It looked like something new in shadow-play, or motion pictures. The shadows looked like men falling in in close formation, save that there was an uncanny shapelessness about them. We could tell that they walked like other men, for we could see the swinging of their legs. But for the rest of their bodies, well, somebody had worked out a great system of camouflage. Heads were just black blobs rising out of shoulders that were stooped and round. We could not tell whether the group had formed facing us or with their backs to us.

A chill crept over and through the dome as the formations fell in. The sounds in our walkie-talkies grew in volume. I think we all sensed menace in the words that were not human words, in tones that were not human tones. We could sense growing menace, and intonations of command.

We could make out nothing resembling any weapons we knew, but never once did we doubt that the shadows were forming against us. We forgot, while the shadows closed ranks, that we had been fed, watered, kept warm. This was no friendly demonstration.

The Shadow Men started closing in. I gave the command for which my men had been waiting, and for the first time the sailors came out of the landing craft to take part.

A vast circle of shadows closed in on us as we formed for defense. Old-timers remembered the ancient "Form for Bolo Attack" as we arranged ourselves in concentric circles, the automatic weapons outside, riflemen behind them with bayonets fixed. There was a rifle and bayonet for each man, including the automatic weaponers, for use if the automatics went out of action.

"No firing until I give the word," I said. "Music!"

"Music," in the Navy, of which the Marine Corps is a proud part, designates a trumpeter or drummer or bugler—whoever beats to quarters or blows the bugle-calls.

"Here, sir," said Trumpeter Krane.

"Blow something," I said, "It doesn't matter what. I'm just curious about what effect it will have."

"How about 'Boots and Saddles', sir?" he asked. There was a snicker, the suggestion of laughter from the marines.

Trumpeter Krane did a good job with "Boots and Saddles". It was a brave sound, but it had no effect whatever on the advancing Shadow Men. As the big circle contracted, every other Shadow Man dropped back, forming an outer circle. One thing that seemed to make clear to us: the Shadow Men had mass. They occupied space. Bullets, then, should have some effect on them.

"Preble!"

"Aye, aye, sir!"

"Scatter some bullets ahead of those things, far enough ahead so that they'll ricochet over them."

Preble stood up and let go with his ultramodern fast-firer. For a few seconds, as he played the weapon's muzzle like a hose, the Shadow Men were obscured by the cloud of kicked-up sand. The sand fell at once, of course—and the Shadow Men were coming directly on! Moreover, there was a grimmer note in our walkie-talkies.

"One fast-firer at each cardinal point of the compass," I said.

Marines in action are something to see. In a split second the Shadow Men from all sides were being warned by bullets. But they came right on.

"No other choice," I said quietly. "Shoot into them. Fire at will!"

Thousands of steel-jacketed slugs poured into the Shadow Men. But not one fell, and not for so much as an instant did they hesitate in their advance. Now other men had fallen back so that four concentric circles of Shadow Men closed in on us. They were quite close when they halted. I was just preparing to order our new explosives to be hurled among them, when, directly in front of me, a shadow detached itself from other shadows. It strode forward a few paces and halted. The clumsy arms seemed to gesticulate. The sounds of whispering came louder in our walkie-talkies. I think we all felt that in some way we were being challenged.

"Someone is to go forward," I said. "I don't know what it wants, but—Hold your fire, now—not that it seems to be worth much!"

I rose and started forward, conscious that there wasn't a movement among the marines, nor among the Shadow Men. I wondered as I approached the foremost shadow, how we would make ourselves understood to each other. The other entity must have some idea or there would be no suggestion of a parley.

I must have been halfway there when I was aware of running footfalls behind me. I didn't turn—and by failing to turn I saved my own life at the expense of PFC Yount's. The footfalls were right behind me, but I wasn't expecting what happened. Arms went around my legs in as neat a tackle as ever a leatherneck footballer pulled. I was thrown on my face so hard I couldn't breathe. I don't remember when I've been downed so hard.

