by Ray Bradbury
Alita listened and shuddered. Why was she still alive and swimming forty fathoms under?
And then she knew. It was like sudden flame in her. She lived because she loved Richard Jameson. She lived simply because his ship might pass this way some day soon again, like it had three weeks ago, returning from England. And she might see him leaning on the rail, smoking his pipe and trying to smile, still alive.
She lived for that. She lived to keep him safe on every trip. Like the others, she had a purpose, a hot, constricting, unquenchable purpose to prevent more victims from coming down to join her in the same nightmare fashion as the USS Atlantic. She guessed that explained everything. There was good reason for her still to be moving, and somehow God had motivated them all in the green sea-weed plateaus and gullies.
“Now,” came Conda’s heavy thought, “we’ve this German submarine to consider. We have to knock it out of action completely. We can’t have it lying here when the convoy comes. Alita—”
Alita jerked. She came out of her thoughts, and her pale lips moved. “Yes?”
“You know what to do, Alita? And…Helene?”
Helene drifted down dreamily, laughing in answer, and opened white fingers to clench them tight.
“It’s up to you, Alita and Helene. The rest of us will deploy around the submarine. Jones, you and Merrith try to jam the torpedo openings somehow. Acton, you work on the induction valves. Simpson, see what you can do to the guns on deck; and Haines, you and the other men try your damnedest with the periscope and conning tower.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good enough, sir.”
“If we do it, this’ll be the sixth sub for us—”
“If we do it,” said Conda.
“Alita’ll do it for us, won’t you Alita?”
“What? Oh, yes. Yes! I’ll do it.” She tried to smile.
“All right then.” Conda swung about. “Spread out and go in toward the submarine under a smoke-screen. Deploy!”
* * * *
Silently the congregation split into twos and threes and swam toward the coral shelf, around it, then sank to the bottom, scooped up great handfuls of mud and darkened the water with it. Alita followed, cold, tired, unhappy.
The submarine squatted on the bottom like a metal shark, dark and wary and not making a sound. Sea-weed waved drowsy fronds around it, and several curious blue-fish eyed it and fluttered past. Sunshine slanted down through water, touching the gray bulk, making it look prehistoric, primeval.
A veil of mud sprang up as the cordon of Conda’s people closed in around the U-boat. Through this veil their pasty bodies twisted, naked and quick.
Alita’s heart spasmed its cold grave-flesh inside her. It beat salt water through her arteries, it beat agony through her veins. There, just a few feet from her through the mud-veil lay an iron-womb, and inside it grown-up children stirred, living. And out here in the cold deeps nothing lived but the fish.
Conda and Alita and the others didn’t count.
The submarine, a metal womb, nurturing those men, keeping the choking, hungry waters from them. What a difference a few inches of metal made between pink flesh and her own white flesh, between living and not living, between laughing and crying. All of that air inside the submarine. What would it be like to gasp it in again, like the old days just a few scant weeks ago? What would it be like to suck it in and mouth it out with talked words on it? To talk again!
Alita grimaced. She kicked her legs. Plunging to the U-boat, she beat her fists against it, screaming, “Let me in! Let me in! I’m out here and I want to live! Let me in!”
“Alita!” The old woman’s voice cried in her mind. A shadow drew across her lined face, softening it. “No, no, my child, do not think of it! Think only of what must be done!”
Alita’s handsome face was ugly with torture.
“Just one breath! Just one song!”
“Time shortens, Alita. And the convoy comes! The submarine must be smashed—now!”
“Yes,” said Alita wearily. “Yes. I must think of Richard—if he should happen to be in this next convoy—” Her dark hair surged in her face. She brushed it back with white fingers and stopped thinking about living again. It was needless torture.
She heard Helene’s laughter from somewhere. It made her shiver. She saw Helene’s nude body flash by above her like a silver fish, magnificent and graceful as a wind-borne thistle. Her laughter swam with her. “Open the U-boat up! Open it up and let them out and I’ll make love to a German boy!”
