Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore (children's ebooks online .TXT) 📕

over its soil. Nationalism suddenly became rampant. "We will die as Ecuadorians, descendants of the Incas," exclaimed the leading[275] newspaper of Quito. El Gaucho of Lima pointed out caustically that most of Ecuador's area really belonged to Peru and the Peruvians were the true descendants of the Incas anyway. "We shall all die as unashamed Peruvians!" thundered El Gaucho.

In vain the Church pointed out the difference between Christian resignation and sinful suicide. The reply of most South Americans, when they bothered to reply at all, was either that the coming of the Grass expressed God's will toward them or else to scorn the Church entirely. Imitations of Brother Paul's movement flourished, with additions and refinements suited to the Latin temperament.

So the efforts of the World Congress were almost entirely limited to searching each ship, plane, and individual leaving the doomed continent to be sure none of the fatal seeds were transported. Even this precaution was resented as an infringement on national sovereignty, but the resentment was limited to bellicose pronouncements in the newspapers; the republics looked on sullenly while their honor was systematically violated by phlegmatic inspectors.

75. The Grass grew to unheardof heights in the tropical valley of the Amazon. It washed the slopes of the Andes as it had the Cordilleras and the Rockies, leaving only the highest peaks free of its presence. It raced across the llanos, the savannas and the pampas and covered the high plateaus in a slow relentless growth.

The people ran from the Grass, not in a straight line from north to south, but by indirection, seeking first the seacoasts and then escape from the afflicted land. Those North Americans who had eluded the Grass once did not satisfy themselves with halfmeasures when their sanctuary was lost, but bought passage on any bottom capable, however dubiously, of keeping out the sea and embarked for the farthest regions.[276]

76. In point of time, I am now about halfway through my narrative. It is hard to believe that only eleven years have passed since the Grass conquered South America; indeed, it is extraordinarily difficult for me to reconstruct these middle years at all. Not because they were hard or unpleasant—on the contrary, they carried me from one success to another—but because they have, in memory, the dreamlike quality of unreality, elusive, vague and tantalizing.

Like a dream, too, was the actual progress of the Grass. We were all, I think, impressed by the sense of repetition, of a scene enacted over and over again. It was this quality which gives my story, now that I look back upon it, a certain distortion, for no one, hearing it for the first time, and not as any reader of these words must be, thoroughly familiar with the events, could believe in the efforts made to combat the Grass. These efforts existed; we did not yield without struggles; we fought for South America as we had fought for North America. But it was a nightmare fight; our endeavors seem retrospectively those of the paralyzed....

The Grass gripped the continent's great northern bulge, squeezed it into submission and worked its way southward to the slender tip, driving the inhabitants before it, duplicating previous acts by sending an influx from sparsely to thickly settled areas, creating despair, terror, disruption and confusion; pestilence, hysteria and famine.

The drama was not played through in one act, but many; to a world waiting the conclusion it dragged on through interminable months and years, offering no change, no sudden twists of fortune, no elusive hopes. At last, mercifully, the tragedy ended; the green curtain came down and covered the continent to the Strait of Magellan. The Grass looked wistfully across at Tierra del Fuego, the land of ice and fire, but even its voracity balked, momentarily at any rate, at the inhospitable island and left it to whatever refugees chose its shores as a slower but still certain death.

South America finally gone, the rest of the globe breathed[277] easier. It would be a slander on humanity to say there was actual rejoicing when the World Congress sealed off this continent too, but whatever sorrow was felt for its loss was balanced by the feeling that at long last the peril of the Grass was finally ended. No longer would speculative Germans, thoughtful Chinese or wakeful Englishmen wonder if the supercyclone fans were indeed an effective barrier; no longer would Cubans, Colombians or Venezuelans look northward apprehensively. Oceanic barriers now confined the peril and though the world was shrunken and hurt it was yet alive. More, it was free from fear for the first time since the mutated seeds had blown over the saltband.

I must not give the impression that a wiping off of the Grass from the accountbooks of humanity was universal and complete. The World Congress periodically considered proposals for countermeasures. On the top of Mount Whitney Miss Francis still labored. New assistants were flown to her as the old ones wandered down the great rockslide from the old stone weatherhouse off into the Grass during fits of despondency, went mad from the realization that, except for problematical survivors on the polar caps, they were alone in an abandoned hemisphere, or died of simple homesickness. In the researchlaboratories of Consolidated Pemmican formulas for utilizing the Grass were still tinkered with, and the death of almost every publicspirited man of fortune revealed a will containing bequests to aid those seeking means of controlling the weed.

77. It is not, afterall, a detached history of the past twentyone years I am writing. Contemporaries are only too well aware of the facts and posterity will find them dehydrated in textbooks. I started out to tell of my own personal part in the coming of the Grass, not to take an Olympian and aloof view of the passion of man.

The very mention of a personal part brings to mind a subject which might be painful were I of a petty nature. There were people who, willfully blind to the facts, held me responsible,[278] in the face of all reason, for the Grass itself. Although it is difficult to believe, there have been many occasions when I have been denounced by demagogues and my blood called for by vicious mobs.

