ime I got my weekly salary; at any event, moved by
an unaccountable impulse I took the two checks to a barbershop where,
perhaps incongruously, a wellknown firm of Los Angeles stockbrokers had
quartered themselves. I forced the checks upon a troubledlooking
individual--too taciturn to be mistaken for the barber--and mumbling,
"Buy me all the shares of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates
this will cover," hurried out before sober thought could cause me to
change my mind.

For certainly this was no investment my cool judgment would approve, but
the wildest hunch, causing me to embark on what was no less than a
speculation. I went back to the desk I shared with ten others, bitterly
regretting the things I might have bought with the money and berating
myself for my rashness. Only the abnormal pressure of events could have
made me yield to so irrational an impulse.

In the meantime things happened fast. Barely had the tardiest
_Intelligencer_ employees got away when the enveloping jaws of the weed
closed tight, catching millions of dollars' worth of property within.
The project to bomb the grass out of existence, dormant for some weeks,
could no longer be denied.

Even its most ardent advocates, however, now conceded reluctantly that
ordinary explosives would be futile--more than futile, an assistance to
the growth by scattering the propagating fragments. For the first time
people began talking openly of using the outlawed atomicbomb.

The instant response to this suggestion was an overwhelming opposition.
The President, Congress, the Army, Navy and public opinion generally
agreed that the weapon was too terrible to use in so comparatively
trivial a cause.

But the machinery for some type of bombing had been set in motion and
had to be used. The fuel was stored, the airfields jammed, all available
planes, new, old, obsolescent and obsolete assembled, and for three days
and nights the great fleets shuttled backandforth over the jungled area,
dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs. Following close behind,
still more planes dropped cargoes of fuel to feed the colossal bonfire.

Inverted lightning flashes leapt upward, and after them great, rolling
white, yellow, red and blue flames. The smoke, the smell of roasting
vegetation, the roar and crackle of the conflagration, and the heat
engendered were all noticeable as far away as Capistrano and Santa
Barbara.

Down from the sky, through the surface of the