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Authors: Alistair MacLean

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BOOK: Ice Station Zebra
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      I said something, appropriate but quick, then asked, "What's wrong? What's been the hold-up? Why aren't we under way?"
      "That's the trouble with the world today," Benson said mournfully. "Rush, rush, rush. And where does all the hurry get them? I'll tell you--"
      "Excuse me. I must see the captain." I turned to leave but he laid a hand on my arm.
      "Relax, Dr. Carpenter. We _are_ at sea. Take a seat."
      "At sea? On the level? I don't feel a thing."
      "You never do when you're three hundred feet down. Maybe four hundred. I don't," he said expansively, "concern myself with those trifles. I leave them to the mechanics."
      "Mechanics?"
      "The captain, the engineer officer, people like that." He waved a hand in a generously vague gesture to indicate the largeness of the concept he understood by the term "mechanics." "Hungry?"
      "We've cleared the Clyde?"   
      "Unless the Clyde extends to well beyond the north of Scotland, the answer to that is, yes, we have."
      "Come again?"
      He grinned. "At the last check we were well into the Norwegian Sea, about the latitude of Bergen."
      "This is still only Tuesday morning?" I don't know if I looked stupid: I certainly felt it.
      "It's still only Tuesday morning," he laughed. "And if you can work out from that what kind of speed we've been makin in the last fifteen hours, we'd all be obliged if you'd keep it to yourself." He leaned back in his seat and lifted his voice. "Henry!" -
      A steward, white-jacketed, appeared from what I took to be the pantry. He was a tall, thin character with a dark complexion and the long lugubrious face of a dyspeptic spaniel. He looked at Benson and said in a meaningful voice: "_Another_ plate of French fries, Doc?"
      "You know very well that I never have more than one helping of that carbohydrated rubbish," Benson said with dignity. "Not, at least, for breakfast. Henry, this is Dr. Carpenter."
      "Howdy," Henry said agreeably.
      "Breakfast, Henry," Benson said. "And, remember, Dr. Carpenter is a Britisher. We don't want him leaving with a low opinion of the chow served in the U. S. Navy."
      "If anyone aboard this ship has a low opinion of the food," Henry said darkly, "they hide it pretty well. Breakfast. The works. Right away."
      "Not the works, for heaven's sake," I said. "There are some things we decadent Britishers can't face up to first thing in the morning. One of them is French fries."
      He nodded approvingly and left.
      I said, "Dr. Benson, I gather."
      "Resident medical officer aboard the _Dolphin_, no less," he admitted. "The one who's had his professional competence called into question by having a competing practitioner called in." -
      "I'm along for the ride. I assure you I'm not competing with anyone."
      "I know you're not," he said quickly. Too quickly. Quickly enough so that I could see Swanson's hand in this, could see him telling his officers to lay off quizzing Carpenter too much. I wondered again what Swanson was going to say when and if we ever arrived at the drift station and he found out just how fluent a liar I was. Benson went on, smiling: "There's no call for even one medico aboard this boat, much less two."
      "You're not overworked?" From the leisurely way he was going about his breakfast, it seemed unlikely.
      "Overworked! rye sick-bay call once a day and no one ever turns up--except the morning after we arrive in port with a long cruise behind us, and then there are liable to be a few sore heads around. My main job, and what is supposed to be my specialty, is checking on radiation and atmospheric pollution of one kind or another. In the old submarine days, the atmosphere used to get pretty foul after only a few hours submerged but we have to stay down for months, if necessary." He grinned. "Neither job is very exacting. We issue each member of the crew with a dosimeter and periodically check a film badge for radiation dosage--which is invariably less than you'd get sitting on the beach on a moderately warm day.
      "The atmospheric problem is even easier. Carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are the only things we have to worry about. We have a scrubbing machine that absorbs the breathed-out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumps it out into the sea. Carbon monoxide--which we could more or less eliminate if we forbade cigarette smoking, only we don't want a mutiny on our hands when we're three hundred feet down--is burned to monoxide by a special heater and then scrubbed as usual. And even that hardly worries me, I've a very competent engineman who keeps those machines in tip-top condition." He sighed. "I've a surgery here that will delight your heart, Dr. Carpenter. Operating table, dentist's chair, the works, and the biggest crisis I've had yet is a cigarette burn between the fingers sustained by a cook who fell asleep during one of my lectures."
