Free The Lost Bradbury by Ray Bradbury Page B

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