My men were in battle dress for the landing--steel helmets painted
green, dirty green jackets, pants, cartridge belts, heavy field shoes.
The Caribbean was so deep blue it hurt the eyes. You could look
straight down into it until it made you dizzy. Sharks, some of them
monsters, congregated from all directions.
Marines waiting to debark shouted derisively at the sharks; but it was
noticeable that they didn't pull any funny business on the slings,
and they didn't let go of the slings until their feet were firmly
planted in the bottom of the landing craft. The landing craft scarcely
rose and fell. The Caribbean was as smooth as an inland lake. I think,
now that I look back, that all of us had a strange feeling that
something unusual was going to happen, and that it had nothing to do
with the sharks.
I was first aboard a landing craft. I moved to the outboard side of
my craft and looked toward the half-moon beach where the Yataritas
empties into the Caribbean. The river's mouth was hidden by the sandy
beach. To my right the coast of Cuba, rugged, dirty coral cliffs ten
to fifty feet high, led away eastward, bulging out gradually a mile
south of the white-sandy beach. To my left there were broken cliffs of
rotting coral, and slopes leading up gradually from the shore to cactus
and spined-brush-covered hills so round they cast no shadows.
Captain Ross Haggerty crawled down into the second LCVP, First
Lieutenant Peter Hoose into the third. There were twenty-four men with
each of us, some veterans of two wars, some recruits who'd been too
young for World War II.
We were going in with Haggerty to my right rear, Hoose to my left rear.
We were equipped with the latest in ship-shore-landing-craft-airplane
communications. Four jet planes did fancy stuff over us, over the
beach, and behind the beach, while we got into our places. I could talk
with anybody in any LCVP, aboard the _Odyssey_ or in any one of the
jets. Our headsets made us look like men from Mars.
Every man who was participating in this maneuver wore one of the sets,
for experience had taught that any marine, at any time, might find
himself running the show.
There were flecks of foam about the reefs which flanked the half-moon
beach when all three LCVP's rose on their steps like amphibians ready
to take off, and headed north for the beach, so white it dazzled the
eyes. Behind the beach lay the spined brush wherein, theoretically,
enemy troops were lying in wait to rip us apart.
I always thrilled to a landing, even a make-believe one. So did the
men, boring though peacetime soldiering was. The APD was dropping dud
shells ashore. The jets were diving on us, just to make a noise, and
our three motors sounded like the crack of doom. The men kept down
because that was the rule, but occasionally I pulled myself up and
looked ahead over the ramp--which would come crashing down when we
rammed our nose into the sand. Out over that ramp the marines would
charge, to race for cover and swing into position to give our new
weapons a workout.
We'd be in in five minutes. The boat-handlers were talking to the ship
and the jets. I just listened in. I didn't see or hear a thing out of
the ordinary.
"Stand by!" came the cry. "We're smacking in a coupla seconds!"
The jets were having fun right over the beach and for a moment I envied
their pilots. When we got ashore it was going to be like sitting atop
a burning galley stove, on that sand. It would be even worse under the
brush on the land beyond that rose to the hills and the coral cliffs
which crowned them.
The other two LCVP's had drawn abreast now. We hit the beach nearly
together. I heard the rasping of the chains as the ramps went down,
hitting the sand. There was knee-deep water over the outer ends of the
ramps. The marines dashed ashore. The first odd thing happened then;
one instant there was water over the ends of the ramps, then there was
none.
As a matter of habit every marine did his job. Without command,
they sprayed out to right and left, getting unbunched as quickly as
possible, just in case a theoretical enemy projectile should land among
them.
But their deployment slowed and came to a halt. I think they, like
myself, must instantly have missed the racketing of the jets. I looked
up. The sky, a pale blue, with slowly moving clouds in which I was
aware of greenish tints, was utterly empty of the four jets which were
supposed to support our maneuver.
I whirled and looked back. Where the Caribbean had been there was a
huge sprawl of desert, blinding in the midday sun, stretching away
southward to a semicircle of brooding hills. I judged their crests to
be at least four thousand feet high. And where those crests were, five
minutes before, the Caribbean had been--fully a mile deep under the
stern of the _Odyssey_! Where the _Odyssey_ might now be I hadn't the
slightest idea.
