(based on the series "The Second Black Plague" by the same author)

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the human race was devastated by the most lethal plague in recorded history, respiratory disintegration syndrome (also known as "Morgan’s disease" or "the Rome virus"). Over the course of eight years that relentless contagion wiped out entire countries and sent humanity to the brink of extinction before a cure for the virus was finally found in the laboratory of a biologist sheltering in the jungles of Hawaii. Now suppose for just a minute that the aforementioned scientist had never existed and the nightmare scenarios people had been envisioning at the peak of the global RDS epidemic became reality....

From the logbook of the second New Zealand Special Scientific Expedition to North America, entry dated January 8^th, 1971(continued):

repair. The radio signal we had previously deduced to have been transmitted

by a survivor of the wretched RDS plague has instead turned out to be nothing

more than an automatic homing beacon which short-circuited and died shortly

after the scouting party found it. The beacon, originally built as a navigational

aid for fishing ships in the waters around these islands, had apparently been left

operational by the island’s last surviving inhabitants in what ultimately proved a

vain hope of rescue…

From the January 9^th, 1971 Auckland Daily Mail:

Radio Signal Found To Be Old Navigational Beacon

From Mr. L’s final diary entry, written January 11^th, 1971:

I read the Daily Mail two days ago…I’m going to lock myself in the bathroom, put my

gun to my head and blow my brains out. It’s the only way I can think of to make the

pain stop…

From the January 13^th, 1971 Auckland Daily Mail:

From the logbook of the second New Zealand Special Scientific Expedition to North America, entry dated January 15^th, 1971:

Morale in our ranks is dreadfully low, and I’m afraid it may sink still lower….three

members of our expedition have already committed suicide and two others have

admitted to contemplating suicide. To make matters worse, we’ve lost radio contact

with Auckland….

From an editorial in the January 18^th, 1971 issue of the Auckland Daily Mail:

newspaper effective immediately. Our battle to survive the chaos of the worldwide Morgan’s

pandemic is coming to an end, and it is now apparent we are doomed to lose that battle…

From the logbook of the second New Zealand Special Scientific Expedition to North America, entry dated January 22^nd, 1971:

have taken to fighting among themselves. In my more optimistic moments I had been

hoping that if worst came to worst we might establish a colony here to act as a sort

of nucleus for rebuilding the human race, but that appears less and less likely every

day….

From the January 26th entry:

deserted us to form their own separate camp in the Hawaiian interior; our situation has

now come to disturbingly resemble that of the boys in Lord of the Flies….

From a sign posted outside the town hall in Geelong, Australia on February 2^nd, 1971:

CLOSED EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

From a secret communiqué to the New Zealander provisional government dated February 8^th, 1971:

Australia’s lead and begin making so-called ‘suicide kits’ available to our fellow countrymen who wish to

spare themselves the agonies that inevitably accompany the onset of RDS…

From a sign posted outside a hospital in Adelaide, Australia on February 11^th, 1971:

SUICIDE KITS AVAILABLE WITH PROOF OF IDENTITY

From the logbook of the second New Zealand Special Scientific Expedition to North America, entry dated February 15^th, 1971:

killed and five wounded while the enemy-- how shocking it still is to me to think of some

of my former colleagues that way! --lost seven dead and twelve injured. Much of our

scientific equipment has been rendered useless…

From the February 18^th entry:

Our camp has been attacked again, this time by wild animals….our casualties are

four dead, seven injured, three missing….

From a suicide note by the Hobart, Tasmania chief of police dated February 25^th, 1971:

wants my service pistol after I’m gone is perfectly welcome to it…I’ve got no more

use for the damned thing....

From a directive by the acting chief of staff of the Australian army dated March 3^rd, 1971:

ALICE SPRINGS ARE INSTRUCTED TO WITHDRAW FROM THERE WITHOUT FURTHER

DELAY....

From a letter by the mayor of Brisbane, Australia to municipal workers dated March 10^th, 1971:

subject yourselves any longer to the hazards you now face in attempting to discharge your duties. Therefore,

I hereby release you from your responsibilities effective noon today….

From the logbook of the second New Zealand Special Scientific Expedition to North America, entry dated March 16^th, 1971:

suicide, succumbed to illness, or been killed by animals have become casualties of the

dissident camps’ increasingly bold raids on our settlement; we, in turn, have killed a

good many of the dissidents in defense of our own camp. I suspect there will be no

one left alive in either camp within six months….

From the March 24^th entry:

God help me, I’ve taken sick! During a routine medical examination a few hours

ago I learned that I have apparently contracted mosquito-borne malaria, and as

there are very few medicines of any kind available to us now and none for treating

malaria, it is sadly inevitable that I will be dead within the next week or so, if not

 sooner. I rue the day I agreed to take part in this wretched expedition....