      "Lectures?"
      "I've got to do something if I'm not to go off my rocker. I spend a couple of hours a day keeping up with all the latest medical literature, but what good is that if you don't get a chance to practice it? So I lecture. I read up on places we're going to visit, and everyone listens to those talks. I give lectures on general health and hygiene, and some of them listen to those. I give lectures on the perils of overeating and underexercise, and no one listens to those. I don't listen to them myself. It was during one of those that the cook got burned. That's why our friend Henry, the steward, adopts his superior and critical attitude toward the eating habits of those who should obviously be watching their eating habits. He eats as much as any two men aboard but owing to some metabolic defect he remains as thin as a rail. Claims it's all due to dieting."
      "It all sounds a bit less rigorous than the life of the average G.P."
      "It is, it is." He brightened. "But I've got one job--a hobby to me--that the average G.P. can't have. The ice machine. I've made myself an expert on that."
      "What does Henry think about it?"
      "What? Henry?" He laughed. "Not that kind of ice machine. I'll show you later."
      Henry brought food, and I'd have liked the maitres d'hôtel of some. allegedly five-star hotels in London to be there to see what a breakfast should be like. When I'd finished and told Benson that I didn't see that his lectures on the dangers of overweight were going to get him very far, he said: "Commander Swanson said you might like to look over the ship. I'm at your complete disposal."
      "Very kind of you both. But first I'd like to shave, dress and have a word with the captain."
      "Shave if you like. No one insists on it. As for dress, shirt and pants are the uniform of the day here. And the captain told me to tell you that he'd let you know immediately if anything that could possibly be of any interest to you came through."
      So I shaved and then had Benson take me on a conducted tour of this city under the sea. The _Dolphin_, I had to admit, made any British submarine I'd ever seen look like a relic from the Ice Age.
      To begin with, the sheer size of the vessel was staggering. So big had the hull to be to accommodate the huge nuclear reactor that it had internal accommodation equivalent to that of a 3,000-ton surface ship, with three decks instead of the usual one and lower hold found in the conventional submarine. The size, combined with the clever use of pastel paints for all the accommodation spaces, working spaces, and passageways, gave an overwhelming impression of lightness, airiness, and, above all, spaciousness.
      He took me first, inevitably, to his sick bay. It was at once the smallest and Thost comprehensively equipped surgery I'd ever seen; whether a man wanted a major operation or just a tooth filled, he could have himself accommodated there. Neither clinical nor utilitarian, however, was the motif Benson had adopted for the decoration of the one bulkhead in his surgery completely free from surgical or medical equipment of any kind--a series of film stills in color featuring every cartoon character I'd ever seen, from Popeye to Pinnochio, with, as a two-foot-square centerpiece, an immaculately cravatted Yogi Bear industriously sawing off from the top of a wooden sign post the first word of a legend that read: "Don't feed the bears." From deck to deckhead, the bulkhead was covered with them.
      "Makes a change from the usual pin-ups," I observed.
      "I got inundated with those, too," Benson said regretfully. "Film librarian, you know. Can't use them, supposed to be bad for discipline. However. Lightens the morgue-like atmosphere, doesn't it? Cheers up the sick and the suffering, I like to think--and distracts their attention while I turn to page 217 in the old textbook to find out what's the matter with them."
      From the surgery we passed through the wardroom and officers' quarters and dropped down a deck to the crew's living quarters. Benson took me through the gleaming tiled washrooms, the immaculate bunkroom, then into the crew's mess hail.
      "The heart of the ship," he announced. "Not the nuclear reactor, as the uninformed maintain, but here. Just look at it. Hi-fl, juke box, record player, coffee machine, ice-cream machine, movie theater, library, and the home of all the cardsharps on the ship. What chance has a nuclear reactor against this layout? The old-time submariners would turn in their graves if they could see this: compared to the prehistoric conditions they lived in we must seem completely spoiled and ruined. Maybe we are, then again maybe we're not: the old boys never had to stay submerged for months at a time. . . . This is also where I send them to sleep with my lectures on the evils of overeating." He raised his voice for the benefit of seven or eight men who were sitting around the tables drinking coffee, smoking and reading. "You can observe for yourself, Dr. Carpenter, the effects of my lectures on dieting and keeping fit. Did you ever see a bunch of more out-of-condition fat-bellied slobs in your life?"
