Greener Than You Think, Page 3

  THREE

  _Man Triumphant ... I_

  _21._ The hearings of the Committee to Investigate Dangerous Vegetationwent on for five days and Mr Le ffacase was increasingly delighted asthe proceedings went down, properly edited and embellished to excitereader interest, in the columns of the _Daily Intelligencer_. He evenunbent so far as to call me a fool without any adjectival modification,which was for him the height of geniality.

  I don't want to give the impression the committee stole the show, as thesaying goes. The show essentially and primarily was still the grassitself. It grew while the honorable body inquired and it grew while thehonorable body, tired by its labors, slept. It increased during thespeeches of Senator Jones, through the interjections of Judge Robinson,and as Dr Johnson added his wisdom to the deliberations.

  While the committee probed, listened and digested, the grass finallypushed its way across Hollywood Boulevard, resisting frantic efforts bythe National Guard, the fire and police departments, and a volunteerbrigade of local merchants, to stem its course. It defied alikesharpened steel, fire, chemicals and explosives. Even the smallestrunner could now be severed only with the greatest difficulty, for inits advance the weed had toughened--some said because of its omnivorousdiet, others, its ability to absorb nitrogen from the air--and itsrubbery quality caused it to yield to onslaught only to bound back,apparently uninjured, after each blow.

  One of the most disquieting aspects of the advance was its variabilityand unpredictability. To the west, it had hardly gone five blocks fromthe Dinkman house, while southward it had crossed Santa Monica Boulevardand was nosing toward Melrose. Its growth had been measured and checked,over and over again, but the figures were never constant. Some days ittraveled a foot an hour; on others it leapt nearly a city block betweensunrise and nightfall.

  It is simple to put down "the grass crossed Hollywood Boulevard"; assimple as saying, "our troops advanced" or "the man was hanged at dawn."But when I write these words less than a generation later, surrounded byrolling hills, gentle brooks, and vast lawns sedate and tame, I canclose my eyes and see again the green glacier crawling down thesidestreets and over the low roofs of the shops to pour like a cascadeupon the busy artery.

  Once more I can feel the crawling of my skin as I looked upon themethodical obliteration of men's work. I can see the tendrils splayingout over the sidewalks, choking the roadways, climbing walls, findingvulnerable chinks in masonry, bunching themselves inside apertures andbursting out, carrying with them fragments of their momentary prison asthey pursued their ruthless course.

  Now the uproar and clamor of a disturbed public swelled to giant volume.All the disruption and distress going before had been news; this wasdisaster. "All same Glauman's Chinese, all same Pa'thenon," remarkedGootes, and indeed I have heard far less outcry over the destruction ofhistoric landmarks than was raised when the grass obscured thecelebrated footprints.

  Recall of the mayor was demanded and councilmen's official limousineswere frequently overturned. Meetings denounced the inaction of theauthorities; a gigantic parade bearing placards calling for an end toprocrastination marched past the cityhall. Democrats blamed Republicansfor inefficiency and Republicans retorted that Miss Francis had done herresearch during a Democratic administration.

  Every means previously tried and found wanting was tried again as thoughit were impossible for human minds to acknowledge defeat by an insensateplant. The axes, the scythes, weedburners and reapers were brought outagain, only to prove their inability to cope with the relentless flow ofthe grass. Robot tanks loaded with explosives disappeared as had thosecontaining the soldiers, and only the stifled sound of their explosionregistered the fact that they had fulfilled their design if not theirpurpose.

  It was difficult for the man on the street to understand how the weaponssuccessful in Normandy and Tarawa could be balked by vegetation. Likethe Investigating Committee's pursuit of the question of the crudeoil'sadulteration, they wanted to know if the tanks were firstline vehiclesor some surplus palmed off by the War Department; if the weedburnerswere properly accredited graminicides or just a bunch of bums taken fromthe reliefrolls. The necessary reverse of this picture was the jubilanthailing of each new instrument of attack, the brief but hystericalenthusiasm for each in turn as the ultimate savior.

  Because of my unique position I witnessed the trial of them all. I sawtanks dragging rotary plows and others equipped with devices likeelectricfans but with blades of hardened steel sharpened to razorkeenness. The only thing this latter gadget did was to scatter morepotential nuclei to the accommodating wind.

  I saw the Flammenwerfer, the dreadful flamethrowers which had scorchedthe bodies of men like burnt toast in an instant, direct theirconcentrated fire upon the advancing runners. I smelled the sweetly sicksmell of steaming sap and saw the runners shrivel and curl back as theyhad done on other occasions, until nothing was presented to theflamethrowers except the tangled mass of interwoven stems denuded of allfoliage. Upon this involved wall the fire had no effect, the stems didnot wilt, the hard membranes did not collapse, the steely network didnot retreat. It seemed a drawn battle in one small sector, yet in thatvery part where the grass paused on the ground it rose higher into theair like a poising tidalwave. Higher and higher, until its crest,unbalanced, toppled forward to engulf its tormentors.

  Then the unruffled advance resumed, again some resource was interposedagainst it, again it was checked for an instant and again it overcameits adversary, careless of obstacles, impartially taking to itself goutyroominghouses and pimping frenchprovincial ("17 master bedrooms")chateaus, hotdogstand and Brown Derby, cornergrocery and pyramidalfoodmart; undeterred by anything in its path.

  When you say a clump of weed attacked a city you utter an absurdity. Ithink everyone was aware of the fantastic discrepancy between statementof the event and the event itself. So innocent and ridiculous the grasslooked as it made its first tentative thrust at the urban nerves; thegreen blades sloped forward like some prettily arranged butunimaginative corsage upon the concrete bosom of the street. You couldnot believe those fragile seeming strands would resist the impress of acareless boot, much less the entire arsenal of military and agriculturalimplements. It must have been this deceptive fragility which broke thespirit of so many people.

  From an item in the _Intelligencer_ I recalled the existence of one ofMrs Dinkman's neighbors who had rudely refused the opportunity to havehis lawn treated with the Metamorphizer. He had left an incoherentsuicidenote: "Pigeons in the grass alas. Too many pigeons, too muchgrass. Pigeons are doves, but Noah expressed a raven. Contradictionlies. Roses are red, violets are blue. The grass is green and I am thru.Too too too. Darling kiddies." He then, in full view of the helplessweedfighters, marched on into the grass and was lost to sight.

  In the days following, so many selfdestructions succeeded this one thatthe grass became known in the papers as the Green Horror. Perhaps apeculiar sidelight on human oddity was revealed in most of thesesuicides choosing to immolate themselves, not in the main body of thegrass, but in one of the many smaller nuclei springing up in closeproximity.

  It was my fortune to witness the confluence of two of these descendantbodies. They had come into being only a few blocks apart; understandablytheir true character was unrecognized until they were out of control andhad enveloped the neighborhoods of their origin. They crept toward eachother with a sort of incestuous attraction until mere yards separatedthem; they paused skittishly, the runners crawled forward speculatively,the green fronds began overlapping like clasping fingers, then withaccelerating speed came together much as a pack of cards in the hands ofa deft shuffler slides edge under edge to make a compact and indivisiblewhole. The line of division disappeared, the two became one, and wherebefore there had been left a narrow path for men to tread, now only aserene line of vegetation outlined itself against the unblinking sky.

  _22._ I have said Mr Le ffacase had softened his brutality toward me,but his favor did not extend--so pervasive is lite
rary jealousy--toprinting my own reports. He continued to subject me to the indignity ofbeing "ghosted," a thoroughly expressive term, which by a combination ofbad conjugation and the suggestion of insubstantiality defines the sortof prose produced, by Jacson Gootes. This arrangement, instead of givingme some freedom, shackled me to the reporter, who dashed from celebrityto celebrity, grass to nuclei, office to point of momentary interest,with unflagging energy and infuriating jocosity. I knew his repertory oftricks and accents down to the last yawn.

  Most of all I resented his irregular habits. He never arrived at the_Intelligencer_ office on time or quit after a proper day's work. Hethought nothing of getting me out of bed before I'd had my eight hours'sleep to accompany him on some ridiculous errand. "Bertie, old dormouse,the grass is knocking at the doors of NBC."

  "All right," I answered, annoyed. "It started down Vine Streetyesterday. It would be more surprising if it obligingly paused beforethe studios."

  "Cynic," he said, pulling the bedclothes away from my face. I considerthis the lowest form of horseplay I know of. "How quickly your idealshave been tarnished by contact with the vulgar world of newspaperdom.Front and center, Bertie lad, we must catch the grass making its ownsoundeffects before they jerk out the microphones."

  Protests having no effect I reluctantly went with him, but the scene wasmerely a repetition of hundreds of previous ones, the grass being nomore or less spectacular for NBC than for Watanabe's Nursery and CutFlower Shop a halfmile away. Its aftereffects, however, were immediate.The governor declared martial law in Los Angeles County and ordered theevacuation of an area five miles wide on the perimeter of the grass.

  Furious cries of anguish went up from those affected by the arbitraryorder. What authority had any official to dispossess honest people fromtheir homes in times of peace? The right to hold their propertyunmolested was a prerogative vested in the humblest American and who wasthe governor to abrogate the Constitution, the Declaration ofIndependence, and manifold decisions of the Supreme Court? In embitteredfury Henry Miller resigned from the Investigating Committee, now defunctanyway, its voluminous and inconclusive report buried in the statearchives. Injunctions issued from local courts like ashes from astirring volcano, but the militia were impervious and hustled thefreeholders from their homes with callous disregard for the sacred duesof property.

  When the reason behind this evacuation order leaked out a still greaterlamentation was evoked, for the National Guard was planning nothing lessthan a saturation incendiary bombing of the entire area. The bludgeonwhich reduced the cities of Europe to mere shells must surely destroythis new invader. Even the stoutest defenders of property conceded thismust be so--but what was the point of annihilating the enemy if theirholdings were to be sacrificed in the process? No, no, let the governortake whatever means he pleased to dispatch the weed so long as themethod involved left them homes to enjoy when things were--as theyinevitably must be--restored to normal. So frantic were their effortsthat the Supreme Court actually forced the governor to postpone hisproposed bombing, though it did not discontinue the evacuation.

  There were few indeed who understood how the weed would digest the verywood, bricks or stucco and who packed up and moved out ahead of thetroops. American flags and shotguns recalled the heroic days of thefrontier, and defiance of the governor's edict was the rule instead ofthe exception. Fierce old ladies dared the militiamen to lay a finger onthem or their possessions and apoplectic gentlemen, eyes as glazed asthose of the huntingtrophies on their walls, sputtered refusals to stir,no, not for all the brutal force in the world. No one was seriously hurtin this rebellion, the commonest wound being long scratches on thecheeks of the guardsmen, inflicted by feminine nails, as with variousdegrees of resistance the inhabitants were carried or shooed from theirdwellings.

  While the wrangling over its destruction went on, the grass continuedits progress. Out through Cahuenga Pass it flowed, toward fertile SanFernando Valley. Steadily it climbed to the hilltops, masticating sage,greasewood, oak, sycamore and manzanita with the same ease it boltedhouses and pavements. Into Griffith Park it swaggered, mumbling theplanetarium, Mount Hollywood and Fern Dell in successive mouthfuls andswarmed down to the concretelined bed of the Los Angeles River. Hereineffectual shallow pools had preserved illusion and given touristssomething at which to laugh in the dry season; the weed licked them uplike a thirsty cow at a wallow. Up and down and over the river it ran,each day with greater speed.

  It broke into the watermains, it tore down the poles bearing electric,telephone and telegraph wires, it forced its way between the threadedjoints of gaspipes and turned their lethal vapor loose in the air untilall services in the vicinity were hastily discontinued. Short weeksafter I'd inoculated Mrs Dinkman's lawn, that part of Los Angeles knownas Hollywood had disappeared from the map of civilization and had becomeone solid mass of green devilgrass.

  No one refused to move for this dispossessor as they had for thegovernor; thousands of homeless fled from it. Their going clogged thehighways with automobiles and produced an artificial gasoline shortagereminiscent of wartime. In downtown Los Angeles freightcars stoodunloaded on their sidings, their consignees out of business and thewarehouses glutted. The strain on local transportation, alreadyenfeebled by a publicservice system designed for a city one twentiethits size and a complete lack of those facilities mandatory in everyother large center of population, increased by the necessary reroutingaround the affected area, threatened disruption of the entire organismand the further disintegration of the city's already weakenedcoordination. The values of realestate dropped, houses were sold for asong, officebuildings for an aria, hotels for a chorus.

