Free The Lost Bradbury by Ray Bradbury Page A

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 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