The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 02

by Anthology

  84. The defection of General Thario threw a great burden of work upon my shoulders. Preblesham was able enough in his own sphere, but his vision was not sufficiently broad to operate at the highest levels. The process of closing down our plants was more complicated than had been anticipated and Thario's military mind would have been more useful than Preblesham's theological one. The employees, conceiving through some fantastic logic that their jobs were as much their property as the mills or mines or factorybuildings were mine, rioted and had to be pacified--the first time such a tactic was resorted to in years. In some places these misguided men actually took possession of the places where they worked and tried to operate them, but of course they were balked by their own inefficiency. Human nature being what it is, they tried to blame their helplessness on my control of their sources of raw material and their consequent inability to obtain vital supplies; as well as the cutting off of light and power from the seized plants, but this was mere buckpassing, always noticeable when some radical scheme fails.

  But the setting up of depots in the Sahara, as General Thario had suggested, and by extension, in Arabia, was a different matter. Here Preblesham's genius shone. He flew our whole Australian store of raw materials out without a loss. He recruited gangs of Chinese coolies with an efficiency which would have put an oldtime blackbirder to shame. He argued, cajoled, bullied, sweated for twentyfour hours a day and when in six months he had completed his task, we had seven depots, two in Arabia and five in Africa, complete with four factories, with enough concentrates on hand to feed the world for a year--if the world had the means to pay, which it didnt--and to operate for five.

  During those six months the Grass ravenously snatched morsel after morsel. New Zealand's South Island, New Caledonia, the Solomons and the Marianas were gobbled at the same moment. It gorged on New Guinea and searched out the minor islands of the East Indies as a cat searches for baby fieldmice in a nest her paw has discovered. It took a bite of the Queensland coast just below the Great Barrier Reef. The next day it was reported near Townsville and soon after on the Cape York peninsula, the Australian finger pointing upward to islands where lived little black men with woolly hair.

  The people of Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane took the coming of the Grass with calm anger. Preparations for removal had been made months before and this migration was distinguished from previous ones by its order and completeness. But although they moved calmly in accordance with clear plans their anger was directed against all those in authority who had failed to take measures to protect their beloved land.

  Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania went. The Grass swept southward like a sickle, cutting through South Australia and biting deep with its point into Western. Although we were amply provided with raw material, considering the curtailment of our activities, Preblesham, on the spot, could not resist buying up great herds of sheep for a penny on the pound and having them driven northward in the hope of finding somehow a means to ship them. I am sorry to say--though I'm afraid I could have predicted it--this venture was a total loss.

  85. Burlet, unfolding the Times on my breakfastplate, coughed respectfully. "If I could speak to you at your convenience, sir?"

  "What is it, Burlet? Lord Arpers finally come through with a higher offer?"

  "Not at all, sir. I consider the question of service closed as long as you find yourself satisfied, sir."

  "Quite satisfied, Burlet."

  "I ad in mind the discussion of quite another matter, sir. Not relating to domestic issues."

  "Very well, Burlet. Come into the library after breakfast."

  "Very good, sir."

  With a world of problems on my mind I thought it would be wryly amusing to resolve whatever difficulties troubled my butler. Promptly after I had settled myself at my desk and before I rang for my secretary, Burlet appeared in the doorway, his striped vest smoothed down over his rounded abdomen, every thin hair in place over the dome of his balding head.

  "Come in, Burlet. Sit down. What's on your mind?"

  "Thank you, sir." To my surprise he accepted my invitation and seated himself opposite me. "I ave been speculating, sir."

  "Really, Burlet? Silly thing to do. Lost all your wages, I suppose, and would like an advance?"

  "You misappre--end me, sir. Not speculating on Change. Speculating on the Grass."

  "Oh. And did you arrive at any conclusion, Burlet?"

  "I believe I ave, sir. As I understand it, scientists and statesmen are exerting their energies to fight the Grass."

