"I shall not argue with you any further, Miss Francis. If mankind is really as subject to your efforts as your conceit leads you to believe then I am sure you will find some way to continue them."
"I'm sure I will," she said, and we left it at that.
To say her accusations had been gravely unjust would be to defend myself where no defense is called for. I merely remark in passing that I gave orders to set aside a still greater fund toward finding a reagent against the Grass, and to put those who had lately assisted Miss Francis in charge. I did this, not because I swallowed her strained analogy about a sufferer with his legs cut off, but for purely practical reasons. The world was very well as it was, but an effective weapon against the Grass might at last make possible the neverdiscarded vision of utilizing it beneficially.
81. Meanwhile life went on with a smoothness strange and gratifying to those of us born into a period of strife and restlessness. No more wars, strikes, riots, agitation for higher wages or social experiments by wildeyed fanatics. Those whose limitations laid out a career of toil performed their function with as much efficiency as one could expect and we others who had risen and separated ourselves from the herd carried our responsibilities and accepted the rewards which went with them. The ships of the World Congress continued patrolling the coasts of the deserted continents and restrictions were so far relaxed as to permit planeflights over the area to take motionpictures and confirm the Grass had lost none of its vigor. 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; some instrumentality to limit it and bring it to realization of its proper province. The Grass had acted as such an agent and now, rightly chastised, man could go about his fit business.
This concept gained almost immediate popular support, so far as it filtered down to the masses at all; prominent schoolmen endorsed it wholeheartedly; statesmen gave it qualified approval—"in principle"—and the Pope issued an encyclical calling for a return of Christian resignation and submission. Hardly was the ink dry upon the expressions of thanksgiving for the punishment which had brought about a new and better frameofmind than the philosophy was suddenly and dramatically tested by events.
The island of Juan Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe's island, a peak pushed out of the waters of the Pacific 400 miles west of Chile, densely populated with refugees and a base for patrolboats, was overrun by the Grass. It was an impossible happening. Every inhabitant had had personal experience of the Grass and was fearfully alert against its appearance. The patrols covered the sea between it and the mainland constantly; the distance was too far for windborne seeds. The tenuous hypothesis that gulls had acted as carriers was accepted simply for want of a better.
But the World Congress wasted no time looking backward. 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.
The island itself was sown with salt a halfmile thick after being mined with enough explosives to blow it into the sea. The world, or that portion of it which had not fully accepted all the implications of the doctrine of submission, watched eagerly. But the ships patrolled an empty sea, the searchlights reflected only the glittering saline crystals, the migrant birds never reached their destination. The outpost held, impregnable. Again everyone breathed easier.
Five hundred miles beyond this focalpoint, its convict settlement long abandoned, was Easter Island, Rapa Nui, home of the great monoliths whose origin had ever been a puzzle. Erect or supine, these colossal statues were strewn all over the island. Anthropologists and archaeologists still came to give them cursory inspection and it was on such a visit an unmistakable clump of Grass was found.