East and West -- Fiction; Giants -- Fiction; Science fiction
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[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: _We stared--frozen--at the great face above us._]
_Up from the horror of Hiroshima came a god. He gave the people
hope and for this they killed him--as they have always killed their
gods._
THE IMAGE
and
THE LIKENESS
By John Scott Campbell
Shanghai had changed. We sensed that the moment we came ashore.
Extraterritoriality was long gone; we had known that, of course. The
days of exploitation, of clubs where Chinese and Burmese and Indian
servants waited on Britons and Americans were passed. Pan-Asia had seen
to that. This was 1965. The white man's burden in the east had been upon
brown and yellow shoulders for over sixteen years now, and the Indians
and Burmese and Indonesians were ruling themselves, after their fling at
communism in the fifties.
The initial bitterness which followed the debacle of 1955 had passed, we
were glad to see. Porters no longer spat in the faces of white men. They
were polite, but we had not been in the city a half hour before we
sensed something else. There was an edge to that politeness. It was as
Major Reid had written before we left San Francisco--a subtle change
had come over Asia in the previous few years. They smiled--they waited
on us--they bent over backwards to atone for the excesses of the first
years of freedom from foreign rule; but through it all was an air of
aloofness, of superior knowledge.
Baker put it in his typically blunt British way.
"The blighters have something up their sleeves, all right. The whole
crew of them. Did you notice that rickshaw boy? When I said to take us
to the hotel, he answered 'Yes, today I take you'. The Major was
right--there's something in the wind, and it's damned serious."
We were sitting, surrounded by our luggage, in our suite at the New
China Hotel. There were four of us: Llewelyn Baker, Walter Chamberlin,
Robert Martin, and myself, William Cady. Baker and Martin were
anthropologists, and old China hands as well. Chamberlin was a
geologist, and I claimed knowledge of zoology. We were here ostensibly
as a scientific expedition, and had permission from the Republic of East
Asia to do some work on Celebese man, following up the discoveries by
Rance of bones and artifacts on that East Indian island in 1961.
We had another reason for coming at this particular time, although this
was not mentioned to the authorities. Our real objective was to find out
certain things about New Buddhism, the violently nationalistic religion
which was sweeping Pan-Asia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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