* * * *
There were lights in the submarine. Dim lights. Alita pressed her pale face against the port and stared into a crew’s quarters. Two German men lay on small bunks, looking at the iron ceiling doing nothing. After a while one puckered his lips, whistled, and rolled out of the bunk to disappear through a small iron door. Alita nodded. This was the way she wanted it. The other man was very young and very nervous, his eyes were erratic in a tired face, and his hair was corn-yellow and clipped tight to his head. He twisted his hands together, again and again, and a muscle in his cheek kept jerking.
Light and life, a matter of inches away. Alita felt the cold press of the ocean all around her, the beckoning urge of the cold swells. Oh, just to be inside, living and talking like them….
She raised her tiny fist, the one with Richard’s thick ring on it, from Annapolis, and struck at the port. She struck four times.
No effect.
She tried again, and knew that Helene would be doing the same on the opposite side of the sub.
The Annapolis ring clicked against thick port glass.
Jerking, the German lad pulled his head up half an inch and stared at the port, and looked away again, went back to twisting his fingers and wetting his lips with his tongue.
“I’m out here!” Alita struck again and again. “Listen to me! Listen! I’m out here!”
The German sat up so violently he cracked his head against metal. Holding his forehead with one hand he slipped out of the bunk and stepped to the port.
He squinted out, cupping hands over eyes to see better.
Alita smiled. She didn’t feel like smiling, but she smiled. Sunlight sprang down upon her dark smoke-spirals of hair dancing on the water. Sunlight stroked her naked white body. She beckoned with her hands, laughing.
For one unbelieving, stricken instant, it was as if hands strangled the German lad. His eyes grew out from his face like unhealthy gray things. His mouth stopped retching and froze. Something crumbled inside him. It seemed to be the one last thing to strike his mind once and for all insane.
One moment there, the next he was gone. Alita watched him fling himself back from the port, screaming words she couldn’t hear. Her heart pounded. He fought to the door, staggering out. She swam to the next port in time to see him shout into the midst of a sweating trio of mechanics. He stopped, swayed, swallowed, pointed back to the bunk room, and while the others turned to stare in the designated direction, the young German ran on, his mouth wide, to the entrance rungs of the conning tower.
Alita knew what he was yelling. She spoke little German; she heard nothing; but faintly the waves of his mind impinged on hers, a screaming insanity:
“God! Oh God! She’s outside. And she is swimming! And alive!”
The sub captain saw him coming. He dragged out a revolver and fired, point-blank. The shot missed and the two grappled.
“God! Oh God! I can’t stand it longer! Months of sleeping under the sea! Let me out of this god-damned nightmare! Let me out!”
“Stop! Stop it, Schmidt! Stop!”
The captain fell under a blow. The younger man wrested the gun from him, shot him three times. Then he jumped on the rungs to the conning tower, and twisted at mechanisms.
Alita warned the others. “Be ready! One is coming out! He
’s coming out! He’s opening the inner door!”
Instantly, breathlessly, passionately, Helene’s voice rang: “To hell with the inner door! It’s the outer door we want open!”
“God in heaven, let me out! I can’t stay below!”
“Stop him!”
The crew scrambled. Ringing down, the inner door peeled open. Three Germanic faces betrayed the biting fear in their bellies. They grabbed instruments and threw them at Schmidt’s vanishing legs jumping up the rungs!
Conda’s voice clashed like a thrust gong in the deep sunlit waters. “Ready, everyone? If he gets the outer door open, we must force in to stop the others from ever closing it!”
Helen laughed her knifing laughter. “I’m ready!”
The submarine stirred and rolled to a strange gurgling sound. Young Schmidt was babbling and crying. To Alita, he was now out of sight. The other men were pouring pistol shots up into the conning tower where he’d vanished, to no effect. They climbed after him, shouting.
A gout of water hammered down, crushed them!
“It’s open!” Helene exulted. “It’s open! The outer seal is free!”
