Arthur J. Burks

“ Any Fifth Column from "Outside" is considered fantastic beyond all possibility.
Well, there it is. The high brass all along the way has spoken. Now it's up to me. I checked to find that every nation in the world had denied knowledge of the Shadow Men—except our own United States. But without asking for volunteers, our most ruthless high brass would not have sent us to face those shadows, wherein someone was almost certain to die horribly.
So, some nation has lied! We, the United Nations, have the perfect A-bomb-proof, capable of instant transmission to anywhere it is needed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is deemed advisable, in view of publicity attendant on the Cuba-Yataritas angle of the Kalahari Desert tests, to make public the following facts. First, best protection against the A-Bomb is worldwide observation by special television; the Council has it. Second necessity is ability to make the bombproofs, provided by the Security Council, available to anybody, anywhere in the world, who is threatened by attack. Bombproofs are capable of instant transmission to any spot on the face of the globe—and removal of bombproof and occupants to anywhere else in the world—as Cuba-to-Kalahari-to-Guam. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Right after that we saw the Shadow Men, inside the dome. Something of that which held us at last became visible.
CHAPTER TWO
The Destroying Shadows
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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
CHAPTER THREE
Alien Voices
Each man had his message pad on his knee, or on the sand beside him, opened up. The moon was so brilliant we had scarcely any need of the illuminated pages with which each book was equipped.
Within fifteen minutes our walkie-talkies were going wild. Every last one received first, the eerie whispering. ”

“ People who are forced into these shelters by sudden attack, are automatically provided with food, water and equable temperature, by a process which provides these necessities as separate exudations from the inner walls of the bombproofs! ”