  The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, secure in the knowledge its citysuffered from nothing worse than fires, earthquakes, a miserableclimate, and an invincible provincialism, invited displaced businessmento resettle themselves in an area where improbable happenings were lesslikely; and the state of Oklahoma organized a border patrol to keep outCalifornians.

  I could not blame the realestate men for attempting to unload theirholdings before they suffered the fate of one tall building at Hollywoodand Highland. The grass closed about its base like a false foundationand surged on to new conquests, leaving the monolith bare and forlorn inits new surroundings. At first the weed satisfied itself with jocularand teasing ventures up the smooth sides; then, as though rasped by theskyscraper's quiescence, it forced its way into the narrow space betweenthe steel sash, filling the lower floor and bursting out again in a riotof whirling tendrils. Up the sides it climbed like some false ivy;clinging, falling back, building upon its own defeated body until itreached another story--and another and another. At each one the tale wasrepeated: windows burglariously forced, a floor suffocated, egresseffected, and another height of wall scaled. At the end the proudstructure was a lonely obelisk furred in a green covering to the veryflagpole on its peak, from which waved disappointed yet still aspiringrunners.

  Upward and outward continuously, empty lot, fillingstation, artisticbillboard, all alike to the greedy fingers. Like thumb and index theyformed a crescent, a threatening semicircle, reaching forward byindirection. Northward and southeastward, the two aqueducts kept thedesert from reclaiming its own; for fifty years the city had scraped up,bought, pilfered or systematically robbed all the water it could get;through the gray, wet lines, siphons, opencuts, pumps, lifts, tunnels,the metropolis sucked life. Now the desert had an ally, the grassyfingers avoided the downtown district, feeling purposefully anddangerously toward the aqueducts.

  I spent much of my time, when not actively watching the grass, in the_Intelligencer_ office. I had now agreed to write articles for severalweekly magazines, and though they edited my copy with a heavy andunappreciative hand, still they never outraged me as Le ffacase did bycausing another man to usurp my name. Since I was in both sensesnominally a member of the staff, I had no qualms about using thejournal's typewriters and stationery for the construction of littleessays on the grass as seen through the eyes
of one who had cause toknow it better than anyone else.

  "The-uh curse of Garry-baldi be upon the head of that ee-veal man who-uhcontrols this organeye-zation," rolled out Gootes in pseudoChurchilliantones. "The-uh monster has woven a web; we are-uh summoned, Bertie."

  I got up resignedly and followed him to the managingeditor's office. Wewere not greeted directly. Instead, a question was thrown furiously overour heads. "Where is he? What bristling and baseless egomania sways himto affront the _Daily Intelligencer_ with his contumacious and indecentunpunctuality?"

  "Who, chief?" asked Gootes.

  Le ffacase ignored him. "When this great newspaper condescends to shedthe light of acceptance, to say nothing of an obese and taxablepaycheck, upon the gross corpus of an illiterate moviecameraman, a falseDaguerre, a spurious Steichen, a dubious Eisenstein, it has a right toexpect a return for the goods showered upon such a deceitful sluggard."

  Still ignoring Gootes, he turned to me, and apparently putting theberated one from his mind, went on with comparative mildness: "Weener,an unparalleled experience is to fall to your lot. You have not achievedthis opportunity through any excellence of your own, for I must say,after lengthy contact, no vestige of merit in you is perceptible eitherto the nude eye or through an ultramicroscope. Nevertheless, by pureunhappy chance you are the property of the _Intelligencer_, and as suchthis illustrious organ intends to confer upon you the signal honor ofbeing a Columbus, a Van Diemen, an Amundsen. You, Weener, in yourunworthy person, shall be the first man to set foot upon a virgin land."

  This speech being no more comprehensible to me than his excoriation ofan unknown individual, I could only stay silent and try to lookappreciative.

  "Yes, Weener, you; some refugee from the busy newsroom of the Zwingle(Iowa) _Weekly Patriot_," a disdainful handwave referred thisdescription to Gootes; "some miserable castoff from a fourthrate quickiestudio masquerading as a newscameraman; and a party of sheep--perhaps Icould simplify my whole sentence by saying merely a party of bloodysheep--will be landed by parachute on top of the grass this veryafternoon."

  He smacked his lips. "I can see tomorrow's bannerline now: 'Agent ofDestruction Views Handiwork.' Should you chance to survive, yourghostwritten impressions--for which we pay too high a price, far toohigh a price--will become doubly valuable. Should you come, as Iconfidently expect, to a logical conclusion, the _Intelligencer_ willsupply a suitable obituary. Now get the bloody hell out of here andeither let me see you never again, or as a triumphant Balboa who hassat, if not upon a peak in Darien, at least upon something moreimportant than your own backside."

  _23._ The inside of the converted armybomber smelled like exactly whatit was--a barn. Ten sheep and a solitary goat were tethered tostanchions along the sides. The sheep bleated continuously, the goatlooked cynically forbearing, and all gave off an ammoniacal smell whichwas not absorbed by the bed of hay under their hoofs.

  Enthusiasm for this venture was an emotion I found practicallyimpossible to summon up. Even without Le ffacase's sanguinaryprophecies, I objected to the trip. I had never been in a plane in mylife, and this for no other reason than disinclination. I feared everypossible consequence of the parachutejump, from instant annihilationthrough a broken neck in the jerk of its opening, down to beingsmothered in its folds on the ground. I distinctly did not want to go.

  But caution sometimes defeats itself; I was so afraid of going that Ihesitated to admit my timidity and so I found myself herded with my twocompanions, the pilot and crew, in with the sheep and the goat. I wasnot resigned, but I was quiescent. Gootes and the animals were not.

  While we waited he went through his entire stock of tricks including afew new ones which were not completely successful, before the cameraman,panting, arrived ten minutes after our scheduled departure. His name wasRafe Slafe--which I thought an improbable combination of syllables--andhe was so chubby in every part you imagined you saw the smile whichought to have gone with such a face and figure. Before his breath hadsettled down to a normal routine, Gootes had rushed upon him with anenthusiastic, "Ah, Rafello muchacho, give to me the abrazo; como usted,companero?"

  Slafe scorned reply, pushing Gootes aside with one plump hand while withthe other he tidied the sparse black hairs of his mustache, which wastrimmed down to an eyebrow shading his lip. After inspecting andrejecting several identical bucketseats he found one less to hisdistaste than the others and stowed his equipment, which was extensive,requiring several puffing trips backandforth, next to it. Then helowered his backside onto the unyielding surface with the same anxietywith which he might have deposited a fortune in a dubious bank.

  His hands darted in and out of pockets which apparently held a smallpharmacopoeia. Pulling out a roll of absorbentcotton from which heplucked two wads, he stuck them thoughtfully in his ears. He withdrew anasalsyringe and used it vigorously, swallowed gulps of a clearlylabeled seasickremedy, and then sucked at pills from various boxes whosepurpose was not so obvious. To conclude, he unstopped a glass vial andsniffed at it. All the while Gootes hovered over him, solicitouslydeluging him with friendly queries in one accent or another.

  I lost interest in both fellowpassengers, for the plane, after shakingus violently, started forward, and before I was clearly aware of it hadleft the ground. Looking from the windows I regretted my first airplaneride hadnt been taken under less trying circumstances, for it was anextraordinarily pleasant experience to see the field dwindle into aminiature of itself and the ground beneath become nothing more than alarge and highly colored reliefmap.

  To our right was the stagnant river, dammed up behind the blockading armof grass. Leftward, downtown, the thumb of the cityhall pointed rudelyupward and far beyond was the listless Pacific. Ahead, the gridiron ofstreets was shockingly interrupted and severed by the great green massplumped in its center.

  It grew to enormous bigness and everything else disappeared; we wereover and looked down upon it, a pasture hummock magnified beyond belief;retaining its essential identity, but made ominous by its unappropriatesituation and size. As we hovered above the very pinnacle, the roundedpeak which poked up at us, the pilot spoke over the intercommunicationsystem. "We will circle till the load is disposed of. First the animalswill be dropped, then the equipment, finally the passengers. Is thatclear?"

  Everything was clear to me except how we should escape from that greenmountain once we had got upon it. This was apparently in the hands of Leffacase, a realization, remembering his grisly conversation, making meno easier in my mind. Nor did I relish the pilot's casual description ofmyself as part of a "load"--to be disposed of.

  Slafe suddenly came to life and after peering through a sort oflorgnette hanging round his neck, mumbling unintelligibly to himself allthe while, started his camera which went on clicking magically with noapparent help from him. Efficiently and swiftly the crew fastened uponthe helpless and bleating sheep their parachutes and onebyone droppedthem through the open bombbay. The goat went last and she did not bleat,but dextrously butted two of her persecutors and micturated upon thethird before being cast into space.

  I would have forgone the dubious honor of being the first to land uponthe grass, but the crew apparently had their orders; I was courteouslytapped upon the shoulder--I presume the warders are polite when theyenter the condemned cell at dawn--my chute was strapped upon me and theinstructions I had already read in their printed form at least sixtytimes were repeated verbally, so much to my confusion that when I wasfinally in the air I do not know to this day whether I counted six,sixty, six hundred, or six thousand before jerking the ripcord. Whateverthe number, it was evidently not too far wrong, for although I receiveda marrowexploding shock, the parachute opened and I floated down.

  But no sooner were my fears of the parachute's performance relieved thanI was for the first time assailed with apprehension at the thought of mydestination. The grass, the weed, the destroying body which had devouredso much was immediately below me. I was irrevocably committed to comeupon it--not at its edges where oth
er men battled with itheroically--but at its very heart, where there were none to challengeit.

  Still tormented and dejected, I landed easily and safely a few feet fromthe goat and just behind the rearquarters of one of the sheep.

  And now I pause in my writing to sit quite still and remember--morethan remember, live through again--the sensation of that first physicalcontact with the heart of the grass. Ecstasy is a pale word to apply tothe joy of touching and resting upon that verdure. Soft--yes, it wassoft, but the way sand is soft, unyieldingly. Unlike sand, however, itdid not suggest a tightlypacked foundation, but rather the firmness of agood mattress resting on a wellmade spring. It was resilient, likecarefully tended turf, yet at the same time one thought, not of thesolid ground beneath, but of feathers, or even more of buoyant clouds.My parachute having landed me gently on my feet, I sank naturally to myknees, and then, impelled by some other force than gravity, my body fellfully forward in complete relaxation until my face was buried in thethickly growing culms and my arms stretched out to embrace as much ofthe lush surface as they could encompass.

  Far more complex than the mere physical reactions were the psychicalones. When a boy I had, like every other, daydreamed of discovering newcontinents, of being first to climb a hitherto unscaled peak, to walkbefore others the shores of strange archipelagoes, to bring back talesof outlandish places and unfrequented isles. Well, I was doing thesethings now, long after the disillusionment adolescence brought to thesechildish dreams. But in addition it was in a sense _my_ island, _my_mountain, _my_ land--for I had caused it to be. A sensation oftremendous vivacity and wellbeing seized upon me; I could not have lainupon the grass more than half a second before I leaped to my feet. Witha nimbleness quite foreign to my natural habits I detached theencumbering chute and jumped and danced upon the sward. The goatregarded me speculatively through rectangular pupils, but did not offer,in true capricious fashion, to gambol with me. Her criticism did notstay me, for I felt absolutely free, extraordinarily exhilarated,inordinately stimulated. I believe I even went so far as to shout outloud and break into song.

  The descent of Slafe, still solemnly recording the event, camera beforehim in the position of present arms, did not sober my intoxication,though circumspection caused me to act in a more conventional way. Ifreed him from his harness, for he was too busy taking views of thegrass, the sky, the animals and me to perform this service for himself.

  I do not know if he was affected the way I was, for his deceptivelygenial face showed no emotion as he went on aiming his camera here andthere with sour thoroughness. Then, apparently satisfied for the moment,he applied himself once more to the nasalsyringe and the pillboxes.

