But the setting up of depots in the Sahara, as General Thario had suggested, and by extension, in Arabia, was a different matter. Here Preblesham's genius shone. He flew our whole Australian store of raw materials out without a loss. Herecruited gangs of Chinese coolies with an efficiency which would have put an oldtime blackbirder to shame. He argued, cajoled, bullied, sweated for twentyfour hours a day and when in six months he had completed his task, we had seven depots, two in Arabia and five in Africa, complete with four factories, with enough concentrates on hand to feed the world for a year—if the world had the means to pay, which it didnt—and to operate for five.
During those six months the Grass ravenously snatched morsel after morsel. New Zealand's South Island, New Caledonia, the Solomons and the Marianas were gobbled at the same moment. It gorged on New Guinea and searched out the minor islands of the East Indies as a cat searches for baby fieldmice in a nest her paw has discovered. It took a bite of the Queensland coast just below the Great Barrier Reef. The next day it was reported near Townsville and soon after on the Cape York peninsula, the Australian finger pointing upward to islands where lived little black men with woolly hair.
The people of Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane took the coming of the Grass with calm anger. Preparations for removal had been made months before and this migration was distinguished from previous ones by its order and completeness. But although they moved calmly in accordance with clear plans their anger was directed against all those in authority who had failed to take measures to protect their beloved land.
Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania went. The Grass swept southward like a sickle, cutting through South Australia and biting deep with its point into Western. Although we were amply provided with raw material, considering the curtailment of our activities, Preblesham, on the spot, could not resist buying up great herds of sheep for a penny on the pound and having them driven northward in the hope of finding somehow a means to ship them. I am sorry to say—though I'm afraid I could have predicted it—this venture was a total loss.
85.Burlet, unfolding theTimeson my breakfastplate, coughed respectfully. "If I could speak to you at your convenience, sir?"
"What is it, Burlet? Lord Arpers finally come through with a higher offer?"
"Not at all, sir. I consider the question of service closed as long as you find yourself satisfied, sir."
"Quite satisfied, Burlet."
"I ad in mind the discussion of quite another matter, sir. Not relating to domestic issues."
"Very well, Burlet. Come into the library after breakfast."
"Very good, sir."
With a world of problems on my mind I thought it would be wryly amusing to resolve whatever difficulties troubled my butler. Promptly after I had settled myself at my desk and before I rang for my secretary, Burlet appeared in the doorway, his striped vest smoothed down over his rounded abdomen, every thin hair in place over the dome of his balding head.
"Come in, Burlet. Sit down. What's on your mind?"
"Thank you, sir." To my surprise he accepted my invitation and seated himself opposite me. "I ave been speculating, sir."
"Really, Burlet? Silly thing to do. Lost all your wages, I suppose, and would like an advance?"
"You misappre—end me, sir. Not speculating on Change. Speculating on the Grass."
"Oh. And did you arrive at any conclusion, Burlet?"
"I believe I ave, sir. As I understand it, scientists and statesmen are exerting their energies to fight the Grass."
"That's right." I was beginning to be bored. Had the butler fallen prey to one of the graminophile sects like Brother Paul's and gone through all this rigmarole merely to give me notice previous to immolating himself?
"And so far they ave achieved no success?"
"Obviously, Burlet."
"Well then, sir, would it not be a sensible precaution to findsome means of refuge until and if they find a way to kill the Grass?"
"There is no 'if,' Burlet. The means will be found, and shortly—of that I am sure. As for temporary refuge until that time, no doubt it would be excellent, if practicable. What do you propose—emigration to Mars or floating islands in the oceans?" Both of these expedients had long ago been put forth by contestants in theIntelligencer.
"Journeys to other planets would not solve things, sir. Assuming the construction of a vessel—an assumption so far unwarranted, if I may say so, sir—it would accommodate but a fraction of the affected populations. As for floating islands, they would be no more immune to airborne seeds than stationary ones."
"So it was discovered long ago, Burlet."
"Quite so, sir. Then, if I may say so, protection must be afforded on the spot."
"And how do you propose to do that?"
"Well, sir, by the building of vertical cities."
"Vertical cities?"
"Yes, sir. I believe sites should be selected near bodies of fresh water and tremendous excavations made. The walls and floor of the 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—glass enclosed—and with pipes reaching still igher to bring air in, and completely tight against the Grass. 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 Grass."
There was a faintly familiar ring to the scheme.
"You seem to have worked it out thoroughly, Burlet."
"Polishing the plate, sir."
"Polishing 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 Grass. 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 Grass 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 Grass sped northward and westward through the Malay States and Siam, up into China and Burma. In the beginning the Orientals did not flee, but stood their ground, village by village and family by family, opposing the advance with scythes, stones, and pitiful bonfires of their household belongings,with hoes, flails, and finally with their bare hands. But the naked hand, no matter how often multiplied, was as unable to halt the green flow as the most 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 Grass had somehow failed to make headway on the Asiatic continent and would have remained in their pleasant ignorance had it not been for the premature flight of masses of Asiatics.
