The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 02

by Anthology

  The editor picked up my copy and I could not help but watch him anxiously for some sign of his reaction. It came forth promptly and explosively.

  "What the ingenious and delightfully painful hell is this, Gootes?"

  "'As Reported by Our Special Writer, Albert Weener, The Man Who Inoculated the Loony Grass.'"

  "Gootes, you are the endproduct of a long line of incestuous idiots, the winner of the boobyprize in any intelligencetest, but you have outdone yourself in bringing me this verminous and maggoty ordure," said Le ffaçasé, throwing my efforts to the floor and kicking at them. The outrage made me boil and if he had not been an older man I might have done him an injury. "As for you, Weener, I doubt if you will ever be elevated to the ranks of idiocy. Get the sanguinary hell out of here and do humanity the favor to step in front of the first tentontruck driving by."

  "One minute, Chief," urged Gootes. "Don't be hasty. Seen the latest on the grass? Well, the mayor's asked the governor to call out the National Guard; the Times'll have an interview with Einstein tomorrow and the Examiner's going to run a symposium of what Herbert Hoover, Bernard Shaw and General MacArthur think of the situation. Don't suppose perhaps we could afford to ghost Bertie here?"

  Was I never to escape from the malice inspired by the envy my literary talent aroused? I had certainly expected that a man of the famous editor's reputation would be above such pettiness. I was too dismayed and downcast by the meanness of human nature to speak.

  Le ffaçasé snuffed again and looked malevolently at the wall. A framed caricature of himself returned the stare. "Very well," he grudgingly conceded at length, "youre on the grass anyway, so you might as well take this on too. Leave you only twentytwo hours a day to sleep in. You, Weener, are still on the payroll--at half the agreedupon figure."

  I opened my mouth to protest, but he turned on me with a snarl; baring yellow and twisted teeth, unpleasant to see. "Weener, you look like a criminal type to me; Lombroso couldve used you for a model to advantage. Have you a policerecord or have you so far evaded the law? Let me tell you, the Intelligencer is the evildoers' nemesis. Is your conscience clear, your past unsullied as a virgin's bed, your every deed open to search? Do you know what a penitentiary's like? Did you ever hear the clang of a celldoor as the turnkey slammed it behind him and left you to think and stew and weep in a silence accented and made more wretched by a yellow electricbulb and the stink of corrosivesublimate? Back to the cityroom, you dabbling booby, you precious simpleton, addlepated dunce, and be thankful my boundless generosity permits you to draw a weekly paycheck at all and doesnt condemn you to labor forever unrewarded in the subterranean vaults where the old files are kept."

  First Miss Francis and now Le ffaçasé. Were all these great intelligences touched? Was the world piloted by unbalanced minds? It seemed incredible, impossible it should be so, but two such similar experiences in so short a time apparently supported this gloomy view. Horrible, I thought as I preceded Gootes out of the maniac's office, unbelievably horrible.

  "Son," advised Gootes, "never argue with the chief. He has the makings of a firstclass apoplexy--I hope. You just keep squawking to the bookkeeping department and youll get further than coming up against the Old Man. Now let's go out and look at nature in the raw."

  "But my copy," I protested.

  "Oh, that," he said airily, "I'll run that off when we come back. Deadlines mean nothing to Jacson Gootes, the compositors' companion, the proofreaders' pardner, the layoutman's love. Come, Señor Veener, we take look at el grasso grosso by the moonlight."

  17. However, it was not moonlight illuminating the weird tumulus, but the glare of a battery of searchlights, suggesting, as Gootes irreverently remarked, the opening of a new supermarket. During my absence the National Guard had arrived and focused the great incandescent beams on the mound which now covered five houses and whose threat had driven the inhabitants from as many more. The powdery blue lights gave the grass an uncanny yellowish look, as though it had been stricken by a disease.

  The rays, directed low, were constantly being interrupted by the bodies of the militiamen hurrying back and forth to accomplish some definite task. "What goes on?" inquired Gootes.

  The officer addressed had two gleaming silver bars on his shoulder. He seemed very young and nervous. "Sorry--no one allowed this far without special authorization."

  "Working press." Gootes produced a reporter's badge from the captain's bars.