  "That's right." I was beginning to be bored. Had the butler fallen prey to one of the graminophile sects like Brother Paul's and gone through all this rigmarole merely to give me notice previous to immolating himself?

  "And so far they ave achieved no success?"

  "Obviously, Burlet."

  "Well then, sir, would it not be a sensible precaution to find some means of refuge until and if they find a way to kill the Grass?"

  "There is no 'if,' Burlet. The means will be found, and shortly--of that I am sure. As for temporary refuge until that time, no doubt it would be excellent, if practicable. What do you propose--emigration to Mars or floating islands in the oceans?" Both of these expedients had long ago been put forth by contestants in the Intelligencer.

  "Journeys to other planets would not solve things, sir. Assuming the construction of a vessel--an assumption so far unwarranted, if I may say so, sir--it would accommodate but a fraction of the affected populations. As for floating islands, they would be no more immune to airborne seeds than stationary ones."

  "So it was discovered long ago, Burlet."

  "Quite so, sir. Then, if I may say so, protection must be afforded on the spot."

  "And how do you propose to do that?"

  "Well, sir, by the building of vertical cities."

  "Vertical cities?"

  "Yes, sir. I believe sites should be selected near bodies of fresh water and tremendous excavations made. The walls and floor of the excavations should be lined with concrete, through which the water is piped. The cities could be on many levels, the topmost peraps several miles in the air--glass enclosed--and with pipes reaching still igher to bring air in, and completely tight against the Grass. They should be selfcontained, generating their own power and providing their food by ydroponic farming. Such cities could hold millions of people now doomed until a way is found to kill the Grass."

  There was a faintly familiar ring to the scheme.

  "You seem to have worked it out thoroughly, Burlet."

  "Polishing the plate, sir."

  "Polishing the plate?"

  "It leaves the mind free for cerebration. I ave a full set of blueprints and specifications, if youd like to inspect them, sir."

  It was fantastic, I thought, and probably quite impractical, but I promised to submit his plans to those with more technical knowledge than I possessed. I sent his carefully written papers to an undersecretary of the World Congress and forgot the matter. Idleness certainly led to queer occupations. Vertical cities--and who in the world had the money to erect these nightmare structures? Only Albert Weener--that was probably why Burlet took advantage of his position to approach me with the scheme. Completely absurd....

  86. Probably the complaints of the Australians gave final impetus to the Congress to Combat the Grass. They met in extraordinary session in Budapest and declared themselves the executive body of a world government, which did not of course include the Socialist Union. All qualified scientists were immediately ordered to leave whatever employment they had and place themselves at the disposition of the World Government. Affluence for life, guaranteed against any fluctuations of currency, was promised to anyone who could offer, not necessarily an answer, but an idea which should lead to the solution of the problem in hand. While they were issuing their first edicts the Grass finished off the East Indies, covered threequarters of Australia and attacked the southern Philippines.

  Millions of Indonesians traveling t
he comparatively short distances in anything floatable crowded the already overpopulated areas of Asia. As I had predicted to General Thario, these refugees carried nothing with which to purchase the concentrates to keep them alive, and conditions of famine in India and China, essentially due to the backwardness of these countries, offered no subsistence to the natives--much less to an influx from outside.

  The Grass sped northward and westward through the Malay States and Siam, up into China and Burma. In the beginning the Orientals did not flee, but stood their ground, village by village and family by family, opposing the advance with scythes, stones, and pitiful bonfires of their household belongings, with hoes, flails, and finally with their bare hands. But the naked hand, no matter how often multiplied, was as unable to halt the green flow as the most uptodate weapons of modern science. And the Chinese and the Hindus dying at their posts were no more an obstacle than mountain or desert or stretches of empty sea had been.