For the phenomenon contemporary with the close of the Roman Empire was repeated. A great, struggling, churning, sprawling, desperate efflux from east to west began; once more the Golden Horde was on the march. They did not come, as had their ancestors, on wildly charging horses, threatening with lances and deadly scimitars, but on foot, wretched and begging. Even had I been as maudlin as Stuart Thario desired I could not have fed these people, for there were no longer railroads with 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 Grass it was fleeing from, could formulate no thoughts ofthe 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 carcasses of draft animals which had been pushed to the last extremity; they turned upon the corpses of the newly dead and fed on them, and at length did not wait for death from hunger to make a new cadaver, but mercifully slew the weak and ate the still warm bodies.
The Asiatic influx was a social accordion. The 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 Grass, traveling at the same pace. They came not alone, but with accretions, pushing ahead of them millions of their same dispossessed, hungry, penniless kind. These were not greeted with suspicion, but with hatred; 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 Europeand overwhelm most of it as the barbarians had overwhelmed Rome.
But I anticipate. 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 sexual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small illprinted newspapers carried advertisements promising the gratification of strange lusts. 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 Mass, although I was told by one communicant that participation lacked the necessary zest, since none possessed a faith to which blasphemy could give a shocking thrill.
Murder was indulged in purely for the pleasure. Men and women, hearing of the cannibalism raging among the refugees, adopted and refined it for their own amusement. Small promiscuous groups, at the end of orgies, chose the 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 lusts 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 bestial madness of one kind or another overtook everyone. There were plenty of normal people like myself who were able to maintain their selfcontrol and canalize those energies promoting crimes and beastly exhibitions in the unrestrained into looking forward to the day when the Grass would be gone and sanity return.
Nor would I like anyone to think law and order had completely abdicated its function. As offenses multiplied, laws grew more severe, misdemeanors became felonies, feloniescapital offenses. When death by hanging became the prescribed sentence for any type of theft it was necessary to make the punishment for murder more drastic. Drawing and quartering were reinstituted; this not proving an efficient deterrent, many jurists advocated a return to the Roman practice of 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 Grass pushed the Indians and Chinese westward, they in turn sent the Mongols, the Afghans and the Persians ahead of them. These naturally warlike peoples were displaced, not by force of arms, but by sheer weight of numbers; and so, doubly overcome by being dispossessed of their homes—and by pacifists at that—they vented their pique upon those to the west.
As the starving and destitute trickled into Europe and North Africa, giving a hint of the flood to follow, I congratulated myself on the foresight which led to our retrenchment, for I know these ravening hordes would have devoured the property of Consolidated 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 Grass 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 sex; 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 Grass. Again and again I urged her to give me some idea how long it would be before she could produce a chemical even for experimental use against the Grass and each time she turned me aside with insult or rude jest.
I had set her up in—or rather, to be more accurate, she had insisted upon—a completely equipped and isolated laboratory in Surrey. As it was convenient to my Hampshire place I dropped in almost daily upon her; but I cannot say my visits perceptibly quickened her lethargy.
"Worried, 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 sodiumCynodon dactylonrefuses. 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 Grass 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 Grass, I alone, I, Josephine Spencer Francis—and as soon as possible. Now you have all the data in its most specific form. And I shall accomplish this because I must and not because I love Albert Weener or care a litmuspaper whether or not his offal is swallowed up. I have done what I have done (God forgive me) and I shall undo it, but the matter is between me and a Larger Accountant than the clerk who 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 manyThrilling 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 greenchalk of a stolon ofCynodon 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 hoarding, and as I paid off my driver I thought I caught another glimpse of the nonsensical drawing on the side of a lorry going by.
Perhaps my sensitivity perceived these signs before they were common property, but in a few days they were spread all over Europe, through what insane impulse I do not know. For whatever reason, symbols of the Grass blossomed on the Arc de Triomphe, on the Brandenburger Tor, on the pavement of the Ringstrasse and on the bridges spanning the Danube between Buda and Pesth.
88.Ifind 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 Grass 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 Grass were held by the masses.
When the Grass was in the Deccan and still well below the Yangtze, the Athenians were thrown into panic by the rumor it had appeared in Salonika. At the same time there was wild rejoicing in the streets of Marseilles based on the belief large stretches of North America had become miraculously free. The cult of the Grass idolaters flourished despite the strictestinterdictions and great massmeetings were frequently held during which the worshipers turned their faces toward the southeast and prayed fervently for speedy immolation. It was quite useless for the World Government to attempt to spread the actual facts; the earlier censorship together with a public temper that preferred to believe the extremes of good or bad rather than the truth of gradual yet relentless approach, made people heedless of broadcasts rarely received even by state operated publicaddress systems or of handbills which even the still literate could not bother to decipher.
