The Question of the Zhang

"I must ask - question," the Zhang told his listeners, coughing, dying. "If you run half the time, and walk half the time, how long does it take to get there?"

"...what?" his foremost interrogator asked. But the Zhang was already dead.

One of the torturers swore a foul and most un-Mormonic oath. But the head interrogator, after a moment's thought, was undeterred.

"He never told us the location of the hidden Rebel base," the head interrogator confessed. "But if we can figure out the answer to this question, then we'll know how to get there!"

All the interrogators sat there for a while, sitting in hard wooden chairs arranged about the corpse of a Zhang, musing on the answer to his strange, koan-like query. They broke for prayer, came back, thought some more; and still they could not come up with a reasonable solution.

"42?" one suggested, apropos of nothing.

"WRONG WRONG TOTALLY WRONG,"* the ghost of the Zhang retorted.

"Wait, there's a ghost in here?" the head inquisitor remarked in surprise. "Hey, ghost - give us a hint! Toss us a bone! Something! We're more stumped than the national parks under the Bush administration!*"

"LOOK IT'S LIKE THIS" the Zhang-ghost said, exasperated. "YOU'VE GOT THREE CONSTANTS - DISTANCE, RUNNING SPEED, AND WALKING SPEED - AND YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO RELATE THEM TO TIME - IT'S NOT THAT TRICKY GUYS"

"Oh!" one of the inquisitors remarked. "It's just math!"

The head inquisitor passed out pads of paper and pencils. They set to work.

The problem was not overly difficult; several of them confirmed the same answer. They approached the ghost with their result: "Is it twice distance, divided by the sum of running speed and walking speed?"

"YEP THAT'S IT," the ghost told them. "WELL DONE IT TOOK ME LONGER"

There was a pause.

"How did that help us find the hidden Rebel base?" one of the inquisitors asked.

The Zhang-Ghost just cackled and vanished. Cruel, deceitful Zhang-ghost!

He's worse than Coyote!

*Ghosts are forbidden by the Vatican from using periods and most commas. It's just the latest tragedy of their sorry existences!
**Politico-zing!