“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.