Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 6 (1925-06).djvu/69

The features of each were haughtily cold. The men seemed aloof from the emotions that leap like fire in the breasts of other men. Their tightly compressed lips told plainly that love and its kindred emotions were strangers to them. They were not exactly cruel, at least not with the cruelty of wishing to give pain for pain's sake, but their coldness was heartless, like that of a surgeon working over some living animal at the dissecting table.

They were of all races under the sun. Color or creed did not seem to weigh in their estimation. Nearly all of the faces were long and narrow up to the eyes; above the eyes the head bulged sharply out, while the forehead in each case towered straight up. Although they were of all races, yet they seemed alike in physical characteristics. Mentally, they were giants; their tremendous power of intellect shone from their eyes in streams of zero-cold light.

The one near the altar, or oblong block of yellow metal, abruptly ceased speaking and moved back to a chair behind the altar. He was the youngest. For a few minutes a deep silence reigned. Then one uttered a word to a neighbor; another asked a question of one in the row in front of him; and one by one they began to speak to each other, until they were all speaking at once. Their voices rose higher and higher.

An elderly man with a snow-white beard stood up and snapped out a few words. They all ceased speaking and turned their glowing eyes upon him. With a marked foreign accent he addressed them slowly in English. I dimly grasped the meaning of what he was saying.

"Fellow members of the supreme council of the Society of Man," he began, "you all know that this earth, but an infinitesimal speck in the boundless universe, will soon be too small to hold the hordes of man in comfort. Man is increasing everywhere with astounding rapidity. Hitherto it was the custom of man, on finding that his country was overcrowded, to emigrate to the colonies of his country or to some foreign land that was sparsely populated, a wilder, more virgin land, and grow up with it; but that will soon be impossible, for each land is fast becoming overcrowded and immigration will soon be forbidden.

"It has even been predicted that man will soon live in subterranean cities. Man will have to take his cities off the earth's surface down into the bowels of the earth, for each square inch will soon be needed for the production of food stuffs. Man has already started in that general direction by living in abandoned coal mines. He will burrow deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth before many years have passed. But even down there he can only go so far; the earth grows hotter the farther he descends below a certain level.

"One of the chief reasons for this state of affairs is the rapid advancement in the field of medicine. Births have long since left deaths behind, and plagues that so quickly thinned the ranks of mankind are not so common now, nor so deadly as they were up to the period that immediately followed the great World War. And owing to the rapid mode of transportation and the humane instinct that we now feel toward our fellow men when they are in trouble, famine is almost unknown. In this great war that man is waging against his arch enemy, premature death, we, too, have aided, but secretly, and individually, not openly as the members of our secret society.

"One of the outstanding laws of our society is: 'The use of this glorious society for the gratification of personal desires and ambitions is pun-