By the time I got to my knees Yount was almost in contact with the detached shadow. He had a trench knife in his hand; drew it right after tackling me. I could see everything that happened.

PFC Yount flung himself straight at the shadow. I saw him disappear into the shadow, emerge on the other side. But there was a difference: he went in a marine in full battle dress; he came out a completely articulated skeleton. He had been stripped of clothes, shoes, weapons, skin, flesh and life—so quickly that his forward impetus carried his skeleton on through the shadow.

Now four marines were beside me. A growl rose from the others. I had to yell at them, over my shoulder: "Stand fast! Do you want the same thing to happen to you?"

The four men beside me—I didn't look to see who they were—simply waited.

"Okay, just be careful not to touch any of the shadows," I said. "Apparently that's where the danger is."

Not a shadow moved, not even the one through which Yount had gone to his death. The five of us then, rose and moved straight forward. As we came close I could smell something in the shadows, a vague, pestilential odor, like nothing I had ever experienced.

"I smelled its like, sir," said one, Haggerty, I think, "where men lay too long unburied. This is just a far hint, but it's like it, some way."

We went around the detached shadow. There was no sound, even in our walkie-talkies, now. It was almost as if, honoring an ancient military custom, the Shadow Men were allowing us to collect our dead. I could not see into or through the shadow. It was still so shapeless, even when I was close enough to touch it, that I could not tell anything of its true nature, or whether it, or any of the Shadow Men behind it, were armed. I could see the result of too much impetuosity, however, in the skeleton—snow-white, as if it were that of a man long dead in the burning desert sands—of PFC Yount. I tried to remember, as the others carefully gathered up the skeleton—Haggerty later said it was still warm!—whether Yount had uttered any sound, but could not remember.

Some men said later they were sure they heard a muffled scream, the scream of a man in mortal agony, but I doubt it.

I think it was an afterthought, strictly imagination.

No attempt was made to keep us from retiring with the skeleton of Yount. As soon as we were back, and had placed it against a side of one of the LCVP's for burial later, the Shadow Men again began their inexorable march.

"Sailors!" I called. "Break out the flame-throwers."

We surrounded ourselves with a sheet of flame, hot beyond anything used in World War II. We sprayed the stuff into the faces of the advancing Shadow Men; we blotted them out.

They were erased as if they had never been.

At my command the flames stopped—and the Shadow Men were still coming on.

Not very hopefully, I gave the command to use the flames again. We still had tricks in the bag, but if they proved no more effective than what we had so far used—I shouted my next command:

"Stand by to charge! Hang onto weapons! Go between them! Don't touch one of the shadows! CHARGE!"

I didn't tell the marines to face in any given direction. I merely wanted as many of them as possible to get through the closing cordon.

With a wild, defiant yell the leathernecks charged. As I ran I looked for some opening through the concentric circles. If flesh or skin, clothing or equipment, touched one of the shadows—

It was the queerest ducking and darting game I had ever played. We must not run into one another, we marines, or we might push one another into the shadows—and we knew what had happened to Yount, would never forget it.

It was like trying to dash out through a crowded theater, save that in a theater you didn't lose your life if you happened to touch anything.

I got through, out behind the last circle of Shadow Men. As soon as I was clear, in the cool, starlit waste beyond, I turned and looked back. The circles were still closing, with the LCVP's in their approximate center. To my right and left other marines were emerging from among the Shadow Men.

I looked, and looked away. Some of my own marines were a sight to turn the stomach. It's hell to see an apparently healthy marine standing, stupidly staring at the skeleton of his arm, to the shoulder.... I saw no skeletons in the sand after the marines came through and the Shadows went on. I breathed a sigh of relief. A marine could get along with one arm, and even the skeleton of the other might have possibilities; but a dead marine was dead and done.

I turned and looked back at the closing circles of Shadow Men. As the strange platoon closed in, more and more shadows stepped out of the circles, to form still more concentric circles.

