"You got this in English?" I asked.
"No, sir. It's Mangbetu, an African dialect. I did some work among
those people, some years ago. It's difficult. I could be mistaken, but
I don't think so."
"Did you answer this?"
"No, sir."
"Go ahead," I said, "confirm! We'll see what happens."
He chattered something into his walkie-talkie. Instantly all sound died
out of every last walkie-talkie.
We'd accomplished--what? Only something remotely confirming Matzuku,
the Japanese who had located us in the Kalahari Desert of Africa.
We slept by fits and starts. The Shadow Men did not return. Silence
held sway in our walkie-talkie receivers, though we kept on sending.
Ziegler gave us Mangbetu words to use, but nothing came of it. That
line of investigation was clearly ended.
We began working on the inner wall of the dome with our entrenching
tools. That started something!
* * * * *
It was now clear that if we ever got out of wherever we were, we would
have to do it on our own.
First, to establish the exact circumference of the dome, I formed all
hands, sailors, marines and Japanese, in a single column and we did
the circle. I wanted everybody whose lot was our lot, to know every
detail that might later prove valuable. The area under our feet,
available to us within the dome, we estimated at ten acres. That gave
us considerable inner surface of wall and dome to be studied. We could
not see the dome, we only knew it was there. We had small radar and
sonar sets, but the dome registered on neither. Nothing we shouted was
echoed back to us, nor did the chattering of the fast-firers cause
reverberations. With those fast-firers, the ultimate in small arms,
we searched out every quadrant of the dome, to see if there were any
opening. In the same way we searched out every yard of the wall;
there was no way out, at least of any size, for I'd have wagered, so
carefully was this job done, that if one bullet fired into dome or wall
had fallen outside, some one of us would have spotted it.
We used up a lot of steel-jacketed bullets, but we found not a single
aperture in the wall or dome.
Next we worked on our super-grenades, of which we had a fairly good
supply. This was dangerous work; we had to dig trenches from which
to heave them. Even the rifle grenades were dangerous because of our
limited escape area.
The grenades did nothing to the wall; nothing whatever.
The flame-throwers accomplished little more. There was danger with
these, too, for the flame bathed the wall--we could see it strike and
blossom up and down--and backfired so that it was a wonder all who
stood behind the machines were not wiped out. And even the flames did
not affect the wall.
We even, so help me, tried to _talk_ a hole through the wall! Yes,
Krane thought of it, Trumpeter Krane.
"Maybe we could find the key sound of the dome," he said, "and shatter
it with sound. You know, like marching steps shaking down a bridge."
Well, we tried, but got nowhere.
"Shovels, then," I said. "Entrenching tools! Maybe we can go under."
All hands groaned. There is nothing a marine or sailor dislikes more
than digging in--even when bullets are flying thick and fast.
I think we were all a little mad then. It was bad enough to dig down
into sand that poured into a hole faster than one could dig, but to
accomplish nothing by doing it was heartbreaking. By day we perspired
like hippos, rubbed the skin off our palms, got raw and bleeding where
our clothes chafed. Water and food were no problem, for our mysterious
source of supply never for a moment ceased or abated.
We fought that wall for days and nights on end, as a mob, in shifts,
and singly. We got nowhere. There were times when the sand inside the
dome looked as if a huge animal had been rooting, or a crowd digging
for treasure. But when we stopped for a few moments to rest we could
hear the sand whispering with glee as it slid back into the pits we had
dug--leveling off the area again.
We managed in some places to get down ten feet or so into the sand, and
to witness a strange phenomenon. We never got under the wall, nor were
we able to penetrate it anywhere, yet when sand poured back into the
pits we dug--_it poured back from beyond the wall, too_, as if there
were no obstruction! It poured in, apparently through the very wall we
were trying to breach.
Naturally we wondered, if we had been digging on the outside, trying
to get in, if the sand would have poured outward into the holes, too.
We all remembered how we had got into the dome so easily, yet we could
find no way, shape, form or manner to get out.
The Shadow Men, however, had escaped....
Yes, we studied that LCVP that had seemed to be a funnel by which the
Shadow Men coalesced into one shadow and vanished, but could find no
key to the means or manner of their strange escape.
We were resting one afternoon, and Haggerty had just said this was the
most unsatisfactory duty he had ever performed in twenty-some years
of landing with the marines around the world, while Hoose suggested
we ought to have a name for this nameless area, and Trumpeter Krane
offered "Outpost Zero" as the most appropriate--when Preble erupted:
"My God! Look!"
He was pointing up through the dome. Spinning down toward us from an
empty sky was a ball of something that looked like metal--or perhaps
crystal. It glistened and shone in the sun. It almost hurt the eyes.
Nobody said anything as that ball came closer and closer. I think we
all knew what it was, though none of us had been at Hiroshima that
fatal day.
We saw the A-bomb disintegrate, almost lazily, directly above our dome.
No one who has seen the Hiroshima pictures needs a further explanation
of what we all saw. Only, this A-bomb was far more powerful than the
first one. Only one nation, we all thought, could have it.
