John Christopher - The Death of Grass

She stared at him, for once in undisguised dislike. “How can you!”

Roger stared back. “We once agreed about my being a throwback—remember? If I irritate the people round me, don’t forget they may irritate me occasionally. Woolly-mindedness does. I believe in self-preservation, and I’m not prepared to wait until the knife is at my throat before I start fighting. I don’t see the sense in giving the children’s last crust to a starving beggar.”

“Last crust…’ Ann looked at the table, covered with the remains of a lavish tea. “Is that what you call this?”

Roger said: “If I were giving the orders in this country, there wouldn’t have been any cake for the past three months, and precious little bread either. And I still wouldn’t have had any grain to spare for the Asiatics. Good God! Don’t you people ever look at the economic facts of this country?”

“If we stand by and let those millions starve without lifting a finger to help, then we deserve to have the same happen to us,” Ann said.

“Do we?” Roger asked. “Who are we? Should Mary and Davey and Steve die of starvation because I’m callous?”

Olivia said: “I really think it’s best not to talk about it. It isn’t as though there’s anything we can do about it—we ourselves, anyway. We must just hope things don’t turn out quite so badly.”

“According to the latest news,” John said, “they’ve got something which gives very good results against Phase 5.”

“Exactly!” Ann said. “And that being so, what justification can there possibly be for not sending help to the East? That we might have to be rationed next summer?”

“Very good results,” Roger said ironically. “Did you know they’ve uncovered three further phases, beyond 5? Personally, I can see only one hope—holding out till the virus dies on its own account, of old age. They do sometimes. Whether there will be a blade of grass left to re-start things with at that stage is another thing again.”

Olivia bent down, looking at the lawn on which their chairs rested.

“It’s hard to believe,” she said, “isn’t it—that it really does kill all the grass where it gets a foothold?”

Roger plucked a blade of grass, and held it between his fingers and thumb.

“I’ve been accused of having no imagination,” he said. “That’s not true, anyway. I can visualize the starving Indians, all right. But I can also visualize this land brown and bare, stripped and desert, and children here chewing the bark off trees.”

For a while they all sat silent; a silence of speech, but accompanied by distant bird-song and the excited happy cries of the children.

John said: “We’d better be getting back. I’ve got the car to go over. I’ve been putting it off too long as it is.” He called out for Mary and David. “It may never happen, Rodge, you know.”

Roger said: “I’m as slack as the rest of you. I should be getting into training by learning unarmed combat, and the best way to slice the human body into its constituent joints for roasting. As it is, I just sit around.”

On their way home, Ann said suddenly:

“It’s a beastly attitude to take up. Beastly!”

John nodded his head, warningly, towards the children.

Ann said: “Yes, all right. But it’s horrible.”

“He talks a lot,” John said. “It doesn’t mean anything, really.”

“I think it does.”

“Olivia was right, you know. There isn’t anything we can do individually. Just wait and see, and hope for the best.”

“Hope for the best? Don’t tell me you’ve started taking notice of his gloomy prophecies!”

Not answering immediately, John looked at the scattering autumn leaves and the neat suburban grass. The car travelled past a place where, for a space of ten or fifteen yards, the grass had been uprooted, leaving bare earth: another minor battlefield in the campaign against Phase 5.

“No, I don’t think so, really. It couldn’t happen, could it?”

As autumn settled into winter, the news from the East steadily worsened. First India, then Burma and Indo-China relapsed into famine and barbarism. Japan and the eastern states of the Soviet Union went shortly afterwards, and Pakistan erupted into a desperate wave of Western conquest which, composed though it was of starving and unarmed vagabonds, reached into Turkey before it was halted.

Those countries which were still relatively unaffected by the Chung-Li virus, stared at the scene with a barely credulous horror. The official news accentuated the size of this ocean of famine, in which any succour could be no more than a drop, but avoided the question of whether food could in fact be spared to help the victims. And those who agitated in favour of sending supplies were a minority, and a minority increasingly unpopular as the extent of the disaster penetrated more clearly, and its spread to the Western world was more clearly envisaged.

It was not until near Christmas that grain ships sailed for the East again. This followed the heartening news from the southern hemisphere that in Australia and New Zealand a vigilant system of inspection and destruction was keeping the virus under control. The summer being a particularly brilliant one, there were prospects of a harvest only a little below average.

With this news came a new wave of optimism. The disaster in the East, it was explained, had been due as much as anything to the kind of failure in thoroughness that might be expected of Asiatics. It might not be possible to keep the virus out of the fields altogether, but the Australians and New Zealanders had shown that it could be held in check there. With a similar vigilance, the West might survive indefinitely on no worse than short commons {47} 47 commons, short: reduced rations of food . Meanwhile, the laboratory fight against the virus was still on. Every day was one day nearer the moment of triumph over the invisible enemy. It was in this atmosphere of sober optimism that the Custances made their customary trip northwards, to spend Christmas in Blind Gill.

On their first morning, John walked out with his brother on the rounds of the farm.

They encountered the first bare patch less than a hundred yards from the farm-house. It was about ten feet across; the black frozen soil stared nakedly at the winter sky.

John went over it curiously, and David followed him.

“Have you had much of it up here?” John asked.

“Perhaps a dozen like this.”

The grass around the verges of the gash, although frost-crackled, was clearly sound enough.

“It looks as though you’re holding it all right.”

David shook his head. “Doesn’t mean anything. There’s a fair degree of evidence that the virus only spreads in the growing season, but nobody knows whether that means it can remain latent in the plant in the non-growing season, or not God knows what spring will bring. A good three-quarters of my own little plague spots were end-of-season ones.”

Then you aren’t impressed by the official optimism?”

David jerked his stick towards the bare earth. “I’m impressed by that.”

They’ll beat it They’re bound to.”

“There was an Order-in-Council {48} 48 Order-in-Council: sovereign’s order on some matter of administration, given on the advice of the Privy Council (body of advisers to the sovereign) ,” David said, “stating that all land previously cropped with grain should be turned over to potatoes.”

John nodded. “I heard of it.”

“It’s just been cancelled. On the News last night.”

They must be confident things are going to be all right.”

David said grimly: “They can be as confident as they like. Next spring I’m planting potatoes and beet.”