To Nordenholt himself the situation must have been a terrible one; for Elsa was closer to him than any other human being could ever be: and the position now was worse even than if he had lost her entirely. I am sure that he had never felt anything more than affection for her; but she had become more to him, perhaps, just for that reason. I often used to think that they formed natural complements for one another: he with his great build and powerful personality, she with her slender grace and her character, strong as his own, perhaps, but in a far different sphere.
It was about this period B. diazotans began to die out from the face of the world which it had wrecked. I have already told how Nordenholt had given me the news when it was still a possibility of the future. From their studies upon isolated colonies of the microbe, the bacteriologists had predicted its end. They had found a rapid falling-off in its power of multiplication; and the segregation of a number of the pests soon led to their perishing.
When it became clear that B. diazotans was doomed, Nordenholt began to send out scouting aeroplanes to collect samples of soil from various districts and bring them back to the laboratories of the Nitrogen Area where they could be examined. All told the same tale of extinction. Gradually, the aeroplanes were sent further and further on their journeys into the stricken lands; and at last it became clear that as far as a large part of Europe was concerned, the terror was at an end. The soil, of course, was completely ruined; but there was little to fear in the way of a recrudescence of the blight.
It seems, nowadays, very strange that we had not already foreseen this result; for the cause of it lay upon the surface of things. Once the denitrifying bacteria had destroyed all the nitrogen compounds in the soil, there was nothing left for them to live upon; and they perished of starvation in their turn, following in the track of all the larger organisms which their depredations had ruined.
As soon as Nordenholt had established the definite decease of B. diazotans in the accessible parts of the European continent, he sent out the news to the whole remaining world with which he was in touch through his wireless installation; and after some time had been spent in various centres in which the remnants of humanity were gathered together, word came back from the most widely-separated areas that all over the world B. diazotans had ceased to exist. In many places it had even left no traces of any kind behind it; for as some of the bacteria died their bodies, being nitrogenous, had served as food for those still living; until at last the merest trace of their organisms was all that could be found in the soil.
So this plague passed from the world as swiftly as it came; and its passing left the future more certain than seemed possible in the early stages of its career.
But if our gravest danger was thus removed, we in the Nitrogen Area had other troubles which were nearer to us at that time. In his very earliest calculations, Nordenholt, as I have told, had foreseen that disease would be prevalent owing to the monotony of the diet which was entailed by our conditions. The lack of fresh vegetables and the use of salted meat gave rise to scurvy, which we endeavoured to ward off by manufacturing a kind of synthetic lime juice for the population. The success of this was not complete, however, and the disease caused a very marked falling-off in the productive power of our labour. For a time it seemed as though we were actually losing ground in our factories, just at the moment when the destruction of the denitrifying bacteria had raised our hopes to a high degree.
Nor was scurvy our only trouble. The debilitated health of the people laid them open to all sorts of minor diseases, with their concomitant decline in physical energy. Of these, the most serious was a new type of influenza which ravaged the Nitrogen Area and caused thousands of deaths. Here again, a fall in output coincided with the growth and spread of the disease; but since the death-roll was a heavy one, the number of mouths diminished markedly as well; so that it almost appeared as though the two factors might balance each other. If there were less food in the future, there would be fewer people to consume it.
I think the period of the influenza epidemic was one of the most trying of all in the Nitrogen Area. As the reported cases increased in number, individual medical attention became impossible; for many doctors died of the scourge, and we could not risk the total annihilation of the medical profession. Treatment of the disease was standardised as far as possible and committed to the care of rapidly-trained laymen. Possibly this led to many deaths which might have been avoided with more efficient methods; but it was the only means which would leave us with a supply of trained medical men who would be required in the future.
On the heels of the influenza epidemic, and possibly produced by it, came a period of labour unrest in the Area. It was only what I had always anticipated; for the strain which we were putting upon the workers had now increased almost to the breaking point. There was no way out
