Page:Weird Tales Volume 36 Number 06 (1942-07).djvu/46

 about what lies on the other side of our neighbor's walls or on the back of the mirror moon of which no one has ever seen aught but the face it turns toward us?"

"I am disinterested in the quality of death," Ah Chow said hesitantly. "All my attention is focused on the color and the taste of life."

"Alas, that so little of the repast remains. Soon the mountains of the moon will spew forth their secret, if in eternity man may visualize all that encompasses the universe. You have been my-guests at a feast. I am gratified that the viands were so well prepared, otherwise you would not have partaken of them so lavishly. But without your knowledge there was a condiment mixed with the food, which though tasteless, gave it a certain piquancy. That condiment was a subtle poison. Be not disturbed, however, even as it was tasteless, its effects will be without pain. As a final course at my table, I give you death."

ONG SEE LO made an effort to speak but no sound came from his dry lips. His yellow face blanched into a greenish ashen tinge.

"Be not disturbed, my friend," Dr. Shen Fu repeated. "You will be able to endure death far more easily than you have endured life. In death there will be no necessity for treachery. There will be no advantage to starve the throngs who work in your factories, for you will have no factories."

"But I do not want to die," Wong See Lo declared firmly. "Death may have all the attraction you claim for it, but I am in no hurry. I am content to jog slowly along the road of life without any unnecessary impulse."

Said Ah Chow, "I shun death with the same fervor I would shun a morbid disease."

"You are guilty of wrong thinking," Shen Fu told him. "Being a doctor of medicine I can assure you it is life that is the disease; death is the cure."

Sudden panic seized Ah Chow. "My fingers are growing cold!"

"The fruit of distorted imagination," commented Dr. Shen Fu.

"My feet are numb!" broke in Wong See Lo.

Dr. Shen Fu sighed. "Why not attempt to live your last hours gracefully?"

"Is there nothing we can do?" Ah Chow pleaded. "Must we sit here and do nothing?"

"Nothing?" reflected Dr. Shen Fu. "Nothing? Truly a strange term to use when you are dying. How, then, could you be more gainfully employed?"

Dr. Shen Fu gazed at his guests through half-closed eyes, as though they were beetles in some weird experiment. It was interesting to watch their reactions. Now perhaps the feast was salted with regret. Too late they realized that they were unwise when they perpetrated frauds on the eminent doctor.

"Death is the only exalted place we attain without effort," he mused. "It is man's supreme destiny. Why toil?"

"Would that I were a begger," said Ah Chow. "Then this would not have happened to me."

"Wisdom flows from your lips; truly no begger ever partakes of such a feast."

"Hunger is a blessing," sighed Ah Chow. "How I wish I could enjoy it at this moment."

"When the stomach is full," observed Dr. Shen Fu, "it is easy to be a philosopher."

Although Wong See Lo did not want to die, he fretted over the weary hours that he must endure ere death caught up with