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

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 of[302] 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 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 Europe[303] and 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, felonies[304] 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 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.[305]

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 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 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."[306]

"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 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[307] 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 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. 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 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