“Don’t let them slam it again!” roared Conda. White bodies shot by, flashing green in the sunlight. Thoughts darkened, veiling like unsettled mud.
Inside the machine-room, the crew staggered in a sloshing, belching nightmare of thrusting water. There was churning and thrashing and shaking like the interior of a gigantic washing machine. Two or three crew-men struggled up the rungs to the inner lock and beat at the closing mechanism.
“I’m inside!” Helene’s voice was high, excited. “I’ve got him—the German boy! Oh, this is a new kind of love, this is!”
There was a terrific mental scream from the German, and then silence. A moment later his dangling legs appeared half in, half out of the lock as the door started to seal! Now it couldn’t seal. Yanking desperately, the crew beneath tried to free him of the lock, but Helene laughed dimly and said, “Oh, no, I’ve got him and I’m keeping him here where he’ll do the most good! He’s mine. Very much mine. You can’t have him back!”
Water thundered, spewed. The Germans floundered. Schmidt’s limbs kicked wildly, with no life, in the steadily descending torrent. Something happened to release him. The lock rapped open and he fell face down into the rising waters.
Something came with him. Something white and quick and naked. Helene.
* * * *
Alita watched in a numbed sort of feeling that was too weary to be horror.
She watched until there were three Germans left, swimming about, keeping their heads over the water, yelling to God to save them. And Helene was in among them, invisible and stroking and moving quickly. Her white hands flickered up, grasped one officer by the shoulders and pulled him steadily under.
“This is a different kind of love! Make love to me! Make love! Don’t you like my cold lips?”
Alita swam off, shuddering, away from the fury and yelling and corruption. The submarine was dying, shaking its prehistoric bulk with metal agony. In another moment it would be drowned and the job done. Silence would come down again and sunlight would strike on the dead, quiet U-boat and another attack would be successful.
Sobbing, Alita swam up toward the sun in the green silence. It was late afternoon, and the water became warmer as she neared the surface. Late afternoon. Back in Forest Hills they’d be playing tennis now on the hot courts, drinking cool cocktails, talking about dancing tonight at the Indigo Club. Back in Forest Hills they’d be deciding what formal to wear tonight to that dance, what show to see. Oh, that was so long ago in the sanity of living, in the time before torpedoes crushed the hull of the USS Atlantic and took her down.
Richard, where are you now? Will you be here in a few minutes, Richard, with the convoy? Will you be thinking of us and the day we kissed goodbye in New York at the harbour, when I was on my way to nursing service in London? Will you remember how we kissed and held tight, and how you never saw me again?
I saw you, Richard. Three weeks ago. When you passed by on Destroyer 242, oblivious to me floating a few feet under the water!
If only we could be together. But I wouldn’t want you to be like this, white and sodden and not alive. I want to keep you from all this, darling. And I shall. That’s why I stay moving, I guess. Because I know I can help keep you living. We just killed a submarine, Richard. It won’t have a chance to harm you. You’ll have a chance to go to Britain, to do the things we wanted to do together.
There was a gentle movement in the water, and the old woman was at her side.
Alita’s white shoulders jerked. “It—it was awful.”
The old woman looked at the sun caught in the liquid. “It always is—this kind of death. It always has been—always will be as long as men are at war. We had to do it. We didn’t take lives, we saved lives—hundreds of them.”
Alita closed her eyes and opened them again. “I’ve been wondering about us. Why is it that just you and I and Conda and Helene and a few others survived the sinking? Why didn’t some of the hundreds of others join us? What are we?”
The old woman moved her feet slowly, rippling the currents.
“We’re Guardians, that’s what you’d call us. A thousand people drowned when the Atlantic went down, but twenty of us came out, half-dead, because we have somebody to guard. You have a lover on the convoy routes. I have four sons in the Navy. The others have similar obligations. Conda has sons too. And Helene—well, her lover was drowned inside the Atlantic and never came half-alive like us, so she’s vindictive, motivated by a great vengeance. She can’t ever really be killed.
