Ward Moore

“ At the edge of the weed all the offensive weapons of the world were massed to stay it as long as possible, for even a day's—even an hour's delay might be invaluable.
But the Grass overbore the heavy artillery, the flamethrowers, the bombs, the radium, and all the devices in its path. The inventions of war whose constant improvement was the pride of the human race offered no more obstacle to the Grass than a few anthills might to a herd of stampeding elephants. ”

“ Resting briefly on the weed, they winged out for their food and returned. It mattered no more to them that the manmade piers and wharves, the seacoast towns, gypjoints, rollercoasters, whorehouses, cottages, hotels, streets, gastanks, quarries, potterykilns, oilfields and 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 I thought the grass awesome from the land, monotonous from the air, it seemed eternal from the water. ”

“ The ladder was nearest Slafe, but working more furiously than ever, he waved it impatiently aside and so I grasped it and started upward. The terror of the ascent paradoxically was a welcome one, for it was the common fear which comes to men on the battlefield or in the creaking hours of the night, the natural dread of ordinary perils and not the unmanning panic inspired by the awful unknown within the grass. ”

“ Miss Francis and Preblesham, at opposite ends of the intellectual scale, both maundering on about doing the Will of God and General Thario talking about marks on foreheads—what sort of feebleminded, retrogressive world was I living in? All the outworn superstitions of religion taking hold of people and intruding themselves into otherwise normal conversation. A wave of madness, akin to the plague of the Grass, must be sweeping over the earth, was my conclusion. ”

“ Revived by the heat, relieved of the snow, the Grass, fighting for its life with the same intensity which animated its attackers, burst into a fury of growth. It covered the evidences of destruction in less time than the burning had taken. It tore the pipeline from its tormentors' hands and drove them away with threats of swift immolation. Defiantly it rose to a pinnacle, hiding its mutilation, and flaunted its vivid tendrils to bear witness to its invulnerability [243] till a killing frost followed by another snowfall covered it again. ”

“ Into this insignificant territory and the British Isles were packed all that was left of the world's two billion people: a blinded, starving mob, driven mad by terror. How many there were there, squirming, struggling, dying in a desperate unwillingness to give up existence, no matter how intolerable, no one could calculate; any more than a census could be taken of the numbers buried beneath the Grass now holding untroubled sway over ninetenths of the globe. ”

“ Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates was nothing but a mailing address in one of the most forlorn of Manhattan buildings, long before jettisoned by the tide of commerce. The factory, no bigger than a very small house, was a brokenwindowed affair whose solid brick construction alone saved it from total demolition at the playful hands of the local children. The roof had long since fallen in and symbolical grass and weeds had pushed their way through cracks in the floor to flourish in a sickly and surreptitious way. ”

“ It writhed and spumed upward in great clumps, culminating in enormous, overhanging caps inevitably suggesting the mushroomcloud of the bomb.
The grass had always been cautious of the sea; now the dazzling growth plunged into the saltwater with frenzy, leaping and building upon itself. Great masses of vegetation, piers, causeways, isthmuses of grass offered the illusion of growing out of the ocean bottom, linking themselves to the land, extending too late the lost coast far out into the Pacific. ”

“ I have a proposition for your husband, but far from taking him away from the Grass, it will bring him closer to it."
"Impossible," exclaimed Joe. "I am the Grass and the Grass is me; in mystical union we have become a single entity. I speak with its voice and in the great cadences which come from its heart you can hear Thario's first, transfigured and magnified a hundred thousand times." ”

“ On political maps the United States had lost not one foot of territory. Population statistics showed it harbored as many men, women, and children as before. Not one tenth of the national wealth had been destroyed by the grass or a sixth of the country given up to it, yet it had done what seven wars and many vicissitudes had failed to do: it brought the country to the nadir of its existence, to a hopeless despondency unknown at Valley Forge. ”