The idealization of the Socialist Union—once the Soviet Union—which had risen and fallen through the years, was quickened among those not enamored of the Grass. There must be some intrinsic virtue in this land which had not only been immune to inoculation by the Metamorphizer, but kept the encroaching weed from invading its borders in spite of its long continued proximity across Bering Strait and the Aleutians. The Grass had jumped gaps thousands of ocean miles and yet it had not bridged that narrow strip of water. It would have been a shock to these people had they known, as I knew and as the World Government had vainly tried to tell them, what Moscow had recently and reluctantly admitted: the Grass had long since crossed into Siberia and was now working its will from Kamchatka to the Lena River.
The people of Japan, caught between the jaws of a closing vise, responded in a manner peculiar to themselves. The Christians, now forming a majority, declared the Grass a punishment for the sins of the world and hoped, by their steadfastness in the face of certain death, to earn a national martyr's crown and thus perhaps redeem those still benighted. The Shintoists, on the other hand, agreed the Grass was a punishment—but for a different crime. Had the doctrine of the Eight Corners of the World never been abandoned the Japanese would never have permitted the Grass to overwhelm the Yamato race. The new emperor's reign name, Saiji, they argued, ought not to mean rule by the people as it was usually interpreted, but rule of the people and they called for an immediateSaiji Restoration, under which the subjects of the Mikado would welcome death on the battlefield in a manner compatible with bushido, thus redeeming previous aberrations for which they were now being chastised. Both parties agreed that under no circumstances would any Japanese demean himself by leaving Nippon and the world was therefore spared an additional influx from these islands.
But the Japanese were the only ones who refused to join the westward stampede plunging the world daily deeper into barbarism. We in England had cause to congratulate ourselves on our unique position. The Channel might have been a thousand miles wide instead of twenty. The turmoil of the Continent and of Africa was but dimly reflected. There was still a skeletal vestige of trade, the dole kept the lazy from starvation, railways still functioned on greatly reduced schedules, and the wireless continued to operate from, "Good morning, everybody, this is London," to the last strains ofGod Save the Queen. Although I was constantly rasped by inactivity and by the slowness of the researchworkers to find a weapon against the Grass, I was happy to be able to wait out this terrible period in so ameliorative a spot.
True, our depots in the Arabian and Sahara deserts were unthreatened by either the Grass or the horde, but I should have found it uncomfortable indeed to have lived in either place. In Hampshire or London I felt myself the center of what was left of the world, ready to jump into action the moment the great discovery was finally made and the Grass began to recede.
Preblesham, my right hand, flew weekly to Africa and Asia Minor, weeding out those workers who threatened to become useless to us because of their reaction to the isolated and monotonous conditions at the depots; keeping the heavily armed guards about our closed continental properties alert and seeing our curtailed activities in Great Britain were judiciously profitable. This period of quiescence suited his talents perfectly, for it required of him little imagination, but great industry and force.
I had noticed for some time a slight air of preoccupation and constraint in his demeanor during his reports to me, but I put it down to his engrossment with our affairs and resolved to make him take an extended vacation as soon as he could be spared, never dreaming of disloyalty from him.
I was shocked, then, and deeply wounded when at the close of one of our conferences he announced, "Mr Weener, I'm leaving you."
I begged him to tell me what was wrong, what had caused him to come to this decision. I knew, I said, that he was overworked and offered him the badly needed vacation. He shook his head.
"It aint that. Overwork! I don't believe there is such a thing. At least Ive never suffered from it. No, Mr Weener, my trouble is something no amount of vacations can help, because I can't get away from a Voice."
"Voice, Tony?" Hallucinations were certainly a symptom of overwork. I began mentally recalling names of prominent psychiatrists.
"A Voice within," he repeated firmly. "I am a sinful man, a miserable backslider. Maybe Brother Paul was not treading a true path; I doubt if he was or I would not have been led aside from following him so easily; but when I was doing his work I was at least trying to do the will of God and not the will of another man no better—spiritually, you understand, Mr Weener, spiritually—than myself.
"But now His Voice has sought me out again and I must once more take up the cross. I feel a call to go on a mission to the poor heathens and urge on them submission to their Father's rod."
"Among those savages across the Channel! They will tear you limb from limb."
"Christ will make me whole again."
"Tony, you are not yourself. Youre upset."
"I am not myself, Mr Weener, I have become as a little child again and do my Father's bidding. I am upset, yes, turned upsidedown and insideout by a Force not content to leavemen in wrong attitudes or sinful states. But upset, I stand upright and go about my Father's business. God bless you, Mr Weener."