  "Oh. Excuse me. Say, that was a sharp little stunt, Mr--"

  "Name of Jacson Gootes. Intelligencer."

  "Captain Eltwiss. How did you learn stuff like that?"

  I looked at him, for the name was somehow vaguely familiar. But to the best of my knowledge I had never seen that smooth, boyish face before.

  "Talent. Natural talent. What did you say all the shootin was about?"

  "Getting ready to tunnel under," answered the officer affably. "Blow the thing skyhigh from the middle and get rid of it right now. Not going to let any grass grow under our feet."

  "But I read an article saying neither dynamite, TNT nor nitroglycerin would be effective against the grass; might even do more harm than good."

  "Writers." Captain Eltwiss dismissed literature without even resorting to an exclamationpoint. "Writers." To underline his confidence the boneshaking chatter of pneumatic chisels began a syncopated rattle. Military directness would accomplish in one swift, decisive stroke at the heart of things what civilian fumbling around the edges had failed to do.

  I looked with almost sentimental regret at the great conical heap. I had brought it into being; in a few hours it would be gone and whatever fame its brief existence had given me would be gone with it.

  With swift method the guardsmen started burrowing. In ordered relays, fresh workers replaced tired, and the pile of excavated dirt grew. Since their activity, except for its urgency and the strangeness of the situation, didnt differ from labors observable any time a street was repaired or a foundation laid, I saw no point in watching, hour after hour. I thought Gootes' persistence less a devotion to duty than the idle curiosity which makes grown men gape at a steamshovel.

  My hints being lost on him, I ascertained the hour they expected to be finished and went home. Excitement or no excitement, I saw no reason to abandon all routine. My forethought was proven when I returned refreshed in midmorning as the last shovelfuls of dirt came from the tunnel and the explosive charges were hurried to their place.

  There was reason for haste. While the tunneling had been going on, all the grassfighting activity had ceased, for the militia had ordered weedburners, reapers, bulldozers and the rest off the scene. The weed, unhampered for the first time since Mrs Dinkman attacked it with her lawnmower, responded by growing and growing until more and more guardsmen had to be detached to the duty of keeping it back from the excavation--by the very means they had scorned so recently. Even their most frantic efforts could not prevent the grass from sending its most advanced tendrils down into the gaping hole where the wires were being laid to detonate the charge.

  There was so much dashing to and fro, so many orders relayed, so many dispatches delivered that I thought I might have been witnessing an outofdate Civilwar play instead of a peacetime action of the California National Guard. Captain Eltwiss--I kept wondering where I'd heard the name--was constantly being interrupted in what was apparently a very friendly conversation with Gootes by the arrival of officiallooking envelopes which he immediately stuffed into his pocket with every indication of vexation. "Silly old fools," he muttered, each time the incident happened.

  Quick inspections made, plans checked, an order was rasped to clear the vicinity. Gootes' agonized protest that he had to report the occasion for the Intelligencer's readers was ignored. "Can't start making exceptions," explained Captain Eltwiss. Everyone--workingpress, militia, sightseers and all, had to move back a couple of blocks where intervening trees and houses cut us off from any view of the green hill.

  "This is terrible," e
xclaimed Gootes frantically. "Tragic. Howll I live it down? Howm I going to face W R? Godlike wrath. 'What poolhall were you dozing in, Gootes? Asleep on your bloody feet, ay, somnambulistic offspring of a threetoed sloth?' Wait all night for a story and then not get it, like the star legman on the Jackson Junior Highschool Jive-Jitterbug. I'll never be able to hold my head up again. Say something, say something, Weener--Ive got to get this."

  "We'll be able to hear the explosion from here," I remarked to console him, for his distress was genuine.

  "Oh," he groaned. "Hear the explosion. Albert, Albert ... you have a fertile mind. Why didnt I hide myself before they told us to clear out? Why didnt I get W R to hire a plane? Why didnt I foresee this and do any of a hundred things? A microphone and automatic moviecamera ... Goony Gootes, they called him, the man who missed all bets.... A captive balloon, now.... Hay! What about a roof?"

  "Trees," I objected, with a mental picture of him bursting into the nearest house and demanding entrance to the roof.

  "Bushwa. Zair's no tree in z' way of z' old box over zair--allons!"

