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 t