East and West -- Fiction; Giants -- Fiction; Science fiction
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--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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