  On Gootes, however, the consequence of the landing must have been muchthe same as on me. He too capered and sang and his dialect renderingsreached a new low, such as even a burlesqueshow comedian would havespurned. "Tis the old sod itself," he kept repeating, "Erin go bragh. UpDev!" and he laughed inanely.

  We must have wasted fully an hour in this fashion before enough coolnessreturned to allow anything like calm observation. When it did, weunpacked the equipment, despite obstacles interposed by Gootes, who,still hilarious, found great delight in making the various instrumentsdisappear and reappear unexpectedly. It was quite complete and we--orrather Slafe--recorded the thermometer and barometer readings as well asthe wind direction and altitude, these to be later compared with otherstaken under normal conditions at the same hour.

  Included in the gear were telescope and binoculars; these we put to oureyes only to realize with surprise that we were located in the center ofa hollow bowl perhaps a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet across andthat an horizon of upsurging vegetation cut off our view of anythingexcept the sky itself. I could have sworn we had landed on a flatplateau, if indeed the contour had not sloped upward to a cap. How,then, did we come to find ourselves in a depression? Did the grass shiftlike the sea it resembled? Or--incredible thought--had our weight causedus to sink imperceptibly into a soft and treacherous bed?

  I felt my happiness oozing away. What is man, I thought, but a pigmytrapped in a bowl, bounded by an unknown beginning and headed for aconcealed destination? It was sweet to be, but whether good or evil layin the unseen, who knew? Uneasiness, which did not quite displace myearlier buoyancy, took hold of me.

  The animals, in contrast, gave no signals of disquiet. They cropped atthe grass without nervousness, perhaps more from habit than hunger. Theydid not seem to be obtaining much sustenance; clearly they found it hardto bite off mouthfuls of forage. Rather, they chewed sidewise, like acat, at the tough rubbery tendrils.

  "I tank I want to go home--anyways I tank I want to get out of dishaole," remarked Gootes. Slafe had unpacked another camera and attachedvarious gadgets to it, pursing his lips and running his hands lovinglyover the assembled product before thrusting it downward into the stolonswhere queer shocks of radiance seemed to indicate he was takingflashlight pictures of the subsurface.

  But the sheep and the cameraman could not distract my attention from theappearance of a trap which the basin of grass was assuming, while Gooteswas so volatile he couldnt even put on a simulated stoicism. In a panicI started to climb frantically, all the elation of my first encounterwith the mound completely evaporated. The goat raised her head to notemy undignified scrambling, but the sheep kept up their determinednibbling.

  The trough, as I said, could not have been more than a couple of hundredfeet across and though the loose runners impeded my progress I must havecovered twice the distance to the edge of the rim before I realized itwas as far from me as when I had started. Gootes, going in a directionoblique to mine, had no better success. His waving arms and strugglingbody indicated his awareness of his predicament. Only Slafe wasundisturbed, perhaps unconscious of our efforts, for he had taken outstill another camera and was lying on his back, pointing it over ourheads at the boundary of grass and sky.

  Hysteria burned my lungs as I continued the dreamlike battle upward.Fear may have confused me, but it seemed as though the enveloping weedwas now positively rather than merely negatively hampering me. Therunners whipped around my legs in clinging spirals; the surface, alwayssoft, now developed treacherous spots like quicksands and while one footremained comparatively secure, the other sank deeply, tripping me.Prone, the entangling fronds caught at my arms and neck; the greenblades, no longer tender, scratched my face and smothered my uselesscries for help. I sobbed childishly, knowing myself doomed to die inthis awful morass, drowned in an unnatural sea.

  So despairing were my thoughts that I gave up all struggle and lay thereweakly crying when I noticed the grass relaxing its hold, I was sinkingin no farther; indeed it seemed the lightest effort would set me free. Irose to my knees and finally to my feet, but I was so shaken by mybattle I made no attempt to continue forward, but stood gazing around memarveling that I was still, even if only for a few more moments, alive.

  "Belly belong you walk about too much, ay? Him fella look-look no gotbelly." Gootes had given up his endeavor to reach the rim and apparentlystruggled all the way over to impart, if I understood his _bechedemer_,this absurd and selfevident piece of information.

  "This is hardly a time for levity," I rebuked him coldly.

  "Couldnt think of a better. Reality is escaped through one flippancy oranother. Rafe has his--" he waved his hand toward the still industriouscameraman "--and I have mine. I bet W R has a telescope or a periscopeor a spectroscope somehow trained on us right now and will see to it therescue party arrives ten minutes after all life is extinct."

  To tell the truth I'd forgotten our expedition was but a stunt initiatedby the _Daily Intelligencer_ to rebound to its greater publicity. Herein this isolate cup it was difficult to conceive of an anteriorexistence; I thought of myself, as in some strange manner indigenous toand part of the weed. To recall now that we were here purposefully, thatothers were concerned with our venture, and that we might reasonablyhope for succor extricated me from my subjective entanglement with
thegrass much as the relaxation of my body a short while before freed mefrom its physical bonds. I looked hopefully at the empty sky: of coursewe would get help at any moment.

  Once more my spirits were raised; there was no point in trying to getout of the depression now, seeing we could as easily be rescued from oneportion of the grass as from another. Again the grass was soft andpleasant to touch and Slafe's preoccupation with his pictures no longerseemed either eccentric or heroic, but rather proper and sensible. LikeAlice and the Red Queen, since we had given up trying to reach aparticular spot we found ourselves able to travel with comparative ease.We inspected Slafe's activities with interest and responded readily tohis autocratic gestures indicating positions and poses we should take inorder to be incorporated in his record.

  But our gaiety was again succeeded by another period of despondency; werepeated all our antics, struggles and despair. Again I fought madlyagainst the enmeshing weed and again I gave myself up to death only tobe revived in the moment of my resignation.

  The cameraman was still untouched by the successive waves of fear andjoyfulness. Invincibly armored by some strange spirit he kept on and on,although by now I could not understand--in those moments when I couldthink about anything other than the grass--what new material he couldfind for his film. Skyward and downward, to all points of the compass,holding his cameras at crazy angles, burlesquing all photographers, hiszeal was unabated, unaffected even by the force of the grass.

  Our alternating moods underwent a subtle change: the spans of defeatgrew longer, the moments of hope more fleeting. The sheep too at lastwere infected by uneasiness, bleating piteously skyward and making noattempt to nibble any longer. The goat, like Slafe, was unmoved; shedisdained the emotional sheep.

  And now with horror I suddenly realized that a physical change hadmarched alongside the fluctuations of our temper. The circumference ofthe bowl was the same as at first, but imperceptibly yet swiftly thehollow had deepened, sunk farther from the sky, the walls had becomealmost perpendicular and to my terror I found myself looking upward fromthe bottom of a pit at the retreating sky.

  I suppose everyone at some time has imagined himself irrevocablyimprisoned, cast into some lightless dungeon and left to die. Suchvisions implied human instrumentality, human whim; the most implacablejailer might relent. But this, this was an incarceration no supplicationcould end, a doom not to be stayed. Silently, evenly, unmeasuredly thewell deepened and the walls became more sheer.

  Like kittens about to be ignominiously drowned we slid into a huddledbunch at the bottom of the sack, men and animals equally helpless anddistraught. Fortunately it was during one of the now rare periods ofresurgence that we saw the helicopter, for I do not think we should havehad the spiritual strength needful to help ourselves had it come duringour times of dejection. Gootes and I yelled and waved our armsfrenziedly, while Slafe, exhibiting faint excitement for the first time,contorted himself to aim the camera at the machine's belly. Evidentlythe pilot spotted us without difficulty for the ship came to a hoveringrest over the mouth of the well and a jacobsladder unrolled its lengthto dangle rope sides and wooden rungs down to us.

  "Snatched from the buzzsaw as the express thundered across the switchand the water came up to our noses," chanted Gootes. "W R has a vilelymelodramatic sense of timing."

  The ladder was nearest Slafe, but working more furiously than ever, hewaved it impatiently aside and so I grasped it and started upward. Theterror of the ascent paradoxically was a welcome one, for it was thecommon fear which comes to men on the battlefield or in the creakinghours of the night, the natural dread of ordinary perils and not theunmanning panic inspired by the awful unknown within the grass.

  The helicopter shuddered and dipped, causing the unanchored ladder tosway and twist until with each convulsive jerk I expected to be thrownoff. I bruised and burned my palms with the tightness of my grip, myknees twitched and my face and back and chest were wet. But in spite ofall this, waves of thankfulness surged over me.

  The roaring and rattling above grew louder and I made my way finallyinto the open glassfronted cockpit, pulling myself in with the last bitof my strength. For a long moment I lay huddled there, exhausted. My eyetook in every trifle, every bolthead, rivet, scratch, dent, indicator,seam and panel, playing with them in my mind, making and rejectingpatterns. They were artificial, made on a blessed assemblyline--noterrifying product of nature.

  I wondered how so small a space could accommodate us all and wasdevoutly grateful that I, at least, had achieved safety. Reminded of mycompanions, I looked out and down. The grass walls towered upward almostwithin reach; beyond the hole they so unexpectedly made in its surfacethe weed stretched out levelly, peaceful and inviting. I shuddered andpeered down the reversed telescope where the ladder once more hungtemptingly before Slafe.

  Again he waved it aside. Gootes appeared to argue with him for he shookhis head obstinately and went on using his camera. At length thereporter seized him forcibly with a strength I had not known hepossessed and boosted him up the first rungs of the ladder. Slafe seemedat last resigned to leave, but he pointed anxiously to his other camerasand cans of film. Gootes nodded energetically and waved the photographerupward.

  I saw every detail of what happened then, emphasized and heightened asthough revealed through a slowmotion picture. I heard Slafe climb onboard and knew that in a few seconds now we would be free and away. Isaw the bright sun reflect itself dazzlingly upon the blades of thegrass, sloping imperceptibly away to merge with the city it squattedupon in the distance.

  The sun where we were was dazzling, I say, but in the hole where Gooteswas now tying Slafe's paraphernalia to the ladder, the shadow of thewalls darkened it into twilight. I squinted, telepathically urging himto hurry; he seemed slow and fumbling. And then ...

  And then the walls collapsed. Not slowly, not with warning, notdramatically or with trumpets. They came together as silently andnaturally as two waves close a trough in the ocean, but withoutdisturbance or upheaval. They fell into an embrace, into a coalescenceas inevitable as the well they obliterated was fortuitous. They closedlike the jaws of a trap somehow above malevolence, leaving only the topof the ladder projecting upward from the smooth and placid surface ofthe weed.

  Whether in some involuntary recoil the pilot pressed a wrong control orwhether the action of the grass itself snatched the ladder from the shipI don't know; but that last bit attached to the machine was torn freeand fell upon the green. It was the only thing to mark the spot wherethe bowl which had held us had been, and it lay, a brown and futiletangle of rope and wood, a helpless speck of artifice on animperturbable mass of vegetation.

  _24._ Mr Le ffacase removed the tube of the dictaphone from his lips asI entered. "Weener, although a rigid adherence to fact compels me toclaim some acquaintance with general knowledge and a slight cognizanceof abnormal psychology, I must admit bafflement at the spectacle of yourmottled complexion once more in these rooms sacred to the perpetuationof truth and the dissemination of enlightenment. Everyday you embezzlegood money from this paper under pretense of giving value received, andeach day your uselessness becomes more conspicuous. Almost anyone woulddisapprove the divine choice in the matter of taking Gootes and leavingyou alive, and while I know the world suffered not the least hurt by histranslation to whatever baroque, noisy and entirely public hell isreserved for reporters, at least he attempted to forge some ostensiblereturn for his paycheck."

  "Mr Le ffacase," I began indignantly, but he cut me off.

  "You unalloyed imbecile," he roared, "at least have the prudence if notthe intelligence or courtesy to be silent while your betters arespeaking. Gootes was a bloody knave, a lazy, slipshod, slack, tasteless,absurd, fawning, thieving, conniving sloven, but even if he had theenergy to make the attempt and a mind to put to it, he could not, in tenlifetimes, become the perfect, immaculate and prototypical idiot youwere born."

