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— 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,