Alistair MacLean: Ice Station Zebra

"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'h?tel 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?"