  I don't know how long he would have continued in this insulting vein,but he was interrupted by
the concealed telephone. "What in the name ofthe ten thousand dubious virgins do you mean by annoying me?" hebellowed into the mouthpiece. "Yes. Yes. I know all about deadlines; Iwas a newspaperman when you were vainly suckling canine dugs. Are youambitious to replace me? Go get with child a mandrakeroot, you, youjournalist! I will meet the _Intelligencer_'s deadline as I did beforeyour father got the first tepidly lustful idea in his nulliparous headand as I shall after you have followed your useless testes to a worthydesuetude."

  He replaced the receiver and picked up the mouthpiece of the dictaphoneagain, paying no further attention to me. He enunciated clearly andprecisely, speaking in an even monotone, pausing not at all, as ifreading from some prepared script, though his eyes were fixed upon avacant spot where wall and ceiling joined.

  "In the death today of Jacson Gootes the _Daily Intelligencer_ lost ason. It is an old and good custom on these solemn occasions to pause andremember the dead.

  "Jacson Gootes was a reporter of exceptional probity, of clearunderstanding, of indefatigable effort, and of great native ability. Hisserious and straightforward approach to an occupation which to him was alabor of love was balanced by a sunny yet thoughtful humor, acombination making his company something to be sought. Beloved of hisfellow workers, no one mourns his loss more sincerely than the editorthrough whose hands passed all those brilliant contributions, nowfinally marked, as all newspaper copy is, -30-.

  "But though the _Intelligencer_ has suffered a personal and deeply feltbereavement, American journalism has given another warrior on thebattlefield. Not by compulsion nor arbitrary selection, but of his ownfree will, he who serves the public through the press is a soldier. Andas a soldier he is ready at the proper time to go forward and give uphis life if need be.

  "No member of a sturdy army was more worthy of a gallant end than JacsonGootes. He died, not in some burst of audacity such as may occasionallyactuate men to astonishing feats, but doggedly and calmly in the line ofduty. More than a mere hero, he was a good newspaperman. W.R.L."

  There were tears under my eyelids as the editor concluded his eulogy.Under that gruff and even overbearing exterior must beat a warm andtender heart. You can't go by appearances, I always say, and I felt Iwould never again be hurt by whatever hasty words he chose to hurl atme.

  "Wake up, you moonstruck simpleton, and stop beaming at some privatevision. The time has passed for you to live on the bounty of the_Intelligencer_ like the bloody mendicant you are. You have outlivedyour usefulness as the man who started all this fuss; it is no longergood publicity; the matter has become too serious.

  "No, Weener, from now on, beneath your unearned byline the public willknow you only as the first to set foot upon this terra incognita, thisverdant isle which flourishes senselessly where only yesterday Hollywoodnourished senselessly. So rest no more upon your accidental laurels, buttransform yourself into what nature never intended, a useful member ofthe community. I will make a newspaperman of you, Weener, if I have tobeat into your head an entire typefont, from fourpoint up to andincluding those rare boldfaced letters we keep in the cellar to announceon our final page one the end of the world.

  "You will cover the grass as before and you will bring or send or causein some other manner to be transmitted to me copy without a singleadjective or adverb, containing nothing more lethal than verbs, nouns,prepositions and conjunctions, stating facts and only facts, clearlyand distinctly in the least possible number of words compatible with theusages of English grammar. You will do this daily and conscientiously,Weener, on pain of instant dismemberment, to say nothing of crucifixionand the death of a thousand cuts."

  "The _Weekly Ruminant_ and the _Honeycomb_ have found little pieces ofmine, written without special instructions, suitable for their columns,"I mentioned defensively.

  He threw himself back in his chair and stared at me with suchconcentrated fury I thought he would burst the diamond stud loose fromhis shirtband. "The _Weekly Ruminant_," he informed me, "was founded bya parsimonious whoremaster whose sanctimonious rantings in public wereequaled only by his private impieties. It was brought to greatness--ifinflated circulation be a synonym--by a veritable journalistic pimp whopandered to the public taste for literary virgins by bribing them tocommit their perverse acts in full view. It is now carried on by aspectral corporation, losing circulation at the same rate a haemophilicloses blood.

  "As for the _Honeycomb_, it is enough to say that careful researchproves its most absorbing reading to be the 'throw away your truss' ads.Is it not natural, Weener, that two such journals of taste andenlightenment should appreciate your efforts? Unfortunately the _DailyIntelligencer_ demands accounts written in intelligible English abovethe level of fourthgrade grammarschool."

  I would have been shocked beyond measure at his libelous smirching ofhonored names and hurt as well by his slighting reference to myself hadI not known from the revealing editorial he had dictated what asympathetic and kindly nature was really his and how he might, beneaththis cynical pose, have an admiration great as mine for the charactershe had just slandered.

  "You will be the new Peter Schlemihl, Weener; from now on you will goforth without a ghost and any revision essential to your puny assaultupon the Republic of Letters will be done by me and God help you if Ifind much to do, for my life is passing and I must have time to readthe immortal Hobbes before I die."

  In spite of all he'd said I couldnt help but believe Mr Le ffacaserealized my true worth--or why did he confer on me what was practicallya promotion? I was therefore emboldened to suggest the cancellation ofthe unjust paycut, but this innocent remark called forth such avituperative stream of epithet I really thought the apoplexy Gootes hadpredicted was about to strike and I hurried from his presence lest I beblamed for bringing it on.

  _25._ A little reading brought me uptodate on the state of the grass asa necessary background for my new responsibility. It was now shaped likea great, irregular crescent with one tip at Newhall, broadening out tobury the San Fernando Road; stretching over the Santa Monica Mountainsfrom Beverly Glen to the Los Angeles River. Its fattest part was whathad once been Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the socalled Wilshiredistrict. The right arm of the semicircle, more slender than the left,curled crookedly eastward along Venice Boulevard, in places only a fewblocks wide. It severed the downtown district from the manufacturingarea, crossing the river near the Ninth Street bridge and swallowing thegreat Searsroebuck store like a capsule. The office of the _DailyIntelligencer_, like the Civic Center, was unthreatened and able tofunction, but we were without water and gas, though the electricservice, subject to annoying interruptions, was still available.

  Already arrangements were being completed to move the paper to Pomona,where the mayor and councilmanic offices also intended to continue. Forthere was no hiding the fact that the city was being surrendered to theweed. Eastward and southward the homeless and the alarmed journeyedcarrying the tale of a city besieged and gutted in little more than thetime it would have taken a human army to fight the necessarypreliminaries and bring up its big guns.

  On trains and buses, by bicycles and on foot, the exodus moved. Thosewho could afford it left their ravished homes swiftly behind by air andto these fortunate ones the way north was not closed, as it was to theearthbound, by the weed's overrunning of the highways. Usedcardealerssold out their stocks at inflated figures and a ceilingprice had to beput on the gasoline supplied to those retreating from the grass.

  Though only a fragment of the city had been lost, all industry had cometo a practical standstill. Workers did not care to leave homes whichmight be grassbound by nightfall; employers could not manufacturewithout backlog of materials, for a dwindling market, and withouttransportation for their products. Services were so crippled as to bebarely existent and with the failure of the watersupply, epidemics, mildat first, broke out and the diseases were carried and spread by therefugees.

  Cattlemen, uncertain there would be either stockyards or workingbutchers, held back their shipments. Truckfarmers f
ound it simpler andmore profitable to supply local depots catering at fantastic prices tothe needs of the fugitives, than to depend on railroads which werealready overstrained and might consign their highly perishable goods torot on a siding. Los Angeles began to starve. Housewives rushedfrantically to clean out the grocer's shelves, but this was living offtheir own fat and even the most farsighted of hoarders could provide forno more than a few weeks of future.

  So even those not directly evicted or frightened by its proximity beganmoving away from the grass. But they still had possessions and theywanted to take them along, all of them, down to the obsolescent consoleradio in grandma's room, the busted mantelclock--a weddingpresent fromAunt Minnie--in the garage and the bridgelamp without a shade which hadso long rested in the mopcloset. All of this taxed an alreadyoverstrained transportation system. Since it was entirely a onewaytraffic, charges were naturally doubled and even then shippers werereluctant to risk the return of their equipment to the threatened zone.The greed to take along every last bit of impedimenta dwindled under theimpact of necessity; possessions were scrutinized for what would beleast missed, then for what could be got along without; for theabsolutely essential, and finally for things so dear it was not worthgoing if they were left behind. This last category proved surprisinglysmall, compact enough to be squeezed into the family car--"Junior cansit on the box of fishingtackle--it's flat--and hold the birdcage on hislap"--as it made ready to join the procession crawling along the cloggedhighways.

  _Time_, reporting the progress of the weed, said in part: "Death, as itmust to all, came last week to cult-harboring, movie-producing LosAngeles. The metropolis of the southwest (pop. 3,012,910) diedgracelessly, undignifiedly, as its blood oozed slowly away. A shellremained: downtown district, suburbs, beaches, sprawling South and Eastsides, but the spirit, heart, brain, lungs and liver were gone;swallowed up, Jonah-wise by the advance of the terrifying Bermuda grass(TIME Aug. 10). Still at his post was sunk-eyed W. (for William) R. (forRufus) Le ffacase (pronounced L'Fass-uh-say), prolix, wide-read editorof the Los Angeles _Intelligencer_. Till the last press stopped the_Intelligencer_ would continue to disseminate the news. Among thoseremaining was Le ffacase's acereporter, Jacson C. (for Crayman) Gootes,28. Gootes' permanent beat: the heart of the menacing grass where he methis death."

  Under Religion, _Time_ had another note about the weed. "HarassedAngelinos, distracted & terrified by encroaching _Cynodon dactylon_(TIME Aug. 10) now smothering their city (see National Affairs) werefurther distracted when turning on their radios (those still working)last week. The nasal, portentous boom of the evangelist calling himselfBrother Paul (real name: Algernon Knight Mood) announced the 2nd Advent.It was taking place in the heart of the choking grass. What broughtdeath and disaster to the country's 3rd city offered hope and bliss tofollowers of Brother Paul. 'Sell all you have,' advised theradiopreacher, 'fly to your Savior who is gathering His true disciplesat this moment in the very center of the grass. Do not fear, for He willsustain and comfort you in the thicket through which the unsaved cannotpass.' At last report countless followers had been forcibly restrainedfrom self-immolation in the _Cynodon dactylon_, unnumbered others gonejoyfully to their beatification. Not yet reported as joining his Savior:Brother Paul."

  Under People: "Admitted to the Relief rolls of San Diego County thisweek were Adam Dinkman & wife, whose front lawn (TIME Aug. 3) was thestarting point of the plaguing grass. Said Mrs. Dinkman, 'The governmentought to pay....' Said Adam Dinkman, '... it's a terrible thing....'"

  I resolved to send the Dinkmans some money as soon as I could possiblyafford it. I made a note to this effect in a pocket memorandumbook,feeling the glow of worthy sacrifice, and then went out and got in mycar. It was all right to digest facts and figures about the weed fromthe printed page, but it was necessary to see again its physicalpresence before writing anything for so critical an editor as W R Leffacase.

  I drove through the Second Street tunnel and out Beverly Boulevard.There, several miles from the most advanced runners of the grass, thecertainty of its coming lay like a smothering blanket upon theunnaturally silent district. There was no traffic on my side of thestreet and only a few lastminute straggling jalopies, loaded down withshameless bedding and bundles, coughed their way frantically eastward.

  Those few shops still unaccountably open were bare of goods and the idleproprietors walked periodically to the front to scan the western sky toassure themselves the grass was not yet in sight. But most of the storeswere closed, their windows broken, their signs already tarnished anddecrepit with the age which seems to come so swiftly upon a defunctbusiness. The sidewalks were littered with rubbish, diagonally flattenedpapers, broken boxes, odd shoes. Garbagecans, instead of standingdecorously in alleys or shamefacedly along the curb, sprawled inlascivious abandon over the pavements, their contents strewn widely.Dogs and cats, deserted by fond owners, snarled and fought over choicertidbits. I had not realized how many people in the city kept pets untilthe time came to leave them behind.

  At Vermont Avenue I came upon what I was sure was a new nucleus, a lawngreen and tall set between others withered and yellow, but I did noteven bother reporting this to the police for I knew that before long themain body would take it to its bosom. And now, looking westward, I couldsee the grass itself, a half mile away at Normandie. It rose high in theair, dwarfing the buildings in its path, blotting out the mountainsbehind, and giving the illusion of rushing straight at me.

