The Image and the Likeness

by John Scott Campbell

  VII

  Kazu walked quite slowly from the battlefield. His gait was unsteady,and at first we feared that he would collapse. We could not tell howdeep the burns were, nor whether he was internally hurt by the blast. Heappeared to be suffering from some kind of shock, for he did not speakagain for a long time. But gradually he seemed to gather himselftogether, and we became almost convinced that the shock was morepsychological than physical, and that even the atom bomb was powerlessagainst his might.

  We did not remain to see the outcome of the battle, but presently Martinturned the radio on. The news at first was fragmentary. Word that aRussian plane had atom bombed the new Buddha spread across China, andwith it ended the last shreds of communist prestige. The armies whichhad been pro-communist turned on their officers. Mao himself wasmurdered on the battlefield before Kazu was out of sight. The former reddefenders of Shanghai massacred twenty thousand hapless Russianemigrants. All across Asia the story was the same, a terrible revulsion.At first it was believed that Buddha had died instantly; later rumor hadit that he had crawled off to Mongolia to die.

  Radio Moscow at first was silent. The horror of what had been done wastoo much even for that well oiled propaganda machine. At last a line waspatched together: the bomb had been dropped by an American plane,bearing Russian markings. Then Radio Peking announced that Chinesefighters had shot it down and that the crew was Russian. To this Moscowcould think of only one reply: Radio Peking was lying; the station hadbeen taken over by the Americans! A little later another Moscowbroadcast announced solemnly that the whole story was wrong--Buddhahadn'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 stillmaintaining a pace of better than three hundred miles per hour.

  At first he simply walked westward without any directions from us. Byten o'clock he had put a thousand miles between him and the coast andwas well across the southern Gobi desert. Now Baker, who had been almostas stunned as Kazu, began to look into his maps. He had nothing forcentral Asia as detailed as the charts we had used in Borneo andCelebes, but he presently found a small scale map that would do. Withthis he identified the snowy range of mountains now towering on our leftas the Nan Shan, northernmost bastion of Tibet. He hurriedly called toKazu to turn northwest before he entered the great Tarim Basin, for thewestern side of that vast desert was closed by a range of mountains20,000 feet high. Even with the new course, our altitude would be abovesix thousand feet for many miles.

  At noon we were paralleling another mighty range, the little known AltaiMountains, and at one o'clock we passed the Zaisan Nor, the great lakewhich forms the headwaters for the Irtysh River. Here Kazu paused for adrink, and to rinse his burns with fresh water. Then we were away again,this time due west over more mountain tops, avoiding the inhabitedlowlands. At three-thirty the hills dropped away and there appearedahead the infinite green carpet of the Siberian forest. Kazu stoppedagain at another lake, which Baker guessed might be Dengiz. Atfour-thirty we crossed a wide river which we could not identify, andthen at last commenced to climb into the foothills of the southernUrals. Just in time Baker discovered that Kazu's course was taking himstraight toward the industrial city of Magnetogorsk. We veered northagain into the higher mountains and then turned east to the forests.

  We were sure now that Kazu must be delirious, but after a while hestopped 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 bynine, maybe ten, tonight."

  Kazu shook his head.

  "No. Tonight I must rest, gather strength. We start two AM, arriveKremlin at sunrise. We catch them same time they catch me. No warningwhatever."

  Kazu lay down on the swampy lake bottom while we huddled on the floor ofthe box, courting sleep which never came.

  At one o'clock we at last gave it up, and Baker fired his pistol untilKazu stirred. While he was awakening we listened to the radio. Thingshad calmed down quite a bit, and as we pieced the various broadcaststogether, an amazing realization came over us. Everyone believed thatKazu was dead! Evidently no word of our trip across all of central Asiahad been received! Search planes, both Soviet and Chinese, were combingthe eastern Gobi for the body.

  * * * * *

  Other news included a war declaration by China upon the SovietUnion, and the announcement that the Russian Politbureau had scheduled ameeting in the Kremlin to consider the emergency.

