Salvor-Jones sighed. He got out the animated slide pictures, set up the screen, and amused himself at length. The slides were mostly those of lightly clad females in warm climates, doing pleasantly idle things.
After the second slide, Knucklebone switched his chair around so that his back was to the screen. The girls made him feel too sentimental. The blue skies and golden beaches made him homesick.
On the fifth day Knucklebone Smith was fiddling with a power switch and blew out a safety fuse. It required some three hours for Professor Salvor-Jones to repair it, but he was glad for the diversion.
On the eighth day Smith was pottering in the pile room with an electric torch, making himself a wire bookrack. A lubrication reservoir caught on fire and a minor generator was ruined.
On the eleventh day he dropped a hammer from the fidley of the power room to the floor, a hundred feet below. A gas line was smashed. Salvor-Jones put on a gas mask and went down to fix it. It took quite a long while.
On the fourteenth day, without the slightest pretext, Salvor-Jones called Knucklebone Smith a meddling fool. Smith hit him once and that was that. They didn't speak to each other for four days.
The meteor storm came only three days before their exile was to end. On Pluto, where the frozen atmosphere lies inert on the surface, there was nothing to stop the rain of debris from space. It sounded like sporadic hail on the tough metal hull of the beacon, and their scopes showed the mass to be more than a million miles in width, streaming in from the direction of Orion.
Salvor-Jones was worried. There was a tiny blip in the lower corner of the solar coordinate on the radar screen; a blip that occulted with alternating brightness and dimness, in a pattern of unnatural regularity. A ship!
Her radio came in an hour later. She announced her name, Luna Star, and destination, Alpha Centauri. The hail of stones from space was getting worse. The beacon was built to stand such stress, but a starship, meeting them head on—!