"You don't use energy domes, then," I said, "or compress invisibility
into a solid?"
"No," said Matzuku, "_do you?_"
He had guessed we were prisoners also. I didn't explain. After all,
how could I? We three went back to the LCVP. I ordered the Japanese
into the LCVP on our right flank, placed a guard over them, not because
we had any fear of them, but so they would not hear our discussion.
They showed no interest whatever. They sprawled out on the deck of the
LCVP and were asleep, and raucously snoring, before we met in plenary
session--save for the single guard over the Japanese--near the grave of
Yount's skeleton.
"Could we really be in the Kalahari Desert?" asked Haggerty.
"We could," I said. "The Japs could also be decoys, deliberately sent
to us to make us believe whatever we're supposed to believe. I'm only
sure of one thing: we're not on Yataritas Beach, Cuba!"
"Are we really sure of _that_, even?" asked Captain Haggerty. I had to
admit that we were sure of nothing.
"We seem to be unmolested for the time being," I said. "But we can't
just sit here and brood. Those of you who want to sleep, turn in
wherever you like. Those who want to help figure out what has happened
to us, assemble here with me and we'll see if we can get anywhere."
"You don't suppose, sir," said Krane diffidently, "that we're
all--dead, or something? With all those fancy explosives we brought
along--"
Nobody laughed. Nobody snickered. And nobody drew away to hit the sack.
"I don't believe we're dead, Music," I said, "but I could be wrong
about that, too. I think your 'or something' comes about as close to an
answer as anything we have. Now, I'm open to suggestions as to how we
find out what ails us, where we are, how we get out; what, in general,
it all seems to be about."
"The Shadow Men," said Ziegler, "what were they?"
Nobody knew.
There was something in the shadows. A smell, and something else. Why
didn't the stuff, whatever it was, destroy bones as well? Had we really
heard Yount scream inside the shadow?
We recapitulated everything we could remember. As if we could forget
anything! And it all added up to a nightmare.
"The walkie-talkies," said Haggerty. "We've got eighty-odd of them.
They can all be adjusted to different wavelengths. I suggest we
estimate how many, and then each of us take his share of them, and
start sending, not only in Morse and International codes, but in every
language we know, down to Greek and Latin!"
It was long past midnight by the time we had worked out charts of
wavelengths for the walkie-talkies, and divided them among us. Then we
scattered, first stripping off our jackets and laying our fast-fire
weapons on them to keep the weapons from being fouled by sand. We
needed our hands free.
"The first whisper anybody gets, he'll sing out," I instructed officers
and men.
Marines acquire a lot of miscellaneous information--and plenty of
misinformation. Among seventy-five or eighty one would find a dozen
European languages, Gaelic probably, three or four Chinese dialects, a
smattering of Congo jabbering, a spot of Latin, a touch of Greek. If
someone asked me, anywhere, anytime, in the presence of as few as a
dozen marines, if any of them knew Sanskrit I would hesitate to say no.
We turned all that mess loose on our walkie-talkies. If anybody ever
really "shot the moon," it was us.