grass, the incendiaries
burned great patches clear to the earth. The weed, which had resisted
fire so contemptuously before, suddenly became inflammable and burned
like celluloid for days. Miles of twisted stems, cleaned of blade and
life, exposed tortured nakedness to aerial reconnoiter. Bald spots the
size of villages appeared, black and smoldering; the shape of the mass
was altered and altered again, but when, long after, the last spark
flickered out and the last ember grew dull, the grass itself, torn and
injured, but not defeated or even noticeably beaten back, remained. It
had been a brilliant performance--and an ineffective one.

The failure of the incendiary bombing not only produced ruefully
triumphant Itoldyousos from disgruntled and doubly outraged
propertyowners, but a new crop of bids for the _Intelligencer_'s reward
to the developer of a saving agent. From suggested emigrations to Mars
and giant magnifying glasses set up to wither the grass with the aid of
the sun, they ranged to projects for cutting a canal clear around the
weed from San Francisco Bay to the Colorado River and letting the
Pacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all
light from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt the
sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll
an atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other
grasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the two
giants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouring
each other. This proposal received such wide popular support there is
reason to believe it got some serious consideration in official
quarters, but it was eventually abandoned on the ground that while it
gave only a single slim chance of success it certainly doubled the
potential growths to contend with. The analogy of a backfire in forest
conflagrations was deemed poetic but inapplicable.

More comparatively prosaic courses included walling in the grass with
concrete; the Great Wall of China was the only work of man visible from
the moon; were Americans to let backward China best them? A concrete
wall only a mile high and half a mile thick could be seen by any curious
astronomer on the planet Venus--assuming Venerians to be afflicted with
terrestrial vices--and would cost no more than a very small war, to say
nothing of employing thousands who would otherwise dissipate the
taxpayers' money on Relief. A v