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.