Kazu walked quite slowly from the battlefield. His gait was unsteady,
and at first we feared that he would collapse. We could not tell how
deep the burns were, nor whether he was internally hurt by the blast. He
appeared to be suffering from some kind of shock, for he did not speak
again for a long time. But gradually he seemed to gather himself
together, and we became almost convinced that the shock was more
psychological than physical, and that even the atom bomb was powerless
against his might.
We did not remain to see the outcome of the battle, but presently Martin
turned the radio on. The news at first was fragmentary. Word that a
Russian plane had atom bombed the new Buddha spread across China, and
with it ended the last shreds of communist prestige. The armies which
had been pro-communist turned on their officers. Mao himself was
murdered on the battlefield before Kazu was out of sight. The former red
defenders of Shanghai massacred twenty thousand hapless Russian
emigrants. All across Asia the story was the same, a terrible revulsion.
At first it was believed that Buddha had died instantly; later rumor had
it that he had crawled off to Mongolia to die.
Radio Moscow at first was silent. The horror of what had been done was
too much even for that well oiled propaganda machine. At last a line was
patched together: the bomb had been dropped by an American plane,
bearing Russian markings. Then Radio Peking announced that Chinese
fighters had shot it down and that the crew was Russian. To this Moscow
could think of only one reply: Radio Peking was lying; the station had
been taken over by the Americans! A little later another Moscow
broadcast announced solemnly that the whole story was wrong--Buddha
hadn't been there at all!
All the time that this confused flood of talk was circling the globe,
Kazu Takahashi, still clinging to the battered steel projection room,
was striding across Siberia, staggering now and then, but still
maintaining a pace of better than three hundred miles per hour.
At first he simply walked westward without any directions from us. By
ten o'clock he had put a thousand miles between him and the coast and
was well across the southern Gobi desert. Now Baker, who had been almost
as stunned as Kazu, began to look into his maps. He had nothing for
central Asia as detailed as the charts we had used in Borneo and
Celebes, but he presently found a small scale map that would do. With
this he identified the snowy range of mountains now towering on our left
as the Nan Shan, northernmost bastion of Tibet. He hurriedly called to
Kazu to turn northwest before he entered the great Tarim Basin, for the
western side of that vast desert was closed by a range of mountains
20,000 feet high. Even with the new course, our altitude would be above
six thousand feet for many miles.
At noon we were paralleling another mighty range, the little known Altai
Mountains, and at one o'clock we passed the Zaisan Nor, the great lake
which forms the headwaters for the Irtysh River. Here Kazu paused for a
drink, and to rinse his burns with fresh water. Then we were away again,
this time due west over more mountain tops, avoiding the inhabited
lowlands. At three-thirty the hills dropped away and there appeared
ahead the infinite green carpet of the Siberian forest. Kazu stopped
again at another lake, which Baker guessed might be Dengiz. At
four-thirty we crossed a wide river which we could not identify, and
then at last commenced to climb into the foothills of the southern
Urals. Just in time Baker discovered that Kazu's course was taking him
straight toward the industrial city of Magnetogorsk. We veered north
again into the higher mountains and then turned east to the forests.
We were sure now that Kazu must be delirious, but after a while he
stopped at the edge of a lake.
"How far are we from Moscow?" he asked.
"Twelve hundred miles, more or less," said Baker. "You can make it by
nine, maybe ten, tonight."
Kazu shook his head.
"No. Tonight I must rest, gather strength. We start two AM, arrive
Kremlin at sunrise. We catch them same time they catch me. No warning
whatever."
Kazu lay down on the swampy lake bottom while we huddled on the floor of
the box, courting sleep which never came.
At one o'clock we at last gave it up, and Baker fired his pistol until
Kazu stirred. While he was awakening we listened to the radio. Things
had calmed down quite a bit, and as we pieced the various broadcasts
together, an amazing realization came over us. Everyone believed that
Kazu was dead! Evidently no word of our trip across all of central Asia
had been received! Search planes, both Soviet and Chinese, were combing
the eastern Gobi for the body.
* * * * *
Other news included a war declaration by China upon the Soviet
Union, and the announcement that the Russian Politbureau had scheduled a
meeting in the Kremlin to consider the emergency.
We passed all of this on to Kazu, whose grim face relaxed for the first
time in a fleeting grin.
