86. Probably the complaints of the Australians gave final impetus to the Congress to Combat the Grass. They met in extraordinary session in Budapest and declared themselves the executive body of a world government, which did not of course include the Socialist Union. All qualified scientists were immediately ordered to leave whatever employment they had and place themselves at the disposition of the World Government. Affluence for life, guaranteed against any fluctuations of currency, was promised to anyone who could offer, not necessarily an answer, but an idea which should lead to the solution of the problem in hand. While they were issuing their first edicts the Grass finished off the East Indies, covered threequarters of Australia and attacked the southern Philippines.
Millions of Indonesians traveling the comparatively short distances in anything floatable crowded the already overpopulated areas of Asia. As I had predicted to General Thario, these refugees carried nothing with which to purchase the concentrates to keep them alive, and conditions of famine in India and China, essentially due to the backwardness of these countries, offered no subsistence to the natives—much less to an influx from outside.
The Grass sped northward and westward through the Malay States and Siam, up into China and Burma. In the beginning the Orientals did not flee, but stood their ground, village by village and family by family, opposing the advance with scythes, stones, and pitiful bonfires of their household belongings, with hoes, flails, and finally with their bare hands. But the naked hand, no matter how often multiplied, was as unable to halt the green flow as the most uptodate weapons of modern science. And the Chinese and the Hindus dying at their posts were no more an obstacle than mountain or desert or stretches of empty sea had been.
It was now deemed expedient, in order to keep public hysteria from rising to new selfdestructive heights, to tone down and modify the news. This proved quite difficult at first, for the people in their shortsightedness clamored for the accounts of impending doom which they devoured with a dreadful fascination. But eventually, when the wildest rumors produced by the dearth of accurate reports were disproved, many of the people in Western Europe and Africa actually believed the Grass had somehow failed to make headway on the Asiatic continent and would have remained in their pleasant ignorance had it not been for the premature flight of masses of Asiatics.
For the phenomenon contemporary with the close of the Roman Empire was repeated. A great, struggling, churning, sprawling, desperate efflux from east to west began; once more the Golden Horde was on the march. They did not come, as had their ancestors, on wildly charging horses, threatening with lances and deadly scimitars, but on foot, wretched and begging. Even had I been as maudlin as Stuart Thario desired I could not have fed these people, for there were no longer railroads with rollingstock adequate to carry the freight, no fleets of trucks in good repair, nor was the fuel available had they existed. The world receded rapidly from the machineage, and as it did so famine and pestilence increased in evermounting spirals.
The mob of refugees might be likened to a beast with weak, almost atrophied legs, but with a great mouth and greater stomach. It moved with painful slowness, crawling over the face of southern Asia, finding little sustenance as it came, leaving none whatever after it left. The beast, only dimly aware of the Grass it was fleeing from, could formulate no thoughts of the refuge it sought. Without plan, hope, or malice, it was concerned only with hunger. Day and night its empty gut cried for food.
The starving men and women—the children died quickly—ate first all that was available in the stores and homes, then scrabbled in the fields for a forgotten grain of rice or wheat; they ate the bark and fungus from the trees and gleaned the pastures of their weeds and dung. As they ate they moved on, their faminedistended stomachs craving more to eat, driving the ones who were but one step further from starvation ever before them.
Long ago they had chewed on the leather of their footgear and devoured all cats, dogs and rodents. They ate the stiffened and putrid carcasses of draft animals which had been pushed to the last extremity; they turned upon the corpses of the newly dead and fed on them, and at length did not wait for death from hunger to make a new cadaver, but mercifully slew the weak and ate the still warm bodies.
The Asiatic influx was a social accordion. The pulledout end, the high notes, as it were, the Indian princes, Chinese warlords, arrived quickly and settled into a welcoming obscurity. They came by plane, with gold and jewels and government bonds and shares of Consolidated Pemmican. The middle creases of the accordion came later, more slowly, but as quickly as money could speed their way. Men of wealth when they began their journey, they arrived little more than penniless and were looked upon with suspicion, tolerated only so long as they did not become a public charge.
The low notes, the thick and heavy pleats, took not days nor weeks nor months, but years to make the trek. They kept but a step ahead of the Grass, traveling at the same pace. They came not alone, but with accretions, pushing ahead of them millions of their same dispossessed, hungry, penniless kind. These were not greeted with suspicion, but with hatred; machineguns were turned upon the advancing mobs, the few airplanes in service were commandeered to bomb them, and only lack of fuel and explosives allowed them to sweep into Europe and overwhelm most of it as the barbarians had overwhelmed Rome.