It was even less of a strain than Farradyne anticipated. They helped. Miss Carewe was a home economics teacher and she took care of the galley in a highly efficient manner. Mr. Forbes taught manual training or something of the sort; he requisitioned an oilcan and removed the squeaks from a couple of doors and took care of some of the minor details that Farradyne was inclined to ignore because he had other things on his mind. Someone, Farradyne never found out who, made beds and policed the ship, cleaning the salon and passengers' quarters until the rooms and hallways shone. Whoever it was did not recognize the faint stains of blood apparently, because there were no questions asked about the evidence of Mike Cahill's death.
Miss Tilden spent quite a bit of time making a small oil painting for the space above the bar which she said looked vacant. The degree of their tolerance was high, too. None of them cared for drinking, but they approved of Farradyne and his White Star Trail.
In return, Farradyne took them into the control room and showed them how the ship was run. Professor Hughes toyed with the computer by the hour because he was a mathematics teacher, and Miss Tilden listened to Farradyne by the hour as he recounted some of his adventures in space because she was a teacher of modern history.
The beautiful Mrs. Logan taught science, so Farradyne took her below to explain the atomic pile and how it worked.
With a pre-recorded tape from the course computer running through the autopilot, Farradyne pointed out the motion on the control rods that regulated the activity of the pile. Above the pile, he explained, was a huge tank of water that was used as a reaction-mass. Water was fed through the pile and its energy was raised to some tremendous degree, then hurled out through the throat of the reaction motor.
Mrs. Logan then pointed to the series of little ports in the hull.
Farradyne explained, "Now and then it is necessary to replace the control rods because they become transmuted into metals that have too little absorption factor. To get rid of them on a spaceport would mean the trouble of disposing of quite a bit of metal that is dangerously radioactive. So we take the convenient method of tossing them out in space where they can't harm anything."
"But where do they land?" she asked. "Isn't that dangerous?"
"Not at all. We use discretion. Look. In a few hours we will be halfway to Pluto. Our velocity will be tremendous because we have been accelerating all the way from Mercury. To land on Pluto we'll have to make a turn-over at halfway and start decelerating. If I wanted to replace control rods, I'd do it just before turn-over. The velocity of the ship and the rods would be a good many times the escape velocity of the entire solar system, so the rods would continue on and on, and actually they'd pass out of the solar system beyond Pluto in a matter of hours. Long before we got there."
"But supposing one did land on Terra, for instance?"