Miss Francis and Preblesham, at opposite ends of the intellectual scale, both maundering on about doing the Will of God and General Thario talking about marks on foreheads—what sort of feebleminded, retrogressive world was I living in? All the outworn superstitions of religion taking hold of people and intruding themselves into otherwise normal conversation. A wave of madness, akin to the plague of the Grass, must be sweeping over the earth, was my conclusion.
If General Thario's desertion had thrown an extra weight on my shoulders, Preblesham's burdened me with all the petty details of routine. It was now I who had to inspect our depots periodically and make constant trips into the dangerous regions across the Channel to see that the shutdown plants were being properly cared for. I resented bitterly the trick of fate preventing me from finding for any length of time subordinates to whom I could delegate authority.
Nor even on whom I could rely. What were Miss Francis and her wellpaid staff doing all this time? Why had they produced nothing in return for the fat living they got from me? The Grass was halfway across Asia, lapping the High Pamirs from the south and from the north, digesting Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, thrusting runners into Turkestan—and still no progress made against it. It would be a matter of mere months now until our Arabian depots would be in the danger zone. I could only conclude these socalled scientists were little better than fakers, completely incompetent when confronted by emergency.
They were ready enough to announce useless and inapplicable discoveries and conclusions; byproducts of their research, they called them, with an obviously selfconscious attempt to speak the language of industry. The insects living in and below the Grass were growing ever larger and more numerous. Expeditions had found worms the size of snakes and bugs big as birds, happy in their environment. The oceans, they announced,were drying up, due to the retention of moisture in the soil by the Grass, and added complacently that in a million years or so, assuming the Grass in the meantime covered the earth, there would be no bodies of water left. Climates were equalizing themselves, the polar icecaps were melting and spots previously too cold forCynodon dactylonwere now covered. I felt it to be a clear case of embezzlement that they had used my money, paid for a specific purpose, to make these useless, if possibly interesting, deductions.
For while they dawdled and read learned papers to each other, the Grass touched the Persian Gulf and the Caspian, paused before Lake Balkash and reached the Yenisei at the Arctic Circle. Far to the south it jumped from India to the Maldives, from the Maldives to the Seychelles and from the Seychelles on to the great island of Madagascar. I hammered the theme of "Time, time" at Miss Francis, but her only response was a helpless sneer at my impatience.
At intervals Burlet inquired of me what progress was being made with his plan for cities of refuge. I could only answer him truthfully that as far as I knew the World Government had it under consideration.
"But—if you will excuse my saying so, sir—in the meantime those people are dying."
"Quite so, Burlet, but there is nothing you or I can do about it."
For the first time since he entered my service I caught him looking almost impertinently at me. I faced him back and he dropped his eyes. "Very good, sir. Thank you."
He had made an understatement when he talked about "those people" dying. Europe was a madhouse. In selfdefense all strangers were instantly put to death and in retaliation the invading throngs spared no native. Peasants feared to stay their ground in terror of the oncoming Orientals and equally dared not move westward where certain killing awaited them at the hands of those who yesterday had been their neighbors. In an effort to cling to life they formed small bands and fought impartially both the static and dynamic forces. Farming waspractically abandoned and the swollen population lived entirely on wild growth or upon human flesh.
In Africa the situation was little better. Internecine wars and slavery made their reappearance; the South African whites mercilessly slaughtered the blacks against a possible uprising and the Kaffirs, fleeing northward, repeated the European pattern of overcrowding, famine and pestilence.
89.The day our Arabian depots were abandoned before the oncoming Grass I felt my heart would nearly break with anguish. All that labor, all that forethought, all those precious goods gone. And all because Miss Francis and those like her were too lazy or incompetent to do the work for which they were paid. I flew to the spot, trying vainly to salvage something, but lack of planes and fuel made it impossible. During this trip I caught my first sight of the Grass for years.
I suppose no human eye sees anything abstractly, but only in relation to other things known and observed. With more than half the world in its grip, the towering wave of green bore no more resemblance to its California prototype than a brontosaurus to the harmless lizard scuttling over the sunny floor of an outhouse. Between the dirtysugar sands of the desert and the oleograph sky it was a third band of brilliant color, monstrously outofplace. A tidalwave would have seemed less alien and awful.
The distance was great enough so that no individual part stood out distinctly; instead, it presented itself as a flat belt of green, menacing and obdurate. As my plane rose I looked back at it stretching northward, southward and eastward to the horizon, a new invader in a land weary of many invaders; and I thought of the dead civilizations it covered: Bactria, Parthia, Babylon; the Empire of Lame Timur, Cathay, Cambodia, and the dominions of the Great Mogul.