  I turned the car north, not with the idea of further observation, butbecause standing still in the face of that towering palisade seemedsomehow to invite immediate destruction. I drove slowly and thoughtfullyand then at Melrose the grass came in sight again, creeping down fromLos Feliz. I turned back toward the Civic Center. It would not be morethan a couple of days at most, now, before even downtown was gone.

  _26._ During my drive several walkers loaded with awkward bundles raisedimploring thumbs for a ride, but knowing to what lengths desperationwill drive people and not wishing to be robbed of my car, I had pressedmy foot down and driven on. But now as I went along Temple near Ramparta beautiful woman, incongruously--for it was in the middle of a hotOctober--dressed in a fur coat, and with each gloved hand grasping thehandle of a suitcase, stepped in front of me and I had to jam on thebrakes to avoid running over her.

  The car stopped, radiator almost touching her, but she made no attemptto move. A small hat with a tiny fringe of veil concealed her eyes, buther sullen mouth looked furiously at me as rigidly clutching her luggageshe barred my path. Fearing some trap, I turned off the ignition andunobtrusively slid the keys into a sidepocket before getting out andgoing to her.

  "Excuse me, miss. Can I help you?"

  She threw her head back and her eyes, brown and glistening, appraised methrough heavily painted lashes. I stood there stiffly, uncomfortableunder her gaze till I suddenly remembered my hat and lifted it with anawkward bow. This seemed to satisfy her, for still without speaking shenodded and thrust the two suitcases at me. Not knowing what else to do,I took them from her and she promptly, after smoothing her gloves,walked toward the passenger's side of the car.

  "You want me to take you somewhere, miss?" I inquired quitesuperfluously.

  She bent her head the merest fraction and then rested her fingers on thedoorhandle, waiting for me to open it for her. I ran as fast as I couldwith the bags--they were beautifully matched expensive luggage--to putthem in the turtle and then had to make myself still more ridiculous byrunning back for the forgotten key resting in the sidepocket. When I hadfinally stowed away the baggage and opened the door for her she got inwith the barest of condescending nods for my efforts and sat staringahead.

  I drove very slowly, nipping off little glances of her profile as wemoved along. Her cheeks were smooth as a chinadoll's, her nose thechiseled replica of some lovely antique marble, her mouth a living studyof rounded lines; never had I been so close to such an alluring woman.We reached the Civic Center and I automatically headed for the_Intellige
ncer_ building. But I could not bear to part company soquickly and so I turned left instead, out Macy Street.

  Now we found ourselves caught in the traffic snailing eastward. In lowgear I drove a block, then stopped and waited till a clear ten feetahead permitted another painfully slow forward motion. Still mypassenger had no word to say but kept staring ahead though she could seenothing before her except the trunkladen rearend of a tottery ford longpast its majority.

  "You," I stumbled, "I--that is, I mean wasnt there somewhere inparticular you wanted to go?"

  She nodded, still without looking at me, and for the first time spoke.

  Her voice was deep and had the timbre of some old bronze bell. "Yuma,"she said.

  "Yuma, Arizona?" I asked stupidly.

  Again she nodded faintly. In a panic I reckoned the contents of mywallet. About forty dollars, I thought--no, thirty. Would that take usto Yuma? Barely, perhaps, and I should have to wire the _Intelligencer_for money to return. Besides, in the present condition of the roads thejourney would be a matter of days and I knew she would accept nothingbut the very best. How could I do it? Should I return to the_Intelligencer_ office and try to get an advance on next week's salary?I had heard from more than one disgruntled reporter that it was animpossibility. Good heavens, I thought, I shall lose her.

  Whatever happened I must take her as far as I could; I must not let hergo before I was absolutely forced to. This resolution made, my firstthought was to cut the time, for poking along in this packed mass I wasburning gasoline without getting anywhere. Taking advantage of myknowledge of the sideroads, I turned off at the first chance and wasable to resume a normal speed as I avoided towns and main highways.

  Still she continued silent, until at length, passing orangegroves heavywith coppery fruit, I ventured to speak myself. "My name is AlbertWeener. Bert."

  The right rear tire kicked up some dust as I nervously edged off theroad. Somewhere overhead a plane ripped through the hot silk of the sky.

  "Uh ... what ... uh ... won't you tell me yours?"

  Still facing ahead, she replied, "It isnt necessary."

  After a few more miles I ventured again. "You live--were living in LosAngeles?"

  She shook her head impatiently.

  Well, I thought, really...! Then: poor thing, she's probably terriblyupset. Home and family lost perhaps. Money gone. Destitute. Going East,swallowing pride, make a new start with the help of unsympatheticrelatives. She has only me to depend on--I must not fail her. Break theice, whatever attitude her natural pride dictates, offer your services.

  "I'm on the _Daily Intelligencer_," I said. "I'm the man who firstwalked on top of the grass."

  Ten miles later I inquired, "Wouldnt you be more comfortable with thatheavy fur coat off? I can put it in the back with your luggage and itwon't be crushed."

  She shook her head more impatiently.

  Suddenly I remembered the car radio installed a few days before. Alittle cheerful music calms the soul. I turned it on and got a bandplaying a brandnew hit, "Green as Grass."

  "Oh, no. No noise."

  Of course. How thoughtless of me. The very word "grass" reminded her ofher tragic situation. I kicked myself for my tactlessness.

  We skirted Riverside and joined the highway again at Beaumont where wewere unavoidably packed into the slowmoving mass. "I'm sorry," Iapologized, "but I can take a chance again at Banning and drive up intothe mountains to get away from this."

  An hour later I suggested stopping for something to eat. She shook herhead. "But it's getting late," I said. "Pretty soon we shall have tothink about stopping for the night."

  She raised her left hand imperatively. "Drive all night."

  This would certainly solve part of my financial problem, but I washungry and unreasonably more irritated by her refusal of food than herunsociability. "I have to eat, even if you don't," I told her rudely."I'm going to stop at the next place I see." With the same left hand shemade a gesture of resignation.

  I pulled up before the roadside cafe. "Won't you change your mind andcome in? At least for a cup of coffee?"

  "No."

  I went in angrily and ate. Who was she, to treat me like a hiredchauffeur? A mere pickup, I raged, a stray woman found on a street. ByGod, she would have the courtesy at least to address me, her benefactor,civilly or else I'd abandon her here on the highway and return to LosAngeles. I finished my meal full of determination and strode backpurposefully toward the car. She was still sitting rigid, staringthrough the windshield. I got in.

  "You know--" I began.

  She did not hear me. I turned on the ignition, pressed thestarterbutton, and drove ahead.

  Soddeneyed with lack of sleep and outraged at her taciturnity, Ibreakfasted alone on the soggiest wheatcakes and the muddiest coffee Ihave ever demeaned my stomach with. The absence of my customary morningpaper added the final touch to my wretchedness. But one would havethought to look at my companion that she had been refreshed by a lengthyrepose, had bathed at leisure, and eaten the most delicate ofcontinental breakfasts. There was not a smudge on her suede gloves nor aspeck upon her small hat and the mascara on her eyelashes might havebeen renewed but a moment before.

  The road curved through vast hummocks of sand, which for no good reasonreminded me of the grass in its early stages. Reminded, I wanted to knowwhat the latest news was, how far the weed had progressed in the night.Thoughtlessly, without remembering her interdiction, I turned the knob."Kfkfkk," squeaked the radio.

  "Please," she said, in anything but a pleading tone, and turned it off.

  Well, I thought, this is certainly going too far. I opened my mouth tovoice the angry words but a look at her stopped me. I couldnt help butfeel her imperviousness was fragile, that harsh speech might shatter acalm too taut to be anything but hysterical. I drove on without speakinguntil the hummocks gave way again to smooth desert. "We'll soon be inYuma," I announced. "Arent you going to tell me your name?"

  "It isnt important," she repeated.

  "But it's important to me," I told her boldly. "I want to know who thebeautiful lady was whom I drove from Los Angeles to Yuma."

  She shook her head irritably and we crossed the bridge into Arizona.

  "All right, this is Yuma. Now where?"

  "Here."

  "Right here in the middle of the road?"

  She nodded. I looked helplessly at her, but her gaze was still fixedahead. Resignedly I got out, took her bags from the turtle and set thembeside the road, opened the door. She descended, smoothed her gloves,straightened the edge of her veil, brushed an immaterial speck from hercoat and, after the briefest of acknowledging nods, picked up her grips.

  "But ... can't I carry them for you?"

  She did not even answer this with her usual headshake, but began walkingresolutely back over the way we had come. Bewildered, I watched her amoment and then got into the car and turned it around, trying to keepher in sight in the rearview mirror as I did so. It was an awkwardprocedure on a highway heavy with traffic. By the time I had reversed mydirection she was gone.

  _27._ Due either to Le ffacase's perverse sense of humor or, what ismore likely, his excessive meanness with money, my collect telegramasking for funds to return from Yuma received the following ridiculousreply: KNOW NO SANGUINARY WEENER INTELLIGENCER NO ELEEMOSYNARYINSTITUTION EAT CAKE. The meaning of the last two words escaped me andit was possible they were added purely to make the requisite ten. At allevents Le ffacase's parsimony made a very inconvenient and unpleasanttrip back for me, milestoned by my few valuable possessions pawned withsuspicious and grasping servicestation owners.

  When I left, a map of the downtown district would have resembled theprofile of a bowl. Now it was a bottle with only a narrow neck stillclear. The weed had flung itself upon Pasadena and was curving backalong Huntington Drive, while to the south the opposing pincer wasfeeling its way along Soto Street into Boyle Heights. It was only withthe greatest difficulty that I passed through the police lines into thedoomed district
.

  If I had thought deserted Beverly Boulevard a sad sight only three daysbefore, what can I say about my impression of the city's nerve center inits last hours? Abandoned automobiles stood in the streets at the spotwhere they had run out of gas or some minor mechanical failure hadhalted them. Dead streetcars, like big game stopped short by thehunter's bullet, stayed where the failure of electricpower caught them.The tall buildings reeked of desertion as if their emptying had dulledsome superficial gloss and made them dim and colorless.

  But contrast the dying city with the wall of living green, north, west,and south, towering ever higher and preparing to carry out the sentencealready passed, and the victim becomes insignificant in the presence ofthe executioner. I was reminded of the well where Gootes died for hereexcept on one small side the grass rose like the inside of a stovepipeto the sky; but I suffered neither the same despair nor theunaccountable elation I had upon that hill, perhaps because the troughwas so much bigger or because the animate thing was not beneath my feetto communicate those feelings directly.

  There had evidently been some looting, not so much from greed as fromthe natural impulse of human nature to steal and act lawlessly as soonas police vigilance is relaxed. Here and there stores were openednakedly to the street, their contents spilled about. But such sceneswere surprisingly rare, the hopelessness of transporting stolen or anyother possessions acting as a greater deterrent than morality. One wayor another, as the saying has it, crime does not pay.

  Few people were visible and these were divided sharply into twocategories: those clearly intent upon concluding some business, rushingfuriously, papers, briefcases or articles of worth in their hands; andthose obviously without purpose, dazed, listless, stumbling against thecurbstones as they shambled along, casting furtive glances toward thegreen glacier in the background.

  The newspaper office contained only people of the first type. Le ffacasehad come out of his sanctuary for the first time within memory ofanybody on the staff. Still collarless, snuffbox in hand, henapoleonically directed the removal of those valuables without which thenewspaper could not continue. He was cool, efficient, seemed to haveeyes everywhere and know everything going on in the entire building. Hespent neither greetings nor reproaches on me, indeed was not looking inmy direction but somehow sensed my presence through his back, for hesaid without turning round, "Weener, if you have concluded yourunaccountable peregrinations remove the two files marked E1925 and E1926to Pomona. If you mislay one scrap of paper they contain--the barteringof a thousand Weeners being an inadequate equivalent--your miserablesubstance will be attached to four tractors headed in divergentdirections. Don't come back here, but attempt for once to palliate theoffense of your birth and go interview that Francis female. Interviewher, not yourself. Bring back a story, complete and terse, or commit thefirst sensible act of your life with any weapon you choose and chargethe instrument to the _Intelligencer_."

  "I havent the slightest idea where Miss Francis is to be found."

