Brooks pushed back his chair and paced restlessly across the cabin.

Tyndall and Turner glanced at each other, then over at Vallery, who sat with head and shoulders bowed, eyes resting vacantly on his clasped hands on the table. For the moment, Starr might not have existed.

"It's a vicious, murderous circle," Brooks went on quickly. He was leaning against the bulkhead now, hands deep in his pockets, gazing out sightlessly through the misted scuttle. "The less sleep you have, the tireder you are: the more tired you become, the more you feel the cold.

And so it goes on. And then, all the time, there's the hunger and the terrific tension. Everything interacts with everything else: each single factor conspires with the others to crush a man, break him physically and mentally, and lay him wide open to disease. Yes, Admiral, disease."

He smiled into Starr's face, and there was no laughter in his smile.

"Pack men together like herring in a barrel, deprive 'em of every last ounce of resistance, batten "em below decks for days at a time, and what do you get? T.B. It's inevitable." He shrugged. "Sure, I've only isolated a few cases so far, but I know that active pulmonary T.B. is rife in the lower deck.

"I saw the break-up coming months ago." He lifted his shoulders wearily. "I warned the Fleet Surgeon several times. I wrote the Admiralty twice. They were sympathetic, and that's all. Shortage of ships, shortage of men..."

"The last hundred days did it, sir, on top of the previous months. A hundred days of pure bloody hell and not a single hour's shore leave. In port only twice, for ammunitioning: all oil and provisions from the carriers at sea. And every day an eternity of cold and hunger and danger and suffering. In the name of God," Brooks cried, "we're not machines!"