  It wasnt till he had urged me inside and up a flight of stairs that I realized the "box" was Miss Francis' apartmenthouse. It had been a logical choice, since its height and ugliness distinguished it even from its unhandsome neighbors. Less than a week had gone by since I had come here for the first time. As I followed Gootes' grasshopper leaps upward at a more dignified pace, I reflected how strangely my circumstances had changed.

  The shoddily carpeted halls were musty and still as we climbed, except for the unheeded squeaking of a radio someone had forgotten to turn off. You could always tell when a radio was being listened to, for when disregarded it sulkily gave off painfully listless noises in frustration and loneliness.

  I wasnt at all surprised to find Miss Francis among the spectators crowded on the roof in evidence of having no more important occupation. "I somehow expected you. Have you any new tricks?" she asked Gootes coaxingly.

  "Ecod, your worship, wot time ave I for legerdemain? Wif your elp, now, I'd be a fine gentleman-journalist, stead of a noverworked ack."

  "Ha," she said genially, busy with the toothpick, "youll find enough respectable laboratory mechanics eager to cooperate. How long will it be before they shoot, do you know?"

  Gootes shook his head and I strained my eyes toward the grass. Symmetrical and shimmeringly green, removed as it now was from all connotations of danger by distance and the promise of immediate destruction, it showed serenely beautiful and unaffected by the machinations of its attackers. I could almost have wept as I traced its sloping sides upward to the rounded peak on top. Reversing all previous impressions, it now appeared to be the natural inhabitant and all the houses, roadways, pavements, fences, automobiles, lightpoles and the rest of the evidences of civilization the intruders.

  But even as I looked at it so eagerly it moved and wavered and I heard the muffled boom of explosion. The roof trembled and windows rattled with diminishing echoes. The noise was neither a great nor terrifying one and I distinctly remember thinking it quite inadequate to the occasion.

  I believe all of us there, when we heard the report, expected to see a vast hole where the grass had been. I'm sure I did. When it was clear this hadnt happened, I continued to stare hard, thinking, since my highschool physics was so hazy, I had somehow reversed the relative speed of sight and sound and we had heard the noise before seeing the destruction.

  But the green bulk was still there.

  Oh, not unchanged, by any means. The smooth, picturebook slope had become jagged and bruised while the regular, evenlyrounded apex had turned into a sort of phrygian cap with its pinnacle woundedly askew. The outlines which had been sharp were now blurred, its evenness had become scraggly. The placid surface was vexed; the attempt on its being had hurt. But not mortally, for even with outline altered, it remained; defiant, certain, inexorable.

  The air was filled with small green particles whirling and floating downward. Feathery, yet clumsy, they refused to obey gravity and seek the earth urgently, but instead shifted and changed direction, coyly spiraling upward and sideways before yielding to the inevitable attraction.

  "At least there's less of it," observed Gootes. "This much anyway," he added, holding a broken stolon in his fingers.

  "Cynodon dactylon," said Miss Francis, "like most of the family Gramineae, is propagated not only by seed, but by cuttings as well. That is to say, any part of the plant (except the leaves or flowers) separated from the parent whole, upon receiving water and nourishment will root itself and become a new parent or entity. The dispersion of the mass, far from making the whole less, as our literary friend so ingenuously assumes, increases it to what mathematicians call the nth power because each particle, finding a new restingplace unhampered by the competition for food it encountered when integrated with the parent mass, now becomes capable of spreading infinitely itself unless checked by factors which deprive it of sustenance. These facts have been repeated a hundred times in letters, telegrams and newspaper articles since the project of attempting to blow up the inoculated batch was known. In spite of warnings the authorities chose to go ahead. No, make no mistake, this fiasco has not set Cynodon dactylon back a millimeter; rather it has advanced it tremendously."

  There was silence while we absorbed this unpleasant bit of information. Gootes was the first to regain his usual cockiness and he asked, "You say fiasco, professor. O K--can you tell us just why it was a fiasco? I know they stuck enough soup under it to blow the whole works and when it went off it gave out with a good bang."

