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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 adeck 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