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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