Alita felt someone moving at her side. Another, smaller, woman, very thin in her nakedness, with gray hair and a shriveled husk of face that held nothing but weariness. She swam too, and would keep on swimming.
And then there was Helene, flashing by over their heads like an instantaneous charge of lightning. Helene with her hot angry eyes and her long platinum hair and her strange laughter.
"How much longer, Conda?" The old woman's thought reached through the waters, touching the brains of them all as they swam.
"An hour. Perhaps only forty minutes!" came Conda's blunt retort. It had the depth of fathoms in it; dark like the tides in the sunken water lands.
"Watch out!" somebody cried.
Down through the green waters overhead something tumbled. A shadow crossed the ocean surface, quick, like a gigantic sea-gull.
"Depth-charge!" shouted Conda. "Get away from it!"
Like so many frightened fish the twenty of them scattered instantly, with a flurry of legs, a spreading of arms, a diving of heads.
The depth-charge ripped water into gouts and shreds, spread terrific vibrations down to kick the sandy bottom, up to ram the surface like a geyser!
Alita screamed to herself as she sank, stunned, to the sea-floor, a queer strange pain going through her limbs. If only this were over, if only the real death came. If only it were over.
A shivering went through her. Quite suddenly the water was icy cold, and she was alone in the green emptiness. So very alone. Alone, staring at a dark ring on her left hand.
"Richard, I want to see you again so very much. Oh, Richard, if we could only be together."
"Daughter." The gentle thought husked at her as the old woman glided up, white hair misting around her wrinkled face. "Don't. Don't think. Come along. There's work. Work to be done. Much of it. Work for you and me and the ships on the surface, and for — for Richard."
Alita didn't move. "I don't want to swim. I'd rather just sit here on the sand and… wait."
"You know you can't do that." The old woman touched her. "You'd be all the unhappier. You have a reason to swim or you wouldn't be swimming. Come along. We're almost there!"
The effects of the depth-charge, dropped from a low-flying airplane, had dispersed. Mud-streaks boiled up fogging the water, and there were a million air bubbles dancing toward the outer world like laughing diamonds. Alita let the old woman take her hand and tug her up from the sand floor. Together they progressed toward Conda, who was the nucleus of a growing congregation.
"Submarine!" somebody thought, in a tense whisper. "Over that crop of coral ahead. That's why the airplane dropped the depth-charge!"
"What kind of submarine?" someone else asked.
"German," said Conda grimly. His red beard wavered in the water and his red-rimmed eyes stared out with iron fury. Helene flicked by them all, swiftly, laughing. "A German submarine lying on the bottom, sleeping quietly— waiting for the convoy!"
Their minds swirled at the words of Conda, like so many warm-cold currents intermixing with fear and apprehension.
"And the convoy will pass this spot in how long?"
"Half an hour at most, now."
"Then there isn't much time, is there?"
"Not much."
"Isn't it dangerous for us to be near it? What if the airplane returns with more depth-charges?"
Conda growled. "This is the limit to the plane range. That plane won't be back. He's out of bombs and out of gas. It's our job now. And what of it? You afraid?"
Silence.
The ring of faces looked to Conda for the plan, Alita among them; fourteen men, six women. Men with beards grown out four, five months; hair long and unshorn about their ears. Pallid watery faces with determined bone under the skin, set jaws and tightened fists. All gathered like fragments of some oceanic nightmare. The pallid undead, breathing water, and thinking mute thoughts about the stormy night when the USS Atlantic had been torpedoed and sent to the bottom, with all of them trapped, screaming, inside her.
"We never had our chance," said Conda, grimly, "to get where we were going to do what we had to do. But we'll go on doing it until the war's over because that's all that's worth while doing. I don't know how we live or what makes us live except the will to fight, the will to vengeance, wanting to win — not wanting to lie on the coral shelves like so much meat for the sharks—"
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 opening 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 white 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!