From the April 8^th entry:

left in our camp now. The dissidents, who themselves number less than twenty at

this point, have ironically suffered a few desertions from their own ranks within the

past 72 hours…

From a suicide note by the mayor of Auckland, New Zealand dated April 12^th, 1971:

my duty to see to the welfare of my citizens…

From the logbook of the second New Zealand Special Scientific Expedition to North America, entry dated April 20^th, 1971:

dissident camps numbering less than fifteen. Our original expedition leader died

of heart failure late last night, and the rest of us will no doubt perish in our turn

soon enough; what started in a spirit of hope and scientific inquiry is ending in

division, acrimony, and death. For all I know, we may be the last remnant of the

human race on this earth....

From a sign left outside a Melbourne church on May 5^th, 1971:

Not a very pretty picture, is it? Yet this might have been the fate of the world had the men and

women of the second New Zealand Special Scientific Expedition to North America not had the

good fortune to encounter the refugee biologist who invented the Lazarus-2 vaccine that ultimately

stopped the Second Black Plague and has since become the primary medicine for treating or

preventing respiratory disintegration syndrome. One Sydney University biologist has estimated

that if left unchecked, the Rome virus would have wiped out the last remnants of the human race

by 1973.

Now let’s borrow a page from the old EC sci-fi comics of the early ‘50s and imagine that an extraterrestrial archeologist has landed on the now-deserted Earth a century after the global RDS pandemic began. His homeworld has until now been picking up broadcast signals from this tiny blue planet on the outer edges of known space, but for reasons he is not yet aware of those signals have gradually slowed down and then stopped; he and his survey party diligently probe the planet to see if any trace remains of the beings responsible for the transmissions, but wherever they go they only find skeleton after skeleton. Further investigation suggests that this world has been depopulated as the result of an as-yet unknown disease which was invariably fatal to all those who contracted it. How will the archeologist’s report on his preliminary findings describe this once-teeming planet now devoid of all intelligent life? Probably something like this…

There still remains much work to be done in translating the languages and sub-dialects of the extinct

alien race that once inhabited this world, but from what we do know it is becoming clear that the disease

which ultimately caused their demise was beyond the ability of their medical technology to cope with

and that it spread across this planet with alarming swiftness….Regrettably, we have as yet been unable

to obtain any actual samples of the virus responsible for the disaster…

It is also clear that the inhabitants of this planet were beginning to take the first tentative steps towards

a long-term spaceflight capability before all space travel research by its people was halted due to the

spread of what the aliens’ own records call "the Rome virus". We will never know what they might

have achieved had they not been annihilated by this lethal contagion, but the groundwork had certainly

laid for a concerted effort to chart the skies beyond their own world.

The process which led to the extermination of this world’s inhabitants by the virus appears to have

played out over a span of at least seven or eight solar years....Had their air and ground transport craft

been a bit more technologically sophisticated, the disease might have been able to spread even faster;

it is an established scientific fact that long-distance travelers infected with a given illness can carry it with

them and infect others with frightening ease. A larger number of travelers between the various nation-

states of this world would have, in my estimation at least, led to a corresponding acceleration of the

Rome virus’ proliferation across this planet.

If I might be allowed make a purely subjective observation at this point, it is my judgement that the

demise of this civilization constitutes a great tragedy in the history of intelligent life. Though further

investigation is needed before a final conclusion can be made about the intellectual capacity of the

extinct alien species, what evidence I’ve been able to examine so far suggest that this civilization was

on the verge of starting an era of technological advancement and scientific inquiry that, given time,

might have made them a valuable addition to the interstellar community. That era was unfortunately

stillborn due to the ravages of the virus, and we are left to ponder the empty shell of a society cut down

before its prime...

Our world an intergalactic Pompeii.…a chilling idea, yet that one might have become reality had the Lazarus-2 serum had never been invented. The creation of the vaccine that ultimately rescued humanity from the global RDS pandemic was, to borrow a phrase from the Duke of Wellington, "a near-run thing"; absent that creation, you would probably not be alive to read this and I wouldn’t be alive to write it. As it is, the human race has spent the past four-plus decades struggling to rebuild the civilization that was decimated by the Rome virus.

In 2009 the world will mark the 45^th anniversary of the first RDS outbreak; in its battle to defend humanity against a recurrence of dangerous pandemics, medical science is laboring at a bit of a disadvantage given the blows dealt to scientific progress in the early years of the RDS plague. But with time and diligent effort, doctors may yet succeed in reconstructing the immunological lines of defense that before the plague were an integral part of human society.

THE END