"It would make an interesting looking meteorite; it would melt in mid-air. Then the total radioactivity would spread thin and do no damage."
She was satisfied, and Farradyne led her back to the salon.
For the first time in years Farradyne began to feel at ease with the universe. His mind, previously busy with his main problem, found time to consider other things. And, like the rest of the spaceman breed, Farradyne was something of a gadgeteer.
Spacing, in a sense, was very much like the manning of a sailing ship of the nineteenth century. When something needed attention, in space it was during maneuver for landing, take-off, or turn-over; on sea it was coming about on a tack or setting sail, a full-time attention was necessary. Between periods of activity, the spaceman sat on his duff and waited for one of the silent twinkles to detach itself from the stellar curtain above his observation dome and become a planet or destination.
Some spacemen reverted to the point where they built spacecraft in old bottles, others spent their time in tinkering.
Farradyne had always been one of the latter. And so as his mind felt at ease, he began to tinker with the gear down in the repair shop. It was a small room below the passenger section hardly large enough to hold the machinery it contained. But Farradyne, like many of his fellows, enjoyed making things, repairing things and generally experimenting. Every spaceman hoped to come up with something that would make him rich and famous, and some of them had done it. They had plenty of time, a good grasp of things scientific as well as manual dexterity.
So Farradyne tinkered happily.
The shop was silent; the usual milling around of his passengers stopped as they went to bed. Now there was only the occasional groan of metal-upon-metal or the faint whine as a motor somewhere wound up to do some automatic job. The click and clack of relays were just barely audible; they would have been unheard by someone whose training had been other than that of a spaceman. In the background was the muted sibilant of the reaction motor, a sound like the shush of a distant seashore. Farradyne heard these sounds unconsciously. They were as pleasant to the ears of the spaceman as the sounds of a sailing ship were to the old-time seaman.
But another faint sound came to disturb him, rising up into the level of audibility very slowly.
It was a ringing in Farradyne's ears.