"It leaves the mind free for cerebration. I ave a full set of blueprints and specifications, if youd like to inspect them, sir." It was fantastic, I thought, and probably quite impractical, but I promised to submit his plans to those with more technical knowledge than I possessed. I sent his carefully written papers to an undersecretary of the World Congress and forgot the matter. Idleness certainly led to queer occupations. Vertical cities--and who in the world had the money to erect these nightmare structures? Only Albert Weener--that was probably why Burlet took advantage of his position to approach me with the scheme. Completely absurd.... _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.