Just before we hit the beach there had been thickets of broad-leaved
squatty trees behind the ridges of sand, into which the marines had
been headed for concealment. Now there was nothing of the kind. There
was nothing but sand and silence--silence so deep that even breathing
broke it into brittle bits.
The three LCVP's were still with us, high and dry on the sand in the
middle of the desert. Each was manned by a coxswain and a radioman.
These six men--they were sailors, of course--were now sitting in their
positions aboard the three crafts, like statues; as if they had been
fossilized by the suddenness of whatever had happened.
At first I thought something was wrong with me. Then the marines became
uncertain, and when marines are uncertain the situation is definitely
out of hand. If I was seeing things that weren't there, so were
seventy-four other marines and six sailors.
Captain Haggerty was giving the "assemble" signal and pointing to me.
Even before he gave it the marines were walking slowly toward me, their
weapons at ready, their eyes taking in all there was to see. I moved
back to the central landing craft.
"My radio is dead," I called. "How about yours?"
"Nothing, sir. They couldn't be deader on Judgment Day!"
I leaned against a corner of the LCVP and waited for the men to
assemble. Nobody said anything. They just looked at me. I felt
helpless.
"First," I said, "let's make a check. I want to be sure I haven't gone
completely daft! If what I say is true, say 'Aye, aye!' Got it?"
"Aye, aye, sir!"
"This is not the Yataritas Beach we all know--apparently!"
"Aye, aye, sir!" the voices were low, hesitant, yet sure.
"The Caribbean has disappeared!"
"Aye, aye, sir!"
"No jets! No APD! No _anything_ we know--except sand!"
"Aye, aye, sir!"
"And we have no communication with anything, anywhere. I've no idea
what we ran into, but it happened just as we hit the beach." I looked
at my watch. "And one more thing. We landed about ten minutes ago, at
nine hundred. The sun says it's nearly thirteen hundred. My watch says
it's oh-nine-twelve exactly."
Officers and men looked at their wrist-watches.
"Aye, aye, sir!" They all agreed to that.
"The sailors are inside the--area--whatever it is, or they would be
gone like everything else except the LCVP's. Somewhere behind the
LCVP's, then, should be--"
But I couldn't say it. Everybody could see that behind the LCVP's was
the unknown desert leading away south to the brooding ancient mountains.
Sergeant Eckstrom strode quickly to the rear of the LCVP's. That took
guts, for he might have disappeared; but he didn't. He walked out onto
the hot desert for twenty yards, turned and came back. That ended that.
We were seeing what actually was there.
"We'll send out scouts," I said, "to the four cardinal points of the
compass. We'll split each quadrant with another scout. That's eight
scouts. Make it sixteen, scout in pairs. Don't get out of sight of the
landing craft. No telling what you may run into."
We officers split the horizon into thirds, set out to reconnoiter.
The sailors flatly refused to leave the LCVP's further than the almost
non-existent shade they cast. It was their way of grasping at something
they could understand. I didn't blame them or argue with them. The
skipper of the APD was their immediate superior. Where _was_ he, anyway?
What had snatched us into this unbelievable Limbo?
How had it been done? What was going to happen to us?
* * * * *
I traveled about four points north of the northeast group. I am a fast
walker; even through sand I can travel faster than most men. I was
slightly ahead of all the other groups when suddenly I could go no
further. I could feel nothing, yet when I put out my foot to set it
down in a new place, it struck an invisible something, dropped back,
and my impetus carried me forward to involve my face in something much
finer than cobwebs.
I jumped back, swearing, for I could see nothing except the hot waste
of glistening sand. There were dunes, hummocks with strange grasses and
brush sticking up through them like beards; but I had struck the limit
of my trek and could not reach any of those visible spots beyond.
I pushed against it with my hands. It gave, but only as a taut wire net
might give, then press back against the hands; it was a strain to make
the thing bulge. The counterpressure was strong. I could not advance.
I turned to the right and saw that the nearest patrol had stopped. The
two men were fumbling in the air like blind men. They were raising
and lowering their feet as if they felt for steps above an abyss.
They, too, had come to the end of possible advance. They had come into
contact with invisibility also--invisibility that was inflexibly tough
beyond a certain brief limit.
