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

of Marseilles based on the belief large stretches of North America had become miraculously free. The cult of the Grass idolaters flourished despite the strictest[308] interdictions 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 immediate[309] Saiji 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 of God 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.[310]

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 leave[311] men 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,[312] 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 for Cynodon dactylon were 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 was[313] practically 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, in[314] the 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