paycut, but this innocent remark called forth such a
vituperative stream of epithet I really thought the apoplexy Gootes had
predicted was about to strike and I hurried from his presence lest I be
blamed for bringing it on.

_25._ A little reading brought me uptodate on the state of the grass as
a necessary background for my new responsibility. It was now shaped like
a great, irregular crescent with one tip at Newhall, broadening out to
bury the San Fernando Road; stretching over the Santa Monica Mountains
from Beverly Glen to the Los Angeles River. Its fattest part was what
had once been Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the socalled Wilshire
district. The right arm of the semicircle, more slender than the left,
curled crookedly eastward along Venice Boulevard, in places only a few
blocks wide. It severed the downtown district from the manufacturing
area, crossing the river near the Ninth Street bridge and swallowing the
great Searsroebuck store like a capsule. The office of the _Daily
Intelligencer_, like the Civic Center, was unthreatened and able to
function, but we were without water and gas, though the electric
service, subject to annoying interruptions, was still available.

Already arrangements were being completed to move the paper to Pomona,
where the mayor and councilmanic offices also intended to continue. For
there was no hiding the fact that the city was being surrendered to the
weed. Eastward and southward the homeless and the alarmed journeyed
carrying the tale of a city besieged and gutted in little more than the
time it would have taken a human army to fight the necessary
preliminaries and bring up its big guns.

On trains and buses, by bicycles and on foot, the exodus moved. Those
who could afford it left their ravished homes swiftly behind by air and
to these fortunate ones the way north was not closed, as it was to the
earthbound, by the weed's overrunning of the highways. Usedcardealers
sold out their stocks at inflated figures and a ceilingprice had to be
put on the gasoline supplied to those retreating from the grass.

Though only a fragment of the city had been lost, all industry had come
to a practical standstill. Workers did not care to leave homes which
might be grassbound by nightfall; employers could not manufacture
without backlog of materials, for a dwindling market, and without
transportation for their products. Services were so crippled as to be
barely existent and with the failure of t