 What is not true about the surgeon's job?
] This was the endless problem of all spaceship cooks: He had to feed the men tomorrow on what they had eaten today! Unable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls, men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list. Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick , a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more than a week from groundfall. The Triton made her underwater periplus of Earth with a galley stocked with frozen pizza and concentrated apple-juice. But then, when sailors left the seas for the skies, a decline set in. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes. Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting exordium of Isaiah 36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water. The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a spacer. And for a third footnote to the ancient observation, "God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks," Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the Charles Partlow Sale .
 He's the person to file grievances with when there are interpersonal issues
 He takes care of the mental health and morale of the crew  He has to know when to offer alcohol as the appropriate remedy for a situation  He is a sounding-board for those who need to complain  He's the person to file grievances with when there are interpersonal issues