Alita grimaced. She kicked her legs. Plunging to the U-boat, she beat her fists against it, screaming, "Let me ini Let me in! I'm out here and I want to live! 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 up 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!"
Helene 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 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 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.