The refuge of mankind narrowed continually, an island diminished daily by a lapping surf. Africa was thrice beset, inthe south from Madagascar; in the center from the steppingstones in the Indian Ocean, and across the Red Sea where the Grass sucked renewed life from the steaming jungles and grew with unbelievable rapidity; in the highlands of Rhodesia and Abyssinia it crept slowly over the plateaus toward the slopes of Kilimanjaro and the Drakensberg. Unless something were done quickly our Sahara depots would go the way of the Arabian ones and we would be left with only our limited British facilities until the day when Africa and Asia would be reconquered.
The violence and murder which had gone before were tame compared with the new fury that shook the feartortured people of Europe, helpless in the nightmareridden days, dreaming through twitching nights of an escape geographically nonexistent. Dismembered corpses in the streets, arenas packed with dead bodies, fallow fields newly fertilized with human blood added their stench to that of an unwashed, disease riddled continent. A rumor was circulated that there were still Jews alive and those who but yesterday had sought each other in mortal combat now happily united to hunt down a common prey. And sure enough, in miserable caverns and cellars hitherto overlooked, shunning daylight, a few men in skullcaps and prayingshawls were found, dragged out into the disinterested sunlight with their families and exterminated. It was at this time the Grass crossed the Urals and leaped the Atlantic into Iceland.
In England, George Bernard Shaw, whose reported death some years before had been mourned by those who had never read a word of his, rose apparently from the grave to deliver himself of a last message:
"If any who wept over my senile and useless carcass had taken the trouble to readBack to Methuselah, they could have reassured themselves regarding my premature demise. If ever there was to be a Longliver, that Longliver would have to be me. This was determined by the Life Force in the middle of the XIX Century. That Life Force could not afford to rob a squinting world of a man of perfect vision."Like Haslam (I forget his first name—see my complete works if you're interested) I gave myself out as dead in order to avoid the gawking of a curious and idle multitude. I was recuperating from the labors of my first century in order to throw myself into the more arduous ones of the second."But as I have pointed out so many times, the race was between maturity and the petulant self-destruction of protracted adolescence. Mankind had either to take thought or to perish, and it has chosen (perhaps sensibly after all) to perish. I am too old now to protest against selfindulgence."Is it too late? Is it still possible to survive? The ship is now indeed upon the rocks and the skipper in his bunk below drinking bottled ditchwater. But perhaps a Captain Shotover, drunk on the milk of human kindness rather than rum, will emerge upon the quarterdeck and, blowing his whistle, call all hands on deck before the last rending crash. In that unlikely event, one of those emerging from the forecastle will beG. Bernard Shaw."
"If any who wept over my senile and useless carcass had taken the trouble to readBack to Methuselah, they could have reassured themselves regarding my premature demise. If ever there was to be a Longliver, that Longliver would have to be me. This was determined by the Life Force in the middle of the XIX Century. That Life Force could not afford to rob a squinting world of a man of perfect vision.
"Like Haslam (I forget his first name—see my complete works if you're interested) I gave myself out as dead in order to avoid the gawking of a curious and idle multitude. I was recuperating from the labors of my first century in order to throw myself into the more arduous ones of the second.
"But as I have pointed out so many times, the race was between maturity and the petulant self-destruction of protracted adolescence. Mankind had either to take thought or to perish, and it has chosen (perhaps sensibly after all) to perish. I am too old now to protest against selfindulgence.
"Is it too late? Is it still possible to survive? The ship is now indeed upon the rocks and the skipper in his bunk below drinking bottled ditchwater. But perhaps a Captain Shotover, drunk on the milk of human kindness rather than rum, will emerge upon the quarterdeck and, blowing his whistle, call all hands on deck before the last rending crash. In that unlikely event, one of those emerging from the forecastle will be
G. Bernard Shaw."
90.In spite of the anarchic and unspeakable conditions on the Continent, I could not refrain from making one last tour of inspection. The thought of flooded mines, pillaged factories and gutted mills was more than I could bear. The stocks of oil in England were running short, but I commanded enough to fill my great transportplane. We flew low over roads crawling with humanity as a sick animal crawls with vermin. Some cities were empty, obscenely bereft of population; others choked with wanderers.
The Ruhr was a valley filled with the dead, with men tearing each other's throats in a frenzy of hunger, with the unburied and the soon to be buried sleeping sidebyside through restless nights. Not a building was still whole; what had not been torn down in pointless rage had been razed by reasonless arson. Not one brick of the great openhearths had been left in place, not one girder of the great sheds remained erect.
The Saar was in little better case and the mines of Alsace were useless for the next quartercentury. The industrial district around Paris had been leveled to the ground by the mobs and Belgium looked as it had after the worst devastation of war. I had expected to find a shambles, but my utmost anticipations were exceeded. I could bring myself to look upon no more and my pilot informing me that our gas was low, I ordered him to return.
We were in sight of the Channel, not far from Calais, when both starboard engines developed trouble simultaneously and my pilot headed for a landingfield below. "What are you about, you fool?" I shouted at him.
"Gasline fouled. I think I can fix it in a few minutes, Mr Weener."