  He took a pinch of snuff, issued orders to four or five other people andcontinued calmly, "I am not conducting a school of journalism; if I wereI should have a special duncecap imported solely for your use. Thelowest copyboy knows better than to utter such an inanity. You will findthe Francis and interview her. I'm busy. Get the hell out of here andhandle those files carefully if you value that cadaver you probablythink of as the repository of your soul."

  I am not a drayman and I resented the menial duty of sliding those heavyfilecases down four flights of stairs; but at a time like this, Ithought philosophically, a man has duties he cannot shirk; besides, Leffacase was old, I could afford to humor him even if it meant demeaningmyself.

  With one of the cases in back, I sadly regarded the other one occupyingmost of the front seat. If she had at least given me her name I wouldhave searched and searched until I found her. This train of thoughtreminded me of Le ffacase's command to find Miss Francis and so Iconcentrated my attention on getting away from the _Intelligencer_office.

  It was no light labor; the stalled streetcars and automobiles presentedgrave hazards to the unwary. The air smelt of death, and nervously Ipressed the accelerator to get away quickly from this tomb. I crossedthe dry riverbed and made my way slowly to Pomona, delivered the files,and reluctantly began seeking Miss Francis.

  _28._ It was practically impossible to discover any one person among somany scattered and disorganized people, but chance aided my nativeintelligence and perseverance. Only the day before she had been involvedwith an indignant group of the homeless who attributed their misfortunesto her and overcoming their natural American chivalry toward the weakersex had tried to revenge themselves. I was therefore able to locate her,not ten miles from the temporary headquarters of the _DailyIntelligencer_.

  Her laboratory was an abandoned chickenhouse which must have remindedher constantly of her lost kitchen. She looked almost jaunty as shegreeted me, a cobweb from the roof of the decaying shed caught in herhair. "I have no profitable secrets to market, Weener--youre wastingyour time with me."

  "I am not here as a salesman, Miss Francis," I said. "The _DailyIntelligencer_ would like to tell its readers how you are getting onwith your search for some cure for the grass."

  "You talk as if _Cynodon dactylon_ were a disease. There is no cure forlife but death."

  Since she was going to be so touchy about the grass--as if it were apersonal possession--(why, I thought, it's as much mine as hers)--Isubstituted a more diplomatic form of words.

  "Well, I have made an interesting discovery," she conceded grudginglyand pointed to a row of flowerpots, her eyes lighting as she scanned thesingle blades of grass perhaps an inch and a half high growing in each.The sight meant nothing to me and she must have gathered as much from myexpression.

  "_Cynodon dactylon_," she explained, "germinated from seeds borne by theinoculated plant. Obviously the omnivorous capacity has not beentransmitted to offspring."

  This was probably fascinating to her or a gardener or botanist, but Icouldnt see how it concerned me or the _Daily Intelligencer_.

  "It could be a vitamin deficiency," she muttered incomprehensibly, "orevasion of the laws regarding compulsory education. These plantsindicate the affected grass may propagate its abnormal condition onlythrough the extension of the already changed stolons or rhizomes. Itmeans that only the parent, which is presumably not immortal, isaberrant. The offspring is no different from the weed householders havebeen cursing ever since the Mission Fathers enslaved the DiggerIndians."

  "Why, then," I exclaimed, suddenly enlightened, "all we have to do iswait until the grass dies."

  "Or until it meets some insuperable object," supplemented Miss Francis.

  My faith in insuperable objects had been somewhat shaken. "How long doyou think it will be before the grass dies?" I asked her.

  She regarded me gravely, as though I had been a child asking an absurdquestion. "Possibly a thousand years."

  My enthusiasm was dampened. But after leaving her I remembered howcertain types of people always look for the dark side of things. Itcosts no more to be an optimist than a pessimist; it is sunshine growsflowers, not clouds; and if Miss Francis chose to think the grass mightlive a thousand years, I was equally free to think it might die nextweek. Thus heartened by this bit of homely philosophy, just as valid asany of the stuff entombed in wordy books, I wrote up my interview,careful to guide myself by all the stifling strictures and adjurationsimpressed upon me by the tyrannically narrowminded editor. If I mayanticipate the order of events, it appeared next day in almostrecognizable form under the heading, ABNORMAL GRASS TO DIE SOON, SAYSORIGINATOR.

  _29._ The small city of Pomona was swollen to boomtown size by theexcursion there of so many enterprises forced from Los Angeles. Ordinarycitizens without heavy responsibilities when uprooted thought only ofputting as much distance as possible between themselves and theirpersecutor; but the officials, the industrialists, the businessmen, thestaffs of great newspapers hovered close by, li
ke small boys near theknothole in the ballpark fence from which theyd been banished by anofficious cop.

  The _Intelligencer_ was lodged over the printshop of a local tributarywhich had agreed to the ousting with the most hypocritical assurances ofjoy at the honor done them and payment--in the smallest possibletype--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 themetropolitan daily. No wonder the confusion obviated all possibility ofnormal routine. In addition, the disruption of railroad schedules madethe delivery of mail a hazard rather than a certainty. Perhaps this waswhy, weeks after they were due, it was only upon my return frominterviewing Miss Francis I received my checks from the _WeeklyRuminant_ and the _Honeycomb_.

  It may have been the boomtown atmosphere I have already mentioned orbecause at the same time I got my weekly salary; at any event, moved byan unaccountable impulse I took the two checks to a barbershop where,perhaps incongruously, a wellknown firm of Los Angeles stockbrokers hadquartered themselves. I forced the checks upon a troubledlookingindividual--too taciturn to be mistaken for the barber--and mumbling,"Buy me all the shares of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentratesthis will cover," hurried out before sober thought could cause me tochange my mind.

  For certainly this was no investment my cool judgment would approve, butthe wildest hunch, causing me to embark on what was no less than aspeculation. I went back to the desk I shared with ten others, bitterlyregretting the things I might have bought with the money and beratingmyself for my rashness. Only the abnormal pressure of events could havemade 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 weedclosed 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 thatordinary explosives would be futile--more than futile, an assistance tothe growth by scattering the propagating fragments. For the first timepeople 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 generallyagreed that the weapon was too terrible to use in so comparativelytrivial a cause.

  But the machinery for some type of bombing had been set in motion andhad to be used. The fuel was stored, the airfields jammed, all availableplanes, new, old, obsolescent and obsolete assembled, and for three daysand 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 great, rollingwhite, yellow, red and blue flames. The smoke, the smell of roastingvegetation, the roar and crackle of the conflagration, and the heatengendered were all noticeable as far away as Capistrano and SantaBarbara.

  Down from the sky, through the surface of the grass, the incendiariesburned great patches clear to the earth. The weed, which had resistedfire so contemptuously before, suddenly became inflammable and burnedlike celluloid for days. Miles of twisted stems, cleaned of blade andlife, exposed tortured nakedness to aerial reconnoiter. Bald spots thesize of villages appeared, black and smoldering; the shape of the masswas altered and altered again, but when, long after, the last sparkflickered out and the last ember grew dull, the grass itself, torn andinjured, but not defeated or even noticeably beaten back, remained. Ithad been a brilliant performance--and an ineffective one.

  The failure of the incendiary bombing not only produced ruefullytriumphant Itoldyousos from disgruntled and doubly outragedpropertyowners, but a new crop of bids for the _Intelligencer_'s rewardto the developer of a saving agent. From suggested emigrations to Marsand giant magnifying glasses set up to wither the grass with the aid ofthe sun, they ranged to projects for cutting a canal clear around theweed from San Francisco Bay to the Colorado River and letting thePacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off alllight from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt thesun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyllan atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating othergrasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the twogiants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouringeach other. This proposal received such wide popular support there isreason to believe it got some serious consideration in officialquarters, but it was eventually abandoned on the ground that while itgave only a single slim chance of success it certainly doubled thepotential growths to contend with. The analogy of a backfire in forestconflagrations was deemed poetic but inapplicable.

  More comparatively prosaic courses included walling in the grass withconcrete; the Great Wall of China was the only work of man visible fromthe moon; were Americans to let backward China best them? A concretewall only a mile high and half a mile thick could be seen by any curiousastronomer on the planet Venus--assuming Venerians to be afflicted withterrestrial vices--and would cost no more than a very small war, to saynothing of employing thousands who would otherwise dissipate thetaxpayers' money on Relief. A variant of this plan was to smother theweed 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 thegrass would then be encased in a presumably unbreakable tomb.

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

  It was proposed to spray the surface, to drive tunnels through the rootsto conduct brine, to bombard sectors with sixteeninch guns firingshrapnel loaded with salt, to isolate by means of a wide saline band thewhole territory, both occupied and threatened. Salt enthusiasts arguedthat nothing except a few million tons of an inexpensive mineral wouldbe wasted if an improbable failure occurred, but if successful instopping the advance the country could wait safely behind its ramparttill some weapon to regain the overrun area was found.

  But the salt advocates didnt have everything their own way. There arosea bitter antisalt faction taking pleasure at hurling sneers at theseoptimistic predictions and delight in demolishing the arguments. MissFrancis, they said, who ought to know more about it than anyone else,claimed the grass would break down even the most stable compound andtake what it needed. Well, salt was a compound, wasnt it? If the prosaltfanatics had their way they would just be offering food to a hungryplant. The salt supporters asked what proof Miss Francis had everadvanced that the plant absorbed everything or indeed that herMetamorphizer had anything to do with metabolism and had not merelyinduced some kind of botanical giantism? The antisalts, jeering at theirenemies as Salinists and Salinites, promptly threw away Miss Francis'hypothetical support and relied instead on the proposition that if thesalt were to be efficacious--an unlikely contingency--it would have toreach the roots and if crudeoil, poured on when the plant was young, hadnot done so what possible hope could the prosalt cranks offer for theirpanacea now the rampant grass was grown to its present proportions?

  The salt argument cut society in half. Learned doctors battled in thecolumns of scientific journals. Businessmen dictated sputtering lettersto their secretaries. Housewives wrote newspapers or argued heatedly inthe cornergrocery. Radiocommentators cautiously skirted the edge ofcontroversy and more than one enthusiast had to be warned by hisspo
nsor. Fistfights started in taverns over the question and judiciousbartenders served beer without offering the objectionable seasoning withit.

  The _Intelligencer_, at the start, was vehemently antisalt. "Is there anAmerican Cato," Le ffacase asked, "to call for the final ignominysuffered by Carthage to be applied, not to the land of an enemy, but toour own?" Shortly after this editorial, entitled "Carthage, California"appeared, the _Intelligencer_ swung to the opposite side and Le ffacaseoffered the prosalt argument under the heading "Lot's Wife."

  The Daughters of the American Revolution declared themselves in favor ofsalt and refused the use of Constitution Hall to an antisalt meeting.Stung, the Central Executive Committee of the Communist party circulateda manifesto declaring the use of salt was an attempt to encircle, notthe grass, for that was a mere subterfuge of imperialism, but the SovietUnion; and called upon all its peripheral fringe to write theircongressmen and demonstrate against the saline project. From India theaged Mohandas Gandhi asked in piping tones why such a valuable adjunctwas to be wasted in rich America while impoverished ryots paid a harshtax on this necessity of life? And the Council of Peoples' Commissars,careless of the action of the American Stalinists, offered to sell theUnited States all its surplus salt. The herringpicklers of Hollandstruck in a body while the American salt refiners bid as one to produceon a costplus basis.

  This last was a clincher and the obscurantic antisalts received thedeathblow they richly deserved. The Communist party reversed themselvesswiftly. All respectable and patriotic people lined up behind salt. Withsuch popular unanimity apparent, the government could do no less thantake heed. A band twenty miles wide, stretching from Oceanside to theSalton Sea, from the Salton Sea to the little town of Mojave and fromthere to Ventura, was marked out on maps to be saltsown by the very samebombercommand which had dropped the spectacular but futile incendiaries.The triumph of the salt people was ungenerous in its enthusiasm; thedisgruntled antisalts, now a mere handful of diehards publishing anesoteric press, muttered everyone would be sorry, wait and see.

  _30._ The grass itself waited for nothing. It seemed to take newstrength from the indignities inflicted upon it and it increased, ifanything, its tempo of growth. It plunged into the ocean in a dozenspots at once. It swarmed over sand which had never known anything butcactus and the Sierra Madres became great humps of green against theskyline. This last conquest shocked those who had thought the mountainsimmune 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 ifnecessary to Victorville.

