At ten o’clock on a September night,
Two divers crawled in desperate fright.
Roger, twenty-four, and Peter near thirty,
Hands and knees scraped, rushing, dirty.
Their home was no flat, no city floor,
But a metal box with a watertight door.
Two hundred miles from Scotland’s land,
Beneath the sea, where oil rigs stand.
Pressures deep and gases mixed,
Rules of life that can’t be fixed.
So men live down in pods of steel,
Till shifts are done and wounds can heal.
That night the intercom gave dread,
“A leak’s begun,” the surface said.
The hallway hissed, the air grew thin,
They crawled to safety, slammed within.
They sealed the hatch, backs pressed tight,
Praying the danger stayed outside.
A hiss of helium filled their room,
The door creaked shut, they escaped their doom.
“Thank you,” they mouthed toward the eye,
The black-and-white lens staring nigh.
Then to their bunks, exhausted, sore,
Believing the nightmare harmed no more.
But Reed above, with gauges bright,
Saw something wrong in panel’s light.
The seal, it claimed, was not complete,
A leak still hissed at divers’ feet.
He pumped in more, with trembling hand,
Helium pressure, as gauges planned.
But still the board refused to show,
The door was sealed; the light said no.
Below, the men sprang from their bed,
Toward the hatch with sudden dread.
They pulled, they heaved, the door stood fast,
Their panic rising, breath held last.
Then strange their actions seemed to be,
They stripped their bunks, unnervingly.
On metal springs they writhed about,
As Reed above grew filled with doubt.
“Too much CO₂? Too much gas?
Their minds are slipping far too fast!”
So more helium he forced inside,
Believing he helped, but pressure lied.
The chamber grew hot, unbearably tight,
The steel walls groaned with crushing might.
The men rolled frantic, skin aflame,
Trapped in a deadly, unseen game.
Reed thought a leak consumed their air,
But safe they were—no danger there.
The fault lay not in his intent,
But in controls that misled, bent.
And so, by error, not by hate,
He sealed his divers’ boiling fate.
Roger and Peter, brave lives lost,
Two souls beneath the waves, the cost.
No charges laid, no crime to blame,
Just system flaws and human shame.
Yet still their tale in whispers weep,
Of men who burned beneath the deep.