Greener Than You Think, Ward Moore [ebook reader computer txt] 📗

My enthusiasm was dampened. But after leaving her I remembered how certain types of people always look for the dark side of things. It costs no more to be an optimist than a pessimist; it is sunshine grows flowers, not clouds; and if Miss Francis chose to think the grass might live a thousand years, I was equally free to think it might die next week.[137] Thus heartened by this bit of homely philosophy, just as valid as any of the stuff entombed in wordy books, I wrote up my interview, careful to guide myself by all the stifling strictures and adjurations impressed upon me by the tyrannically narrowminded editor. If I may anticipate the order of events, it appeared next day in almost recognizable form under the heading, ABNORMAL GRASS TO DIE SOON, SAYS ORIGINATOR.

29. The small city of Pomona was swollen to boomtown size by the excursion there of so many enterprises forced from Los Angeles. Ordinary citizens without heavy responsibilities when uprooted thought only of putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their persecutor; but the officials, the industrialists, the businessmen, the staffs of great newspapers hovered close by, like small boys near the knothole in the ballpark fence from which theyd been banished by an officious cop.

The Intelligencer was lodged over the printshop of a local tributary which had agreed to the ousting with the most hypocritical assurances of joy at the honor done them and payment—in the smallest possible type—by the addition to the great newspaper's masthead of the words, "And Pomona Post-Telegram."

Packed into this inadequate space were the entire staff and files of the metropolitan daily. No wonder the confusion obviated all possibility of normal routine. In addition, the disruption of railroad schedules made the delivery of mail a hazard rather than a certainty. Perhaps this was why, weeks after they were due, it was only upon my return from interviewing Miss Francis I received my checks from the Weekly Ruminant and the Honeycomb.

It may have been the boomtown atmosphere I have already mentioned or because at the same time I got my weekly salary; at any event, moved by an unaccountable impulse I took the two checks to a barbershop where, perhaps incongruously, a[138] wellknown firm of Los Angeles stockbrokers had quartered themselves. I forced the checks upon a troubledlooking individual—too taciturn to be mistaken for the barber—and mumbling, "Buy me all the shares of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates this will cover," hurried out before sober thought could cause me to change my mind.

For certainly this was no investment my cool judgment would approve, but the wildest hunch, causing me to embark on what was no less than a speculation. I went back to the desk I shared with ten others, bitterly regretting the things I might have bought with the money and berating myself for my rashness. Only the abnormal pressure of events could have made me yield to so irrational an impulse.

In the meantime things happened fast. Barely had the tardiest Intelligencer employees got away when the enveloping jaws of the weed closed tight, catching millions of dollars' worth of property within. The project to bomb the grass out of existence, dormant for some weeks, could no longer be denied.

Even its most ardent advocates, however, now conceded reluctantly that ordinary explosives would be futile—more than futile, an assistance to the growth by scattering the propagating fragments. For the first time people began talking openly of using the outlawed atomicbomb.

The instant response to this suggestion was an overwhelming opposition. The President, Congress, the Army, Navy and public opinion generally agreed that the weapon was too terrible to use in so comparatively trivial a cause.

But the machinery for some type of bombing had been set in motion and had to be used. The fuel was stored, the airfields jammed, all available planes, new, old, obsolescent and obsolete assembled, and for three days and nights the great fleets shuttled backandforth over the jungled area, dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs. Following close behind, still more planes dropped cargoes of fuel to feed the colossal bonfire.

Inverted lightning flashes leapt upward, and after them[139] great, rolling white, yellow, red and blue flames. The smoke, the smell of roasting vegetation, the roar and crackle of the conflagration, and the heat engendered were all noticeable as far away as Capistrano and Santa Barbara.

Down from the sky, through the surface of the grass, the incendiaries burned great patches clear to the earth. The weed, which had resisted fire so contemptuously before, suddenly became inflammable and burned like celluloid for days. Miles of twisted stems, cleaned of blade and life, exposed tortured nakedness to aerial reconnoiter. Bald spots the size of villages appeared, black and smoldering; the shape of the mass was altered and altered again, but when, long after, the last spark flickered out and the last ember grew dull, the grass itself, torn and injured, but not defeated or even noticeably beaten back, remained. It had been a brilliant performance—and an ineffective one.

The failure of the incendiary bombing not only produced ruefully triumphant Itoldyousos from disgruntled and doubly outraged propertyowners, but a new crop of bids for the Intelligencer's reward to the developer of a saving agent. From suggested emigrations to Mars and giant magnifying glasses set up to wither the grass with the aid of the sun, they ranged to projects for cutting a canal clear around the weed from San Francisco Bay to the Colorado River and letting the Pacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all light from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt the sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll an atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other grasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the two giants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouring each other. This proposal received such wide popular support there is reason to believe it got some serious consideration in official quarters, but it was eventually abandoned on the ground that while it gave only a single slim chance of success it certainly doubled the potential growths to contend with. The analogy[140] of a backfire in forest conflagrations was deemed poetic but inapplicable.

More comparatively prosaic courses included walling in the grass with concrete; the Great Wall of China was the only work of man visible from the moon; were Americans to let backward China best them? A concrete wall only a mile high and half a mile thick could be seen by any curious astronomer on the planet Venus—assuming Venerians to be afflicted with terrestrial vices—and would cost no more than a very small war, to say nothing of employing thousands who would otherwise dissipate the taxpayers' money on Relief. A variant of this plan was to smother the weed with tons of dry cement and sand from airplanes; the rainy season, due to begin in a few months, would add the necessary water and the grass would then be encased in a presumably unbreakable tomb.