  We passed all of this on to Kazu, whose grim face relaxed for the firsttime in a fleeting grin.

  "Good reporters. Know what are most savory items. Now guide me well, andaway from towns until we reach it."

  The trip across the Urals and the plains of European Russia retains anightmare quality in my mind, comparable only with that first night onYat. 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 wesaw the old moon reflected in the Volga. Much of the low country wascovered with ground fog, which reached to Kazu's waist; this, combinedwith the blackout which had been ordered in every town, made observationby us or the Russians either way difficult. A few people saw Kazu, andtheir reports reflect a surrealist madness; those who had the horrifyingexperience of suddenly meeting Buddha in the early morning mists wereuniversally incapable of making any coherent report to the authorities.

  And then, just as the ghostly false dawn turned the night into a mistygray, we saw ahead the towers of Moscow. Now Kazu increased his speed.Concealment was no longer possible; he must reach the Kremlin ahead ofthe warning.

  At 500 miles per hour Buddha descended upon Moscow. His plunging feetreduced block after block of stores and apartment houses to dust, andthe sky behind us was lighted more brightly by the fires he started thanby the dull red of the still unrisen sun. Now at last I heard the tardywail of a siren and saw armored cars darting through the streets. On theroof of an apartment house I glimpsed a crew trying to unlimber anantiaircraft gun, but Kazu saw it also, and smashed the building torubble with a passing kick.

  And then we were at the Red Square. St. Basil's at one end, the fiftyfoot stone walls of the Kremlin along one side and Lenin's Tomb like apile of red children's blocks. Kazu stood for a moment surveying thisfamous scene, his feet sunk to the ankle in a collapsed subway. It wasmy first view of the Red Square, and somehow I knew that it would be thelast, for anyone. Then Kazu slowly walked to the Kremlin and looked downinto it. I remember how suddenly absurd it all seemed. The Kremlinwalls, the very symbol of the iron curtain, were scarcely six incheshigh! The whole thing was only a child's playpen.

  But now Kazu had found what he wanted. Without bothering to lift hisfeet, he crushed through the walls, reached down and pulled the rooffrom one of the buildings. He uncovered a brightly lighted ant-hill.Like a dollhouse exposed, he revealed rooms and corridors along whichmen were running. Kazu dropped to his knees and held our box up so thatwe might also see.

  "Are these the men?" he asked. Baker replied in the negative.

  Kazu abruptly pressed his hand into the building, crushing masonry andtimbers and humans all into a heap of dust, and turned to a largerbuilding. As he did, something about it seemed familiar to me. Yes, Ihad seen it before, in newsreels. It was--

  But again Kazu's fingers were at work. Lifting at the eaves, hecarefully took off the whole roof. Through a window we saw figureshurrying toward a covered bridge connecting this building with another.At Baker's warning, Kazu demolished the bridge, and then gently beganpicking 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 ofLenin 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 theworld in posters, ma
gazines and newsreels. They were the men of thePolitbureau. They were Red Russia's rulers.

  There was an instant of silent mutual recognition, and then Kazu spoketo them. As befitting a god, he spoke in their own tongue. Exactly whathe said I do not know, but after a little hesitation they came aroundthe table to the precarious edge of the room where the outer wall hadbeen. Kazu gave further directions and held up our steel box. Fearfullythey came forward and jumped the gap into our door. One by one they madethe leap, some dressed in the bemedalled uniforms of marshals, others inthe semi-military tunics affected by civilian ministers. The last wasthe man who had succeeded Stalin on his death, and who had taken forhimself the same name, as though it were a title.

  As he entered our room, we saw that he even looked like the firstStalin, clipped hair, moustache and all. He was a brilliant man, weknew. Brilliant and ruthless. He had grown up through the purges, in aworld which knew no mercy, where only the fittest, by communiststandards, survived. He had survived, because he was merciless andefficient and because he hated the free west with a hatred that wasdeadly and implacable.

  * * * * *

  I often wonder what his thoughts were at that moment. He camebecause he was ordered to and because he knew the alternative. He knewhe was to die, but he obeyed because by so doing he could prolong life alittle, and because there was always a chance.