"Not down among those savages. We wouldnt have a chance."
"We wouldnt have a chance over the Channel, sir. I'd rather risk my neck among fellow humans than in the water."
"Maybe you would, but I wouldnt. Straighten out the plane and go on."
"Sorry, Mr Weener; I'm going to have to land here."
And in spite of my protests he did so. I was instantly proved right, for before we came to a stop we were surrounded by an assortment of filthy and emaciated men and women bearing scythes and pitchforks, shouting, yelling and gesticulating, making in fact, such an uproar that no comprehension was possible. However, there was no misunderstanding their brusque motions ordering us away from the plane or the threatening noises which reinforced the command. No sooner had we reluctantly complied than they proceeded methodically to puncture the tires and smash the propellers.
My horror at this marooning among the degenerates was not lessened by their ugly and illdisposed looks and I feared they would not be content with smashing the plane, but would take out their animus against those who had not sunk into their own bestial state by destroying us as well. Since I do not speak much French, I could only say to the man nearest me, a sinisterfellow in a blue smock with a brown stockingcap on his head, "C'est un disgrace, ça; je demandez le pourquoi."
He looked at me for a baffled moment before calling, "Jean, Jean!"
Jean was even more illfavored, having a scar across his mouth which gave him an artificial harelip. However, he spoke English of a kind. "Your airship has been confiscated, citizen."
"What the devil do you mean? That plane is my personal property."
"There is no personal property in the Republic One and Indivisible," replied Jean. "Be thankful your life is spared, Citizen Englishman, and go without further argumentations."
I suppose it was reasonable to take this advice, but I could not resist informing him, "I am not an Englishman, but an American. We also had a Republic one and indivisible."
He shook his head. "On your ways, citizen. The Republic does not make distinctions between one bourgeois and another."
I looked around for the pilot, but he had vanished. Alone, furious at the act of robbery and not a little apprehensive, I began walking toward the coast; but I was not steeled against isolation among the barbarians of the Continent, nor dressed for such an excursion. Between anxiety lest I run into a less pompous and more bloodthirsty group of representatives of the Republic One and Indivisible—when it had come into being, how far its authority extended or how long it lasted I never learned—and the burning and blistering of my feet in their thinsoled shoes, I doubt if I was more than a few miles from the airfield and therefore many from the coast when darkness fell. I kept on, tired, anxious, hungry, in no better plight than thousands of other wretches who at the same moment were heading the same way under identical conditions.
The only advantage of traveling by night was the removal of my fear of the intentions of men, but nature made up for this by putting her own obstacles in my way. The hedgerows which had been allowed to grow wild, the unrepaired roadways,sunken and marked by deep holes and ruts and a hundred other pitfalls made my progress agonizingly slow.
As the moon rose I had a sudden feeling of being near water, and coming out from a thicket I was confirmed in this by seeing the light break into ripples on an uneven surface. But tragically, it was not the Channel I had come upon, merely a river, too wide to cross, which though it undoubtedly led to my goal, would increase the length of my journey by many miles. I'm afraid I gave way to a quite unmanly weakness as I threw myself upon the hard ground and thought of my miserable fate.
I may have lain there for ten minutes, or twenty. The moon went behind a cloud, the air grew chilly. I was nerving myself to get up and resume my journey—though to what purpose I could not conceive for I would be little better off on a Norman beach than inland—when a timid hand was put upon my shoulder and someone said questioningly, "Angleterre?"
I sprang up. "England. Oh, yes, England. Can you help me get there?"
The moon stayed covered and I could not see his face in the dark. "England," he said. "Yes, I'll take you."
I followed him to a little backwater, where was beached a rowboat. Even by feel, in the blackness, it seemed to me a very small and frail craft to chance the voyage across the choppy sea, but I had no choice. I seated myself in the stern while he took the oars, cast off and rowed us down the river toward the estuary.
I decided he must be one of that company of smugglers who were ferrying refugees into Britain despite the strictest watch. No doubt he thinks to make a pretty penny for tonight's work, I thought, but no coastguard would turn back Albert Weener. I would pay him well for his help, but he could not blackmail me for fabulous ransom.
Still the moon did not come out. My eyes, accustoming themselves to the dark, vaguely discerned the shape opposite me and I saw he was a short man, but beyond this I could not distinguishhis features. The river broadened, the air became salty, the wind rose and soon the little boat was bobbing up and down in a manner to give discomfort to my stomach. The water, building terraces and battlements, reflected enough light to impress me with the diminutiveness of the boat, set in the vastness on which it floated.