“ To our right was the stagnant river, dammed up behind the blockading arm of grass. Leftward, downtown, the thumb of the cityhall pointed rudely upward and far beyond was the listless Pacific. Ahead, the gridiron of streets was shockingly interrupted and severed by the great green mass plumped in its center.
It grew to enormous bigness and everything else disappeared; we were over and looked down upon it, a pasture hummock magnified beyond belief; retaining its essential identity, but made ominous by its unappropriate situation and size. ”

“ But the night had not proved restful, for over the edges of every tarpaulin the eager grass had thrust impatient runners and when the time came to decamp more than half the canvases had been left in possession of the weed. The second day's progress was slower than the first and it was clear to the observers the men were tiring unduly. More than one threw away his rifle to make the marching easier, some freed themselves of their snowshoes and so after a few yards sank, inextricably tangled into the grass; others lay down exhausted, to rise no more. ”

“ Hundreds of gallons of dark crudeoil were being poured upon the grass. At least ten bystanders eagerly explained to any who would listen the purpose and value of this maneuver. Petroleum, deadly enemy of all rooted things, would unquestionably kill the weed. They might as well call off all the other silly efforts, for in a day or two, as soon as the oil soaked into the ground, the roots would die, the monster collapse and wither away. I wanted with all my heart to believe in this hope, but when I compared the feeble brown trickle to the vast green body I was gravely doubtful. ”

“ To write a history of the Grass would at least afford me an escape from the daily irritation of concerning myself exclusively with the incompetents and blunderers. Not being the type of person to undertake anything I was not prepared to finish, I thought it might be advisable to keep a journal, first to get myself in the mood for the larger work and later to have a daytoday account of momentous events as seen by someone uniquely connected with the Grass. ”

“ Although between Juan Fernandez and the next land westward the distance was three times greater than between it and South America, the Congress seized upon the only island to which it could possibly spread, Sala-y-Gomez, and made of it a veritable fortress against the Grass. Not only did ships guard its waters by day and keep it brilliantly lit with their searchlights at night, but swift pursuitplanes bristling with machineguns brought down every bird in flight within a thousand miles. ”

“ Now the Dinkman lawn wasnt continuous with its neighbors, but, until now, had been set off by chesthigh hedges. The day before these had contained and defined the growth, but, overwhelming them in the night, the grass had swept across and invaded the neat, civilized plots behind, blurring sharply cut edges, curiously investigating flowerbeds, barbarously strangling shapely bushes.
But these werent the ravages which upset me; it was reasonable if not entirely comfortable to see shrubbery, plants and blossoms swallowed up. Work of men's hands they may be, but they bear the imprimatur of nature. ”

“ How Miss Francis contrived to make every place she lived in, apartment, chickenhouse or cottage, look exactly alike was remarkable. Nothing is more absurd than the notion that socalled intellectual workers are always alert—as Miss Francis demonstrated by her greeting to me.
"Well, Weener, what is it this time? Selling on commission or an interview?"
It was inconceivable any literate person in the United States could be ignorant of my position. "It is neither," I returned with some dignity. "I am here to do you a favor. To help you in your work." ”

“ 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 ”

“ I do not know, Doctor, where these beautiful and eminently sensible ideals you have so eloquently outlined are practiced, where scientists, regardless of biological fitness, share with each other their advances from moment to moment and so add to the security of civilization from day to day. Is it in the great research foundations whose unlimited funds are used to lure promising young men to their staffs, much as athletes used to be given scholarships by universities anxious to improve the physical qualities of American youth? ”

“ It is quite unbelievable—under this tropical green blanket lies the continent of Europe, the home of civilization. And the bodies of millions, too. Except for a few gulls who shriek their way inland and return dejectedly, there is not a living thing in sight but the Grass.
I have reserved the afterdeck to myself and as I sit here now, scribbling these notes, I think what impresses me more than anything else is the feeling of vitality which radiates from the herbaceous coast. The dead continent is alive, alive as never [347] before—wholly alive ”

