eers to the last, but as their flights went on the Grass crept into
British Honduras. The workers sent another twenty miles of Panama into
nothingness and the Grass completed the conquest of Guatemala. They blew
up another ten miles and the Grass took over El Salvador. Dynamite
widened the Nicaragua Canal to a ridiculously thin barrier as the Grass
overran Honduras.

They stood now almost facetoface, the width of one pitiful little Banana
Republic between them. On one hand the Grass, funneled and constricted
to a strip of land absurdly inadequate to support its gargantuan might,
on the other the combined resources of man, desperately determined to
destroy the bridge before the invader. In tropic heat the work was kept
up at superhuman pace. Gangs of native laborers fainting under their
loads were blown skyhigh by impatient technicians unwilling to waste the
time necessary to revive them. In selfdefense the South American states
doubled their contributions. At the edge of the weed all the offensive
weapons of the world were massed to stay it as long as possible, for
even a day's--even an hour's delay might be invaluable.

But the Grass overbore the heavy artillery, the flamethrowers, the
bombs, the radium, and all the devices in its path. The inventions of
war whose constant improvement was the pride of the human race offered
no more obstacle to the Grass than a few anthills might to a herd of
stampeding elephants. It swept down to the edge of the ditch and paused
at the fiftymile stretch of saltwater between it and the shapeless
island still offering the temptation of a foothold in front of the now
vastly enlarged Panama Canal.

If those engaged in the task, from coordinator-in-chief down to the
sweating waterboys, had worked like madmen before, they worked like
triple madmen now, for the wind might blow a single seed onto what had
been Costa Rica and undo all they had so far accomplished. The
explosions were continuous, rocking the diminishing territory with
ceaseless earthquakes. After an hour on the job men reeled away,
deafened, blinded and shocked.

On the South American side, as had been planned, great supercyclone fans
were set up to blow back any errant seed. Fed by vast hydroelectric
plants in the Colombian highlands, the noise of their revolving blades
drowned out the sounds of the explosions for all those nearby. The
oceans became interested participants and enormously high tides possibly
caused by the di