At 3 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, Harvard ski team captain Ben Steele stole into a paperback bookstore on Mass Ave. Why was he smiling so? With some advice whispered to him by a tan, dark-haired woman from Woodstock, Vt., he made his choice from the fiction rack. A glance at the titles before the salesman slipped the two slim tomes into a bag seemed a clue. If the titles did not exactly tell a tale, they hinted at one. Steele, ever the mild-mannered, wild blond-haired, slight-of-limb, mightily-muscled, bespectacled young hawk, tucked his new bought copies of Deliverance and On the Road into his duffel and skittered through the traffic to the ski room in Wigglesworth. In a few moments, he and coach Peter Carter would be headed to the airport with their skis.

Two weeks from now they will return--after 7000 miles and five slaloms against the best racers in the country in the USSA Western Spring series. As Steele and Carter race against the likes of Bobby Cochran and several just-off-the-World Cup-circuit Europeans at Snoqualmie, Washington, Mt. Hood and Mammoth Mountain, they will likely remember the Harvard Athletic Department fondly, for the men at 60 Boylston St. found enough cash out of special funds to pay for the skiers' air fare.