But enough of morbid retrospection. I think I can say at this time there was, with the exception of certain Indian nabobs, hardly a wealthy man left in the world who did not owe in some way the retention of his riches to me. I controlled more than half the steel industry; I owned outright the majority stocks of the world oil cartel; coal, iron, copper, tin and other mines either belonged directly to me or to tributary companies in which I held large interests.

Along with the demagoguery of attributing the Grass to Albert Weener there was the agitation for socialism and the expropriation of all private property, the attempt to deprive men of the fruit of their endeavor and reduce everyone to a regimented, miserable level. It is hardly necessary to say that I spared no effort to combat the insidious agents of the Fourth International. Fortunately for the preservation of the free enterprise system, I had tools ready to hand.

The overrunning of the United States wiped out the gangs which operated so freely there, but remnants made their escape, taking with them to the older continents their philosophy of life and property. Gathering native recruits, they began following the familiar patterns and would in time no doubt have divided the world into countless minute baronies.

However, I was able to subsidize and reason with enough of their leaders to persuade them that their livelihood and very existence rested on a basis of private property and that their great danger came not from each other, but from the advocates of socialism. They saw the point, and though they did not cease from warring on each other, or mulcting the general public, they were ruthless in exterminating the socialists and they left the goods and adjuncts of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Industries scrupulously unmolested.

Strange as it sounds, it was not my part in protecting the world from the philosophy of equality, nor my ramified properties,[279] which gave me my unique position. Unbelievably, because the change had occurred so gradually, industry, though still a vital factor, no longer played the dominant role in the world, but had given the position back to an earlier occupant. Food was once more paramount in global economy. Loss of the Americas had cut the supply in half without reducing the population correspondingly. The Socialist Union remained selfsufficient and uninterested, while Australia, New Zealand and the cultivated portions of Africa strove to feed the millions of Europeans and Asiatics whose lands could not grow enough for their own use. The slightest falling off of the harvest produced famine.

At this point Consolidated Pemmican practically took over the entire business of agriculture. Utilizing byproducts, and crops otherwise not worth gathering, waste materials, and growths inedible without processing, with plants strung out all over the four continents and with tremendously reduced shipping costs because of the small compass in which so much food could be contained, we were able to let our customers earn their daily concentrates by gathering the raw materials which went into them. I was not only the wealthiest, most powerful man in the world, but its savior and providence as well.

With the new feeling of security bathing the world, tension dissolved into somnolence and the tempo of daily life slackened until it scarcely seemed to move at all. The waves of anxiety, suspicion and distrust of an earlier decade calmed into peaceful ripples, hardly noticeable in a pondlike existence.

No longer beset by thoughts or fears of wars, nations relaxed their pride, armies were reduced to little more than palaceguards, brassbands and parade units; while navies were kept up—if periodic painting and retaining in commission a few obsolete cruisers and destroyers be so termed—only to patrol the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the lost hemisphere.

The struggle for existence almost disappeared; the wagescales set by Consolidated Pemmican were enough to sustain life, and in a world of limited horizons men became content[280] with that. The bickering characteristic of industrial dispute vanished; along with it went the outmoded weapon of the tradesunion. It was a halcyon world and if, as cranks complained, illiteracy increased rapidly, it could only be because with everyman's livelihood assured his natural indolence took the upper hand and he not only lost refinements superficially acquired, but was uninterested in teaching them to his children.

78. I don't know how I can express the golden, sunlit quality of this period. It was not an heroic age, no great deeds were performed, no conflicts resolved, no fundamentshaking ideas broached. Quiet, peace, content—these were the keywords of the era. Preoccupation with politics and panaceas gave place to healthier interests: sports and pageants and giant fairs. Men became satisfied with their lot and if they to a great extent discarded speculation and disquieting philosophies they found a useful substitute in quiet meditation.

Until now I had never had the time to live in a manner befitting my station; but with my affairs running so smoothly that even Stuart Thario and Tony Preblesham found idle time, I began to turn my attention to the easier side of life. Of course I never considered making my permanent home anywhere but in England; for all its parochialism and oddities it was the nearest I could come to approximating my own country.

I bought a gentleman's park in Hampshire and had the outmoded house torn down. It had been built in Elizabethan times and was cold, drafty and uncomfortable, with not one modern convenience. For a time I considered preserving it intact as a sort of museumpiece and building another home for myself on the grounds, but when I was assured by experts that Tudor architecture was not considered to be of surpassing merit and I could find in addition no other advantageous site, I ordered its removal.

I called in the best architects for consultation, but my own artistic and practical sense, as they themselves were quick to[281] acknowledge, furnished the basis for the beautiful mansion I put up. Moved by nostalgic memories of my lost Southland I built a great and ample bungalow of some sixty rooms—stucco, topped with asbestos tile. Since the Spanish motif natural to this form would have been out of place in England and therefore in bad taste, I had timbers set in the stucco, although of course they performed no function but that of decoration, the supports being framework which was not visible.

It was delightful and satisfying to come into the spacious and cozy livingroom, filled with overstuffed easychairs and comfortable couches, warmed by the most efficient of centralheating systems or to use one of the perfectly appointed bathrooms whose every fixture was the best money could buy and recall the dank stone floors and walls leading up to a mammoth and—from a thermal point of view—perfectly useless fireplace flanked by the coatsofarms of deadandgone gentry who were content