One of his other stories to deal with the sea is ‘Undersea Guardians', a rather neglected tale not yet included in any of his collections. It was written back in 1944 and not surprisingly takes the Second World War as its theme. It is an imaginative and memorable story introducing us to another of the sea's strange mysteries - mermaids.
The ocean slept quietly. There was little movement in its deep green silence. Along the floor of a watery valley some bright flecks of orange colour swam: tiny arrow-shaped fish. A shark prowled by, gaping its mouth. An octopus reached up lazily with a tentacle, wiggled it at nothing, and settled back dark and quiet.
Fish swam in and around the rusting, tom hulk of a submerged cargo ship, in and out of gaping holes and ripped ports. The legend on the prow said: USS Atlantic.
It was quite soundless. The water formed around the ship like green gelatin.
And then Conda came, with his recruits.
They were swimming like dream-motes through the wide dark-watered valleys of the ocean; Conda at the head of the school with his red shock of hair flurried upright in a current, and his red bush beard trailed down over the massive ribs of his chest. He put out his great arms, clutched water, pulled back, and his long body shot ahead.
The others imitated Conda, and it was very quietly done. The ripple of white arms, cupped hands, the glimmer of quick moving feet, was like the movement of motion pictures from which the sound-track has been cut. Just deep water silence and the mute moves of Conda and his swarm.
Alita came close at his kicking heels. She swam with her sea-green eyes wide-fixed and dark hair spilling back over her naked body. Her mouth twisted with some sort of agony to which she could give no words.
Alita felt something moving at her side. Another, smaller, woman, very thin in her nakedness, with gray hair and a shrivelled 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 the 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 for, 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.