Fear is the Key

At first glance, in the fleeting patches of dim starlight, it looked like a forest of huge factory chimneys sticking up out of the sea. Half-way up their height those chimneys were all joined by a deep and massive platform through the sides of which those chimneys penetrated. And, at the very right hand side, built on the platform itself and reaching up into the sky, mysterious and fragile in the spiderlike tracery of its slenderly interwoven girders, twice the height of the chimneys and outlined against the night sky in its fairy-like festoon of white and coloured operating and aircraft warning lights, was the oil-drilling derrick itself.

I'm not one of those characters who go about pinching themselves to convince themselves that things are real, but if I were I would never have had a better opportunity or reason to pinch than right then. To see that weird Martian structure suddenly thrusting itself up out of the sea would have had the most hardened topers in the country screaming to climb aboard the water wagon.

The chimneys, I knew, were massive tubular metal legs of almost unbelievable strength, each one capable of supporting a weight of several hundred tons, and on this rig I could count no less than fourteen of (hose legs, seven on each side, and there must have been a stretch of four hundred feet between the outer ones at the ends. And the astonishing thing was that this huge platform was mobile: it had been towed there with the platform deep-sunk in the sea and the legs thrusting high up almost to the level of the top of the derrick: arrived at the right spot, those legs had dropped right down to the floor of the sea — and then the whole huge platform and derrick, maybe four or five thousand tons in all and powered by huge engines, had risen dripping from the sea till it was safe beyond the reach of even the highest of the hurricane-lashed waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

All this I had known; but knowing and seeing weren't the same things at all.

A hand touched my arm and I jumped. I had quite forgotten where I was.

"What do you think of him, Mr. Talbot?" It was the skipper. "You like, eh?"

"Yes. It's nice. How much did this little toy cost? Any idea?"

"Four million dollars." Zaimis shrugged. "Maybe four and a half."

"A fair investment," I conceded. "Four million dollars."

"Eight," Zaimis corrected. "A man cannot just come and start drilling, Mr. Talbot. First he buy the land under the sea, five thousand acres, three million dollars. Then to drill a well — just one well, maybe two miles deep — it cost perhaps three-quarters of a million. If he's lucky."

Eight million dollars. And not an investment either. A gamble. Geologists could be wrong, they were more often wrong than right. General Blair Ruthven, a man with eight million dollars to throw away: what colossal prize could a man like that, with a reputation like his, be working for if he was prepared, as he so obviously was prepared, to step outside the law? There was only one way of finding out. I shivered and turned to Zaimis.

"You can get in close? Real close, I mean?"

"All the way." He pointed to the near side of the vast structure. "You have seen the ship tied up alongside?"

I hadn't but I could see her now, a lean dark shape maybe two hundred and fifty feet long, completely dwarfed by the massive rig, the tips of her masts reaching no more than halfway up to the platform deck of the oil rig. I looked back at Zaimis.

"Is that going to queer our pitch, John?"

"Get in our way, you mean? No. We make a wide curve and approach from the south,"

He touched the rudder and the Matapan swung away to port, heading to by-pass the X 13 to the south: to have gone to the north, the right, would have brought the Matapan under the glare of the arc and floodlights that illuminated the big working platform round the derrick. Even at a mile we could clearly see men moving around the derrick and the subdued hum of powerful machinery, like that of diesel compressors, came at us clearly over the darkened waters. So much, at least, was in our favour; it had not occurred to me that work on those mobile rigs would go on twenty-four hours a day but at least the clamour of their operations would drown out the throaty whisper of the Matapan's engines.

The boat had begun to corkscrew violently. We were quartering to the south-west, taking that long, deepening swell on our starboard bow and water was beginning to break over the sides of the boat. And I was getting wet. I crouched under a tarpaulin near the rudder, lit a last cigarette under cover and looked at the skipper.

"That ship out there, John. What chances of it moving away?"

"I don't know. Not much, I think. It is a supply and power ship. It brings out food and drink and mud for the drills, and thousands of gallons of oil. Look closely, Mr. Talbot. It is a kind of small tanker. Now it brings oil for the big machines, and perhaps electricity from its dynamos. Later, when the strike comes, it takes oil away."