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.