eir pique upon
those to the west.

As the starving and destitute trickled into Europe and North Africa,
giving a hint of the flood to follow, I congratulated myself on the
foresight which led to our retrenchment, for I know these ravening
hordes would have devoured the property of Consolidated Pemmican with as
little respect as they did the scant store of Ah Que, Ram Singh or
Mohammed Ali. My chief concern was now to keep my industrial and
organizational machinery intact against the day when a stable market
could again be established. To this end I kept our vast staff of
researchworkers--exempt from the draft of the World Government which had
been quite reasonable in the matter--constantly busy, for every day's
delay in the arresting of the Grass meant a dead loss of profits.

_87._ Josephine Francis alone, and as always, proved completely
uncooperative. Undoubtedly much of her stubbornness was due to her sex;
the residue, to her unorthodox approach to the mysteries of science.
When I prodded her for results she snarled she was not a slotmachine.
When I pointed out tactfully that only my money made possible the
continuation of her efforts, she told me rudely to seek the Wailing Wall
in Jerusalem before it was covered by the Grass. Again and again I urged
her to give me some idea how long it would be before she could produce a
chemical even for experimental use against the Grass and each time she
turned me aside with insult or rude jest.

I had set her up in--or rather, to be more accurate, she had insisted
upon--a completely equipped and isolated laboratory in Surrey. As it was
convenient to my Hampshire place I dropped in almost daily upon her; but
I cannot say my visits perceptibly quickened her lethargy.

"Worried, Weener?" she asked me, absently putting down a coffeepot on a
stack of microscope slides. "_Cynodon dactylon_'ll eat gold and
banknotes, drillpresses and openhearths as readily as quartz and mica,
dead bodies and abandoned household goods."

I couldnt resist the opening. "Anything in fact," I pointed out, "except
salt."

"A Daniel!" she exclaimed. "A Daniel come to judgment. Oh, Weener, thou
shouldst have been born a chemist. And what is the other mistake? Give
me leave to throw away my retorts and testtubes and bunsen burners by
revealing the other element besides sodium _Cynodon dactylon_ refuses.
For every mistake there is another mistake which supplements it. Sodium
was the blindspot in the Me