"Interested or not, I have no reason to believe you alone are capable of scientific discovery. Anyway, the world seems pretty well off as it is."
She tugged at her hair as if it were false and would come off if she jerked hard enough. "Of course it's well enough off from your pointofview. It offers you more food than you could eat if you had a million bellies, more clothes than you could wear out in a million years, more houses than you could live in if the million contradictions which go to make up any single human were suddenly made corporeal. Of course youre satisfied; why shouldnt you be? If the Grass were to be pushed back and the world once more enlarged, if hope and dissatisfaction were again to replace despair and content, you might not find yourself such a big toad in a small puddle—and you wouldnt like that, would you?"
I had intended all along to give her a small pension to keep her from want and allow her to putter around, but her irrational accusations and insults only showed her to be the kind from whom no gratitude could be expected.
"I'm afraid we can be of no further use to each other."
"Look here, Weener, you can't do this. The life of civilization depends on countering the Grass. Don't tell me the world can go on only half alive. Look around you and notice the recession every day. Outside of your own subservient laboratories what scientific work is being done? Since Palomar and Mount Wilson and Flagstaff went what has happened in astronomy? If you pick up the shrunken pages of your Times or Tatler, do you wonder at the reason for their shrinkage or do you realize there are fewer literates in the world than there were ten years ago?
"The Americas were upstart continents, werent they? I am not speaking sarcastically, my point is not a chauvinistic one, not even hemispherically prideful. And the Old World the womb of culture? But how much culture has that womb borne since the Americas disappeared? Without a doubt there are exactly the same number of composers and painters, writers and sculptors alive on the four continents today as there were when there were six, but in this drowsy halfworld how many books of importance are being produced?"
"There are plenty of books already in existence; besides, those things go by cycles."
"God give me patience; this is the man who has humanity prostrate."
"Humanity seems quite content in the position you ascribe to it."
"Of course, of course—that's the tragedy. It's content the same way a man who has just had his legs cut off is content; suffering from shock and loss of blood he enters a merciful coma from which he may never emerge. The legs do not write the books or think the thoughts, whether these activities wait for the cyclical moment or not, but the brain, dependent on the circulation of the blood and the wellbeing of the rest of the body for proper functioning. And who are you, little man, to stand in the way of assisting the patient?"