"Good reporters. Know what are most savory items. Now guide me well, and
away from towns until we reach it."
The trip across the Urals and the plains of European Russia retains a
nightmare quality in my mind, comparable only with that first night on
Yat. Even Baker, who plotted the course, can remember it little better.
Now and again we caught glimpses of the dim lights in farms, and once we
saw the old moon reflected in the Volga. Much of the low country was
covered with ground fog, which reached to Kazu's waist; this, combined
with the blackout which had been ordered in every town, made observation
by us or the Russians either way difficult. A few people saw Kazu, and
their reports reflect a surrealist madness; those who had the horrifying
experience of suddenly meeting Buddha in the early morning mists were
universally incapable of making any coherent report to the authorities.
And then, just as the ghostly false dawn turned the night into a misty
gray, we saw ahead the towers of Moscow. Now Kazu increased his speed.
Concealment was no longer possible; he must reach the Kremlin ahead of
the warning.
At 500 miles per hour Buddha descended upon Moscow. His plunging feet
reduced block after block of stores and apartment houses to dust, and
the sky behind us was lighted more brightly by the fires he started than
by the dull red of the still unrisen sun. Now at last I heard the tardy
wail of a siren and saw armored cars darting through the streets. On the
roof of an apartment house I glimpsed a crew trying to unlimber an
antiaircraft gun, but Kazu saw it also, and smashed the building to
rubble with a passing kick.
And then we were at the Red Square. St. Basil's at one end, the fifty
foot stone walls of the Kremlin along one side and Lenin's Tomb like a
pile of red children's blocks. Kazu stood for a moment surveying this
famous scene, his feet sunk to the ankle in a collapsed subway. It was
my first view of the Red Square, and somehow I knew that it would be the
last, for anyone. Then Kazu slowly walked to the Kremlin and looked down
into it. I remember how suddenly absurd it all seemed. The Kremlin
walls, the very symbol of the iron curtain, were scarcely six inches
high! The whole thing was only a child's playpen.
But now Kazu had found what he wanted. Without bothering to lift his
feet, he crushed through the walls, reached down and pulled the roof
from one of the buildings. He uncovered a brightly lighted ant-hill.
Like a dollhouse exposed, he revealed rooms and corridors along which
men were running. Kazu dropped to his knees and held our box up so that
we might also see.
"Are these the men?" he asked. Baker replied in the negative.
Kazu abruptly pressed his hand into the building, crushing masonry and
timbers and humans all into a heap of dust, and turned to a larger
building. As he did, something about it seemed familiar to me. Yes, I
had seen it before, in newsreels. It was--
But again Kazu's fingers were at work. Lifting at the eaves, he
carefully took off the whole roof. Through a window we saw figures
hurrying toward a covered bridge connecting this building with another.
At Baker's warning, Kazu demolished the bridge, and then gently began
picking the structure to pieces. In a moment we saw what we were after.
A wall was pulled down, exposing a great room with oil paintings of
Lenin and Stalin on the wall and a long conference table in the center.
And clustered between the table and the far wall were a score of men.
Anyone would have recognized them, for their faces had gone round the
world in posters, magazines and newsreels. They were the men of the
Politbureau. They were Red Russia's rulers.
There was an instant of silent mutual recognition, and then Kazu spoke
to them. As befitting a god, he spoke in their own tongue. Exactly what
he said I do not know, but after a little hesitation they came around
the table to the precarious edge of the room where the outer wall had
been. Kazu gave further directions and held up our steel box. Fearfully
they came forward and jumped the gap into our door. One by one they made
the leap, some dressed in the bemedalled uniforms of marshals, others in
the semi-military tunics affected by civilian ministers. The last was
the man who had succeeded Stalin on his death, and who had taken for
himself the same name, as though it were a title.
As he entered our room, we saw that he even looked like the first
Stalin, clipped hair, moustache and all. He was a brilliant man, we
knew. Brilliant and ruthless. He had grown up through the purges, in a
world which knew no mercy, where only the fittest, by communist
standards, survived. He had survived, because he was merciless and
efficient and because he hated the free west with a hatred that was
deadly and implacable.
* * * * *
I often wonder what his thoughts were at that moment. He came
because he was ordered to and because he knew the alternative. He knew
he was to die, but he obeyed because by so doing he could prolong life a
little, and because there was always a chance.
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.