l
was justified in his strictures. The war was entirely static. With fear
of raids by marauding aircraft allayed, the only remaining uneasiness of
the public had been whether the words "heavier than air craft" covered
robot or V bombs. But when weeks had passed without these dreadful
missiles whistling downward, this anxiety also went and the country
settled down to enjoy a wartime prosperity as pleasant, notwithstanding
the fiftyhour week, rationing, and the exorbitant incometax, as the
peacetime panic had been miserable. In my own case Consolidated Pemmican
was quoted at 38 and I was on my way, in spite of all hampering
circumstances, to reap the benefits of foresight and industry. Unique
among great combats, not a shot had so far been exchanged and everyone,
except cranks, began to look upon the academic conflict as an unalloyed
benefit.

Gradually the war began leaving the frontpages, military analysts found
themselves next to either the chessproblems, Today's Selected Recipe, or
the weekly horoscope; people once more began to concern themselves with
the grass. It now extended in a vast sweep from a point on the Mexican
coast below the town of Mazatlan, northward along the slope of the Rocky
Mountains up into Canada's Yukon Province. It was wildest at its point
of origin, covering Southern California and Nevada, Arizona and part of
New Mexico, and it was narrowest in the north where it dabbled with
delicate fingers at the mouth of the Mackenzie River. It had spared
practically all of Alaska, nearly all of British Columbia, most of
Washington, western Oregon and the seacoast of northern California.

Why it surged up to the Rockies and not over them when it had conquered
individually higher mountains was not understood, but people were quick
once more to take hope and remember the plant's normal distaste for cold
or think there was perhaps something in the rarefied atmosphere to
paralyze the seeds or inhibit the stolons, so preventing further
progress. Even through the comparatively low passes it came at such a
slow pace methods tried fruitlessly in Los Angeles were successful in
keeping it back. Everyone was quite ready to wipe off the Far West if
the grass were going to spare the rest of the country.

General Thario's indiscreet letters kept coming. If anything, they
increased in frequency, indiscretion, and length as his continued
frustration in securing a field command was added to his helpless wrath
at the gen