Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
It was Coffee who clutched Corporal Wallis' wrist and pointed. Wallis
could see nothing, but he followed as Coffee moved silently through the
gray mist. Presently he too, straining his eyes, saw an indistinct
movement.
The roaring of motors died away suddenly. The fighting had stopped, a
long way off, apparently because the helicopters had been withdrawn.
Except for the booming of artillery a very long distance away, firing
unseen at an unseen target, there was no noise at all.
"Aimin' for our pill-box," whispered Coffee.
They saw the dim shape, moving noiselessly, halt. The dim figure seemed
to be casting about for something. It went down on hands and knees and
crawled forward. The two infantrymen crept after it. It stopped, and
turned around. The two dodged to one side in haste. The enemy
infantryman crawled off in another direction, the two Americans
following him as closely as they dared.
He halted once more, a dim and grotesque figure in the fog. They saw him
fumbling in his belt. He threw something, suddenly. There was a little
tap as of a fountain pen dropped upon concrete. Then a hissing sound.
That was all, but the enemy infantryman waited, as if listening....
* * * * *
The two Americans fell upon him as one individual. They bore him to the
earth and Coffee dragged at his gas-mask, good tactics in a battle where
every man carries gas-grenades. He gasped and fought desperately, in a
seeming frenzy of terror.
They squatted over him, finally, having taken away his automatics, and
Coffee worked painstakingly to get off his gas-mask while Wallis went
poking about in quest of tobacco.
"Dawggone!" said Coffee. "This mask is intricate."
"He ain't got any pockets," mourned Wallis.
Then they examined him more closely.
"It's a whole suit," explained Coffee. "H-m.... He don't have to bother
with sag-paste. He's got him on a land diving-suit."
"S-s-say," gasped the prisoner, his language utterly colloquial in spite
of the beady eyes and coarse black hair that marked him racially as of
the enemy, "say, don't take off my mask! Don't take off my mask!"
"He talks an' everything," observed Coffee in mild amazement. He
inspected the mask again and painstakingly smashed the goggles. "Now,
big boy, you take your chance with th' rest of us. What' you doin'
around here?"
The prisoner set his teeth, though deathly pale, and did not reply.
"H'm-m...." said Coffee meditatively. "Let's take him in the pill-box
an' let Loot'n't Madison tell us what to do with him."
They picked him up.
"No! No! For Gawd's sake, no!" cried the prisoner shrilly. "I just
gassed it!"
* * * * *
The two halted. Coffee scratched his nose.
"Reckon he's lyin', Pete?" he asked.
Corporal Wallis shrugged gloomily.
"He ain't got any tobacco," he said morosely. "Let's chuck him in first
an' see."
The prisoner wriggled until Coffee put his own automatic in the small of
his back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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