k 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.

When the Grass was in the Deccan and still well below the Yangtze, the
Athenians were thrown into panic by the rumor it had appeared in
Salonika. At the same time there was wild rejoicing in the streets of
Marseilles based on the belief large stretches of North America had
become miraculously free. The cult of the Grass idolaters flourished
despite the strictest interdictions and great massmeetings were
frequently held during which the worshipers turned their faces toward
the southeast and prayed fervently for speedy immolation. It was quite
useless for the World Government to attempt to spread the actual facts;
the earlier censorship together with a public temper that preferred to
believe the extremes of good or bad rather than the truth of gradual yet
relentless approach, made people heedless of broadcasts rarely received
even by state operated publicaddress systems or of handbills which even
the still literate could not bother to decipher.

The idealization of the Socialist Union--once the Soviet Union-