  Daily Le ffacase became a sterner taskmaster, a more pettishly exactingemployer. By the living guts of William Lloyd Garrison, he raged, had noone ever driven the simple elements of punctuation into my bloody head?Had no schoolmaster in moments of heroic enthusiasm attempted to pound afew rules of rhetoric through my incrassate skull? Had I never heard oftaste? Was the word "style" outside my macilent vocabulary? What thedevil did I mean by standing there with my mouth open, exposing myunfortunate teeth for all the world to see? Was it possible for anyallegedly human to be as addlepated as I? And had I been thrust from mymother's womb--I suppress his horrible adjectives--only to torment andafflict his longsuffering editorial patience?

  A hundred times I was tempted to sever my connection with thisjournalistic autocrat. My column was widely read and twopublishinghouses had approached me with the idea of putting out a book,any editorial revision and emendations to be taken care of by themwithout disturbing me at all. I could have allied myself with almost anypaper in the country, undoubtedly at better than the meager stipend Leffacase doled out to me.

  But I think loyalty is one of the most admirable of virtues and it wasnot in my nature to desert the _Intelligencer_--certainly not till Icould secure a lengthy and ironclad contract, such as for some reasonother papers seemed unwilling to offer me. In accord with this innateloyalty of mine--I take no credit for it, I was born that way--I did notbalk at the assignments given me though they ranged from the hazardousto the absurd.

  One of the more pleasant of these excursions thought up by Mr Leffacase was to fly over the grass and to Catalina, embark on a charteredboat there and survey the parts of the coast now overrun. A fresh pointof observation. Accompanying me was the moviecameraman, Rafe Slafe, asuncommunicative and earnest in his medications as before.

  It was a sad sight to see neat rectangular patterns of roads andhighways, cultivated fields and orangegroves, checkered towns andsprawling suburbs come to an abrupt stop where they were blotted out bythe regimented uniformity of the onrushing grass. For miles we flewabove its dazzling green until our eyes ached from the sameness and ourminds were dulled from the lack of variety below. On the sea far ahead afrothing whitecap broke the monotony of color, a flyingfish jumped outof the water to glisten for a moment in the sun, loose seaweed floatedon the surface, to change in some degree the intense blue. But herebelow no alien touch lightened the unnatural homogeneity. No solitarytree broke this endless pasture, now healed of the wounds inflicted bythe incendiary bombing, no saltlick, wandering stream or struggling bushenlivened this prairie. There was not even an odd conformation, a higherclump here or there, a dead patch to relieve the unimaginative symmetry.I have read of men going mad in solitary confinement from looking at thesame unchanging walls; well, here was a solitary cell hundreds of milesin area and its power to destroy the mind was that much magnified.

  I got little consolation from the presence of the others, for the pilotwas engaged in navigation while Slafe was, as ever, singlemindedlyrecording mile after mile of the verdant mat beneath, never pausing norspeaking, though how he justified the use of so much film when one footwas identical with what went before and the next, I could notunderstand.

  At last we cleared the awful cancer and flew over the sea. A thousandvariations I had never noticed before offered themselves to my suddenlyrefreshed eyes. Not for one split second was the water the same.Leaping, tossing, spiraling, foaming back upon itself, making its ownshadows and mirroring in an infinitely faceted glass the sunlight, itchanged so constantly it was impossible to grasp even a fraction of itsmutations. But Slafe evidently did not share my blessed relief, for heturned his camera back to catch every last glimpse of the solid green Iwas so happy to leave behind.

  At the airport, on the way to the boat, on the little vessel itself, Iexpected Slafe to relax, to indulge in a conversational word, to dosomething to mark him as more than an automaton. But his actions wereconfined to using the nasalsyringe, to exchanging one camera foranother, to quizzing the sun through that absurd lorgnette, and tomuttering over cans of film which he sorted and resorted, always to hisinevitable discontent.

  While we waited to start, a perverse fog rolled between us and themainland. It made a dramatic curtain over the object of our visit andemphasized the normality and untouchedness of Avalon behind us. As theboat got under way, strain my eyes as I could eastward, not the faintestsuggestion of the ominous outline showed. We sped toward it, cutting thepurple sea into white foam. Slafe was in the bow, customarily taciturn,the crew were busy. Alone on board I had no immediate occupation and soI took out my copy of the _Intelligencer_ and after reading the columnwhich went under my name and noting the incredible bad taste which haddiluted when it had not excluded everything I had written, I turned asfor consolation to the marketquotations. The Dow-Jones average was downagain, as might be expected since the spread of the weed had unsettledthe delicate balance of the stockmarket. My eyes automatically ran downthe column and over to the corner where stocks were quoted in cents toreassure my faith in Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates.There it was, immovable through any storm or stress or injudiciousinvestment by Albert Weener, "CP&AC ... 1/16."

  I must have raised my eyes from the newspaper just about the
time thefog lifted. Before us, like the smokewreath accompanying the dischargeof some giant cannon, the green mass volleyed into the sea. It did notslope gently like a beach or offer a rugged shoulder to be gnawed awayas a rocky cliff, but thundered forward into the surging brine, yieldingbut invincible, a landforce potent as the wave itself. Hundreds of feetinto the air it towered, falling abruptly in a sharp wall, its ends andfringes merging with the surf and wallowing in happy freedom. Thebreakers did not batter it for it offered them no enmity to rage andboil upon, but giving way with each surge, smothered the eternal angerof the ocean with its own placid surety.

  The seagulls, the helldivers, pelicans, seapigeons had not beenaffected. Resting briefly on the weed, they winged out for their foodand returned. It mattered no more to them that the manmade piers andwharves, the seacoast towns, gypjoints, rollercoasters, whorehouses,cottages, hotels, streets, gastanks, quarries, potterykilns, oilfieldsand factories had been swallowed up than if some old wreck in the sand,once offering them foothold, had been taken back by the sea. If Ithought the grass awesome from the land, monotonous from the air, itseemed eternal from the water.

  But impressive as it was from any angle, there were just so many thingsI could say about it. My art, unlike Slafe's, not permitting of endlessrepetition, I was glad to get back to the Pomona office, to pad whatlittle copy I had, retire into the small tent I shared with six othersufferers from the housing shortage, and attempt some sleep.

  _31._ The course mapped for the saltband caused almost as muchcontroversy, anguish and denunciation as the proposal itself. Cities andtowns fought to have the saltband laid between them and the approachinggrass, understandably ignoring larger calculations and considerations.Cattle ranchers shot at surveying parties and individual farmers orhomeowners fought against having their particular piece of propertycovered with salt. The original plan had contemplated straight lines;eventually the band twisted and turned like a typewriter ribbon plaguedby a kitten, avoiding not only natural obstacles, but the domains ofthose with proper influence.

  Recovery plants worked three shifts a day to pile up great mounds of thewhite crystals, which were hauled to the airfields by trains and trucks.The laden trucks moved over the highways bumper to bumper; thefreighttrains' engines nosed the cabooses of those in front. All othergoods were shunted on sidings, perishables rotted, valuables wentundelivered; all transportation was reserved for the salt.

  Not only was the undertaking unprecedented for its magnitude, but theurgency and the breakdowns, bottlenecks, shortages and disruptionscaused by the grass itself added to the formidable accomplishment. Butthe people were aroused and aware of danger, and they put almost thesame effort behind the saltsowing as they would have in turning outinstruments of war.

  The sowing itself was in a way anticlimactic. By the whim of Le ffacaseI went in one of the planes on the first day of the task. My protests,as always, proving futile, I spent a very boresome time flyingbackandforth over the same patch of ground. That is, it would have beenboresome had it not been for the dangers involved, for in order to sowthe salt evenly and thickly it was necessary to fly low, to hedgehop,the pilot called it. If the parachutejump had unnerved me, the flying atterrific speed straight toward a tree, hill or electricpowerline andthen curving upward at the last second to miss them by a whisper musthave put gray in my hair and taken years from my life.

  The rivers, washes and creeks on the inner edge had been roughly dammedto lessen future erosion of the salt and inappropriately gay flagsmarked the boundaries of the area. Owing to our speed the salt billowedout behind us like powdery fumes, but beyond the evidence of this smokytrail we might merely have been a group of madmen confusedly searchingfor some object lost upon the ground.

  In reporting for the _Intelligencer_ it was impossible to dramatize theevent; even the rewritemen were baffled, for under the enormous headSALT SOWN they could not find enough copy to carry over from page one.

  _32._ The sowing of the salt went on for weeks, and the grass leapedforward as if to meet it. It raced southward through Long Beach, SealBeach and the deserted dunes to Newport and Balboa; it came east in afury through Puente and Monrovia, northeastward it moved into Lancaster,Simi and Piru. Only in its course north did the weed show a slower pace;by the time we had been forced to leave Pomona for San Bernardino it hadgot no farther than Calabasas and Malibu.

  The westward migration of the American people was abruptly reversed.Those actually displaced by the grass infected others, through whosehomes they passed in their flight, with their own panic. Land valueswest of the Rockies dropped to practically nothing and the rich farms ofthe Great Plains were worth no more than they had been a hundred yearsbefore. People had seen directly, heard over the radio, or read innewspapers of the countless methods vainly used to stop the grass andthere was little confidence in the saltband's succeeding where otherdevices had failed. True, there were hereandthere individuals or wholefamilies or even entire communities obstinate enough to scorn flight,but in the opinion of most they were like pigheadedly trustful peasantswho cling, in the face of all warning, to homes on the slopes of anactive volcano.

  It was generally thought the government itself, in creating thesaltband, was making no more than a gesture. Whatever the validity ofthis pessimism, the work itself was impressive. Viewed from high in theair only a month after the start it was already visible; after twomonths it was a thick, glistening river winding over mountain, desert,and what had been green fields, a white crystalline barrier behind whichthe country waited nervously.

  When the salt had been first proposed, batches had been dumped inproximity to the grass, but the quantity had been too small todemonstrate any conclusion and observers had been immediately drivenfrom the scene of the experiments by the grass.

  Nevertheless, the very inclusiveness of these trials confirmed thedoubts of the waiting country as the narrow gap before the salt wasclosed and the weed rolled to it near Capistrano. I would like to thinkof the meeting as dramatic, heightened by inaudible drumrolls andflashes of invisible lightning. Actually the conflict was pedestrian.

  Manipulated once more by my tyrant, I was stationed, like otherreporters and radiomen, in a captive balloon. For the utmost indiscomfort and lack of dignity let me recommend this ludicrousinvention. Cramped, seasickened, inconvenienced--I don't like to mentionthis, but provisions for answering the calls of nature were, to say theleast, inadequate--I swayed and rocked in that inconsiderable basket,chilled, blinded by the dazzle of the salt, knocked about by gusts ofirresponsible wind, and generally disgusted by the uselessness of mypursuit. A telescope to the eye and constant radioreports from shuttlingplanes told of the approaching grass, but under the circumstancesweariness rather than excitement or anxiety was the prevailing emotion.

  At last the collision came. The long runners, curiously flat from theair, pushed their way ahead. The salt seemed no more to them than bareground, concrete, vegetation, or any of the hundred obstacles they hadtraveled. Unstutteringly the vinelike stolons went forward. A foot, two,six, ten. No recoil, no hesitation, no recognition they were traversinga wall erected against them.

  Behind these first outposts, the higher growth came on, and stillfarther off the great bulk itself reared skyward, blotting out thehorizon behind, threatening, inexhaustible. It seemed to prod itsprecursors, to demand hungrily ever more and more room to expand.

  But the creeping of the runners over the first few feet of saltdwindled to a stop. This caused experienced observers like myself noelation; we had seen it happen many times before at the encountering ofany novel obstacle, and its only effect had been to make the weed changeits tactics in order to overcome the obstruction, as it did now. Asecond rank moved forward on top of the halted first, a third upon thesecond and so on till a living wall frowned down upon the salt, throwingits shadow across it for hundreds of ominous yards. It towered erect andthen, repeating the tactic invariably successful, it toppled forward tocreate a bridgehead from which to launch new assaults.

