"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: