Haggopian and Other Stories

Joe Borszowski was the man—superstitious as hell, panicky, spooked at the sight of a mist on the sea—and when he saw the star-thing…!

It happened like this:

We’d drilled that first difficult bore through some very hard stuff down to a depth of some six hundred feet when a core-sample produced the first of the stars. Now, Chalky had reckoned the one he sent me to be a fossilized star-fish of sorts from some time when the North Sea was warm, a very ancient thing; and I must admit that with its five-pointed shape and being the size of a small star-fish I believed him to be correct. Anyway, when I showed the Sea-Maid star to old Borszowski he nearly went crackers. He swore we were in for trouble and demanded we all stop drilling and head for land right away. He insisted that our location was “accursed” and generally carried on like a mad thing without attempting to offer anything like a real explanation.

Well, of course I couldn’t just leave it at that. If one of the lads was round the twist, as it were (meaning Borszowski) he could well affect the whole operation, jeopardize the whole thing, especially if his madness caught him at an important time. My immediate reaction was to want him off the rig; but the radio had been giving us a bit of bother so that I couldn’t call in Wes Atlee, the chopper pilot. Yes, I’d seriously considered having the Pole lifted off by chopper. Riggers can be damned superstitious, as you well know, and I didn’t want Joe “infecting” the others. As it turned out, that sort of action wasn’t necessary, for in no time at all old Borszowski was round apologising for his outburst and trying to show he was sorry about all the fuss he’d made. Something told me, though, that he’d been quite serious about his fears—whatever they were. And so, to put the Pole’s mind at rest (if I possibly could) I decided to have the rig’s geologist, Carson, take the star to bits and have a closer look at it and let me know what the thing actually was.

Of course, he’d tell me it was simply a fossilised star-fish—I’d report the fact to Borszowski—things would be back to normal. So naturally when Carson told me that the thing wasn’t a fossil, that he didn’t know exactly what it was, well, I kept that bit of information to myself and told Carson to do the same. I was sure that whatever the trouble had been with Borszowski it wouldn’t be helped any by telling him that the star-thing was not a perfectly ordinary, completely explicable object.

The drilling brought up two or three more of the stars down to about a thousand feet but nothing after that, so for a period I forgot all about them. As it happened I should have listened a bit more willingly to old Joe—and I would have, too, if I’d followed my intuition. You see, I’d been spooked myself right from the start. The mists were too heavy, the sea too quiet—things were altogether too queer all the way down the line. Of course, I didn’t experience any of the early troubles the divers and geologists had known—I didn’t join the rig till she was in position, ready to chew—but I was certainly in on it from then on. It had really started with the sea-phones, even before those stars came along.

Now you know I’m not knocking your ’phones, Johnny, they’ve been a damn good thing ever since Seagasso developed them, giving readings right down to the inch almost, so’s we could tell just exactly when the drill was going through into gas or oil. And they didn’t let us down this time either—we just failed to recognize or heed their warning, that’s all.

In fact there were lots of warnings, but, as I’ve said, it started out with the sea-phones. We’d put a ’phone down inside each leg of the rig, right onto the sea-bed where they sat listening to the drill as it cut its way through the rocks, picking up the echoes as the bit worked its way down and the sounds of the cutting rebounded from the strata below. And of course, everything they heard we picked up on the surface—duplicated electronically and fed out to us through our computer. Which was why we believed initially that either the computer was on the blink or one of the ’phones was dicky. You see, even when we weren’t drilling—when we were changing bits, joining up lengths or lining the bore—we were still getting readings from the computer!