  "Certainly. Cynodon dactylon spreads in what may be called jumps. That is, the stems are short and jointed. Those aboveground, the true stems, are called stolons, and those below, from which the roots spread, are rhizomes. Conceive if you will twoinch lengths of stiff wire--and this plant is vulgarly called wiregrass in some regions just as it is called devilgrass here--bent on either end at rightangles. Now take these bits and weave them horizontally into a thick mass. Then add, vertically, more of the wires, breaking the pattern occasionally and putting in more in odd places, just to be sure there are no logical fracturepoints. Cover this involved web--not forgetting it has three dimensions despite my instructions treating it as a plane--with earth, eight, ten, or twelve inches deep. Then try to blow it up with dynamite or trinitrotoluene and see if you havent--in a much lesser degree--duplicated and accounted for the situation in hand."

  Everything now seemed unusually and, perhaps because of the contrast, unreasonably quiet. Downstairs the radio, which had been monotonously soothing a presumptive audience of unsatisfied housewives with languid ballads, raised its pitch several tones as though for the first time it had become interested in what it purveyed.

  "... Yes, unseen friends, God is preparing His vengeance for wickedness and sin, even as you are listening. You have been warned many times of the wrath to come, but I say to you, the wrath is at hand. Even now God is giving you a sign of His displeasure; a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. But, O my unseen friends, that cloud has within it all the storms, cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes and tornadoes necessary to destroy you and yours. Unless you repent of your pride and sloth, Judgment will surely come upon you. The Lord has taken a simple and despisèd weed and caused it to multiply in defiance of all your puny powers and efforts. O my friends, do not fight this grass, but cherish it; do not allow it to be cut down for it is full of significance for you. Call off all your minions and repent, lest if the holy messenger be injured a more terrible one is sent. But now, my friends, I see my time is up; please send your contributions so urgently needed to carry on the Divine Work to Brother Paul care of the station to which you are listening."

  "That's one way of looking at it," said Gootes. "Adios amigos."

  He went down the stairs at an even more breakneck pace than he had come up. Almost in front of the apartmenthouse door we nearly collided with two officers in angry dispute.

  "You mean to tell me, Captain, that no
t one of the urgent orders to suspend operations came through to you?"

  "Colonel, I havent seen a thing against the project except some fool articles in a newspaper."

  Suddenly I remembered where I'd seen the name Eltwiss. It was on the financial page, not far away from the elusive quotation on Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates for which I'd been idly searching. "Eltwiss Explosives Cut Melon." Funny how things come back to you as soon as you put them out of your mind.

  Miss Francis, who had followed us down was busy collecting some of the stolons which were still floating lazily downward.

  18. An illiterate patchwork of lifeless and uninteresting scribbling appeared under my byline day after day in the Intelligencer. Not a word, not a thought of my own was left. I was not restrained from protest by the absurd threats of Le ffaçasé, but prudence dictated not throwing away dirty water before I got clean, and the money from the paper, while negligible of course, yet provided my most pressing needs.

  As I was being paid for my name while my talents went to waste, I was free to go anywhere I pleased, but I had little desire to leave the vicinity of the grass. It exerted upon me, more understandably, the same fascination as on the merely curious.

  But I was not permitted unmolested access to the phenomenon with which I was so closely concerned. An officious young guardsman warned me away brusquely and I was not allowed to come near until I swallowed my pride and claimed connection with the Intelligencer. Even then it was necessary for me to explain myself to several nervous soldiers on pain of being ordered from the spot.

  I was struck as I had not been before by the dynamic quality of the grass; never the same for successive instants. Constant movement and struggle as the expanding parts fought for room among themselves, pushing upward and outward, seemed to indicate perceptible sentience permeating the whole body. Preparing, brooding, it was disturbed, searching, alert.

  Its external aspect reflected the change. The proportions of height to breadth had altered since the explosion. The peak had disappeared, flattening out into an irregular plateau. Its progress across the ground, however, had been vastly accelerated; it had crossed the streets on all sides of the block and was spreading with great rapidity over the whole district. For the moment no new effort was apparently being made to halt its progress, the activities of the militia being confined to patrolling the area and shooing decent citizens away. I wondered if a new strategy contemplated allowing the thing to exhaust itself. Since it looked more vigorous with each passing hour, I saw myself on the payroll of the Intelligencer for a long time to come.