Olga Romanoff

by George Chetwynd Griffith

There was no sign of physical disease, no apparent source of physical infection, and none of the horrors which characterised the plagues that were decimating the outside world. Those attacked by it went to bed in apparently robust health, and in the morning they were found dead with an expression of perfect peace upon their features and no marks of disease upon their bodies.

That was all that was publicly known. There had been, and, as the President told his son, there would be no inquiry into the cause or origin of the epidemic. Whether those who died died voluntarily, or whether the visitation was a merciful release from the torment and terror of the general doom, it was not for those who survived to ask.

It was enough for them that the Shadow of Death had begun to steal silently and swiftly over the land of the royal race who had raised the dignity of humanity to a height untouched before in the story of man. They were content to know that their friends and kindred were permitted to die in painless peace rather than forced to writhe out their last hours in torture amidst the conflagration of the world.

All day and all night for nearly a month the fires of a hundred crematoria had burned, and day and night the funeral processions had never ceased passing through their gates. The population of Aeria, which had been over a million at the end of July, was now little more than a hundred thousand, and these were hourly dwindling under the mysterious epidemic.

Those who had returned in the Alma and the Isma accepted all without question and applied themselves with all their energy to the performance of the solemn duties that remained to them.

The work in the caverns of Mount Austral was now almost completed, and the minute calculations which had been made had shown that it would be possible for two hundred and fifty souls to find a refuge in them for ten days if necessary.

Sufficient supplies of food had been already stored, the machinery for lighting the caverns was complete, and solid oxygen had been enclosed in steel reservoirs to supply what would be consumed by respiration, while provision had also been made for continually abstracting the carbonic acid and other injurious constituents from the respired air.

Everything that human genius and skill at their best could do to ensure the preservation of this remnant of humanity, had been done, and by the 15th of September the caverns were finally ready for occupation. Only one more task now remained to be completed, and this was the selection of those who were to survive, provided that the precautions taken proved adequate. Unspeakably pathetic as this work of selection was, it was performed with a calm and apparently passionless precision worthy of the unparalleled solemnity of the occasion and the splendid traditions of those who accomplished it.

The field of selection was first narrowed by confining it to those who had been regularly betrothed when the first message was received from Mars. From these first the physically perfect were chosen, then the strongest and the fairest of these, and finally those who to their physical perfections added the highest intellectual and moral qualities.