Ice Station Zebra Read Online Free PDF Page B

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