  It was now deemed expedient, in order to keep public hysteria from rising to new selfdestructive heights, to tone down and modify the news. This proved quite difficult at first, for the people in their shortsightedness clamored for the accounts of impending doom which they devoured with a dreadful fascination. But eventually, when the wildest rumors produced by the dearth of accurate reports were disproved, many of the people in Western Europe and Africa actually believed the Grass had somehow failed to make headway on the Asiatic continent and would have remained in their pleasant ignorance had it not been for the premature flight of masses of Asiatics.

  For the phenomenon contemporary with the close of the Roman Empire was repeated. A great, struggling, churning, sprawling, desperate efflux from east to west began; once more the Golden Horde was on the march. They did not come, as had their ancestors, on wildly charging horses, threatening with lances and deadly scimitars, but on foot, wretched and begging. Even had I been as maudlin as Stuart Thario desired I could not have fed these people, for there were no longer railroads with rollingstock adequate to carry the freight, no fleets of trucks in good repair, nor was the fuel available had they existed. The world receded rapidly from the machineage, and as it did so famine and pestilence increased in evermounting spirals.

  The mob of refugees might be likened to a beast with weak, almost atrophied legs, but with a great mouth and greater stomach. It moved with painful slowness, crawling over the face of southern Asia, finding little sustenance as it came, leaving none whatever after it left. The beast, only dimly aware of the Grass it was fleeing from, could formulate no thoughts of the refuge it sought. Without plan, hope, or malice, it was concerned only with hunger. Day and night its empty gut cried for food.

  The starving men and women--the children died quickly--ate first all that was available in the stores and homes, then scrabbled in the fields for a forgotten grain of rice or wheat; they ate the bark and fungus from the trees and gleaned the pastures of their weeds and dung. As they ate they moved on, their faminedistended stomachs craving more to eat, driving the ones who were but one step further from starvation ever before them.

  Long ago they had chewed on the leather of their footgear and devoured all cats, dogs and rodents. They ate the stiffened and putrid carcasses of draft animals which had been pushed to the last extremity; they turned upon the corpses of the newly dead and fed on them, and at length did not wait for death from hunger to make a new cadaver, but mercifully slew the weak and ate the still warm bodies.

  The Asiatic influx was a social accordion. The pulledout end, the high notes, as it were, the Indian princes, Chinese warlords, arrived quickly and settled into a welcoming obscurity. They came by plane, with gold and jewels and government bonds and shares of Consolidated Pemmican. The middle creases of the accordion came later, more slowly, but as quickly as money could speed their way. Men of wealth when they began their journey, they arrived little more than penniless and were looked upon with suspicion, tolerated only so long as they did not become a public charge.

  The low notes, the thick and heavy pleats, took not days nor weeks nor months, but years to make the trek. They kept but a step ahead of the Grass, traveling at the same pace. They came not alone, but with accretions, pushing ahead of them millions of their same dispossessed, hungry, penniless kind. These were not greeted with suspicion, but with hatred; machineguns were turned upon the advancing mobs, the few airplanes in service were commandeered to bomb them, and only lack of fuel and explosives allowed them to sweep into Europe and overwhelm most of it as the barbarians had overwhelmed Rome.

  But I anticipate. While the bulk of the Orientals was still beyond the Himalayas and the Gobi, Europe indulged in a wild saturnalia to celebrate its own doom. All pretense of sexual morality vanished. Men and women coupled openly upon the streets. The small illprinted newspapers carried advertisements promising the gratification of strange lusts. A new cult of Priapus sprang up and virgins were ceremoniously deflowered at his shrine. Those beyond the age of concupiscence attended celebrations of the Black Mass, although I was told by one communicant that participation lacked the necessary zest, since none possessed a faith to which blasphemy could give a shocking thrill.

  Murder was indulged in purely for the pleasure. Men and women, hearing of the cannibalism raging among the refugees, adopted and refined it for their own amusement. Small promiscuous groups, at the end of orgies, chose the man and woman tiring soonest; the two victims were thereupon killed and devoured by their late paramours.

