"Guide me," he said, "Guide me, Baker. Guide me to Moscow!"
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 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.