The two men turned now and looked at me. I gave the halt signal and
started toward them. I ran into something and caromed off, falling
to my knees. The horrible thought struck me that each group might
have stumbled inside some hideous globe and become separated from all
other groups. But it wasn't so. I got to my feet, put my left hand out
against the invisible wall--which felt warm to the touch, as if it were
a living thing--and started toward the northeast group.
The surface of that strange substance was undulant; it zig-zagged, like
the weaving walk of a drunken man.
I reached the first patrol, Corporal Hoge Ziegler and Private First
Class Barry Preble. Their faces were white. I wouldn't say they were
scared but they were definitely concerned.
"Well, at least we've discovered what it was we ran through at the
moment we hit the beach," I offered. "All we need to do is find a way
through it, and go on with our maneuver."
Ziegler shook his head. "No, sir, I don't see it like that. We can see
through this stuff, or seem to, but we can't see back the way we came,
astern of the landing craft."
"Right, corporal; what do you think it is, then?"
"I'm no scientist, sir. I'd say it is a net of some kind, in which we
have been caught, landing craft and all, like so many fish. But by
whom? By what? For what reason? It has me stopped."
"I wonder--" began Preble, then stopped, staring at the place where he
and Ziegler had come to a dead stop. Preble stepped back. In his arms
he cradled one of the latest automatic weapons.
Preble stepped back, lifted the muzzle of the weapon, held down the
trigger for a few squirts. The weapon acted naturally enough. There was
no question that the bullets left the muzzle of the fast-firer. But we
didn't hear them hit the invisible screen; nor, looking beyond it, did
we see where the bullets kicked up sand. The bullets simply plunked
into nothingness as bullets of an obsolete day vanished into soap or
sand during firing tests.
A few seconds passed. Then there were soft sounds in the sand at the
very spot where the two marines had hit the wall. All three of us
looked down. The flattened, steel-jacketed bullets lay in a small group
in the sand, within a couple of inches of the invisible wall--on our
side of it.
"Caught the bullets, like a baseball catcher!" said Preble, his voice
high-pitched with threatened hysteria. "Then just dropped 'em! Took
them in, killed their speed, then slowly discarded them! And I saw the
wall do it!"
Ziegler and I had not seen this phenomenon, but we were not directly
behind the weapon, as Preble was.
I lifted my binoculars for the first time and looked around at the
other patrols, all of which I could see easily. All except those which
followed a southerly direction had come to the wall and were just as
puzzled by it as we. None of us had anything to offer; we were even
afraid to think lest we question our own sanity.
We held our ground until all patrols had come up against the invisible
wall. Then we had some idea of the extent of our prison. That brooding
mountain to the south, it appeared, was forbidden to us.
How high did the wall reach? Was it domed?
"Preble, fire as nearly straight up as you can," I told the private.
"Then we'll duck away fifty or sixty yards, just in case, and listen."
Ziegler and I stepped well back. Preble took careful aim. He squirted a
few score slugs, then ran to join us. We were so silent we could not
even hear each other's breathing. Shortly we heard the bullets drop
into the sand, and stepped forward.
Theoretically a bullet fired straight up strikes the ground with
the same speed at which it was fired--so the slugs would have been
flattened anyway. But we had noticed a thin film of some substance
unknown to us around the slugs which had been first fired into the wall.
That same substance was clinging to the several slugs we managed to
sift up from the sand. Our wall of invisible tension was a dome!
"I feel like a bug!" said Preble. "I feel like a bug must feel when a
scientist wants to study it. The scientist keeps covering it with a
glass tumbler when it tries to walk or fly away!"
"Do you suppose our own authorities," said Ziegler, "would be trying
out a new interdiction weapon on us? Major, they wouldn't do it without
at least telling you, sir, would they?"
"They might," I said. "There are secret weapons only the highest high
brass knows about. But if your hunch is right, corporal, we've sure
got ourselves something, haven't we? Wouldn't it be something if we
could throw an invisible net over every dive bomber of an enemy, every
warship, every man, and nullify the attack before it got started?"
"It would make them all feel pretty silly," said Preble. "But suppose
an enemy had such a 'net'? Suppose it could reach out from anywhere in
the world--"
Slowly we all walked back to the LCVP's.
