"You don't suppose, sir," said Krane diffidently, "that we're all—dead, or something? With all those fancy explosives we brought along—"
Nobody laughed. Nobody snickered. And nobody drew away to hit the sack.
"I don't believe we're dead, Music," I said, "but I could be wrong about that, too. I think your 'or something' comes about as close to an answer as anything we have. Now, I'm open to suggestions as to how we find out what ails us, where we are, how we get out; what, in general, it all seems to be about."
"The Shadow Men," said Ziegler, "what were they?"
Nobody knew.
There was something in the shadows. A smell, and something else. Why didn't the stuff, whatever it was, destroy bones as well? Had we really heard Yount scream inside the shadow?
We recapitulated everything we could remember. As if we could forget anything! And it all added up to a nightmare.
"The walkie-talkies," said Haggerty. "We've got eighty-odd of them. They can all be adjusted to different wavelengths. I suggest we estimate how many, and then each of us take his share of them, and start sending, not only in Morse and International codes, but in every language we know, down to Greek and Latin!"
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.