Behind us the French coast was a looming mass, then a thick blob, finally a thin blur hardly perceptible to strained eyes. I was thoroughly seasick, retching and vomiting over the narrow freeboard. Steadily and rhythmically the man rowed with tireless arms, apparently unaffected by the boat's leaping and dropping in response to the impulse of the waves and in my intervals of relief from nausea I reflected that he must have gained plenty of practice, that he was an old hand in making this trip. It was a peculiar way to gain wealth, I thought, caught in another spasm of sickness, enriching oneself on the misery of others.
I vomited and dozed, dozed and vomited. The night was endless, the wind was bitter. What riches, I wondered, could compensate a man for such hardships? By the time the wanderers got to the Channel they could not very well have much left and unless my smuggler were gifted with secondsight he could not know, judging by the way he had accosted me, whether he was carrying a man who could pay £10, £100 or £500 for the accommodation. Well, I philosophized, it takes all kinds to make a world, and who am I to say this illicit trafficker isnt doing as much good in his way as I in mine?
I don't know when my nausea finally left me, unless it was after nothing whatever remained in my stomach. I sat limp and cold, conscious only of the erratic bobbing of the little vessel and the ceaseless rhythm of the oars. At last, unbelievably, the sky turned from black to gray. I could not believe it anything but an optical illusion in the endless night and I strained to dissipate whatever biliousness was affecting my vision. But it was dawn, sure enough, and soon it revealed the pettish, wallowing Channel and the fragile outline of our boat, even tinier than I had conceived. I shuddered with more thancold—had I known what a cockleshell it was I might have paused before trusting my life so readily to it.
Line by line the increasing light drew the countenance of my guide. At first he was nothing but a shape, well muffled, with some kind of flat cap upon his head. A little more light revealed a glittering eye, more, a great, hooked nose with wide nostrils. He was a man of uncertain age, bordering upon the elderly, with a black skullcap under which curled outward two silverygray horns of hair. The lower part of his face was covered with a grizzled beard.
He must have been studying me as intently, for he now broke the silence which had prevailed all night. "You are not a poor man," he announced accusingly. "How is it you have waited so long?"
"I'm afraid youve made a mistake in me, my friend," I told him jovially, "we shan't be making an illegal entry. I am resident in England and can come home at any time."
He was silent; from disappointment, I concluded. "Never mind, I'll pay you as much as a refugee—within reason."
"You are a follower of reason, sir?"
I tried hard to make out more of his still obscured face for there was a note of irony in his voice. "I believe we'd all be better off if everyone were to accept things philosophically. Responsible people will find a way to end our troubles eventually and in the meantime madness and violence—" I waved my hand to the French coast behind—"don't help at all."
"Ah," he said without pausing in his rowing, "men alone, then, will solve Man's problem."
"Who else?"
"Who Else, indeed?"
The smuggler's answer or confirmation or whatever the equivocal echo was irritated me. "You think our problems can be solved from the outside?"
He managed to shrug his shoulders without breaking the rhythm of his arms. "Perhaps my English is unequal to understanding what you mean by outside. All the forces I know are represented within."
I was baffled and switched the subject to more immediate themes. "Are we about halfway, do you think?"
The light now exposed him fully. His hands were small and I doubted if the arms extending from them were muscular, but he radiated an air of great vitality. His face was lined, his eyes fierce under outthrust eyebrows, his lips—where the crisp waves of his beard permitted them to show—stern, but his whole demeanor was not unkindly.
"It is easy to measure how far we have come, but who can say how far we have to go?"
This metaphysical doubletalk annoyed me. "I don't know what is happening to people," I said. "Either they act like those over there," I gestured toward the Republic One and Indivisible, "or else they become mystics."
"You find questions without immediate answers mystical, sir?"
"I like my questions to be susceptible to an answer of some kind."
"You are a man of thought."
It amused me to speak intimately to this stranger. "I have lived inside myself a great many years. Naturally my mind has not been idle all the while."
"You have not married?"
"I never had the time."
"Ah." He rowed quietly for some moments. "'Never had the time,'" he repeated thoughtfully.
"You think marriage is important?"
"A man without children disowns his parents."
"Sounds like a proverb."
"It is not. Just an observation. I suppose since you have not had the time to marry you have devoted your life to good works."
"I have given employment to many, and help to the pauperized."
"It is commanded to be charitable."
"I have given millions of dollars—hundreds of thousands of pounds to philanthropies."
"Anonymously, of course. You must be a godly man, sir."
"I am an agnostic. I do not know if there is such a thing."
He shook his head. "Beneath us there are fish who do not know it is the sea in which they swim; above us there are birds unaware of the reaches of the sky. The fish have no conception of sky; the birds know nothing of the deep. They are agnostics also."
"Well, it doesnt seem to do them any harm. Fishes continue to spawn and birds to nest without the benefits of esoteric knowledge."
"Exactly. Fish remain fish in happy ignorance; doubt does not cause a bird to falter in its flight."
