Ice Station Zebra

‘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, engineer officer, people like those.’ 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 have been making 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 up in the United States 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, far less two.’

‘You’re not overworked?’ From the leisurely way he was going about his breakfast it seemed unlikely.

‘Overworked! I’ve 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 speciality, is checking on radiation and atmosphere pollution of one kind or another – in the olden 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 dioxide 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 lot, 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 the lectures.’

‘Lectures?’

‘I’ve got to do something if I’m not to go round the bend. 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 practise it? So I lecture. I read up about 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 under-exercise 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 towards the eating habits of those who should obviously be watching their habits. He eats as much as any two men aboard but owing to some metabolic defect he remains as thin as a rake. 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 maîtres 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 see 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 rig of the day here. And the captain told me to tell you that he’d let you know immediately anything came through that could possibly be of any interest to you.’

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 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 most 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 colour featuring every cartoon character I’d ever seen, from Popeye to Pinocchio, with, as a two-foot square centrepiece, an immaculately cravatted Yogi Bear industriously sawing off from the top of a wooden signpost the first word of a legend which 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 get 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, what? Cheers up the sick and suffering, I like to think – and distracts their attention while I turn up 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 bunk-room, then into the crew’s mess hall.

‘The heart of the ship,’ he announced. ‘Not the nuclear reactor, as the uninformed maintain, but here. Just look at it. Hifi, juke-box, record player, coffee machine, ice-cream machine, movie theatre, library and the home of all the card-sharps on the ship. What chance has a nuclear reactor against this lot? 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 about the tables, drinking coffee, smoking and reading. ‘You can observe for yourself, Dr Carpenter, the effects of my lectures in 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 as I’d seen in Zabrinski and Rawlings – an air of calmly relaxed competence, a cheerful imperturbability, that marked them out as being the men apart that 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 acclimatisation 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 hall. ‘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 up 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 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, white-coated cook turned at our entrance and grinned at Benson. ‘Come to sample to-day’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 to-day?’

‘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.’