Why would our own people be so intent on wiping us out?
In a split second we were in the midst of the cloud, in the heart of
the explosion, each one of us trying to convince himself, by pinching,
that he was actually going through an A-bomb explosion--absolutely
unscathed. Not even a sound came through.
We were sitting in the middle of the perfect defense against the
A-bomb, but we didn't know what it was or who had made it--and we
couldn't get out of it!
There was comfort in the knowledge that _someone_ knew, else how did it
happen that the A-bomb made what would have been a direct hit on the
dome if it hadn't been detonated about a thousand feet above? There was
design here, all right--but _whose_?
Nobody could imagine our own government addressing us in Mangbetu!
* * * * *
We thought we were all dead men. We had all seen pictures of survivors
of Hiroshima, with their skin burned off their bones.
The Japs had not seen. They had been in the Guamian jungles and had not
even heard of Hiroshima. I told them. They looked at one another in
amazement. All this time we cowered in the heart of the explosion, and
for the first time we could see the shape and extent of the dome which
imprisoned us. It was outlined in smoke through which shot tongues of
blue, green, and salmon pink. In the cloud which surrounded us we could
see all the prisms play--and inter-flashing of lights of all colors
that was unbelievably awesome. Yet we heard no sound. There was an
eerie glow on the sand around us which must have come from the light,
but if it had any ill effect on our bodies we have not yet become aware
of it.
We had kept our watches wound and synchronized, so we timed the
duration of the blast. The cloud about us lasted for two hours. Then it
began slowly to disintegrate.
"Out to the walls, now," I said. "We'll move out from the center as
skirmishers. Then, at my signal, when we're against the wall, we'll
circle to the right until we have examined every inch we can reach or
see."
Far above the dome we saw the great snowy mushroom of the blast's
residue, with lights playing through it. We looked out through the wall
at the sand beyond--and there _was_ no sand. Only a landscape shaped
as it had been when it had been sand; but now it was a smooth, rolling
expanse of light green! The blast had been a vast primordial glazier,
and the sand was not sand now, but green glass--right up to the outside
of our still invisible dome! We marched out and looked through. We
did the natural things, like putting our hands up beside faces that we
pressed nose-flat against the invisible. The wall felt warm, but no
warmer than it had felt before the blast. Our dome had withstood every
possible destructive effect of the A-bomb blast!
I stood there, staring out. I looked around, and the marines, sailors
and Japanese were standing in the same manner--looking out and through
like children looking through a zoo fence.
We must all have realized it at the same time. I noticed, first, that
there was suddenly a space between the outside of the wall and the sea
of green glass. I noticed that it ran away to right and left, a border
between the glass and our sand, which became a little wider even as I
stared. Then I felt pressure against the toes of my field shoes. Then
I was being pushed bodily back, and the sand border outside was a foot
wide!
I whirled this time, back against the wall, to stare at the others.
They were all facing inboard, too. It was clear that all had noticed
the widening border, that each knew the fact: our dome was closing in
on us, all around.
Probably most of us had read Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum" and enjoyed
the spine-tingling horror of the walls closing in to crush the hapless
victim.
Just now it was far from thrilling.
From all sides the wall closed in. We looked away to the south. The
entire mountain there had become greenish, as if it, too, had turned to
glass.
"No one blast," said Haggerty grimly, "did that. Not even the best we
have in A-bombs could have done so much. That mountain is ten, fifteen
miles away, at least. There must have been more A-bombs...."
"And maybe more domes," said Hoose. "How do we know that this whole
desert isn't dotted with them?"
"Each one with its bugs under it for scientific study," said Haggerty
wryly.
My mind went around and around. The Shadow Men ... Mangbetu ... the
blast ... the desert ... the betrayal by the very sky itself ... the
Japanese....
I had to turn it off or go crazy. Besides, the closing wall wasn't
giving us much time. Faster and faster it advanced.
It was clear that we were being pushed deliberately inward on the
LCVP's. Within a few minutes we were practically on the LCVP ramps.
"Grab all weapons!" I yelled. "Don't risk finding them on the pay roll!"
Marines who lose weapons have to pay for them. That's what I meant,
silly as it seems in the circumstances.
Just as we were falling in at the sand-covered ramps of the three
LCVP's, Krane cried out: "Where are the Japs?"
It gave me a chill. There was no escaping a peculiar fact: that even
while the invisible was herding us, assembling us before our LCVP's,
something of it, or about it, had snatched away the Japanese. They had
simply vanished.
The walls were not circular now, but oval, roughly encompassing the
LCVP's. Haggerty assembled his men before his LCVP. Hoose did the same.
Mine assembled about me on the central ramp.
Then, when we were inside, in position as he had been when we landed,
with only one man missing--Yount--the wall ceased closing in. For ten
minutes we wondered about this. Then I had a hunch.
"Can we raise the ramps without the motors?"
We couldn't, not all the way, but we could, with two men at each outer
corner, raise them about four feet, catch and hold them with their
rattling chains.