"Something else funny," said Ziegler. "It's noon now, by our time. The
sun says it's about four in the afternoon or thereabouts. But we're
still ordinary marines, aren't we? Maybe I'm different from the rest of
you, but doesn't it strike you as off--"
"I'm not hungry," said Preble. "Nor thirsty! By this time of the
day, when we had breakfast at oh-six-hundred at Guantanamo, I'd be
starving." Preble was the company chow-hound. "But I'm not hungry, or
thirsty. You, corporal?"
Ziegler shook his head. He was by way of being a hearty eater himself,
while I confess I came as close to being a glutton as an officer and a
gentleman dares allow himself to be.
We had hiked for several hours under a blazing sun. Moreover, all of
us had sweated away a lot of moisture. Each of us carried a canteen of
water, so water was not yet a problem; but the point is, none of us had
taken a drink!
When we got back to the LCVP's it was to find that nobody else was
either hungry or thirsty....
"We're prisoners," said Captain Haggerty, "that's clear. And according
to the laws of war, prisoners are fed. If we've been fed, and given
water without eating or drinking, _how_?"
"Through our pores!" said Preble impetuously.
There was a long moment of silence which somebody had to break pretty
soon.
Lieutenant Hoose broke it.
"Personally, I don't want to be sprinkled by something invisible, even
if I'm dying of thirst. And if food is being somehow rubbed into us,
I'd just as soon nobody rubbed it in! I'm not too lazy to chew for
myself!"
It brought the first laugh. Hoose had a drawling manner of speech which
sometimes caused the men in ranks some discomfort to keep their faces
straight. We were more relaxed than we had been, for we appeared to
be in no danger. Besides, we were extremely well armed. If anybody
attacked us--but I refused to think too much about that. I had a
sneaking hunch that our top-secret weapons were, in this place, just so
much metal, value zero.
* * * * *
Now and again, during a comfortable afternoon, I sent out patrols to
check on the invisible wall. They always found it. Either it was there
continuously, or it was dropped when nobody was near and hurriedly
restored when a patrol went out to check.
The feeling that everything we did or said was noted and heard began
to make us wary of movement and speech. We tried to pick out vantage
points from which we could be seen. Any one of the dunes outside our
prison might have hidden something. But discussing it, none of us felt
that this was up to the standard of behavior of whatever it was that
held us.
That's about as far as we got before the sun went down with startling
suddenness and darkness settled over our Limbo. The darkness was
impenetrable. It lasted perhaps an hour. Then a sort of haze seemed to
withdraw in all directions, inwardly and outwardly--and the wondrous
tropical sky, studded with stars that hung down almost within reach of
human hands, bathed our upturned faces.
In silence we all watched. There was an unusual coolness in the air,
too, for several minutes, Cuba, at that time of the year, was almost
never cool, even late at night; but some of the men were shivering.
Sweat had not dried on all of us, and sweat is bad when you are
motionless, at night. I was about to order the men to exercise a
little, when I realized something that Hoose put into words first:
"Now," he said, "they're feeding us warmth, just as they feed and water
us! And we've been here for hours and don't have any idea, even, who or
what they are!"
Nobody else said anything. All the rest of us were studying the sky.
"I don't see the Big Dipper!" said Sergeant Eckstrom.
"Nor the North Star!" somebody added.
"Nor Venus, nor Lyra!" said someone else. "I've been studying our books
on constellations, and I don't recognize a one! _Where are we?_ We're
not even in Cuba! Not even in the Northern Hemisphere! Not even--"
"Not even on the Earth--?" said Hoose.
It was just here that the whispering began in our walkie-talkies;
whispering like nothing we had ever heard. We could make out nothing
that sounded at all like human words. The sounds were mechanical, yet
not-mechanical. I've called them whispers only because that comes
closest to describing the eerie sounds which every last one of us was
now hearing in his walkie-talkie.
"It's vibration on our wavelength," said one of the gobs. "But that's
the best I can say of it."
"Morse? International?" I asked.
But nobody could offer an answer.
Right after that we saw the Shadow Men, inside the dome. Something of
that which held us at last became visible.