“ A small part, a heartbreakingly small part of the United States remains at this moment. In a matter of weeks even this little must be overrun, stilled and covered green as all graves are. Scattered through the world there will be Americans, participants in a bitter diaspora. For them—and for their children to be instructed zealously in the formalities of an antique civilization—there can be no Fourth of July, no Thanksgiving; only one holiday will remain, and that continue through all the year. ”

“ It grows while your back is turned. Just to give you an example: while the boys have been busy a second time with the parkwaystrip, the grass has come back and grown again over all they burned up beyond the sidewalk. And now it's starting to come back over the concrete. You can actually see it move. The creepers run out in front and crawl ahead like thousands of little green snakes. Imagine seeing grass traveling forward like an army of worms. An army you can't stop. Because it's alive. Alive and coming at you. It's alive. It's alive. ”

“ On the South American side, as had been planned, great supercyclone fans were set up to blow back any errant seed. Fed by vast hydroelectric plants in the Colombian highlands, the noise of their revolving blades drowned out the sounds of the explosions for all those nearby. The oceans became interested participants and enormously high tides possibly caused by the difference in level between the Atlantic and Pacific, clawed away great hunks of land. The great island became a small island, the small island an islet. At last nothing but ruffling blue water lay between the Grass and South America. ”

“ Beyond this, the generality of mankind forgot the weed and the regions it covered, living geographically as though Columbus had never set forth from Palos.
It was at this time a new philosophic idea was advanced—giving the lie to Miss Francis' dictum that no new thoughts were being thought—which was, briefly, that the Grass was essentially a good thing in itself; that the world had not merely made the best of a bad situation, but had been brought to a beneficent condition through the loss of the Western Hemisphere. Mankind had desperately needed a brake upon its heedless course ”

“ In my heart, now, there was little doubt the new grass was an extension of the old and it didnt take more than a single look at the overrun park to confirm this. The same creeping runners growing perceptibly from instant to instant, the same brilliant color, the same towering central mass gorged with food. ”

“ Her laboratory was an abandoned chickenhouse which must have reminded her constantly of her lost kitchen. She looked almost jaunty as she greeted me, a cobweb from the roof of the decaying shed caught in her hair. "I have no profitable secrets to market, Weener—youre wasting your time with me."
"I am not here as a salesman, Miss Francis," I said. "The Daily Intelligencer would like to tell its readers how you are getting on with your search for some cure for the grass."
"You talk as if Cynodon dactylon were a disease. There is no cure for life but death." ”

“ The violence and murder which had gone before were tame compared with the new fury that shook the feartortured people of Europe, helpless in the nightmareridden days, dreaming through twitching nights of an escape geographically nonexistent. Dismembered corpses in the streets, arenas packed with dead bodies, fallow fields newly fertilized with human blood added their stench to that of an unwashed, disease riddled continent. ”

“ There was no doubt that originally the peculiar voracity of [165] the inoculated plant had not been inherited; but it was equally uncontroverted that somehow, during the period it had been halted by the salt, a mutation had happened and now every wind blowing over the weed carried seeds no longer innocent but bearing embryos of the destroyer.
Terror ran before the grass like a herald. The shock felt when Los Angeles went down was multiplied tenfold. Now there was no predictable course men could shape their actions to avoid. ”

“ I smelled the sweetly sick smell of steaming sap and saw the runners shrivel and curl back as they had done on other occasions, until nothing was presented to the flamethrowers except the tangled mass of interwoven stems denuded of all foliage. Upon this involved wall the fire had no effect, the stems did not wilt, the hard membranes did not collapse, the steely network did not retreat. It seemed a drawn battle in one small sector, yet in that very part where the grass paused on the ground it rose higher into the air like a poising tidalwave. ”

“ Carrying a ladder the men plunged toward the house. Their boots trod the sprawling runners heavily, spurning and crushing them carelessly. The grass responded by flowing back like water, sloshing over ankles and lapping at calves, thoroughly entangling and impeding progress. Panting and struggling the firemen penetrated only a short way into the mass before they were slowed almost to a standstill. From the sidelines it seemed as though they were wrestling with an invisible octopus. Feet were lifted high, but never free of the twining vegetation ”