Farradyne watched them carefully as they came aboard and after he had seen them he breathed a sigh of relief. There was something prim and straitlaced about them all, and they would give him no trouble. It was going to be a breeze.
There were a few whose faces and names correlated; the rest became a confusing background of nonentities, uninteresting and bland. Professor Martin was an elderly gentleman who herded them all into place efficiently, and who knew enough about spacing to handle the job. He took over and left only the running of the Lancaster to Farradyne. There was a Miss Otis who giggled like a fifty year old schoolgirl; a Mrs. Logan who probably had all of the boys in her class drooling; a Miss Tilden who was old enough to be Farradyne's mother and a Miss Carewe who was old enough to be Miss Tilden's mother and who also knew her way around space, apparently. Miss Higginbotham was the she-dragon type and Mr. Hughes was the know-it-all type.
He left them alone. They ran the galley and policed the joint and made the beds, and one of them made a small water-color to hang in the empty space over the tiny bar and Miss Carewe requested an oilcan because she hated squeaky doors.
Beyond that, Farradyne saw little of them. He used his spare time tinkering down in the tiny workshop, or demonstrating how the atomic pile was controlled by the damper rods.
He was happy and free from care, even though the bunch of them took over the more comfortable parts of the ship and left him only the control room above and the lower reaches of the ship, below the salon and the passenger's cabins.
He sat for long hours, thinking idly. He was lulled by the noises of the ship itself; the faint sound of metal on metal, an occasional groan of a plate or the creaking of a point. The moaning cry of a motor winding up to take care of some automatic function and the click and clack of relays and circuit breakers and the peculiar hum of the servodynes that maintained the correct level of pile activity. The muted sibilance of the reaction motor created a threshold level of something like a constant heavy exhalation or the sound of seashore from a distance.
And then a few hours before turnover there came another sound that bothered Farradyne. It was a faint ringing in his ears.
He knew that ringing in the ears can come of too much alcohol, a box on the side of the head, certain diseases—or a change in air pressure. He was healthy, had not been drinking, no one had clipped him; but he had spent a number of years in an environment where the air pressure was damned important—
He sneezed and brought forth a tiny trickle of blood!
He couldn't believe it; any such change in air pressure would make alarms ring like the crack of doom all over the ship and there would be a lot of activity from the air-pressure regulators.