The middle LCVP happened to be the center of the closing circles. The first Shadow Man reached it and stopped, right in the LCVP. Others closed in there—and merged with the first. The Shadow Men were piling themselves into a black heap within the landing craft.

Still the Shadow Men marched inward, converging on that central spot. The heap of blackness in the center did not grow larger. It was as if there were some sort of hole there, into which the shadows were pouring, like water into a funnel.

The last ring of Shadow Men stepped into the LCVP—and vanished.

Well outside the place of disappearance, looking as if they were participants in a nightmare, were the marines. Every last officer and man, with most of our weapons, had got through the cordon of Shadow Men.

It could have been a dream, but for the skeleton of Yount, there by the LCVP, and the fact that several men had touched the shadows and been severely injured. Four hands were missing—save for the bones. One man had lost an ear, but he laughed. "It could have been my whole head!" he said. "What's an ear?"

"We got through with extraordinarily good luck, sir," said Haggerty. "What do we do now, sir?"

"What can we do, except wait and see what happens next, Captain?" He had no answer for that.

Automatically, we buried the skeleton of Yount. First his closest friends went back to the spot where his body had disappeared, and hunted for remnants. They didn't find so much as a button of his uniform or a screw from his weapons, or any part even of the steel blade of his trench knife. The detached shadow had absorbed everything of Yount save his bones.

The shadows were, in some fashion, chemical, that seemed clear enough. But beyond that we were all stuck. They were not human. They were maneuverable, plainly; but not self-maneuverable. Who, then, or what, controlled and manipulated the Shadow Men?

The Shadow Men, it gave us a shiver to note, left no footprints. Nor had they in any way affected the landing craft.

After the starlit funeral, we re-formed as we had been before the sudden appearance of the Shadow Men.

"Mother of God!" cried Krane, the trumpeter. "It's starting again. But this time it's different!"

We all whirled to look. Coming out of the northwest was a group of scarecrow figures. They didn't look like our Shadow Men. I didn't recognize them at first, though I could hear their hoarse panting, their rasped words. They staggered like men far gone in hunger and thirst. One of them fell on his face, struggled to his knees, came on.

"Japs!" cried Haggerty. "Japs! Attacking, too, and this is nineteen forty-nine!"

It couldn't be true, yet it was. There were rusty rifles in the hands of the Japanese, rifles that plainly would not work. As if to emphasize this, they began to throw them away.

One of them called out to us, in English:

"Water! Food! We surrender! We surrender!"

Japs? Surrendering? In Cuba—or thereabouts!—in 1949? I was tempted to laugh, until I remembered something that was absolutely no comfort whatever: in other parts of the world, a long way from Cuba, Japs still were holding out against patrols that hunted them down, Japs who somehow hadn't got the word that the war was over, or else refused to believe it.

I was proud of the marines when the Japs asked for food and water. Not one of them spoke up and said, "You don't need either one here." I knew then that every marine regarded it as at least possible that what was happening to us was a top-brass secret, or series of secrets, of our own government. I doubted it because of what happened to Yount. The government doesn't risk human lives on a whim. But the possibility was there. I hadn't expected Yount to tackle me, either, or to hurl himself into the shadow which slew him.

We all had canteens, none of which had been emptied. And no landing would have been properly simulated without food. We let the Japs come among us, then Hoose, who spoke some Japanese, and Matzuku, a Jap corporal who spoke some English, got together.

The Japanese were seated with their backs against an LCVP and canteens were passed to them, together with our special rations. They drank as if they had forgotten the glory of water, ate as if they had forgotten how. I gave them a little time. We did not pull in our defensive rings, even though it could be seen that they were not especially useful. When the Japs seemed more or less sated, I got Matzuku and Hoose together and began asking questions.

KING: "Where have you been for the past four years?"

MATZUKU: "Hiding out in the hills. What place is this? I know the whole island, but I don't remember this desert area."

KING: "What island?"

MATZUKU: "Guam, of course, as you Americans call it."

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."

I grinned at the little corporal.

"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.