Haggopian and Other Stories

Oh, the trouble was there all right, whatever it was, but it was showing up so regularly that we were fooled into believing the fault to be mechanical. On the seismograph it showed as a regular blip in an otherwise perfectly normal line; a blip that came up bang on time once every five seconds or so—blip…blip…blip—very odd! But, seeing that in every other respect the information coming out of the computer was spot on, no one worried over much about those inexplicable deviations. And, as you’ll see, it wasn’t till the very end I found a reason for them. Oh, yes, those blips were there right to the finish—but in between there came other difficulties; one of them being the trouble with the fish.

Now, if that sounds a bit funny, well, it was a funny business. The lads had rigged up a small platform, slung twenty feet or so below the main platform and about the same height above the water, and in their off-duty hours when they weren’t resting or knocking back a pint in the mess, you could usually see one or two of them down there fishing. First time we found anything odd in the habits of the fish around the rig was one morning when Nick Adams hooked a beauty. All of three feet long, the fish was, wriggling and yellow in the cold November sunlight. Nick just about had the fish docked when the hook came out of its mouth so that it fell among some support-girders down near where leg number four was being washed by a slight swell. It just lay there, flopping about a bit, writhing around in the girders. Nick scrambled down after it with a rope round his waist while his brother Dave hung on to the other end. And what do you think?—when he got down to it, damned if the fish didn’t go for him! It actually made to bite him, flopping after him on the girders and snapping its jaws until he had to yell for Dave to haul him up. Later he told us about it—how the damned thing hadn’t even tried to get back into the sea, seeming more interested in setting its teeth in him than preserving its own life! Now, you’d expect that sort of reaction from a great eel, Johnny, wouldn’t you?—but hardly from a cod—not from a North-Sea cod!

From then on Spelmann, the diver, couldn’t go down—not wouldn’t mind you, couldn’t—the fish simply would not let him! They’d chew on his suit, his air-hose—he got so frightened of them he became literally useless to us. I can’t see as I blame him though, especially when I think of what later happened to Davies.

But of course, before Davies’ accident, there was that further trouble with Borszowski. It was in the sixth week, when we were expecting to break through at any time, that Joe failed to come back off shore-leave. Instead he sent me a long, rambling letter—a supposedly “explanatory” letter—and to be truthful, when I read it I figured we were better off without him.

The man had quite obviously been cracking up for a long time. He went on about monsters (yes, monsters!), sleeping in great caverns underground and especially under the seas, waiting for a chance to take over the surface world. He said that those stone, star-shaped things were seals or barriers that kept these beings (“gods”, he called them) imprisoned; that these gods could control the weather to a degree; that they were even capable of influencing the actions of lesser creatures—such as fish, or, occasionally, men—and that he believed one of them must he lying there, locked in the ground beneath the sea, pretty close to where we were drilling. He was afraid we were “going to set it loose”! The only thing that had stopped him pressing the matter earlier (when he’d carried on so about that first star-thing), was that then, as now, he believed we’d all think he was mad! Finally, though, and particularly since the trouble with the fish, he had had to warn me. As he put it: “If anything should happen, I would never be able to forgive myself if I had not at least tried.”

Well, as I’ve said, Borszowski’s letter was rambling and disjointed—but he’d written it in a rather convincing manner, hardly what you’d expect from a real madman. He quoted references from the Holy Bible (particularly Exodus 20:4) and emphasized again his belief that the star-shaped things were nothing more or less than prehistoric pentacles (pentagrams?), laid down by some great race of alien scientists many millions of years ago. He reminded me of the heavy, unusual mists we’d had and of the queer way the cod had gone for Nick Adams. He even brought up again the question of the dicky sea-phones and computer—making, in toto, an altogether disturbing assessment of Sea-Maid’s late history as applicable to his own odd fancies.