  As there was a cult to Priapus, so there was an equally strong cult to Diana. The monasteries and convents overflowed. But in the tension of the moment many were not satisfied with mere vows of celibacy. In secret and impressive ceremonies women scarified their tenderest parts with redhot irons, thus proving themselves forever beyond the lusts of the flesh; men solemnly castrated themselves and threw the symbols of their manhood into a consuming fire.

  I wouldnt want to give the impression bestial madness of one kind or another overtook everyone. There were plenty of normal people like myself who were able to maintain their selfcontrol and canalize those energies promoting crimes and beastly exhibitions in the unrestrained into looking forward to the day when the Grass would be gone and sanity return.

  Nor would I like anyone to think law and order had completely abdicated its function. As offenses multiplied, laws grew more severe, misdemeanors became felonies, felonies capital offenses. When death by hanging became the prescribed sentence for any type of theft it was necessary to make the punishment for murder more drastic. Drawing and quartering were reinstituted; this not proving an efficient deterrent, many jurists advocated a return to the Roman practice of spreadeagling a man to death; but the churches vigorously objected to this suggestion as blasphemous, believing the ordinary sight of crucified murderers would tend to debase the central symbol of Christianity. A less common Roman usage was adopted in its stead, that of being torn by hungry dogs, and to this the Christians did not object.

  But the utmost severity of local and national officials, even when backed by the might of World Government, could not cope with the waves of migrants from the East nor the heedlessness of law they brought with them. As the Grass pushed the Indians and Chinese westward, they in turn sent the Mongols, the Afghans and the Persians ahead of them. These naturally warlike peoples were displaced, not by force of arms, but by sheer weight of numbers; and so, doubly overcome by being dispossessed of their homes--and by pacifists at that--they vented their pique upon those to the west.

  As the starving and destitute trickled into Europe and North Africa, giving a hint of the flood to follow, I congratulated myself on the foresight which led to our retrenchment, for I know these ravening hordes would have devoured the property of Consolidated Pemmican with as little respect as they did the scant store of Ah Que, Ram Singh or Mohammed Ali. My chief concern was now to keep my industrial and organizational machinery intact against the day when a stable market could again be established. To this end I kept our vast staff of rese
archworkers--exempt from the draft of the World Government which had been quite reasonable in the matter--constantly busy, for every day's delay in the arresting of the Grass meant a dead loss of profits.

  87. Josephine Francis alone, and as always, proved completely uncooperative. Undoubtedly much of her stubbornness was due to her sex; the residue, to her unorthodox approach to the mysteries of science. When I prodded her for results she snarled she was not a slotmachine. When I pointed out tactfully that only my money made possible the continuation of her efforts, she told me rudely to seek the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem before it was covered by the Grass. Again and again I urged her to give me some idea how long it would be before she could produce a chemical even for experimental use against the Grass and each time she turned me aside with insult or rude jest.

  I had set her up in--or rather, to be more accurate, she had insisted upon--a completely equipped and isolated laboratory in Surrey. As it was convenient to my Hampshire place I dropped in almost daily upon her; but I cannot say my visits perceptibly quickened her lethargy.

  "Worried, Weener?" she asked me, absently putting down a coffeepot on a stack of microscope slides. "Cynodon dactylon'll eat gold and banknotes, drillpresses and openhearths as readily as quartz and mica, dead bodies and abandoned household goods."

  I couldnt resist the opening. "Anything in fact," I pointed out, "except salt."

  "A Daniel!" she exclaimed. "A Daniel come to judgment. Oh, Weener, thou shouldst have been born a chemist. And what is the other mistake? Give me leave to throw away my retorts and testtubes and bunsen burners by revealing the other element besides sodium Cynodon dactylon refuses. For every mistake there is another mistake which supplements it. Sodium was the blindspot in the Metamorphizer; when I find the balancing blindspot I shall know not only the second element which the Grass cannot absorb but one which will be poison to it."

  "I'm not a chemist, Miss Francis," I said, "but it seems to me Ive heard there are a limited number of elements."