The sun was pushed into the air from the waters as a ball is pushed by the thumb and forefinger. The chalkcliffs were outlined ahead of me and I calculated we had little more than an hour to go. "You have chosen a strange way of earning a living, my friend," I ventured at last.
"Upon some is laid the yoke of the Law, others depend upon the sun for light," he said. "Perhaps, like yourself, I have committed some great sin and am expiating it in this manner."
"I don't know what you mean. I am conscious of no sin—if I understand the meaning of the theological term."
"'We have trespassed,'" he murmured dreamily, "'we have been faithless, we have robbed, we have spoken basely, we have committed iniquity, we have wrought unrighteousness——'"
"Since the rational world discarded the superstitions of religion halfacentury ago," I said, "we have learned that good and evil are relative terms; without meaning, actually."
For the first time he suspended his oars and the boat wallowed crazily. "Excuse me," he resumed his exertions. "Good is evil sometimes and evil is good upon occasion?"
"It depends on circumstances and the point of view. What is beneficial at one time and place may be detrimental under other circumstances."
"Ah. Green is green today, but it was yellow yesterday and will be blue tomorrow."
"Even such an exaggeration could be defended; however, that was not my meaning."
"'We have wrought unrighteousness, we have been presumptuous, we have done violence, we have forged lies, we have counseled evil, we have lied, we have scoffed, we have revolted, we have blasphemed, we have been rebellious, we have acted perversely, we have transgressed, we have persecuted——'"
"Perhaps you have," I interrupted with some asperity, "but I don't belong in that category. Far from persecuting, I have always believed in tolerance. Live and let live, I always say. People can't help the color of their skins or the race they were born into."
"And if they could they would naturally choose to be white northEuropean gentiles."
"Why should anyone voluntarily embrace a status of inconvenience?"
"Why, indeed? 'We have persecuted, we have been stiffnecked, we have done wickedly, we have corrupted ourselves, we have committed abominations, we have gone astray and we have led astray....'"
We both fell silent after this catalogue, quite inapplicable to the situation, and it was with heartfelt thanks I distinguished each fault and seam in the Dover Cliffs as well as the breaking line of surf below.
I presumed because of what I'd said about legal entry he was not avoiding the coastguard, but with a practiced oar he suddenly veered and drove us onto a minute sandy beach at the foot of the cliffs, obviously unfrequented and probably unknown to officialdom. A narrow yet clearly defined path led upward; this was evidently his customary haven. Were I an emotional man I would have kissed the little strip of shingle, as it was I contented myself with a deep sigh of thanksgiving.
My guide stood on the sand, smoothing the long, shapeless garment he wore against his spare body. He had taken a small book from his pocket and was mumbling some unintelligible words aloud. I was struck again by the nervous vigor of theman which had given him the strength to row all night against a harsh sea—and presumably would generate the energy necessary for the return trip.
I pulled out my wallet and extracted two £100 banknotes. No one could say Albert Weener didnt reward service handsomely. "Here you are, my friend," I said, "and thank you."
"I accept your thanks." He bowed slightly, putting his hands behind him and moving toward his boat.
Perversely, since he seemed bent on rejecting my reward, I became anxious to press it upon him. "Don't be foolish," I argued. "This is a perilous game, this running in of refugees. You can't do it for pleasure."
"It is a work of charity."
I don't know how this shabby fellow conceived charity, but I had never understood that virtue to conflict with the law. "You mean you ferry all these strays for nothing?"
"My payment is predetermined and exact."
"You are foolish. Anyone using your boat for illegal entry would be glad to give everything he possessed for the trip."
"There are many penniless ones."
"Need that be your concern—to the extent of risking your life and devoting all your time?"
"I can speak for no one but myself. It need be my concern."
"One man can't do much. Oh, don't think I don't sympathize with your attitude. I too pity these poor people deeply; I have given thousands of pounds to relieve them."
"Their plight touches your heart?"
"Indeed it does. Never in all history have so many been so wretched through no fault of their own."
"Ah," he agreed thoughtfully. "For you it is something strange and pathetic."
"Tragic would be a better word."
"But for us it is an old story."
He pushed his boat into the water. "An old story," he repeated.
"Wait, wait—the money!"
He jumped in and began rowing. I waved the banknotesridiculously in the air. His body bent backward and forward, urging the boat away from me with each pull. "Your money!" I yelled.
He moved steadily toward the French shore. I watched him recede into the Channel mists and thought, another madman. I turned away at last and began to ascend the path up the cliff.
91.When I finally got back to Hampshire, worn out by my ordeal and feeling as though I'd aged ten years, there was a message from Miss Francis on my desk. Even her bumptious rudeness could not conceal the jubilation with which she'd penned it.
"To assuage your natural fear for the continued safety of Albert Weener's invaluable person, I hasten to inform you that I believe I have a workable compound. It may be a mere matter of weeks now before we shall begin to roll backCynodon dactylon."