  At that moment I deeply regretted knowing no Russian. The twenty one whocame in talked among themselves in short sentences. They saw us, butignored us. Baker spoke, first in English and then in German. The onecalled Stalin understood the German, for he looked at Baker searchinglyfor a moment, and then turned away. Only one of them replied. This wasMalik, the man who wrecked the old United Nations and then becameForeign Minister after Vishinsky was murdered. He ignored the German andspat 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 amcertain--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--asthough Kazu had suddenly sickened of destruction and slaughter. Hiswhispering was the roaring of winds as he said, "No--no. This is not theway--not Buddha's way. They must talk. They must understand each other.They must sit at tables and settle their differences, that is mymission."

  Kazu took five steps. Below us was an airfield.

  "Can you fly?" he asked us. Chamberlin had been an army pilot in thefifties. 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 inWashington. Tell America about me. Tell America I am coming--that I ambringing--_them_. Tell America there must be--peace."

  We scrambled out of the steel box, leaving the Russians in a miserableheap in one corner.

  He arose to his full height and carefully adjusted the cables around hisneck. I noticed that his fingers fumbled awkwardly, and that hestaggered slightly. Then he spoke once more.

  "I cannot cross Atlantic. Only route for Buddha is Siberia, BeringStraight, Alaska. But this not take long. You better hurry or I get toWashington 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. Amoment later it arose silently, vertically like an elevator. Chamberlin,in the pilot's seat, hurriedly started the engines. He leaned from awindow and waved his arm, and we shot forward and upward. For a momentthe 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 Moscowtoward the west.

  * * * * *

  The flight to London and the Atlantic crossing seemed unreal.We lived beside the radio. War and revolt against the Soviets had brokenout everywhere. With the directing power in the Kremlin gone, thetop-heavy Soviet bureaucracy was paralyzed. The Yugoslavs marched intothe Ukraine, Chinese armies occupied Irkutsk and were pressing acrossSiberia. Internal revolution broke out at a hundred points once it waslearned that Moscow was no more.

  Eagerly we listened to every report for word of Kazu. At first there wasnothing, and then a Chinese plane reported seeing him crossing the ObRiver, near the Arctic Circle. They said that he carried a box in hishand and appeared to be talking to it. Then news from the tiny riversettlement of Zhigansk on the Lena that he had passed, but that helimped and staggered as he climbed the mountains beyond.

  After that, silence.

  Planes swarmed over eastern Siberia, the Arctic Coast and Alaska, butfound nothing. Five hundred tons of C ration were rushed to Fairbanks,and tons of medical supplies for burns and possible illness werereadied, but no patient appeared. At first we were hopeful, knowingKazu'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 moreworried.

  "It's the radiation," he explained. "He took the full dose of gamma raysright 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 himinternally."

  So the days passed, and so gradually hope died. And then, at last, therewas news. It came, belatedly, from an eskimo hunter on the PribolofIslands, in Bering Sea. He reported that a great sea god had come out ofthe waters, so tall that his head vanished into the clouds. But, he wasa 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 wordsto this in a strange tongue. And the charm answered him in the sametongue, and with the voice of a man. And the two spoke to each other fora time and then the great one arose and walked off of the island andinto 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 examinedhis chart of Bering Sea, he found that the ocean to the north and west,towards Siberia, was shallow--less than five hundred feet. But thePribolofs stood on the edge of a great deep. Only twenty miles south ofthe islands, the ocean floor dropped off to more than ten thousand feet,for three hundred miles of icy fog shrouded ocean, before the bleakAleutians arose out of the mists. This desolate area was searched formonths by ships and planes, but no trace ever appeared from the treacherouscurrents of the stormy sea. Kazu had vanished.

  So here ended the story of Kazu Takahashi, who was born in the days ofthe first bomb, and who died by the last ever to sear the world. He wasbelieved by millions to be the incarnation of the Lord Buddha, but tofour 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

 
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