I pondered the matter a few minutes. It wasn't possible that these
Japanese had finally decided to surrender, had started hunting marines
to whom to turn in their rusty weapons--then walked through the
invisible dome, out of the hinterland of Guam into the midst of what
we fondly believed to be Cuba. Yet here they were, flesh-and-blood men,
and here were we, also flesh-and-blood men--or so we thought.
Of course, Matzuku and his men were as much prisoners as we were. They
were not only prisoners of whatever manipulated the dome, but they were
our prisoners as well. There was nothing they could do, nowhere they
could go with any secrets filched from us; but I decided not to tell
them anything.
Matzuku, I noticed, was studying the sky. I watched his brown face as
he struggled with some idea that plainly had him buffaloed. He looked
at me quickly, then looked away. He knew something, but was afraid to
say what it was. I could at least make it clear to him that he was not
crazy, need not be afraid to say what was in his mind.
"You are amazed, corporal," I said, "to discover that you can't
possibly be on Guam. I see that you know something of astronomy. It
won't be taken amiss if you hazard a guess as to where you are, and how
you got here."
"I should like to do that, sir," said the Jap corporal, "but it does
not seem possible that we should merely have seen a marine patrol,
scouting the jungles of Guam, approached them to surrender, and found
ourselves in the Kalahari Desert! It isn't possible, therefore I must
not know the stars as well as I had thought. And yet, sir, I _do_ know
the stars. Unless this is delirium induced by fever, lack of water and
food over the years, we _are_ somewhere in the Kalahari Desert!"
"Let's go have a look, Matzuku," I said. "You, too, Hoose. Haggerty,
you'd better stay with the command."
Matzuku, Hoose and I started back the way the Japs had come. Matzuku
seemed to have forgotten his fatigue, the fact that he had been
practically a walking dead man when he approached the "patrol" to
surrender. Ten sets of footprints led in a wavering line back to the
invisible dome which hemmed us in. Hoose and I hung back to let Matzuku
go on ahead of us. He came to the invisible wall and halted, looking
foolish as a fore-thrust foot slid down what appeared to be nothingness.
The footprints all ended against the invisible wall. Moonlight shed
its brilliance over everything, and we could see far out beyond the
invisible wall, into the eerie area of sand dunes, stunted brush, to a
horizon which offered no hope whatever.
"We couldn't have come from out there!" said Matzuku wonderingly. "We
came out of the Guamian jungles, but our footprints don't start until
we reach this invisible barricade." Matzuku turned on me. "I have no
right to ask, but what kind of a concentration camp _is_ this? We
Japanese have much experience in camps, but we use barbed wire, high
rock walls with broken glass embedded in their tops, or dungeons and
caves."