      The men grinned cheerfully. They were obviously well used to this sort of thing: Benson was exaggerating and they knew it. Each of them looked as if he knew what to do with a knife and fork when he got them in his hands, but that was about as far as it went. All had a curious similarity, big men and small men, the same characteristic I'd seen in Zabrinski and Rawlings--an air of relaxed competence, a cheerful imperturbability that marked them out as being the men apart they undoubtedly were.
      Benson conscientiously introduced me to everyone, telling me exactly what their function aboard ship was and in turn informing them that I was a Royal Navy doctor along for an acclimatization trip. Swanson would have told him to say this; it was near enough the truth and would stop speculation on the reason for my presence there.
      Benson turned into a small compartment leading off the mess hail. "The air-purification room. This is Engineman Harrison. How's our box of tricks, Harrison?"
      "Just fine, Doc, just fine. CO reading steady on thirty parts a million." He entered some figures in a log book, Benson signed it with a flourish, exchanged a few more remarks and left.
      "Half my day's toil done with one stroke of the pen," he observed. "I take it you're not interested in inspecting sacks of wheat, sides of beef, bags of potatoes, and about a hundred different varieties of canned goods."
      "Not particularly. Why?"
      "The entire for'ard half of the deck beneath our feet-- a storage hold, really--is given up mainly to that. Seems an awful lot, I know, but then a hundred men can get through an awful lot of food in three months, which is the minimum time we must be prepared to stay at sea if the need arises. We'll pass up the inspection of the stores, the sight of all that food just makes me feel I'm fighting a losing battle all the time, and have a look at where the food's cooked."
      He led the way for'ard into the galley, a small square room all tiles and glittering stainless steel. A tall, burly whitecoated cook turned at our entrance and grinned at Benson. "Come to sample today's lunch, Doc?"
      "I have not," Benson said coldly. "Dr. Carpenter, the chief cook and my arch enemy, Sam MacGuire. What form does the excess of calories take that you are proposing to thrust down the throats of the crew today?"
      "No thrusting required," said MacGuire happily. "Cream soup, sirloin of beef no less, roast potatoes and as much apple pie as a man can cope with. All good, nourishing food."
      Benson shuddered. He was just about to leave the galley when he stopped and pointed at a heavy bronze ten-inch tube that stood about four feet above the deck of the galley. It had a heavy hinged lid and screwed clamps to keep the lid in position. "This might interest you, Dr. Carpenter. Guess what?"
      "A pressure cooker?"
      "Looks like it, doesn't it? This is our garbage-disposal unit. In the old days, when a submarine had to surface every few hours, garbage disposal was no problem: you just tipped the stuff over the side. But when you spend weeks on end cruising at three hundred feet, you can't just walk up to the upper deck and tip the waste over the side: garbage disposal becomes quite a problem. This tube goes right down to the bottom of the _Dolphin_. There's a heavy water-tight door at the lower end corresponding to this one, with interlocking controls that make it impossible for both doors to be open at the same time: it would be curtains for the _Dolphin_ if they were. Sam here, or one of his henchmen, sticks the garbage into nylon mesh or polythene bags, weighs them with bricks--"
      "'Bricks,' you said?"
      "Bricks. Sam, how many bricks aboard this ship?"
      "Just over a thousand at the latest count, Doc."
      "Regular builder's yard, aren't we?" Benson grinned. "Those bricks are to make sure the garbage bags sink to the bottom of the sea and not float to the surface. Even in peacetime we don't want to give our position away to anyone. In go three or four bags, the top door is clamped shut, and the bags are pumped out under pressure. Then the outer door is closedagain. Simple."
      "Yes." For some reason or other this odd contraption held a curious fascination for me. Days later I was to remember my inexplicable interest in it and wonder whether, after all, I wasn't becoming psychic with advancing years.
      "It's not worth all that attention," Benson said goodhumoredly. "Just an up-to-date version of the old rubbish chute. Come on, a long way to go yet."
      He led the way from the galley to a heavy steel door set in a transverse bulkhead. Eight massive clamps to release and then replace after we had passed through the doorway.

BOOK: Ice Station Zebra
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