"What the devil do you mean, Weener? 'Temporary protective measures'? What euphuistic gibberish is this?" I outlined briefly my butler's plan of vertical cities. Miss Francis startled me with a laugh resembling the burst of machinegun fire. "Someone's been pulling your leg, poor terrified Maecenas. Or else youre befuddled with too many _Thrilling Wonder Scientifictions_. Pipes into the stratosphere! Watersupply piped in through concrete walls! Doesnt your mad inventor know the seeds would find these apertures in an instant?" "Oh, those are possibly minor flaws which could be remedied." "Well, go and remedy them and leave me to my work. Or pin your faith on substantialities instead of flights of fancy." I went up to London, my mind full of a thousand problems. I had caught the economical British habit of using the trains, conserving the petrol and tyres on my car. The first thing I saw on the Marylebone platform was the crude picture in green chalk of a stolon of _Cynodon dactylon_. What idiot, I thought as I irritably rubbed at it with the sole of my shoe, what feebleminded creature has been let loose to do a thing like this? The brittle chalk smeared beneath my foot, but the representation remained, almost recognizable. On my way to the Savoy I saw it again, defacing a hoarding, and as I paid off my driver I thought I caught another glimpse of the nonsensical drawing on the side of a lorry going by. Perhaps my sensitivity perceived these signs before they were common property, but in a few days they were spread all over Europe, through what insane impulse I do not know. For whatever reason, symbols of the Grass blossomed on the Arc de Triomphe, on the Brandenburger Tor, on the pavement of the Ringstrasse and on the bridges spanning the Danube between Buda and Pesth. _88._ I find myself, in retrospect, involuntarily telescoping the time of events. Looking backward, years become days, and months minutes. At the time I saw the first reproductions of the Grass in London the thing itself was continents away, busy absorbing the fringes of Asia. But its heralds and victims went before it, changing the life of man as it had itself changed the face of the world. The breakdown of civilization beyond the Channel was almost complete. Only Consolidated Pemmican and the World Government still maintained communication facilities; and with the blocking of the normal ways of commerce the World Government found it difficult to spread either news or decrees to the general public. The most fantastic and contradictory ideas about the Grass were held by the masses.