But the most popular suggestion embodied the use of salt, ordinary table salt. From their own experience in backyard and garden, eager men and women wrote in urging this common mineral be used to end the menace of the grass. "It will Kill ennything," wrote an Imperial Valley farmer. "Its lethal effect on plantlife is instantaneous," agreed a former Beverly Hills resident. "I know there is not anything like Salt to destroy Weeds" was part of a long and rambling letter on blueruled tabletpaper, "In the June of 1926 or 7 I cannot remember exactly it may have been 28 I accidentally dropped some Salt on a beautiful Plumbago...."

It was proposed to spray the surface, to drive tunnels through the roots to conduct brine, to bombard sectors with sixteeninch guns firing shrapnel loaded with salt, to isolate by means of a wide saline band the whole territory, both occupied and threatened. Salt enthusiasts argued that nothing except a few million tons of an inexpensive mineral would be wasted if an improbable failure occurred, but if successful in stopping the advance the country could wait safely behind its rampart till some weapon to regain the overrun area was found.

But the salt advocates didnt have everything their own way.[141] There arose a bitter antisalt faction taking pleasure at hurling sneers at these optimistic predictions and delight in demolishing the arguments. Miss Francis, they said, who ought to know more about it than anyone else, claimed the grass would break down even the most stable compound and take what it needed. Well, salt was a compound, wasnt it? If the prosalt fanatics had their way they would just be offering food to a hungry plant. The salt supporters asked what proof Miss Francis had ever advanced that the plant absorbed everything or indeed that her Metamorphizer had anything to do with metabolism and had not merely induced some kind of botanical giantism? The antisalts, jeering at their enemies as Salinists and Salinites, promptly threw away Miss Francis' hypothetical support and relied instead on the proposition that if the salt were to be efficacious—an unlikely contingency—it would have to reach the roots and if crudeoil, poured on when the plant was young, had not done so what possible hope could the prosalt cranks offer for their panacea now the rampant grass was grown to its present proportions?

The salt argument cut society in half. Learned doctors battled in the columns of scientific journals. Businessmen dictated sputtering letters to their secretaries. Housewives wrote newspapers or argued heatedly in the cornergrocery. Radiocommentators cautiously skirted the edge of controversy and more than one enthusiast had to be warned by his sponsor. Fistfights started in taverns over the question and judicious bartenders served beer without offering the objectionable seasoning with it.

The Intelligencer, at the start, was vehemently antisalt. "Is there an American Cato," Le ffaçasé asked, "to call for the final ignominy suffered by Carthage to be applied, not to the land of an enemy, but to our own?" Shortly after this editorial, entitled "Carthage, California" appeared, the Intelligencer swung to the opposite side and Le ffaçasé offered the prosalt argument under the heading "Lot's Wife."

The Daughters of the American Revolution declared themselves in favor of salt and refused the use of Constitution Hall[142] to an antisalt meeting. Stung, the Central Executive Committee of the Communist party circulated a manifesto declaring the use of salt was an attempt to encircle, not the grass, for that was a mere subterfuge of imperialism, but the Soviet Union; and called upon all its peripheral fringe to write their congressmen and demonstrate against the saline project. From India the aged Mohandas Gandhi asked in piping tones why such a valuable adjunct was to be wasted in rich America while impoverished ryots paid a harsh tax on this necessity of life? And the Council of Peoples' Commissars, careless of the action of the American Stalinists, offered to sell the United States all its surplus salt. The herringpicklers of Holland struck in a body while the American salt refiners bid as one to produce on a costplus basis.

This last was a clincher and the obscurantic antisalts received the deathblow they richly deserved. The Communist party reversed themselves swiftly. All respectable and patriotic people lined up behind salt. With such popular unanimity apparent, the government could do no less than take heed. A band twenty miles wide, stretching from Oceanside to the Salton Sea, from the Salton Sea to the little town of Mojave and from there to Ventura, was marked out on maps to be saltsown by the very same bombercommand which had dropped the spectacular but futile incendiaries. The triumph of the salt people was ungenerous in its enthusiasm; the disgruntled antisalts, now a mere handful of diehards publishing an esoteric press, muttered everyone would be sorry, wait and see.

30. The grass itself waited for nothing. It seemed to take new strength from the indignities inflicted upon it and it increased, if anything, its tempo of growth. It plunged into the ocean in a dozen spots at once. It swarmed over sand which had never known anything but cactus and the Sierra Madres became great humps of green against the skyline. This last conquest shocked those who had thought[143] the mountains immune in their inhospitable heights. Cynodon dactylon, uninoculated, had always shunned coldness, though it survived some degrees of frost. The giant growth, however, seemed to be less subject to this inhibition, though it too showed slower progress in the higher and colder regions. The Intelligencer planned to move from Pomona to San Bernardino and if necessary to Victorville.

Daily Le ffaçasé became a sterner taskmaster, a more pettishly exacting employer. By the living guts of William Lloyd Garrison, he raged, had no one ever driven the simple elements of punctuation into my bloody head? Had no schoolmaster in moments of heroic enthusiasm attempted to pound a few rules of rhetoric through my incrassate skull? Had I never heard of taste? Was the word "style" outside my macilent vocabulary?