/>   The next day new stolons emerged from the mass, but now for the firsttime excitement seized us up in our bobbing post of observation. Notonly were the new runners visibly shorter in length but they creptforward more slowly, haltingly, as though hurt. This impression wasgenerally discredited, people were surfeited with optimism; they feltour reports were wishful thinking. Their pessimism seemed to beconfirmed when the weed repeated its action of the day before, fallingahead of itself upon the salt; and few took stock in our excitedannouncements that the grass had covered only half the previousdistance.

  Again the probing fingers poked out, again the reserves piled up, againthe mass fell. But it fell far short of a normal leap. There could nolonger be any doubt about it; the advance had been slowed, almoststopped. The salt was working.

  Everywhere along the entire band the story was the same. The grassrushed confidently in, bit off great chunks, then smaller, then smaller,until its movement ceased entirely. That part which embedded itself inthe salt lost the dazzling green color so characteristic and turnedpiebald, from dirty gray through brown and yellow, an appearance sofamiliar in its normal counterpart on lawns and vacant lots.

  The encircled area filled up and choked with the balked weed. Time aftertime it essayed the deadly band, only to be thwarted. The glisteningfortification, hardly battered, stood triumphant, imprisoning theinvader within. Commentators in trembling voices broke the joyful newsover every receivingset and even the stodgiest newspapers brought outtheir blackest type to announce GRASS STOPPED!

  _33._ The President of the United States, as befitted a farmer knowingsomething of grasses on his own account, issued a proclamation ofthanksgiving for the end of the peril which had beset the country. Thestockmarket recovered from funereal depths and jumped upward. In all thegreat cities hysterical rapture so heated the blood of the people thatall restraints withered. In frantic joy women were raped in the streets,dozens of banks were looted, thousands of plateglasswindows were smashedwhile millions of celebrants wept tears of 86 proof ecstasy. Torntickertapes made Broadway impassable and the smallest whistlestopsspontaneously revived the old custom of uprooting outhouses and perchingthem on the church steeple.

  I had my own particular reason to rejoice coincident with the stoppageof the grass. It was so unreal, so dreamlike, that for many days I hadtrouble convincing myself of its actuality. It began with a series ofagitated telephone messages from a firm of stockbrokers asking for myimmediate presence, which because of my assignments, failed to reach mefor some time. So engrossed was I in the events surrounding the victoryover the grass I could not conceive why any broker would want to see meand so put off my visit several times, till the urgency of the callsbegan to pique my curiosity.

  The man who greeted me was runcible, with little strands of sickly hairtwisted mopwise over his bald head. His striped suit was rumpled, thecollar of his shirt was wrinkled, and dots of perspiration stood out onhis upperlip and forehead. "Mr Weener?" he asked. "Oh, thank God, thankGod."

  Completely at a loss, I followed him into his private office. "Yourecall commissioning us--when we were located in Pomona--to purchasesome shares of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates for youraccount?"

  To tell the truth, while I had not forgotten the event, I had beensufficiently ashamed of my rashness to have pushed all recollection ofthe transaction to the back of my mind. But I nodded confirmingly.

  "No doubt you would be willing to sell at a handsome profit?"

  Aha, I thought, the rise of the market has sent Consolidated Pemmican upfor once beyond its usual 1/8. I am probably a rich man and this fellowwants to cheat me of the fruits of my foresight. "You bought the stockoutright?"

  "Of course, Mr Weener," he affirmed in a hurt tone.

  "Good. Then I will take immediate delivery."

  He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his lip and forehead with evidentinefficiency for the perspiration either remained or started afresh. "MrWeener," he said, "I am authorized to offer you six times--six times,"he echoed impressively, "the amount of your original investment. This isan amazing return."

  If it was worth it to him, it was worth it to me. "I will take immediatedelivery," I repeated firmly.

  "And no brokerage fees involved," he added, as one making anunbelievable concession.

  I shook my head.

  "Mr Weener," he said, "I have been empowered to make you an incredibletender for your stock. Not only will the boardofdirectors ofConsolidated Pemmican return to you six times the amount of yourinvestment, but they will assign to you, over and above this price, 49percent of the company's votingstock. It is a magnificent andunparalleled bid and I sincerely advise you to take it."

  I pressed my palms into the back of the chair. I, Albert Weener, was acapitalist. The money involved already seemed negligible, for it was amere matter of a few thousand dollars, but to own what amounted to acontrolling interest, even in a defunct or somnolent corporation, mademe an important person. Only a reflex made me gasp, "I will takeimmediate delivery."

  The broker dropped his hands against his thighs. "Mr Weener, you are anacute man. Mr Weener, I must confess the truth. You have bought moreshares of Consolidated Pemmican than there are in existence; you notonly own the firm, lock, stock and barrel, but you owe yourself money."He gave a weak laugh.

  "Above and beyond this, Mr Weener, through an unfortunate series ofevents due to the confusion of the times--without it, such an absurdsituation would never have occurred--several people: our own firm, ourNew York correspondents, and the present heads of Consolidated Pemmicanare liable to prosecution by the Securities Exchange Commission. We canonly throw ourselves on your mercy."

  I waved this aside magnanimously. "Where is my property located?"

  "Well, I believe Consolidated Pemmican has an office in New York."

  "Yes, but the factory, the works; where is the product made?"

  "Strictly speaking, I understand active operations ceased back in 1919.However, there is a plant somewhere in New Jersey, I think; I'll look itup for you."

  My dream of wealth began fading as the whole situation became clear andsuspicions implicit in the peculiar behavior of the stock wereconfirmed. The corporation had evidently fallen into the hands ofunscrupulous promoters who manipulated for the small but steady "take"its fluctuations on the market afforded. Without attempting to operatethe factory, my reasoning ran, they had taken advantage of the stock'slow price to double whatever they cared to invest twice yearly. It was aneat and wellshaped little racket and discovery, as the broker admitted,would have exposed them to legal action. Only my recklessness with thechecks from the _Weekly Ruminant_ and the _Honeycomb_ had broken theroutine.

  But ... they had offered me several thousand dollars, evidently in coldcash. Defunct or not, then, the business was presumably worth at leastthat. And if they had employed the stock to maintain some sort ofincome, why, I could certainly learn to do the same. I was anindependent man afterall.

  Except for the slightly embarrassing detail of being without currentfunds I was also free of Le ffacase and the _Daily Intelligencer_. "MrBlank," I said, "I need some money for immediate expenses."

  "I knew youd see things in a sensible light, Weener. I'll have yourcheck in a minute."

  "You misunderstand me. I have no intention of giving up any part ofConsolidated Pemmican."

  "Ah?"

  "No."

  He looked at me intently. "Mr. Weener, I am not a wealthy man. Above andbeyond that, since this grass business started, I assure you any commonlaborer has made more money than I. Any common laborer," he repeatedsadly.

  "Oh, I only need about a thousand dollars for immediate outlays. Justwrite me a check for that much, like a good fellow."

  "Mr Weener, how can we be sure you won't call upon us again formore--ah--expensemoney?"

  I drew myself up indignantly. "Mr Blank, no one has ever questioned myintegrity before. When I say a thousand dollars is all the expensemoneyI require, why, it is all the expensemoney I requi
re. To doubt it is toinsult me."

  "Ah," he said.

  "Ah," I agreed.

  Reluctantly he wrote the check and handed it to me. Then, more amicably,we settled the details of the stock transfer and he gave me the locationof my property. I went back to the _Intelligencer_ office with thespringy step of a man who acknowledges no master. In my mind I prepareda triumph: I would wait--even if it took days--for the first bullyingword from Le ffacase and then I would magnificently fling my resignationin his face.

  _34._ When the grass was thought to be invincible, Miss Francis, as thediscoverer of the compound which started it on its course, was therecipient of a universal if grudging respect. Those whom the grass hadmade homeless hated her and would have overcome their natural feeling ofprotection toward a woman sufficiently to lynch her if they could. Menlike Senator Jones instinctively disliked her; others, like Dr Johnson,detested her, but no one thought of her lightly, even when they gliblycoupled the word nut with her name.

  When it was found the saltband worked Miss Francis immediately becamethe butt of all the ridicule and contumely which could be heaped uponher head. What could you expect of a woman who meddled with thingsoutside her province? Since she had asserted the grass would absorbeverything, its failure to absorb the salt proved beyond all doubt shewas an ignoramus, a dangerous charlatan, and a crazy woman, betterlocked up, who had destroyed Southern California to her own obscurebenefit. The victory over the grass became a victory over Miss Francis;of the ordinary gumchewing moviegoing maninthestreet over thepretentious highbrow. She was ignominiously ejected from herchickenhouse-laboratory on the ground that it was more needed for itsoriginal use, and she was jeered at in every vehicle of publicexpression. In spite of my natural chivalry, I cannot say I pitied herin her fall, which she took with an unbecoming humility amounting toarrogance.

  _35._ It was amazing how quickly viewpoints returned to an apparentnormality as soon as the grass stopped at the saltband. That it stillexisted, in undisputed possession of nearly all Southern Californiaafter dispersing and scattering millions of people all over the country,disturbing by its very being a large part of the national economy, wasonly something read in newspapers, an accepted fact to be pushed intothe farthest background of awareness, now the immediate threat was gone.The salt patrol, vigilant for erosions or leachings, a select corps, wasalert night and day to keep the saline wall intact. The generalattitude, if it concerned itself at all with the events of the past halfyear, looked upon it merely as one of those setbacks periodicallyafflicting the country like depressions, epidemics, floods, earthquakes,or other manmade or natural misfortunes. The United States had been agreat nation when Los Angeles was a pueblo of five thousand people; themovies could set up in business elsewhere, Iowans find another spot forsenescence, the country go on much as usual.

  One of the first results of the defeat of the grass was the building,almost overnight, it seemed, of a great city on the east bank of theSalton Sea. Displaced realtors from the metropolis found the surroundingmountains ideally suited for subdivision and laid out romantically namedsuburbs large enough to contain the entire population of Californiabefore the site of the city had been completely surveyed. Beyond theirclaims, the memorial parks, columbariums, homes of eternal rest andelysian lawns offered choice lots--with a special discount oncaskets--on the installmentplan. Magnificent brochures were printed, askeletal biographical dictionary--$5 for notice, $50 for aportrait--planned, advertisements in leading magazines urged themigration of industry: "contented labor and all local taxes remitted forten years."

  These essential preliminaries accomplished, the city itself was laidout, watermains installed, and paving and grading begun. It was no greatfeat to divert the now aimless Colorado River aqueduct to the site norto erect thousands of prefabricated houses. The climate was declared tobe unequalled, salubrious, equable, pleasant and bracing. Factories wereerected, airports laid out, hospitals, prisons, and insane asylumsbuilt. The Imperial and Coachella valleys shipped their products in atlow cost, and as a gesture to those who might suffer from homesicknessit was called New Los Angeles.

  Perhaps in relief from the fear and despair so recently dispelled, NewLos Angeles began to boom from the moment the mayor first handed the keyto a passing distinguished visitor. It grew and spread as the grass hadgrown and spread, the embryonic skeletons of its unborn skyline rivaledthe height of the green mass now triumphant in its namesake, presenting,as newsphotographers were quick to see, an aspect from the west notentirely dissimilar to Manhattan's.

  To New Los Angeles, of course, the _Daily Intelligencer_ moved as soonas a tent large enough to house its presses could be set up. But I didnot move with it. For some reason, perhaps intuitively forewarned of myintention, Le ffacase never gave me the opportunity to humiliate him asI planned. On the contrary, I received from him, a few days before thepaper's removal, a silly and characteristic note: "Since the freak grasshas been stopped it seems indicated other abnormalities be terminatedalso. Your usefulness to this paper, always debatable, is now clearly atan end. As of this moment your putative services will be no longerrequired. W.R.L."

  Bitter vexation came over me at having lost the opportunity to give thisbully a piece of my mind and my impulse was to go immediately to hisoffice and tell him I scorned his petty paycheck, but I reflected a manof his nature would merely find some tricky way of turning the interviewto his malicious satisfaction and he would know soon enough it was thepaper which was suffering a loss and not I.

  I started next morning and drove eastward toward my property, quitesatisfied to leave behind forever the scenes of my early struggles. TheWest had given me only petty irritations. In the East, with its olderculture and higher level of intelligence, I looked forward to having myworth appreciated.