“We all have a stake in the convoys that cross and recross the ocean. We’re not the only ones. Maybe there are thousands of others who cannot and will not rest between here and England, breaking seams in German cargo boats, darkening Nazi periscopes and frightening German crewmen, sinking their gunboats when the chance comes.
“But we’re all the same. Our love for our husbands and sons and daughters and fathers makes us go on when we should be meat for fish, make us go on being Guardians of the Convoy, gives us the ability to swim faster than any human ever swam while living, as fast as any fish ever swam. Invisible guardians nobody’ll ever know about or appreciate. Our urge to do our bit was so great we wouldn’t let dying put us out of action….”
“I’m so tired, though,” said Alita. “So very tired.”
“When the war is over—we’ll rest. In the meanwhile—”
“The convoy is coming!”
* * * *
It was Conda’s deep voice of authority. Used to giving captain’s orders for years aboard the Atlantic, he appeared below them now, about a hundred yards away, striving up in the watered sunlight, his red hair aflame around his big-nosed, thick-lipped face. His beard was like so many living tentacles, writhing.
The convoy!
The Guardians stopped whatever they were doing and hung suspended like insects in some green primordial amber, listening to the deeps.
From far, far off it came: the voice of the convoy. First a dim note, a lazy drifting of sound, like trumpets blown into eternity and lost in the wind. A dim vibration of propellers beating water, a bulking of much weight on the sun-sparkled Atlantic tides.
The convoy!
Destroyers, cruisers, corvettes, and cargo ships. The great bulking convoy!
Richard! Richard! Are you with them?
Alita breathed water in her nostrils, down her throat, in her lungs. She hung like a pearl against a green velvet gown that rose and fell under the breathing of the sea.
Richard!
The echo of ships became more than a suggestion. The water began to hum and dance and tremble with the advancing armada. Bearing munitions and food and planes, bearing hopes and prayers and people, the convoy c
hurned for England.
Richard Jameson!
The ships would come by like so many heavy blue shadows over their heads and pass on and be lost soon in the night-time, and tomorrow there would be another and another stream of them.
Alita would swim with them for a way. Until she was tired of swimming, perhaps, and then she’d drop down, come floating back here to this spot on a deep water tide she knew and utilized for the purpose.
Now, excitedly, she shot upward.
She went as near to the surface as she could, hearing Conda’s thunder-voice commands.
“Spread out! One of you to each major ship! Report any hostile activity to me instantly! We’ll trail with them until after sunset! Spread!”
The others obeyed, rising to position, ready. Not near enough to the surface so the sun could get at their flesh.
They waited. The hammer-hammer, churn-churn of ships folded and grew upon itself. The sea brimmed with its bellow going down to kick the sand and striking up in reflected quivers of sound. Hammer-hammer-churn!
Richard Jameson!
Alita dared raise her head above the water. The sun hit her like a dull hammer. Her eyes flicked, searching, and as she sank down again she cried, “Richard. It’s his ship. The first destroyer. I recognize the number. He’s here again!”
“Alita, please,” cautioned the old woman. “Control yourself. My boy too. He’s on one of the cargo ships. I know its propeller voice well. I recognize the sound. One of my boys is here, near me. And it feels so very good.”
The whole score of them swam to meet the convoy. Only Helene stayed behind. Swimming around and around the German U-boat, swimming swiftly and laughing her strange high laugh that wasn’t sane.
* * * *
Alita felt something like elation rising in her. It was good, just to be this close to Richard, even if she couldn’t speak or show herself or kiss him ever again. She’d watch him every time he came by this way. Perhaps she’d swim all night, now, and part of the next day, until she couldn’t keep up with him any longer, and then she’d whisper goodbye and let him sail on alone.
The destroyer cut close to her. She saw its number on the prow in the sun. And the sea sprang aside as the destroyer cut it like a glittering knife.
