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?