Part 7
At that moment I deeply regretted knowing no Russian. The twenty one who came in talked among themselves in short sentences. They saw us, but ignored us. Baker spoke, first in English and then in German. The one called Stalin understood the German, for he looked at Baker searchingly for a moment, and then turned away. Only one of them replied. This was Malik, the man who wrecked the old United Nations and then became Foreign Minister after Vishinsky was murdered. He ignored the German and spat out his reply in English.
"You will not live to gloat over us. He will kill you too, all of you!"
We can never be sure of what Kazu planned, because now--and of this I am certain--his plans changed. There was suddenly a stillness. We waited. Then I ran to the window and looked upward into the great face.
It had changed. A deep weariness and a bewilderment was upon it--as though Kazu had suddenly sickened of destruction and slaughter. His whispering was the roaring of winds as he said, "No--no. This is not the way--not Buddha's way. They must talk. They must understand each other. They must sit at tables and settle their differences, that is my mission."
Kazu took five steps. Below us was an airfield.
"Can you fly?" he asked us. Chamberlin had been an army pilot in the fifties. Kazu pushed the box up to a transport, an American DC8.
"Go in this," he said quite clearly. "Go in this plane until you are in Washington. Tell America about me. Tell America I am coming--that I am bringing--_them_. Tell America there must be--peace."
We scrambled out of the steel box, leaving the Russians in a miserable heap in one corner.
He arose to his full height and carefully adjusted the cables around his neck. I noticed that his fingers fumbled awkwardly, and that he staggered slightly. Then he spoke once more.
"I cannot cross Atlantic. Only route for Buddha is Siberia, Bering Straight, Alaska. But this not take long. You better hurry or I get to Washington first!"
He turned on his heel and walked a few steps to the end of the runway.
"Now get in plane. I give little help in takeoff!"
We climbed into the familiar interior of the big American transport. A moment later it arose silently, vertically like an elevator. Chamberlin, in the pilot's seat, hurriedly started the engines. He leaned from a window and waved his arm, and we shot forward and upward. For a moment the plane wavered and dipped, taking all of Walt's ability to recover. Then with a powerful roar, the big DC8 zoomed over the flames of Moscow toward the west.
* * * * *
The flight to London and the Atlantic crossing seemed unreal. We lived beside the radio. War and revolt against the Soviets had broken out everywhere. With the directing power in the Kremlin gone, the top-heavy Soviet bureaucracy was paralyzed. The Yugoslavs marched into the Ukraine, Chinese armies occupied Irkutsk and were pressing across Siberia. Internal revolution broke out at a hundred points once it was learned that Moscow was no more.
Eagerly we listened to every report for word of Kazu. At first there was nothing, and then a Chinese plane reported seeing him crossing the Ob River, near the Arctic Circle. They said that he carried a box in his hand and appeared to be talking to it. Then news from the tiny river settlement of Zhigansk on the Lena that he had passed, but that he limped and staggered as he climbed the mountains beyond.
After that, silence.
Planes swarmed over eastern Siberia, the Arctic Coast and Alaska, but found nothing. Five hundred tons of C ration were rushed to Fairbanks, and tons of medical supplies for burns and possible illness were readied, but no patient appeared. At first we were hopeful, knowing Kazu's powers. Perhaps he had lost his way, without Baker and the maps, but surely he could not vanish. As the days passed Baker became more worried.
"It's the radiation," he explained. "He took the full dose of gamma rays right in his back. He might go on for days, and then suddenly keel over. He's had a bad burn outside, but it's nothing to what it did to him internally."
So the days passed, and so gradually hope died. And then, at last, there was news. It came, belatedly, from an eskimo hunter on the Pribolof Islands, in Bering Sea. He reported that a great sea god had come out of the waters, so tall that his head vanished into the clouds. But, he was a sick god, for he could hardly stand, and soon crawled on his hands. Around his neck, said the eskimo, he carried a charm, and he spoke words to this in a strange tongue. And the charm answered him in the same tongue, and with the voice of a man. And the two spoke to each other for a time and then the great one arose and walked off of the island and into the fog and the ocean.
Questioned, the man was somewhat vague as to the exact direction taken, although it seemed clear that Kazu had headed south. When Baker examined his chart of Bering Sea, he found that the ocean to the north and west, towards Siberia, was shallow--less than five hundred feet. But the Pribolofs stood on the edge of a great deep. Only twenty miles south of the islands, the ocean floor dropped off to more than ten thousand feet, for three hundred miles of icy fog shrouded ocean, before the bleak Aleutians arose out of the mists. This desolate area was searched for months by ships and planes, but no trace ever appeared from the treacherous currents of the stormy sea. Kazu had vanished.
So here ended the story of Kazu Takahashi, who was born in the days of the first bomb, and who died by the last ever to sear the world. He was believed by millions to be the incarnation of the Lord Buddha, but to four men he was known not as a god but as a great and good man.
THE END
* * * * *
Transcriber Notes:
This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science Fiction November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
Obvious punctuation errors have been corrected.
Corrections made:
page 6 original: wind, and its damned serious." replacement: wind, and it's damned serious."
page 16 original: first fence, and affair of steel posts replacement: first fence, an affair of steel posts
page 31 original: When Baker as only part-way replacement: When Baker was only part-way
page 34 original: handfulls of the unseasoned stuff, replacement: handfuls of the unseasoned stuff,
Unchanged:
page 16 sculping a king sized Buddha after sculping is an old useage of the word
page 55 Straight, Alaska. But this not Straight is an old useage of the word
End of Project Gutenberg's The Image and the Likeness, by John Scott Campbell