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. 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. Then the men began to report shouts, weeping, wordless screams, unearthly music, wind instruments, drums, tom-toms--just about every noise-making agency of which any of us had ever heard. Was all this in answer to our attempts to communicate? How could we make contact that would also make sense? So far, the sounds were no more informative than static. But it was something, when we had been hearing nothing at all, so we kept at it. We kept it up for three days and nights. The Shadow Men did not return during that time. The Japanese gradually mingled with us. They realized that we knew no more of our situation than they did, possibly less, and joined with us in trying to work it out. It was midnight, the fourth night of our disappearance, when we got a break. Ziegler brought me a message which said: "You are wasting your time. Contact like this is forbidden." I looked at Ziegler. "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.