Free from the control board, Farradyne had two choices. In his role of lover he could rap on her door because he wanted to be near her, or he could let her sleep because he did not want to disturb her. He listened at her door on his way to the galley but he could hear nothing; apparently she did not snore. He went on down and built himself a plate of ham and eggs and a large pot of coffee, and thankful for the quiet and the solitude and the freedom, he ate his breakfast and then loafed in the salon, trying to plan his future course.
Carolyn made her appearance at ten o'clock and reproached him. He gave her the stock answer, against which there could be no rebuttal, and offered her breakfast. He was solicitous and gentle. He felt that with four hours of nerve-soothing quiet behind him, he could play it with a bit more relaxation.
"Where are we?" she asked.
"About a half-million miles out from Terra, I can figure it out for you if you want it precisely."
She smiled at him. "It's important. How close is that 'about' a half-million miles?"
Farradyne leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes as he went through the familiar formula, tossing out the figures beyond three significants. It took him half a minute of plain mental arithmetic to come up with the answer, "Four hours at one gravity makes it six hundred sixty thousand miles. There's some error there, caused by the fact that our apparent gravity just at take-off was not much more than one-point-three, and the pull of the earth was replaced by true accelerations as the Terran gravity diminished. But those figures should be close enough."
"I didn't think you could guess that close."
"That was no guess, it was a practiced estimate. I can come closer than that with some thought. After all, a shoe salesman should be able to call off the sizes of the shoes he sees on the street, and you know the Classical Chinese Carpenter?"
"No."
"The Chinese Carpenter is an oriental who comes in and takes a careful look where the plaster fell out of the ceiling, and then goes away and cuts a hunk of plasterboard that exactly fits the holes without any cutting or even shaving."